Imagine a world where jaywalking gets you automatically direct-withdrawal fines from your bank account? And how about when your credit score goes down because you took a right-on-red where you weren't supposed to, therefore marking you as "risky?"
Imagine you live in Virginia in 2007.
In Virginia, you now get civil _AND_ criminal charges against you for running a red light or speeding. The civil stuff comes in fines starting around $1,000 payable in 3 payments which are independant of the criminal charges. If you don't have the cash handy, then you are sent to collections, your credit gets screwed, and I would imagine that they then do the same tricks they have for years like not telling you that your registration is expired on your car, so it lapses and then you are subject to having your car impounded on the spot w/o a court appearance or legal represntation whatsoever.
I'M SICK AND FUCKING TIRED OF DRIVING BEING A CRIME.
To be clear, I don't want to drive. Its dangerous both physically and legally. I'm a pretty boring guy, but driving on the US highways is a very risky behavior.
Another true story. I drove a "stolen" car for somewhere between 1 and 2 years without knowing it. When I was in highschool, I did a stupid highschool thing and took off for a weekend. My dumbass father reported my car (registered in his name) as stolen, and never reported it as unstolen. I went to renew my plates or something at DMV, and they told me that they couldn't because my car was reported stolen.
Now, imagine if this scanning thing was in place, and I got pulled over? I would guess that a number of "stolen" vehicles are driven by their owners.
Now, with the people with warrants. I mean, how tough is it to find these people just by looking? Don't you have to show 10 forms of ID to do anything? Also, most stolen cars are not driven as is outside of joy rides.
As a citizen, I don't feel more comfortable or safe having the police scan license plates. I feel less safe and comfortable.
Were it not for amateur videographers, it would have been the victims word alone versus the cops, and everyone knows the judge will side with the cops.
Now, when the government or even a private store puts surveillance cameras around to monitor traffic possibly have an "eye in the sky" for crimes and whatnot, of course the privacy extremists stand up for everyone's privacy. And it seems as though this gets knocked down because the philosophical argument is "Hey, what kind of privacy to you expect in public?" Which is a pretty good argument.
However, the inverse is not true in the new fascists regime. The public areas are not public, and we, the public are subject to their permission to do normal and legal things in public.
Seeing that you already own an iMac, I think the bigger question is why are you so insistent on running Linux on your Mac?
I was wondering the same thing. I love linux, but I see no advantage of running it on my iMac. Linux runs great headless on cheap hardware, and OS X has X11, NFS, a great terminal application _AND_ it runs OS X apps. I leave my iMac on 24/7, and its power management spins down the harddisk and turns off the monitor. All of the software to hardware stuff like my bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the eject button on the keyboard, my external firewire harddrive and other 3rd party hardware "just works". It takes about 20 seconds or so for it to wake up, and when I'm done I just walk away and it just goes to sleep.
Even though Linux is "free" it would probably cost me $5-15/month in electricity to run it on my Mac, and it would at the same time put more wear and tear on my hardware.
I've not been a fan of emulation or dual booting or any of that jazz for years. Lower end hardware is cheap enough and powerful enough to justify just buying another box instead of overloading one box. So, I really don't understand the problem here, or how running OS X apps on Apple hardware using the Linux OS is a solution to anything. OS X runs great on iMacs. Linux runs great on plenty of inexpensive hardware that is accessable from the Mac running OS X with no problem, or at least much less of a problem than running OS X apps on top of Linux on Apple hardware.
OH, and I forgot that you can buy parallels for OS X, and run Linux/Windows/FreeBSD or whatever you want without a second box. So, remind me again what running Linux as the primary OS on an iMac gives somebody ?
I'm not sure that for the usually simple task of command line processing, I'd like to learn a whole new lex/yacc syntax thingy.
The syntax for gperf is not that bad, but its simply the wrong tool for the job as far as commandline processing goes.
gperf simply makes a "perfect" has function for searching a predetermined static lookup. It provides no mechanism for arbitrary arguments like input filenames or modifiers (like a filter for including/excluding things, or increasing/decreasing something) nor does it check for conflicting options or missing options.
gperf would give you nothing besides a match of input to a state. gperf would provide nothing for a common commandline like: --include="*.txt" --exclude="*.backup" --with-match="some text|or this text" --limit-input=5megabytes
getopt or just rolling your own if/else if ladder or switch statement would provide much more flexibility over gperf.
Now, with parsing a configuration file, gperf might help, but for processing commandline arguments, gperf is simply the wrong tool for the job.
