...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
Me neither. Its inevitable considering how internet spaceships and fantasy sword and sorcery are so alike in almost every way imaginable.
Remember, CCP Games had to change the name of the game to EvE because they were about to get sued for copyright and trademark infringement for the word-for-word similarity that Dungeons and Dragons has to EvE Online. Almost every person who has ever seen these two games side by side actually cannot tell them apart, such is the similarity in evidence here.
You should see what Phil and Kaja Folio had to say about the differences between High Tech role player, and Medieval fantasy role playing: "None."
Portal spells? Windows. "With this rod of power I banish thee to nothing" / "Eat hot photons, alien slime". That sort of thing.
Oh, sure, some minor differences. "Help!" / "Sorry, we're 6 months away because of the distance of space" vs "Help!" / "You rang?"
"No, George Lucas has sold the franchise to soulless corporate executives at Disney..." "Nooooooooooooo, THAT"S NOT TRUE, THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" "Search your feelings, you know this to be true."
Search your DNA report, err, Financial statement, you know this to be true.
(OK, what's the HTML tag for strikethrough? Neither < s > nor < strike > work.)
The real problem here is the whole "Kansas" jurisdiction for the trial.
The constitution gives a guarantee of a jury of your peers. That was violated here.
Everything else is not relevant.
Was he convicted with lousy evidence from someone who was just trying to reduce their own sentence? Yes.
Was the prosecutor allowed to make crazy, unsubstantiated claims:
McCracken’s case may have been largely circumstantial, but she did an effective job of portraying Anaya as a man who enjoyed the perks of drug trafficking. She spoke of his “expensive motorcycles and four-wheel bikes to go on the sand,” his collection of guns, and his vast array of Snap-on tools. On several occasions, she mentioned that he had a backyard pool “custom built with his name in the bottom of it in marble.”
Yes.
Was he in violated of the actual law?
There is nothing intrinsically illegal about building traps, which are commonly used to hide everything from pricey jewelry to legal handguns. But the activity runs afoul of California law if an installer knows for certain that his compartment will be used to transport drugs. The maximum penalty is three years in prison.
Nothing in that article actually says that he knew for certain. There is testomony that he actually tried to make sure it was OK.
He was tried in an unconstitutional jurisdiction. He was tried by a jury not of his peers. He was sentenced in violation of the appropriate law.
Sometime in late 2008, Anaya received a call from a customer who lived in the San Diego area. The man wanted him to fix a malfunctioning trap located in Tijuana. Anaya was scared to venture across the border; as much as he hated to renege on his warranty, he refused to go to Mexico.
Anaya thought he had protected himself by turning down the job, but the damage had been done the moment he answered the phone. This particular customer was the target of a DEA investigation, and agents had eavesdropped on their conversation. The DEA decided to tap Anaya’s phone too, in an effort to identify other drug traffickers who were having traps built by Valley Custom Audio.
Was this wiretapping done with a court order, or was it done without any approval, illegally?
I see illegally obtained evidence. I see a violation of constitutional guarantees
The Justice Department occasionally goes after trap makers for violating statutes that ban the sale of drug paraphernalia, but these are difficult cases to make; they require hard evidence, such as an audio recording, that proves the defendant was explicitly told how his compartment would be used. Anaya was never caught on tape discussing drugs.
But the prosecutors in Kansas went after Anaya for a much graver crime than selling paraphernalia: They indicted him as a full-fledged conspirator in the California-to-Kansas trafficking operation. Even though he had never seen or touched any drugs and had been shunned as an informant after building just four traps in exchange for less than $20,000, Anaya faced the exact same charge as Maldanado, Montiel, and Crow.
And I see a prosecution system that is out of control.
According to this, the federal government is basically saying "We can go after you at any time, in any state, for any reason, if we don't like you".
That is unconstitutional.
This man deserves to be freed, protected from a second attempt by the government to try him (something about twice being subject to loss of life or liberty for the same crime), and the person(s) who authorized the wiretaps and prosecution in Kansas need to be tried for abuse of government authority.
While you make some interesting points, you still haven't listed example of anything that disappeared overnight
Except I have.
Most of the time, Google makes changes to their UI and behavior with no notice.
Google docs went from "I may as well stop using my local machine editor, as this does everything I need, and does "folders" better than unix does", to "Egads, I hate this".
GMail's interface changes went from "A wonderful email program" to "egads, I hate this".
Both of these changes were rather instant. Gmail gave you "Click here to go back to the old version" for a short period, but even now you can't do that anymore. And docs... had no alternative when it made it's change.
There is a reason that my email signature in Apple's mail.app says, "I hate the new Gmail interface, and dislike Apple's only slightly less".
===
Somewhere along the line, people decided that school drop-outs who were not even in the 95% of normal knew how to design user interfaces. And, others simply copied what these people did. Somewhere, some other people actually did research, and concluded that you needed a new interface paradigm, and even made new controls so that people would know to get new training. And yet, the research was ignored -- and marketers simply copied whatever was new and different, but still similar, without any regard for usability.
Apple's one-button design for their iPad was probably the first example of "designed usability" I can think of in the last several decades.
...and that includes admitting that something was only a partial success, or not a success at all..
I'd be happy if they were a little more honest.
"People don't use feature X, so it is unwanted, and we'll remove it" vs "People don't use feature X. We've done a bad job with it. Instead of doing a better job, we'll admit our incompetence, and leave it for someone else to do".
Customized RSS feeds as headline spots in mail? Great. Oh, wait, it's a complete PITA to customize, and can't sync with their generic RSS feed sync back-end aka Reader. Hey, no one uses it. Is it a hard to use implementation? Naaah, no one wants RSS in the email. Poof!
