Right, because some types of applications that are heavily hardware dependent are on-topic than others. It's fine to talk about servers, and benchmarks, gaming, video encoding, and other topics that might have some relevance to hardware performance, but not bitcoins!
Seriously, I don't use bitcoins, don't care about them, but yet some of the overreactions regarding them and the outcries of, "Stop talking about bitcoin on slashdot" is more annoying than the mentions of bitcoin themselves. Since when is application performance on specific hardware not relevant to hardware discussions?
There are many people that despise Facebook, but begrudgingly go along with it, at least in a limited fashion, because it's adoption rate has become so great that it has become more difficult to maintain a social life, or to date, without some use of Facebook.
The problem with the social network concept is that even if you developed the finest social network that you can imagine, that it won't matter unless the people are there. There are already alternatives to Facebook that I'd much prefer to use, but nobody that I know uses them.
Google is among a small number of companies that has the reputation and brand recognition to really have a chance of creating an upset.
Besides, if you have trouble getting people to believe that you are truly following, "don't be evil", then at least put yourself into the position where you will be contrasted against someone even more evil to help you look better in comparison.;-)
EVERY popular platform drowns in shovelware. Every console generation that I can remember had tons of shovelware on whatever happens to be the most popular system(s).
If the PS3 were in the lead, you'd see all the shovelware there (like in the previous 2 generations), and we'd be complaining about Sony instead.
It's your loss. I spent a lot of time learning "proper languages" before getting around to trying Python.
When I finally got around to looking at the language, I regretted not learning it sooner. I was able to both learn the language and write the program that I needed in less time than it would have taken me using the languages I already knew.
Python is a handy tool to have available. Sure, it isn't the best tool for every job, but neither is duct tape.
But you can't control who gets to see what *others* post on your wall though, AFAIK. It's either on your wall your can hide it, but I'm not aware of getting to choose which groups get to see posts made by others.
We'll have to see, however there is one thing that Facebook sorely lacked that Google is addressing. The abilility to seperate people into different social "Circles" to control what you want to share with who. How many stories have we all heard about posts causing issues for a person because Facebook putting all your posts and friends all in one bucket.
To me, it seems like a no-brainer. The things I want my family, friends, highschool and college acquaintances, coworkers, and potential dating partners to see are quite often different enough that I don't bother saying anything at all.
I dislike Zuckerburg, Zynga, and the many other sleazy players involved with the scene. I have an account, and I use it as little as I can. Unfortunately, it has become so prevalent that ignoring it completely effectively makes one a pariah these days.
Not to suggest that this is unfamiliar territory for many of us here.;-)
I never liked using dates. It limits passcodes too greatly. I have used the last digits of phone numbers or addresses of people that I remembered from my childhood though. Numbers that haven't been valid for 20 years, for example, but that I have a strong personal memory of.
What if, uh, the original owner wants to start fresh?
That's part of what bugs me too. Some games (such as Resident Evil 4) were still fun to play through additional times. I replayed it to the end twice. Once with additional ulnocks, and once completely from scratch.
Secondly, this doesn't just punish used games (and rentals). It also punishes households that buy a title with the intention of sharing it, whether it be siblings, roomates, or couples. Are they expected to buy two games now?
Of course, it also makes it unappealing or borrowing and trading.
BUt this isn't just a consumer-unfriendly choice. This really sounds like an incredibly bad business choice.
1) They will likely lose sales from the "try before you buy" crowd (those that borrow, swap, rent, etc). 2) They will likely lose sales from households that do share games. 3) They will likely lose sales from people who boycott it based on their distaste for this tactic (see Spore as an example). 4) They will likely lose sales from people who feel like piracy will offer them a better user experience than buying legitimately, who would have purchased if Capcom had been more reasonable.
While I certainly don't agree with the current TSA situation this is a poor argument. How many trespassers/terrorists are stopped by the fence and guards that surround nuclear power plants? Should we remove these security deterrents unless people are actively throwing themselves upon them?
Can you seriously not make a distinction between overly invasive security procedures with little to no proven effectiveness to reasonable security procedures which, whether effective or not, don't involve so much loss of privacy, rights, and dignity?
Terrorists use eight year old kids as vessel for their explosives, precisely because security is sometimes lowered for obviously innocent types.
