"Lock down"? You mean like Win7, where you don't ever actually need to enter a product key and/or activate it to have a fully functional system?
Microsoft has always gamed the thin line between market share and enforcement; but for the first time in its history, I think they've finally acknowledged that people really do have viable alternatives. And the best way to preserve their real cash-cow, the Enterprise market? Give the product away to home users, because if they use it at home, they'll want it at work. Since that would piss off the cheese-eaters at EU HQ, though, Microsoft has opted to do the next best thing - Make it trivial to semi-legally license for a pittance, or even to outright pirate it. They just don't care unless you have "inc" in your name.
Absolutely, getting him a long sentence would be worth a few murdered generals.
Nah, generals just do the dirty work the politicians tell them to.
The politicians themselves, OTOH... Yeah, a few less of them wasting our oxygen, and one unbalanced whack-job in prison - I'd call that a net positive all around!
YMMV. I'll agree it annoys me that the glossed over "the finer points", but a lot of people tend to just assume "you can't do it" until they see someone else succeed. Knowing you can do it often counts as 99% of the challenge.
and ignores the fact that zip ties are used far more than handcuffs for restrainng people these days.
We all know how to get out of plasticuffs already (worst case, you can weaken them enough with a few good rubs against rough concrete to just break them by force, you can melt them, and if you actually have something sharp available, game over). Those don't really apply to traditional steel handcuffs.
Free clue - The police don't always act in our best interests.
They occasionally cuff people, throw 'em in a cage, and abandon them for days at a time. They occasionally cuff people and then beat the poor helpless bastard silly, claiming "resistance" (which if they want to claim it, at least you should have the ability to defend yourself and earn the extra charges). They occasionally torture handcuffed hippies by pepper-spray coated q-tips to the eyes.
The more ways we have to defend ourselves against the bad ones (which for the sake of argument, I'll pretend count as the minority), the better.
P.S. If any of you OccuTards protest teh GOP convention, I hope you get shot and killed.
Why bother? I for one look forward to the Paulites schooling the whole convention in Robert's Rules the same way they did in Maine and Nevada. That'll make for much better entertainment (and a presidential candidate for whom I might actually want to vote) than watching the media butcher another round of Occupiers by asking them "hard" questions like "what do you want."
The reason you should care is because the members of Pussy Riot that were given 2 year prison sentences are political prisoners
Well, yes, but no. Google "petukhi". Google "Mikhail Khodorkovsky". Google "Sergei Magnitsky".
You should care because they will spend that time in the worst-of-the-worst "black" prisons. They will endure daily rape, by both fellow inmates and staff. They will leave (if they leave) with HIV and/or multi-drug resistant TB. They will most likely not leave... Or last a week, for that matter.
The court didn't need to sentence them to any crazy-long sentence, because the court sentenced them to death and hell. Simple as that.
You want central planning, right? You want education to be controlled from the top down, by people you have never even met, right? You want the system to be enforced through the coercive power of government, right?
Nope.
I want standardized testing (not necessarily "central", and not this NCLB bullshit - More like the NY Regency exams). If you and your inbred neighbors want to teach nothing but apples-and-snakes, have it your way; but when you try to get into a college or get a job, we'll all have no ambiguity whatsoever what your A+ in "science" really means.
I want licensed doctors to grasp the concept of evolved antibiotic resistance. I want historians capable of referring to dates prior to 4000BCE. I want psychiatrists who give out antidepressants rather than E-meters.
If you want shamans and voodoo, I have nothing against you having those as an option; but you damned well won't call them "doctors" - At least not without the qualifier "witch".
Really? And how do they plan to stop me from completely ignoring their API and just faking it via HTTP, as though the user had actually logged in through a web browser? Anything they can test for, I can respond accordingly.
Devs only use the API instead of spoofing it because the API gives them more flexibility. Take that away, and they can expect their direct "web based" usage to skyrocket.
Nonono, you misunderstand... My "SuperTwit" client doesn't require more than a million user tokens... SuperTwit A requires 900k, SuperTwit B requires 900k, and SuperTwit C requires 538k. Sure, they all look very, very similar, but hey, some people just don't like the letter "A" as much as "B", and so on!