Gmail has gone from easy to use to a pain to use. Docs has lost lots of features. Drive -- and the "sync files on your computer" -- doesn't help, I have to go back to the web interface and adjust every file I upload. The whole "the format when a docs file is downloaded versus when you upload a normal format are different" thing is...
Drive is a pain/fail. Mail has lost features/usability. Docs has dropped features without any replacements in sight, and has demonstrated that you can't rely on it.
So... no, I won't rely on any new feature from Google.
Google is the new apple. "Hey, use this for your business. Opps, we're dropping it, good luck."
Scramble? Really? Please enlighten us which free Google service essential to your life disappeared overnight.
How about a gmail interface that can be used on small screens with large text?
How about, in general, scrollable html-based interfaces?
Have you noticed that lots of people -- google included -- now make sections of the browser window fixed, non-scrollable -- even though the very idea of a "movable window onto the larger document underneath" that was behind the scrollable window, the idea that the HTML page was just marked-up text without a fixed format that could be adjusted by the end-user's user agent -- making it harder to use unless your system has as much display space as what they test on at their end?
What has google tossed out?
1. Find documents not in any directory. You know: Everything you create goes in the root, not in any folder -- not changable. Anything you've classified or categorized with folders/tags is organized. Anything not so classified got lost. Suddenly, docs went from each to work with to painful. 2. A choice between page-layout oriented editing and free-form / web-page oriented editing. In fairness, this one was announced.
3. A mail interface usable on smaller windows. Heck, a mail interface that doesn't assume it has the full screen.
4. Usability by people who need large fonts.
5. Usability by people with a low pixel count.
Google changes the display layout all the time. As they do, with no warning they break things. Some of these I can work-around by using stylish, But that is exactly what an end-user should not have to do! I should not have to try to decipher their web page style to write a new style sheet code for them, that they will break by altering something else next year.
Yes, their launch of it had problems, but they fixed those quickly.
I haven't seen any reason for Google plus, and frankly I'm more scared of it than not.
(Gee: If you use Google plus, you agree to use your real name, and let that be used by your google account for all activities. No more "keybounce".
The real problem here: 3, 5, or 10 different functions, and a requirement that a single account linking all your activities be used for all the different functions. No way to keep them from aggregating my data from separate things together; no way to have two or three different blog or youtube channels for completely unrelated activities. As far as google is concerned, I only have one topic for broadcasting, or only one topic for blogging. Foo.)
In fairness, Google's approach (each message has a list of tags) is superior to iMap (each copy of a message exists in exactly one folder).
Frankly, I'm surprised that the "each object (message, document, etc) has a list of locations" hasn't caught on even more. I'd love to know how they manage what appears to be a messy "many/many" relationship system so well.
Google, and their behavior, and their dropping of features, is the single best argument ever for refusing to use any sort of cloud-app for any serious business need ever.
Google has killed/dropped/ruined at least the following at different times:
(note that they changed how their editor worked, causing problems with both at different times. Right now there is only one choice, and the other doesn't seem to be coming back at all).
4. Support for identifying items not classified into folders. 5. Support for working with folders
(It's there now, but at different times was not)
6. Offline email reading.
(NB: Offline synching has never been an issue. Offline reading now only works in chrome, and only if you want an i-pad style interface)
7. The older, more useful gmail interface. 8. Support for smaller screens in docs and email (the new layout for both assumes a large screen that can have significant space dedicated to fixed data that isn't what you want to work with.)
Google reader? I stopped using it because google's code changes STANK.
How do you kill off a product that consumes lots of resources and does not return enough ad revenue? Well, lets see. You could focus on making the ad revenue source useful? (*) No? Ok. Make a change in the interface that people hate. People leave. Close it down, citing lack of use.
(*): At one point, GMail's "advertisement line" was 80% from RSS feeds that I could customize, and 20% ads. I actually had my ad blocker turned off for gmail, because I wanted to use that. I was one of the people asking Google to interface my reader RSS list with this.
Google's response? Change it from a user customizable list that was a pain to customizable to a fixed, non-customizable list because no one used it, then change it from 80% RSS to zero RSS (I suddenly only saw pure ads, nothing else -- and then the adblocker went back on).
There are two companies that I won't rely on for any long-term business need. Google (demonstrates that cloud apps are not reliable), and Apple (EOF? Dead. Java as a full-fledged citizen? Dead. WOF? Effectively dead. Direct to Java? Dead. Etc.)
It's a sad statement that Microsoft is the best friend a business's computer needs has.
But in this day and age constant internet access is pretty much a given.
You are very much mistaken.
Lots of people still have to use a dial-up phone line to get to the internet. Some people cannot get faster than 28.8 because of distance from the central office.
LAN play? Households with two computers, and dialup internet service; more common than you think.
Or... how well does this system handle 3 or 4 people behind a router sharing a single IP address? Can they all play together? Is it really as fast as a direct LAN?
No, you can play "offline", without connecting to the authentication servers.
Equally, any server can change one line in a text file, and be an "offline" server -- and then it won't check people who logon for validity.
Result: you can play on a server with no internet connection (LAN/VPN), or if Mojang's authentication servers go down.
And,... err, not that I have done this(*), but you could start up a second instance on the spare computer on your desk, and log in as "packmule" or something, so you can carry more stuff around.
(*): At least, not since I changed my server from vanilla to forge with mods; once I get that G4 system upgraded to J6, I just might do so again.
Yeah well, Blizzard gets it right on release days...
Clearly, you never tried playing World of Warcraft on release?
This was a game that was supposed to redefine how online games would work. With anti-ganking systems in place -- even documented as such.
And, they even gave a 30 day refund if you didn't like it -- so you could try it, risk free. Right?
