That's totally fine by me. I depend on people like that to stock shelves in used game stores with stuff they bought and don't want anymore. I'm more of a collector, and don't generally sell off anything I own, unless I have more than one of it. A lot of people buy a game, play it until they beat it or are bored with it, and then sell it. Some people really want to be the first to play a new game, and enjoy being the one in their group of friends who has all the insider knowledge, and who has gotten there first -- it gives them a certain social status as an alpha geek.
Once you have a house payment and a car payment, and you want to sock all extra money you possibly can away for retirement, buying new seems a lot less appealing. And I'd rather not waste my time and money on stuff the industry over-hypes, over-markets, and fails to develop and deliver fully on the promises that their hype machines make. I got sick of the fanboi mentality years ago, and quit buying things as soon as they came out, only to discover that they weren't anywhere near as fun as I'd been lead to believe by the marketing machine, and reviews weren't any help either. And waiting for months and years for some game to come out. It's a lot better for me to cherry pick A titles at bargain bin prices long after the hype of new has worn off them.
And trust me, they're still as fun to play. Pac Man and Asteroids are still a blast to play. New isn't what makes it fun for me. If I ignore for the most part what's happening in the current generation, I can act like it's cutting edge even though the game is really 5-6 years old.
If you wait about a year or so, or sometimes longer, depending, games come down in price. Buying immediately at full retail when they're released is foolish unless you've got a ton of disposable cash.
As an example, when Half-Life 2 first came out, I waited, because my PC's hardware wouldn't have been up to running it, and I didn't want to spend $1000 or so just to upgrade to a new box so I could play one game. Within about two years, I built a PC that exceeded the high end specs from back then, for about $400, and took advantage of a deal where I got the Platinum Edition of HL2 for $5 on clearance at Best Buy.
I generally buy games "behind the curve", after they've come down in price, and after enough time for the hype to wear off, and for it to become common knowledge whether the game is actually that awesome or not.
Popular OSS products are generally popular for a good reason. Many people find them to be useful.
Lots of people looking for exploits on a popular product means that, all things being equal, the more popular product will be more secure, not less, so long as security holes are being attended to by the project's maintainers. If a product is good enough to become popular, that usually means that the product also has people working on it who know what they're doing, and with a lot of interest in a product it means that there's likely to be more interest in contributing improvements.
Going with an unfamiliar/poorly known/obscure solution isn't going to help whitehouse.gov. People know about whitehouse.gov, and are going to want to attack it, regardless of what they implement the site in. If it's some obscure solution that few people know about, then you can be sure very quickly people will start to learn about it. So selecting a more obscure solution isn't going to help them out any.
You're missing the point... I'm not saying that anything can provide a person with a guarantee of perfect protection. I'm saying that anonymity is a tool which people may choose to use as they see fit as one measure to protect themselves while exercising their right to free speech. Giving up anonymity necessarily exposes people to more risk. It's up to the individual to decide if they want to take on that risk. Gandhi and King were assassinated, many people would prefer not to have to die for their causes if they can avoid it. Whatever outspoken public figures may accomplish, not everyone may aspire to be such a person. And that is OK; that is their right.
I'm well aware of that. So, since there can be no guarantees, why should I voluntarily give up protections afforded by anonymity which cannot be replaced by anything else?
Where did you get the idea that the government has to perfectly protect everyone?
I don't. I'm saying that if someone were to propose that I give up anonymous speech because the government protects free speech, then I want absolute assurance that I will be protected perfectly when exercising my right to free speech. Since this is impossible, I'm unwilling to give up anonymnity.
Yes, I know this too.
The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers.
All it means is that the Federal government isn't supposed to pass any laws that abridge your freedom to speak your mind, and to assemble into groups, and to freely practice the religion of your choice. And by and large, State and Local levels of government tend to fall in line with this as well.
Of course, the government does try to pass these sorts of laws all the time. Usually because they're "thinking of the children" or have prioritized national security over everything, including common sense. Often without recognizing that some law they're passing will have just these sorts of consequences.
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
This guy apparently doesn't understand that for many, anonymity is a security feature.
Anonymity is prone to abuse, sure, but it is vital for free exchange of ideas. People who are identifiable are less likely to make risky statements, and this is detrimental to culture. Repression and oppression should not be the goal of Security.
Beyond that, not everything on the internet is a person.
But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour?
Very obviously it is sexist because you did not ask out an equal number of men, proportionate to the standard distribution of gender in our species. You clearly have a bias for asking out women, not men, and are therefore sexist.:P
These findings are pretty un-surprizing. Did anyone really think that computer owners could only own one computer at a time, or would typically own only one platform?