Yeah, I don't suspect Twitter would fall for it. More to the point, however, if more than a million of your users want to use client-X, why the hell would you tell them "no"?
Next time you meet someone with money get them to explain what a serial number is and why banks record them.
Sorry, I lost that phone number we need to call every single time someone pays us in cash to report the serial numbers and transaction date. Could you remind me, please?
Wait, you mean to say that not every transaction either comes from or goes to a bank?
I am simple and believe...
That every monetary transaction either comes from or goes to a bank?
That the FBI can pick "my" $20 out of the $400k Walmart daily drop at the bank?
That you can read, despite failing to make it aaaaall the way to the end of my second paragraph?
But hey, you saw it on CSI, so it must really work that way, right?
I normally suggest growing the balls to make your own account, but for you... Well... I'd have to advise you to keep posting AC for now, at least until you get half a clue.
While, yes, Bitcoin transactions by necessity have to be verifiable to stop double spending, etc.,
Don't take my comment the wrong way, I love BitCoin, and sincerely hope it succeeds to the point of driving every fiat currency on the planet into nothing more than an obscure quirk only used for paying taxes in legacy-currency-holdout nations. I won't hold my breath on that one, though.:)
But yeah, I agree, the transaction history doesn't seriously jeopardize anonymity, which most of the haters don't seem to grasp. It does, however, lead to at least the possibility of a provable chain of custody (with each step discoverable via intimidation) back to the person of interest; with cash, you can't prove it, and even ignoring that, the chain effectively ends at the most recent time the cash sat in a Walmart register.
Please enlighten me on how converting to/from USD would serve as a money laundering strategy.
Because cash has no history, simple as that. You have no way of knowing if the last person to spend that $20 bill the ATM just gave you bought diapers, or heroin, or bullets for the Taliban with it.
Now, the converting to/from part may present something of a problem in itself - But once you start dealing in bills instead of bits, the IRS/Treasury/DoJ lose any ability whatsoever to track that $100k from questionable sources, until it reappears in entirely innocent deposits at 80 different banks across 12 states.
Which, ironically enough, makes BitCoin less suitable for money laundering... Although BitCoin has taken steps to preserve anonymity, it does have a complete history of every transaction in which a given BTC has participated, right back to the originally mined block.
I do, however, find the thesis... Strange. Primarily because I had read a translation of it (translation, as in, why did she submit her thesis to a Swedish university in English?) a while back and it said largely what I claimed. As I have no way to prove this, however, consider the point ceded.
Failure??? This counts as the best idea ever - Since only "people" (like Dow and Ford and Pfizer... Why, just last week I went out for a beer with good ol' Pfizer, heck of a guy, great jokes!) with an interest in marketing to me can afford to register a new TLD, I can safely block all of them, and thereby cut down drastically on the spam!
But there is only one sane solution to these international problems. Put everything in the country specific tlds.
We already have those - And hey, they help me cut down on my spam as well... From any country other than Canida, the UK, and Australia? No mail from you! And poof, half the spam with one easy filter rule.
Keep 'em coming, let the spammers segregate themselves into oblivion. Makes my life that much easier.
This is a really bad day to be working for Kongregate.
Although Kong does have a dedicated mobile section, most of content (particularly newer games from the past two years or so) requires a decent-sized screen, not a smartphone.
And even if you have a tablet, or for the smaller-window games, most assume you have a real keyboard and/or mouse. Sure, you have ways to handle that on a tablet (up to plugging in a "real" keyboard, I suppose, but that destroys 99% of the "conveniently portable" aspects of a tablet).
So no, I don't think Kong cares much about this. OTOH, the fact that Adobe seems intent on killing Flash off completely may well worry them. But just the portable market? Meh.
(All that aside, I still use a tablet for playing cheesy flash games when I need to kill an hour away from a real PC, and this move by Adobe seriously pisses me off. Yes, Flash "should" die - But it very much has not yet, and any internet-enabled device that can't access it in the present, amounts to a badly crippled device).
