Unless, of course, you are talking about actual illegal activity, in which case you *should* be arrested. That's why we have laws.
Every single person in modern Western Civilization unavoidably breaks some laws on a daily basis. Period.
Currently, only the impossibility of actually catching and enforcing every single one of our transgressions makes it possible to remain "free" (in the "as a bird" sense). When our daily sins merely go into a queue waiting for the government to get around to having a reason to go after us - and the powers-that-be make damned sure we know it - What effect do you suppose that might have on your "right" to speak out against the government? Your right to demand redress of grievances? Your right to do anything that might make you stick out just the tiniest bit from the rest of the crowd?
Without public anonymity, without reality having a short memory, without the government prevented from violating our fourth amendment rights proactively, we have no rights or freedoms.
Seems like a basic customization that you should be able to do on any smartphone.
Smartphone? Hell, my 10+ year old Nokia piece-of-crap had custom skins the user could select.
Or more to the point - Don't buy a phone that won't let you skin it, won't let you tether it, won't even let you make calls ya left-handed bastards... Just get an Android (Like the majority of non-Apple fanboys - can ya smell the coffee, Steve?).
"Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;"
This is so vague even I can't understand what it is.
I think it means something like the annoying Win7 rolodex-o'-apps that replaced the formerly clean-and-easy-to-use alt-tab behavior.
"Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;"
No idea what this means either.
Progress bars, nothing more.
Truly revolutionary stuff here, Microsoft. Did you run out of boolean operators (*cough* XOR *cough*) to patent?
I would advise against this type of "hypothetical model" unless you want to slow innovation and business growth.
Slow innovation? My very first thought on reading this amounted to "Cool, time to write a tethering app for the cheapest device they allow
on their network".
When you price based on something over which your customers have direct control, expect your consumers to exploit that to minimize their costs.
...And, with that single link, you've not only gotten around the intent of this unicorn-farts-and-pixie-dust "superinjunction", but made an entirely new and previously uninterested group of people (consisting of at least me) aware of his status as an evil banker.
So, while the British might grasp the idea of wielding the law as a maul, they still don't grasp the full power of the Streisand effect.
Depends on how many can and do vote with their feet. If a lot of AT&T people leave, AT&T might rethink the policy. Likewise if a cable ISP or whoever else is getting a lot of people from AT&T because of the cap, they might think long and hard before putting in such a cap themselves.
If - And I mean that as a really big "if" - You have the great fortune of having more than a single broadband ISP in your area, you might choose to switch between them when one misbehaves. When both demonstrate the same contempt for their customers, what then? Go back to dialup, crippling yourself just to teach 'em a lesson?
Market pressure only works when you actually have something resembling an open marketplace. When only two long-entrenched players offer what you need, they just take turns seeing who can screw you harder.
So then how, as a YouTube user, do I get original videos that my team has produced and uploaded into "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR"?
Silly consumer - You don't.
We all need to learn to ignore that whole YouTube fad thing and come to terms with the fact that only big Hollywood money can make "real" content. Just sit back, relax, have a can of government-permitted intoxicant, and watch whatever your push-content provider has decided to make available to you.
Wikileaks is sitting on all sorts of good stuff about Russia. Why does Assange not release that?
Because the mob (and by extension, the Russian "government") doesn't even pretend to "prosecute" you, they just pull you into an unmarked white van, torture you, and dump your corpse in a ditch.
The reasonable intent of the citation rule is that a thing should not be considered just notable because some Wikipedia contributors *claim* it is.
One problem there - Why not keep anything factually correct, regardless of notability?
That has always bothered me about Wikipedia... The world already has an ample supply of dead-tree encyclopedias, and online storage space comes really really cheap. Wikipedia should have exactly three deletion-worthy offenses - non-content (ie, complete random crap or mime-encoded MP3s submitted as "articles"), factual error (which the person catching it should simply fix rather than flag), and a bit fuzzier, pure opinion-based content.