No.
The first week was a complete disaster. They realized this. They gave everyone a week's extension.
At the end of that time? When I realized that several features not only were not implemented, would not be implemented -- the whole point of a PVP server where PvP would be made fair by game rules to prevent ganking, except that they decided it was impossible? Etc?
How about the complete lack of play testing and balance on some of the classes? The bugs? The lack of features in various areas of the Horde's side (I later learned that the Allience's side was much better developed, fleshed out, and much closer to being "finished").
I asked for my money back. I wanted my refund.
"Sorry, your 30 day refund period expired 7 days ago. We cannot give you a refund. If you are not happy, we'll try to appease you with a 10% discount on your next month's subscription."
I no longer buy anything from Blizzard. They went from "Nothing wrong" (I may not have liked the Diablo games, but those that did said they were excellent) to "So completely messed up I never want to deal with them again".
Refuse to refund me, per their promise? I now bad-mouth them every chance I get.
I strongly recommend that everyone bad-mouth EA every chance you get. Make sure that these companies know that unhappy customers have very long memories and very big mouths
Managing remote teams requires a different set of skills. Most places make the mistake of assuming a remote worker is just like an on-site worker, to be treated the same. They're not. It's not better or worse, just different.
Interestingly, in my experience, the number one flaw in remote working is something most managers never think of:
Setting up a remote office means setting up an office, that happens to be remote.
Have you ever had a manager that assumed that there would be no time or cost to setting up a remote work environment, that from day 1 the worker would be just as productive as in-shop?
You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.
But can I put 16 GB of ram into my mother board?
The limit is not how much memory I can afford. The limit is the physical hardware. Or rather, The FIRST part of the limit is my physical hardware
The second part of the limit is even simpler: I don't run a single app as my whole machine.
I don't run a single app as my whole machine. My machine is multitasking.
Right now, what do I have running?
Gui: Finder, Process monitor, Temperature monitor, Terminal (With 10 different windows on 7 different desktops), TextEdit (with something like 70 open files that I need to go through, review, and take action on), Mail, Quicktime (mostly just sitting there, with 4 parts of a video I'm making open, waiting for me to start recording the next segment), MultiMC (just the launcher for minecraft), Skype (so I can can get contacted by the people I play with), Midi Audio Setup (so I can monitor the sound, and switch between hardware speakers and soundflower, as well as adjust volume levels -- which I can't do if I use a multi-output device, and the volume keys adjust the wrong thing if I'm using soundflower), NBT Explorer (just sitting there; has something up that I'll be using in my next video segment), and a Flac to m4a audio converter (again, just sitting there.)
That's just the BACKGROUND gui stuff.
There's also a mumble server, two minecraft servers (both currently ctrl-Z'd; testing memory usage/reclaimation shows that Mac OS does a crappy job of paging out unused memory, reducing the effective memory available to me).
And... FireFox. Firefox that wants to use ridiculously high amounts of memory. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814173 -- and remember, Firefox is currently the only browser I know of that has something like NoScript.
What else am am I likely (but not at the moment) running? iMovie doing quicktime exports to compress video. Yea, it stinks that I have to load a giant GUI program to compress video, but attempting to compress it from Finder gives me a "one-size fits all, we won't even tell you what settings we're using, and we don't care if you don't like the looks, we know what works on YouTube no matter how old our settings are or how much YouTube has changed" output that is of no use to me. (Seriously, if I'm recording 480p screencasts, for a system that wants 480p uploads, that streams to users at 480p, why would I want a 540p encoding?) Or Mumble -- a great audio/voice processor and recorder, that sadly wants to consume very large amounts of CPU activity even when there's no voice activity -- so while I have murmurd (the mumble server) running all the time, I only use mumble during play (And leave skype up so my cohorts can reach me).
Do I need to shut down the browser when playing? Given that I may need to refer to documentation, or report issues to various forums/bug trackers? Should I shut down email for a trivial gain of space?
You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.
But due to stupidity from Apple, that 16 GB of ram requires 16 GB of hibernation space to be on my root partition. It has to be in/var/vm/swapfile, and/var/vm must be a directory -- neither/var, nor/var/vm can be symbolic links to a second partition on the primary drive. So I would have to be able to repartition my system drive -- which doesn't even work.
So... I have to have temporary files (/var/tmp,/var/folders), swap files (/var/vm), hibernation, etc, all in a partition that was sized big enough for the operating system, and expected growth -- back in 10.6 when XCode was on a different partition, etc. -- and then Apple decided that developers must have the entire development environment on that partition a
> Let me spill out a little prejudice here: any nerd who doesn't hate Windows isn't a nerd.
Alright, lets look at options?
1. Windows 8. Microsoft continues the "every other system" approach. Windows 7... I got lucky, we managed to find a closeout laptop demo unit. For $400, my mother got a laptop that is a 6GB i5 4 core. Why 6GB? Because apparently, Microsoft artificially hampers the reported memory speed index of computers with only 4 GB. Why? Maybe their software is too bloated to work in small systems? Maybe they do bleep poor determination of what to swap out? Whatever -- it's more computer than she needs, it's cheap enough, and... it's problems aren't that problematic. (Yes, she has TeamViewer, and I'm fixing something weekly.)
2. Macintosh Mountain Lion laptop. (10.8) Well, there isn't much to say here. Apple has managed to go from "It does what you want" to "We've stopped caring about real feedback from customers, our marketing knows what you want and we'll give you what we know we've said you want.". Higher price, and no longer better functionality.
Seriously Apple, WTF is with your "transparent application lifespan", "OS managed revisions", "live update of files when you edit them so you don't even need to save", etc?