"Mobile devices" doesn't just mean crappy low-powered cellphones anymore. It includes fairly powerful tablets and netbooks with more than half the horsepower of a typical (typical, not high-end-gaming rig) desktop PC, far more than adequate for watching YouTube videos or playing cheesy flash games.
As much as I hate to say it, this alone may well push me to Windows 8 rather than Android - And I loathe everything about don't-call-it-Metro. But when I want to waste some time while traveling or waiting for an oil change or the like, hey, I don't care if I can write a frickin' novel, I just care that I can play MeatBoy and watch people's cats attacking shadows.
She didn't just write two anti-Castro articles - She "personally" (aka via Ulf Bjereld or OneSweden) funded (and to some degree led, until her deluded army of angry young men realized she had goals totally unrelated to their best interests) an organized anti-Castro movement, in Cuba, leading to her eventual deportation.
Where's the "No Sources Except Tin Foil Hat Blogs" moderation? Are we so happy to accept this unsubstantiated claim just because it meshes with our prejudices?
Well now, unfortunately, Ardin and Wilen have have managed to purge the web of all but the most ridiculous information relating to them, so efficiently that most fortune-500 companies can't afford such effective PR. Impressive.
For example, the fact that Anna Ardin wrote her Master's thesis on the use of rape as a weapon - Google that. You'll get tons of hits containing it in the cached summary, and yet, every single one of them seems to go to an unrelated (or redacted) page. You can, however, still find copies of her curiously-no-longer-existant blog where she detailed her "seven steps to revenge".
Or the fact that Ardin's cousin served as deputy head of ops in Afghanistan. Again, cached summaries, but no content actually says that (interestingly, two years ago you could find this information everywhere; today, I can barely find reference to it except one bullet point on a website I wouldn't tend to trust as a source, except insofar that it agrees with a reality that has somehow otherwise vanished).
Or the fact that Ardin spent several years working as an anti-Castro organizer in Cuba, somehow "personally" funding the movement until Cuba deported her - Which I can only find in Spanish (guess her PR whitewashing friends don't speak Spanish) and the occasional snippets here and there.
Or the fact that it horrified Sofia Wilen to learn that the police (and not just any police; not the local police; but rather, a detective Ardin knew personally from an entirely different jurisdiction) had charged Assange with rape, when she (apparently something of a germophobe) only wanted to compel him to get an STD test.
Yep. Completely unsubstantiated - If you require a link from CNN. If you actually dig a bit, a much darker picture appears than that of two girls falling victim to a serial acquaintance-rapist.
I don't think you can quite count it as "merely linking" if you actively source pirated material to link to.
Welcome to the intersection of copyright as the default state of any creative work, and the internet.
Everything on the internet has a copyright on it, and you do not (usually) have permission from the copyright holder to link to it.
Yes, we can all quibble over this as an egregious example, but it sets a really bad precedent that moves us solidly back in the direction of "producers" and "consumers", rather than "participants".
This means that a brute-force attack on a 4-digit PIN takes about 20 minutes (ok, that's not much), but when you consider complex PINs with 5 or more characters you are soon at 50 days (don't have the exact numbers in my mind right now, but there is a good presentation on that).
Er, no. It means you make a copy of the flash storage, and brute-force it on a "real" computer in a matter of milliseconds.
I just don't understand how people consider ball chairs so wonderful... Sure, for the first five minutes, I look like a model for an ergonomics poster; Within 15 minutes, I end up slumped forward, with my legs half-folded under me, putting all my weight on my elbows and my forearms at a sharp angle inward so I can reach keyboard, and my back in prime Quasimodo-pose.
Slashdot Mirror
they can lock down the retail/OEM versions harder
"Lock down"? You mean like Win7, where you don't ever actually need to enter a product key and/or activate it to have a fully functional system?
Microsoft has always gamed the thin line between market share and enforcement; but for the first time in its history, I think they've finally acknowledged that people really do have viable alternatives. And the best way to preserve their real cash-cow, the Enterprise market? Give the product away to home users, because if they use it at home, they'll want it at work. Since that would piss off the cheese-eaters at EU HQ, though, Microsoft has opted to do the next best thing - Make it trivial to semi-legally license for a pittance, or even to outright pirate it. They just don't care unless you have "inc" in your name.