MercExchange is a pseudo-business front for a patent lawyer. I did research on them when I first heard about them, and its pretty clear what they are.
This ruling on allowing the "buy it now" feature seems clearly the right one, but the thing that really bothers me is that I don't see parasites like this going away, and what is going to happen once something stupid like this actually gets backed. The SCO fiasco and one click patent are great examples.
I mean how much time and money and effort is wasted on crap like this? These things really bother me, because I don't see them becoming less likely to happen in the future, but the opposite. It would be nice if the US had in its legal system where the aggressor/plaintif had to pay both sides of a lawsuits bills if the court rules in favor of the defendant.
Although lawyers like ambulance chasers don't have the most respect, I see them as a necessary evil to keep people/businesses honest, but I simply see no value in these business methods, patent, and intellectual property parasites.
I don't get why people would like this. I hate renting. I want to buy it and be done with it, not be on the hook to continually pay and pay and pay forever even after the purchase price has been met multiple times over.
I'm actually the opposite. I rent my DVR. I did w/o TV for a while, so I returned the DVR and didn't have to pay for it or cable, no big deal. Then I went back with the service, and I got an upgraded DVR (HDMI output and larger harddrive) w/o having to dispose of or buy a new item.
I consider all electronics purchases as renting. They are disposable, and they can be replaced for a fraction of the cost at a later date. To me, owning and renting is basically the same, but with renting I have an easy way out and don't have to dispose of the item or sell it which is often a waste of time because a new one is better and cheaper.
Another example is the iPod itself. The lack of an explicit power button, also mentioned in the article, isn't a big deal. But having no separate volume control really harms the usability of the device.
I have a 80 gig video iPod, which I guess is the most recent model. The volume is accessable when a track is playing by virtually rotating the round thingy (sorry, I can't describe it any better).
Is this UI different than older ones?
I'm not an iPod fanboy or anything. I hardly ever use it, and actually regret the purchase.
It seems like the iPhone (which I'm still drooling over!) seem pretty hard to use for the blind. Some sort of non-visual feedback is pretty much required for them!
At least the phone comes with voice to text for hearing imaired!
Oops, wrong phone, I guess the iPhone does not work for the deaf, blind, or those without hands either.
Sometimes I think the American attitude of thou shalt be accessable to anything with a pulse goes a little to far.
The main reason is that once people use Windows, they get locked in. Incompatible file formats, refusal to interoperate with anything other than Windows.
That statement is so wrong. AFAIK, NIS doesn't work on Windows. Without Cygwin, and even with it, most of the Linux software does not work in Windows. OS X apps don't work on Windows.
What locks people in is that for most people Windows simply is "good enough". Just like for most people crappy cars (like the one I drive) -- because its good enough. McDonalds is the #1 restraunt in the world, not because its known to be great food, because its good enough for the money.
For those that can afford to and know better _and_ care, they choose things more carefully. Remember, 98% of all of the action in the world is below the 2nd standard deviation above the mean. And it always will be that way.
In other words, yes, this password was prone to be dict'ed.
Who cares?
I have yet to of heard about a successful "dict'ed" account crack.
This type of issue is actually the most common. Leaving a password laying around.
Its also common for passwords to be given away via social engineering, man in the middle attacks, sniffed when being proudly displayed in plaintext, or similar (So the passwords complexity does not matter here).
Default passwords are a common source of breakin.
Its also common for a password to be compromised because it is being reused, and one of the hosts that it was used on was compromised.
In summary, passwords are a weak form of authentication. No matter how "good" they are. I have yet to of heard of a guessed or dictionary password break aside from the movie Wargames. I have heard of some people from ISPs who have had people that knew people guess easy to guess passwords though. But 99.999% of all password compromises are not due to weak passwords. Its from either still using passwords, or from weak password management.
I know this is completely off topic, but I'm just curious: Why do you think illegal drugs are still illegal in the US?
Money, power, and racism mostly. Also, the people in the government simply don't have it on their priority radar to undo the obvious wrong. Kinda like all of the junk laws on the books like things that are "illegal" for you to do between consenting adults in private.
The origins of the drug laws in the US are mostly racially motivated.
And why wouldn't Korea have illegal drugs?
The reason I brought this up was the racial part. AFAIK, drug laws in other countries do not have their origins in racism like here in the US. I find it interesting and unanswered as to how common it is for a mostly benign drug like marijuana is almost universally illegal in the world. It must be a conspiracy, right?
What's wrong with selective breeding? It's proven to work, it's without any real drawbacks, it's cheap and it's easy to do.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best ones.
I did not read the article, so I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I thought the same thing.
