This is going to sound horrible but sometimes it's just a cultural thing. Nobody wants to admit they're wrong. Some Americans don't break unless you're holding a big effing gun to their head. Some Indians just never break... I don't know why and I'm certainly not qualified to research it, but anyone who's worked with Indian consultants and staff has run into this brick wall: your guy screwed up royally but adamantly refuses to admit it, like you're going to rip his head off if he does.
Back to the topic: in this case, I wouldn't be all that surprised if the whole thing was a hoax. Let's pretend they didn't crack the system. Let's say they just started talking like they had figured out, but actually hadn't. Their names were on the guest list, and now they're on slashdot. People think there's an exploit when really there isn't. The perceived threat (to TPM manufacturers) is non-negligible, and some of damage is already done, sight unseen.
Have you ever seen a "terrorist" with your own eyes ? Probably not. Are you afraid of them ? Probably yes. As long as there's the seed of doubt, humans will act irrationally.
I second that. Sun's product line is very aggressive for SMB gear. They don't stray much into the supercomputing arena because it's a whole other ballgame, but for high-end "common" servers and workstations, they offer some pretty serious bang for the buck. In that light, they compete in the same segments as Dell's Poweredge line, or HP's Proliant. Medium iron as opposed to big iron. Server gear for the rest of us who aren't on the Fortune 50:)
I fell in love with Sun when I first laid my hands on a Sun Fire V40z, 8 cores of AMD goodness in a small box, but half the price of a competing Dell system.
It doesn't just say how old the car is, it also says how young YOU are:) Seriously though, dating computers by their year of release would help a little bit. It would give the non-techies something easy to latch onto, instead of having people say "Pentium 4 ? you're trying to sell me old junk! I want a Pentium 64!"
At least when you buy a used car, even a non-mechanic can figure out that a 2001 Ford Focus is a piece of shit... erm, and that it's 6 years old. If people advertised their PC as a "2004 AMD" then you could derive that it's between 1.6 and 2.4ghz, probably has 256mb of ram and a 40gh hard drive. More importantly, they'd know it's probably not extremely different from someone else's 2004 computer.
Actually the video cards usually have regular increasing numbers for every new chipset revision. It's the asian OEMs like Asus, Gigabyte and others that totally mess it up. Like for example, Asus released a V9999 many years ago which had a Geforce 6800 Ultra at its heart. It was a fast card for sure, but where do you go after 9999 ? Is the EN8800GTX slower than the 9999 (No, it's not).
It gets even dumber when truly unenlightened souls try to compare video cards by their onboard memory. I've lost count of how many times people walked up to me and bought a $50 rock-bottom 256mb-card, which is basically a stick of ram with a blitter duct-taped to the backside. The next day they come back and complain that my card sucks because FEAR didn't run smoothly on their Radeon x300 "but the box says 256mb recommended". Then the guy will try to "upgrade" to a 512mb entry-level card, which is usually where I put my foot down and try to explain the whole VRAM scam, but often times I just have to throw them out of the store once they've made two things clear: 1. they aren't listening to my wisdom and 2. they can't afford the $200 mid-range gamer card that will allow them to run that brand new game they just pirated.
It used to be simple, all graphics cards sucked equally, and all processors had almost linear performance relative to their clock speed. Most people are still stuck in that mentality, even the semi-techy crowd if they haven't been throwing all their money at the upgrade gods.
I never quite understood Opera's raison d'etre. They've always been the underdog, and they've always boasted better standards compliance, but does the common user care about compliance ? I think not. In fact, even if a web site looks like ass in their browser, as long as the clicky things work, they will put up with all sorts of mediocrity.
I switched over to Firefox around the same time that IE7 was released, mostly because I was royally underwhelmed. Then I fell in love with the many development add-ons that helped me debug my web pages and javascript, and now there is no turning back. We all know IE isn't going anywhere, but it would be nice if Opera and Firefox could pool together and release one uber browser to rule them all.
You hit the nail on the head: elitism is what kills our efficiency. We suffer from inflated head'ism, where any ideas that come from outside the clique are seen as threats. Just look at all the major open source projects, not just the kernel but Apache, Samba, Gnome and KDE... they all suffer from this bizarre "us vs them" attitude.
I can certainly understand that there are a lot more dumb whiney people than clever ones, but an open-source project manager, like any other manager, needs to learn to maximize the resources available. If you have a half-brained monkey banging on your door, give up some boring job that no one else wants, that will keep them busy AND get your work done. Likewise if someone comes along with a bright idea, don't get jealous and vindictive, instead try to find ways to incorporate these new ideas and skills in your team.