Better to die fighting than bound and prone on the ground.
Absolutely, getting him a long sentence would be worth a few murdered generals.
Nah, generals just do the dirty work the politicians tell them to.
The politicians themselves, OTOH... Yeah, a few less of them wasting our oxygen, and one unbalanced whack-job in prison - I'd call that a net positive all around!
Except it doesn't teach you anything
YMMV. I'll agree it annoys me that the glossed over "the finer points", but a lot of people tend to just assume "you can't do it" until they see someone else succeed. Knowing you can do it often counts as 99% of the challenge.
and ignores the fact that zip ties are used far more than handcuffs for restrainng people these days.
We all know how to get out of plasticuffs already (worst case, you can weaken them enough with a few good rubs against rough concrete to just break them by force, you can melt them, and if you actually have something sharp available, game over). Those don't really apply to traditional steel handcuffs.
This is really low, even for you people.
Free clue - The police don't always act in our best interests.
They occasionally cuff people, throw 'em in a cage, and abandon them for days at a time. They occasionally cuff people and then beat the poor helpless bastard silly, claiming "resistance" (which if they want to claim it, at least you should have the ability to defend yourself and earn the extra charges). They occasionally torture handcuffed hippies by pepper-spray coated q-tips to the eyes.
The more ways we have to defend ourselves against the bad ones (which for the sake of argument, I'll pretend count as the minority), the better.
P.S. If any of you OccuTards protest teh GOP convention, I hope you get shot and killed.
Why bother? I for one look forward to the Paulites schooling the whole convention in Robert's Rules the same way they did in Maine and Nevada. That'll make for much better entertainment (and a presidential candidate for whom I might actually want to vote) than watching the media butcher another round of Occupiers by asking them "hard" questions like "what do you want."
I assure you that when she is out of prison
Do you mean that as a joke, or just naivete?
If she lives a week... If she makes it two years... She will leave broken, and with any of a number of fatal diseases.
She won't leave.
Fuck Putin. He deserves what the coming revolution will do to him.
The reason you should care is because the members of Pussy Riot that were given 2 year prison sentences are political prisoners
Well, yes, but no. Google "petukhi". Google "Mikhail Khodorkovsky". Google "Sergei Magnitsky".
You should care because they will spend that time in the worst-of-the-worst "black" prisons. They will endure daily rape, by both fellow inmates and staff. They will leave (if they leave) with HIV and/or multi-drug resistant TB. They will most likely not leave... Or last a week, for that matter.
The court didn't need to sentence them to any crazy-long sentence, because the court sentenced them to death and hell. Simple as that.
You want central planning, right? You want education to be controlled from the top down, by people you have never even met, right? You want the system to be enforced through the coercive power of government, right?
Nope.
I want standardized testing (not necessarily "central", and not this NCLB bullshit - More like the NY Regency exams). If you and your inbred neighbors want to teach nothing but apples-and-snakes, have it your way; but when you try to get into a college or get a job, we'll all have no ambiguity whatsoever what your A+ in "science" really means.
I want licensed doctors to grasp the concept of evolved antibiotic resistance. I want historians capable of referring to dates prior to 4000BCE. I want psychiatrists who give out antidepressants rather than E-meters.
If you want shamans and voodoo, I have nothing against you having those as an option; but you damned well won't call them "doctors" - At least not without the qualifier "witch".
Really? And how do they plan to stop me from completely ignoring their API and just faking it via HTTP, as though the user had actually logged in through a web browser? Anything they can test for, I can respond accordingly.
Devs only use the API instead of spoofing it because the API gives them more flexibility. Take that away, and they can expect their direct "web based" usage to skyrocket.
Nonono, you misunderstand... My "SuperTwit" client doesn't require more than a million user tokens... SuperTwit A requires 900k, SuperTwit B requires 900k, and SuperTwit C requires 538k. Sure, they all look very, very similar, but hey, some people just don't like the letter "A" as much as "B", and so on!