What does cloning give you? Because even if you have the best genetically 100% reproducible drug sniffing organism, it still has to be _trained_ to do its task at hand.
Now, I know why most of the illegal drugs are still illegal in the US, but why does Korea have illegal drugs?
It has been a pet gripe of mine: why do developers insist that data entry can be performed with a mouse?
Because developers are not data entry people:) And neither are their PHBs.
Look at how great the commandline interface is for UNIX and linux. Why is it great? Because the people that made it use it. Now, look at the GUI land for UNIX/Linux. People that use Linux don't care as much about it, and it shows. Although it is getting better, but its so far behind OS X and even Windows in GUI.
Data entry types of things are fastest if there is a way to input the data normally without a mouse, and then some kind of way to do "abnormal" things like fix a wrong field or something in a slightly different way (using tab, function key, or at a last resort use a mouse).
Now, here is a pet pieve of mine. How about input via a mouse with a GUI widget that looks like a rotary knob? Yes, that is right, the user is expected to use the mouse to adjust things in a circular manor.
I've seen this more than once, and I can just picture the PHB convincing the developer this is a good idea.
But the price that the gas station charges is only slightly related to the cost of the fuel. The price of gas down the street is more likely to be a factor. If you make them start compensating for temperature, they will just hike the price. This whole thing is silly unless you find one station with warmer gas than another, giving them an unfair advantage.
Retail gas is not a money maker - the little convenience store is what makes money.
I've heard the latter part there many times, and I believe it. Sounds like the gas/oil people have the same power structure as the movie and music business.
Oh, and BTW, I think suing over this is stupid. From the summary:
The fuel industry claims that the costs of installing temerature-adjustment sensors on every pump would be prohibitively high. These sensors are already installed in Canada, however, where the colder temperatures favor consumers.
I could see the gas people paying for the lawsuit, installing these "temerature" sensors, which is a one time cost of say $100,000, and then raising the cost of fuel to make that much up every week.
Sure the squeaky wheel gets oiled, but you may not like the oil they use.
Buying CDs and ripping them is more difficult than simply downloading them, or paying a site a few pennies to download them. AllofMP3 was so popular because for a couple cents getting music was even more convenient. You didn't even have to search through pirate sites to find them, they were all there in one place. They paid for the music because it was convenient, not because they wanted to make sure money went to the artists.
Basically, what this is saying is that AllofMP3 has a better business model than the current RIAA one, which I agree with completely.
Downloading crap from pirate sites is work. You have to search for the crap. Figure out if the quality is what you are looking for. Often times the downloads are not labeled correctly, may or may not include album artwork, you then have to then move the files from where you downloaded them to your archive once the download is finished and you are happy with the results. Often, you have to delete the stuff because it is not what you want. Then there are downloads where the seeders die off or whatnot.
Regardless of the ethical, legal, or any other argument one can make about pirating music and/or movies, it is not "free" unless yo u consider your time and effort worth nothing. All the time people pay different prices for things due to the convenience and quanity of the purchase. Buy hotdogs from a warehouse store. $.10/dog when bought by the palate. Buy hotdogs from grocery store. $.20/dog bought by the 8-16 dogs per package. Buy 1 hotdot from convenience store. $2.00/dog.
I know I'm a minority here on slashdot because I actually watch TV on a TV, but a majority of the people I know do this. I actually pay extra for the convenience of having a DVR from my cable company which records shows for me, and I can watch them when I want and skip the commercials, rewind, etc. My cable comes with music channels, but they suck and I don't pay any attention to those. Would I pay for a decent music service? Yes. I would view it to simply be more convenient than using torrent sites, but I'm forced by a lack of a business model to get the music I want the way I want it, so I either do without or on occasion I'll download music when I feel the urge. Now, I place about zero value on a majority of what I download because 1) I didn't pay for it, so I don't care if I lose it. 2) Many of the MP3s are of lower quality than I would prefer. They are OK for background listening or on the computer, but they are unacceptable to listen to on my car or home stereo. They are the equivalent of FM that I don't pay for.
Classical music fans tend to be more concerned with sound quality than the average listener of popular music, so it makes sense these formats would be targeted at them.
I think its a function of age and budget vs musical genre.
You can get "audiophile" recordings of blues, rock, classical, jazz, but it simply makes no sense to get a gourmet presentation of a wonka bar, which is pretty much what a lot of pop music is.
I've been an audio nut since I was a teenager, but it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I could afford the stuff because its not cheap.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
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Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's really all come down to games for me. If my games would all run on Linux I'd be there tomorrow.