OSS projects should be run like any other project, with one extremely important advantage: there are no salaries to be paid, so you can get the right-sized team for the project. Too few people and things won't get done, people will tire and give up. Too many people and you spend all your time herding cattle, or hearing your lead developer bitch about how the new kid shat all over CVS.
To the original poster: if you're a fresh coder and you want in on a project, you're going at it the wrong way. Don't shop around like it's a day job, rather find something you're good at and do it, then show off your work. If you're worth the bandwidth, someone will notice. There is so much fluff in the marketplace, kids who just want their name in Google so they can butter up their resume, that people begging for work don't even get the time of day, except from other newbies who don't know any better.
Now I may be an idiot, but there is one thing I am not, sir, and that, sir, is an idiot.
This is just as lame as movie ratings. Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and any other big name stores and rental clubs refuse to carry "NC-17" films for reasons that are deeply entrenched in the cosanguine roots of America. Now game retailers refuse to carry "AO" games. What was the point of rating it in the first place ? Seems to me that from a business perspective, if I were running the shop, I'd sell whatever the customers want. If there's a market for Manhunt 2, then I'll happily sell it for profit! I'll even put in the extra effort to ask for ID if a ten year old tries to rent it. The fact is that the huge retail chains hire the dumbest of the dumb, who lack the cerebral activity to stop kids from buying games and films with explicit and gratuitous violence/nudity. Rather than solve the staffing problem, they'd rather punish the creators and "protect our youth" by not showing them what mentally and morally inferior people end up doing for money in the real world.
It would be nice if they could just print the rating on the box, like they already do, then let the consumer make an educated decision based on that information. God forbid someone would actually have to think before buying some shiny crap for their prepubescent child.
Unfortunately for now, the only solution to this fountain of stupid is to get your "obscene" goods from Europe or Asia, where civilization comes from!
All this talk about loss leaders makes me wonder how much an ink-jet printer really costs to build. It's really just a couple of stepping motors, a simple controller and a little bit of memory. Maybe I'm a crazy old geek but those components are just bigger, slower and cheaper versions of the parts that go into a hard drive (minus the platters). If I can buy an 80gb hard drive for ~$30, with its tight tolerances and fast transfer rate, then why should I be paying three times more for a big hunk of plastic that moves a little box of ink back and forth ? I could probably build one around a microcontroller and some SRAM, so what's with the ridiculous price tag ?
I hope I'm not alone when I ask: Why does it have to be so complicated ?
I've been programming for a good 25 years now, and the one thing that goes through my head all the time is "Why is this stuff as baroque as it was 25 years ago?" It comes out in various forms, like "Why do I have to write yet another business app that's 99% identical to the last" and "Why in god's name did some Web 2.0 idiot have to invent yet another Smalltalk dialect?", but the underlying sentiment is the same.
The hardware has evolved by leaps and bounds, yet software is still blah. If I invent some neat little gadget that scratches an itch, I don't want to spend weeks teaching my PC how to talk to it. Ultimately, we're ferrying data back and forth. I don't care if it's a NIC, 3d accelerator, USB controller or god-knows-what, what they do with the data is very different, but getting it to/from the CPU/RAM should be consistent (in a pure-design technicolor dream). Quite frankly, I don't care if the bits get shipped over CAT5, DVI or a cheap dumb USB cable, once it leaves the FSB it becomes the peripheral's responsibility. If that means hardware manufacturers need to add a little front-end controller chip to their devices, in exchange for a dramatically simplified driver implementation, well... they're the hardware guys, it should be easy!
I must be missing some important detail here: how is a 48-port router any different from, say, a regular router with a 48-port switch ? Do you really need an IRQ for each port ? Don't they use "switch fabric" for those things ? Hypercube-style topology or the like.
Mr. Lessig has done amazing things in the copyright arena, I can only wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors, as he works his way up the chain to the source of corporate evil. The fact that he's going after what I consider to be the greatest destroyer of mankind makes his quest absolutely legendary. I just hope he doesn't get "disappeared" when he digs up the dirt.