Anything else amounts to the wikimods circle-jerking each other over their pet topics. Notability? Hey, if someone cared enough to write a factual, grammatically correct description of OMM, that alone makes it notable. Anything else should at most count as editorial suggestions... Cites make a good example of this - Yes, adding cites improves an article; Tagging every parenthetical definition of a technical term, every translation between languages, every trivially-true statement with "[citation needed]" does not.
The old way of thinking is "one PC, one OS." This is going by the wayside and if you don't adopt to the reality of it all and you're in IT you'll be going by the wayside soon as well.
Come again? Did you respond to the wrong post?
I use VMs (and relatives) literally on a daily basis - From "real" virtualization, to emulation, to lowly runtime-sandboxes.
Key detail, though - I choose what to run on my PC, and when to run something non-native to my primary hardware and OS combo. You do not choose that for me. HP does not. Even Microsoft does not. I do.
Perhaps I can't do a whole lot about bundling in the long run, but I can sure as hell cost HP sales today for trying to tell me what I will or will not run on machines I control.
Aaaaand... One more reason why my first task on any new OEM PC boils down to "wipe and reinstall the OS".
I honestly don't know if I "like" WebOS or not yet, but if I want a Windows PC, I damned well want a Windows PC, not a frankenbox designed to push some crack-addled CEO's latest cross-marketing wet dreams on an otherwise unwilling audience.
Another, IMHO, probably baseless assumption at worst or the surveillance state at its best (self-censorship etc.).
Where's the line anyway? Using HTTP? Using SSL? Using SSH tunnels? Using Tor or your own private VPN and Proxies? Many of these are perfectly legit and who knows how many millions of such connections are going on this very second simultaneously. So what's to be afraid of?
In spirit, I agree with you completely. In practice, wearing a hijab to the bank might fall within your first amendment rights, but it sure doesn't do much for preserving your anonymity when you appear on the evening news as the person that got tackled by a swat team after refusing to show ID to the bank's rent-a-cop.
So I suppose this all boils down to: Do you want privacy, or do you want to flaunt your right to the same? If the latter, good for you (and I mean that), thanks for fighting for the rest of us. If the former, rather than using Tor just to read Slashdot, you'd accomplish more by teaching others such basic steps as using FF's Private Browsing mode and how to use GPG.
Using HTTP and without a proxy...no, you don't post AC!
True, but I think we have some reasonable middle-ground to occupy here...
Since the early days of the internet, I have used aliases online. I have taken care to use encrypted protocols whenever possible, and thoroughly separate my personal accounts from my work accounts from my random-online-crap accounts. And when necessary, I know how to guarantee "real" online anonymity, though the effort almost always outweighs the benefits.
Still, I have no delusions of online privacy for the vast majority of what I do. If a random TLA government agency took an interest in me, they could certainly correlate most of my various online activities. But at what level of effort? Put simply, I don't interest anyone enough to bother; jumping through hoops to obfuscate my activity on a regular basis would arguably make me a more interesting target.
So to answer the FP author - Don't bother. Take a few basic precautions, but just realize that in the modern world, your privacy depends almost entirely on blending into the background noise, not on adopting increasingly complex technological means of concealment.
Out of curiousity, what do you plan to do once 3.5 stops getting security updates?
Wait... So I should update from v2.0.0.20 sometime in the next few years?
More seriously, browsers (and not just FireFox) - Hell, all software in general - need to stop focusing on Change For Its Own Sake, and stick with implementing support for new technologies in the least intrusive manner possible. I get so sick of having to relearn entirely well-known programs every few years just because "ribbons" look fashionable this year.
Yes, some changes certainly count as good (tabbed browsing FTW), but it seems like the vast majority exist solely to justify rolling the major version number.
Yeah, I'd like to know this too. Hell, if I had any experience I'd start something myself. This seems like a real opportunity for some competition that promises to be less corrupt than Paypal.
Obviously that doesn't help non-profits, but for legitimate businesses, it makes processing fees all but a non-issue. Key word there, "legitimate" - No business planning to declare their PayPal receipts as taxable income would risk having their assets frozen on a whim. PayPal amounts to the online euphemism for "cash business".
so why the fuck am I supposed to feel bad that this guy is getting exactly the punishment that he knew he would get?