Yeah, I don't suspect Twitter would fall for it. More to the point, however, if more than a million of your users want to use client-X, why the hell would you tell them "no"?
Next time you meet someone with money get them to explain what a serial number is and why banks record them.
Sorry, I lost that phone number we need to call every single time someone pays us in cash to report the serial numbers and transaction date. Could you remind me, please?
Wait, you mean to say that not every transaction either comes from or goes to a bank?
I am simple and believe...
That every monetary transaction either comes from or goes to a bank?
That the FBI can pick "my" $20 out of the $400k Walmart daily drop at the bank?
That you can read, despite failing to make it aaaaall the way to the end of my second paragraph?
But hey, you saw it on CSI, so it must really work that way, right?
I normally suggest growing the balls to make your own account, but for you... Well... I'd have to advise you to keep posting AC for now, at least until you get half a clue.
While, yes, Bitcoin transactions by necessity have to be verifiable to stop double spending, etc.,
:)
Don't take my comment the wrong way, I love BitCoin, and sincerely hope it succeeds to the point of driving every fiat currency on the planet into nothing more than an obscure quirk only used for paying taxes in legacy-currency-holdout nations. I won't hold my breath on that one, though.
But yeah, I agree, the transaction history doesn't seriously jeopardize anonymity, which most of the haters don't seem to grasp. It does, however, lead to at least the possibility of a provable chain of custody (with each step discoverable via intimidation) back to the person of interest; with cash, you can't prove it, and even ignoring that, the chain effectively ends at the most recent time the cash sat in a Walmart register.
Please enlighten me on how converting to/from USD would serve as a money laundering strategy.
Because cash has no history, simple as that. You have no way of knowing if the last person to spend that $20 bill the ATM just gave you bought diapers, or heroin, or bullets for the Taliban with it.
Now, the converting to/from part may present something of a problem in itself - But once you start dealing in bills instead of bits, the IRS/Treasury/DoJ lose any ability whatsoever to track that $100k from questionable sources, until it reappears in entirely innocent deposits at 80 different banks across 12 states.
Which, ironically enough, makes BitCoin less suitable for money laundering... Although BitCoin has taken steps to preserve anonymity, it does have a complete history of every transaction in which a given BTC has participated, right back to the originally mined block.
Wow... Consider me impressed! Very thorough!
I do, however, find the thesis... Strange. Primarily because I had read a translation of it (translation, as in, why did she submit her thesis to a Swedish university in English?) a while back and it said largely what I claimed. As I have no way to prove this, however, consider the point ceded.
ICANN wants the money too badly to admit failure.
Failure??? This counts as the best idea ever - Since only "people" (like Dow and Ford and Pfizer... Why, just last week I went out for a beer with good ol' Pfizer, heck of a guy, great jokes!) with an interest in marketing to me can afford to register a new TLD, I can safely block all of them, and thereby cut down drastically on the spam!
But there is only one sane solution to these international problems. Put everything in the country specific tlds.
We already have those - And hey, they help me cut down on my spam as well... From any country other than Canida, the UK, and Australia? No mail from you! And poof, half the spam with one easy filter rule.
Keep 'em coming, let the spammers segregate themselves into oblivion. Makes my life that much easier.
This is a really bad day to be working for Kongregate.
Although Kong does have a dedicated mobile section, most of content (particularly newer games from the past two years or so) requires a decent-sized screen, not a smartphone.
And even if you have a tablet, or for the smaller-window games, most assume you have a real keyboard and/or mouse. Sure, you have ways to handle that on a tablet (up to plugging in a "real" keyboard, I suppose, but that destroys 99% of the "conveniently portable" aspects of a tablet).
So no, I don't think Kong cares much about this. OTOH, the fact that Adobe seems intent on killing Flash off completely may well worry them. But just the portable market? Meh.
(All that aside, I still use a tablet for playing cheesy flash games when I need to kill an hour away from a real PC, and this move by Adobe seriously pisses me off. Yes, Flash "should" die - But it very much has not yet, and any internet-enabled device that can't access it in the present, amounts to a badly crippled device).
