I am a writer and this settelment, far from being perfect, falls within the
realm of consideratoin
With such mastery of the English language, $300 must seem like quite a nice chunk
of change for your work...
Perhaps the compensation is not enough.
Not enough for what, exactly? Allowing your works to receive the single
most effective form of free advertising ever devised by humanity?
In Google's position, I would have just blacklisted all guildmember's works from
search results until they paid me for sending them sales. It amazes me
that anyone still has the 'nads to complain about their work appearing on Google...
Such petulance strikes me as similar to a man who complains about winning the lottery
because of the increased taxes. Boo-frickin'-hoo.
After all, they cannot teach their students that which they themselves
do not know.
Thus explaining why we never advanced beyond harvesting naturally-ignited fires from
lightning strikes?
Like it or not, today's kids already know far, far more about technology than
their teachers (college-level engineering professors excepted, and sometimes even then).
In particular, the research and collaborative aspects of technology that most
apply to education, kids "get" in a way only the uber-geeks among their elders will ever
grasp.
Now, if we both accept public school as merely a form of socialized babysitting with
the occasional unintended side effect of imparting a bit of knowledge from the
tedious daily busy-work, I'll agree that having the prisoners more competent than the
jailers raises serious control issues... But from the "education" perspective,
the brand of tool doesn't matter, only that it works. And mind your metaphors!
You don't add features that late in the game, you fix bugs.
In fairness, none of the things mentioned really sound like "features" so much as behavioral
tweaks to address things that annoyed users - Arguably "bugs" of a sort.
You fork features into the next release, service pack etc.
No, you don't add features to service packs, either! MS habitually uses
this as a way to unofficially get Joe Sixpack to beta test features for their
next server version, and has more than once caused serious problems as a result.
Bugfixes only, please.
This, I think, is the reason why OSS is generally of poor quality (generally speaking)
compared to closed source competition.
Did you mean that as a troll, or do you sincerely believe that?
Let's move past the "Windows vs Linux" argument first of all, as they each appeal to
different types of people, and both have merits and downsides.
First, at the ultra-low-end, where you have Joe Sixpack dependant on one-click
do-everything apps, I will agree that closed source has the edge, and for an
obvious (IMO) reason - The same people interested in FOSS tend to want more
control than such software provides.
At the ultra-techie end, you pretty much have your choices dictated by platform. For
serious Windows development, you use Visual Studio (and I write that as someone who
does prefer MinGW to Visual Studio, but I won't play dumb); For web development,
Adobe has pretty much a hard monopoly (and again, I say that as someone who will not
use Adobe dev tools). For the unixy and embedded markets, you either have FOSS or
WindRiver (and in that case, FOSS has such a huge edge that WindRiver gave up on
their own garbage and now just repackages FOSS tools).
So, let's consider the middle-to-advanced users, those who know they have a choice, but
don't necessarily care about ideology, just results. I would of course point out FireFox and
ThunderBird as crown jewels of open source; For DRM-unencumbered media players, you only
have Open Source choices; For rippers (that don't impose their own DRM), again, pretty much
all open source with the notable exception of SlySoft (which only has an edge at the moment
because they beat us to the punch on BluRay ripping). For image editing, GIMP has a complicated
interface with a steep learning curve - But so does Photoshop. For DAW, I honestly
know more engineers using Audacity than Sonar/DP/GB/etc, with the exception that if you need custom hardware or realtime support, you don't have many choices there. For those who know
the difference between word processing and text editing, the FOSS Notepad++ has pretty much
crushed the competition for the text editor crown. For secure terminal sessions and most
tunneling, everyone (in the Windows world) uses PuTTY; For (non-one-click) video
format conversion, VirtualDub counts as pretty much the only choice...
So... I don't know that I'd call FOSS better than commercial apps, but in some cases
yes, and in most cases comparable.
CF works passably in WORM-like scenarios, where you basically use it in read-only mode and update it rarely
and in big chunks. For random R/W access, CF lacks wear leveling to give it a tolerable life expectancy... Thus
you commonly see it used in embedded devices such as routers and dumbterms where you may update the firmware or
OS every few months; You don't see it used much in real, live writable FSs.
It also tends to have rather poor performance, with reads in the sub-5MB/s range and writes taking forever.