3/10, but I'll bite anyway - Because whether or not his case amounts to a prosecutorial slam-dunk, he still has the right to a fair trial.
More importantly, this has less to do with whether or not you should "feel bad" for him, than with whether or not a private business has the right to arbitrarily seize your assets temporarily in their possession. The specifics here (depriving someone of the funds required to afford one of our basic constitutional rights) just makes the core offense all the more insulting.
I cannot imagine why any sane person or organization would use PayPal as a bank-like entity after their many, many, MANY abuses of their "not a bank" status.
Seriously... It surprises more to hear about people successfully getting their money out, than stories like the FP.
Really simple, folks - Just stop using them. Period. They have the right not to serve us, and we have the right not to use them. Exercise that right, and put these bastards permanently in the red ASAP.
You cannot possibly do a buffer overflow in the traditional sense of the word in Java.
Ahahahahaahhaa...
Heh.
<snrrrrk>
You Java guys. Always cracking me up. "But it runs in more places"... Than GCC used to compile the JRE? "But you can't overflow buffers"... Not within the language (why would you want to compromise a sandbox?), but via the implementation (thus giving "real" access outside the sandbox).
Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.
I agree with you up to this point. Now, I can see both sides of the "pure tech" vs "well rounded" argument, and won't fault anyone for their preference there. That said...
Plenty of tech-oriented colleges offer almost "pure" engineering programs, devoid of all but a few token humanities requirements. If, therefore, you chose to spend your money and time attending a university that forces you to take an excessive number of liberal arts courses in which you have no interest, you have failed to adequately research your chosen career's dependency chain.
I would also point out that the vast majority of gen eds at a typical university barely require staying awake through class to ace them. If you need to cheat to pass them, you don't belong in any harder domain-specific classes.
And how about all the people who don't update their registration when they move? Rental cars?
The former counts as your problem, not theirs. As they would see it, they sent a bill, you didn't pay it. End of story.
The latter already have means in place for charging you after-the-fact for any incidental expenses incurred while you have the car (such as red-light camera tickets). They'll just forward you the receipt for the charge (plus a "small" processing fee in the ballpark of 50x the actual toll charge), already applied to your CC by the time you get the receipt.
And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration?
Why bother? You need to re-register again every year... "That'll be $25 for the registration and $50 in unpaid toll charges, plus a $9.95 penalty per use per month, coming out to... $672 even. No, we don't take credit cards."
Cali can't do that to out of state plates or plates from Canada/Mexico.
For other US states, they may or may not have reciprocity agreements. For Mexico and states that don't have traffic violation reciprocity, no, they can't do much, but pray that you never get pulled over for a routine stop in CA four years down the line.
While I dont fully agree with those claiming this is completely "off topic" it doesnt really answer the question at all.
Not to keep beating this poor deceased equine, but it doesn't just answer the question, it provides the only answer.
Someone needs to manage the backups. Someone needs to grant permissions, even if they have no other administrative role. Someone needs god-like powers to keep everything running smoothly. And if that someone decides to cause damage on their way out, they can and will.
Asking how to prevent that damage misses the point - You can't. You can take a variety of steps to limit the damage any one person can take and you can make sure that such damage gets noticed quickly, but the only real answer consists of not having people leave in such a pissed-off state that they would consider risking criminal charges and civil damages "worth it" to make their point on the way out the door.
...And in completely unrelated news, Sony has just announced that the NGP will ship with a remake of Doom (and have no other titles available at launch).
Okay, how did you do that? The "" tag has absolutely no effect for me ever since Slashdot upgraded (for example, I just put the word "Slashdot" inside a pair of normal italics tags).
Line breaks still work, bolding still works, just not italics (for me).
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, you are talking about actual illegal activity, in which case you *should* be arrested. That's why we have laws.
Every single person in modern Western Civilization unavoidably breaks some laws on a daily basis. Period.