"Mobile devices" doesn't just mean crappy low-powered cellphones anymore. It includes fairly powerful tablets and netbooks with more than half the horsepower of a typical (typical, not high-end-gaming rig) desktop PC, far more than adequate for watching YouTube videos or playing cheesy flash games.
As much as I hate to say it, this alone may well push me to Windows 8 rather than Android - And I loathe everything about don't-call-it-Metro. But when I want to waste some time while traveling or waiting for an oil change or the like, hey, I don't care if I can write a frickin' novel, I just care that I can play MeatBoy and watch people's cats attacking shadows.
Do I know? Yep, that I do!
She didn't just write two anti-Castro articles - She "personally" (aka via Ulf Bjereld or OneSweden) funded (and to some degree led, until her deluded army of angry young men realized she had goals totally unrelated to their best interests) an organized anti-Castro movement, in Cuba, leading to her eventual deportation.
Please merge any further responses in with my other, far more detailed, response on this topic.
Where's the "No Sources Except Tin Foil Hat Blogs" moderation? Are we so happy to accept this unsubstantiated claim just because it meshes with our prejudices?
Well now, unfortunately, Ardin and Wilen have have managed to purge the web of all but the most ridiculous information relating to them, so efficiently that most fortune-500 companies can't afford such effective PR. Impressive.
For example, the fact that Anna Ardin wrote her Master's thesis on the use of rape as a weapon - Google that. You'll get tons of hits containing it in the cached summary, and yet, every single one of them seems to go to an unrelated (or redacted) page. You can, however, still find copies of her curiously-no-longer-existant blog where she detailed her "seven steps to revenge".
Or the fact that Ardin's cousin served as deputy head of ops in Afghanistan. Again, cached summaries, but no content actually says that (interestingly, two years ago you could find this information everywhere; today, I can barely find reference to it except one bullet point on a website I wouldn't tend to trust as a source, except insofar that it agrees with a reality that has somehow otherwise vanished).
Or the fact that Ardin spent several years working as an anti-Castro organizer in Cuba, somehow "personally" funding the movement until Cuba deported her - Which I can only find in Spanish (guess her PR whitewashing friends don't speak Spanish) and the occasional snippets here and there.
Or the fact that it horrified Sofia Wilen to learn that the police (and not just any police; not the local police; but rather, a detective Ardin knew personally from an entirely different jurisdiction) had charged Assange with rape, when she (apparently something of a germophobe) only wanted to compel him to get an STD test.
Yep. Completely unsubstantiated - If you require a link from CNN. If you actually dig a bit, a much darker picture appears than that of two girls falling victim to a serial acquaintance-rapist.
Ya because no covert intelligence agency anywhere has ever used a Honey trap...
And not at all suspicious that we have a known CIA operative - And a close friend of hers - as the women involved here.
That doesn't mean he didn't do it, but when it comes to "benefit of the doubt", he definitely gets it in this case.
I don't think you can quite count it as "merely linking" if you actively source pirated material to link to.
Welcome to the intersection of copyright as the default state of any creative work, and the internet.
Everything on the internet has a copyright on it, and you do not (usually) have permission from the copyright holder to link to it.
Yes, we can all quibble over this as an egregious example, but it sets a really bad precedent that moves us solidly back in the direction of "producers" and "consumers", rather than "participants".
This means that a brute-force attack on a 4-digit PIN takes about 20 minutes (ok, that's not much), but when you consider complex PINs with 5 or more characters you are soon at 50 days (don't have the exact numbers in my mind right now, but there is a good presentation on that).
Er, no. It means you make a copy of the flash storage, and brute-force it on a "real" computer in a matter of milliseconds.
Sit on a ball
I just don't understand how people consider ball chairs so wonderful... Sure, for the first five minutes, I look like a model for an ergonomics poster; Within 15 minutes, I end up slumped forward, with my legs half-folded under me, putting all my weight on my elbows and my forearms at a sharp angle inward so I can reach keyboard, and my back in prime Quasimodo-pose.
Ah, yep. You have it right. Mixed up my conflicts of interest.
:)
Damn, gotta go wipe that egg off my face now...