All I can say is I'm glad I don't have anything important like games to dictate what OS I use. Yes, in some respects I'm being a troll/sarcastic here, but also games appear to be _the_ driving force for technical people here on slashdot to tie them to Windows. Other less technical users simply don't know any better.
Maybe I'm just an eletist or whatever, but I simply don't need the headaches that come with Windows. I had a couple of crappy jobs back in the 1999-2000 era that required Windows, but other than that I've been Windows free since 1997 or so both personally and professionally.
To me, the OS is just software. Just like I have a choice in shells, window managers, desktop environments, web servers, whatever. For many reasons, technical, stylish, reliability, ease of use, ease of maintenance, etc, I simply can't find a reason to use Windows.
If games were that important to me, I would buy a console, or two or three.
We've been asking for this for years. Or -1 wrong, or something similar. Its frustrating to see completely incorrect informtion being moderated as insightful or informative when in fact its completely wrong, but sounds good.
As long as we keep wishing for it, it will eventually come.
My phone with SprintPCS is about $80/mo, unlimited nights and weekends...I think about 1000 anytime minutes, SMS is extra, but, I don't use that much, nor do I ever come close to the daytime minutes.
I heard the other day on NPR how it was difficult for Apple or any other hardware manufactuer to get into the phone market because of the service cartel. Personally, I think talking about $80/mo as if its nothing is crazy. I pay like $30/mo for my phone and I think I'm getting ripped off (~ 12-15 of that is taxes and fees and other crap).
I simply don't understand how I can use the internet for $20-40/mo, unlimited "minutes" worldwide access, but talking to someone on the phone frequently costs more?
To me, in 2007, phone service should be less than $20/mo, but being that people are willing to spend over $100/household for phones, the phone service people will gladly take their money.
And therein lies the problem. Microsoft views virtualization as the road to rampant piracy and I can't blame them given their software validation model. It is all about money in the end.
First, when you are as wealthy as Microsft is, money is not a goal. Its power. Same with the *IAA people.
Virtualization is a blow to this power game. Microsoft was _very_ lucky in the beginning. Right place at the right time with the right deal with the right company. I mean, if I were to be teleported back to the late 70s to early 90s and tell me that this DOS thing would make someone to be the richest person in the world, I simply would not believe it. Without Microsoft's power games into preloading and freequently double billing their OSes on a vast majority of the computers in the world, their success simply would not be the same as it is today. Virtualization removes this preinstall/bundle "tax". It makes Microsoft just another software company like every other one, and that is not what they want.
Now, as an extention to this power thing. Why in 2007 are we still talkinga about EULAs? As far as I know, they are complete BS. There is no "agreement" in an End User License Agreement. Take a look at contract which implies agreement, more specifically, contractual terms. These "agreements" are thrown at people who may or may not even be of age to enter into an agreement. They are completely non-binding, and companies like Microsoft agrees so much to their end of the agreement that they change the EULA at will when they feel like it.
The day that I get some kind of merchantability out of a product and a 3rd party is present and I actually agree to a EULA with a signature not a forced "Click here to continue" is the day that I'll pay any attention to an EULA. Until then, I just consider them welfare for lawyers.
I think one of the biggest issues with electric cars and plug-in hybrids is not battery life, but charge time. Right now, Tesla has a car that goes 200 miles on a charge at freeway speeds. The problem is that it takes several hours to charge it. When it takes hours to charge a car, then range is a problem. If you could charge a car in minutes, then a slightly reduced range is less of an issue.
What about instead of putting the power lines on the side of the road, put them in the road, and make cars like slot cars or trollies? Have gas as a backup and for roads where its not economically viable to embed the power into the roads, but to me this seems to be the best compromise between individual vehicles and public transportation.
Right now this is a cat and mouse game. I've come across captchas that I cannot do. However, in 2020 computers are supposed to be as smart as a human. So, when that happens, how can we then differentiate between them?
Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky was utterly irrelevant to the case at hand, as the only allegations of impropriety were related to infidelity, which is not what the lawsuit was supposed to be about.
If someone spent $40 million dollars digging dirt on _anyone_ something will come up. Being that only a BJ came up after $40 million in research actually proves that Clinton is almost a saint.
This was a witch hunt, plain and simple. Just a precursor to the commander in chief we have today and the loss of rights of everyone in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a world where jaywalking gets you automatically direct-withdrawal fines from your bank account? And how about when your credit score goes down because you took a right-on-red where you weren't supposed to, therefore marking you as "risky?"
Imagine you live in Virginia in 2007.