Currently, only the impossibility of actually catching and enforcing every single one of our transgressions makes it possible to remain "free" (in the "as a bird" sense). When our daily sins merely go into a queue waiting for the government to get around to having a reason to go after us - and the powers-that-be make damned sure we know it - What effect do you suppose that might have on your "right" to speak out against the government? Your right to demand redress of grievances? Your right to do anything that might make you stick out just the tiniest bit from the rest of the crowd?
Without public anonymity, without reality having a short memory, without the government prevented from violating our fourth amendment rights proactively, we have no rights or freedoms.
Seems like a basic customization that you should be able to do on any smartphone.
Smartphone? Hell, my 10+ year old Nokia piece-of-crap had custom skins the user could select.
Or more to the point - Don't buy a phone that won't let you skin it, won't let you tether it, won't even let you make calls ya left-handed bastards... Just get an Android (Like the majority of non-Apple fanboys - can ya smell the coffee, Steve?).
"Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;"
This is so vague even I can't understand what it is.
I think it means something like the annoying Win7 rolodex-o'-apps that replaced the formerly clean-and-easy-to-use alt-tab behavior.
"Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;"
No idea what this means either.
Progress bars, nothing more.
Truly revolutionary stuff here, Microsoft. Did you run out of boolean operators (*cough* XOR *cough*) to patent?
I would advise against this type of "hypothetical model" unless you want to slow innovation and business growth.
Slow innovation? My very first thought on reading this amounted to "Cool, time to write a tethering app for the cheapest device they allow on their network".
When you price based on something over which your customers have direct control, expect your consumers to exploit that to minimize their costs.
IDK, The British are pretty good at it. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-10/u-k-lawmaker-says-rbs-s-goodwin-obtained-super-injunction-.html
...And, with that single link, you've not only gotten around the intent of this unicorn-farts-and-pixie-dust "superinjunction", but made an entirely new and previously uninterested group of people (consisting of at least me) aware of his status as an evil banker.
So, while the British might grasp the idea of wielding the law as a maul, they still don't grasp the full power of the Streisand effect.
Depends on how many can and do vote with their feet. If a lot of AT&T people leave, AT&T might rethink the policy. Likewise if a cable ISP or whoever else is getting a lot of people from AT&T because of the cap, they might think long and hard before putting in such a cap themselves.
If - And I mean that as a really big "if" - You have the great fortune of having more than a single broadband ISP in your area, you might choose to switch between them when one misbehaves. When both demonstrate the same contempt for their customers, what then? Go back to dialup, crippling yourself just to teach 'em a lesson?
Market pressure only works when you actually have something resembling an open marketplace. When only two long-entrenched players offer what you need, they just take turns seeing who can screw you harder.
So then how, as a YouTube user, do I get original videos that my team has produced and uploaded into "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR"?
Silly consumer - You don't.
We all need to learn to ignore that whole YouTube fad thing and come to terms with the fact that only big Hollywood money can make "real" content. Just sit back, relax, have a can of government-permitted intoxicant, and watch whatever your push-content provider has decided to make available to you.
Wikileaks is sitting on all sorts of good stuff about Russia. Why does Assange not release that?
Because the mob (and by extension, the Russian "government") doesn't even pretend to "prosecute" you, they just pull you into an unmarked white van, torture you, and dump your corpse in a ditch.
The reasonable intent of the citation rule is that a thing should not be considered just notable because some Wikipedia contributors *claim* it is.
One problem there - Why not keep anything factually correct, regardless of notability?
That has always bothered me about Wikipedia... The world already has an ample supply of dead-tree encyclopedias, and online storage space comes really really cheap. Wikipedia should have exactly three deletion-worthy offenses - non-content (ie, complete random crap or mime-encoded MP3s submitted as "articles"), factual error (which the person catching it should simply fix rather than flag), and a bit fuzzier, pure opinion-based content.
Anything else amounts to the wikimods circle-jerking each other over their pet topics. Notability? Hey, if someone cared enough to write a factual, grammatically correct description of OMM, that alone makes it notable. Anything else should at most count as editorial suggestions... Cites make a good example of this - Yes, adding cites improves an article; Tagging every parenthetical definition of a technical term, every translation between languages, every trivially-true statement with "[citation needed]" does not.