So again, using a 32MB CF to boot a router, works great; Using a 32GB CF as the system partition for a modern
desktop PC (even with some solution to the limited erase lifetime, such as a UnionFS against a ramdisk with
commit-on-shutdown), you can expect 10+ minute boot times.
But as far as I can tell, the King Kong defense is this:
Yeah, Wiki needs to start putting the BS meta-comments at the bottom of the page.
IMO, one and only one of those tags needs to appear at the top, the "current event, subject
to rapid chage" notice... And even that doesn't really belong, as the actual content limits itself
primarily to factual content rather than speculation about the future of the trial.
And for the rest - Who else has installed the "no citation needed" GreaseMonkey script to
get rid of the endless sea of blue plaguing Wiki? Seriously, some things just count as obvious,
for example, the absolutely atrocious last sentence, "The term King Kong defense was quickly popularized[citation
needed] by use in online blogs,[citation needed] micro-blogs,[citation needed] file-sharing news feeds,[citation
needed] and in media reports[citation needed] on the Pirate Bay Trial". Free hint, Jeremy - If I get to a
Wiki article from a damned FP link on Slashdot, the linked concept counts as "popular". Perhaps you would
prefer to quantize that word, with a disclaimer like "As defined by Slashdot bringing our servers to their
knees as people search for this term"?
Yeah, mod me offtopic, but this particular link demonstrates pretty much everything wrong with Wiki - Though don't
get me wrong, I say that as someone who consults it at least daily.
This is just the normal escalation process for a student who started out disobeying a minor rule by texting and then made the matter worse when she refused to turn the phone over to the teacher. The cops were called because of the refusal, not because of the texting.
I realize schools technically act in loco parentis, but on a more practical level, they also derive their authority from a mostly cooperative (if disinterested) student population.
So on that basis, why raise a fuss over some uncooperative bink who won't hand over her phone? Call the parents and have her removed, with a suspension pending her agreement to return without a phone.
This escalated because school administrators go off on power trips to "prove" their authority over a group of people with few real rights. It could have ended with one simple phone call (to someone other than the police), but no, someone needed to "win" a contest of wills against an insecure teenage girl, rather than simply resolve the situation in the easiest manner possible.
She deserves a spanking, not a criminal record. And the school deserves every bit of mockery by morning DJs they get over this for making a mountain out of a molehill.
At some level, citizens have to submit to authority figures.
Why? Don't get me wrong, the guy with the gun and the legal authority to use it on me always gets a polite "yes sir", but "arbitrary social rules" do not equal "universal truths".
Lying about it and causing a kerfluffle about it ought to be punishable.
"Punishable", yes. Absolutely. Detention, suspension, even expulsion. But in an actual court of law, for classroom insubordination??? No. Just... No.
How do you balance this individual need against an organizations's need for continuity
of operations in the event of your death or incapacity to perform work?
A well-defined procedure already exists to handle that possibility - You write all the
root-like passwords on a card, possibly with some level of instructions on where and
how to use them, seal it in an envelope signed across the flap, and deposit it in (on of)
the company's safe deposit box(es).
If the "wrong" people have access to that, then a company has much bigger problems
than mere network security.
As that concept applies in this particular instance - It sounds like Childs should never have
had sole possession of the router passwords in the first place, so do we blame him
or his superiors for that? And as for his "superiors", it sounds like the chain of command
here remains very much in question, with only one person involved (other than Childs), his
immediate boss, having any clear "right" to those passwords.
Giving out the passwords could also lead to jail time. My personal password
ties my account to me personally.
It sounds like Childs had a pretty good clue about network administration - Meaning
that he almost certainly didn't "run as root". He also had decent forewarning (most
accounts describe this as ongoing for at least six months) that he could expect
some bad mojo down the line, and could have taken appropriate steps to isolate his
personal access from his professional access well in advance of the issue
coming to a head.
Now, if I absolutely had to surrender my personal account, I'd simply change the
password to "password" first, and ASAP bulk-email everyone in my address list to say that
ownership of my account had changed hands and future contact from that account would not
come from me.
Whether or not my employer owns "my" account, they sure as hell don't own my reputation.
but even without those restrictions I'm not going to hand out my password to my
boss, my boss's boss, or even the CEO of the company.
I like my job, but preserving it comes pretty damned far behind "my freedom" in order of
my priorities. Jail vs giving out the keys to the kingdom? "Would you like the portcullis
up or down when you arrive, Mr. Barbarian?"
