It sounds like you have some real anti-social
tendencies more than anything else
Like I said, "As a fairly typical geek...".
Does the phrase "extroverted geek" sound like
anything but an oxymoron in most people's
opinion?;-)
Seriously, though, team sports have one major
drawback as a form of exercise for geeks - they
require a dozen or so people to all manage to
schedule the same period of time free, at least
once or twice a week. Personally, I have a
fairly small group of close friends (hey, I
admit it, I tend toward introversion, though not
actually antisocial), and have difficulty getting
more than two or three to arrange for simultaneous
free time even with a month's notice, nevermind
once a week.
Now, a one-on-one or two-on-two type
game, I don't so much mind, and doesn't take
too much work to schedule. However, I don't
think I'd really consider that a "team"
sport.
It sounds like you have some real anti-social
tendencies more than anything else
Coding does not occur as a "team" effort.
Each person codes to some portion of a spec,
and if they all do it well, those distinct
parts work together as a whole (and if everyone
doesn't do their share, it doesn't
take much reading of code to figure out who
failed to pull their weight). Subdividing
a task among a group of people does not
automatically make that group a "team", it
makes a group of indiduals working
toward a (coincidentally common) goal.
Sorry I don't share the more common human
pack mentality, but, as they say, "team"
has no "I" in it - a cheesy platitude that
cuts both ways, and with which I wholeheartedly
agree (in its less common interpretation). I
work for pay. I code for my benefit,
not for the good of the group. Screw the
"team", I whore my skills to the highest
bidder, do my job damn well, and couldn't
care less about what the rest of the "team"
does with their time. If they stare at porn
all day, no skin off my back. When projects
come due, when code audits occur when review
time comes, the driftwood floats away, and
I'll still draw a salary.
I'd hate to have to be a co-worker of anyone
who hates being part of a team.
In my experience, the only people who like
"teams" come from the same group who would
cease to have gainful employment if not for
the more productive members of such teams.
And incidentally, I get along rather well with
coworkers. I suspect you have confused my
preference for "personal accountability" with
"antisocial". They do not mean the same thing.
I don't mind giving coworkers a hand, I enjoy
socializing with like-minds, and I don't even
mind asking others for a hand when I need
it. I just do not like having my
performance evaluated on the basis of whatever
schmucks management decides to stick me with
on a given project (or, to relate this back
to something a tad less offtopic, losing a
game because a given teammate couldn't catch
a pop-fly to center, couldn't kick a goal on
an empty field, or couldn't shoot a 6' high
hoop standing right next to it). I don't
consider that unreasonable, wanting evaluation
based on my own merits rather than the average
of mine and someone else's (and that applies to
those better than me, as well - They fully deserve
a better evaluation than me, and I would feel
terrible to drag someone "god-like"
down because I only count as "above average"
at something).
if you drink pop all day, all of the
sugar accumulates.
I agree with that one 100%. At my previous
workplace, we had free soda fountains for
the engineers, and I would literally consume
up to a gallon of Mountain Dew each day.
Switching to diet Dew, though I had to buy
it myself, cut literally 1500 calories per
day from my diet, and it didn't "hurt" (in
the sense of having to go without something)
at all.
As a fairly typical geek, I tend to dislike
most sports (particularly those involving
"teams" - stupid primate dominance rituals).
I also cannot stand going to the gym - You
have to deal with too many people unless you
go at obscene times of the day, bad smells,
paying attention to which muscle groups you
work, and at least one of my friends who go
almost always have some gym-related
injury they need to work around (Pulled neck,
crunched knee, hyperextended bicep, blah blah
blah). And, I personally consider going to
a gym just incredibly boring.
You might, however, find that you enjoy an
alternative form of exercise.
Personally, I enjoy hiking, and just getting
out at least once each weekend for a good
4-6 hour hike will both keep you toned and
keep the weight down.
Alternatively, swimming burns massive amounts
of calories, and you don't even need to sweat
while doing it.
As another nice alternative, though it does
tend to involve a small number of other people,
try taking up a martial art (a "real" one, not
cardio-kickboxing or one of the cheesy pseudo
martial arts designed just to give you an
aerobic workout). I formerly took Kempo (and
will again, when I find a good dojo in the
area to which I moved), and found it quite
enjoyable. You'll find yourself in the best
shape of your life, it won't bore you
nearly as much as going to the gym,
since it engages your mind as well as your
body, and as a side effect you'll gain the
ability to defend yourself if you ever
have a need to do so.
The real "secret", though, doesn't count as
a secret at all. Limit your caloric intake
and/or get more exercise. No other "fad"
will help you, they all just find ways to
hide the discomfort of denying our genetic
predisposition to eating as much as possible
in case of a famine. Find something you enjoy,
and do it. Try a lot of different activities,
you must like something. And find little
ways to burn more calories during the day
(walk/bike to work and/or lunch, if possible;
Always take the stairs rather than the
elevator; walk to a coworker's cubical rather
than calling or emailing someone 50 feet
away).
carefully put the damn things in my basket,
smiling for the camera, walk to another aisle,
and put them on another shelf.
I had the exact opposite idea...
Have a friend take them from the shelf,
discretely pass them to me somewhere in
the store out of sight of any security
cameras, then I check out with them yet
never actually picked them up off the shelf
(no shoplifting involved, I mean to pay
for them). This makes not one, but
two unmatched photos for the
rent-a-cops to have to deal with.
"And can you... Can you imagine 50 people a
day? I said 50 people a day?... They
may think it's a movement!
When the Boss steals, it's big-time, way
more than any of you make in a year at your
salaried job.
The big guys don't need to steal to
drain the company. The laws (and corporate
policies) allow them to do things the rest of
us would spend hard time in the federal pen
for.
As a trivial (though not unusual) example,
at my previous job, the CEO made a bad call
about handling a bug in a customer's software.
Relatively minor bug, but due to the nature
of the software, he and the company might
actually have had to endure criminal
proceedings if they handled his bad call
poorly.
So the solution? He left the company with
nearly a ten MILLION dollar parting bonus,
sort of vaguely admitted responsibility,
regulators considered the matter suitably
dealt with, and the problem went away.
Think about that... This guy broke the law,
so they gave him millions of dollars.
And some folks wonder why so many of us
outright despise corporate America.
As Eric Idle once said, after killing a
dozen or so tribesmen in Monty Python's
"The Meaning of Life", "Back home they'd
hang me, but here they gimme a fuckin
medal!".
The RIAA would have to buy themselves a
new law before they could do that.
Not true. This has come up a number of
times in other discussions. Consider - If
I buy the new Harry Potter book, and place
it in Times Square on top of a photocopier
with an inifinite supply of paper and ink,
have I committed a crime? No, the people
who come along and copy it commit the crime.
In a less extreme setting, you could call
this a "library".
Similarly, we can realistically question
whether the act of making a file visible
on a public network breaks any laws. For
example, while I do not use Kazaa or the
like, I have on numerous occasions placed
copyrighted files I would need while
away from home on my personal web site
(more reliable than a CD, and I can't
lose it somewhere, or scratch it, or
worry if someone has a flakey old CD drive
that can't read it). Technically, for
a few days, anyone could have downloaded
them, but I put them on-line for personal
use only. Did I break the law? Some
would say yes, but the reality of the
situation suggests that no law suffers
until someone other than me actually
downloads that material.
