Now you're being shortsighted. I'm only posting this because I think it's important that we remain level-headed when discussing politics.
Full disclosure: I'm a moderate who leans liberal socially.
Fox News news casts have reported on many non-partisan issues. It's not only possible that they've reported on things in a fair and balanced way, it's incredibly likely. If you amend your statement to talk about reporting political stories in a fair and balanced way, I'd be much more inclined to agree with you.
That said, I think that Limbaugh and Beck are entertainment in much the same way that David Koresh was entertainment to his followers. Limbaugh and Beck both have fans who blindly believe anything they hear from their media personality. Rush's followers were even called "dittoheads" at one point (I don't know if this moniker is still in use.) To me, that makes them more than entertainment. My fear is equivalent to the fear that many people have of their children seeing something dangerous on TV and trying to mimic it. Even if it's just entertainment, the fact that people believe it without thought is scary and dangerous.
I mean, I tend to ascribe to the "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck" philosophy of labeling things. I could claim to be a vegetarian, but if I'm at a steakhouse enjoying a prime rib, no amount of protesting is going to keep people from thinking that I'm a meat-eater.
So yeah. It sounds like Beck's spouting things that aren't true. Maybe they were true at one time, and maybe not. Maybe Beck knows that they're no longer true, and maybe not. I'm not willing to say that he's a liar based on this one data point, because it's entirely possible that he's overlooking Van Jones' current record. But he does seem to be misleading his listeners, at least some of whom don't go out and check the facts.
When you're a popular radio and TV personality, you have a responsibility to be honest. Using your status and power to influence people to agree with your agenda is abhorrent behavior.
If we could trust politicians to be honest and honorable, I'd completely agree with the sentiment.
Unfortunately, they cater to industry interests (in exchange for kickbacks and whatnot) over just about anything else. So electing an elite just means that they'll be better at serving their own interests.
Of course, someone "just like me" is probably an elite who's good at appearing like the common man. I don't think that Mr. Smith can get to Washington these days, much less hold the highest, most powerful position in the country.
You know that Slashdot is going down hill when a perfectly reasonable comment asking for more information is replied to by three sarcastic comments about tubes, trucks, and pipes.
Ubuntu One looks like it uses other Ubuntu One users to store up to 2GB of data (hopefully securely) in a cloud-like state, e.g. with redundancy so that one failure doesn't cause you to lose those backups. I got that from a brief look at https://one.ubuntu.com/
It's not less to type once you've already typed "cat/proc/cpuinfo" and then realized -- dangit, I have to paginate that."
Basically, your post is equivalent to advocating writing your own bubblesort implementation, because it's fast enough on small data sets with modern processors, rather than using the system-provided quicksort function. It's a bad habit, and the fact that it isn't too bad in certain situations doesn't mean it's something that should be encouraged.
It's like using system-implemented bubblesort over system-implemented quicksort because you're using to typing bubblesort. When you realize that you actually need something faster, you can switch. You're advocating Premature Optimization, which Knuth warns against.
I think that "Useless Use of cat" is funny. I really do. I go back and read it every once in a while just for grins.
But we're in the future, now. Spawning that extra process isn't going to hurt anything. Yeah, it's fun to poke at people who do silly things like that, but in reality, there's rarely harm in doing things this way. Even if you're using a shell script which will run "cat file | grep" over and over, you're probably not going to start thrashing on a modern CPU.
No, I don't have particularly valuable data. But it's interesting to think about these things, and to implement them. I actually don't even encrypt my notebook's drive, because the added decryption reduces battery life and slows things down noticeably (though not substantially.)
Yeah, some other people have posted suggesting the USB method. That's probably fine, but I've had USB drives fail, so it's a scary prospect. I'd rather use the USB key to boot the OS and verify the important hard drive sectors are unchanged the first time I boot up after the computer has been out of my sight.
Of course, there's still the hardware keylogger problem to worry about. My laptop doesn't have chassis intrusion detection.