This sort of sneaky behavior is like a big billboard on Wall Street saying "For auction: W3C, ICANN and other dirty rotten entities"
To everyone outside the USA, it seems obvious that there is no way a "neutral" organization can honestly survive within US borders. We don't necessarily care who runs it, as long as it's not Americans. It's not the American people that are the problem, it's the rampant cutthroat business attitude that spoils everything, in the land where everything has its price, and corporations are virtually immune from prosecution, as long as they know how to hand out bribes. Given the huge amount of money in internet ventures, the W3C is a prime target for manipulation and doing things behind closed doors is just proof that they have stuff to hide.
You know, if this man honestly believes we should "waste" less time combating fraud, burglary and bank robbery, maybe we should let him have it that way.
Why download the latest movies when you can easily buy them with other people's money ?:) I'll gladly steal Rick Cotton's identity and empty his accounts if it means I can buy my own movies and sleep with a clear conscience.
It's easy for a download junkie to justify their actions by saying "I'm not a criminal because I wouldn't pay for this anyway", just as it is easy for MAFIAA monkeys to say "I'm not a victim because I've never been defrauded or burglarized, and bank robberies only happen in movies!".
The big difference is that the victims of fraud and burglary are far more numerous and tangible than the supposed victims of media piracy. When you file that police report and insurance claim after being been robbed, there's no fuzzy multiplier to inflate the value of your goods. When a 419 scammer sends you a fake bank draft, there's no speculation about the numbers printed on the piece of paper. Yet when these corporate shills quote their losses, they can't even say the same numbers from day to day, and you have to wonder how they even survive in the cutthroat business world if they're really losing "hundreds of billions" every time they step into the morning sun.
Man, I really wish I could have sued the whole world when my puny little computer store was losing business to the competition. After all, it's not my fault that the asian guy across the street had lower prices and a larger inventory... right ? So he wasn't necessarily paying his taxes, worked shady deals with his supplier and cooked the books to hide the fact that his employees were paid below minimum wage, but really... it's the customers that are to blame for taking advantage of the better deals... RIGHT ?
Substitute "computer store" with "film/record industry" and "asian guy across the street" with "the internet". Dun-Dun-DUNNN!
I love bacteria! Bacteria is what makes the difference between me and my spouse (well, that and the boobs). Being an utterly absent-minded ubergeek, I have a lax sense of how long food can survive in the fridge... if it doesn't have martian cheese, I declare it edible. The result of a decade of this dietary abuse is that I hardly ever get indigestion or cramps, while she will get nauseated just at the thought of day-old pizza.
The human body is a complex, self-regulating organism. If you life your whole life in a super-sanitized bubble, soaked in distilled water and shielded from the sun's "harmful" rays, the very instant you step outside into the real world you'll drop dead. I'm not saying we should go about our daily chores covered in filth, but I certainly don't live my life in fear of microscopic critters. We humans have been around for thousands of years, well guess what: even the Neanderthal managed to survive, and while they didn't have the pollution problems of industrialization, they certainly didn't have hyper-filtered water and Purell lotion. We may be smarter and more productive than our far ancestors, but we've become big pussies.
If one idiot in an office can dramatically worsen the quality of hundreds of thousands of lives with a mere pen stroke, I nominate that idiot for the wood chipper.
The REAL sad truth is that they visited a Gigabyte factory. Given the ridiculously poor quality control that company is known for, I think it's safe to assume that more reputable manufacturers like Asus and MSI have more advanced facilities and refined processes.
Just because you know how a McDonalds burger is made, doesn't mean you know how Hard Rock Cafe makes theirs.
It's really cute that they invented a gadget that detects cell phones.. really, bravo! It's so frickin' hard to scan on the 900/1800mhz cell frequencies and use directional antennae to pinpoint the source. Wow!
Giving this to cops will only make cops that much more obnoxious, and that much more likely to piss me off one day and draw my obsessive-compulsive ire. You can bet your house that the day this system gets implemented, all the cops will bother doing is pulling EVERYONE over who has a cell phone. Well I hope this gadget also detects firearms because I can see a lot of cops getting in trouble over this nosey crap.
Next point: Taxis. How many people use their cell phone while riding in a cab ? I know that if I'm on my way to a business conference, I'm typically on the cell phone coordinating stuff, making use of the long stupid wait while stuck in traffic.
It all boils down to the same story as every conservative argument: stupid people do stupid things. Instead of inventing gadgets and laws that punish everyone for the transgressions of a small group, why don't we just exclude the idiots in the first place ? Some people suck at driving to begin with, even without a phone, music or any other distractions, they still can't drive 10 miles without trading paint or seriously infuriating the person behind/beside them. We need stricter licensing to keep the idiots off the road, then the rest of us, responsible and attentive, we can make our phone calls as needed while the fools ride the bus.
