It still makes me wonder: how come Google ads just don't irritate me*, and even actually interest me enough to click though on regular basis, but Facebook, Flickr, and everyone else seem to handle advertising in ways that just plain irritate me?
Or that apparently waste advertisers' money because they're flinging ads at people who have utterly no interest in them.
Kind of the same way that I can drop back into Amazon.com after a year or so, and it just feels good and somehow makes it really easy to buy stuff, yet 95% of e-commerce sites suck terribly.
I guess it's that geeky drive to invent something brand new every time instead of just copying (or licencing) what already works well.
They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers, passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content infants seated in the back.
Ah yes, back in the Good Old Days everyone knew that the ideal way to travel with kids was to make a big bed in the back of the station wagon and just let 'em all roll around loose.
We are being told - and some of us suspected as much for a very long time - that the NSA &Co track everything we do, and have the ability de-encrypt much of what we think is secure; whether through brute force, exploits, backdoors, or corporate collusion.
Surely we should also assume that there are other criminal and/or hacker groups with the resources or skills to gain similar access? Another case of "once they know it can be done, you can't turn back."
I honestly believe that we're finally at the point where the reasonable assumption is that nothing is secure, and that you should act accordingly.
I'm an end user, although one that likes mucking about in Linux, flashing a new OS on to my phone, and generally getting into the guts of whatever tech I'm using.
Maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember trying to make early Linux distros work relying on Man pages, but "documentation" tends to be the last place that I look for answers. I still shudder to recall that understanding Man Page A required understanding Man page B required understanding Man page C..... I just wanted my modem to work!
The problem is that so much documentation is just too much for day to day needs. I don't want to understand the technical underpinnings of Android or Debian packages I just want to know how to make a problem go away. Simple questions require simple answers.
Instead I rely heavily on Google + Forums for probably 98% of my needs. I really need to have a very, very obscure problem to find that no-one has figured it out yet. (At which point I dutifully file a bug report)
Finally, am I alone in finding that whatever technical support docs are available on corporate sites are useless?
Far, far more frightening though is the possibility that you may find yourself shipped off to a foreign country (Syria say) to be tortured and imprisoned. What happened to Maher Arar (and others) is more than enough to make me avoid crossing the US border for any reason.
You may believe you're innocent, and that there's no reason why you would have problems, but so did he.
Ah yes, but I'm in Canada, the land of the Three Big Cel Companies with no competition. The Nexus 4 at Telus runs $425, and good luck finding a decent plan for less than $60 a month - that includes 500 megs of data, voicemail that will only hold THREE messages, and everything in the world is $10 a month extra.
I'm looking to replace my ageing Nexus S. I'm sick of getting locked into scumbag cel phone company contracts, but I really can't convince myself to fork over the $500-$700 asking price for a tool that realistically might be usable for two years. There's just no way that these prices seem reasonable.
I'm looking fairly seriously at the many cheap Android phones selling out of China. Even if the build quality is a bit sloppy, it looks like I can pick up a good usable Android phone for a couple of hundred bucks. At that price replacing it every year or so makes sense.
Maybe there are people who feel that paying an extra $500 for the absolute newest, fastest, shiniest phone is reasonable, but for a lot of us $200 is about the right price point for a smart phone that does everything that we need adequately. That's where things like the cheap Firefox phones are likely to make their mark.
Y'know, I read through the summary twice, and both times concluded that there's about a 1% chance of this whole mess working. Too many things relying on too many other things relying on too many other things.
Show me the captcha before I enter any data please.
Yes! God yes! I've walked away from a few sites that expected me to re-enter a whack of data because the CAPTCHA borfed. Including some where I had intended to spend money.
It always seemed stunningly obvious that you carry over the form contents in situations like this.
Passwords, with no two sites accepting the same format. CAPTCHAs, which often as not even normally sighted people can't read without difficulty. Security questions which are either inane or represent their own special security risk.
