They decided to stop selling Yaoi manga. For anyone not aware of the term, it's male homo-erotic manga. However, they didn't stop selling Yuri - the female equivalent with homosexual relationships between women instead of men.
It struck me at the time as blatant homophobia on the part of Amazon, I never bought any yaoi or yuri from them in the first place, but after that (and various other shady practices, like their remote deletion of copies of 1984 that people had bought on Kindle) I stopped using Amazon at all.
Now you can of course argue that it's their business, and they are free to sell or not sell whatever they choose - and that's absolutely fine by me, in fact I'd disagree if you tried to force their hand in terms of what they can sell or not. By the same token though, I'm free to buy from them, or not. I don't.
It's amazing the shit these laywers manage to pull off. Instead of an actual cash refund for how much they illegally ripped you off by, you get "credit" to spend at their store.
Since they have their profit margin on whatever you buy with this, they are still making money from you and being rewarded for their bad behaviour. Plus I see people posting about the tiny amounts they are getting, so if you actually want to buy anything, you will need to spend even more of your money to take advantage of it.
Add to that there is a nice time limit on there which will save them even more money, from all the people who don't claim it within the time limit, this is a joke. You might as well just let them off entirely, this as a "punishment" is a huge green light saying "please do something similar again in future, you'll make more money overall".
Back when the UK passed the Snoopers Charter (the one that lets everyone and their dog access your full internet history), those clever politicians made just one important exemption - they themselves wouldn't be subject to the law.
I wouldn't comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of open source software compared to their main commercial competitors, since I haven't enough experience of the former to make a proper judgement.
What I would say though is that just because the software is FOSS, that doesn't mean zero cost.
Sure, you don't have to buy licenses, but you still need all the infrastructure to deploy it, and especially to support it. If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support. If your support staff aren't good with it either, you might need to invest in training courses and/or more qualified staff. Heck, you might even need an expensive support contract with another company to provide 3rd line support.
" The company says Stethoscope tracks disk encryption, firewall, automatic updates, up-to-date OS/software, screen lock, jailbroken/rooted status, security software stack configurations of the device."
Fantastic! Which one of those stops the user clicking on the nice shiny link in the email claiming to be from the helpdesk and telling them they need to reset their password instantly or lose their account, then filling in their account details for the nice phisher?
Up to 1000 Mbps - yeah, perhaps if you have built your house right on top of the cabinet. In fact, not even then.
I was on their FTTC product for a couple of years, the one that's "up to" 80 Mbps. I got 18 down and 0.75 up. I tried reporting the speed to them on several occasions, especially the upstream speed which was very limiting, only to be told they didn't consider that to be a problem - it's within the range of speeds considered acceptable for that product.
"In the Commonwealth's view, the defendant's act of decryption would not communicate facts of a testimonial nature to the government beyond what the defendant already has admitted to investigators. As such, the Commonwealth continues, the defendant's act of decryption does not trigger Fifth Amendment protection."
So if he had not admitted anything already and had refused to decrypt, the ruling may have been different.
As usual for an invasion of privacy or violation of fundamental rights, the UK got there first. In England, you get your DNA taken and stored simply if you get arrested - you don't even need to be charged, let alone convicted.
I scanned through the comments and didn't see this mentioned yet, so...
Check if the processor speed is being throttled. I once saw a laptop that seems to have the symptoms you described - everything going slow, processes taking lots of CPU time.
It turned out something was wrong with the power management and it was keeping the CPU at the minimum speed permanently. Setting the power profile to "Always On" fixed it for a while, but then it started again, so I disabled the processor power management features in the BIOS.
The post didn't mention if this is a laptop or desktop, but even modern desktop CPUs have lots of power states. Worth a look.
I used to own a generic no-name router, the thing locked up all the time.
I've got a Netgear DG834 now and it has currently been up for 124 days, which is the time since we last had a power cut. I never reset it, and never have any problems.
This allows you to produce updated Windows installation CDs, that actually have the service packs and post-service pack hotfixes *already integrated into the installation*. This saves the extra time normally taken to install Windows *then* go apply all the updates.
So, if I have this right, the wavelength is somewhere between that of X-Rays, which penetrate the human body, and Microwaves, which also penetrate the body. And they are strong enough to cause "small blisters".
What about the possibility of internal damage? Cooked brain, microwaved organs anyone?
Am I the only one who read that part and thought how strange/sad it was as an inclusion?
Why would you want to know the national security level at ALL TIMES, in your own home?