The new cyber-warfare isn't about operating systems or hardware, it's about the weakest element of all: humans.
If you want confidential information about some secret project, just ask! The most secure computer system in the world is no match for its naive operator.
What makes you think it would be any easier to leave China?
Oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that Chinese immigrants account for roughly 8% of my country's population. That's not counting Canadian-born people from Chinese parents. To top it off, the collective Chinese languages overtook Arabic languages roughly ten years ago, becoming the most popular allophone language in Canada. That means it comes right after English and French, and believe me we have lots of Arabic people in the cities. Heck we now have Chinese people in the country, smack dab in the middle of the Quebec rednecks. That right there is something you didn't see 10-20 years ago, and they're not running restaurants or convenience stores; they're retired and enjoying a peaceful life while their Canadian-born children are living their lives in the city.
I'm not saying it's easy to leave China, it most probably isn't, but when people want to leave, they find a way. Many Vietnamese went through Thailand, and endured some pretty rough conditions to come to Canada... It's hard to imagine emigrating when you've lived in a free country all your life, but if you're from a less-than-ideal nation with dramatic problems like unemployment, inadequate health care, an oppressive government, you've got far greater motivation to do something about it.
I don't know much about telecoms, but I do know about small-town business:) One thing that is certain is that the more people get frustrated with a big service provider, the more likely they are to switch to a smaller, friendlier provider. That's why small-time ISPs are still doing well, because they build their business around the customer, not the other way around.
It's quite simple: the common user does a whole bunch of stuff on the internet. If the big company's service doesn't let you do what you want to do, you find someone else who will. It could go as far as creating opportunities for "black market" services. The concept of a pirate-friendly ISP isn't so far fetched; we already have pirate-friendly datacenters overseas. Hell, I put up with slow-ass 125ms pings to my server in Amsterdam, but the benefit is that I don't have to worry about trigger-happy idiots like Michael Crook or crazy left-wingers trying to tell me what I can and can't post on my blog.
I'm personally quite fond of three-strike rules, especially when dealing with heinous crimes like identity theft. Not running a red light, minor possession or "disturbing the peace" with your bass-heavy rice rocket; those can be annoying, anti-social or even dangerous in this idiotic world, but they're just ignorance crimes. Identify theft, arson, rape, aggravated assault, now these are hateful crimes that severely damage other people's lives.
1st strike: Criminal charges, fines, possible jail time. Do not pass go. 2nd strike: Guaranteed jail time, stiffer fines, maybe a little tracking chip embedded in your urethra. 3rd strike: We "accidentally" toss you in a wood chipper and the world breathes a sigh of relief.
Seriously, those of you who still foolishly believe human life is precious and fragile, I have one good argument: there are 6.6 billion people alive right now (estimated). 5 babies are born every second. I think it's fair to sacrifice one failed human to make the world a tiny bit safer for the 5 babies, who will hopefully not grow up to be heinous criminals.
People make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, and many are worthy of our forgiveness. Those who demonstrate a complete lack or ability or desire to change their evil ways, they are a threat to everyone else and should be excluded by whatever means necessary. We don't have anywhere to put them, so we're just going to have to kill them.
It always amazes me how the word "liberal" carries more anger than racial slurs in the USA. What's wrong with telling the government to mind their business ?
The big problem with gun control is that it doesn't remove any guns already in circulation. I think the big driver for gun crime in the USA is fear. The bad guys are afraid of being shot by a shotgun-wielding convenience store clerk (!?), so they show up with a weapon of their own to "defend" themselves. In Canada if you want to rob a liquor store, just say so and they'll either beat you to a pump or hand over the money, but you won't get shot. That's why in Canada we have such low incidences of crimes involving firearms. Baseball bats are far more common, usually to compensate for a little shortcoming in the robber's pants because they hardly ever have the balls to swing it, they just hope it will scare the clerk into giving up the cash. That's my personal experience from 8 years of retail in the nastiest part of town. I've been robbed a few times, never been injured, though I can't say the same for my attackers;)
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This is going to sound horrible but sometimes it's just a cultural thing. Nobody wants to admit they're wrong. Some Americans don't break unless you're holding a big effing gun to their head. Some Indians just never break... I don't know why and I'm certainly not qualified to research it, but anyone who's worked with Indian consultants and staff has run into this brick wall: your guy screwed up royally but adamantly refuses to admit it, like you're going to rip his head off if he does.