Mac owners tend to have a lot of money. They probably have an older PC or two laying, because they still work. Or, perhaps the Mac is older, and they bought a cheap new PC to run games and Windows applications. Newer Mac owners likely run OS X and Windows on the same hardware, if they run Windows at all. But if they have an older PC sitting around, they probably still have it and use it occasionally, or let other family members use it, etc.
The whole "fanboi only uses $platform" thing is probably overblown, with highly visible zealots who only use one platform being much more vocal and visible than those who work on both platforms.
So let's not hear any more of this "Linux would have viruses too if it were as popular as Windows" bull.
I agree that it's bull, but my take on this isn't that Linux would somehow have all these latent vulnerabilities discovered that have always been there if only it were as popular as Windows. Rather, I take this statement as "In order to have a hope of being as widespread in its usage as Windows, Linux would have to make concessions that would make it easy enough to use by "average people" -- and in so doing would open vulnerabilities.
Just for the mere fact that you can't expect the entire world to become savvy UNIX admins, you're going to have a lot of systems managed by people who don't know what they're doing, don't understand how it works, don't know how to patch, or don't think it's important, etc. Just like it is with Windows users and clueless Windows admins. Poorly managed boxes are vulnerable -- even poorly managed linux or BSD boxes. It's more that in order to manage these boxes at all, you have to know a fair bit of what you're doing, that you tend to have some concept of security and its importance.
It's almost secondary that the actual security archictecture, design, implementation, and configuration of windows is technically inferior to UNIX/Linux/BSD. Put it in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and they'll open holes in whatever system.
I've been using fastmail for years, and have been very happy with it. As a free email provider they are one of the best. Arguably gmail gives you more, but I use my fastmail and gmail accounts about equally, and I really like them both about the same. And fastmail doesn't have the looming spectre of gmail's targeted ads based on the content of your messages, suggesting that they care a bit more about your privacy. Google has a little bit nicer interface, and way more storage for free, buuuuut... fastmail of late has had better availability/uptime.
For now I think the people who should be worried are not Mozilla, but Adobe. Some of the stuff coming out of HTML5 demos looks extremely nifty, and uses a fraction of the power that flash uses.
And not a moment too soon, because Flash sucks ass.
The only thing I use it for is embedding video. Groovy menus? AJAX and CSS. Flash was a great idea when we all had dial up. We've moved on from there, and we all learned not to build flash based splash pages. This makes Flash a fairly useless application. I look forward to it dying, like its bloated predecessor, Director.
After some thinking on this, I believe I have arrived at a conclusion that Flash as a vehicle to deliver video is too entrenched by now to be replaced by the HTML5 <video> tag. Flash provides an opporunity for the web designer not merely to deliver a video stream, but to provide additional controls. The player interface itself, "related video" links like you see on Youtube videos, and other interactive controls -- embedded advertising, links to buy placed products, stat counting, rating and comments, etc. These things add up to give us a "rich video" experience -- more than simply a rectangular area in the browser viewpane through which a video is displayed, and that's it. Unless HTML5 can also deliver on this type of rich video experience, and do it better/cheaper than Flash, it's not going to compete with a well-designed and polished Flash-based experience.
I believe that in order for video on the internet to feel like something more advanced than traditional television, these features are essential. People don't want to just click and watch, they want to click, watch, comment, rate, embed in their blog, email to friends, buy something they saw in the video, buy the video as a download, etc. Now, you could do all of that in HTML5, using the video tag and other HTML+CSS+Javascript elements to build up an application, but if all of that already exists in a convenient, mature package based on Flash, why would web developers bother to re-implement all of that work using open standards? What do they gain by doing so, when 99% of the market already has Flash installed? It might cost a bit for the Flash developer tools, but those are already paid for, and there's considerable investment in the development of flash-based video embedding, and at this point I think it's going to be hard for the web design industry to walk away from that.
You must have misunderstood... it's not the picture that will look better, but the cable itself. Some people apparently like to spend $100+ on cables, and apparently spend the majority of their time *behind* their home theater, checking connectors, routing cables, tidying everything up... and they just LOVE the way expensive cables make their system look.
About 12 years ago, I had the thought that it would be great if there was a way to annotate any web page, and make the annotations viewable by others. I never could figure out how it would actually work, but I'm glad to see that something like my concept has come to fruitition.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, I was just about to post a comment that said, "Your mom."
Still dead...
That's totally fine by me. I depend on people like that to stock shelves in used game stores with stuff they bought and don't want anymore. I'm more of a collector, and don't generally sell off anything I own, unless I have more than one of it. A lot of people buy a game, play it until they beat it or are bored with it, and then sell it. Some people really want to be the first to play a new game, and enjoy being the one in their group of friends who has all the insider knowledge, and who has gotten there first -- it gives them a certain social status as an alpha geek.