Seems like another fine example of the US Government wanting its citizens to live in nice orderly fear, whilst it "protects" them from dangerous terrorists.
Why evolution in humans should have stopped by now
on
Human Genes Still Evolving
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
People now live and have children when they would previously have died, either through diseases, or harsh environmental conditions. The elimination of the process of natural selection should see to it that evolution in humans no longer occurs, at least not in any beneficial way. Bad genes that lead to people having chronic medical conditions are not removed from the gene pool by those people dying without producing offspring. Humankind needs to step in with more advanced medical care and gene therapy to replace what was once done by nature.
Exchange Server, archiving with Enterprise Vault. 6 actual servers, the users distributed over them. 10 Mb attachment limit, no executables, zip files with executables, or anything we can't scan for whatever reason.
Approx. 8000 users, no mailbox size limit, anything over 1 month old gets archived in the vault.
And if you spend 30 seconds looking at the article, as CmdrTaco should have, you will see that this drive does not deliver 300 Mb/sec. As reported by SiSoft Sandra, it gives 52 Mb/sec. Which many other high performance drives can match. The 300 Mb/sec figure is cache to host transfer speed, which with a 300 Mb/sec transfer and 16 Mb of cache, could be sustained for a whopping 0.0533333... seconds. Wow.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember this, back in 2011?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
They decided to stop selling Yaoi manga. For anyone not aware of the term, it's male homo-erotic manga. However, they didn't stop selling Yuri - the female equivalent with homosexual relationships between women instead of men.
It struck me at the time as blatant homophobia on the part of Amazon, I never bought any yaoi or yuri from them in the first place, but after that (and various other shady practices, like their remote deletion of copies of 1984 that people had bought on Kindle) I stopped using Amazon at all.
Now you can of course argue that it's their business, and they are free to sell or not sell whatever they choose - and that's absolutely fine by me, in fact I'd disagree if you tried to force their hand in terms of what they can sell or not. By the same token though, I'm free to buy from them, or not. I don't.
"disables DDE only in Word, but not Excel or Outlook"
News from next week - cybercriminals switch to using malicious Excel sheets instead of Word documents in their malware spam.
Seriously, what are they thinking here?
It's amazing the shit these laywers manage to pull off. Instead of an actual cash refund for how much they illegally ripped you off by, you get "credit" to spend at their store.
Since they have their profit margin on whatever you buy with this, they are still making money from you and being rewarded for their bad behaviour. Plus I see people posting about the tiny amounts they are getting, so if you actually want to buy anything, you will need to spend even more of your money to take advantage of it.
Add to that there is a nice time limit on there which will save them even more money, from all the people who don't claim it within the time limit, this is a joke. You might as well just let them off entirely, this as a "punishment" is a huge green light saying "please do something similar again in future, you'll make more money overall".
Back when the UK passed the Snoopers Charter (the one that lets everyone and their dog access your full internet history), those clever politicians made just one important exemption - they themselves wouldn't be subject to the law.
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
I'd be surprised if the US hasn't done the same thing, but then the UK *is* a world leader in surveillance of their own citizens.
I wouldn't comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of open source software compared to their main commercial competitors, since I haven't enough experience of the former to make a proper judgement.
What I would say though is that just because the software is FOSS, that doesn't mean zero cost.
Sure, you don't have to buy licenses, but you still need all the infrastructure to deploy it, and especially to support it. If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support. If your support staff aren't good with it either, you might need to invest in training courses and/or more qualified staff. Heck, you might even need an expensive support contract with another company to provide 3rd line support.
" The company says Stethoscope tracks disk encryption, firewall, automatic updates, up-to-date OS/software, screen lock, jailbroken/rooted status, security software stack configurations of the device."
Fantastic! Which one of those stops the user clicking on the nice shiny link in the email claiming to be from the helpdesk and telling them they need to reset their password instantly or lose their account, then filling in their account details for the nice phisher?
Oh yeah, none of them. Good luck with that.
Amazing that people are willing to buy this from Amazon, even the SlashDot crowd seem to have forgotten this incident:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Up to 1000 Mbps - yeah, perhaps if you have built your house right on top of the cabinet. In fact, not even then.
I was on their FTTC product for a couple of years, the one that's "up to" 80 Mbps. I got 18 down and 0.75 up. I tried reporting the speed to them on several occasions, especially the upstream speed which was very limiting, only to be told they didn't consider that to be a problem - it's within the range of speeds considered acceptable for that product.