Can you cite one example of the TSA catching a child being used by terrorists? One old woman? Hell, How many Muslims extremist with evidence of terrorist intentions have been caught by the TSA?
What is the TSA actually accomplishing, aside from trying to justify the loss of our privacy, convenience, and freedom in exchange for false security?
Are the terrorists, who are willing to die in order to cause mayhem and terror, suddenly afraid they might get caught?
The threat of terrorism is wasting our money and time, eroding our rights, and leading to us groping and violating the privacy of our women, children, and elderly.
At least there is money to be made by at least some people off all this, right?
I'm getting way too many of these e-mails lately. I've had multiple companies send me e-mails to inform me their servers have been compromised. One of my accounts on another server was compromised last week as well.
I think that my biggest concern isn't what they might get out of an individual account, but what type of information that they can put together through cross-referencing information derived from multiple compromised servers. Birth dates, secret questions that might open up other accounts elsewhere, etc.
If marijuana users want it to be legal, they need to fight for it, pester their law makers.
It's not just users that want it to be legal. I've never had any form of illegal drugs, ever. However, I still want it to be legal.
I want it legalized because I think that the enforcement of drug laws in regards to marijuana are for more destructive to people's lives than marijuana itself. Being illegal makes for a potentially less safe for product for those that do use. Enforcement, prosecution and punishment is costing us way too much of our tax money, plus we're losing tax revenue from it's sales on top of that!
It's an all around losing deal to society to keep it illegal.
You seem to be assuming that the firing was unfairly given and that he had legitimate reason for revenge. His firing could have been completely legitimate and fair. Management could have been completely reasonable. We don't know either way.
People *do* indeed sometimes flip out and do act out revenge for imagined slights quite often. Some people can't take rejection, and are incapable of taking any form of criticism at all. Some people are just unstable.
We don't know if his employer deserved it, but this guy's actions at least hint at instability. Hire him if you want, but I'd never do it.
It's funny. I agree that this isn't exactly a broken window fallacy. However, it's funny that you say that this is like a tornado being good for the construction industry, because my understanding is *that* would actually be precisely an example of the broken window fallacy.
My understanding of the broken window fallacy does not require that the boy goes around breaking windows. The parable has been expanded to ponder that possibility as well, however it was not assumed in the initial parable and is not required for the fallacy to be valid.
Indeed, I came here to say the same thing. First of all, it has an absurdly high cost of $185,000. That is a price that is going to discourage even many large legitimate corporations, let alone cybercriminals that could be just throwing the money away once their TLD becomes blacklisted.
Secondly, this application *does* have a vetting process to ensure that you have the right to the domain name you are requesting.
I was just a statement in jest aimed at the many comments that seemed to think that only words that were coined by a company can be used as a trademark, when clearly there are many cases of trademarked names that were derived from old names or words.
I'm not trying to defend the side of BestBuy. Personally, I personally think that Geek Squad is perfectly valid, but I do agree it's silly to universally own the term "Geek." That said, I've seen some pretty ludicrous rulings in regards when it comes to name ownership.
Or like Microsoft trademarking the word "Windows" in reference to their windowed application operating system/environment! That would never fly, Right?
"Enough with this Bitcoin spam already. Bitcoin is stupid, unneccessary and irrelevant, we don't care for your fucking scam."
Seriously. Slashdot editors: give me an option to block your idiotic Bitcoin spam, or at least post less of it. I'm so tired of every third story being a shill for this ridiculous scam that I'm going to find another technology news source if one of those two things doesn't happen.
You are either participating in an attempt to swindle a bunch of people out of their money, or you are so deluded by this moronic idea that you're going to be among the swindled yourselves.
Either way, it doesn't speak well for the general quality of material on the site if multiple editors here can be persuaded to post "stories" about it approximately every five minutes.
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but typically "shills" don't generally post stories to slashdot that demonstrate weaknesses or blunders related to themselves. Do you think the Playstation Network outage stories were by Sony shills too?
And you want an option to block these stories? Have you considered trying to exercise enough willpower not to click on the freaking link?
Some people here might find it to be an interesting experiment (though possibly naive), even if they aren't buying into it.
Just because it has favored early adeopters doesn't necessarily make it a ponzi scheme. There are many things that favor early adopters without being schemes.