Interestingly enough, we have no legal
precedent to clarify this question, either.
All those the RIAA has SLAPP'ed settled
before going to court, thus not setting any
precedent for the rest of us to go by. I
would consider those who make shares visible
as "librarians". Owners of an archive which,
out of kindness and at their own expense (for
bandwidth) they share with the public. Only
those who copy such shared works and do not
delete them some reasonable time thereafter
break any actual "laws", much the same as with
the photocopier in Times Square.
The RIAA would have a better legal standing
by going after the downloaders rather than
the sharers. However, P2P networks have a
critical vulnerability in that too high of
a leech-to-sharer ratio renders them useless.
So they go after the sharers, hoping to scare
people, even though, if it ever went to trial,
they might actually lose.
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because
their theory is if they can scare people out
of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will
saturate the remaining uploaders so that the
file-sharing network will cease to be
useful.
And before that, they only went after companies,
on the theory that only companies had the deep
pockets to produce the software that make
file-sharing possible. If they could scare
companies away from creating file-sharing
apps, the problem would cease to exist
Unfortunately, like their first approach, their
second one will fail as well. And the RIAA
WILL start going after progressively
smaller fish. I'd say within a year we'll hear
about their first attack on a group of particuarly
heavy downloaders.
And, in the long term, don't feel too surprised
when "plausible deniability", at least in the
online world, turns into "plausible guilt". Run
something like Freenet, where they can't tell
exactly who requested a particular file, and
everyone along the chain of the request bears
equal "guilt" for the download.
10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3
The biggest factor that keeps me from using
Freenet comes from the bandwidth requirement.
I have a nice fat cablemodem connection, on a
non-saturated segment, so I get GREAT rates,
both up- and down-stream.
However, I officially have a 2GB/month cap
(fortunately my ISP has yet to enforce it,
since I use 5-6GB in a typical month).
As slow as it sounds, 10Kbps, continuously
used, would effectively consume slightly over
my monthly cap. That strikes me as a SERIOUS
problem. Realistically, I would need to set
it to 1kbps up and down to leave room for my
"normal" net use, and that just doesn't seem
either fair to other users or convenient for
me, IMO.
I don't have any direct numbers that can
detail just how many of these 291 million
Americans are users of p2p. Let's say it's
50%, then wouldn't the drop be in usage be
more like 6.5%? -/+ a few points? I'm sure
there is a/.er out there that can help us
out.
Okay, the "real" statistical problems here...
IF those people using file-sharing apps
form an essentially random cross-section of the
population, and if none of those people
had any way to engage in their normal filesharing
activity while on vacation, then you would
see the same percentage drop in filesharing as
people going away for the long weekend - though
only for the time they stayed away from home,
so we have effectively a factor of 3/7ths on
top of the raw number of vacationers.
(Quick summary of the above - under idealized
conditions, a 13% travel rate that week would
translate into a 5.6% drop in filesharing over
the course of that week).
I see it as likely that the
incidence of filesharers does NOT count
as a random selection from the general US
population. For the most obvious confounding
factor, we could fairly consider both "travel"
and "owns a decent computer with a broadband
connection" as luxuries heavily dependant on
income. This would cause the numbers as
presented to increase, in that if a higher
percentage of filesharers went on vacation
than nonfilesharers.
For another confounding factor, looking at
usage patterns over so short a period of
time (for measuring social change) as a
week carries very little weight. Large
short-term fluctuations can occur in almost
any measured variable. As an example,
last week I had pizza for five meals, about
three meals more than in a normal week. Can
we attribute that to the RIAA's threats, or
just a coincidence?
In order for the RIAA to validly claim
their threats "caused" the drop in filesharing,
they would need to somehow undo their threat
and watch levels return to normal. And repeat
that a number of times, with consistent results.
And even then, they could only call it "likely"
that their threats caused the changes.
Like most ACs, I doubt you'll ever come back
to read a response to your sad little snipe.
However, I will reply anyway, as I don't have
much to do today.
What would you suggest we might ask them that
couldn't, in some way, constitute legal
"advice"? Shall we limit our questions to "I
had a nice day yesterday. Did you?", or "Does
Ashcroft prefer Ham or Turkey?"?
I can only presume the request not to ask for
legal advice referred to SPECIFIC cases, such
as "I've downloaded 200 copies of Metallica's
newest album off Kazaa, and the RIAA sent
me a C&D - Can they get me for each download,
or do they all count as the same infringement?".
Interpreting their request otherwise makes the
offer to answer our questions totally meaningless,
since any topical question will, by nature,
involve legalities. And, while it would not
surprise me for a government agency to quite
deliberately make a hollow offer, we won't
accomplish much unless we assume they had
some level of good faith behind the
offer.
So, log in to your real account, you sad little
pseudonymic troll, find some mod points, and go
on an "offtopic" rating spree. Because anything
on-topic you will consider unacceptible.
They didn't have any trouble stepping
on MS's toes.
They made a lot of noise, ended up with a
pathetic set of penalties, and haven't
even bothered pursuing MS's substantial
noncompliance with what those
penalties.
I don't consider that to involve much
stepping on toes. They cost MS a few
million in lawyers, and not a whole lot
more.
If you RTFA, you'd know that this question
won't get answered because it constitutes
legal advice pertaining to a personal
situation, something they cannot do (legally
or ethically).
Though he could have phrased it better, no,
he did not ask for legal advice on a personal
situation. He asked the larger question (again,
phrased poorly in a manner that appears
personal) of "Do I have the right to download
music I already own in some format, specifically,
analog?".
However, I have little doubt the DoJ will not
want to touch that one with a 10-foot-C&D,
since the RIAA would say "no way in hell" but
US law says "probably". Mustn't step on the
toes of one's corporate masters, after all.
"Gormless Twat"? I like that one. I'll
have to remember it (You actually made
me need to look up "gormless", a credit
not many people can claim).
Anyway...
so if I were 'clueful', rather than
moving to the top of my screen, I'd much
rather...[snip]
No. You missed my point - That, while
such things may change, they ALMOST
NEVER do so under normal operation of a
machine in a manner requiring the ability to
rapidly switch profiles. "2nd Post!" responded
to me with a situation where it matters, but I
would have to consider him a VERY unusual user,
and not really indicative of a typical user (four
different user profiles just for himself? Hell,
I alias commands like "dir" and "del" on Unix
machines, and vice-versa on Windows machines,
because I so often temporarily forget which
system I sit at, nevermind whether I have my
"at home websurfing" or "at work looking
productive" or "somewhere else playing games"
profile active).
And therein lies the difference - I referred
not to the idea that no one might have
a use for such features, but that typical
users who might benefit from it don't need
it. A typical desktop sits in one place, with
the same net connection for months at a time.
A typical laptop moves between home and work,
sometimes getting used on the train/bus/whatever,
requiring really only two profiles (AC/wired
and battery/netless) and no need to rapidly
switch between them.
Yes, actual performance does not matter. That is one of Apple's main marketing messages when marketing machines with sluggish processors in them to try and fool buyers into thinking it does not matter at all.
