Aye. I have about 4 passwords depending on how much I care about the thing in question. Frankly, if someone hacks my/. account, I'll be more amused than angry. My bank account, OTOH...
That said, I have had my WoW account hacked, because I made the mistake of logging on my brother's computer once, and he is a nub who downloaded a keylogger off MSN Messenger. That was the last time I do that.
It'd probably be a good thing if they require the authenticators, less grief all around. Even smart people (my brother's in a mechanical engineering program, so he doesn't have down syndrome, to my knowledge) can do stupid things and get their accounts hacked.
It only suggests that on the internet, the longer any argument goes on, the probability of a Nazi comparison approaches 1. It's more of a mathematical statement than anything else.
That's exactly what I meant. On Slashdot, on any given discussion about the government, inevitably a "20XX is 1984!" post will show up, being all hysterical, and making any real discussion of the matter stupid.
Sometime a given 1984 comparison, intelligently written, might be valid, but excessive airport security is not that topic.
Sometimes I think the Movie and (espeically) the Music industries won't be content until the government outright introduces a "media tax" and gives it directly to the industry, regardless of whether anyone wants to actually buy what they produce.
I've got this crazy (and probably stupid) vision in my head of the RIAA and related organisations that no longer even pretends to produce something, and yet is shoveled money by the government as a way of "protecting artists" or something. Doubt it would ever get that far, but I'm sure some people in said organisations has had a similar, more sinister vision.
Hmmm. A government agency that doesn't actually do anything, yet continues to be fed billions in tax dollars that no one wants to pay. There's a joke in there somewhere.
There needs to be some sort of Godwin's law for 1984 comparisons.
No, I don't like the airport paranoia, but to compare airport security tech to 1984 is rather hysterical.
It would be claiming anti-Arab feelings and sentiment make the US just like Nazi Germany.
Yet on any article about the government on/. it's a simple matter of time when reading the comments before one compares whatever the privacy violation of the day is to 1984. Which generally makes it hard to take seriously.
Yep. My mother works at a drug treatment center, and her view of drugs tends to be... different. She's gone from, in her teens, wearing a Marijuana bracelet, frequently doing LSD and hanging around drug dealers (her 5ish year boyfriend, prior to my father was a coke dealer) to being paranoid about her children taking any drugs, right down to a time when she almost seemed convinced I had nefarious plans with she found Robaxacet in my apartment. She's aware her anti-drug feelings tend to be over the top (and has apologised for being over-paranoid before), but I tend to cut her slack considering the sheer volume of people who have completely and utterly ruined their life, and often the lives of others (frequently horrendously tragically) in drug-related ways.
Though, these days, I pretty much never drink. Not for her sake really, but because I get days of horrendous heartburn (for days) from Alcohol. Still drink up to 10 cups of tea a day though...
Wow. This is one of the stupidest comments I've seen in 10 years of Slashdot.
People buy such games because they enjoy them. If we didn't, we wouldn't buy them.
You might not enjoy "heavily scripted rollercoaster games", and that's perfectly cool. But others do enjoy them, and assuming your tastes are the only acceptable ones is both arrogant and stupid,
I personally don't like vegetables. I can easily see why others do though, and don't go around asking "Why people keep buying these awful tasting weirdly coloured plants to eat is beyond me."
Different people. Different tastes. It's a good thing, and adds variety to life.
Booksurge is great for very niche products. I've bought some stuff that was published with them, that was great, but far, far from mainstream (Neopagan reconstructionism). One can see where a publisher's resources would help (higher rate of spelling errors), but overall, I think self-publishing like that is great for books with a very specific market.
That said, I agree with you that mainstream publishers aren't going anywhere. They do provide valuable services in terms of proofreading, editing and promotion, even if the actual printing aspect is likely to decline in importance.
Somewhere, there's a recording executive reading this article and planning on dispatching a team to try to retrofit DRM onto vinyl records somehow.
Which I imagine would be quite a feat for a purely analog medium.
