Oh any why do you need online storage? Use SSH/SFTP and you're
all set. I guess that only works for all us geeks who leave our
machines on 24/7, or run our own servers.
As a geek who leaves (some of) his machines on 24/7, and also makes
extensive use of SSH tunnels, might I ask how you make the use of
remote filesystems transparent, in particular on a (corporate standard)
Windows desktop?
I know you can tunnel Samba, but the only way I know of requires
having a local Linux box not running Samba, with it running
the forwarding tunnel back to your home server; Then you can map the
forwarded ports on the local machine, which really point to your remote
machine. Big hack - Having used it myself, I wouldn't recommend
it to my worst enemy.
If you know of a better way, I'd love to hear it (no sarcasm intended)!
Ah, you simply didn't take the blame-game quite far enough...
See, if we can blame FireFox for flaws in 3rd party code it forks off, then
we can also, by proxy, blame Windows for letting FireFox let
the same buggy code run.
It all balances out in the great karmic wheel of "Always Microsoft's Fault, Somehow".
Drive where slowly? Into the middle of an
intersection? Into oncoming traffic? Through a
guardrail?
Even if you allow for a somewhat risky right-on-red,
situations still exist (left turning lane onto a one-way
road, for example) where you couldn't do something
like that.
The entire argument made in the excerpt is predicated upon
completely ignoring 17 USC 1, Section 107, "Fair Use". Period.
Fair use does not, however, count as a "right" in the normal sense of the
word.
It counts as a legal defense.
Which means, even if you win, you've already lost - Time, at the very least,
and money (lawyer's fees) if you want any shot at all of winning the case.
Hell, when was the last time you got on the highway and
the majority of the traffic wasn't going at least 5 mph over
the speed limit?
Since you mention highways...
With a posted minimum of 45mph, and entrance/exit ramps have a limit of 35
(or often less), you can't physically get on or off the highway without violating
one or the other.
And for those who thought them a joke, I have seen
one-way dead-end streets...
Or for one of my personal peeves - What do you do at a
red light when an ambulance or firetruck comes up behind
you? (this one might actually have an answer, but
I don't know it...)
You could say the same (possibly more accurately) about a AA battery. The key
difference here, this one uses spoooooooky nook-yuh-ler thingamabobs, so people
automatically put their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU LA NUKULAR LA LA".
but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb.
We need energy, period. Until we perfect fusion, fission looks like the best we have.
That said, fission has something of a bad reputation, largely undeserved. In the US, with a
decent level of regulatory oversight, only one person (Robert Peabody) has ever died as
a result of a nuclear accident at a commercial facility. How many people died in US coal mines
last year alone?
I would normally agree with you that renaming a technology to get around PR disasters just
insults us - But in this case, if it takes renaming it to "teddy bear hug-powered" to get the
completely ignorant (but vocally opinionated) masses to accept nuclear power, sign me up for
all the fuzzy wuzzy snugglies we can get!
I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step?
The professional world can't stand when your real life and their little toy world-of-whoredom intersect in messy ways. When this
happens, you hear about people fired for sexual harassment over a coworker uninvitedly reading your personal website or blog.
So, where should you list your online handle(s) on your resume? Nowhere! Thus the whole point of using a handle in the
first place... Only an idiot would pretend it gives us true anonymity, but to a casual search for info on you, the two
worlds will maintain some degree of separation. You want that effect.
Remember that once you make it to an actual interview, employers don't look for reasons to hire you, they look for
reasons not to hire you. Think of it like a driving test where you start with 100 and can only go down... The less
you do outside the scope of the test, the better. At your driving exam, did you ask to stop at the local head-shop to pick
up some filters?
If you really feel the need to provide some online persona for an employer, make a new one. Create a cute little
profile on all the big social networking sites, and post carefully censored historical details of your life.
I can see that your brain alternates the sides it thinks on when the wind changes.
And I always felt bad for Gore for the whole "flip-flop" thing - Yes, I see different sides
of the same issues depending on exactly what you ask. I consider that a strength, not a
weakness, but take it as you will.
Spending for the war in the sandboxes is done outside the budget so if we weren't doing that,
we wouldn't be spending the money anyways.
I did say that I realize it doesn't work that simply. Still, don't pretend that
"war" spending magically doesn't eventually hit us as taxes. It may fall outside regular
budgetary allocations, but we pay for it one way or another.
Do you actually believe this?
To tell the truth, I have no clue why we've decided to play in Iraq. We already know the
whole "WMD" excuse forms one of the thinnest cover-stories in history. "Oil" just doesn't
make sense as an answer, considering what a low percentage (a mere 2%, before the war
all but halted oil production there) of our actual oil we get from
there (while we mostly ignore the turmoil in Venezuela). "Security" doesn't hold water,
considering that we daily make more enemies than we remove... (And, we threaten Iran while
ignoring N. Korea and Pakistan, and let's not even go to Saudi Arabia and 15/19 hijackers).