Careful, you'll piss off the karma-sucking Apple
zealots, a scary and VERY defensive group.
Anyway, right at the moment, it looks like Apple
does actually have the fastest desktop-class
machine on the market (at 5x the cost of an
Athlon pulling 90% of that performance, of
course). However, in typical Apple style,
they'll manage a few gens of gradual G5
speed improvements, then fall behind the PC
world for another five years. All the while
switching from their current "we have faster
CPUs" gloat back to the more traditional
Apple-apologist line of "well, they ''feel''
faster than PCs and look nicer"
But no, don't piss off the Apple fans, for
they have mod points and always use them to
vote down realists (and I say "realists"
rather than "PC zealots" because many
Windows users would love to run
OS-X instead, if doing so didn't result in
a machine that costs more, has worse performance
(though technically not right at the moment,
at least for the high-end Macs), and
essentially no real upgrade path beyond
"buy a new one").
Location Manager allows a single user to
change multiple settings on a computer with
a single selection: [... snipped]
All of the things you mention sound vaguely
useful, for someone clueless about the actual
workings of their machine.
However...
Every one of them involves a HARDWARE
change. Not a "user" change. So what,
exactly, does the preexistance of their
"location manager" have to do with fast
user switching?
"at work. No, quick, at home! Okay, you
have a network... Hah, gotcha, just kidding,
start dialing... Oops, quick, power failure,
hibernate... Nope, back on, at work with a
network again". Yeah, whatever. Unless you
enjoy torturing an inanimate object, this
seems of dubious value.
Not that user-switching really matters under
either Windows or OS-X... Under windows,
trying to run as non-admin takes more skill
than safely running as an admin/root, and
under OS-X, 90% of the "useful" progs run
setuid root anyway, so again, you basically
have every user a superuser. Why switch between
equally useless (or open to abuse, depending on
your perspective) accounts?
McDonalds had the temperatures set high
because their coffee tasted like crap.
Not true - Prior to this suit, McDonalds
had what many considered the best coffee
you could get short of making it yourself
or going to a "specialty" coffee shop such
as Starbucks.
And, more relevantly, they had this reputation
precisely because they served it so hot -
Believe it or not, the "experts" on coffee
brewing suggest using water at 202-205F.
McDonalds only used 180-195F.
And, even ignoring the negligence issue
on the part of McDonalds, none of these
"they shouldn't have had it so hot" arguments
do a damn thing to lessen the basic problem
most people have with this case - It doesn't
take a genius to figure out that very hot
water can cause burns. Only a moron would
place such hot liquids near their crotch
anytime, nevermind in a vehicle
where any number of events beyond one's
control can cause that beverage to spill.
This doesn't count as quite so laughable a
claim as many have suggested.
Consider the following three situations:
1) You buy a new CD. You go to listen to it
in your car, only to discover that it won't
play, since most audio CD players actually
use CD-ROM drives that have difficulty (by
design of the CD, not the player) reading
copy-protected (ie, "broken") audio CDs.
Solution? Download the album, of which you
legally own a copy, and burn it to a
non-broken CD.
2) You buy a new CD. Since you listen to 99%
of your music while sitting at your computer,
you just keep it all as Ogg files on your HDD.
This shiny new 12cm hunk of plastic won't
play on your PC, nor can you rip it to ogg.
So, you download off the net, for personal
use only, an already-ripped-and-encoded version
of the album you have a legal right to listen
to.
3) You purchased a copy-protected CD a year ago,
and while you usually make backups of all your
CDs, for obvious reasons you could not do so in
this case. Your dog eats that CD. Not wanting
(or legally needing) to purchase the same CD
again, you download a copy of the CD off the
net.
All COMPLETELY LEGAL reasons to
"pirate" music off a service such as Kazaa.
And, they all reflect the exact argument
made in this case - That, if not for the
annoying copy protection that renders a nice
new CD nothing more than a round hunk of plastic
and foil so far as your PC cares, such people
would not have needed to download that music
in the first place.
Does this describe the most common reasons
to "pirate" music? That depends. A
hit-of-the-week by the latest boy-or-girl
pop group, probably not. For anything else,
I don't consider one of the above (or some
other similar and legal scenario) as all
that unlikely.
And it has quite an effect showing terrorists
how their connection can be eavesdropped.
Agreed... Though probably not the desired
effect.
"What? Those bastards can disable our nice
secure channel any time they want? Well then,
time to buy a few third-party end-to-end
crypto devices that not only can't they disable
at whim, but can't tap when it hits a landline
either".
Yeah. Great idea.
When the hell will people learn that the "real"
threats to our safety (not counting "stupid"
criminals who barely escape a Darwin nomination)
have enough of a clue not to trust any form of
privacy they don't have direct control over?
Unless you end up making up an acronym that
actually exists but YOU haven't heard of...
...A more likely event than you might think.
Pick a random-but-pronouncable-in-English three
or four letter acronym. Now search Google for
it. Repeat. Just doing this myself, I got hits
for something that really did already exist eight
times out of ten.
So, when an interviewer asks such a question,
you can make something up on the spot, and
look like you know something they don't.
However, pricks like the parent's poster
demonstrate that interviewers don't actually
care about hiring the applicant most qualified
to do the job advertised. They care about
playing stupid little games and making
people squirm, and hire the least threatening
applicant that can probably manage to
get the job done, and has a good personality
(or breasts, which trump even personality
and brown-nosing combined).
Why read more when arrogance is
always unjustified?
What an arrogant statement.;-)
Sorry, I don't mean that as sharply as it
sounds. But your insistance that your
belief holds true while mine does not...
Well, I'd like to know how you consider
that not a form of arrogance in
itself.
However, I do have a better point to make
than a meaningless "gotcha"...
What you term "the masses" (in just a
shopworn elitist way of setting yourself
apart) is really just a bunch of people
just like you.
Truly, I used to believe that myself.
I would say to myself, whenever something
seemed very "wrong" about another person's
(or rather, most people's) behavior,
that they thought more-or-less the same
way that I do and I only needed to find
the motivation for their behavior to
make sense.
But at some point, I came to the conclusion
that no, "they" do not think like I do.
They simply do not think, period. Most
people simple lack any curiosity about their
world, beyond what gets them fed, sheltered,
and laid. Not that I mean that to apply to
everyone - I know quite a few people who appear
to actually "think", and tend to associate with
such people preferentially. But the majority?
No. Not by a long shot.
Most people have no sense of wonder at
the world (past childhood, when I believe
some people could still make it to
"conscious being" in later life if we didn't
have such an "effective" public school system).
They don't look at the sky and wonder why it
appears blue. They don't plug something in
and wonder why it takes three prongs, when
two (or one, actually, assuming an object
not completely insulated from its surroundings)
would suffice. They don't wonder what a "byte"
means in relation to "that new way to distract
myself I downloaded off Kazaa". They don't
wonder how a shiny 12cm disc translates into
the sensory experience of Beethoven's 5th (or
even how Beethoven's 5th translates into a
sensory experience at all). They don't
wonder why ethanol makes you drunk but the
very very similar methanol molecule kills
you. They don't wonder why chenille yarn
feels so soft and why lens paper feels rough.
They don't wonder why Advil makes aches and
pains go away. They don't wonder. Period.