In Virginia, you now get civil _AND_ criminal charges against you for running a red light or speeding. The civil stuff comes in fines starting around $1,000 payable in 3 payments which are independant of the criminal charges. If you don't have the cash handy, then you are sent to collections, your credit gets screwed, and I would imagine that they then do the same tricks they have for years like not telling you that your registration is expired on your car, so it lapses and then you are subject to having your car impounded on the spot w/o a court appearance or legal represntation whatsoever.
I'M SICK AND FUCKING TIRED OF DRIVING BEING A CRIME.
To be clear, I don't want to drive. Its dangerous both physically and legally. I'm a pretty boring guy, but driving on the US highways is a very risky behavior.
Another true story. I drove a "stolen" car for somewhere between 1 and 2 years without knowing it. When I was in highschool, I did a stupid highschool thing and took off for a weekend. My dumbass father reported my car (registered in his name) as stolen, and never reported it as unstolen. I went to renew my plates or something at DMV, and they told me that they couldn't because my car was reported stolen.
Now, imagine if this scanning thing was in place, and I got pulled over? I would guess that a number of "stolen" vehicles are driven by their owners.
Now, with the people with warrants. I mean, how tough is it to find these people just by looking? Don't you have to show 10 forms of ID to do anything? Also, most stolen cars are not driven as is outside of joy rides.
As a citizen, I don't feel more comfortable or safe having the police scan license plates. I feel less safe and comfortable.
Were it not for amateur videographers, it would have been the victims word alone versus the cops, and everyone knows the judge will side with the cops.
Now, when the government or even a private store puts surveillance cameras around to monitor traffic possibly have an "eye in the sky" for crimes and whatnot, of course the privacy extremists stand up for everyone's privacy. And it seems as though this gets knocked down because the philosophical argument is "Hey, what kind of privacy to you expect in public?" Which is a pretty good argument.
However, the inverse is not true in the new fascists regime. The public areas are not public, and we, the public are subject to their permission to do normal and legal things in public.
Seeing that you already own an iMac, I think the bigger question is why are you so insistent on running Linux on your Mac?
I was wondering the same thing. I love linux, but I see no advantage of running it on my iMac. Linux runs great headless on cheap hardware, and OS X has X11, NFS, a great terminal application _AND_ it runs OS X apps. I leave my iMac on 24/7, and its power management spins down the harddisk and turns off the monitor. All of the software to hardware stuff like my bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the eject button on the keyboard, my external firewire harddrive and other 3rd party hardware "just works". It takes about 20 seconds or so for it to wake up, and when I'm done I just walk away and it just goes to sleep.
Even though Linux is "free" it would probably cost me $5-15/month in electricity to run it on my Mac, and it would at the same time put more wear and tear on my hardware.
I've not been a fan of emulation or dual booting or any of that jazz for years. Lower end hardware is cheap enough and powerful enough to justify just buying another box instead of overloading one box. So, I really don't understand the problem here, or how running OS X apps on Apple hardware using the Linux OS is a solution to anything. OS X runs great on iMacs. Linux runs great on plenty of inexpensive hardware that is accessable from the Mac running OS X with no problem, or at least much less of a problem than running OS X apps on top of Linux on Apple hardware.
OH, and I forgot that you can buy parallels for OS X, and run Linux/Windows/FreeBSD or whatever you want without a second box. So, remind me again what running Linux as the primary OS on an iMac gives somebody ?
I'm not sure that for the usually simple task of command line processing, I'd like to learn a whole new lex/yacc syntax thingy.
0 4/09/1539255 and http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/0 4/09/1539255
The syntax for gperf is not that bad, but its simply the wrong tool for the job as far as commandline processing goes.
gperf simply makes a "perfect" has function for searching a predetermined static lookup. It provides no mechanism for arbitrary arguments like input filenames or modifiers (like a filter for including/excluding things, or increasing/decreasing something) nor does it check for conflicting options or missing options.
gperf would give you nothing besides a match of input to a state. gperf would provide nothing for a common commandline like: --include="*.txt" --exclude="*.backup" --with-match="some text|or this text" --limit-input=5megabytes
getopt or just rolling your own if/else if ladder or switch statement would provide much more flexibility over gperf.
Now, with parsing a configuration file, gperf might help, but for processing commandline arguments, gperf is simply the wrong tool for the job.
This is like the second or third slashdot posting from IBM's developer works that is simply a well formated nonsense. Past examples are http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/
This is silly on both slashdot and IBMs part.
MercExchange is a pseudo-business front for a patent lawyer. I did research on them when I first heard about them, and its pretty clear what they are.