Personal (or at least, friends and relatives) profit doesn't quite work considering the
level of 3rd party oversight that has failed to turn up more than the vague former connection
between Cheney and Halliburton. And religion? Well, Bush may count as a bit of a relidiot, but
I don't actually consider him that screwed up (or scholarly) to actually go through the
precursors to bring about his religion's Armageddon.
What does that leave? Not much. Every rational (even "tin-foil" rational) explanation makes no
sense. Yet, we remain in Iraq.
I hate to say it, but I have to: ONE day of deployment in Iraq would pay for this thing.
I wish the war in Iraq only cost that much...
We could make up the entire 2.5 million shortfall by putting the war in Iraq
on hold for a mere five minutes. Yes, five minutes - It costs us $500k per minute
we spend pissing around in the sandbox. We could pay the entire Aricebo budget simply by
giving our soldiers an extra smoke-break tomorrow (yes, I know it doesn't work that simply,
but you get the idea).
But hey, what do we care about mere extinction when those dirty arabs still pollute the holy
land by their mere presence?
The credit card company isn't looking to scam people out of money
Riiiiight... Can I have some of that Kool-Aid, my friend?
They are looking for payment for the activation process which, while has negligible cost, still cost them money.
And I should care about this why? If they don't want people to sign up then immediately cancel, stop forcing
minimum-wage-slaves who have more to worry about than losing their jobs over meeting "store" CC quotas to push the
sponsorship-of-the-week on us.
Yeah, this has an associated expense - I don't care. The issuing bank (or
the store itself that chose to nag me) can eat that expense as the cost of annoying
me, thankyouverymuch. Hint - If you don't have ID on you, they'll almost never cancel
the application process, and will give "you" your 10% discount. Get creative; when
this starts costing them far more than it makes them, they'll stop harassing us.
If you sign a contract you are obligated to keep your end of the agreement.
Most people do not consider an "application" a "contract". The law may differ here, in which
case the law needs to change. Yes, the "wall of text" probably mentioned fees; how
well does your poor old granny read 4pt fonts consisting of dense legalese?
All this supposed controversy does is feed idiot developers who make games without redeeming content.
While I'll stand at the front of the line to support an actual plot over mindless violence and gore, clearly a
market exists for mindless violence and gore. Why shouldn't some game designers fill that niche?
Personally, I see absolutely no point to the Madden 1960 to 2048 series. But I don't grudge those who
do enjoy them (except in sneering derisively when they ask if I want to play for a bit and they
have nothing but crap sports games), some people really do seem to like that genre.
Personally, I see two major problems with video game ratings today... First, they don't map at all well
to the more familiar MPAA ratings (also garbage IMO, but people know what to expect, for the most part).
A level of violence that would barely get a movie a "PG-13" rating will put a game at the upper edge of
"M"; racyness that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in an "R" movie puts games solidly into "AO".
Second, AO shouldn't mean "porn" from the perspective of console makers and retailers... It maps better to
"R" for movies (also "for adults only", since most places only show/sell R-rated movies to over-18s), both
in terms of content and target audience. If it didn't carry the stigma of having effectively no target market,
we'd see a lot more titles come out that deserve an AO, and adults would buy them (who does Sony think buys
most non-"E" games in the first place? 18-30YO males, period).
Then again, I consider ratings an insult in the first place. If parents don't want little Billy to see
tits n' gore, they should watch/play it first, and only then decide whether or not to let the
innocent li'l babe indulge.
Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure?
Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
That I've seen, very few people put permanant links in TinyURL (or similar) form on
their web pages. When making an actual link, the length doesn't much matter.
People use these shortened links as a short-term length reducer for mediums such as email
or blogs (while you could argue both have some degree of permanance, the vast majority
of them fade into obscurity within a month). In that sense, even if TinyURL went down for
good, it would cause almost no problems - A few thousand people might, if they cared
enough to bother, resend the link using a different shortening service.
As for ads or malware - I would point out that you can have legitimate
sites, with full-form URLs, annoy you with ads or fall to an attack and serve
malware for a few hours. But if you worry that much about it - Just don't use
shortened links. Simple as that.
The journalist could have written about the suicide phenomenon (which goes back as far
as history does) but that's not interesting. Myspace-assisted suicide apparently is.
Did you (or, I have to wonder, quite a few of the posters so far) actually read
the backstory to this FP?