And THAT I assert as my justification
for calling them mindless. Not that they
don't contain quite a lot of information,
but rather, they don't want to contain
any information beyond that necessary to
keep breathing. Anything more than that
people resent and attack out of fear. No one
thanks the geek who builds a solar still to
allow a dozen people trapped on a desert island
to survive - They consider him a threat, since
he knows how to keep them alive and they do
not.
Rather than "mindless", I suggest "not quite
conscious". The idea that people sleepwalk
through their lives. Content to live to
work to eat to live to work and so on until
death.
And I did believe otherwise, once upon a
time. You can only disprove a hypothesis
so many times, though, before you need to
declare it inductively false. Not arrogance,
but a rational progression of ideas.
I stopped reading your rant when I got to
"mindless masses", since that epitomizes the
kind of unjustified arrogance that motivated
my original post
I like your use of the word "unjustified".
Why, you may ask?
Because it refers to EXACTLY what you refused
to read. You stopped before reading my
JUSTIFICATION for that "arrogance" Thus,
you can maintain your personal delusion that
such a stance has no justification.
Cute.
We can't just hide from that which we don't
like. Even if you disagree with me, knowing
my reasons for my attitude can only help
you. "Know thy enemy..." and all.
For example, I don't like "Corporate America",
but you can bet the farm that I don't stick
my head in the sand and pretend that strange
pain in my netherregion doesn't exist.
Instead, I study their methods and motivations,
and do my damnedest to use their own
blind passions against them.
Knowledge does equal power. Learn
or remain powerless, but either way, others
will learn, and quite rightly will
gain power over those who choose not to.
I've read it. I rather like Vonnegut, and
have read most of his novels (though only a
handful of his short stories).
However...
Despite his anti-elitism and apparent fear
of uncontrolled technology, we do live
in a world controlled largely by machines,
like it or not. People can choose to ignore
that if it makes them feel better, but that
doesn't eliminate the need to understand those
machines if they want to understand the world
around them.
With respect, this is more than just a very
bad idea. This is why real people think techs
and geeks are arrogant dweebs who live on
another planet.
And at the same time, the reason we geeks
consider the masses as unbelievably stupid
sheep.
These words don't have an arbitrary basis
(beyond the arguement that all words
reflect a set of arbitrary choices several
thousand years ago)... Basic engineering
terms with SI units to quantify them. Really,
only "byte" counts as a truly "unique" word
people need to understand. Everything else
simply describes, in terms existing quite
happily outside computer tech, physical aspects
of the component. (Okay, "mouse" seems like
a new word (or use thereof), but people don't
have much trouble with that one).
While techies can certainly make an effort to
explain their use of words that get a
blank stare, the mindless masses still deserve
much of the scorn we heap upon them. For
example, memory vs HDD space - Really NOT a
tough distinction, at least at a high-level.
One stays around after you shut off the machine.
Simple as that. Yet people can't remember even
that much. Even worse, now that we
tend to measure both in gigabytes (oooh, those
nasty SI units Americans in particular seem
to hate, as I learned many years ago in a
college intro-bio class). Of course, confusing
them on the basis of using the same units to
measure them strikes me as equally sensible to
confusing my penis and my monitor because I
could measure both in inches.
Do people who buy and drive cars need to
learn that vocabulary in order to use an
automobile?
Yes. Try to drive a car without knowing
what an "accelerator", "brake", or possibly
a "clutch" does? Without knowing how many
"gallons" or "liters" of fuel the car holds,
and how far I can drive on that? Without
knowing what a "defroster" does and the
farly standard symbol that will appear on
the button for it? Same issue.
If people want to use computers, they need to
learn the basic parts and the units of measure
for those parts.
Ditto for tech stuff. People need to know "How
many movies will fit on this drive?", not listen
impatiently as someone explains what gigabyte
means
Yes, people want answers phrased like that,
but simply can't have them without a better
understanding of the question. What codec?
what bitrate? How long of a movie? Any "quick"
answer makes a lot of possibly unsafe assumptions.
Similar to your automobile analogy, someone might
"know" that 10 gallons of fuel in a typical
car should take them (at least) 200 miles over
the deathly-hot desert to the next town - Oops,
forgot to mention they drive an '82 Dodge Dart,
getting 12 miles to the gallon. "They gonna die"
for wanting a "simple" answer without any
contextual understanding.
These matters are not important to the
rest of the world.
No excuse exists for willful ignorance. If a
term confuses me, I look it up. If
I need to really grasp it, for example
to properly use something I spend several
hours each day using, I research related
conceptual territory until I grasp the
ideas behind the word. I don't only do this
for computer terms, but for medical terms,
automotive terms, knitting terms, audio terms,
whatever. "Jargon" only provides an excuse
for not knowing a word the first time
someone hears it.
THAT makes me a geek, and explains why we
deride the sheeple so venemously - Because most
people will not even look up a word they don't
know, prefering to stay ignorant. Unforgiveable,
and those of us who do take the initiative
to better ourselves most certainly should
not accomodate those too lazy to do
likewise. They want to stay ignorant? Fine,
they can serve my fries (until we completely
automate the fast-food industry) and I'll
spare them the jargon.
State's rights (which should be more
important) aren't shit. Remember that.
You make a good point, but need to also
consider what it takes on a local level
for the feds to enforce the patriot
act.
By forcing noncompliance, local areas can
remove most of the teeth of the Patriot act.
Businesses and libraries deliberately getting
rid of client information after 24 hours removes
most of the privacy-stripping portions of the
act. Local police refusing to cooperate with
the feds on Patriot-act related investigations
leaves the feds with no more power than they
had before. Entire states deliberately
hindering federal investigations
can, in many situations, leave the FBI et al
in a worse position than before the
Patriot act (when local police would often
help as much as possible, even if they didn't
need to).
So yes, this seemingly "only symbolic" protesting
by states, cities, and private businesses
does have the potential to make the
Patriot act all but meaningless.
What about California's (and others)
medical pot legislations?
If you followed it, you'll notice that Ed
Rosenthal received a whopping one-day sentence,
of time served. Even the Federal courts have
started realizing that they can't sustain a
war against their own member states.
Yup. But a civil suit does not result in
a "conviction", merely a transfer of money
(and sometimes an order to stop doing something,
kinda irrelevant at this point for this
exploit).
You should never challenge a powerful
company like this
You left out the word "directly" at the
end. Unfortunately, the prize of $100k
has clouded this team's judgement. If
not for that, the still would have worked
toward the same goal, reached it, and could
have released their underflow bug discovery
in complete anonymity.
Glory has its place. Money has its place.
Putting corporate America in ITS
place does not safely involve obtaining
either of them.
Personally, I would have taken a
road trip a few hundred miles away (via
public transportation paid for in cash),
visited a public library (one that
doesn't check IDs to use a
computer, ie, most of them), and posted
the exploit to as many sites as possible
over the course of an hour. Then go back
home and keep my mouth shut. Presto, all
the fun and none of the liability, and
Microsoft could go pound sand for all they
could do to me.
People need to decide their objective...
Making the world better, or becoming an
alterna-celebrity. The Open Source movement
pretends toward the first, yet somehow
produces quite a few of the latter.