The old way of thinking is "one PC, one OS." This is going by the wayside and if you don't adopt to the reality of it all and you're in IT you'll be going by the wayside soon as well.
Come again? Did you respond to the wrong post?
I use VMs (and relatives) literally on a daily basis - From "real" virtualization, to emulation, to lowly runtime-sandboxes.
Key detail, though - I choose what to run on my PC, and when to run something non-native to my primary hardware and OS combo. You do not choose that for me. HP does not. Even Microsoft does not. I do.
Perhaps I can't do a whole lot about bundling in the long run, but I can sure as hell cost HP sales today for trying to tell me what I will or will not run on machines I control.
Aaaaand... One more reason why my first task on any new OEM PC boils down to "wipe and reinstall the OS".
I honestly don't know if I "like" WebOS or not yet, but if I want a Windows PC, I damned well want a Windows PC, not a frankenbox designed to push some crack-addled CEO's latest cross-marketing wet dreams on an otherwise unwilling audience.
Another, IMHO, probably baseless assumption at worst or the surveillance state at its best (self-censorship etc.). Where's the line anyway? Using HTTP? Using SSL? Using SSH tunnels? Using Tor or your own private VPN and Proxies? Many of these are perfectly legit and who knows how many millions of such connections are going on this very second simultaneously. So what's to be afraid of?
In spirit, I agree with you completely. In practice, wearing a hijab to the bank might fall within your first amendment rights, but it sure doesn't do much for preserving your anonymity when you appear on the evening news as the person that got tackled by a swat team after refusing to show ID to the bank's rent-a-cop.
So I suppose this all boils down to: Do you want privacy, or do you want to flaunt your right to the same? If the latter, good for you (and I mean that), thanks for fighting for the rest of us. If the former, rather than using Tor just to read Slashdot, you'd accomplish more by teaching others such basic steps as using FF's Private Browsing mode and how to use GPG.
Using HTTP and without a proxy...no, you don't post AC!
True, but I think we have some reasonable middle-ground to occupy here...
Since the early days of the internet, I have used aliases online. I have taken care to use encrypted protocols whenever possible, and thoroughly separate my personal accounts from my work accounts from my random-online-crap accounts. And when necessary, I know how to guarantee "real" online anonymity, though the effort almost always outweighs the benefits.
Still, I have no delusions of online privacy for the vast majority of what I do. If a random TLA government agency took an interest in me, they could certainly correlate most of my various online activities. But at what level of effort? Put simply, I don't interest anyone enough to bother; jumping through hoops to obfuscate my activity on a regular basis would arguably make me a more interesting target.
So to answer the FP author - Don't bother. Take a few basic precautions, but just realize that in the modern world, your privacy depends almost entirely on blending into the background noise, not on adopting increasingly complex technological means of concealment.
Out of curiousity, what do you plan to do once 3.5 stops getting security updates?
Wait... So I should update from v2.0.0.20 sometime in the next few years?
More seriously, browsers (and not just FireFox) - Hell, all software in general - need to stop focusing on Change For Its Own Sake, and stick with implementing support for new technologies in the least intrusive manner possible. I get so sick of having to relearn entirely well-known programs every few years just because "ribbons" look fashionable this year.
Yes, some changes certainly count as good (tabbed browsing FTW), but it seems like the vast majority exist solely to justify rolling the major version number.
Yeah, I'd like to know this too. Hell, if I had any experience I'd start something myself. This seems like a real opportunity for some competition that promises to be less corrupt than Paypal.
You'd find less demand for such a service than you might think, for the simple reason that businesses can deduct payment processing fees on their taxes.
Obviously that doesn't help non-profits, but for legitimate businesses, it makes processing fees all but a non-issue. Key word there, "legitimate" - No business planning to declare their PayPal receipts as taxable income would risk having their assets frozen on a whim. PayPal amounts to the online euphemism for "cash business".
so why the fuck am I supposed to feel bad that this guy is getting exactly the punishment that he knew he would get?