This didn't occur as a "Myspace-assisted suicide" - A small group of supposedly responsible
adults decided to pose as a love-interest for a rather emotionally disturbed girl, all to
find out gossip about their own kids. One particular parent and her daughter took it too
far and "drove" said emotional cripple to suicide.
Now, personally, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. As seems so common in these
situations, everyone involved behaved like complete idiots. The adults behaved in a
reprehensible manner, but probably not actually illegal (thus the lack of charges filed over
anything except the foosball table). The now-dead girl had, as we all do, a choice; she chose
exceptionally poorly, but satisfied Darwin in the process.
But this involves more than just another angsty teen idiot and their MySpace page. Bloggers
outed the offending mother because of the lack of criminal charges, yet most people
feel she deserves some form of punishment for all this. If the police won't act,
it falls to society to decide how best to deal with her; and if she suffers a bit of harassment - quite a
lot, actually - I for one would not consider it undeserved.
Irrelevant. Public key encryption makes a court order irrelevant. Only
the victims' stupidity made even turning their emails over possible.
Did hushmail lie?
All companies lie.
Did hushmail violate it's TOS?
TOSs apply to customers, not service providers. Not that I approve of that,
but so it stands.
Did hushmail do anything illegal?
Legal and illegal simply don't apply here. They could have followed the
letter of the law and still acted reprehensibly, or they could have broken
the law and acted "patriotically" by rolling over.
Mostly this boils down to people using a service they didn't understand. This
should pretty much destroy HushMail as a company, but only because of how they
presented themselves. The real blame here falls squarely on the idiots who
trusted their sensitive information to anyone other than themselves.
Since it's your incompetence which created the problem
NIce try.
Let me know when you write a perfectly bug-free program - And that includes both
"quirks" in every library you use and the OS itself. And of course, "bugs" that
do exactly what you wanted but the customer failed to describe their actual
needs in the first place.
A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality
Why? What (little) I've uploaded, I encoded at 320x240 at the highest quality possible with their
size restriction. I don't regret optimizing it for quality under a known set of limitations, just
because of the possiblity that someday they might raise the limits a tad.
lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not
adding crud on top of crud
I had the impression that, as long as you upload something within their size (dimensions and actual
number of bytes) limit, they don't reconvert it on you. Perhaps I should check that out, by comparing
one of my files ripped vs the original as-uploaded...
You don't need AoE or any other game on your corporate-provided and
owned tools. You need to do your job with them... anything beyond that
is your own personal stuff and therefore should be RUN on your own
personal stuff.
...But they don't care if you use their power, water, physical space, heat,
toilets, and various other corporate assets on your breaks?
Drawing a magical line around "CPU time" as a corporate asset and ignoring
the rest strikes me as a petty and meaningless argument. Yes, they "own" it
and can tell you what you can and can't use - And when your friends throw away
leftover pizza rather than letting you have a slice, you don't stay friendly
with them for very long.
As a salaried employee, if I want to play games for half an hour to unwind,
as long as I still get my work done at the end of the day/week/project, I
have every right to do so.
Explain, however, how I would convince a corporate IT department that I need
AoE installed (even presuming, of course, that I provide my own legal copy)?
what the fuck does that case have to do with this ?
It shows an all-too-common pattern of behavior among the former-and-still
bullies disposed to the job.
completely different set of circumstances.
You mean, "walking while non-white"? Yeah, clearly asking
for it, the bastard!
Oh i understand, you one of these moronic cop haters
I would hardly call it "moronic" to despise the single most dangerous element
of modern society. And while good ones certainly exist (perhaps even
the majority of them), far, far too many bad ones exist to just trust
them by default, as a whole.
who will cry like a bitch for the cops he despises to come save him at the first sign of danger.
Have you ever actually called the police to report a crime?
I have (and won't bother ever again), and I've known others who have. And they do jack shit.
About half the time they bother to show up. When they do, they write down random observations and
you never hear from them again. But, god help you if you drive 46 in a 45 zone near the end of the
month...
You need to respect your customers, because if they went away, you'd be out of a job, it's that simple.
Technically true, but irrelevant. If cows went away, we couldn't have any more hamburgers. That doesn't mean we'd
all starve to death, because we can eat other things. But you want know the funny part here?
We could do most of their jobs (perhaps with a bit of training). Not all of us, and
not all of their jobs, but in general. They cannot, ever, learn our jobs. One of our surprisingly
few actual skills, "problem domain reduction" (kudos to 19thNervousBreakdown for the term), most people simply
can't learn, regardless of will or even intelligence. On the flip side of that, however, it means we can pretty
much accomplish anything we try, from coding to plumbing to animal husbandry to stonemasonry.
Think, really think, about how many geeks you know who, during the tech crash half a decade ago, did just fine on a
variety of completely unrelated-to-IT jobs. Personally, I did a stint in construction/carpentry, and produced some
damned nice work (if I do say so myself) - with ZERO training beyond casual observation of standard proceedures.