Well, I'd say that the browsers actually
adhering to standards instead of doing
whatever they feel like seems like an
innovation...
Coding to the HTML spec does not mean the
same thing as innovation in navigation.
As a simple example, changing the history
list to a graphical map of recent sites
visited would not break compatibility with
anything, yet some would consider it an
innovation.
Personally, I think nothing big has appeared
in web navigation in a few years for one simple
reason - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Put simply, barring some major change
in how we browse the web, the current model
represents the "best" of the minor variations
on the general theme of "forward, backward,
history/bookmark".
Okay, it takes some work to remember "that
great site I saw a few days ago that I didn't
think to bookmark at the time", but I see no
trivial modification of history/bookmarks
would solve that (I know that some people
like hierarchical histories better, but
they have their own set of shortcomings,
and I'd consider it more of a lateral
change than an "improvement").
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you have some real anti-social tendencies more than anything else
;-)
Like I said, "As a fairly typical geek...". Does the phrase "extroverted geek" sound like anything but an oxymoron in most people's opinion?
Seriously, though, team sports have one major drawback as a form of exercise for geeks - they require a dozen or so people to all manage to schedule the same period of time free, at least once or twice a week. Personally, I have a fairly small group of close friends (hey, I admit it, I tend toward introversion, though not actually antisocial), and have difficulty getting more than two or three to arrange for simultaneous free time even with a month's notice, nevermind once a week.
Now, a one-on-one or two-on-two type game, I don't so much mind, and doesn't take too much work to schedule. However, I don't think I'd really consider that a "team" sport.
It sounds like you have some real anti-social tendencies more than anything else
Coding does not occur as a "team" effort. Each person codes to some portion of a spec, and if they all do it well, those distinct parts work together as a whole (and if everyone doesn't do their share, it doesn't take much reading of code to figure out who failed to pull their weight). Subdividing a task among a group of people does not automatically make that group a "team", it makes a group of indiduals working toward a (coincidentally common) goal.
Sorry I don't share the more common human pack mentality, but, as they say, "team" has no "I" in it - a cheesy platitude that cuts both ways, and with which I wholeheartedly agree (in its less common interpretation). I work for pay. I code for my benefit, not for the good of the group. Screw the "team", I whore my skills to the highest bidder, do my job damn well, and couldn't care less about what the rest of the "team" does with their time. If they stare at porn all day, no skin off my back. When projects come due, when code audits occur when review time comes, the driftwood floats away, and I'll still draw a salary.
I'd hate to have to be a co-worker of anyone who hates being part of a team.
In my experience, the only people who like "teams" come from the same group who would cease to have gainful employment if not for the more productive members of such teams.
And incidentally, I get along rather well with coworkers. I suspect you have confused my preference for "personal accountability" with "antisocial". They do not mean the same thing. I don't mind giving coworkers a hand, I enjoy socializing with like-minds, and I don't even mind asking others for a hand when I need it. I just do not like having my performance evaluated on the basis of whatever schmucks management decides to stick me with on a given project (or, to relate this back to something a tad less offtopic, losing a game because a given teammate couldn't catch a pop-fly to center, couldn't kick a goal on an empty field, or couldn't shoot a 6' high hoop standing right next to it). I don't consider that unreasonable, wanting evaluation based on my own merits rather than the average of mine and someone else's (and that applies to those better than me, as well - They fully deserve a better evaluation than me, and I would feel terrible to drag someone "god-like" down because I only count as "above average" at something).
if you drink pop all day, all of the sugar accumulates.
I agree with that one 100%. At my previous workplace, we had free soda fountains for the engineers, and I would literally consume up to a gallon of Mountain Dew each day. Switching to diet Dew, though I had to buy it myself, cut literally 1500 calories per day from my diet, and it didn't "hurt" (in the sense of having to go without something) at all.
As a fairly typical geek, I tend to dislike most sports (particularly those involving "teams" - stupid primate dominance rituals). I also cannot stand going to the gym - You have to deal with too many people unless you go at obscene times of the day, bad smells, paying attention to which muscle groups you work, and at least one of my friends who go almost always have some gym-related injury they need to work around (Pulled neck, crunched knee, hyperextended bicep, blah blah blah). And, I personally consider going to a gym just incredibly boring.
You might, however, find that you enjoy an alternative form of exercise.
Personally, I enjoy hiking, and just getting out at least once each weekend for a good 4-6 hour hike will both keep you toned and keep the weight down.
Alternatively, swimming burns massive amounts of calories, and you don't even need to sweat while doing it.
As another nice alternative, though it does tend to involve a small number of other people, try taking up a martial art (a "real" one, not cardio-kickboxing or one of the cheesy pseudo martial arts designed just to give you an aerobic workout). I formerly took Kempo (and will again, when I find a good dojo in the area to which I moved), and found it quite enjoyable. You'll find yourself in the best shape of your life, it won't bore you nearly as much as going to the gym, since it engages your mind as well as your body, and as a side effect you'll gain the ability to defend yourself if you ever have a need to do so.
The real "secret", though, doesn't count as a secret at all. Limit your caloric intake and/or get more exercise. No other "fad" will help you, they all just find ways to hide the discomfort of denying our genetic predisposition to eating as much as possible in case of a famine. Find something you enjoy, and do it. Try a lot of different activities, you must like something. And find little ways to burn more calories during the day (walk/bike to work and/or lunch, if possible; Always take the stairs rather than the elevator; walk to a coworker's cubical rather than calling or emailing someone 50 feet away).
carefully put the damn things in my basket, smiling for the camera, walk to another aisle, and put them on another shelf.
... They
may think it's a movement!
I had the exact opposite idea...
Have a friend take them from the shelf, discretely pass them to me somewhere in the store out of sight of any security cameras, then I check out with them yet never actually picked them up off the shelf (no shoplifting involved, I mean to pay for them). This makes not one, but two unmatched photos for the rent-a-cops to have to deal with.
"And can you... Can you imagine 50 people a day? I said 50 people a day?
When the Boss steals, it's big-time, way more than any of you make in a year at your salaried job.
The big guys don't need to steal to drain the company. The laws (and corporate policies) allow them to do things the rest of us would spend hard time in the federal pen for.
As a trivial (though not unusual) example, at my previous job, the CEO made a bad call about handling a bug in a customer's software. Relatively minor bug, but due to the nature of the software, he and the company might actually have had to endure criminal proceedings if they handled his bad call poorly.
So the solution? He left the company with nearly a ten MILLION dollar parting bonus, sort of vaguely admitted responsibility, regulators considered the matter suitably dealt with, and the problem went away.
Think about that... This guy broke the law, so they gave him millions of dollars.
And some folks wonder why so many of us outright despise corporate America.
As Eric Idle once said, after killing a dozen or so tribesmen in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", "Back home they'd hang me, but here they gimme a fuckin medal!".
The RIAA would have to buy themselves a new law before they could do that.
Not true. This has come up a number of times in other discussions. Consider - If I buy the new Harry Potter book, and place it in Times Square on top of a photocopier with an inifinite supply of paper and ink, have I committed a crime? No, the people who come along and copy it commit the crime. In a less extreme setting, you could call this a "library".