I don't think that's the real problem with Bitcoin. The problem is that for currency to work, it needs to be freely exchanged
From reading forum posts by Bitcoin users and advocates, it seems that many of the users have seen the trend for the value of Bitcoins to rise, so they continue to hang onto them to them. I saw comments from some of these early adopters who felt a little burned by the fact they spent many of their Bitcoins, only to have the value rise later. Therefor, it seems many Bitcoin miners want to hang on to the majority of their coins and only spend a small number.
This obviously is going to create a Bitcoin bubble that eventually will burst.
Once people start cashing coins out for real currency (instead of continuing to hold onto them or everyone spending them on various services) it seems inevitable that there will be a price crash, whether there are account compromises or not.
Just admit you don't have everything figured out. I know that may give rise to healthy skepticism. People may not want to spend trillions in dollars to fix a problem you aren't certain about.
If estimates regarding the impact that man has on global warming are overrated, does that mean that it's no longer important to stop poisoning our air, ground, and water? Does that free us to ignore the more localized damage that we do know occurs? Do we no longer need to worry about seeking cleaner and renewable energy sources?
I'm sick of the whole debate over whether or not Global Warming is real or not. It's a red herring. It's not like the threat of impending doom is the only reason for being concerned about the environment.
Besides, "Save the Earth" is a misnomer anyway. We're not going to destroy the Earth. It's pretty far-fetched we will destroy Life on Earth. I think it's rather unlikely that we'll even make it uninhabitable for humans, even if they are right about global warming. However, I do think we can make it a lot less healthy and pleasant. "Save My Quality of Life" isn't nearly as catchy or compelling though.
See, all these disagreements about what constitutes what alignment is exactly why they removed enforcement of alignment through game mechanics in 4th Edition D&D.;-)
No one says you can't get up and say "lights on" or have a proximity sensor light your way as you stumble through the house.
And if the battery on your phone is dead, and you have lost your voice...
I can see additional interfaces for switches existing. I can see reducing the prominence and importance of the simple light switch. I don't see ditching them entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because some types of applications that are heavily hardware dependent are on-topic than others. It's fine to talk about servers, and benchmarks, gaming, video encoding, and other topics that might have some relevance to hardware performance, but not bitcoins!
Seriously, I don't use bitcoins, don't care about them, but yet some of the overreactions regarding them and the outcries of, "Stop talking about bitcoin on slashdot" is more annoying than the mentions of bitcoin themselves. Since when is application performance on specific hardware not relevant to hardware discussions?
There are many people that despise Facebook, but begrudgingly go along with it, at least in a limited fashion, because it's adoption rate has become so great that it has become more difficult to maintain a social life, or to date, without some use of Facebook.
The problem with the social network concept is that even if you developed the finest social network that you can imagine, that it won't matter unless the people are there. There are already alternatives to Facebook that I'd much prefer to use, but nobody that I know uses them.
Google is among a small number of companies that has the reputation and brand recognition to really have a chance of creating an upset.
Besides, if you have trouble getting people to believe that you are truly following, "don't be evil", then at least put yourself into the position where you will be contrasted against someone even more evil to help you look better in comparison. ;-)
EVERY popular platform drowns in shovelware. Every console generation that I can remember had tons of shovelware on whatever happens to be the most popular system(s).
If the PS3 were in the lead, you'd see all the shovelware there (like in the previous 2 generations), and we'd be complaining about Sony instead.
It's your loss. I spent a lot of time learning "proper languages" before getting around to trying Python.
When I finally got around to looking at the language, I regretted not learning it sooner. I was able to both learn the language and write the program that I needed in less time than it would have taken me using the languages I already knew.
Python is a handy tool to have available. Sure, it isn't the best tool for every job, but neither is duct tape.
But you can't control who gets to see what *others* post on your wall though, AFAIK. It's either on your wall your can hide it, but I'm not aware of getting to choose which groups get to see posts made by others.
We'll have to see, however there is one thing that Facebook sorely lacked that Google is addressing. The abilility to seperate people into different social "Circles" to control what you want to share with who. How many stories have we all heard about posts causing issues for a person because Facebook putting all your posts and friends all in one bucket.
To me, it seems like a no-brainer. The things I want my family, friends, highschool and college acquaintances, coworkers, and potential dating partners to see are quite often different enough that I don't bother saying anything at all.