Either that, or said executive is now more paranoid about the "analog hole" than ever before, and now believes that people are turning to vinyl to pirate music somehow.
Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.
Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.
Dammit, this is why you're not supposed to reveal your secret identity. He could have been a superhero with a wide array of crazy gadgets, but now if we see some crazy guy with a jetpack stopping crime, everyone will know who it is.:(
I would easily take a free netbook if it were offered. I'd mess around with it, if it was useful, I'd continue using it, if not, it would go in the big pile of laptops I've replaced but haven't gotten rid of yet. (Going back to a PowerBook 540c from 1994, IIRC).
However, I can't see the advertising or whatever actually making up for it, especially considering that a fair number of them wouldn't end up being used at all, and many would end up being used for strange purposes.
The last time I remember a company giving large amounts of free hardware away, to make it up with advertising, was the CueCat disaster. OTOH, the CueCat was pretty useless to begin with, and their company was based only on that junk, IIRC. Even if such an idea tanks, I'm sure google could eat a few billion in losses. Still, I really doubt such a thing will happen. Free netbooks just sound too good to be true.
The internet is a mass of data interconnected by address. Data is not an object, but the status of variables. Data has no more weight than any other abstract concept.
WHAT!? I thought the internet was a series of tubes.:-/
I agree with you on every count, it sounds very light to me. Though, if the Germans are happy with their law, I feel that's their business, and as a Canadian I don't feel it's my business to tell them how to run their own country, any more than they can try to tell us that we can't use their names.
Merely carry guns? What kind of protection is that?
I say, it should be mandatory to have a USB firearm attached to your computer. If it detects someone trying to steal the computer, someone getting the password wrong, or someone trying to install unwanted software, the computer will now have a way to defend itself. I think we'd all be safer in a world where every computer has a USB assault rifle attached to it.
When I was in University, I once had some leftist student try to convince me that Batman was evil, using a Marxist analysis. That is, he's a rich man, who tries to keep the poor of Gotham down under his boot by going out at night, scaring beating the crap out of the proletariat for daring to stand up to him and his exploitive, capitalist parents.
While rather amusing (I don't think he was fully serious, I hope), the truth is, you can see whatever as a metaphor/representation/whatever of anything you want, but at the end of the day, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Zombies are cool cause they eat people. That's my analysis.
Ack, with headlines shouting about Vishing and MiFi, two words I've never heard of, for possibly the first time in my life I feel out of the loop and too old for all these newfangled words, at 22.:-(
My first thought was that MiFi was a form of WiFi for Nintendo Miis, but that can't possibly be right...
My experience is somewhat different, but mostly because the only online game I've played really is WoW.
In my experience in WoW, kids have been a real mixed bag. Some of the better players I've had in guilds have been 12-14, and so have some of the worst. In general, once someone is known to be a little kid, the ventspeak gets somewhat less "mature". It always feels weird, though, when you know your tank is 12 or so, even if he's doing a great job.
I suppose my server (Lightninghoof) tends to be pretty good communitywise. Sure we have our share of dickheads, but much less than other servers I've played on. Probably because we're an RP server, for what that's worth.
I am not a Canadian, but I wouldn't count on the product working well, given that Amazon suppresses digital content to anybody they don't happen to care for. Australia currently falls into this category; digital copies of books are unavailable where Amazon is perfectly happy to sell you a dead-tree version.
I happen to prefer the latter, but for some texts, it would be nice to forego the exorbitant US freight costs.
To be fair, I really doubt it's that they have an axe to grind against Australians. More likely is some annoying conflicts with Australian laws, publishers, organisations and/or cell phone companies. It really wouldn't be a smart decision to not release content to Australia because a dingo ate Bezos' baby or he was molested by a Kangaroo or something.
Same as Canada. I'm sure they want to have my money, but are either waiting for our (terrible) phone companies to stop sucking, or some conflict with Canadian publishers or laws. (For all I know, my country probably has some law forcing ebooks to have 30% "Canadian Content" or something equally stupid.)