I don't say that to brag - Hell, I don't really consider it much to brag about - Just putting myself
forward as an example. We can do their jobs. They can't do ours.
No, it's because you act like a self-important little shite who thinks they should be bowing on their knees
and sucking your dick for every line of code you produced.
Not really, because I code for me. They just pay me for it. I'd do it in my spare time if I didn't do
it as part of my employment. I stay up-to-date on the world of IT because I find it fascinating, not because
someone pays me to freshen my skill-set or because the terms of my state-permission-to-practice requires some
pathetically low number of hours of study per year.
Anyway, all of the above said, I do try my best to remain humble and polite to most people, geek or not - And
for the most part, I succeed. I very much doubt most people who know me would call me a "self-important little
shite". But still, the constant jabs come anyway - From "complimenting" me on my skills the same way you would
compliment medusa on her hairstyle, to barely-tempered insults only blunted by the fact that we've usurped the
language no differently than blacks using the word "nigga". "Dude, you're such a geek!" "Yeah, thanks".
People look at us as freaks for what we can do, and you tell us to respect them?
The fact that the parent was moderated down just shows me that the arrogance,
contempt, and stupidity in corporate America is alive and well - especially in IT.
Some people deserve contempt and our scorn.
They act as though we can save the world before dinner when they want
something, and call us miserable worthless slacker bastards the next. They
insist we fix their problem in 48 hours when they can't even describe
the problem accurately enough to reproduce. They need us and beg us for help
and resent every second of it. They treat us like disposeable/interchangeable
cogs, then bemoan that we each have unique and difficult-to-replace skillsets.
You want to know why geeks look at most people with utter contempt? Because they
spit on us first.
but if the layout is similar to the regular magazine layout, you can
easily read a bit before you realize what's going on.
Good one - I fear, though, that the group you so sublimely mock
here probably won't get the joke.
Of course, you did mean that as a joke, right? That, if
the "content" and "advertisements" look so similar, you effectively have
bought a magazine for the ads?
and new issues will only go online at least six months
after they first appear in print.
Only six months?
C'mon, guys, we follow a strict "OYATM" policy to let the publishers get
their fair share! Let's not go undercutting...
Oh, waitasec... Heh. Nevermind.
More seriously, what gives with only putting "teaser" issues online?
As with almost all traditional media, they just don't
seem to grasp that I can already obtain their entire back-catalog
in high-res (higher than the original printing, in most cases - you can
distinctly make out the halftoning in most cases) digital
form.
They, as the rights-holder, have three distinct advantages over that - One,
legality, which we all prefer when given the choice (under reasonable terms);
Two, potentially near-perfect quality, which for older material even
the best of scanners can't obtain (even if you could get a
mint condition unfaded Spider Man #8, who the hell would unbind it
to scan???); And three, "extras", such as commentary by Stan Lee or
preliminary sketches or deleted panels that never made it to the final
print.
But no. They want to offer, for a (admittedly reasonably) fee,
something less impressive than what you can already download for
free. That should work well for them...
Especially since if they started in spring 2000, it was under Clinton's authority.
Defensive much?
I don't give a damn about whether Bush or Clinton or Mahatma frickin' Gandhi
started the domestic wiretapping program. I just care that it exists, an
affront to everything America stands (or rather, "stood") for. Like torture, any
debate over the "legality" of it misses the point completely.
As for your curious defense of TweedleDum(R) over TweedleDee(D), I also don't
care that Bush calls himself a Republican. Clinton? Scum of the Earth, and I
wouldn't let him within 50 yards of a female relative; through Janet Reno, he
singlehandedly destroyed the last shred of respect people had for the DOJ.
But Bush??? Personally, I would consider him the single worst, and the least
Republican, president in US history - And I include FDR, "The Great
Socialist" in that comparison. Republicans (claim to) believe in fiscal
responsibility, small government, and minding their own business to the point
of isolationism; Bush has racked up a debt that dwarfs his predecessors;
made the government bigger and more intrusive than ever; and followed a foreign
policy of busybody-ism resulting in massively decreased security for not
just us but the whole world.
And you want to view it as a game of left-vs-right? We may as well argue
about who has the nicer cufflinks.
Our government, regardless of meaningless party affiliations, has declared war
against its own citizens. If you think it cares which letter, D or R, appears on
your driver's license - Well, enjoy your false sense of security while it lasts.
As an aside, the letter that appears on my driver's license might surprise
you. So do me the credit of having a better argument than whining that "Clinton
did it first", hoping that I'll have no comeback to that, as though it excuses anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh any why do you need online storage? Use SSH/SFTP and you're all set. I guess that only works for all us geeks who leave our machines on 24/7, or run our own servers.