Exactly - another key sentence in there is:
"In the Commonwealth's view, the defendant's act of decryption would not communicate facts of a testimonial nature to the government beyond what the defendant already has admitted to investigators. As such, the Commonwealth continues, the defendant's act of decryption does not trigger Fifth Amendment protection."
So if he had not admitted anything already and had refused to decrypt, the ruling may have been different.
Way back in 2011, Amazon already started censoring what they choose to sell - it was reported right here on SlashDot.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/15/0254250/amazon-removes-yaoi-manga-titles-from-kindle-store
Since then, I boycotted them. Looks like another bunch of companies just made the list.
As usual for an invasion of privacy or violation of fundamental rights, the UK got there first. In England, you get your DNA taken and stored simply if you get arrested - you don't even need to be charged, let alone convicted.
Too easy?
Apply the patch update and change the options to disable vita chambers. Now death means death.
I scanned through the comments and didn't see this mentioned yet, so...
Check if the processor speed is being throttled. I once saw a laptop that seems to have the symptoms you described - everything going slow, processes taking lots of CPU time.
It turned out something was wrong with the power management and it was keeping the CPU at the minimum speed permanently. Setting the power profile to "Always On" fixed it for a while, but then it started again, so I disabled the processor power management features in the BIOS.
The post didn't mention if this is a laptop or desktop, but even modern desktop CPUs have lots of power states. Worth a look.
Yup, "bad hardware" gets my vote too.
I used to own a generic no-name router, the thing locked up all the time.
I've got a Netgear DG834 now and it has currently been up for 124 days, which is the time since we last had a power cut. I never reset it, and never have any problems.
It's worse than that even - the processor doesn't exist yet either!
Intel had them overclock an existing Core 2 Quad Extreme to perform the "benchmarks".
Check out the article on Toms Hardware Guide:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-QX9770-X48-X38-QX9650,review-29749.html
Hmmm... an AI that monitors kids online. It appears cute so they will like it, whilst secretly monitoring them... why is this familiar...
Ah yes. BonziBUDDY Spyware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBUDDY
For anyone interested in this sort of thing, you might also want to check out RyanVM:
http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/
This allows you to produce updated Windows installation CDs, that actually have the service packs and post-service pack hotfixes *already integrated into the installation*. This saves the extra time normally taken to install Windows *then* go apply all the updates.
So, if I have this right, the wavelength is somewhere between that of X-Rays, which penetrate the human body, and Microwaves, which also penetrate the body. And they are strong enough to cause "small blisters".
What about the possibility of internal damage? Cooked brain, microwaved organs anyone?
No, they aren't. Really. Go into a Marks & Spencer store, and ask customers at random if they are concerned about RFID, or even what it is.
About 90% of them will have never even heard of it, and a further 9.9% or so will know what it is but not care.
The one they taught us at school was "My Very Easy Method, Just Set Up Nine Planets".
Erm... such much for that, I can't even shorten it since there are eight!
"... and even the national security level."
Am I the only one who read that part and thought how strange/sad it was as an inclusion?
Why would you want to know the national security level at ALL TIMES, in your own home?
Seems like another fine example of the US Government wanting its citizens to live in nice orderly fear, whilst it "protects" them from dangerous terrorists.
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
The fact that through medical care and technology, we have almost eliminated "survival of the fittest" (better written as "survival of the best fit to their habitat")?
People now live and have children when they would previously have died, either through diseases, or harsh environmental conditions. The elimination of the process of natural selection should see to it that evolution in humans no longer occurs, at least not in any beneficial way. Bad genes that lead to people having chronic medical conditions are not removed from the gene pool by those people dying without producing offspring. Humankind needs to step in with more advanced medical care and gene therapy to replace what was once done by nature.
Just my $0.02 of course!
Exchange Server, archiving with Enterprise Vault. 6 actual servers, the users distributed over them. 10 Mb attachment limit, no executables, zip files with executables, or anything we can't scan for whatever reason.
Approx. 8000 users, no mailbox size limit, anything over 1 month old gets archived in the vault.
And if you spend 30 seconds looking at the article, as CmdrTaco should have, you will see that this drive does not deliver 300 Mb/sec. As reported by SiSoft Sandra, it gives 52 Mb/sec. Which many other high performance drives can match. The 300 Mb/sec figure is cache to host transfer speed, which with a 300 Mb/sec transfer and 16 Mb of cache, could be sustained for a whopping 0.0533333... seconds. Wow.
Damn, tinfoil is no good? Guess I need to switch to my lead lined hat now. And a neck brace.