So lemme get this straight. You say that Mac browser's suck. So that means:
Konqueror sucks (which Safari originated from) Firefox/Camino/Mozilla/Netscape suck Opera sucks
Wow... that's quite a load of FUD you're spitting out there;) Make sure you brush your teeth.
The ONLY browser that I will agree with you on is IE for Mac which MS abandoned quite some time ago. All the others I listed are pretty much identical to their Windows or Linux counterparts and are quite nice.
This particular police chief should be repremanded for these statements and issue a public apology for assuming that everyone is guilty before innocent.
The problem I have with the whole "if you have nothing to hide..." argument is that it can be really hard to even know when/if you are doing something illegal! For a variety of reasons:
People have a hard time separating their personal judgement from what is law
A prime example is our history of sodomy law. All it takes is one deeply religious person in power who is unable or unwilling to separate church from state before you have a problem.
798.01 Living in open adultery.--Whoever lives in an open state of adultery shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083. Where either of the parties living in an open state of adultery is married, both parties so living shall be deemed to be guilty of the offense provided for in this section.
798.02 Lewd and lascivious behavior.--If any man and woman, not being married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, engages in open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, they shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.
Are you living in Florida with your unmarried girlfriend or boyfriend right now? (Oh wait, this is Slashdot:) You're breaking the law, and I doubt you're alone.
People misinterpret things, especially when they don't understand
What happens when big brother misinterprets your repeated login attempts because you forgot your password as attempted illegal entry into a computer system?
Or how about when you open your e-mailbox and receive those "hot teens!" spam and you're mistaken for a pedophile because you "downloaded child porn" thanks to the attached jpeg?
There are plenty of silly, stupid and broad laws on the books
I won't even bother to comprehend how many silly, stupid and broad laws there are. Check out some of your state's dumb laws (DumbLaws.com coral cached) and discover your true criminal identity.
And lets not forget about the growing issue of computer crimes created by politicians who have been bought or simply don't understand. If the RIAA/MPAA gets its way, it'll soon be illegal to put a DVD in your computer or record your favorite movie aired on TV to watch later.
... anyway...
My point is that you are mistaken to think that you have nothing to worry about if you've supposedly done nothing wrong.
First, everyone in this country has probably broken or will eventually break a law or two unknowingly or willingly. And secondly, history has proven that whoever has the power to monitor the people will undoubtably abuse that power according to their beliefs and to their advantage -- whether it's in public locations or in the privacy of your own home.
I had a certain senator who got my e-mail address from somewhere (no idea where) and started spamming me on almost a daily basis.
What worked for me was to first e-mail them with a polite request to be removed from their lists. When that request was ignored I then followed with a handful of warnings that I would begin reporting them to various anti-SPAM groups and blocklists if they continued to send me spam.
According to the article, it does not sound like that will be the case. It merely sounds like a way to have images and links on by default.
I realize that doesn't sound like much, but to an advertiser it is a *huge* deal. Time an again it has been shown that HTML emails garnish a much better click-through (and probably conversion) rate over plain-text messages. And if you can pay a small amount to ensure that the images and links will be seen by the recipient all the better.
I could be wrong about the end result, but frankly, it seems to me like it would be a bad business decision for AOL to just start dumping non-verified bulk mailings into the the user's spambox. If they did, there's no doubt that people would start complaining about missing e-mail and that would increase the possibility for them to loose more customers themselves.
We've ever experienced that problem and have sent, or helped send many e-mails to AOL contacts over the years. But usually they are highly targeted, double opt-in contacts.
Judging from the rash of response, I can see that a good portion of people here either do not have AOL accounts or do not know how HTML mail works in AOL.
Currently, if you receive a HTML e-mail in the AOL client, any links or images in the message are not displayed. Instead, only the text of the e-mail is displayed, and a "button" at the top of the message window allows the user to turn on images and links in the message.
What AOL is clearly implementing is a way for "validated" third-parties to pay to have their HTML e-mails sent to AOL users with images and links turned on without requiring the user to take action to see them.
That's it. Nothing more to see here. Please move along.
Right. No need to worry. Until you start thinking about the big picture. It's not just this one flaw that's worth worrying about, it's the combination of Windows' security flaws that are the problem.
You're sitting in your local coffee shop and someone is there listening for signals... they connect to your machine, install an vbscript that runs periodically and attempts delivery of a payload to any machines available on whatever network you connect to. Or perhaps one that simply puts an e-mail in your outbound Outlook queue to anyone in your address book.