Back to the topic: in this case, I wouldn't be all that surprised if the whole thing was a hoax. Let's pretend they didn't crack the system. Let's say they just started talking like they had figured out, but actually hadn't. Their names were on the guest list, and now they're on slashdot. People think there's an exploit when really there isn't. The perceived threat (to TPM manufacturers) is non-negligible, and some of damage is already done, sight unseen.
Have you ever seen a "terrorist" with your own eyes ? Probably not. Are you afraid of them ? Probably yes. As long as there's the seed of doubt, humans will act irrationally.
I second that. Sun's product line is very aggressive for SMB gear. They don't stray much into the supercomputing arena because it's a whole other ballgame, but for high-end "common" servers and workstations, they offer some pretty serious bang for the buck. In that light, they compete in the same segments as Dell's Poweredge line, or HP's Proliant. Medium iron as opposed to big iron. Server gear for the rest of us who aren't on the Fortune 50 :)
I fell in love with Sun when I first laid my hands on a Sun Fire V40z, 8 cores of AMD goodness in a small box, but half the price of a competing Dell system.
It doesn't just say how old the car is, it also says how young YOU are :) Seriously though, dating computers by their year of release would help a little bit. It would give the non-techies something easy to latch onto, instead of having people say "Pentium 4 ? you're trying to sell me old junk! I want a Pentium 64!"
At least when you buy a used car, even a non-mechanic can figure out that a 2001 Ford Focus is a piece of shit... erm, and that it's 6 years old. If people advertised their PC as a "2004 AMD" then you could derive that it's between 1.6 and 2.4ghz, probably has 256mb of ram and a 40gh hard drive. More importantly, they'd know it's probably not extremely different from someone else's 2004 computer.
Actually the video cards usually have regular increasing numbers for every new chipset revision. It's the asian OEMs like Asus, Gigabyte and others that totally mess it up. Like for example, Asus released a V9999 many years ago which had a Geforce 6800 Ultra at its heart. It was a fast card for sure, but where do you go after 9999 ? Is the EN8800GTX slower than the 9999 (No, it's not).
It gets even dumber when truly unenlightened souls try to compare video cards by their onboard memory. I've lost count of how many times people walked up to me and bought a $50 rock-bottom 256mb-card, which is basically a stick of ram with a blitter duct-taped to the backside. The next day they come back and complain that my card sucks because FEAR didn't run smoothly on their Radeon x300 "but the box says 256mb recommended". Then the guy will try to "upgrade" to a 512mb entry-level card, which is usually where I put my foot down and try to explain the whole VRAM scam, but often times I just have to throw them out of the store once they've made two things clear: 1. they aren't listening to my wisdom and 2. they can't afford the $200 mid-range gamer card that will allow them to run that brand new game they just pirated.
It used to be simple, all graphics cards sucked equally, and all processors had almost linear performance relative to their clock speed. Most people are still stuck in that mentality, even the semi-techy crowd if they haven't been throwing all their money at the upgrade gods.
I never quite understood Opera's raison d'etre. They've always been the underdog, and they've always boasted better standards compliance, but does the common user care about compliance ? I think not. In fact, even if a web site looks like ass in their browser, as long as the clicky things work, they will put up with all sorts of mediocrity.
I switched over to Firefox around the same time that IE7 was released, mostly because I was royally underwhelmed. Then I fell in love with the many development add-ons that helped me debug my web pages and javascript, and now there is no turning back. We all know IE isn't going anywhere, but it would be nice if Opera and Firefox could pool together and release one uber browser to rule them all.
You hit the nail on the head: elitism is what kills our efficiency. We suffer from inflated head'ism, where any ideas that come from outside the clique are seen as threats. Just look at all the major open source projects, not just the kernel but Apache, Samba, Gnome and KDE... they all suffer from this bizarre "us vs them" attitude.
I can certainly understand that there are a lot more dumb whiney people than clever ones, but an open-source project manager, like any other manager, needs to learn to maximize the resources available. If you have a half-brained monkey banging on your door, give up some boring job that no one else wants, that will keep them busy AND get your work done. Likewise if someone comes along with a bright idea, don't get jealous and vindictive, instead try to find ways to incorporate these new ideas and skills in your team.