God almighty, can't we come up with something to replace all of these?
All so people can watch some of the worst entertainment in human history.
You know what? There's actually a bloody gigantic amount of excellent content on NetFlix. Admittedly their ultra-pathetic interface makes it damned near impossible to find, but it is there.
Now, there are reasons to dislike DRM, and in fact the stupid regional DRM licences are one of the reasons why people pay extra to access US NetFlix instead of their local one*, And surely there are still times each month when I'll grab something from Pirate Bay because NetFlix doesn't have it.
But, and this is the big fat critical but, at the end of the day NetFlix works, works well, and delivers a hell of a lot of good programming for very, very little money. And does so in way that the DRM is simply not noticeable.
It may be preferable for NetFlix to have no DRM, but as it stands now I can't think of any practical difference it would make to my experience as a user.
Until the anti-DRM crowd creates a fully Open Source media service, licences tens of thousands of TV shows and movies, and serves it up DRM free, NetFlix is the best that we've got.
*If you're stuck with NetFlix Canada, well accept that you've got one quarter of the choices, and half of those feature Paul Gross.
Really it's pretty simple. The people who have the power to make the rules, also have the power to ignore that parts they don't like.
In practical terms your "rights" exist exactly as long as your government wants them to. As long as government has bigger and better guns, more prisons, and runs the judiciary and police, you will have exactly as many "rights" as they find convenient.
It's remarkably naive to think otherwise, and it has always been the case.
(Cue the Americans who actually believe that any of their rights are so inviolate that they are beyond the reach of their government...)
(And those who can't distinguish between lip service and a willingness to actually do something.)
In point of fact, the only intrinsic advantage between Photoshop and the current version of The Gimp is that Photoshop offers arguably better support for CMYK than The Gimp does.
Pure nonsense. Working with PS is an order of magnitude easier than working with The GIMP. It's quite simply a better program in every sense.
I slogged along with The GIMP for a couple of years after switching to Linux, figuring it was good enough for my needs. When Adobe offered the "free" downloads of Photoshop CS last year I installed that under WINE and was pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised with how much easier it was to do almost everything.
Now, whether it's better enough to be worth a thousand bucks is another question entirely.
I can't see where it says that the carriers have to comply with this code under penalty of law...am I missing something?
Too lazy to actually check, but it may be yet another semi-voluntary thing. At a guess I'd say that this new set of rules was pretty much developed within, and then handed to the CRTC by the Big Three telcos.
As you noted, the CRTC really doesn't regulate mobile phones. In fact they hardly regulate anything any longer, what with years of neo-liberal Harper government, and a Prime Minister's Office that will happily jump in and force them to change anything that they corporate buddies don't like.
But it can do nothing to force a business to support or continue an unprofitable venture.
Trust me, These piddly little changes will still allow Telus, Bell, and Rogers to charge overly high prices, buy up or stifle competition, and generally make obscenely large profits. There never has been, and likely never will be, an unprofitable business in Canadian telecoms, as long as you belong to the Big Three monopolists.
Slashdot Mirror
It still makes me wonder: how come Google ads just don't irritate me*, and even actually interest me enough to click though on regular basis, but Facebook, Flickr, and everyone else seem to handle advertising in ways that just plain irritate me?
Or that apparently waste advertisers' money because they're flinging ads at people who have utterly no interest in them.
Kind of the same way that I can drop back into Amazon.com after a year or so, and it just feels good and somehow makes it really easy to buy stuff, yet 95% of e-commerce sites suck terribly.
I guess it's that geeky drive to invent something brand new every time instead of just copying (or licencing) what already works well.
*OK, YouTube ads are the exception
They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers, passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content infants seated in the back.
Ah yes, back in the Good Old Days everyone knew that the ideal way to travel with kids was to make a big bed in the back of the station wagon and just let 'em all roll around loose.