Yeah, you can, but the whole thing about ebook readers is they use ePaper and eInk. From what I understand, it has a display that highly resembles paper, has no lighting, etc. This makes it much more like a book, not to mention the form factor. I've tried to read ebooks on my MacBook pro, and I just can't, because it's nothing like a real book, it's awkward and totally terrible outside etc.
It's not just an aversion to LCD either. I'm a big comic book fan (Marvel mainly) but because I'm in a rural area, I typically am able to get pirated versions of my comics before my paper copy arrives. Because my paper version arrives up to a month after release, I've taken to downloading pirated comics and reading them before my paper copy arrives. I have no problem reading a comic on an LCD, but a text book just doesn't work for me that way.
Yeah, I was really hoping to get one for Christmas, so this pretty much sucks. If it's not out by December, I'll probably get a Sony eBook reader (yes, Sony is evil, but I like their products, and I have a high tolerance for evil.) or buy a Kindle off eBay.
For those who know better than I, if I buy an American Kindle off eBay, how well will it work in Canada? Will I be able to buy the ebooks off the American store (with a Canadian CC) and just load them with USB, or will the DRM cause me too many problems?
Basically, I'm wondering if anyone knows which will be a better option, a Sony Reader or an eBayed American Kindle if it comes to that.
(Please don't turn this into a DRM flamefest, I know DRM is evil, but I put up with it if the product's good enough.)
I don't really pay too much attention to the chip business, so I'm wondering how well, historically, Intel has followed their roadmaps? Are they like an actual roadmap of a, uh, road, that you can follow, or more like a "Roadmap to Peace" that's made because it looks good and people expect you to, even though everyone knows it's not going to work out?
Anyone got a roadmap from 1996 or so, so one can see how well it was followed?
Slashdot Mirror
Aye. I have about 4 passwords depending on how much I care about the thing in question. Frankly, if someone hacks my /. account, I'll be more amused than angry. My bank account, OTOH...
That said, I have had my WoW account hacked, because I made the mistake of logging on my brother's computer once, and he is a nub who downloaded a keylogger off MSN Messenger. That was the last time I do that.
It'd probably be a good thing if they require the authenticators, less grief all around. Even smart people (my brother's in a mechanical engineering program, so he doesn't have down syndrome, to my knowledge) can do stupid things and get their accounts hacked.
I think you missed my point completely.
It only suggests that on the internet, the longer any argument goes on, the probability of a Nazi comparison approaches 1. It's more of a mathematical statement than anything else.
That's exactly what I meant. On Slashdot, on any given discussion about the government, inevitably a "20XX is 1984!" post will show up, being all hysterical, and making any real discussion of the matter stupid.
Sometime a given 1984 comparison, intelligently written, might be valid, but excessive airport security is not that topic.
Sometimes I think the Movie and (espeically) the Music industries won't be content until the government outright introduces a "media tax" and gives it directly to the industry, regardless of whether anyone wants to actually buy what they produce.
I've got this crazy (and probably stupid) vision in my head of the RIAA and related organisations that no longer even pretends to produce something, and yet is shoveled money by the government as a way of "protecting artists" or something. Doubt it would ever get that far, but I'm sure some people in said organisations has had a similar, more sinister vision.
Hmmm. A government agency that doesn't actually do anything, yet continues to be fed billions in tax dollars that no one wants to pay. There's a joke in there somewhere.
There needs to be some sort of Godwin's law for 1984 comparisons.
No, I don't like the airport paranoia, but to compare airport security tech to 1984 is rather hysterical.
It would be claiming anti-Arab feelings and sentiment make the US just like Nazi Germany.
Yet on any article about the government on /. it's a simple matter of time when reading the comments before one compares whatever the privacy violation of the day is to 1984. Which generally makes it hard to take seriously.