OSS projects should be run like any other project, with one extremely important advantage: there are no salaries to be paid, so you can get the right-sized team for the project. Too few people and things won't get done, people will tire and give up. Too many people and you spend all your time herding cattle, or hearing your lead developer bitch about how the new kid shat all over CVS.
To the original poster: if you're a fresh coder and you want in on a project, you're going at it the wrong way. Don't shop around like it's a day job, rather find something you're good at and do it, then show off your work. If you're worth the bandwidth, someone will notice. There is so much fluff in the marketplace, kids who just want their name in Google so they can butter up their resume, that people begging for work don't even get the time of day, except from other newbies who don't know any better.
Now I may be an idiot, but there is one thing I am not, sir, and that, sir, is an idiot.
This is just as lame as movie ratings. Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and any other big name stores and rental clubs refuse to carry "NC-17" films for reasons that are deeply entrenched in the cosanguine roots of America. Now game retailers refuse to carry "AO" games. What was the point of rating it in the first place ? Seems to me that from a business perspective, if I were running the shop, I'd sell whatever the customers want. If there's a market for Manhunt 2, then I'll happily sell it for profit! I'll even put in the extra effort to ask for ID if a ten year old tries to rent it. The fact is that the huge retail chains hire the dumbest of the dumb, who lack the cerebral activity to stop kids from buying games and films with explicit and gratuitous violence/nudity. Rather than solve the staffing problem, they'd rather punish the creators and "protect our youth" by not showing them what mentally and morally inferior people end up doing for money in the real world.
It would be nice if they could just print the rating on the box, like they already do, then let the consumer make an educated decision based on that information. God forbid someone would actually have to think before buying some shiny crap for their prepubescent child.
Unfortunately for now, the only solution to this fountain of stupid is to get your "obscene" goods from Europe or Asia, where civilization comes from!
All this talk about loss leaders makes me wonder how much an ink-jet printer really costs to build. It's really just a couple of stepping motors, a simple controller and a little bit of memory. Maybe I'm a crazy old geek but those components are just bigger, slower and cheaper versions of the parts that go into a hard drive (minus the platters). If I can buy an 80gb hard drive for ~$30, with its tight tolerances and fast transfer rate, then why should I be paying three times more for a big hunk of plastic that moves a little box of ink back and forth ? I could probably build one around a microcontroller and some SRAM, so what's with the ridiculous price tag ?
It's not price fixing, it's market balance. If Brand A is gouging customers with overpriced goods, Brand B has two options:
1. Sell cheaper and hope to attract lots of customers that way
2. Match Brand B's price and join in on the looting!
There is no such thing as a "fair price" in business school.
I hope I'm not alone when I ask: Why does it have to be so complicated ?
I've been programming for a good 25 years now, and the one thing that goes through my head all the time is "Why is this stuff as baroque as it was 25 years ago?" It comes out in various forms, like "Why do I have to write yet another business app that's 99% identical to the last" and "Why in god's name did some Web 2.0 idiot have to invent yet another Smalltalk dialect?", but the underlying sentiment is the same.
The hardware has evolved by leaps and bounds, yet software is still blah. If I invent some neat little gadget that scratches an itch, I don't want to spend weeks teaching my PC how to talk to it. Ultimately, we're ferrying data back and forth. I don't care if it's a NIC, 3d accelerator, USB controller or god-knows-what, what they do with the data is very different, but getting it to/from the CPU/RAM should be consistent (in a pure-design technicolor dream). Quite frankly, I don't care if the bits get shipped over CAT5, DVI or a cheap dumb USB cable, once it leaves the FSB it becomes the peripheral's responsibility. If that means hardware manufacturers need to add a little front-end controller chip to their devices, in exchange for a dramatically simplified driver implementation, well... they're the hardware guys, it should be easy!
I must be missing some important detail here: how is a 48-port router any different from, say, a regular router with a 48-port switch ? Do you really need an IRQ for each port ? Don't they use "switch fabric" for those things ? Hypercube-style topology or the like.
How about "the RIAA pays up $x thousand to snitch on our students. Tuition is non-refundable anyway, fuck em!"
... and then people will stop trying to play nice with the broken legal system, and start playing dirty with guns and ammo.
Ed Howdershelt said it best.
Mr. Lessig has done amazing things in the copyright arena, I can only wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors, as he works his way up the chain to the source of corporate evil. The fact that he's going after what I consider to be the greatest destroyer of mankind makes his quest absolutely legendary. I just hope he doesn't get "disappeared" when he digs up the dirt.