Then again, Green Tortoise bus lines took that idea to whole new corporate level....
Just for minute let's ignore the seemingly pointless harangues about whether or not "climate change" really exists.
Instead let's examine the issue in the terms that we used back in the 1970's:
1) Burning stuff releases pollutants.
2) Putting less pollutants into the air, water, and ground is a good thing.
We are being told - and some of us suspected as much for a very long time - that the NSA &Co track everything we do, and have the ability de-encrypt much of what we think is secure; whether through brute force, exploits, backdoors, or corporate collusion.
Surely we should also assume that there are other criminal and/or hacker groups with the resources or skills to gain similar access? Another case of "once they know it can be done, you can't turn back."
I honestly believe that we're finally at the point where the reasonable assumption is that nothing is secure, and that you should act accordingly.
I'm an end user, although one that likes mucking about in Linux, flashing a new OS on to my phone, and generally getting into the guts of whatever tech I'm using.
Maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember trying to make early Linux distros work relying on Man pages, but "documentation" tends to be the last place that I look for answers. I still shudder to recall that understanding Man Page A required understanding Man page B required understanding Man page C..... I just wanted my modem to work!
The problem is that so much documentation is just too much for day to day needs. I don't want to understand the technical underpinnings of Android or Debian packages I just want to know how to make a problem go away. Simple questions require simple answers.
Instead I rely heavily on Google + Forums for probably 98% of my needs. I really need to have a very, very obscure problem to find that no-one has figured it out yet. (At which point I dutifully file a bug report)
Finally, am I alone in finding that whatever technical support docs are available on corporate sites are useless?
OH NOES! IT'S CANADA!
Bright side - maybe the co. stocks in a Canadian Lithium mine that our broker talked us into will finally start to appreciate....
Really, this is old news. Just ask Jacob Appelbaum.
Far, far more frightening though is the possibility that you may find yourself shipped off to a foreign country (Syria say) to be tortured and imprisoned. What happened to Maher Arar (and others) is more than enough to make me avoid crossing the US border for any reason.
You may believe you're innocent, and that there's no reason why you would have problems, but so did he.
Ah yes, but I'm in Canada, the land of the Three Big Cel Companies with no competition. The Nexus 4 at Telus runs $425, and good luck finding a decent plan for less than $60 a month - that includes 500 megs of data, voicemail that will only hold THREE messages, and everything in the world is $10 a month extra.
I'm looking to replace my ageing Nexus S. I'm sick of getting locked into scumbag cel phone company contracts, but I really can't convince myself to fork over the $500-$700 asking price for a tool that realistically might be usable for two years. There's just no way that these prices seem reasonable.
I'm looking fairly seriously at the many cheap Android phones selling out of China. Even if the build quality is a bit sloppy, it looks like I can pick up a good usable Android phone for a couple of hundred bucks. At that price replacing it every year or so makes sense.
Maybe there are people who feel that paying an extra $500 for the absolute newest, fastest, shiniest phone is reasonable, but for a lot of us $200 is about the right price point for a smart phone that does everything that we need adequately. That's where things like the cheap Firefox phones are likely to make their mark.
Y'know, I read through the summary twice, and both times concluded that there's about a 1% chance of this whole mess working. Too many things relying on too many other things relying on too many other things.
Although having the word "Netscape" in there.....
Show me the captcha before I enter any data please.
Yes! God yes! I've walked away from a few sites that expected me to re-enter a whack of data because the CAPTCHA borfed. Including some where I had intended to spend money.
It always seemed stunningly obvious that you carry over the form contents in situations like this.
Passwords, with no two sites accepting the same format. CAPTCHAs, which often as not even normally sighted people can't read without difficulty. Security questions which are either inane or represent their own special security risk.
God almighty, can't we come up with something to replace all of these?
All so people can watch some of the worst entertainment in human history.