Anyone who chooses prison over a job doesn't count as "principled", they count as an idiot.
Some people have a requirement to keep certain documents for 7,10, or even 20+
years, digital isn't necessarily the best format to keep such documents.
Not the best format? For keeping any substantial number of documents that long,
you should consider digital the only format to use.
You've said that twice now, but I have read them, and even base my original
statement on them.
They amount to nothing so much as a discussion of "how can we give the sheep the vote,
while not really giving them any say in government". Particularly apropos to my point,
Madison's stance that we can best control dominant "factions" by making the majority of
them impotent...
...Which goes back to precisely my original statement: The electoral college exists to
keep masses of idiots from having too much impact on the outcome of elections. As for
the education-vs-intelligence argument, keep in mind the character of the Founding Fathers,
mostly well-educated elitists (albeit with a taste for whiskey and wimmin). They didn't
consider the masses "uninformed" so much as "uninformable".
The Electoral College was created because communication was so poor.
No, the electoral college exists because the Founding Fathers(tm) understood that most
people count as complete and total idiots, and that idiots of a given bias will tend
to group together.
Take the Fundies as a good example - They vote, and they all vote the same way. If you
counted the popular vote, they would have considerably more influence than they do now;
Instead, by lumping together in a handful of states, you end up with the winner of those
states getting a good 70-90% of the vote, but that does their actual candidate no better
than winning a mere 51% of the vote.
This is cute, but just think about the problem of trying to
preserve the gameplay of various MMO games, without the servers
Reproducing the social aspects of them, no. But the actual gameplay
part, that just takes a suitable AI player - And in MMOs, lets face it, "suitable
AI" means "shout random boasts of your latest kill/find" and "go to dungeon X,
clear it out, teleport home if you get hurt too badly, rinse wash repeat".
Good luck trying to beat the various forms of DRM through
an emulator (without using a crack).
Which leads us to one nice aspect of emulation - You can pre-crack the
DRM of the image, and just don't implement it at all in the emulator.
Also DirectX is also a bitch, specially the earlier versions (4-6)
have various compatibility issues.
Emulating a known API takes far less work than emulating actual
hardware at the per-chip level - Thus the reason it took a decade and
numerous speed hacks to get decent SNES emulation, while we had PS1 and N64
emulators fairly stable (if slow) even before the EOL of those consoles.
Encrypt everything, hide everything, obfuscate everything, always assume
that THEY are out to get you.
You left out "always wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints", "flip a coin/roll a D6
to pick your route to and from work every day", and "randomly do thing in which you have
no interest, to poison their profile".
I'm not a girl, but I'm surprised that drivel like yours gets modded
up at all, much less to +5.
Politically Incorrect or not, I expect that I got modded up because most people
(males, at least - which happen to form the vast majority of Slashdotters) can
strongly identify with my statements.
but what I *do* know is that there are a large number to which this does NOT apply.
Oh, no doubt! Very few unqualified generalizations hold true universally; you'll
get no disagreement from me on that point. But let's not play semantic games,
you understood my intended point.
I don't even want to get to your misogyny here
Okay, there, you need to back up a bit. In no way did I claim females as
inferior to males. In this particular instance, I don't even claim them as all that
different than males (hey, I'll admit it, I care about results, not the process of getting
to the result). As for the implied self-deception, we all have lies we tell ourselves;
I merely pointed out a particular one that seems predominantly female in nature. If you
believe that makes me a misogynist, well, you have a right to your own opinion.
No offense, but what "real" females - shallow or not - say and what they
mean differ drastically. I don't think this involves lying
so much as simple self-delusion (since they seem to actually believe what they
say), but it all ends up the same.
Simple example - Would you rather get a blinking card that represents a week's work from
your SO, or a mere half-day's pay worth of roses delivered conspicuously to your workplace?
And before you answer, I've tried both (well, not a blinking card, but same idea). The
"lovingly crafted with my own hands and dozens of hours of hard work" gift gets a "gee,
thanks, how... nice". The large bundle of dying plant debris result in a tigress
throwing you to the floor and a few hours of scratch-mark-leaving entertainment.
Women want stuff and attention, and as much of it as possible. They don't
care about the effort or intent involved, just the end product.
See the NIST Recommendation for Key Management (PDF), page 63.