This sort of sneaky behavior is like a big billboard on Wall Street saying "For auction: W3C, ICANN and other dirty rotten entities"
To everyone outside the USA, it seems obvious that there is no way a "neutral" organization can honestly survive within US borders. We don't necessarily care who runs it, as long as it's not Americans. It's not the American people that are the problem, it's the rampant cutthroat business attitude that spoils everything, in the land where everything has its price, and corporations are virtually immune from prosecution, as long as they know how to hand out bribes. Given the huge amount of money in internet ventures, the W3C is a prime target for manipulation and doing things behind closed doors is just proof that they have stuff to hide.
You know, if this man honestly believes we should "waste" less time combating fraud, burglary and bank robbery, maybe we should let him have it that way.
:) I'll gladly steal Rick Cotton's identity and empty his accounts if it means I can buy my own movies and sleep with a clear conscience.
Why download the latest movies when you can easily buy them with other people's money ?
It's easy for a download junkie to justify their actions by saying "I'm not a criminal because I wouldn't pay for this anyway", just as it is easy for MAFIAA monkeys to say "I'm not a victim because I've never been defrauded or burglarized, and bank robberies only happen in movies!".
The big difference is that the victims of fraud and burglary are far more numerous and tangible than the supposed victims of media piracy. When you file that police report and insurance claim after being been robbed, there's no fuzzy multiplier to inflate the value of your goods. When a 419 scammer sends you a fake bank draft, there's no speculation about the numbers printed on the piece of paper. Yet when these corporate shills quote their losses, they can't even say the same numbers from day to day, and you have to wonder how they even survive in the cutthroat business world if they're really losing "hundreds of billions" every time they step into the morning sun.
Man, I really wish I could have sued the whole world when my puny little computer store was losing business to the competition. After all, it's not my fault that the asian guy across the street had lower prices and a larger inventory... right ? So he wasn't necessarily paying his taxes, worked shady deals with his supplier and cooked the books to hide the fact that his employees were paid below minimum wage, but really... it's the customers that are to blame for taking advantage of the better deals... RIGHT ?
Substitute "computer store" with "film/record industry" and "asian guy across the street" with "the internet". Dun-Dun-DUNNN!
I love bacteria! Bacteria is what makes the difference between me and my spouse (well, that and the boobs). Being an utterly absent-minded ubergeek, I have a lax sense of how long food can survive in the fridge... if it doesn't have martian cheese, I declare it edible. The result of a decade of this dietary abuse is that I hardly ever get indigestion or cramps, while she will get nauseated just at the thought of day-old pizza.
The human body is a complex, self-regulating organism. If you life your whole life in a super-sanitized bubble, soaked in distilled water and shielded from the sun's "harmful" rays, the very instant you step outside into the real world you'll drop dead. I'm not saying we should go about our daily chores covered in filth, but I certainly don't live my life in fear of microscopic critters. We humans have been around for thousands of years, well guess what: even the Neanderthal managed to survive, and while they didn't have the pollution problems of industrialization, they certainly didn't have hyper-filtered water and Purell lotion. We may be smarter and more productive than our far ancestors, but we've become big pussies.
Simple: hold politicians to the same rules!
If one idiot in an office can dramatically worsen the quality of hundreds of thousands of lives with a mere pen stroke, I nominate that idiot for the wood chipper.
The REAL sad truth is that they visited a Gigabyte factory. Given the ridiculously poor quality control that company is known for, I think it's safe to assume that more reputable manufacturers like Asus and MSI have more advanced facilities and refined processes.
Just because you know how a McDonalds burger is made, doesn't mean you know how Hard Rock Cafe makes theirs.
It's really cute that they invented a gadget that detects cell phones.. really, bravo! It's so frickin' hard to scan on the 900/1800mhz cell frequencies and use directional antennae to pinpoint the source. Wow!
Giving this to cops will only make cops that much more obnoxious, and that much more likely to piss me off one day and draw my obsessive-compulsive ire. You can bet your house that the day this system gets implemented, all the cops will bother doing is pulling EVERYONE over who has a cell phone. Well I hope this gadget also detects firearms because I can see a lot of cops getting in trouble over this nosey crap.
Next point: Taxis. How many people use their cell phone while riding in a cab ? I know that if I'm on my way to a business conference, I'm typically on the cell phone coordinating stuff, making use of the long stupid wait while stuck in traffic.