I dislike Zuckerburg, Zynga, and the many other sleazy players involved with the scene. I have an account, and I use it as little as I can. Unfortunately, it has become so prevalent that ignoring it completely effectively makes one a pariah these days.
Not to suggest that this is unfamiliar territory for many of us here. ;-)
I never liked using dates. It limits passcodes too greatly. I have used the last digits of phone numbers or addresses of people that I remembered from my childhood though. Numbers that haven't been valid for 20 years, for example, but that I have a strong personal memory of.
What if, uh, the original owner wants to start fresh?
That's part of what bugs me too. Some games (such as Resident Evil 4) were still fun to play through additional times. I replayed it to the end twice. Once with additional ulnocks, and once completely from scratch.
Secondly, this doesn't just punish used games (and rentals). It also punishes households that buy a title with the intention of sharing it, whether it be siblings, roomates, or couples. Are they expected to buy two games now?
Of course, it also makes it unappealing or borrowing and trading.
BUt this isn't just a consumer-unfriendly choice. This really sounds like an incredibly bad business choice.
1) They will likely lose sales from the "try before you buy" crowd (those that borrow, swap, rent, etc).
2) They will likely lose sales from households that do share games.
3) They will likely lose sales from people who boycott it based on their distaste for this tactic (see Spore as an example).
4) They will likely lose sales from people who feel like piracy will offer them a better user experience than buying legitimately, who would have purchased if Capcom had been more reasonable.
While I certainly don't agree with the current TSA situation this is a poor argument. How many trespassers/terrorists are stopped by the fence and guards that surround nuclear power plants? Should we remove these security deterrents unless people are actively throwing themselves upon them?
Can you seriously not make a distinction between overly invasive security procedures with little to no proven effectiveness to reasonable security procedures which, whether effective or not, don't involve so much loss of privacy, rights, and dignity?
Sure, but nobody really gets upset about what happens to us, so why even bother mentioning us?
Terrorists use eight year old kids as vessel for their explosives, precisely because security is sometimes lowered for obviously innocent types.
Can you cite one example of the TSA catching a child being used by terrorists? One old woman? Hell, How many Muslims extremist with evidence of terrorist intentions have been caught by the TSA?
What is the TSA actually accomplishing, aside from trying to justify the loss of our privacy, convenience, and freedom in exchange for false security?
Are the terrorists, who are willing to die in order to cause mayhem and terror, suddenly afraid they might get caught?
The threat of terrorism is wasting our money and time, eroding our rights, and leading to us groping and violating the privacy of our women, children, and elderly.
At least there is money to be made by at least some people off all this, right?
I'm getting way too many of these e-mails lately. I've had multiple companies send me e-mails to inform me their servers have been compromised. One of my accounts on another server was compromised last week as well.
I think that my biggest concern isn't what they might get out of an individual account, but what type of information that they can put together through cross-referencing information derived from multiple compromised servers. Birth dates, secret questions that might open up other accounts elsewhere, etc.
If marijuana users want it to be legal, they need to fight for it, pester their law makers.
It's not just users that want it to be legal. I've never had any form of illegal drugs, ever. However, I still want it to be legal.
I want it legalized because I think that the enforcement of drug laws in regards to marijuana are for more destructive to people's lives than marijuana itself. Being illegal makes for a potentially less safe for product for those that do use. Enforcement, prosecution and punishment is costing us way too much of our tax money, plus we're losing tax revenue from it's sales on top of that!
It's an all around losing deal to society to keep it illegal.
You seem to be assuming that the firing was unfairly given and that he had legitimate reason for revenge. His firing could have been completely legitimate and fair. Management could have been completely reasonable. We don't know either way.
People *do* indeed sometimes flip out and do act out revenge for imagined slights quite often. Some people can't take rejection, and are incapable of taking any form of criticism at all. Some people are just unstable.
We don't know if his employer deserved it, but this guy's actions at least hint at instability. Hire him if you want, but I'd never do it.
I don't waste a lot of time during my life.
But when I do I re-rip my collection to FLAC.
Is this when you drink Dos Equis as well?
It's funny. I agree that this isn't exactly a broken window fallacy. However, it's funny that you say that this is like a tornado being good for the construction industry, because my understanding is *that* would actually be precisely an example of the broken window fallacy.
My understanding of the broken window fallacy does not require that the boy goes around breaking windows. The parable has been expanded to ponder that possibility as well, however it was not assumed in the initial parable and is not required for the fallacy to be valid.