*Whooooosh!*
Very good, informative post - But you still missed the point that social
engineering (whether flirting or torture or looking under the user's keyboard for their
post-it note full of passwords) takes less time than brute forcing even a low-quality
cryptosystem.
No "practical" difference exists, because "in practice", an attacker will reach for
the blowtorch before they bother with any cracking tools.
having to spend 10-20+ hours unlocking content for a game that is a "casual" game, that really spoils it.
I don't think TFA meant "spoiler" in quite that sense, but following up on your point anyway...
In most cases, you don't need to tediously grind to get all the "extra" content if you just want to "win" the
game. You only need to do the side crap if you want to.
RPGs make a good example - Most of them have a core plot that you can finish in 10-20 hours total, and with
the perfectly normal equipment you get via the main plot, you can still kick the final boss' ass (in fact, I've
noticed that many RPGs seem to scale the key boss battles down - or up - to your current level and even adapt to
what you have equipped to make it hard-but-winnable). If, however, you want the 100% everything gained perfect
finish, you can throw in up to another few hundred hours of play, doing all the side quests and hidden
dungeons and seemingly-endless-arena and such. The rewards for that (usually the best items in the game) can pay
off by making the final boss battle trivial, but you'd spend far less time skipping all that.
But it all comes down to asking yourself, "Why do I play in the first place". Personally, I game when I want
to burn through a few hours (on a plane, in doctors' waiting rooms, etc), so "wasting my time" unlocking hidden
features really doesn't annoy me all that much... If anything, I find it gives a game quite a lot more replay
value after completing the main storyline.
Or are you implying that every office in the world has their own fab plant and I didn't know about it?
Of course... Don't you? We keep ours in a shed out back.
Why, just last week, my boss said that our DB cluster needed more horsepower and to slide the
"transistor size" switch down to 35nm... Problem solved (of course, we needed to wait overnight for
the first batch, we don't have one of the fancy new ones that can pop out a batch of chips in 15 minutes
or less).
Slashdot Mirror
I am a writer and this settelment, far from being perfect, falls within the realm of consideratoin
With such mastery of the English language, $300 must seem like quite a nice chunk of change for your work...
Perhaps the compensation is not enough.
Not enough for what, exactly? Allowing your works to receive the single most effective form of free advertising ever devised by humanity?
In Google's position, I would have just blacklisted all guildmember's works from search results until they paid me for sending them sales. It amazes me that anyone still has the 'nads to complain about their work appearing on Google... Such petulance strikes me as similar to a man who complains about winning the lottery because of the increased taxes. Boo-frickin'-hoo.
It looks like a flag is set for the account when you "upgrade."
So just cancel your account and sign up for a new one. Not like you get any special deals for your long-term loyalty.
After all, they cannot teach their students that which they themselves do not know.
Thus explaining why we never advanced beyond harvesting naturally-ignited fires from lightning strikes?
Like it or not, today's kids already know far, far more about technology than their teachers (college-level engineering professors excepted, and sometimes even then). In particular, the research and collaborative aspects of technology that most apply to education, kids "get" in a way only the uber-geeks among their elders will ever grasp.
Now, if we both accept public school as merely a form of socialized babysitting with the occasional unintended side effect of imparting a bit of knowledge from the tedious daily busy-work, I'll agree that having the prisoners more competent than the jailers raises serious control issues... But from the "education" perspective, the brand of tool doesn't matter, only that it works. And mind your metaphors!
You don't add features that late in the game, you fix bugs.
In fairness, none of the things mentioned really sound like "features" so much as behavioral tweaks to address things that annoyed users - Arguably "bugs" of a sort.
You fork features into the next release, service pack etc.
No, you don't add features to service packs, either! MS habitually uses this as a way to unofficially get Joe Sixpack to beta test features for their next server version, and has more than once caused serious problems as a result. Bugfixes only, please.
This, I think, is the reason why OSS is generally of poor quality (generally speaking) compared to closed source competition.
Did you mean that as a troll, or do you sincerely believe that?
Let's move past the "Windows vs Linux" argument first of all, as they each appeal to different types of people, and both have merits and downsides.
First, at the ultra-low-end, where you have Joe Sixpack dependant on one-click do-everything apps, I will agree that closed source has the edge, and for an obvious (IMO) reason - The same people interested in FOSS tend to want more control than such software provides.