I installed it. Does a GREAT job with nearly every WMV that Media Player can't handle, but you'll still need WMP around for some files. I had something from TechTV that was all distorted with F4M but plays fine in the old player.
Anyway, it wasn't created by MS, but actually licensed from Telestream, Inc.. This can be verified by the press release from them, but also because the plugin actually phones home to FlipCenter.com when it is used -- probably for update checks.
Obviously, it's a little half-baked. I would have expected it to check for updates from Microsoft's site or not at all. The update checks can be disabled in the prefs, but I haven't yet verified that this is what it was doing and instead just blocked any outgoing requests from it period.
I never considered it weird myself and actually kind of enjoyed it for some twisted reason. What is weird to me though is that it feels like they're dropping things left and right. I realize it's only two products thus far, but IE and Windows Media Player for Mac have been around for quite some time.
Is the rest of the Mactopia line going to be on the chopping block next? Is Microsoft gearing up for an all-out "platform-warm" with Apple and planning to remove their presences from OS X completely?
Seriously...
VirtualPC will probably become obsolete since under OS X/Intel it will just be a crappy additional (and somewhat unrequired) layer.
Apple is almost building an Office Suite with Pages, Keynote, Mail and iCal. Will Office matter on OS X in the coming years?
That really only leaves Messenger and Remote Desktop, which aren't even the big players for the MS MacBU. Will be interesting to see what happens.
I have no idea. It all really just feels like a bunch of industry lobbyists have been pushing the government to force a transition in an attempt to gain more control (via the "broadcast flag" and/or one or more kinds of DRM that will be possible with the new system).
TV is an entertainment medium. The government should NOT be using my tax dollars to subsidise it. Doing so is the same as if the government gave movie theaters money so they could all have DLP theaters and told the movie industry they had to make digital films only.
Quite frankly, I don't see a single benefit for being forced to switch to a new way of paying for commercials.
This will mean the only true emergency communications medium will become radio - so much for my little pocket TV next time I need it during the next natural disaster.
As if we weren't trashing the Earth enough, now we're going to send 70 million television sets into the landfills.
And lastly, why the hell can't television sets receive both types of signals and let the industry decide whether to use one or both?
I'm currently paying about $80/month for standard cable (a crapload of channels + HBO).
That's $960/year.
My neighborhood alone probably generates $50,000 - $100,000 for the cable company a year.
In 1990, there were 3,541,308 family homes in the county where I live, of which my cable company probably services a signifcant portion of. If just 1% of those total homes had the same basic cable package as me today, that would be $33,996,480 a year.
And that's just a single medium-sized county in a single state.
So, we have:
* You and I paying the cable company. * The cable company paying the networks. * The advertisers paying the networks.
Yes, yes... I realize this is an overly simplistic view of things -- but even still, it seems to me that we are already paying for the shows AND paying to watch commercials.
Sounds like your really did lose more than a half-hour of work -- sense of security, hour and a half of work, missed the proceedings, the DHS at your house, another hour at the coffee shop and loss of happiness... and all that after just one trip. Can't wait to hear what happens on the next one. Maybe they'll detain you for a day or two since you're on "the list" now:D
I'm joking, I'm joking;)
In all seriousness, I wasn't really implying that you didn't do enough. I was merely trying to explain what the grandparent's sarcasm was trying to communicate.
I believe his point was that, regardless of how the agents acted, he should have raised a much larger stink about the whole situation instead of just posting some lackadaisical story about it on an unknown blog. As the parent mentioned, he was lucky that he was even able to do that.
In 10-20 years everyone will be wondering "How the hell did we get in this crappy position to begin with?" Until that time, the uninitiated masses will just continue to ignore everything and mutter "in this day and age we just have to give up some things, I guess."
:) I was trying to be a little humorous in my post, but good points none-the-less.
However, trans fat *IS* a naturally occuring substance found typically in animal-based foods like dairy and meet that (supposedly) shouldn't be totally eliminated from the diet.
The problem isn't trans fat itself, but the HUGE amount of, as you mentioned, man-made hydrogenated oils that we are all are consuming on a daily basis just so crap can sit on the grocery store shelf a little longer.
Yeah, like explain to us what all those wonderful chemicals in it are, tell us how awesome high fructose corn syrup is, and finally to remind us that when they say "0g TRANS FAT!!!" on the front, it;) REALLY, truly, honestly;) means;) 0g;).
Slashdot Mirror
So lemme get this straight. You say that Mac browser's suck. So that means:
;) Make sure you brush your teeth.