The whole point is that people think that encryption is some sort of magic bullet that will prevent them from having to think about security. So if they think that they're secure, they think that there's no need to lug the laptop around. If it gets stolen, who cares? The thieves won't get any information off of it.
This story is trying to promote the fact that there's more to it.
Lots and lots of people (on Slashdot and elsewhere) believe that TPM is essentially only useful for locking down a system so that you can't use it how you want to. The belief is that eventually, TPM will be a) in every computer you buy and b) restrict the use of, say, alternate operating systems or software that your vendor doesn't approve of.
If they can compromise the bootloader or BIOS, then they can do it with the machine off. But I believe that Rutkowska realized the implications after moving from Windows to OS X. OS X does not offer full disk encryption--rather, it encrypts your home directory. Thus it's likely still possible to compromise in this manner.
And of course, she focuses on Truecrypt, which also doesn't do whole disk encryption. However it's a popular geek tool for encryption, and as such it's pretty relevant.
I've seen some technical books in open formats very occasionally. Is there much (in-print) fiction available? It would be fantastic if I could buy non-DRM e-books!
This is a trade-off. You can't read e-ink in the dark--ever.
it causes more eyestrain to look at a backlit screen than an electronic paper display.
This is somewhat contested. I've heard eye-doctors make the claim that LCDs don't hurt, and I've seen them claim that they do. My suspicion is that it depends on the person. I stare at LCDs for probably 13 hours per day, and I don't experience eye-strain.
What's more, even a netbook is going to be bigger, bulkier, and heavier than the nook or kindle, so you have to consider how you want to use the device and which form-factor makes more sense. Plus, these e-book devices have built-in cellphone data plans and supported ebook stores, which might make it easier and more convenient to get the content you want.
This is the biggest issue, I think. You can get pretty light and small netbooks, but it's nothing compared to the e-readers on the market these days. The cellular plans really take the taco, though. I can't imagine the convenience of hearing about a book on the radio or a friend talking about it, and being able to just grab my reader and buy it right there. This is also a disadvantage, of course!
That convenience comes with a cost I'm rarely willing to pay--the inability to resell, loan, or even give away my books, and the inability for Amazon to guarantee that I'll have access to my purchased books indefinitely (switch devices too many times, and you could hit an invisible download limit set by the publisher.)
The Nook seems to have taken care of the loaner part. Also, since you can apparently store books on an SD card, I suspect that I also won't have to worry about downloading a book too many times. I'd give up the ability to resell if the book was cheap enough (in other media, I'm typically willing to do this if I get the digital download for 15% of the purchase price of the content on physical media.) Unfortunately, the e-books on Amazon tend to be closer to 60% of the purchase price of the physical book.
He's referring to slight redesigns (and a smaller fab process) that makes the box run cooler and significantly reduces most of the RRoD failures. It still functions in the same way as the older devices.
What you're referring to is not having to upgrade components, I think. A 360 is a 360 is a 360, and you don't have to check to make sure that yours has the right graphics card in order to know that a particular game will work on it. You need the right peripherals, of course, and if Project Natal takes off, that could be an issue for some people.
It probably has to do with marketshare, the fact that the iPhone was the first widely used browser to support all of that, and the zooming--dear God, the zooming, which makes most pages downright pleasant to read.
Since the iPhone was released, there have been lots of other manufacturers that put out very capable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing browsers. But there aren't nearly as many people using any single one of them (and possibly all of them combined) as there are iPhone users.
Slashdot Mirror
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/SFW_Porn is an example of SFW porn.
By the way, here's a neat trick: you can append #t=XmYs to jump straight to X minutes, Y seconds in a youtube video.
For example, instead of telling people "about 4:15 in", you can link to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwaM0JJGbfM#t=4m15s
By the way, what's the difference between being radical and having radical views?
Now you're being shortsighted. I'm only posting this because I think it's important that we remain level-headed when discussing politics.
Full disclosure: I'm a moderate who leans liberal socially.