This ruling on allowing the "buy it now" feature seems clearly the right one, but the thing that really bothers me is that I don't see parasites like this going away, and what is going to happen once something stupid like this actually gets backed. The SCO fiasco and one click patent are great examples.
I mean how much time and money and effort is wasted on crap like this? These things really bother me, because I don't see them becoming less likely to happen in the future, but the opposite. It would be nice if the US had in its legal system where the aggressor/plaintif had to pay both sides of a lawsuits bills if the court rules in favor of the defendant.
Although lawyers like ambulance chasers don't have the most respect, I see them as a necessary evil to keep people/businesses honest, but I simply see no value in these business methods, patent, and intellectual property parasites.
I don't get why people would like this. I hate renting. I want to buy it and be done with it, not be on the hook to continually pay and pay and pay forever even after the purchase price has been met multiple times over.
I'm actually the opposite. I rent my DVR. I did w/o TV for a while, so I returned the DVR and didn't have to pay for it or cable, no big deal. Then I went back with the service, and I got an upgraded DVR (HDMI output and larger harddrive) w/o having to dispose of or buy a new item.
I consider all electronics purchases as renting. They are disposable, and they can be replaced for a fraction of the cost at a later date. To me, owning and renting is basically the same, but with renting I have an easy way out and don't have to dispose of the item or sell it which is often a waste of time because a new one is better and cheaper.
How often is your server 40 kilometers from the nearest switch?
My mom's basement is HUGE!
Another example is the iPod itself. The lack of an explicit power button, also mentioned in the article, isn't a big deal. But having no separate volume control really harms the usability of the device.
I have a 80 gig video iPod, which I guess is the most recent model. The volume is accessable when a track is playing by virtually rotating the round thingy (sorry, I can't describe it any better).
Is this UI different than older ones?
I'm not an iPod fanboy or anything. I hardly ever use it, and actually regret the purchase.
It seems like the iPhone (which I'm still drooling over!) seem pretty hard to use for the blind. Some sort of non-visual feedback is pretty much required for them!
At least the phone comes with voice to text for hearing imaired!
Oops, wrong phone, I guess the iPhone does not work for the deaf, blind, or those without hands either.
Sometimes I think the American attitude of thou shalt be accessable to anything with a pulse goes a little to far.
The main reason is that once people use Windows, they get locked in. Incompatible file formats, refusal to interoperate with anything other than Windows.
That statement is so wrong. AFAIK, NIS doesn't work on Windows. Without Cygwin, and even with it, most of the Linux software does not work in Windows. OS X apps don't work on Windows.
What locks people in is that for most people Windows simply is "good enough". Just like for most people crappy cars (like the one I drive) -- because its good enough. McDonalds is the #1 restraunt in the world, not because its known to be great food, because its good enough for the money.
For those that can afford to and know better _and_ care, they choose things more carefully. Remember, 98% of all of the action in the world is below the 2nd standard deviation above the mean. And it always will be that way.
In other words, yes, this password was prone to be dict'ed.
Who cares?
I have yet to of heard about a successful "dict'ed" account crack.
This type of issue is actually the most common. Leaving a password laying around.
Its also common for passwords to be given away via social engineering, man in the middle attacks, sniffed when being proudly displayed in plaintext, or similar (So the passwords complexity does not matter here).
Default passwords are a common source of breakin.
Its also common for a password to be compromised because it is being reused, and one of the hosts that it was used on was compromised.
In summary, passwords are a weak form of authentication. No matter how "good" they are. I have yet to of heard of a guessed or dictionary password break aside from the movie Wargames. I have heard of some people from ISPs who have had people that knew people guess easy to guess passwords though. But 99.999% of all password compromises are not due to weak passwords. Its from either still using passwords, or from weak password management.
I know this is completely off topic, but I'm just curious: Why do you think illegal drugs are still illegal in the US?
Money, power, and racism mostly. Also, the people in the government simply don't have it on their priority radar to undo the obvious wrong. Kinda like all of the junk laws on the books like things that are "illegal" for you to do between consenting adults in private.
The origins of the drug laws in the US are mostly racially motivated.
And why wouldn't Korea have illegal drugs?
The reason I brought this up was the racial part. AFAIK, drug laws in other countries do not have their origins in racism like here in the US. I find it interesting and unanswered as to how common it is for a mostly benign drug like marijuana is almost universally illegal in the world. It must be a conspiracy, right?
What's wrong with selective breeding? It's proven to work, it's without any real drawbacks, it's cheap and it's easy to do.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best ones.