Indeed, I came here to say the same thing. First of all, it has an absurdly high cost of $185,000. That is a price that is going to discourage even many large legitimate corporations, let alone cybercriminals that could be just throwing the money away once their TLD becomes blacklisted.
Secondly, this application *does* have a vetting process to ensure that you have the right to the domain name you are requesting.
Complete FUD.
I was just a statement in jest aimed at the many comments that seemed to think that only words that were coined by a company can be used as a trademark, when clearly there are many cases of trademarked names that were derived from old names or words.
I'm not trying to defend the side of BestBuy. Personally, I personally think that Geek Squad is perfectly valid, but I do agree it's silly to universally own the term "Geek." That said, I've seen some pretty ludicrous rulings in regards when it comes to name ownership.
Or like Microsoft trademarking the word "Windows" in reference to their windowed application operating system/environment! That would never fly, Right?
"Enough with this Bitcoin spam already. Bitcoin is stupid, unneccessary and irrelevant, we don't care for your fucking scam."
Seriously. Slashdot editors: give me an option to block your idiotic Bitcoin spam, or at least post less of it. I'm so tired of every third story being a shill for this ridiculous scam that I'm going to find another technology news source if one of those two things doesn't happen.
You are either participating in an attempt to swindle a bunch of people out of their money, or you are so deluded by this moronic idea that you're going to be among the swindled yourselves.
Either way, it doesn't speak well for the general quality of material on the site if multiple editors here can be persuaded to post "stories" about it approximately every five minutes.
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but typically "shills" don't generally post stories to slashdot that demonstrate weaknesses or blunders related to themselves. Do you think the Playstation Network outage stories were by Sony shills too?
And you want an option to block these stories? Have you considered trying to exercise enough willpower not to click on the freaking link?
Some people here might find it to be an interesting experiment (though possibly naive), even if they aren't buying into it.
Just because it has favored early adeopters doesn't necessarily make it a ponzi scheme. There are many things that favor early adopters without being schemes.
I don't think that's the real problem with Bitcoin. The problem is that for currency to work, it needs to be freely exchanged
From reading forum posts by Bitcoin users and advocates, it seems that many of the users have seen the trend for the value of Bitcoins to rise, so they continue to hang onto them to them. I saw comments from some of these early adopters who felt a little burned by the fact they spent many of their Bitcoins, only to have the value rise later. Therefor, it seems many Bitcoin miners want to hang on to the majority of their coins and only spend a small number.
This obviously is going to create a Bitcoin bubble that eventually will burst.
Once people start cashing coins out for real currency (instead of continuing to hold onto them or everyone spending them on various services) it seems inevitable that there will be a price crash, whether there are account compromises or not.
I listened to this broadcast as well, and he didn't mean just farm equipment. It was "Tools" in general.
It was an interesting piece, check it out: Tools Never Die. Waddaya Mean, Never?
Just admit you don't have everything figured out. I know that may give rise to healthy skepticism. People may not want to spend trillions in dollars to fix a problem you aren't certain about.
If estimates regarding the impact that man has on global warming are overrated, does that mean that it's no longer important to stop poisoning our air, ground, and water? Does that free us to ignore the more localized damage that we do know occurs? Do we no longer need to worry about seeking cleaner and renewable energy sources?
I'm sick of the whole debate over whether or not Global Warming is real or not. It's a red herring. It's not like the threat of impending doom is the only reason for being concerned about the environment.
Besides, "Save the Earth" is a misnomer anyway. We're not going to destroy the Earth. It's pretty far-fetched we will destroy Life on Earth. I think it's rather unlikely that we'll even make it uninhabitable for humans, even if they are right about global warming. However, I do think we can make it a lot less healthy and pleasant. "Save My Quality of Life" isn't nearly as catchy or compelling though.
Have you tried turning off the Cloud, and turning it back on again?
See, all these disagreements about what constitutes what alignment is exactly why they removed enforcement of alignment through game mechanics in 4th Edition D&D. ;-)
No one says you can't get up and say "lights on" or have a proximity sensor light your way as you stumble through the house.
And if the battery on your phone is dead, and you have lost your voice...
I can see additional interfaces for switches existing. I can see reducing the prominence and importance of the simple light switch. I don't see ditching them entirely.