(TextEdit, Finder, ruined virtual desktops, Terminal, and a browser (safari) that is too slow/unresponsive? That's just the user end -- I'm not even getting into the broken programmer-side promises.)
Now, how does Mac OS behave with only 4 GB of memory? Horrendously poor swapout behavior, battery life that is "long" if I reboot my OS but goes way down after being up long enough, insisting on using the discrete video card more often than I want it to (quicktime export of video -- which I actually do with iMovie -- is so far the only thing I've found that actually benefits from that card, and it's too power hungry), horrible power management in general (too many cores active too often; discrete video card tracked as having several different power consumption levels with no way to control what is used, etc), etc.
I'm long past regarding Apple as better than Microsoft. Right now I hate both OS's.
In fairness, the "memory" problem really only happens with Firefox. Everything else degrades acceptably well, given enough time for the system to finally figure out what to swap out. Firefox is just a memory hog, and if anything else could run NoScript, and be responsive / display partially loaded pages without having to load it all first, I'd gladly switch.
3. Linux based systems. Seriously? For my mother? Nuff said. And actually, I've had so many bad experiences with Linux-based gui's that -- well, let me know if X ever actually gets it's act together. Seriously, who ever decided that letting every programmer use a different widget tookit so that no two programs look alike or behave the same is better for the end user? (Yes, I know that modern systems have two different answers for this -- so now you have to choose between one of two incompatible master supplements for X, and cannot run both of them, so you have incompatible program groups -- and that still does nothing to address using older programs that don't use those two new behaviors.)
4. Tablets. Franky, if my mother did not have stuff that needs windows (medical devices that need at least a windows emulation environment on the computer), this might have been an option for her. And if any tablet OS actually decides to treat me like it's my computer, and I'm not just a consumer of DRM'd videos, maybe I will.
So, we're looking at only two options: 1. Closeouts of older PC laptops, still running windows 7, with no windows 8 certification. $400. (What we got my mother.) 2. Used old Macbook Pro, 10.7 (Lion), $1100 (what I got.).
So, do I qualify as a NeRD ("NeXT Registered Developer") under your classification?
"Defendant is capable of loading and firing a gun, convict them of manslaughter!"
Every one of your examples is missing the critical part. For example: "Defendant is capable of loading and firing a gun" OWNS A GUN, AND SOMEONE WAS SHOT WITH THAT GUN WHILE THE DEFENDANT WAS IN POSSESSION OF THAT GUN "convict them...".
OK, then how about this:
Defendant is accused of assaulting someone, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend. Defendant is muscular, and easily capable of doing the aggressive acts. No other proof is presented at the initial hearing; the judge orders held on $15,000 bail, and refuses to even listen to the pregnant (not sure if they were married, or just engaged) significant other. Family is currently living in a tent; defendant works at a job. But being held in jail, he loses his job. After a week of being held for a bail amount that cannot be met, the public prosecutor and public defender meet in the court room, half an hour before the judge is to show up, and review the case for the first time. Both are astonished at what they see; the prosecutor even says "this is just a he-said, she-said case; if the roles were reversed, I wouldn't even prosecute".
Still not enough? Alright, how about being told by the public defender that he has two choices: One, go to a full trial, will take about a month, maybe more (apparently, they could legally go 45 days before starting the trial), and have a 95% chance of being found innocent by a jury, or two, plead guilty to a plea bargain arrangement, which would technically accrue one strike (out of a three strike law) that could be used against him in the future.
All with no evidence of action, merely that it could have been done, and one person's accusation.
That's not a made up story. Happened in Tennessee (if I recall correctly; was either there or Louisiana).
"Capable of breaking the law and inflicting harm, lock them up" is a very real behavior. Heck, just look at the recent story of the 5 children who were abused by the police to make a strong statement against crime, that has recently (in the last year or so) come to light and news.
A smart backdoor would look like a bug and could easily be explained away as such...
Tee hee. A while ago, one of the hacker sites had a competition to see who could hide a "backdoor" -- the idea was to take an image in a script compatible form (all the numbers were in text, rather than in binaries), black out a certain region (think redaction), and still have some way to have the redacted area be recoverable when the right inputs were given.
The catch? The code would be given a peer review, so you had to come up with something that would pass most attempts at oversight.
A lot of people tried to hide stuff in "error detection" routines.
The winning code had no bugs of any kind. It did perfect redaction of the specified area. No flaws, no errors, nothing to be spotted in code review.
Except for one oddball usage of fetching and writing individual characters -- getc() and putc(). The author explained that as an attempt to make sure that no matter what was in the input data, no matter how messed up the graphics were in an attempt to break the code, it would not have any overruns, no undefined behavior, etc.
Result? The "black" would be written out as "0", "00", or "000", depending on the light level of the source. For all three color channels.
Absolutely unnoticeable when viewed on a viewer. There was no hidden alpha channel, no slight alternation between black-0 and black-1, etc.
Yet you could still recover readable text, almost perfect pictures, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
Me neither. Its inevitable considering how internet spaceships and fantasy sword and sorcery are so alike in almost every way imaginable.
Remember, CCP Games had to change the name of the game to EvE because they were about to get sued for copyright and trademark infringement for the word-for-word similarity that Dungeons and Dragons has to EvE Online. Almost every person who has ever seen these two games side by side actually cannot tell them apart, such is the similarity in evidence here.
You should see what Phil and Kaja Folio had to say about the differences between High Tech role player, and Medieval fantasy role playing: "None."
Portal spells? Windows.
"With this rod of power I banish thee to nothing" / "Eat hot photons, alien slime".
That sort of thing.
Oh, sure, some minor differences.
"Help!" / "Sorry, we're 6 months away because of the distance of space" vs
"Help!" / "You rang?"