It all boils down to the same story as every conservative argument: stupid people do stupid things. Instead of inventing gadgets and laws that punish everyone for the transgressions of a small group, why don't we just exclude the idiots in the first place ? Some people suck at driving to begin with, even without a phone, music or any other distractions, they still can't drive 10 miles without trading paint or seriously infuriating the person behind/beside them. We need stricter licensing to keep the idiots off the road, then the rest of us, responsible and attentive, we can make our phone calls as needed while the fools ride the bus.
The new cyber-warfare isn't about operating systems or hardware, it's about the weakest element of all: humans.
If you want confidential information about some secret project, just ask! The most secure computer system in the world is no match for its naive operator.
What makes you think it would be any easier to leave China?
Oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that Chinese immigrants account for roughly 8% of my country's population. That's not counting Canadian-born people from Chinese parents. To top it off, the collective Chinese languages overtook Arabic languages roughly ten years ago, becoming the most popular allophone language in Canada. That means it comes right after English and French, and believe me we have lots of Arabic people in the cities. Heck we now have Chinese people in the country, smack dab in the middle of the Quebec rednecks. That right there is something you didn't see 10-20 years ago, and they're not running restaurants or convenience stores; they're retired and enjoying a peaceful life while their Canadian-born children are living their lives in the city.
I'm not saying it's easy to leave China, it most probably isn't, but when people want to leave, they find a way. Many Vietnamese went through Thailand, and endured some pretty rough conditions to come to Canada... It's hard to imagine emigrating when you've lived in a free country all your life, but if you're from a less-than-ideal nation with dramatic problems like unemployment, inadequate health care, an oppressive government, you've got far greater motivation to do something about it.
I don't know much about telecoms, but I do know about small-town business :) One thing that is certain is that the more people get frustrated with a big service provider, the more likely they are to switch to a smaller, friendlier provider. That's why small-time ISPs are still doing well, because they build their business around the customer, not the other way around.
It's quite simple: the common user does a whole bunch of stuff on the internet. If the big company's service doesn't let you do what you want to do, you find someone else who will. It could go as far as creating opportunities for "black market" services. The concept of a pirate-friendly ISP isn't so far fetched; we already have pirate-friendly datacenters overseas. Hell, I put up with slow-ass 125ms pings to my server in Amsterdam, but the benefit is that I don't have to worry about trigger-happy idiots like Michael Crook or crazy left-wingers trying to tell me what I can and can't post on my blog.
I'm personally quite fond of three-strike rules, especially when dealing with heinous crimes like identity theft. Not running a red light, minor possession or "disturbing the peace" with your bass-heavy rice rocket; those can be annoying, anti-social or even dangerous in this idiotic world, but they're just ignorance crimes. Identify theft, arson, rape, aggravated assault, now these are hateful crimes that severely damage other people's lives.
1st strike: Criminal charges, fines, possible jail time. Do not pass go.
2nd strike: Guaranteed jail time, stiffer fines, maybe a little tracking chip embedded in your urethra.
3rd strike: We "accidentally" toss you in a wood chipper and the world breathes a sigh of relief.
Seriously, those of you who still foolishly believe human life is precious and fragile, I have one good argument: there are 6.6 billion people alive right now (estimated). 5 babies are born every second. I think it's fair to sacrifice one failed human to make the world a tiny bit safer for the 5 babies, who will hopefully not grow up to be heinous criminals.
People make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, and many are worthy of our forgiveness. Those who demonstrate a complete lack or ability or desire to change their evil ways, they are a threat to everyone else and should be excluded by whatever means necessary. We don't have anywhere to put them, so we're just going to have to kill them.
It always amazes me how the word "liberal" carries more anger than racial slurs in the USA. What's wrong with telling the government to mind their business ?
;)
The big problem with gun control is that it doesn't remove any guns already in circulation. I think the big driver for gun crime in the USA is fear. The bad guys are afraid of being shot by a shotgun-wielding convenience store clerk (!?), so they show up with a weapon of their own to "defend" themselves. In Canada if you want to rob a liquor store, just say so and they'll either beat you to a pump or hand over the money, but you won't get shot. That's why in Canada we have such low incidences of crimes involving firearms. Baseball bats are far more common, usually to compensate for a little shortcoming in the robber's pants because they hardly ever have the balls to swing it, they just hope it will scare the clerk into giving up the cash. That's my personal experience from 8 years of retail in the nastiest part of town. I've been robbed a few times, never been injured, though I can't say the same for my attackers