Similarly, we can realistically question whether the act of making a file visible on a public network breaks any laws. For example, while I do not use Kazaa or the like, I have on numerous occasions placed copyrighted files I would need while away from home on my personal web site (more reliable than a CD, and I can't lose it somewhere, or scratch it, or worry if someone has a flakey old CD drive that can't read it). Technically, for a few days, anyone could have downloaded them, but I put them on-line for personal use only. Did I break the law? Some would say yes, but the reality of the situation suggests that no law suffers until someone other than me actually downloads that material.
Interestingly enough, we have no legal precedent to clarify this question, either. All those the RIAA has SLAPP'ed settled before going to court, thus not setting any precedent for the rest of us to go by. I would consider those who make shares visible as "librarians". Owners of an archive which, out of kindness and at their own expense (for bandwidth) they share with the public. Only those who copy such shared works and do not delete them some reasonable time thereafter break any actual "laws", much the same as with the photocopier in Times Square.
The RIAA would have a better legal standing by going after the downloaders rather than the sharers. However, P2P networks have a critical vulnerability in that too high of a leech-to-sharer ratio renders them useless. So they go after the sharers, hoping to scare people, even though, if it ever went to trial, they might actually lose.
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because their theory is if they can scare people out of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will saturate the remaining uploaders so that the file-sharing network will cease to be useful.
And before that, they only went after companies, on the theory that only companies had the deep pockets to produce the software that make file-sharing possible. If they could scare companies away from creating file-sharing apps, the problem would cease to exist
Unfortunately, like their first approach, their second one will fail as well. And the RIAA WILL start going after progressively smaller fish. I'd say within a year we'll hear about their first attack on a group of particuarly heavy downloaders.
And, in the long term, don't feel too surprised when "plausible deniability", at least in the online world, turns into "plausible guilt". Run something like Freenet, where they can't tell exactly who requested a particular file, and everyone along the chain of the request bears equal "guilt" for the download.
10/5 on DSL adds less than 1ms to my ping on ut2k3
The biggest factor that keeps me from using Freenet comes from the bandwidth requirement. I have a nice fat cablemodem connection, on a non-saturated segment, so I get GREAT rates, both up- and down-stream.
However, I officially have a 2GB/month cap (fortunately my ISP has yet to enforce it, since I use 5-6GB in a typical month). As slow as it sounds, 10Kbps, continuously used, would effectively consume slightly over my monthly cap. That strikes me as a SERIOUS problem. Realistically, I would need to set it to 1kbps up and down to leave room for my "normal" net use, and that just doesn't seem either fair to other users or convenient for me, IMO.
I don't have any direct numbers that can detail just how many of these 291 million Americans are users of p2p. Let's say it's 50%, then wouldn't the drop be in usage be more like 6.5%? -/+ a few points? I'm sure there is a /.er out there that can help us
out.
Okay, the "real" statistical problems here...
IF those people using file-sharing apps form an essentially random cross-section of the population, and if none of those people had any way to engage in their normal filesharing activity while on vacation, then you would see the same percentage drop in filesharing as people going away for the long weekend - though only for the time they stayed away from home, so we have effectively a factor of 3/7ths on top of the raw number of vacationers.
(Quick summary of the above - under idealized conditions, a 13% travel rate that week would translate into a 5.6% drop in filesharing over the course of that week).
I see it as likely that the incidence of filesharers does NOT count as a random selection from the general US population. For the most obvious confounding factor, we could fairly consider both "travel" and "owns a decent computer with a broadband connection" as luxuries heavily dependant on income. This would cause the numbers as presented to increase, in that if a higher percentage of filesharers went on vacation than nonfilesharers.
For another confounding factor, looking at usage patterns over so short a period of time (for measuring social change) as a week carries very little weight. Large short-term fluctuations can occur in almost any measured variable. As an example, last week I had pizza for five meals, about three meals more than in a normal week. Can we attribute that to the RIAA's threats, or just a coincidence?
In order for the RIAA to validly claim their threats "caused" the drop in filesharing, they would need to somehow undo their threat and watch levels return to normal. And repeat that a number of times, with consistent results. And even then, they could only call it "likely" that their threats caused the changes.
That's still asking for legal advice, moron.
Like most ACs, I doubt you'll ever come back to read a response to your sad little snipe. However, I will reply anyway, as I don't have much to do today.
What would you suggest we might ask them that couldn't, in some way, constitute legal "advice"? Shall we limit our questions to "I had a nice day yesterday. Did you?", or "Does Ashcroft prefer Ham or Turkey?"?
I can only presume the request not to ask for legal advice referred to SPECIFIC cases, such as "I've downloaded 200 copies of Metallica's newest album off Kazaa, and the RIAA sent me a C&D - Can they get me for each download, or do they all count as the same infringement?". Interpreting their request otherwise makes the offer to answer our questions totally meaningless, since any topical question will, by nature, involve legalities. And, while it would not surprise me for a government agency to quite deliberately make a hollow offer, we won't accomplish much unless we assume they had some level of good faith behind the offer.
So, log in to your real account, you sad little pseudonymic troll, find some mod points, and go on an "offtopic" rating spree. Because anything on-topic you will consider unacceptible.
They didn't have any trouble stepping on MS's toes.
They made a lot of noise, ended up with a pathetic set of penalties, and haven't even bothered pursuing MS's substantial noncompliance with what those penalties.
I don't consider that to involve much stepping on toes. They cost MS a few million in lawyers, and not a whole lot more.
If you RTFA, you'd know that this question won't get answered because it constitutes legal advice pertaining to a personal situation, something they cannot do (legally or ethically).
Though he could have phrased it better, no, he did not ask for legal advice on a personal situation. He asked the larger question (again, phrased poorly in a manner that appears personal) of "Do I have the right to download music I already own in some format, specifically, analog?".
However, I have little doubt the DoJ will not want to touch that one with a 10-foot-C&D, since the RIAA would say "no way in hell" but US law says "probably". Mustn't step on the toes of one's corporate masters, after all.
"Gormless Twat"? I like that one. I'll have to remember it (You actually made me need to look up "gormless", a credit not many people can claim).
Anyway...
so if I were 'clueful', rather than moving to the top of my screen, I'd much rather...[snip]
No. You missed my point - That, while such things may change, they ALMOST NEVER do so under normal operation of a machine in a manner requiring the ability to rapidly switch profiles. "2nd Post!" responded to me with a situation where it matters, but I would have to consider him a VERY unusual user, and not really indicative of a typical user (four different user profiles just for himself? Hell, I alias commands like "dir" and "del" on Unix machines, and vice-versa on Windows machines, because I so often temporarily forget which system I sit at, nevermind whether I have my "at home websurfing" or "at work looking productive" or "somewhere else playing games" profile active).
And therein lies the difference - I referred not to the idea that no one might have a use for such features, but that typical users who might benefit from it don't need it. A typical desktop sits in one place, with the same net connection for months at a time. A typical laptop moves between home and work, sometimes getting used on the train/bus/whatever, requiring really only two profiles (AC/wired and battery/netless) and no need to rapidly switch between them.
Yes, actual performance does not matter. That is one of Apple's main marketing messages when marketing machines with sluggish processors in them to try and fool buyers into thinking it does not matter at all.