Once you have a house payment and a car payment, and you want to sock all extra money you possibly can away for retirement, buying new seems a lot less appealing. And I'd rather not waste my time and money on stuff the industry over-hypes, over-markets, and fails to develop and deliver fully on the promises that their hype machines make. I got sick of the fanboi mentality years ago, and quit buying things as soon as they came out, only to discover that they weren't anywhere near as fun as I'd been lead to believe by the marketing machine, and reviews weren't any help either. And waiting for months and years for some game to come out. It's a lot better for me to cherry pick A titles at bargain bin prices long after the hype of new has worn off them.
And trust me, they're still as fun to play. Pac Man and Asteroids are still a blast to play. New isn't what makes it fun for me. If I ignore for the most part what's happening in the current generation, I can act like it's cutting edge even though the game is really 5-6 years old.
If you wait about a year or so, or sometimes longer, depending, games come down in price. Buying immediately at full retail when they're released is foolish unless you've got a ton of disposable cash.
As an example, when Half-Life 2 first came out, I waited, because my PC's hardware wouldn't have been up to running it, and I didn't want to spend $1000 or so just to upgrade to a new box so I could play one game. Within about two years, I built a PC that exceeded the high end specs from back then, for about $400, and took advantage of a deal where I got the Platinum Edition of HL2 for $5 on clearance at Best Buy.
I generally buy games "behind the curve", after they've come down in price, and after enough time for the hype to wear off, and for it to become common knowledge whether the game is actually that awesome or not.
Popular OSS products are generally popular for a good reason. Many people find them to be useful. Lots of people looking for exploits on a popular product means that, all things being equal, the more popular product will be more secure, not less, so long as security holes are being attended to by the project's maintainers. If a product is good enough to become popular, that usually means that the product also has people working on it who know what they're doing, and with a lot of interest in a product it means that there's likely to be more interest in contributing improvements. Going with an unfamiliar/poorly known/obscure solution isn't going to help whitehouse.gov. People know about whitehouse.gov, and are going to want to attack it, regardless of what they implement the site in. If it's some obscure solution that few people know about, then you can be sure very quickly people will start to learn about it. So selecting a more obscure solution isn't going to help them out any.
HAMMER FS... instead of a Permission Denied error when you don't have rights to a file, you get a U Can't Touch This error.
I would tell them to go away, or I would taunt them a second time.
You're missing the point... I'm not saying that anything can provide a person with a guarantee of perfect protection. I'm saying that anonymity is a tool which people may choose to use as they see fit as one measure to protect themselves while exercising their right to free speech. Giving up anonymity necessarily exposes people to more risk. It's up to the individual to decide if they want to take on that risk. Gandhi and King were assassinated, many people would prefer not to have to die for their causes if they can avoid it. Whatever outspoken public figures may accomplish, not everyone may aspire to be such a person. And that is OK; that is their right.
I'm well aware of that. So, since there can be no guarantees, why should I voluntarily give up protections afforded by anonymity which cannot be replaced by anything else?
Citation needed.
Where did you get the idea that the government has to perfectly protect everyone?
I don't. I'm saying that if someone were to propose that I give up anonymous speech because the government protects free speech, then I want absolute assurance that I will be protected perfectly when exercising my right to free speech. Since this is impossible, I'm unwilling to give up anonymnity.
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers. All it means is that the Federal government isn't supposed to pass any laws that abridge your freedom to speak your mind, and to assemble into groups, and to freely practice the religion of your choice. And by and large, State and Local levels of government tend to fall in line with this as well. Of course, the government does try to pass these sorts of laws all the time. Usually because they're "thinking of the children" or have prioritized national security over everything, including common sense. Often without recognizing that some law they're passing will have just these sorts of consequences.
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
Junior J. Junior III is not actually printed on my birth certificate, just to clear up any confusion.
This guy apparently doesn't understand that for many, anonymity is a security feature.
Anonymity is prone to abuse, sure, but it is vital for free exchange of ideas. People who are identifiable are less likely to make risky statements, and this is detrimental to culture. Repression and oppression should not be the goal of Security.
Beyond that, not everything on the internet is a person.
I mean really how many houses cars boats do you need ?
Capitalist: All of them.
slashgame: cookie #1 is cookie with power of su
slashgame: cookie #2 is cookie of apple power
slashgame: drop cookie with power of su
slashgame: you drop the cookie with power of su
slashgame: anonymous coward picks up cookie with power of su
slashgame: in soviet union, cookie eats anonymous coward
slashgame: exit
me@slashdot >
Why would anyone browse /. as AC but leave cookies enabled? Silly, silly mortals...