Fox News news casts have reported on many non-partisan issues. It's not only possible that they've reported on things in a fair and balanced way, it's incredibly likely. If you amend your statement to talk about reporting political stories in a fair and balanced way, I'd be much more inclined to agree with you.
That said, I think that Limbaugh and Beck are entertainment in much the same way that David Koresh was entertainment to his followers. Limbaugh and Beck both have fans who blindly believe anything they hear from their media personality. Rush's followers were even called "dittoheads" at one point (I don't know if this moniker is still in use.) To me, that makes them more than entertainment. My fear is equivalent to the fear that many people have of their children seeing something dangerous on TV and trying to mimic it. Even if it's just entertainment, the fact that people believe it without thought is scary and dangerous.
No True Communist Fallacy?
I mean, I tend to ascribe to the "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck" philosophy of labeling things. I could claim to be a vegetarian, but if I'm at a steakhouse enjoying a prime rib, no amount of protesting is going to keep people from thinking that I'm a meat-eater.
So yeah. It sounds like Beck's spouting things that aren't true. Maybe they were true at one time, and maybe not. Maybe Beck knows that they're no longer true, and maybe not. I'm not willing to say that he's a liar based on this one data point, because it's entirely possible that he's overlooking Van Jones' current record. But he does seem to be misleading his listeners, at least some of whom don't go out and check the facts.
When you're a popular radio and TV personality, you have a responsibility to be honest. Using your status and power to influence people to agree with your agenda is abhorrent behavior.
If we could trust politicians to be honest and honorable, I'd completely agree with the sentiment.
Unfortunately, they cater to industry interests (in exchange for kickbacks and whatnot) over just about anything else. So electing an elite just means that they'll be better at serving their own interests.
Of course, someone "just like me" is probably an elite who's good at appearing like the common man. I don't think that Mr. Smith can get to Washington these days, much less hold the highest, most powerful position in the country.
Oh. Well that's pretty interesting. I'm surprised that they (either Canonical or Amazon) were willing to foot the bill for 2GB/user.
You know that Slashdot is going down hill when a perfectly reasonable comment asking for more information is replied to by three sarcastic comments about tubes, trucks, and pipes.
Ubuntu One looks like it uses other Ubuntu One users to store up to 2GB of data (hopefully securely) in a cloud-like state, e.g. with redundancy so that one failure doesn't cause you to lose those backups. I got that from a brief look at https://one.ubuntu.com/
It's not less to type once you've already typed "cat /proc/cpuinfo" and then realized -- dangit, I have to paginate that."
Basically, your post is equivalent to advocating writing your own bubblesort implementation, because it's fast enough on small data sets with modern processors, rather than using the system-provided quicksort function. It's a bad habit, and the fact that it isn't too bad in certain situations doesn't mean it's something that should be encouraged.
It's like using system-implemented bubblesort over system-implemented quicksort because you're using to typing bubblesort. When you realize that you actually need something faster, you can switch. You're advocating Premature Optimization, which Knuth warns against.
I think that "Useless Use of cat" is funny. I really do. I go back and read it every once in a while just for grins.
But we're in the future, now. Spawning that extra process isn't going to hurt anything. Yeah, it's fun to poke at people who do silly things like that, but in reality, there's rarely harm in doing things this way. Even if you're using a shell script which will run "cat file | grep" over and over, you're probably not going to start thrashing on a modern CPU.
No, I don't have particularly valuable data. But it's interesting to think about these things, and to implement them. I actually don't even encrypt my notebook's drive, because the added decryption reduces battery life and slows things down noticeably (though not substantially.)
Interesting idea.
I wonder if there would be a market for screws which destroy themselves upon removal.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification.
Yeah, some other people have posted suggesting the USB method. That's probably fine, but I've had USB drives fail, so it's a scary prospect. I'd rather use the USB key to boot the OS and verify the important hard drive sectors are unchanged the first time I boot up after the computer has been out of my sight.