[ rummaging though my link collection ]
http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growfcomic.php?date=20070617
Read it. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll Kiss. ...
Google is the Thermite of Privacy?
(Google, or facebook, not sure which)
I just realized. We can finally settle the age-old question.
JJ's Star Trek vs. JJ's Star Wars: Which is worse?
"No, George Lucas has sold the franchise to soulless corporate executives at Disney..."
"Nooooooooooooo, THAT"S NOT TRUE, THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"
"Search your feelings, you know this to be true."
Search your DNA report, err, Financial statement, you know this to be true.
(OK, what's the HTML tag for strikethrough? Neither < s > nor < strike > work.)
The real problem here is the whole "Kansas" jurisdiction for the trial.
The constitution gives a guarantee of a jury of your peers. That was violated here.
Everything else is not relevant.
Was he convicted with lousy evidence from someone who was just trying to reduce their own sentence? Yes.
Was the prosecutor allowed to make crazy, unsubstantiated claims:
McCracken’s case may have been largely circumstantial, but she did an effective job of portraying Anaya as a man who enjoyed the perks of drug trafficking. She spoke of his “expensive motorcycles and four-wheel bikes to go on the sand,” his collection of guns, and his vast array of Snap-on tools. On several occasions, she mentioned that he had a backyard pool “custom built with his name in the bottom of it in marble.”
Yes.
Was he in violated of the actual law?
There is nothing intrinsically illegal about building traps, which are commonly used to hide everything from pricey jewelry to legal handguns. But the activity runs afoul of California law if an installer knows for certain that his compartment will be used to transport drugs. The maximum penalty is three years in prison.
Nothing in that article actually says that he knew for certain.
There is testomony that he actually tried to make sure it was OK.
He was tried in an unconstitutional jurisdiction.
He was tried by a jury not of his peers.
He was sentenced in violation of the appropriate law.
Sometime in late 2008, Anaya received a call from a customer who lived in the San Diego area. The man wanted him to fix a malfunctioning trap located in Tijuana. Anaya was scared to venture across the border; as much as he hated to renege on his warranty, he refused to go to Mexico.
Anaya thought he had protected himself by turning down the job, but the damage had been done the moment he answered the phone. This particular customer was the target of a DEA investigation, and agents had eavesdropped on their conversation. The DEA decided to tap Anaya’s phone too, in an effort to identify other drug traffickers who were having traps built by Valley Custom Audio.
Was this wiretapping done with a court order, or was it done without any approval, illegally?
I see illegally obtained evidence.
I see a violation of constitutional guarantees
The Justice Department occasionally goes after trap makers for violating statutes that ban the sale of drug paraphernalia, but these are difficult cases to make; they require hard evidence, such as an audio recording, that proves the defendant was explicitly told how his compartment would be used. Anaya was never caught on tape discussing drugs.
But the prosecutors in Kansas went after Anaya for a much graver crime than selling paraphernalia: They indicted him as a full-fledged conspirator in the California-to-Kansas trafficking operation. Even though he had never seen or touched any drugs and had been shunned as an informant after building just four traps in exchange for less than $20,000, Anaya faced the exact same charge as Maldanado, Montiel, and Crow.
And I see a prosecution system that is out of control.
According to this, the federal government is basically saying "We can go after you at any time, in any state, for any reason, if we don't like you".
That is unconstitutional.
This man deserves to be freed, protected from a second attempt by the government to try him (something about twice being subject to loss of life or liberty for the same crime), and the person(s) who authorized the wiretaps and prosecution in Kansas need to be tried for abuse of government authority.
But information leaks out of black holes :-)
Just don't eat those marshmallows ... you don't know what's in the smoke that gets into them.
While you make some interesting points, you still haven't listed example of anything that disappeared overnight
Except I have.
Most of the time, Google makes changes to their UI and behavior with no notice.
Google docs went from "I may as well stop using my local machine editor, as this does everything I need, and does "folders" better than unix does", to "Egads, I hate this".
GMail's interface changes went from "A wonderful email program" to "egads, I hate this".
Both of these changes were rather instant. Gmail gave you "Click here to go back to the old version" for a short period, but even now you can't do that anymore. And docs ... had no alternative when it made it's change.
There is a reason that my email signature in Apple's mail.app says, "I hate the new Gmail interface, and dislike Apple's only slightly less".
===
Somewhere along the line, people decided that school drop-outs who were not even in the 95% of normal knew how to design user interfaces. And, others simply copied what these people did. Somewhere, some other people actually did research, and concluded that you needed a new interface paradigm, and even made new controls so that people would know to get new training. And yet, the research was ignored -- and marketers simply copied whatever was new and different, but still similar, without any regard for usability.
Apple's one-button design for their iPad was probably the first example of "designed usability" I can think of in the last several decades.
Can you please provide citations/sources for this?
Specifically, the quote itself, and that Harry Anslinger was the primary force behind this?
I'm not trying to be mean or anything; I want to arm myself with facts and cites for my own such battles.
I almost did -- I actually went to look at it, I figured it went to an older, archived discussion.
Speaking of which, have you heard about TvTrope's forray into producing a TV/Podcast series? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/AvatarAndTheAirbendingFellowshipOfVampireSlayers
It's actually several years old now, with spin-off "books" and "comics" (web-based, of course)
...and that includes admitting that something was only a partial success, or not a success at all..
I'd be happy if they were a little more honest.
"People don't use feature X, so it is unwanted, and we'll remove it"
vs
"People don't use feature X. We've done a bad job with it. Instead of doing a better job, we'll admit our incompetence, and leave it for someone else to do".
Customized RSS feeds as headline spots in mail? Great.