You know what? There's actually a bloody gigantic amount of excellent content on NetFlix. Admittedly their ultra-pathetic interface makes it damned near impossible to find, but it is there.
Now, there are reasons to dislike DRM, and in fact the stupid regional DRM licences are one of the reasons why people pay extra to access US NetFlix instead of their local one*, And surely there are still times each month when I'll grab something from Pirate Bay because NetFlix doesn't have it.
But, and this is the big fat critical but, at the end of the day NetFlix works, works well, and delivers a hell of a lot of good programming for very, very little money. And does so in way that the DRM is simply not noticeable.
It may be preferable for NetFlix to have no DRM, but as it stands now I can't think of any practical difference it would make to my experience as a user.
Until the anti-DRM crowd creates a fully Open Source media service, licences tens of thousands of TV shows and movies, and serves it up DRM free, NetFlix is the best that we've got.
*If you're stuck with NetFlix Canada, well accept that you've got one quarter of the choices, and half of those feature Paul Gross.
One of the things that annoys me about Android: having to print through the Cloud ... to a printer ten feet from me
Sure it would be lovely to have easy printing built into Android, but honestly I've found that PrinterShare works just fine.
Really it's pretty simple. The people who have the power to make the rules, also have the power to ignore that parts they don't like.
In practical terms your "rights" exist exactly as long as your government wants them to. As long as government has bigger and better guns, more prisons, and runs the judiciary and police, you will have exactly as many "rights" as they find convenient.
It's remarkably naive to think otherwise, and it has always been the case.
(Cue the Americans who actually believe that any of their rights are so inviolate that they are beyond the reach of their government...)
(And those who can't distinguish between lip service and a willingness to actually do something.)
That's it! Tempted to copy that into my browser but suspect it would be a VERY bad idea.
Kids today have no idea how much you appreciate Photoshop when you've downloaded in one file using a dial-up modem.
Wow. Make me feel like an old timer! I used to love altavista - it was the absolute best there was.
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
There is no "on a computer" exemption
Yes there is! It's the same as the "copyright doesn't apply on the Internet" rule.
Sexism Still a Problem Everywhere
Fixed that for you....
Ah! Never even considered the 32/64 bit question. In my defense, the site just says "Linux (Ubuntu)" so I assumed it would just work.
Gee whiz, looks good. I WANT IT. But my limit for mucking about trying to make something work in Linux is 60 minutes.
.... error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 indeed....
Seriously, I'm using Mint, the bastard son of Ubuntu, so it should be easy.
Never have points when I need them! ABSOLUTELY right!
In point of fact, the only intrinsic advantage between Photoshop and the current version of The Gimp is that Photoshop offers arguably better support for CMYK than The Gimp does.
Pure nonsense. Working with PS is an order of magnitude easier than working with The GIMP. It's quite simply a better program in every sense.
I slogged along with The GIMP for a couple of years after switching to Linux, figuring it was good enough for my needs. When Adobe offered the "free" downloads of Photoshop CS last year I installed that under WINE and was pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised with how much easier it was to do almost everything.
Now, whether it's better enough to be worth a thousand bucks is another question entirely.
I can't see where it says that the carriers have to comply with this code under penalty of law...am I missing something?
Too lazy to actually check, but it may be yet another semi-voluntary thing. At a guess I'd say that this new set of rules was pretty much developed within, and then handed to the CRTC by the Big Three telcos.
As you noted, the CRTC really doesn't regulate mobile phones. In fact they hardly regulate anything any longer, what with years of neo-liberal Harper government, and a Prime Minister's Office that will happily jump in and force them to change anything that they corporate buddies don't like.
But it can do nothing to force a business to support or continue an unprofitable venture.
Trust me, These piddly little changes will still allow Telus, Bell, and Rogers to charge overly high prices, buy up or stifle competition, and generally make obscenely large profits. There never has been, and likely never will be, an unprofitable business in Canadian telecoms, as long as you belong to the Big Three monopolists.