At the ultra-techie end, you pretty much have your choices dictated by platform. For serious Windows development, you use Visual Studio (and I write that as someone who does prefer MinGW to Visual Studio, but I won't play dumb); For web development, Adobe has pretty much a hard monopoly (and again, I say that as someone who will not use Adobe dev tools). For the unixy and embedded markets, you either have FOSS or WindRiver (and in that case, FOSS has such a huge edge that WindRiver gave up on their own garbage and now just repackages FOSS tools).
So, let's consider the middle-to-advanced users, those who know they have a choice, but don't necessarily care about ideology, just results. I would of course point out FireFox and ThunderBird as crown jewels of open source; For DRM-unencumbered media players, you only have Open Source choices; For rippers (that don't impose their own DRM), again, pretty much all open source with the notable exception of SlySoft (which only has an edge at the moment because they beat us to the punch on BluRay ripping). For image editing, GIMP has a complicated interface with a steep learning curve - But so does Photoshop. For DAW, I honestly know more engineers using Audacity than Sonar/DP/GB/etc, with the exception that if you need custom hardware or realtime support, you don't have many choices there. For those who know the difference between word processing and text editing, the FOSS Notepad++ has pretty much crushed the competition for the text editor crown. For secure terminal sessions and most tunneling, everyone (in the Windows world) uses PuTTY; For (non-one-click) video format conversion, VirtualDub counts as pretty much the only choice...
So... I don't know that I'd call FOSS better than commercial apps, but in some cases yes, and in most cases comparable.
So why should I get a SSD vs. a CF card?
CF works passably in WORM-like scenarios, where you basically use it in read-only mode and update it rarely and in big chunks. For random R/W access, CF lacks wear leveling to give it a tolerable life expectancy... Thus you commonly see it used in embedded devices such as routers and dumbterms where you may update the firmware or OS every few months; You don't see it used much in real, live writable FSs.
It also tends to have rather poor performance, with reads in the sub-5MB/s range and writes taking forever. So again, using a 32MB CF to boot a router, works great; Using a 32GB CF as the system partition for a modern desktop PC (even with some solution to the limited erase lifetime, such as a UnionFS against a ramdisk with commit-on-shutdown), you can expect 10+ minute boot times.
But as far as I can tell, the King Kong defense is this:
Yeah, Wiki needs to start putting the BS meta-comments at the bottom of the page.
IMO, one and only one of those tags needs to appear at the top, the "current event, subject to rapid chage" notice... And even that doesn't really belong, as the actual content limits itself primarily to factual content rather than speculation about the future of the trial.
And for the rest - Who else has installed the "no citation needed" GreaseMonkey script to get rid of the endless sea of blue plaguing Wiki? Seriously, some things just count as obvious, for example, the absolutely atrocious last sentence, "The term King Kong defense was quickly popularized[citation needed] by use in online blogs,[citation needed] micro-blogs,[citation needed] file-sharing news feeds,[citation needed] and in media reports[citation needed] on the Pirate Bay Trial". Free hint, Jeremy - If I get to a Wiki article from a damned FP link on Slashdot, the linked concept counts as "popular". Perhaps you would prefer to quantize that word, with a disclaimer like "As defined by Slashdot bringing our servers to their knees as people search for this term"?
Yeah, mod me offtopic, but this particular link demonstrates pretty much everything wrong with Wiki - Though don't get me wrong, I say that as someone who consults it at least daily.
This is just the normal escalation process for a student who started out disobeying a minor rule by texting and then made the matter worse when she refused to turn the phone over to the teacher. The cops were called because of the refusal, not because of the texting.
I realize schools technically act in loco parentis, but on a more practical level, they also derive their authority from a mostly cooperative (if disinterested) student population.
So on that basis, why raise a fuss over some uncooperative bink who won't hand over her phone? Call the parents and have her removed, with a suspension pending her agreement to return without a phone.
This escalated because school administrators go off on power trips to "prove" their authority over a group of people with few real rights. It could have ended with one simple phone call (to someone other than the police), but no, someone needed to "win" a contest of wills against an insecure teenage girl, rather than simply resolve the situation in the easiest manner possible.
She deserves a spanking, not a criminal record. And the school deserves every bit of mockery by morning DJs they get over this for making a mountain out of a molehill.
At some level, citizens have to submit to authority figures.