As a geek who leaves (some of) his machines on 24/7, and also makes extensive use of SSH tunnels, might I ask how you make the use of remote filesystems transparent, in particular on a (corporate standard) Windows desktop?
I know you can tunnel Samba, but the only way I know of requires having a local Linux box not running Samba, with it running the forwarding tunnel back to your home server; Then you can map the forwarded ports on the local machine, which really point to your remote machine. Big hack - Having used it myself, I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy.
If you know of a better way, I'd love to hear it (no sarcasm intended)!
So how is this a firefox problem?
Ah, you simply didn't take the blame-game quite far enough...
See, if we can blame FireFox for flaws in 3rd party code it forks off, then we can also, by proxy, blame Windows for letting FireFox let the same buggy code run.
It all balances out in the great karmic wheel of "Always Microsoft's Fault, Somehow".
Drive slowly to clear a space for them.
Drive where slowly? Into the middle of an intersection? Into oncoming traffic? Through a guardrail?
Even if you allow for a somewhat risky right-on-red, situations still exist (left turning lane onto a one-way road, for example) where you couldn't do something like that.
The entire argument made in the excerpt is predicated upon completely ignoring 17 USC 1, Section 107, "Fair Use". Period.
Fair use does not, however, count as a "right" in the normal sense of the word.
It counts as a legal defense.
Which means, even if you win, you've already lost - Time, at the very least, and money (lawyer's fees) if you want any shot at all of winning the case.
Hell, when was the last time you got on the highway and the majority of the traffic wasn't going at least 5 mph over the speed limit?
Since you mention highways...
With a posted minimum of 45mph, and entrance/exit ramps have a limit of 35 (or often less), you can't physically get on or off the highway without violating one or the other.
And for those who thought them a joke, I have seen one-way dead-end streets...
Or for one of my personal peeves - What do you do at a red light when an ambulance or firetruck comes up behind you? (this one might actually have an answer, but I don't know it...)
Uh, yeah, except it is a reactor.
You could say the same (possibly more accurately) about a AA battery. The key difference here, this one uses spoooooooky nook-yuh-ler thingamabobs, so people automatically put their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU LA NUKULAR LA LA".
but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb.
We need energy, period. Until we perfect fusion, fission looks like the best we have.
That said, fission has something of a bad reputation, largely undeserved. In the US, with a decent level of regulatory oversight, only one person (Robert Peabody) has ever died as a result of a nuclear accident at a commercial facility. How many people died in US coal mines last year alone?
I would normally agree with you that renaming a technology to get around PR disasters just insults us - But in this case, if it takes renaming it to "teddy bear hug-powered" to get the completely ignorant (but vocally opinionated) masses to accept nuclear power, sign me up for all the fuzzy wuzzy snugglies we can get!
I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step?
The professional world can't stand when your real life and their little toy world-of-whoredom intersect in messy ways. When this happens, you hear about people fired for sexual harassment over a coworker uninvitedly reading your personal website or blog.
So, where should you list your online handle(s) on your resume? Nowhere! Thus the whole point of using a handle in the first place... Only an idiot would pretend it gives us true anonymity, but to a casual search for info on you, the two worlds will maintain some degree of separation. You want that effect.
Remember that once you make it to an actual interview, employers don't look for reasons to hire you, they look for reasons not to hire you. Think of it like a driving test where you start with 100 and can only go down... The less you do outside the scope of the test, the better. At your driving exam, did you ask to stop at the local head-shop to pick up some filters?
If you really feel the need to provide some online persona for an employer, make a new one. Create a cute little profile on all the big social networking sites, and post carefully censored historical details of your life.
I can see that your brain alternates the sides it thinks on when the wind changes.
And I always felt bad for Gore for the whole "flip-flop" thing - Yes, I see different sides of the same issues depending on exactly what you ask. I consider that a strength, not a weakness, but take it as you will.
Spending for the war in the sandboxes is done outside the budget so if we weren't doing that, we wouldn't be spending the money anyways.
I did say that I realize it doesn't work that simply. Still, don't pretend that "war" spending magically doesn't eventually hit us as taxes. It may fall outside regular budgetary allocations, but we pay for it one way or another.
Do you actually believe this?