I did not read the article, so I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I thought the same thing.
What does cloning give you? Because even if you have the best genetically 100% reproducible drug sniffing organism, it still has to be _trained_ to do its task at hand.
Now, I know why most of the illegal drugs are still illegal in the US, but why does Korea have illegal drugs?
It has been a pet gripe of mine: why do developers insist that data entry can be performed with a mouse?
:) And neither are their PHBs.
Because developers are not data entry people
Look at how great the commandline interface is for UNIX and linux. Why is it great? Because the people that made it use it. Now, look at the GUI land for UNIX/Linux. People that use Linux don't care as much about it, and it shows. Although it is getting better, but its so far behind OS X and even Windows in GUI.
Data entry types of things are fastest if there is a way to input the data normally without a mouse, and then some kind of way to do "abnormal" things like fix a wrong field or something in a slightly different way (using tab, function key, or at a last resort use a mouse).
Now, here is a pet pieve of mine. How about input via a mouse with a GUI widget that looks like a rotary knob? Yes, that is right, the user is expected to use the mouse to adjust things in a circular manor.
I've seen this more than once, and I can just picture the PHB convincing the developer this is a good idea.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of robots teaching autistic children to be social slightly ironic?
Oxymoronic maybe, because as far as I know social implies like organisms.
But the price that the gas station charges is only slightly related to the cost of the fuel. The price of gas down the street is more likely to be a factor. If you make them start compensating for temperature, they will just hike the price. This whole thing is silly unless you find one station with warmer gas than another, giving them an unfair advantage.
Retail gas is not a money maker - the little convenience store is what makes money.
I've heard the latter part there many times, and I believe it. Sounds like the gas/oil people have the same power structure as the movie and music business.
Oh, and BTW, I think suing over this is stupid. From the summary:
The fuel industry claims that the costs of installing temerature-adjustment sensors on every pump would be prohibitively high. These sensors are already installed in Canada, however, where the colder temperatures favor consumers.
I could see the gas people paying for the lawsuit, installing these "temerature" sensors, which is a one time cost of say $100,000, and then raising the cost of fuel to make that much up every week.
Sure the squeaky wheel gets oiled, but you may not like the oil they use.
Buying CDs and ripping them is more difficult than simply downloading them, or paying a site a few pennies to download them. AllofMP3 was so popular because for a couple cents getting music was even more convenient. You didn't even have to search through pirate sites to find them, they were all there in one place. They paid for the music because it was convenient, not because they wanted to make sure money went to the artists.
Basically, what this is saying is that AllofMP3 has a better business model than the current RIAA one, which I agree with completely.
Downloading crap from pirate sites is work. You have to search for the crap. Figure out if the quality is what you are looking for. Often times the downloads are not labeled correctly, may or may not include album artwork, you then have to then move the files from where you downloaded them to your archive once the download is finished and you are happy with the results. Often, you have to delete the stuff because it is not what you want. Then there are downloads where the seeders die off or whatnot.
Regardless of the ethical, legal, or any other argument one can make about pirating music and/or movies, it is not "free" unless yo u consider your time and effort worth nothing. All the time people pay different prices for things due to the convenience and quanity of the purchase. Buy hotdogs from a warehouse store. $.10/dog when bought by the palate. Buy hotdogs from grocery store. $.20/dog bought by the 8-16 dogs per package. Buy 1 hotdot from convenience store. $2.00/dog.
I know I'm a minority here on slashdot because I actually watch TV on a TV, but a majority of the people I know do this. I actually pay extra for the convenience of having a DVR from my cable company which records shows for me, and I can watch them when I want and skip the commercials, rewind, etc. My cable comes with music channels, but they suck and I don't pay any attention to those. Would I pay for a decent music service? Yes. I would view it to simply be more convenient than using torrent sites, but I'm forced by a lack of a business model to get the music I want the way I want it, so I either do without or on occasion I'll download music when I feel the urge. Now, I place about zero value on a majority of what I download because 1) I didn't pay for it, so I don't care if I lose it. 2) Many of the MP3s are of lower quality than I would prefer. They are OK for background listening or on the computer, but they are unacceptable to listen to on my car or home stereo. They are the equivalent of FM that I don't pay for.
Classical music fans tend to be more concerned with sound quality than the average listener of popular music, so it makes sense these formats would be targeted at them.
I think its a function of age and budget vs musical genre.
You can get "audiophile" recordings of blues, rock, classical, jazz, but it simply makes no sense to get a gourmet presentation of a wonka bar, which is pretty much what a lot of pop music is.