3/10, but I'll bite anyway - Because whether or not his case amounts to a prosecutorial slam-dunk, he still has the right to a fair trial.
More importantly, this has less to do with whether or not you should "feel bad" for him, than with whether or not a private business has the right to arbitrarily seize your assets temporarily in their possession. The specifics here (depriving someone of the funds required to afford one of our basic constitutional rights) just makes the core offense all the more insulting.
I cannot imagine why any sane person or organization would use PayPal as a bank-like entity after their many, many, MANY abuses of their "not a bank" status.
Seriously... It surprises more to hear about people successfully getting their money out, than stories like the FP.
Really simple, folks - Just stop using them. Period. They have the right not to serve us, and we have the right not to use them. Exercise that right, and put these bastards permanently in the red ASAP.
You cannot possibly do a buffer overflow in the traditional sense of the word in Java.
Ahahahahaahhaa...
Heh.
<snrrrrk>
You Java guys. Always cracking me up. "But it runs in more places"... Than GCC used to compile the JRE? "But you can't overflow buffers"... Not within the language (why would you want to compromise a sandbox?), but via the implementation (thus giving "real" access outside the sandbox).
Honestly, I can't blame them for that. It's good time management and it shows they know how to budget their energy for things that matter.
I agree with you up to this point. Now, I can see both sides of the "pure tech" vs "well rounded" argument, and won't fault anyone for their preference there. That said...
Plenty of tech-oriented colleges offer almost "pure" engineering programs, devoid of all but a few token humanities requirements. If, therefore, you chose to spend your money and time attending a university that forces you to take an excessive number of liberal arts courses in which you have no interest, you have failed to adequately research your chosen career's dependency chain.
I would also point out that the vast majority of gen eds at a typical university barely require staying awake through class to ace them. If you need to cheat to pass them, you don't belong in any harder domain-specific classes.
And how about all the people who don't update their registration when they move? Rental cars?
The former counts as your problem, not theirs. As they would see it, they sent a bill, you didn't pay it. End of story.
The latter already have means in place for charging you after-the-fact for any incidental expenses incurred while you have the car (such as red-light camera tickets). They'll just forward you the receipt for the charge (plus a "small" processing fee in the ballpark of 50x the actual toll charge), already applied to your CC by the time you get the receipt.
And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration?
Why bother? You need to re-register again every year... "That'll be $25 for the registration and $50 in unpaid toll charges, plus a $9.95 penalty per use per month, coming out to... $672 even. No, we don't take credit cards."
Cali can't do that to out of state plates or plates from Canada/Mexico.
For other US states, they may or may not have reciprocity agreements. For Mexico and states that don't have traffic violation reciprocity, no, they can't do much, but pray that you never get pulled over for a routine stop in CA four years down the line.
While I dont fully agree with those claiming this is completely "off topic" it doesnt really answer the question at all.
Not to keep beating this poor deceased equine, but it doesn't just answer the question, it provides the only answer.
Someone needs to manage the backups. Someone needs to grant permissions, even if they have no other administrative role. Someone needs god-like powers to keep everything running smoothly. And if that someone decides to cause damage on their way out, they can and will.
Asking how to prevent that damage misses the point - You can't. You can take a variety of steps to limit the damage any one person can take and you can make sure that such damage gets noticed quickly, but the only real answer consists of not having people leave in such a pissed-off state that they would consider risking criminal charges and civil damages "worth it" to make their point on the way out the door.
...And in completely unrelated news, Sony has just announced that the NGP will ship with a remake of Doom (and have no other titles available at launch).
Ah... Many thanks! :)
Okay, how did you do that? The "" tag has absolutely no effect for me ever since Slashdot upgraded (for example, I just put the word "Slashdot" inside a pair of normal italics tags).
Line breaks still work, bolding still works, just not italics (for me).
Emotionally disturbed children have an immovable moral compass.
"Immovable" does not mean "accurate".
/ Functioning Italics suuuuure would make Slashdot a better place...