Careful, you'll piss off the karma-sucking Apple zealots, a scary and VERY defensive group.
Anyway, right at the moment, it looks like Apple does actually have the fastest desktop-class machine on the market (at 5x the cost of an Athlon pulling 90% of that performance, of course). However, in typical Apple style, they'll manage a few gens of gradual G5 speed improvements, then fall behind the PC world for another five years. All the while switching from their current "we have faster CPUs" gloat back to the more traditional Apple-apologist line of "well, they ''feel'' faster than PCs and look nicer"
But no, don't piss off the Apple fans, for they have mod points and always use them to vote down realists (and I say "realists" rather than "PC zealots" because many Windows users would love to run OS-X instead, if doing so didn't result in a machine that costs more, has worse performance (though technically not right at the moment, at least for the high-end Macs), and essentially no real upgrade path beyond "buy a new one").
Location Manager allows a single user to change multiple settings on a computer with a single selection: [... snipped]
All of the things you mention sound vaguely useful, for someone clueless about the actual workings of their machine.
However...
Every one of them involves a HARDWARE change. Not a "user" change. So what, exactly, does the preexistance of their "location manager" have to do with fast user switching?
"at work. No, quick, at home! Okay, you have a network... Hah, gotcha, just kidding, start dialing... Oops, quick, power failure, hibernate... Nope, back on, at work with a network again". Yeah, whatever. Unless you enjoy torturing an inanimate object, this seems of dubious value.
Not that user-switching really matters under either Windows or OS-X... Under windows, trying to run as non-admin takes more skill than safely running as an admin/root, and under OS-X, 90% of the "useful" progs run setuid root anyway, so again, you basically have every user a superuser. Why switch between equally useless (or open to abuse, depending on your perspective) accounts?
McDonalds had the temperatures set high because their coffee tasted like crap.
Not true - Prior to this suit, McDonalds had what many considered the best coffee you could get short of making it yourself or going to a "specialty" coffee shop such as Starbucks.
And, more relevantly, they had this reputation precisely because they served it so hot - Believe it or not, the "experts" on coffee brewing suggest using water at 202-205F. McDonalds only used 180-195F.
And, even ignoring the negligence issue on the part of McDonalds, none of these "they shouldn't have had it so hot" arguments do a damn thing to lessen the basic problem most people have with this case - It doesn't take a genius to figure out that very hot water can cause burns. Only a moron would place such hot liquids near their crotch anytime, nevermind in a vehicle where any number of events beyond one's control can cause that beverage to spill.
This doesn't count as quite so laughable a claim as many have suggested.
Consider the following three situations:
1) You buy a new CD. You go to listen to it in your car, only to discover that it won't play, since most audio CD players actually use CD-ROM drives that have difficulty (by design of the CD, not the player) reading copy-protected (ie, "broken") audio CDs. Solution? Download the album, of which you legally own a copy, and burn it to a non-broken CD.
2) You buy a new CD. Since you listen to 99% of your music while sitting at your computer, you just keep it all as Ogg files on your HDD. This shiny new 12cm hunk of plastic won't play on your PC, nor can you rip it to ogg. So, you download off the net, for personal use only, an already-ripped-and-encoded version of the album you have a legal right to listen to.
3) You purchased a copy-protected CD a year ago, and while you usually make backups of all your CDs, for obvious reasons you could not do so in this case. Your dog eats that CD. Not wanting (or legally needing) to purchase the same CD again, you download a copy of the CD off the net.
All COMPLETELY LEGAL reasons to "pirate" music off a service such as Kazaa. And, they all reflect the exact argument made in this case - That, if not for the annoying copy protection that renders a nice new CD nothing more than a round hunk of plastic and foil so far as your PC cares, such people would not have needed to download that music in the first place.
Does this describe the most common reasons to "pirate" music? That depends. A hit-of-the-week by the latest boy-or-girl pop group, probably not. For anything else, I don't consider one of the above (or some other similar and legal scenario) as all that unlikely.
And it has quite an effect showing terrorists how their connection can be eavesdropped.
Agreed... Though probably not the desired effect.
"What? Those bastards can disable our nice secure channel any time they want? Well then, time to buy a few third-party end-to-end crypto devices that not only can't they disable at whim, but can't tap when it hits a landline either".
Yeah. Great idea.
When the hell will people learn that the "real" threats to our safety (not counting "stupid" criminals who barely escape a Darwin nomination) have enough of a clue not to trust any form of privacy they don't have direct control over?
Unless you end up making up an acronym that actually exists but YOU haven't heard of...
...A more likely event than you might think.
Pick a random-but-pronouncable-in-English three or four letter acronym. Now search Google for it. Repeat. Just doing this myself, I got hits for something that really did already exist eight times out of ten.
So, when an interviewer asks such a question, you can make something up on the spot, and look like you know something they don't.
However, pricks like the parent's poster demonstrate that interviewers don't actually care about hiring the applicant most qualified to do the job advertised. They care about playing stupid little games and making people squirm, and hire the least threatening applicant that can probably manage to get the job done, and has a good personality (or breasts, which trump even personality and brown-nosing combined).
Why read more when arrogance is always unjustified?
;-)
What an arrogant statement.
Sorry, I don't mean that as sharply as it sounds. But your insistance that your belief holds true while mine does not... Well, I'd like to know how you consider that not a form of arrogance in itself.
However, I do have a better point to make than a meaningless "gotcha"...
What you term "the masses" (in just a shopworn elitist way of setting yourself apart) is really just a bunch of people just like you.
Truly, I used to believe that myself. I would say to myself, whenever something seemed very "wrong" about another person's (or rather, most people's) behavior, that they thought more-or-less the same way that I do and I only needed to find the motivation for their behavior to make sense.
But at some point, I came to the conclusion that no, "they" do not think like I do. They simply do not think, period. Most people simple lack any curiosity about their world, beyond what gets them fed, sheltered, and laid. Not that I mean that to apply to everyone - I know quite a few people who appear to actually "think", and tend to associate with such people preferentially. But the majority? No. Not by a long shot.
Most people have no sense of wonder at the world (past childhood, when I believe some people could still make it to "conscious being" in later life if we didn't have such an "effective" public school system). They don't look at the sky and wonder why it appears blue. They don't plug something in and wonder why it takes three prongs, when two (or one, actually, assuming an object not completely insulated from its surroundings) would suffice. They don't wonder what a "byte" means in relation to "that new way to distract myself I downloaded off Kazaa". They don't wonder how a shiny 12cm disc translates into the sensory experience of Beethoven's 5th (or even how Beethoven's 5th translates into a sensory experience at all). They don't wonder why ethanol makes you drunk but the very very similar methanol molecule kills you. They don't wonder why chenille yarn feels so soft and why lens paper feels rough. They don't wonder why Advil makes aches and pains go away. They don't wonder. Period.
And THAT I assert as my justification for calling them mindless. Not that they don't contain quite a lot of information, but rather, they don't want to contain any information beyond that necessary to keep breathing. Anything more than that people resent and attack out of fear. No one thanks the geek who builds a solar still to allow a dozen people trapped on a desert island to survive - They consider him a threat, since he knows how to keep them alive and they do not.