Of course, there's still the hardware keylogger problem to worry about. My laptop doesn't have chassis intrusion detection.
I was under the impression that FDE only worked on Windows, so I guess I wasn't aware that they'd added it.
The whole point is that people think that encryption is some sort of magic bullet that will prevent them from having to think about security. So if they think that they're secure, they think that there's no need to lug the laptop around. If it gets stolen, who cares? The thieves won't get any information off of it.
This story is trying to promote the fact that there's more to it.
Lots and lots of people (on Slashdot and elsewhere) believe that TPM is essentially only useful for locking down a system so that you can't use it how you want to. The belief is that eventually, TPM will be a) in every computer you buy and b) restrict the use of, say, alternate operating systems or software that your vendor doesn't approve of.
If they can compromise the bootloader or BIOS, then they can do it with the machine off. But I believe that Rutkowska realized the implications after moving from Windows to OS X. OS X does not offer full disk encryption--rather, it encrypts your home directory. Thus it's likely still possible to compromise in this manner.
And of course, she focuses on Truecrypt, which also doesn't do whole disk encryption. However it's a popular geek tool for encryption, and as such it's pretty relevant.
I'm kinda curious, too.
I've seen some technical books in open formats very occasionally. Is there much (in-print) fiction available? It would be fantastic if I could buy non-DRM e-books!
Then it's no longer dark.
Not only can LCDs (often) not be read in sunlight
This is a trade-off. You can't read e-ink in the dark--ever.
it causes more eyestrain to look at a backlit screen than an electronic paper display.
This is somewhat contested. I've heard eye-doctors make the claim that LCDs don't hurt, and I've seen them claim that they do. My suspicion is that it depends on the person. I stare at LCDs for probably 13 hours per day, and I don't experience eye-strain.
What's more, even a netbook is going to be bigger, bulkier, and heavier than the nook or kindle, so you have to consider how you want to use the device and which form-factor makes more sense. Plus, these e-book devices have built-in cellphone data plans and supported ebook stores, which might make it easier and more convenient to get the content you want.
This is the biggest issue, I think. You can get pretty light and small netbooks, but it's nothing compared to the e-readers on the market these days. The cellular plans really take the taco, though. I can't imagine the convenience of hearing about a book on the radio or a friend talking about it, and being able to just grab my reader and buy it right there. This is also a disadvantage, of course!
That convenience comes with a cost I'm rarely willing to pay--the inability to resell, loan, or even give away my books, and the inability for Amazon to guarantee that I'll have access to my purchased books indefinitely (switch devices too many times, and you could hit an invisible download limit set by the publisher.)
The Nook seems to have taken care of the loaner part. Also, since you can apparently store books on an SD card, I suspect that I also won't have to worry about downloading a book too many times. I'd give up the ability to resell if the book was cheap enough (in other media, I'm typically willing to do this if I get the digital download for 15% of the purchase price of the content on physical media.) Unfortunately, the e-books on Amazon tend to be closer to 60% of the purchase price of the physical book.
He's referring to slight redesigns (and a smaller fab process) that makes the box run cooler and significantly reduces most of the RRoD failures. It still functions in the same way as the older devices.
What you're referring to is not having to upgrade components, I think. A 360 is a 360 is a 360, and you don't have to check to make sure that yours has the right graphics card in order to know that a particular game will work on it. You need the right peripherals, of course, and if Project Natal takes off, that could be an issue for some people.
Unusable? Man. Did you ever use dial-up?
I wish it wasn't a phone. I'd be perfectly happy with just a 3G data-enabled iPod Touch.
It probably has to do with marketshare, the fact that the iPhone was the first widely used browser to support all of that, and the zooming--dear God, the zooming, which makes most pages downright pleasant to read.
Since the iPhone was released, there have been lots of other manufacturers that put out very capable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing browsers. But there aren't nearly as many people using any single one of them (and possibly all of them combined) as there are iPhone users.