I've been an audio nut since I was a teenager, but it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I could afford the stuff because its not cheap.
It's really all come down to games for me. If my games would all run on Linux I'd be there tomorrow.
All I can say is I'm glad I don't have anything important like games to dictate what OS I use. Yes, in some respects I'm being a troll/sarcastic here, but also games appear to be _the_ driving force for technical people here on slashdot to tie them to Windows. Other less technical users simply don't know any better.
Maybe I'm just an eletist or whatever, but I simply don't need the headaches that come with Windows. I had a couple of crappy jobs back in the 1999-2000 era that required Windows, but other than that I've been Windows free since 1997 or so both personally and professionally.
To me, the OS is just software. Just like I have a choice in shells, window managers, desktop environments, web servers, whatever. For many reasons, technical, stylish, reliability, ease of use, ease of maintenance, etc, I simply can't find a reason to use Windows.
If games were that important to me, I would buy a console, or two or three.
We need a category "Incorrect".
We've been asking for this for years. Or -1 wrong, or something similar. Its frustrating to see completely incorrect informtion being moderated as insightful or informative when in fact its completely wrong, but sounds good.
As long as we keep wishing for it, it will eventually come.
My phone with SprintPCS is about $80/mo, unlimited nights and weekends...I think about 1000 anytime minutes, SMS is extra, but, I don't use that much, nor do I ever come close to the daytime minutes.
I heard the other day on NPR how it was difficult for Apple or any other hardware manufactuer to get into the phone market because of the service cartel. Personally, I think talking about $80/mo as if its nothing is crazy. I pay like $30/mo for my phone and I think I'm getting ripped off (~ 12-15 of that is taxes and fees and other crap).
I simply don't understand how I can use the internet for $20-40/mo, unlimited "minutes" worldwide access, but talking to someone on the phone frequently costs more?
To me, in 2007, phone service should be less than $20/mo, but being that people are willing to spend over $100/household for phones, the phone service people will gladly take their money.
And therein lies the problem. Microsoft views virtualization as the road to rampant piracy and I can't blame them given their software validation model. It is all about money in the end.
First, when you are as wealthy as Microsft is, money is not a goal. Its power. Same with the *IAA people.
Virtualization is a blow to this power game. Microsoft was _very_ lucky in the beginning. Right place at the right time with the right deal with the right company. I mean, if I were to be teleported back to the late 70s to early 90s and tell me that this DOS thing would make someone to be the richest person in the world, I simply would not believe it. Without Microsoft's power games into preloading and freequently double billing their OSes on a vast majority of the computers in the world, their success simply would not be the same as it is today. Virtualization removes this preinstall/bundle "tax". It makes Microsoft just another software company like every other one, and that is not what they want.
Now, as an extention to this power thing. Why in 2007 are we still talkinga about EULAs? As far as I know, they are complete BS. There is no "agreement" in an End User License Agreement. Take a look at contract which implies agreement, more specifically, contractual terms. These "agreements" are thrown at people who may or may not even be of age to enter into an agreement. They are completely non-binding, and companies like Microsoft agrees so much to their end of the agreement that they change the EULA at will when they feel like it.
The day that I get some kind of merchantability out of a product and a 3rd party is present and I actually agree to a EULA with a signature not a forced "Click here to continue" is the day that I'll pay any attention to an EULA. Until then, I just consider them welfare for lawyers.
I think one of the biggest issues with electric cars and plug-in hybrids is not battery life, but charge time. Right now, Tesla has a car that goes 200 miles on a charge at freeway speeds. The problem is that it takes several hours to charge it. When it takes hours to charge a car, then range is a problem. If you could charge a car in minutes, then a slightly reduced range is less of an issue.
What about instead of putting the power lines on the side of the road, put them in the road, and make cars like slot cars or trollies? Have gas as a backup and for roads where its not economically viable to embed the power into the roads, but to me this seems to be the best compromise between individual vehicles and public transportation.
Right now this is a cat and mouse game. I've come across captchas that I cannot do. However, in 2020 computers are supposed to be as smart as a human. So, when that happens, how can we then differentiate between them?
Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky was utterly irrelevant to the case at hand, as the only allegations of impropriety were related to infidelity, which is not what the lawsuit was supposed to be about.
/ starr.costs/
This is 100% correct. Look here: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/02/01
If someone spent $40 million dollars digging dirt on _anyone_ something will come up. Being that only a BJ came up after $40 million in research actually proves that Clinton is almost a saint.
This was a witch hunt, plain and simple. Just a precursor to the commander in chief we have today and the loss of rights of everyone in the process.