Oh, wait, it's a complete PITA to customize, and can't sync with their generic RSS feed sync back-end aka Reader.
Hey, no one uses it. Is it a hard to use implementation? Naaah, no one wants RSS in the email. Poof!
Gmail has gone from easy to use to a pain to use. ...
Docs has lost lots of features.
Drive -- and the "sync files on your computer" -- doesn't help, I have to go back to the web interface and adjust every file I upload.
The whole "the format when a docs file is downloaded versus when you upload a normal format are different" thing is
Drive is a pain/fail.
Mail has lost features/usability.
Docs has dropped features without any replacements in sight, and has demonstrated that you can't rely on it.
So ... no, I won't rely on any new feature from Google.
Google is the new apple. "Hey, use this for your business. Opps, we're dropping it, good luck."
Scramble? Really?
Please enlighten us which free Google service essential to your life disappeared overnight.
How about a gmail interface that can be used on small screens with large text?
How about, in general, scrollable html-based interfaces?
Have you noticed that lots of people -- google included -- now make sections of the browser window fixed, non-scrollable -- even though the very idea of a "movable window onto the larger document underneath" that was behind the scrollable window, the idea that the HTML page was just marked-up text without a fixed format that could be adjusted by the end-user's user agent -- making it harder to use unless your system has as much display space as what they test on at their end?
What has google tossed out?
1. Find documents not in any directory. You know: Everything you create goes in the root, not in any folder -- not changable. Anything you've classified or categorized with folders/tags is organized. Anything not so classified got lost. Suddenly, docs went from each to work with to painful.
2. A choice between page-layout oriented editing and free-form / web-page oriented editing. In fairness, this one was announced.
3. A mail interface usable on smaller windows. Heck, a mail interface that doesn't assume it has the full screen.
4. Usability by people who need large fonts.
5. Usability by people with a low pixel count.
Google changes the display layout all the time. As they do, with no warning they break things. Some of these I can work-around by using stylish, But that is exactly what an end-user should not have to do! I should not have to try to decipher their web page style to write a new style sheet code for them, that they will break by altering something else next year.
I actually liked Buzz.
Yes, their launch of it had problems, but they fixed those quickly.
I haven't seen any reason for Google plus, and frankly I'm more scared of it than not.
(Gee: If you use Google plus, you agree to use your real name, and let that be used by your google account for all activities. No more "keybounce".
The real problem here: 3, 5, or 10 different functions, and a requirement that a single account linking all your activities be used for all the different functions. No way to keep them from aggregating my data from separate things together; no way to have two or three different blog or youtube channels for completely unrelated activities. As far as google is concerned, I only have one topic for broadcasting, or only one topic for blogging. Foo.)
In fairness, Google's approach (each message has a list of tags) is superior to iMap (each copy of a message exists in exactly one folder).
Frankly, I'm surprised that the "each object (message, document, etc) has a list of locations" hasn't caught on even more. I'd love to know how they manage what appears to be a messy "many/many" relationship system so well.
Google, and their behavior, and their dropping of features, is the single best argument ever for refusing to use any sort of cloud-app for any serious business need ever.
Google has killed/dropped/ruined at least the following at different times:
1. Offline documents.
2. Page-layout oriented documents
3. Web-layout oriented documents
(note that they changed how their editor worked, causing problems with both at different times. Right now there is only one choice, and the other doesn't seem to be coming back at all).
4. Support for identifying items not classified into folders.
5. Support for working with folders
(It's there now, but at different times was not)
6. Offline email reading.
(NB: Offline synching has never been an issue. Offline reading now only works in chrome, and only if you want an i-pad style interface)
7. The older, more useful gmail interface.
8. Support for smaller screens in docs and email
(the new layout for both assumes a large screen that can have significant space dedicated to fixed data that isn't what you want to work with.)
Google reader? I stopped using it because google's code changes STANK.
How do you kill off a product that consumes lots of resources and does not return enough ad revenue? Well, lets see. You could focus on making the ad revenue source useful? (*) No? Ok. Make a change in the interface that people hate. People leave. Close it down, citing lack of use.
(*): At one point, GMail's "advertisement line" was 80% from RSS feeds that I could customize, and 20% ads. I actually had my ad blocker turned off for gmail, because I wanted to use that. I was one of the people asking Google to interface my reader RSS list with this.
Google's response? Change it from a user customizable list that was a pain to customizable to a fixed, non-customizable list because no one used it, then change it from 80% RSS to zero RSS (I suddenly only saw pure ads, nothing else -- and then the adblocker went back on).
There are two companies that I won't rely on for any long-term business need.
Google (demonstrates that cloud apps are not reliable), and Apple (EOF? Dead. Java as a full-fledged citizen? Dead. WOF? Effectively dead. Direct to Java? Dead. Etc.)
It's a sad statement that Microsoft is the best friend a business's computer needs has.
But in this day and age constant internet access is pretty much a given.
You are very much mistaken.
Lots of people still have to use a dial-up phone line to get to the internet.
Some people cannot get faster than 28.8 because of distance from the central office.
LAN play? Households with two computers, and dialup internet service; more common than you think.
Or ... how well does this system handle 3 or 4 people behind a router sharing a single IP address? Can they all play together? Is it really as fast as a direct LAN?
No, you can play "offline", without connecting to the authentication servers.
Equally, any server can change one line in a text file, and be an "offline" server -- and then it won't check people who logon for validity.
Result: you can play on a server with no internet connection (LAN/VPN), or if Mojang's authentication servers go down.
And, ... err, not that I have done this(*), but you could start up a second instance on the spare computer on your desk, and log in as "packmule" or something, so you can carry more stuff around.