Rather than "mindless", I suggest "not quite conscious". The idea that people sleepwalk through their lives. Content to live to work to eat to live to work and so on until death.
And I did believe otherwise, once upon a time. You can only disprove a hypothesis so many times, though, before you need to declare it inductively false. Not arrogance, but a rational progression of ideas.
I stopped reading your rant when I got to "mindless masses", since that epitomizes the kind of unjustified arrogance that motivated my original post
I like your use of the word "unjustified".
Why, you may ask?
Because it refers to EXACTLY what you refused to read. You stopped before reading my JUSTIFICATION for that "arrogance" Thus, you can maintain your personal delusion that such a stance has no justification.
Cute.
We can't just hide from that which we don't like. Even if you disagree with me, knowing my reasons for my attitude can only help you. "Know thy enemy..." and all. For example, I don't like "Corporate America", but you can bet the farm that I don't stick my head in the sand and pretend that strange pain in my netherregion doesn't exist. Instead, I study their methods and motivations, and do my damnedest to use their own blind passions against them.
Knowledge does equal power. Learn or remain powerless, but either way, others will learn, and quite rightly will gain power over those who choose not to.
Please read player piano.
I've read it. I rather like Vonnegut, and have read most of his novels (though only a handful of his short stories).
However...
Despite his anti-elitism and apparent fear of uncontrolled technology, we do live in a world controlled largely by machines, like it or not. People can choose to ignore that if it makes them feel better, but that doesn't eliminate the need to understand those machines if they want to understand the world around them.
With respect, this is more than just a very bad idea. This is why real people think techs and geeks are arrogant dweebs who live on another planet.
And at the same time, the reason we geeks consider the masses as unbelievably stupid sheep.
These words don't have an arbitrary basis (beyond the arguement that all words reflect a set of arbitrary choices several thousand years ago)... Basic engineering terms with SI units to quantify them. Really, only "byte" counts as a truly "unique" word people need to understand. Everything else simply describes, in terms existing quite happily outside computer tech, physical aspects of the component. (Okay, "mouse" seems like a new word (or use thereof), but people don't have much trouble with that one).
While techies can certainly make an effort to explain their use of words that get a blank stare, the mindless masses still deserve much of the scorn we heap upon them. For example, memory vs HDD space - Really NOT a tough distinction, at least at a high-level. One stays around after you shut off the machine. Simple as that. Yet people can't remember even that much. Even worse, now that we tend to measure both in gigabytes (oooh, those nasty SI units Americans in particular seem to hate, as I learned many years ago in a college intro-bio class). Of course, confusing them on the basis of using the same units to measure them strikes me as equally sensible to confusing my penis and my monitor because I could measure both in inches.
Do people who buy and drive cars need to learn that vocabulary in order to use an automobile?
Yes. Try to drive a car without knowing what an "accelerator", "brake", or possibly a "clutch" does? Without knowing how many "gallons" or "liters" of fuel the car holds, and how far I can drive on that? Without knowing what a "defroster" does and the farly standard symbol that will appear on the button for it? Same issue. If people want to use computers, they need to learn the basic parts and the units of measure for those parts.
Ditto for tech stuff. People need to know "How many movies will fit on this drive?", not listen impatiently as someone explains what gigabyte means
Yes, people want answers phrased like that, but simply can't have them without a better understanding of the question. What codec? what bitrate? How long of a movie? Any "quick" answer makes a lot of possibly unsafe assumptions. Similar to your automobile analogy, someone might "know" that 10 gallons of fuel in a typical car should take them (at least) 200 miles over the deathly-hot desert to the next town - Oops, forgot to mention they drive an '82 Dodge Dart, getting 12 miles to the gallon. "They gonna die" for wanting a "simple" answer without any contextual understanding.
These matters are not important to the rest of the world.
No excuse exists for willful ignorance. If a term confuses me, I look it up. If I need to really grasp it, for example to properly use something I spend several hours each day using, I research related conceptual territory until I grasp the ideas behind the word. I don't only do this for computer terms, but for medical terms, automotive terms, knitting terms, audio terms, whatever. "Jargon" only provides an excuse for not knowing a word the first time someone hears it.
THAT makes me a geek, and explains why we deride the sheeple so venemously - Because most people will not even look up a word they don't know, prefering to stay ignorant. Unforgiveable, and those of us who do take the initiative to better ourselves most certainly should not accomodate those too lazy to do likewise. They want to stay ignorant? Fine, they can serve my fries (until we completely automate the fast-food industry) and I'll spare them the jargon.
The world moves on, with us or without us.
State's rights (which should be more important) aren't shit. Remember that.
You make a good point, but need to also consider what it takes on a local level for the feds to enforce the patriot act.
By forcing noncompliance, local areas can remove most of the teeth of the Patriot act. Businesses and libraries deliberately getting rid of client information after 24 hours removes most of the privacy-stripping portions of the act. Local police refusing to cooperate with the feds on Patriot-act related investigations leaves the feds with no more power than they had before. Entire states deliberately hindering federal investigations can, in many situations, leave the FBI et al in a worse position than before the Patriot act (when local police would often help as much as possible, even if they didn't need to).
So yes, this seemingly "only symbolic" protesting by states, cities, and private businesses does have the potential to make the Patriot act all but meaningless.
What about California's (and others) medical pot legislations?
If you followed it, you'll notice that Ed Rosenthal received a whopping one-day sentence, of time served. Even the Federal courts have started realizing that they can't sustain a war against their own member states.
You can sue over basically anything.
Yup. But a civil suit does not result in a "conviction", merely a transfer of money (and sometimes an order to stop doing something, kinda irrelevant at this point for this exploit).
You should never challenge a powerful company like this
You left out the word "directly" at the end. Unfortunately, the prize of $100k has clouded this team's judgement. If not for that, the still would have worked toward the same goal, reached it, and could have released their underflow bug discovery in complete anonymity.
Glory has its place. Money has its place. Putting corporate America in ITS place does not safely involve obtaining either of them. Personally, I would have taken a road trip a few hundred miles away (via public transportation paid for in cash), visited a public library (one that doesn't check IDs to use a computer, ie, most of them), and posted the exploit to as many sites as possible over the course of an hour. Then go back home and keep my mouth shut. Presto, all the fun and none of the liability, and Microsoft could go pound sand for all they could do to me.
People need to decide their objective... Making the world better, or becoming an alterna-celebrity. The Open Source movement pretends toward the first, yet somehow produces quite a few of the latter.
Well, I'd say that the browsers actually adhering to standards instead of doing whatever they feel like seems like an innovation...
Coding to the HTML spec does not mean the same thing as innovation in navigation.
As a simple example, changing the history list to a graphical map of recent sites visited would not break compatibility with anything, yet some would consider it an innovation.
Personally, I think nothing big has appeared in web navigation in a few years for one simple reason - "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Put simply, barring some major change in how we browse the web, the current model represents the "best" of the minor variations on the general theme of "forward, backward, history/bookmark".
Okay, it takes some work to remember "that great site I saw a few days ago that I didn't think to bookmark at the time", but I see no trivial modification of history/bookmarks would solve that (I know that some people like hierarchical histories better, but they have their own set of shortcomings, and I'd consider it more of a lateral change than an "improvement").