Yep. My mother works at a drug treatment center, and her view of drugs tends to be... different. She's gone from, in her teens, wearing a Marijuana bracelet, frequently doing LSD and hanging around drug dealers (her 5ish year boyfriend, prior to my father was a coke dealer) to being paranoid about her children taking any drugs, right down to a time when she almost seemed convinced I had nefarious plans with she found Robaxacet in my apartment. She's aware her anti-drug feelings tend to be over the top (and has apologised for being over-paranoid before), but I tend to cut her slack considering the sheer volume of people who have completely and utterly ruined their life, and often the lives of others (frequently horrendously tragically) in drug-related ways.
Though, these days, I pretty much never drink. Not for her sake really, but because I get days of horrendous heartburn (for days) from Alcohol. Still drink up to 10 cups of tea a day though...
Wow. This is one of the stupidest comments I've seen in 10 years of Slashdot.
People buy such games because they enjoy them. If we didn't, we wouldn't buy them.
You might not enjoy "heavily scripted rollercoaster games", and that's perfectly cool. But others do enjoy them, and assuming your tastes are the only acceptable ones is both arrogant and stupid,
I personally don't like vegetables. I can easily see why others do though, and don't go around asking "Why people keep buying these awful tasting weirdly coloured plants to eat is beyond me."
Different people. Different tastes. It's a good thing, and adds variety to life.
Booksurge is great for very niche products. I've bought some stuff that was published with them, that was great, but far, far from mainstream (Neopagan reconstructionism). One can see where a publisher's resources would help (higher rate of spelling errors), but overall, I think self-publishing like that is great for books with a very specific market.
That said, I agree with you that mainstream publishers aren't going anywhere. They do provide valuable services in terms of proofreading, editing and promotion, even if the actual printing aspect is likely to decline in importance.
Somewhere, there's a recording executive reading this article and planning on dispatching a team to try to retrofit DRM onto vinyl records somehow.
Which I imagine would be quite a feat for a purely analog medium.
Either that, or said executive is now more paranoid about the "analog hole" than ever before, and now believes that people are turning to vinyl to pirate music somehow.
Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.
Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.
On second thought, the guy in the picture is bald, so if that's him, I'd say he's more likely to end up as a supervillian. Might be for the best.
Dammit, this is why you're not supposed to reveal your secret identity. He could have been a superhero with a wide array of crazy gadgets, but now if we see some crazy guy with a jetpack stopping crime, everyone will know who it is. :(
I would easily take a free netbook if it were offered. I'd mess around with it, if it was useful, I'd continue using it, if not, it would go in the big pile of laptops I've replaced but haven't gotten rid of yet. (Going back to a PowerBook 540c from 1994, IIRC).
However, I can't see the advertising or whatever actually making up for it, especially considering that a fair number of them wouldn't end up being used at all, and many would end up being used for strange purposes.
The last time I remember a company giving large amounts of free hardware away, to make it up with advertising, was the CueCat disaster. OTOH, the CueCat was pretty useless to begin with, and their company was based only on that junk, IIRC. Even if such an idea tanks, I'm sure google could eat a few billion in losses. Still, I really doubt such a thing will happen. Free netbooks just sound too good to be true.
The internet is a mass of data interconnected by address. Data is not an object, but the status of variables. Data has no more weight than any other abstract concept.
WHAT!? I thought the internet was a series of tubes. :-/
Well, I guess that answers my question of whether Superman could legally gather evidence for the police using his X-Ray vision.
Good to know. Now I can stop lining my walls with lead and kryptonite.
Now, need to find a case relating to super-hearing.
I agree with you on every count, it sounds very light to me. Though, if the Germans are happy with their law, I feel that's their business, and as a Canadian I don't feel it's my business to tell them how to run their own country, any more than they can try to tell us that we can't use their names.
Pfft. From TV I know we should be able to enhance the image enough so that we can see individual aliens by enhancing that pixel enough.
Merely carry guns? What kind of protection is that?
I say, it should be mandatory to have a USB firearm attached to your computer. If it detects someone trying to steal the computer, someone getting the password wrong, or someone trying to install unwanted software, the computer will now have a way to defend itself. I think we'd all be safer in a world where every computer has a USB assault rifle attached to it.