Why? Don't get me wrong, the guy with the gun and the legal authority to use it on me always gets a polite "yes sir", but "arbitrary social rules" do not equal "universal truths".
Lying about it and causing a kerfluffle about it ought to be punishable.
"Punishable", yes. Absolutely. Detention, suspension, even expulsion. But in an actual court of law, for classroom insubordination??? No. Just... No.
How do you balance this individual need against an organizations's need for continuity of operations in the event of your death or incapacity to perform work?
A well-defined procedure already exists to handle that possibility - You write all the root-like passwords on a card, possibly with some level of instructions on where and how to use them, seal it in an envelope signed across the flap, and deposit it in (on of) the company's safe deposit box(es).
If the "wrong" people have access to that, then a company has much bigger problems than mere network security.
As that concept applies in this particular instance - It sounds like Childs should never have had sole possession of the router passwords in the first place, so do we blame him or his superiors for that? And as for his "superiors", it sounds like the chain of command here remains very much in question, with only one person involved (other than Childs), his immediate boss, having any clear "right" to those passwords.
Giving out the passwords could also lead to jail time. My personal password ties my account to me personally.
It sounds like Childs had a pretty good clue about network administration - Meaning that he almost certainly didn't "run as root". He also had decent forewarning (most accounts describe this as ongoing for at least six months) that he could expect some bad mojo down the line, and could have taken appropriate steps to isolate his personal access from his professional access well in advance of the issue coming to a head.
Now, if I absolutely had to surrender my personal account, I'd simply change the password to "password" first, and ASAP bulk-email everyone in my address list to say that ownership of my account had changed hands and future contact from that account would not come from me.
Whether or not my employer owns "my" account, they sure as hell don't own my reputation.
but even without those restrictions I'm not going to hand out my password to my boss, my boss's boss, or even the CEO of the company.
I like my job, but preserving it comes pretty damned far behind "my freedom" in order of my priorities. Jail vs giving out the keys to the kingdom? "Would you like the portcullis up or down when you arrive, Mr. Barbarian?"
Anyone who chooses prison over a job doesn't count as "principled", they count as an idiot.
Some people have a requirement to keep certain documents for 7,10, or even 20+ years, digital isn't necessarily the best format to keep such documents.
Not the best format? For keeping any substantial number of documents that long, you should consider digital the only format to use.
you really should read theFederalist Papers.
...Which goes back to precisely my original statement: The electoral college exists to
keep masses of idiots from having too much impact on the outcome of elections. As for
the education-vs-intelligence argument, keep in mind the character of the Founding Fathers,
mostly well-educated elitists (albeit with a taste for whiskey and wimmin). They didn't
consider the masses "uninformed" so much as "uninformable".
You've said that twice now, but I have read them, and even base my original statement on them.
They amount to nothing so much as a discussion of "how can we give the sheep the vote, while not really giving them any say in government". Particularly apropos to my point, Madison's stance that we can best control dominant "factions" by making the majority of them impotent...
The Electoral College was created because communication was so poor.
No, the electoral college exists because the Founding Fathers(tm) understood that most people count as complete and total idiots, and that idiots of a given bias will tend to group together.
Take the Fundies as a good example - They vote, and they all vote the same way. If you counted the popular vote, they would have considerably more influence than they do now; Instead, by lumping together in a handful of states, you end up with the winner of those states getting a good 70-90% of the vote, but that does their actual candidate no better than winning a mere 51% of the vote.
This is cute, but just think about the problem of trying to preserve the gameplay of various MMO games, without the servers
Reproducing the social aspects of them, no. But the actual gameplay part, that just takes a suitable AI player - And in MMOs, lets face it, "suitable AI" means "shout random boasts of your latest kill/find" and "go to dungeon X, clear it out, teleport home if you get hurt too badly, rinse wash repeat".
Good luck trying to beat the various forms of DRM through an emulator (without using a crack).
Which leads us to one nice aspect of emulation - You can pre-crack the DRM of the image, and just don't implement it at all in the emulator.
Also DirectX is also a bitch, specially the earlier versions (4-6) have various compatibility issues.
Emulating a known API takes far less work than emulating actual hardware at the per-chip level - Thus the reason it took a decade and numerous speed hacks to get decent SNES emulation, while we had PS1 and N64 emulators fairly stable (if slow) even before the EOL of those consoles.
Er, and what do you do when the child says no?