Konqueror sucks (which Safari originated from)
Firefox/Camino/Mozilla/Netscape suck
Opera sucks
Wow... that's quite a load of FUD you're spitting out there
The ONLY browser that I will agree with you on is IE for Mac which MS abandoned quite some time ago. All the others I listed are pretty much identical to their Windows or Linux counterparts and are quite nice.
Uh oh. Quick! Somebody set up the Lesbian defense donation fund for all the lesbians Texans who own more than 6 dildos.
The problem I have with the whole "if you have nothing to hide..." argument is that it can be really hard to even know when/if you are doing something illegal! For a variety of reasons:
People have a hard time separating their personal judgement from what is law
A prime example is our history of sodomy law. All it takes is one deeply religious person in power who is unable or unwilling to separate church from state before you have a problem.
From the current Florida lawbooks:
Are you living in Florida with your unmarried girlfriend or boyfriend right now? (Oh wait, this is Slashdot
People misinterpret things, especially when they don't understand
What happens when big brother misinterprets your repeated login attempts because you forgot your password as attempted illegal entry into a computer system?
Or how about when you open your e-mailbox and receive those "hot teens!" spam and you're mistaken for a pedophile because you "downloaded child porn" thanks to the attached jpeg?
There are plenty of silly, stupid and broad laws on the books
I won't even bother to comprehend how many silly, stupid and broad laws there are. Check out some of your state's dumb laws (DumbLaws.com coral cached) and discover your true criminal identity.
And lets not forget about the growing issue of computer crimes created by politicians who have been bought or simply don't understand. If the RIAA/MPAA gets its way, it'll soon be illegal to put a DVD in your computer or record your favorite movie aired on TV to watch later.
... anyway
My point is that you are mistaken to think that you have nothing to worry about if you've supposedly done nothing wrong.
First, everyone in this country has probably broken or will eventually break a law or two unknowingly or willingly. And secondly, history has proven that whoever has the power to monitor the people will undoubtably abuse that power according to their beliefs and to their advantage -- whether it's in public locations or in the privacy of your own home.
I had a certain senator who got my e-mail address from somewhere (no idea where) and started spamming me on almost a daily basis.
What worked for me was to first e-mail them with a polite request to be removed from their lists. When that request was ignored I then followed with a handful of warnings that I would begin reporting them to various anti-SPAM groups and blocklists if they continued to send me spam.
They stopped shortly after.
According to the article, it does not sound like that will be the case. It merely sounds like a way to have images and links on by default.
I realize that doesn't sound like much, but to an advertiser it is a *huge* deal. Time an again it has been shown that HTML emails garnish a much better click-through (and probably conversion) rate over plain-text messages. And if you can pay a small amount to ensure that the images and links will be seen by the recipient all the better.
I could be wrong about the end result, but frankly, it seems to me like it would be a bad business decision for AOL to just start dumping non-verified bulk mailings into the the user's spambox. If they did, there's no doubt that people would start complaining about missing e-mail and that would increase the possibility for them to loose more customers themselves.
We've ever experienced that problem and have sent, or helped send many e-mails to AOL contacts over the years. But usually they are highly targeted, double opt-in contacts.
Judging from the rash of response, I can see that a good portion of people here either do not have AOL accounts or do not know how HTML mail works in AOL.
Currently, if you receive a HTML e-mail in the AOL client, any links or images in the message are not displayed. Instead, only the text of the e-mail is displayed, and a "button" at the top of the message window allows the user to turn on images and links in the message.
What AOL is clearly implementing is a way for "validated" third-parties to pay to have their HTML e-mails sent to AOL users with images and links turned on without requiring the user to take action to see them.
That's it. Nothing more to see here. Please move along.
Wow. Talk about a potential privacy issue. I wonder if that will be removed for the final release.
Many diseases have no obvious immediate symptoms, so how do you really know that you've never contracted one? ;)
Just in case anyone isn't in the mood to hunt it down, here's a few links for Little Snitch:
/ 17642
t ml
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/10426
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx
Developer's Site:
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.h
Right. No need to worry. Until you start thinking about the big picture. It's not just this one flaw that's worth worrying about, it's the combination of Windows' security flaws that are the problem.
You're sitting in your local coffee shop and someone is there listening for signals... they connect to your machine, install an vbscript that runs periodically and attempts delivery of a payload to any machines available on whatever network you connect to. Or perhaps one that simply puts an e-mail in your outbound Outlook queue to anyone in your address book.
Yeah, no need to worry at all.
I installed it. Does a GREAT job with nearly every WMV that Media Player can't handle, but you'll still need WMP around for some files. I had something from TechTV that was all distorted with F4M but plays fine in the old player.