To tell the truth, I have no clue why we've decided to play in Iraq. We already know the whole "WMD" excuse forms one of the thinnest cover-stories in history. "Oil" just doesn't make sense as an answer, considering what a low percentage (a mere 2%, before the war all but halted oil production there) of our actual oil we get from there (while we mostly ignore the turmoil in Venezuela). "Security" doesn't hold water, considering that we daily make more enemies than we remove... (And, we threaten Iran while ignoring N. Korea and Pakistan, and let's not even go to Saudi Arabia and 15/19 hijackers). Personal (or at least, friends and relatives) profit doesn't quite work considering the level of 3rd party oversight that has failed to turn up more than the vague former connection between Cheney and Halliburton. And religion? Well, Bush may count as a bit of a relidiot, but I don't actually consider him that screwed up (or scholarly) to actually go through the precursors to bring about his religion's Armageddon.
What does that leave? Not much. Every rational (even "tin-foil" rational) explanation makes no sense. Yet, we remain in Iraq.
I hate to say it, but I have to: ONE day of deployment in Iraq would pay for this thing.
I wish the war in Iraq only cost that much...
We could make up the entire 2.5 million shortfall by putting the war in Iraq on hold for a mere five minutes. Yes, five minutes - It costs us $500k per minute we spend pissing around in the sandbox. We could pay the entire Aricebo budget simply by giving our soldiers an extra smoke-break tomorrow (yes, I know it doesn't work that simply, but you get the idea).
But hey, what do we care about mere extinction when those dirty arabs still pollute the holy land by their mere presence?
The credit card company isn't looking to scam people out of money
Riiiiight... Can I have some of that Kool-Aid, my friend?
They are looking for payment for the activation process which, while has negligible cost, still cost them money.
And I should care about this why? If they don't want people to sign up then immediately cancel, stop forcing minimum-wage-slaves who have more to worry about than losing their jobs over meeting "store" CC quotas to push the sponsorship-of-the-week on us.
Yeah, this has an associated expense - I don't care. The issuing bank (or the store itself that chose to nag me) can eat that expense as the cost of annoying me, thankyouverymuch. Hint - If you don't have ID on you, they'll almost never cancel the application process, and will give "you" your 10% discount. Get creative; when this starts costing them far more than it makes them, they'll stop harassing us.
If you sign a contract you are obligated to keep your end of the agreement.
Most people do not consider an "application" a "contract". The law may differ here, in which case the law needs to change. Yes, the "wall of text" probably mentioned fees; how well does your poor old granny read 4pt fonts consisting of dense legalese?
All this supposed controversy does is feed idiot developers who make games without redeeming content.
While I'll stand at the front of the line to support an actual plot over mindless violence and gore, clearly a market exists for mindless violence and gore. Why shouldn't some game designers fill that niche?
Personally, I see absolutely no point to the Madden 1960 to 2048 series. But I don't grudge those who do enjoy them (except in sneering derisively when they ask if I want to play for a bit and they have nothing but crap sports games), some people really do seem to like that genre.
Personally, I see two major problems with video game ratings today... First, they don't map at all well to the more familiar MPAA ratings (also garbage IMO, but people know what to expect, for the most part). A level of violence that would barely get a movie a "PG-13" rating will put a game at the upper edge of "M"; racyness that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in an "R" movie puts games solidly into "AO".
Second, AO shouldn't mean "porn" from the perspective of console makers and retailers... It maps better to "R" for movies (also "for adults only", since most places only show/sell R-rated movies to over-18s), both in terms of content and target audience. If it didn't carry the stigma of having effectively no target market, we'd see a lot more titles come out that deserve an AO, and adults would buy them (who does Sony think buys most non-"E" games in the first place? 18-30YO males, period).
Then again, I consider ratings an insult in the first place. If parents don't want little Billy to see tits n' gore, they should watch/play it first, and only then decide whether or not to let the innocent li'l babe indulge.
Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure? Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
That I've seen, very few people put permanant links in TinyURL (or similar) form on their web pages. When making an actual link, the length doesn't much matter.
People use these shortened links as a short-term length reducer for mediums such as email or blogs (while you could argue both have some degree of permanance, the vast majority of them fade into obscurity within a month). In that sense, even if TinyURL went down for good, it would cause almost no problems - A few thousand people might, if they cared enough to bother, resend the link using a different shortening service.
As for ads or malware - I would point out that you can have legitimate sites, with full-form URLs, annoy you with ads or fall to an attack and serve malware for a few hours. But if you worry that much about it - Just don't use shortened links. Simple as that.
The journalist could have written about the suicide phenomenon (which goes back as far as history does) but that's not interesting. Myspace-assisted suicide apparently is.
Did you (or, I have to wonder, quite a few of the posters so far) actually read the backstory to this FP?
This didn't occur as a "Myspace-assisted suicide" - A small group of supposedly responsible adults decided to pose as a love-interest for a rather emotionally disturbed girl, all to find out gossip about their own kids. One particular parent and her daughter took it too far and "drove" said emotional cripple to suicide.