You walk over and unplug it, and take it away for a week or three.
That way, they quickly learn that undesired cooperation on the short term can result in a greater net gain in the long run.
You can back up your demands with physical action, but you probably shouldn't start by putting a pickaxe through the PS3.
Anonymous libel/slander does not equal free speech.
"Anonymous" speech rapidly approaches the only free speech we have.
Tried protesting at a major political event lately? Sorry, but "designated protest zones" do not equal free speech.
Encrypt everything, hide everything, obfuscate everything, always assume that THEY are out to get you.
You left out "always wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints", "flip a coin/roll a D6 to pick your route to and from work every day", and "randomly do thing in which you have no interest, to poison their profile".
The best escape starts before you need it.
I'm not a girl, but I'm surprised that drivel like yours gets modded up at all, much less to +5.
Politically Incorrect or not, I expect that I got modded up because most people (males, at least - which happen to form the vast majority of Slashdotters) can strongly identify with my statements.
but what I *do* know is that there are a large number to which this does NOT apply.
Oh, no doubt! Very few unqualified generalizations hold true universally; you'll get no disagreement from me on that point. But let's not play semantic games, you understood my intended point.
I don't even want to get to your misogyny here
Okay, there, you need to back up a bit. In no way did I claim females as inferior to males. In this particular instance, I don't even claim them as all that different than males (hey, I'll admit it, I care about results, not the process of getting to the result). As for the implied self-deception, we all have lies we tell ourselves; I merely pointed out a particular one that seems predominantly female in nature. If you believe that makes me a misogynist, well, you have a right to your own opinion.
And yes, I'm female. Really.
No offense, but what "real" females - shallow or not - say and what they mean differ drastically. I don't think this involves lying so much as simple self-delusion (since they seem to actually believe what they say), but it all ends up the same.
Simple example - Would you rather get a blinking card that represents a week's work from your SO, or a mere half-day's pay worth of roses delivered conspicuously to your workplace?
And before you answer, I've tried both (well, not a blinking card, but same idea). The "lovingly crafted with my own hands and dozens of hours of hard work" gift gets a "gee, thanks, how... nice". The large bundle of dying plant debris result in a tigress throwing you to the floor and a few hours of scratch-mark-leaving entertainment.
Women want stuff and attention, and as much of it as possible. They don't care about the effort or intent involved, just the end product.
See the NIST Recommendation for Key Management (PDF), page 63.
*Whooooosh!*
Very good, informative post - But you still missed the point that social engineering (whether flirting or torture or looking under the user's keyboard for their post-it note full of passwords) takes less time than brute forcing even a low-quality cryptosystem.
No "practical" difference exists, because "in practice", an attacker will reach for the blowtorch before they bother with any cracking tools.
having to spend 10-20+ hours unlocking content for a game that is a "casual" game, that really spoils it.
I don't think TFA meant "spoiler" in quite that sense, but following up on your point anyway...
In most cases, you don't need to tediously grind to get all the "extra" content if you just want to "win" the game. You only need to do the side crap if you want to.
RPGs make a good example - Most of them have a core plot that you can finish in 10-20 hours total, and with the perfectly normal equipment you get via the main plot, you can still kick the final boss' ass (in fact, I've noticed that many RPGs seem to scale the key boss battles down - or up - to your current level and even adapt to what you have equipped to make it hard-but-winnable). If, however, you want the 100% everything gained perfect finish, you can throw in up to another few hundred hours of play, doing all the side quests and hidden dungeons and seemingly-endless-arena and such. The rewards for that (usually the best items in the game) can pay off by making the final boss battle trivial, but you'd spend far less time skipping all that.
But it all comes down to asking yourself, "Why do I play in the first place". Personally, I game when I want to burn through a few hours (on a plane, in doctors' waiting rooms, etc), so "wasting my time" unlocking hidden features really doesn't annoy me all that much... If anything, I find it gives a game quite a lot more replay value after completing the main storyline.
Or are you implying that every office in the world has their own fab plant and I didn't know about it?
Of course... Don't you? We keep ours in a shed out back.
Why, just last week, my boss said that our DB cluster needed more horsepower and to slide the "transistor size" switch down to 35nm... Problem solved (of course, we needed to wait overnight for the first batch, we don't have one of the fancy new ones that can pop out a batch of chips in 15 minutes or less).