When I was in University, I once had some leftist student try to convince me that Batman was evil, using a Marxist analysis. That is, he's a rich man, who tries to keep the poor of Gotham down under his boot by going out at night, scaring beating the crap out of the proletariat for daring to stand up to him and his exploitive, capitalist parents.
While rather amusing (I don't think he was fully serious, I hope), the truth is, you can see whatever as a metaphor/representation/whatever of anything you want, but at the end of the day, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Zombies are cool cause they eat people. That's my analysis.
Ack, with headlines shouting about Vishing and MiFi, two words I've never heard of, for possibly the first time in my life I feel out of the loop and too old for all these newfangled words, at 22. :-(
My first thought was that MiFi was a form of WiFi for Nintendo Miis, but that can't possibly be right...
My experience is somewhat different, but mostly because the only online game I've played really is WoW.
In my experience in WoW, kids have been a real mixed bag. Some of the better players I've had in guilds have been 12-14, and so have some of the worst. In general, once someone is known to be a little kid, the ventspeak gets somewhat less "mature". It always feels weird, though, when you know your tank is 12 or so, even if he's doing a great job.
I suppose my server (Lightninghoof) tends to be pretty good communitywise. Sure we have our share of dickheads, but much less than other servers I've played on. Probably because we're an RP server, for what that's worth.
how well will it work in Canada?
I am not a Canadian, but I wouldn't count on the product working well, given that Amazon suppresses digital content to anybody they don't happen to care for. Australia currently falls into this category; digital copies of books are unavailable where Amazon is perfectly happy to sell you a dead-tree version.
I happen to prefer the latter, but for some texts, it would be nice to forego the exorbitant US freight costs.
To be fair, I really doubt it's that they have an axe to grind against Australians. More likely is some annoying conflicts with Australian laws, publishers, organisations and/or cell phone companies. It really wouldn't be a smart decision to not release content to Australia because a dingo ate Bezos' baby or he was molested by a Kangaroo or something.
Same as Canada. I'm sure they want to have my money, but are either waiting for our (terrible) phone companies to stop sucking, or some conflict with Canadian publishers or laws. (For all I know, my country probably has some law forcing ebooks to have 30% "Canadian Content" or something equally stupid.)
Yeah, you can, but the whole thing about ebook readers is they use ePaper and eInk. From what I understand, it has a display that highly resembles paper, has no lighting, etc. This makes it much more like a book, not to mention the form factor. I've tried to read ebooks on my MacBook pro, and I just can't, because it's nothing like a real book, it's awkward and totally terrible outside etc.
It's not just an aversion to LCD either. I'm a big comic book fan (Marvel mainly) but because I'm in a rural area, I typically am able to get pirated versions of my comics before my paper copy arrives. Because my paper version arrives up to a month after release, I've taken to downloading pirated comics and reading them before my paper copy arrives. I have no problem reading a comic on an LCD, but a text book just doesn't work for me that way.
Yeah, I was really hoping to get one for Christmas, so this pretty much sucks. If it's not out by December, I'll probably get a Sony eBook reader (yes, Sony is evil, but I like their products, and I have a high tolerance for evil.) or buy a Kindle off eBay.
For those who know better than I, if I buy an American Kindle off eBay, how well will it work in Canada? Will I be able to buy the ebooks off the American store (with a Canadian CC) and just load them with USB, or will the DRM cause me too many problems?
Basically, I'm wondering if anyone knows which will be a better option, a Sony Reader or an eBayed American Kindle if it comes to that.
(Please don't turn this into a DRM flamefest, I know DRM is evil, but I put up with it if the product's good enough.)
I don't really pay too much attention to the chip business, so I'm wondering how well, historically, Intel has followed their roadmaps? Are they like an actual roadmap of a, uh, road, that you can follow, or more like a "Roadmap to Peace" that's made because it looks good and people expect you to, even though everyone knows it's not going to work out?
Anyone got a roadmap from 1996 or so, so one can see how well it was followed?