(*): At least, not since I changed my server from vanilla to forge with mods; once I get that G4 system upgraded to J6, I just might do so again.
Yeah well, Blizzard gets it right on release days ...
Clearly, you never tried playing World of Warcraft on release?
This was a game that was supposed to redefine how online games would work. With anti-ganking systems in place -- even documented as such.
And, they even gave a 30 day refund if you didn't like it -- so you could try it, risk free. Right?
No.
The first week was a complete disaster. They realized this. They gave everyone a week's extension.
At the end of that time? When I realized that several features not only were not implemented, would not be implemented -- the whole point of a PVP server where PvP would be made fair by game rules to prevent ganking, except that they decided it was impossible? Etc?
How about the complete lack of play testing and balance on some of the classes? The bugs? The lack of features in various areas of the Horde's side (I later learned that the Allience's side was much better developed, fleshed out, and much closer to being "finished").
I asked for my money back. I wanted my refund.
"Sorry, your 30 day refund period expired 7 days ago. We cannot give you a refund. If you are not happy, we'll try to appease you with a 10% discount on your next month's subscription."
I no longer buy anything from Blizzard. They went from "Nothing wrong" (I may not have liked the Diablo games, but those that did said they were excellent) to "So completely messed up I never want to deal with them again".
Refuse to refund me, per their promise? I now bad-mouth them every chance I get.
I strongly recommend that everyone bad-mouth EA every chance you get. Make sure that these companies know that unhappy customers have very long memories and very big mouths
Managing remote teams requires a different set of skills. Most places make the mistake of assuming a remote worker is just like an on-site worker, to be treated the same. They're not. It's not better or worse, just different.
Interestingly, in my experience, the number one flaw in remote working is something most managers never think of:
Setting up a remote office means setting up an office, that happens to be remote.
Have you ever had a manager that assumed that there would be no time or cost to setting up a remote work environment, that from day 1 the worker would be just as productive as in-shop?
You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.
But can I put 16 GB of ram into my mother board?
The limit is not how much memory I can afford.
The limit is the physical hardware. Or rather, The FIRST part of the limit is my physical hardware
The second part of the limit is even simpler: I don't run a single app as my whole machine.
I don't run a single app as my whole machine. My machine is multitasking.
Right now, what do I have running?
Gui:
Finder, Process monitor, Temperature monitor, Terminal (With 10 different windows on 7 different desktops), TextEdit (with something like 70 open files that I need to go through, review, and take action on), Mail, Quicktime (mostly just sitting there, with 4 parts of a video I'm making open, waiting for me to start recording the next segment), MultiMC (just the launcher for minecraft), Skype (so I can can get contacted by the people I play with), Midi Audio Setup (so I can monitor the sound, and switch between hardware speakers and soundflower, as well as adjust volume levels -- which I can't do if I use a multi-output device, and the volume keys adjust the wrong thing if I'm using soundflower), NBT Explorer (just sitting there; has something up that I'll be using in my next video segment), and a Flac to m4a audio converter (again, just sitting there.)
That's just the BACKGROUND gui stuff.
There's also a mumble server, two minecraft servers (both currently ctrl-Z'd; testing memory usage/reclaimation shows that Mac OS does a crappy job of paging out unused memory, reducing the effective memory available to me).
And ... FireFox. Firefox that wants to use ridiculously high amounts of memory. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814173 -- and remember, Firefox is currently the only browser I know of that has something like NoScript.
What else am am I likely (but not at the moment) running? iMovie doing quicktime exports to compress video. Yea, it stinks that I have to load a giant GUI program to compress video, but attempting to compress it from Finder gives me a "one-size fits all, we won't even tell you what settings we're using, and we don't care if you don't like the looks, we know what works on YouTube no matter how old our settings are or how much YouTube has changed" output that is of no use to me. (Seriously, if I'm recording 480p screencasts, for a system that wants 480p uploads, that streams to users at 480p, why would I want a 540p encoding?) Or Mumble -- a great audio/voice processor and recorder, that sadly wants to consume very large amounts of CPU activity even when there's no voice activity -- so while I have murmurd (the mumble server) running all the time, I only use mumble during play (And leave skype up so my cohorts can reach me).
Do I need to shut down the browser when playing? Given that I may need to refer to documentation, or report issues to various forums/bug trackers? Should I shut down email for a trivial gain of space?
You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.
But due to stupidity from Apple, that 16 GB of ram requires 16 GB of hibernation space to be on my root partition. It has to be in /var/vm/swapfile, and /var/vm must be a directory -- neither /var, nor /var/vm can be symbolic links to a second partition on the primary drive. So I would have to be able to repartition my system drive -- which doesn't even work.
So ... I have to have temporary files (/var/tmp, /var/folders), swap files (/var/vm), hibernation, etc, all in a partition that was sized big enough for the operating system, and expected growth -- back in 10.6 when XCode was on a different partition, etc. -- and then Apple decided that developers must have the entire development environment on that partition a
> Let me spill out a little prejudice here: any nerd who doesn't hate Windows isn't a nerd.
Alright, lets look at options?
1. Windows 8. Microsoft continues the "every other system" approach. Windows 7 ... I got lucky, we managed to find a closeout laptop demo unit. For $400, my mother got a laptop that is a 6GB i5 4 core. Why 6GB? Because apparently, Microsoft artificially hampers the reported memory speed index of computers with only 4 GB. Why? Maybe their software is too bloated to work in small systems? Maybe they do bleep poor determination of what to swap out? Whatever -- it's more computer than she needs, it's cheap enough, and ... it's problems aren't that problematic. (Yes, she has TeamViewer, and I'm fixing something weekly.)