Now, personally, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. As seems so common in these situations, everyone involved behaved like complete idiots. The adults behaved in a reprehensible manner, but probably not actually illegal (thus the lack of charges filed over anything except the foosball table). The now-dead girl had, as we all do, a choice; she chose exceptionally poorly, but satisfied Darwin in the process.
But this involves more than just another angsty teen idiot and their MySpace page. Bloggers outed the offending mother because of the lack of criminal charges, yet most people feel she deserves some form of punishment for all this. If the police won't act, it falls to society to decide how best to deal with her; and if she suffers a bit of harassment - quite a lot, actually - I for one would not consider it undeserved.
Was there a court order? Or Canadian equivalent?
Irrelevant. Public key encryption makes a court order irrelevant. Only the victims' stupidity made even turning their emails over possible.
Did hushmail lie?
All companies lie.
Did hushmail violate it's TOS?
TOSs apply to customers, not service providers. Not that I approve of that, but so it stands.
Did hushmail do anything illegal?
Legal and illegal simply don't apply here. They could have followed the letter of the law and still acted reprehensibly, or they could have broken the law and acted "patriotically" by rolling over.
Mostly this boils down to people using a service they didn't understand. This should pretty much destroy HushMail as a company, but only because of how they presented themselves. The real blame here falls squarely on the idiots who trusted their sensitive information to anyone other than themselves.
Since it's your incompetence which created the problem
NIce try.
Let me know when you write a perfectly bug-free program - And that includes both "quirks" in every library you use and the OS itself. And of course, "bugs" that do exactly what you wanted but the customer failed to describe their actual needs in the first place.
A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality
Why? What (little) I've uploaded, I encoded at 320x240 at the highest quality possible with their size restriction. I don't regret optimizing it for quality under a known set of limitations, just because of the possiblity that someday they might raise the limits a tad.
lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not adding crud on top of crud
I had the impression that, as long as you upload something within their size (dimensions and actual number of bytes) limit, they don't reconvert it on you. Perhaps I should check that out, by comparing one of my files ripped vs the original as-uploaded...
You don't need AoE or any other game on your corporate-provided and owned tools. You need to do your job with them... anything beyond that is your own personal stuff and therefore should be RUN on your own personal stuff.
...But they don't care if you use their power, water, physical space, heat,
toilets, and various other corporate assets on your breaks?
Drawing a magical line around "CPU time" as a corporate asset and ignoring the rest strikes me as a petty and meaningless argument. Yes, they "own" it and can tell you what you can and can't use - And when your friends throw away leftover pizza rather than letting you have a slice, you don't stay friendly with them for very long.
and pertinent to me doing my job
Key phrase there.
As a salaried employee, if I want to play games for half an hour to unwind, as long as I still get my work done at the end of the day/week/project, I have every right to do so.
Explain, however, how I would convince a corporate IT department that I need AoE installed (even presuming, of course, that I provide my own legal copy)?
I would love to see a real-world comparison of a large number of 19-22" LCD panels
(replying to myself here)
Found one, using numbers from PG&E.
what the fuck does that case have to do with this ?
It shows an all-too-common pattern of behavior among the former-and-still bullies disposed to the job.
completely different set of circumstances.
You mean, "walking while non-white"? Yeah, clearly asking for it, the bastard!
Oh i understand, you one of these moronic cop haters
I would hardly call it "moronic" to despise the single most dangerous element of modern society. And while good ones certainly exist (perhaps even the majority of them), far, far too many bad ones exist to just trust them by default, as a whole.
who will cry like a bitch for the cops he despises to come save him at the first sign of danger.
Have you ever actually called the police to report a crime?
I have (and won't bother ever again), and I've known others who have. And they do jack shit. About half the time they bother to show up. When they do, they write down random observations and you never hear from them again. But, god help you if you drive 46 in a 45 zone near the end of the month...
You need to respect your customers, because if they went away, you'd be out of a job, it's that simple.
Technically true, but irrelevant. If cows went away, we couldn't have any more hamburgers. That doesn't mean we'd all starve to death, because we can eat other things. But you want know the funny part here?
We could do most of their jobs (perhaps with a bit of training). Not all of us, and not all of their jobs, but in general. They cannot, ever, learn our jobs. One of our surprisingly few actual skills, "problem domain reduction" (kudos to 19thNervousBreakdown for the term), most people simply can't learn, regardless of will or even intelligence. On the flip side of that, however, it means we can pretty much accomplish anything we try, from coding to plumbing to animal husbandry to stonemasonry.
Think, really think, about how many geeks you know who, during the tech crash half a decade ago, did just fine on a variety of completely unrelated-to-IT jobs. Personally, I did a stint in construction/carpentry, and produced some damned nice work (if I do say so myself) - with ZERO training beyond casual observation of standard proceedures. I don't say that to brag - Hell, I don't really consider it much to brag about - Just putting myself forward as an example. We can do their jobs. They can't do ours.