Anyway, it wasn't created by MS, but actually licensed from Telestream, Inc.. This can be verified by the press release from them, but also because the plugin actually phones home to FlipCenter.com when it is used -- probably for update checks.
Obviously, it's a little half-baked. I would have expected it to check for updates from Microsoft's site or not at all. The update checks can be disabled in the prefs, but I haven't yet verified that this is what it was doing and instead just blocked any outgoing requests from it period.
I never considered it weird myself and actually kind of enjoyed it for some twisted reason. What is weird to me though is that it feels like they're dropping things left and right. I realize it's only two products thus far, but IE and Windows Media Player for Mac have been around for quite some time.
Is the rest of the Mactopia line going to be on the chopping block next? Is Microsoft gearing up for an all-out "platform-warm" with Apple and planning to remove their presences from OS X completely?
Seriously...
VirtualPC will probably become obsolete since under OS X/Intel it will just be a crappy additional (and somewhat unrequired) layer.
Apple is almost building an Office Suite with Pages, Keynote, Mail and iCal. Will Office matter on OS X in the coming years?
That really only leaves Messenger and Remote Desktop, which aren't even the big players for the MS MacBU. Will be interesting to see what happens.
I have no idea. It all really just feels like a bunch of industry lobbyists have been pushing the government to force a transition in an attempt to gain more control (via the "broadcast flag" and/or one or more kinds of DRM that will be possible with the new system).
TV is an entertainment medium. The government should NOT be using my tax dollars to subsidise it. Doing so is the same as if the government gave movie theaters money so they could all have DLP theaters and told the movie industry they had to make digital films only.
Quite frankly, I don't see a single benefit for being forced to switch to a new way of paying for commercials.
This will mean the only true emergency communications medium will become radio - so much for my little pocket TV next time I need it during the next natural disaster.
As if we weren't trashing the Earth enough, now we're going to send 70 million television sets into the landfills.
And lastly, why the hell can't television sets receive both types of signals and let the industry decide whether to use one or both?
Just become a Freegan ;)
... and maybe hire a lawyer in case they decide to sue you for losses from everyone else's account :)
I'm currently paying about $80/month for standard cable (a crapload of channels + HBO).
That's $960/year.
My neighborhood alone probably generates $50,000 - $100,000 for the cable company a year.
In 1990, there were 3,541,308 family homes in the county where I live, of which my cable company probably services a signifcant portion of. If just 1% of those total homes had the same basic cable package as me today, that would be $33,996,480 a year.
And that's just a single medium-sized county in a single state.
So, we have:
* You and I paying the cable company.
* The cable company paying the networks.
* The advertisers paying the networks.
Yes, yes... I realize this is an overly simplistic view of things -- but even still, it seems to me that we are already paying for the shows AND paying to watch commercials.
You changed it! Bummer... now my silly post isn't as funny :(
:)
I was just poking a little fun, sorry
Sounds like your really did lose more than a half-hour of work -- sense of security, hour and a half of work, missed the proceedings, the DHS at your house, another hour at the coffee shop and loss of happiness... and all that after just one trip. Can't wait to hear what happens on the next one. Maybe they'll detain you for a day or two since you're on "the list" now :D
;)
I'm joking, I'm joking
In all seriousness, I wasn't really implying that you didn't do enough. I was merely trying to explain what the grandparent's sarcasm was trying to communicate.
Oh wow CAPS LOCK in sig junkies ... ;)
I believe his point was that, regardless of how the agents acted, he should have raised a much larger stink about the whole situation instead of just posting some lackadaisical story about it on an unknown blog. As the parent mentioned, he was lucky that he was even able to do that.
In 10-20 years everyone will be wondering "How the hell did we get in this crappy position to begin with?" Until that time, the uninitiated masses will just continue to ignore everything and mutter "in this day and age we just have to give up some things, I guess."
:) I was trying to be a little humorous in my post, but good points none-the-less.
However, trans fat *IS* a naturally occuring substance found typically in animal-based foods like dairy and meet that (supposedly) shouldn't be totally eliminated from the diet.
The problem isn't trans fat itself, but the HUGE amount of, as you mentioned, man-made hydrogenated oils that we are all are consuming on a daily basis just so crap can sit on the grocery store shelf a little longer.
Yeah, like explain to us what all those wonderful chemicals in it are, tell us how awesome high fructose corn syrup is, and finally to remind us that when they say "0g TRANS FAT!!!" on the front, it ;) REALLY, truly, honestly ;) means ;) 0g ;).
A while back, Discovered moved all the good ole' Discovery Channel stuff to the more refined Science Channel. No motorcycles there :)