2. Macintosh Mountain Lion laptop. (10.8) Well, there isn't much to say here. Apple has managed to go from "It does what you want" to "We've stopped caring about real feedback from customers, our marketing knows what you want and we'll give you what we know we've said you want.". Higher price, and no longer better functionality.
Seriously Apple, WTF is with your "transparent application lifespan", "OS managed revisions", "live update of files when you edit them so you don't even need to save", etc?
(TextEdit, Finder, ruined virtual desktops, Terminal, and a browser (safari) that is too slow/unresponsive? That's just the user end -- I'm not even getting into the broken programmer-side promises.)
Now, how does Mac OS behave with only 4 GB of memory? Horrendously poor swapout behavior, battery life that is "long" if I reboot my OS but goes way down after being up long enough, insisting on using the discrete video card more often than I want it to (quicktime export of video -- which I actually do with iMovie -- is so far the only thing I've found that actually benefits from that card, and it's too power hungry), horrible power management in general (too many cores active too often; discrete video card tracked as having several different power consumption levels with no way to control what is used, etc), etc.
I'm long past regarding Apple as better than Microsoft. Right now I hate both OS's.
In fairness, the "memory" problem really only happens with Firefox. Everything else degrades acceptably well, given enough time for the system to finally figure out what to swap out. Firefox is just a memory hog, and if anything else could run NoScript, and be responsive / display partially loaded pages without having to load it all first, I'd gladly switch.
3. Linux based systems. Seriously? For my mother? Nuff said. And actually, I've had so many bad experiences with Linux-based gui's that -- well, let me know if X ever actually gets it's act together. Seriously, who ever decided that letting every programmer use a different widget tookit so that no two programs look alike or behave the same is better for the end user? (Yes, I know that modern systems have two different answers for this -- so now you have to choose between one of two incompatible master supplements for X, and cannot run both of them, so you have incompatible program groups -- and that still does nothing to address using older programs that don't use those two new behaviors.)
4. Tablets. Franky, if my mother did not have stuff that needs windows (medical devices that need at least a windows emulation environment on the computer), this might have been an option for her. And if any tablet OS actually decides to treat me like it's my computer, and I'm not just a consumer of DRM'd videos, maybe I will.
So, we're looking at only two options:
1. Closeouts of older PC laptops, still running windows 7, with no windows 8 certification. $400. (What we got my mother.)
2. Used old Macbook Pro, 10.7 (Lion), $1100 (what I got.).
So, do I qualify as a NeRD ("NeXT Registered Developer") under your classification?
404. Sorry, the stargate denies you access.
"Defendant is capable of loading and firing a gun, convict them of manslaughter!"
Every one of your examples is missing the critical part. For example: "Defendant is capable of loading and firing a gun" OWNS A GUN, AND SOMEONE WAS SHOT WITH THAT GUN WHILE THE DEFENDANT WAS IN POSSESSION OF THAT GUN "convict them ...".
OK, then how about this:
Defendant is accused of assaulting someone, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend. Defendant is muscular, and easily capable of doing the aggressive acts. No other proof is presented at the initial hearing; the judge orders held on $15,000 bail, and refuses to even listen to the pregnant (not sure if they were married, or just engaged) significant other. Family is currently living in a tent; defendant works at a job. But being held in jail, he loses his job. After a week of being held for a bail amount that cannot be met, the public prosecutor and public defender meet in the court room, half an hour before the judge is to show up, and review the case for the first time. Both are astonished at what they see; the prosecutor even says "this is just a he-said, she-said case; if the roles were reversed, I wouldn't even prosecute".
Still not enough? Alright, how about being told by the public defender that he has two choices: One, go to a full trial, will take about a month, maybe more (apparently, they could legally go 45 days before starting the trial), and have a 95% chance of being found innocent by a jury, or two, plead guilty to a plea bargain arrangement, which would technically accrue one strike (out of a three strike law) that could be used against him in the future.
All with no evidence of action, merely that it could have been done, and one person's accusation.
That's not a made up story. Happened in Tennessee (if I recall correctly; was either there or Louisiana).
"Capable of breaking the law and inflicting harm, lock them up" is a very real behavior. Heck, just look at the recent story of the 5 children who were abused by the police to make a strong statement against crime, that has recently (in the last year or so) come to light and news.
I want to see a link to the political maps for this area.
The last time I looked at those maps was the whole Band Of Brothers issues from years ago.
Apparently, there were two major battles going on this weekend, plus the 3100+ bigger battle from ... what, a year prior?
I want to see how the political control landscape changes as a result of these big fights. Link please?
A smart backdoor would look like a bug and could easily be explained away as such...
Tee hee. A while ago, one of the hacker sites had a competition to see who could hide a "backdoor" -- the idea was to take an image in a script compatible form (all the numbers were in text, rather than in binaries), black out a certain region (think redaction), and still have some way to have the redacted area be recoverable when the right inputs were given.
The catch? The code would be given a peer review, so you had to come up with something that would pass most attempts at oversight.
A lot of people tried to hide stuff in "error detection" routines.
The winning code had no bugs of any kind. It did perfect redaction of the specified area. No flaws, no errors, nothing to be spotted in code review.
Except for one oddball usage of fetching and writing individual characters -- getc() and putc(). The author explained that as an attempt to make sure that no matter what was in the input data, no matter how messed up the graphics were in an attempt to break the code, it would not have any overruns, no undefined behavior, etc.
Result? The "black" would be written out as "0", "00", or "000", depending on the light level of the source. For all three color channels.
Absolutely unnoticeable when viewed on a viewer. There was no hidden alpha channel, no slight alternation between black-0 and black-1, etc.
Yet you could still recover readable text, almost perfect pictures, etc.
Security hole back door? Very doable.