No, it's because you act like a self-important little shite who thinks they should be bowing on their knees and sucking your dick for every line of code you produced.
Not really, because I code for me. They just pay me for it. I'd do it in my spare time if I didn't do it as part of my employment. I stay up-to-date on the world of IT because I find it fascinating, not because someone pays me to freshen my skill-set or because the terms of my state-permission-to-practice requires some pathetically low number of hours of study per year.
Anyway, all of the above said, I do try my best to remain humble and polite to most people, geek or not - And for the most part, I succeed. I very much doubt most people who know me would call me a "self-important little shite". But still, the constant jabs come anyway - From "complimenting" me on my skills the same way you would compliment medusa on her hairstyle, to barely-tempered insults only blunted by the fact that we've usurped the language no differently than blacks using the word "nigga". "Dude, you're such a geek!" "Yeah, thanks". People look at us as freaks for what we can do, and you tell us to respect them?
Sometimes, customers are unreasonable
"Sometimes"? Heh... Good one.
and if they are,
"if"? Man, where do you come up with this stuff?
they should be treated with respect
Ahahahaahahhaaaa... Heh...
and the problem explained to them.
HAHAH[choke]
[gasp]
[snort]
Ahem... Please, stop, I can't take anymore.
The fact that the parent was moderated down just shows me that the arrogance, contempt, and stupidity in corporate America is alive and well - especially in IT.
Some people deserve contempt and our scorn.
They act as though we can save the world before dinner when they want something, and call us miserable worthless slacker bastards the next. They insist we fix their problem in 48 hours when they can't even describe the problem accurately enough to reproduce. They need us and beg us for help and resent every second of it. They treat us like disposeable/interchangeable cogs, then bemoan that we each have unique and difficult-to-replace skillsets.
You want to know why geeks look at most people with utter contempt? Because they spit on us first.
but if the layout is similar to the regular magazine layout, you can easily read a bit before you realize what's going on.
Good one - I fear, though, that the group you so sublimely mock here probably won't get the joke.
Of course, you did mean that as a joke, right? That, if the "content" and "advertisements" look so similar, you effectively have bought a magazine for the ads?
and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.
Only six months?
C'mon, guys, we follow a strict "OYATM" policy to let the publishers get their fair share! Let's not go undercutting...
Oh, waitasec... Heh. Nevermind.
More seriously, what gives with only putting "teaser" issues online? As with almost all traditional media, they just don't seem to grasp that I can already obtain their entire back-catalog in high-res (higher than the original printing, in most cases - you can distinctly make out the halftoning in most cases) digital form.
They, as the rights-holder, have three distinct advantages over that - One, legality, which we all prefer when given the choice (under reasonable terms); Two, potentially near-perfect quality, which for older material even the best of scanners can't obtain (even if you could get a mint condition unfaded Spider Man #8, who the hell would unbind it to scan???); And three, "extras", such as commentary by Stan Lee or preliminary sketches or deleted panels that never made it to the final print.
But no. They want to offer, for a (admittedly reasonably) fee, something less impressive than what you can already download for free. That should work well for them...
Especially since if they started in spring 2000, it was under Clinton's authority.
Defensive much?
I don't give a damn about whether Bush or Clinton or Mahatma frickin' Gandhi started the domestic wiretapping program. I just care that it exists, an affront to everything America stands (or rather, "stood") for. Like torture, any debate over the "legality" of it misses the point completely.
As for your curious defense of TweedleDum(R) over TweedleDee(D), I also don't care that Bush calls himself a Republican. Clinton? Scum of the Earth, and I wouldn't let him within 50 yards of a female relative; through Janet Reno, he singlehandedly destroyed the last shred of respect people had for the DOJ.
But Bush??? Personally, I would consider him the single worst, and the least Republican, president in US history - And I include FDR, "The Great Socialist" in that comparison. Republicans (claim to) believe in fiscal responsibility, small government, and minding their own business to the point of isolationism; Bush has racked up a debt that dwarfs his predecessors; made the government bigger and more intrusive than ever; and followed a foreign policy of busybody-ism resulting in massively decreased security for not just us but the whole world.
And you want to view it as a game of left-vs-right? We may as well argue about who has the nicer cufflinks.
Our government, regardless of meaningless party affiliations, has declared war against its own citizens. If you think it cares which letter, D or R, appears on your driver's license - Well, enjoy your false sense of security while it lasts.
As an aside, the letter that appears on my driver's license might surprise you. So do me the credit of having a better argument than whining that "Clinton did it first", hoping that I'll have no comeback to that, as though it excuses anything.