But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour?
Very obviously it is sexist because you did not ask out an equal number of men, proportionate to the standard distribution of gender in our species. You clearly have a bias for asking out women, not men, and are therefore sexist. :P
These findings are pretty un-surprizing. Did anyone really think that computer owners could only own one computer at a time, or would typically own only one platform?
Mac owners tend to have a lot of money. They probably have an older PC or two laying, because they still work. Or, perhaps the Mac is older, and they bought a cheap new PC to run games and Windows applications. Newer Mac owners likely run OS X and Windows on the same hardware, if they run Windows at all. But if they have an older PC sitting around, they probably still have it and use it occasionally, or let other family members use it, etc.
The whole "fanboi only uses $platform" thing is probably overblown, with highly visible zealots who only use one platform being much more vocal and visible than those who work on both platforms.
So let's not hear any more of this "Linux would have viruses too if it were as popular as Windows" bull.
I agree that it's bull, but my take on this isn't that Linux would somehow have all these latent vulnerabilities discovered that have always been there if only it were as popular as Windows. Rather, I take this statement as "In order to have a hope of being as widespread in its usage as Windows, Linux would have to make concessions that would make it easy enough to use by "average people" -- and in so doing would open vulnerabilities.
Just for the mere fact that you can't expect the entire world to become savvy UNIX admins, you're going to have a lot of systems managed by people who don't know what they're doing, don't understand how it works, don't know how to patch, or don't think it's important, etc. Just like it is with Windows users and clueless Windows admins. Poorly managed boxes are vulnerable -- even poorly managed linux or BSD boxes. It's more that in order to manage these boxes at all, you have to know a fair bit of what you're doing, that you tend to have some concept of security and its importance.
It's almost secondary that the actual security archictecture, design, implementation, and configuration of windows is technically inferior to UNIX/Linux/BSD. Put it in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and they'll open holes in whatever system.
I've been using fastmail for years, and have been very happy with it. As a free email provider they are one of the best. Arguably gmail gives you more, but I use my fastmail and gmail accounts about equally, and I really like them both about the same. And fastmail doesn't have the looming spectre of gmail's targeted ads based on the content of your messages, suggesting that they care a bit more about your privacy. Google has a little bit nicer interface, and way more storage for free, buuuuut... fastmail of late has had better availability/uptime.
Go fastmail:)
For now I think the people who should be worried are not Mozilla, but Adobe. Some of the stuff coming out of HTML5 demos looks extremely nifty, and uses a fraction of the power that flash uses.
And not a moment too soon, because Flash sucks ass.
The only thing I use it for is embedding video. Groovy menus? AJAX and CSS. Flash was a great idea when we all had dial up. We've moved on from there, and we all learned not to build flash based splash pages. This makes Flash a fairly useless application. I look forward to it dying, like its bloated predecessor, Director.
After some thinking on this, I believe I have arrived at a conclusion that Flash as a vehicle to deliver video is too entrenched by now to be replaced by the HTML5 <video> tag. Flash provides an opporunity for the web designer not merely to deliver a video stream, but to provide additional controls. The player interface itself, "related video" links like you see on Youtube videos, and other interactive controls -- embedded advertising, links to buy placed products, stat counting, rating and comments, etc. These things add up to give us a "rich video" experience -- more than simply a rectangular area in the browser viewpane through which a video is displayed, and that's it. Unless HTML5 can also deliver on this type of rich video experience, and do it better/cheaper than Flash, it's not going to compete with a well-designed and polished Flash-based experience.
I believe that in order for video on the internet to feel like something more advanced than traditional television, these features are essential. People don't want to just click and watch, they want to click, watch, comment, rate, embed in their blog, email to friends, buy something they saw in the video, buy the video as a download, etc. Now, you could do all of that in HTML5, using the video tag and other HTML+CSS+Javascript elements to build up an application, but if all of that already exists in a convenient, mature package based on Flash, why would web developers bother to re-implement all of that work using open standards? What do they gain by doing so, when 99% of the market already has Flash installed? It might cost a bit for the Flash developer tools, but those are already paid for, and there's considerable investment in the development of flash-based video embedding, and at this point I think it's going to be hard for the web design industry to walk away from that.
You must have misunderstood... it's not the picture that will look better, but the cable itself. Some people apparently like to spend $100+ on cables, and apparently spend the majority of their time *behind* their home theater, checking connectors, routing cables, tidying everything up... and they just LOVE the way expensive cables make their system look.
About 12 years ago, I had the thought that it would be great if there was a way to annotate any web page, and make the annotations viewable by others. I never could figure out how it would actually work, but I'm glad to see that something like my concept has come to fruitition.
I thought this was already proven by the existence of public schools.