I have no idea what they were thinking, but it could easily be that they know there's no way to secure the file, so why give people a false sense of security?
If you leave it in a file that is plaintext and unencrypted, perhaps people will treat it like they treat their wallet or their social security card. If you encrypt it, you've done *nothing* to help security, but have led a much broader set of users to believe you have.
When money is involved, people will make a reasonable effort in their attempts to steal it. Writing some code to use thread injection and a filesystem filter to grab it as the software decrypts it is only a slight bit more complicated for anyone who knows that level of OS internals.
- One video doesn't show you how a UX works - A company like Microsoft will not change the UX on software used by a billion people without cold hard facts that its better for most of them. The scale that Microsoft invests in UX analysis and testing dwarfs what even big software companies spend on their software in general.
Its a pretty strong statement to make, from someone who has neither used it, nor done any usability testing themselves, to declare that its a big step back.
Poor patents are issued today because the system is overwhelmed by submissions from individuals and corporations paying tends of thousands per filing.
And you think things would get better by making them *free*!? If you think an idea is worth protecting, suck it up and pay the money. Tens of thousands of individuals do.
If you don't, all you need to do is publish something about it. When you had that idea in '06 (and its not anything new -- active LCD 3D wasn't uncommon even in the early 90's, and I saw this done back then!), you could've whipped up some software to do it, or tossed a blog posting online and that would've counted as prior art.
And its trivial for a carrier to tell that the data coming off your phone doesn't match mobile device usage heuristics, or is reporting unusual browser headers, or using ports that phones won't normally use.
And then they can whack you with huge fees for it. (Read your TOS)
Unfortunately,/. has been the Fox News of the tech world for a decade now.
I think the real problem is that readers who weren't around even prior to having user accounts don't remember that it was just a site for collecting links by a bunch of friends on the Internet. Those same non-editors are still the ones tossing stories on there.
The issue is more that/. presents their employees as editors when, for 15 years, they have not been editors. While there is news to be had on/., you'll get more out of it realizing that its just a hub of a particular type of nerd group-think, and reading it with that in mind.
Decades ago, they did. These days they're sophisticated, networked computers calculating odds across the entire casino to keep the payout percentage *exactly* at the state mandated minimum while adjusting payout patterns to keep slot players in their seat.
So you are wonderning why they aren't random? When you take in a billion in cash, and the state mandates you pay back 97% of it, you're talking about a change in statistics shifting 30 million dollars in profits. Missing that percentage by.01% is still $300k. Going under, you are breaking the law. With millions of dollars at stake when skating that line, no one is going to leave it to random chance.
No, you are full of shit. Slot machines are not random, in any sense. Modern ones are networked, and vary their payouts based on the playing patterns in the machines around them. Play slowing down? People moving between machines (ever wonder WHY there are slot club cards?), the computers will dole out various sized jackpots to keep people in their seat. If an entire row is full of people who aren't moving around and are cycling a lot of money? Payouts will drop.
Its all totally legal, as long as the slot machines meet the local laws' requirements for payout percentages.
Is it also asshat to set Automatic Updates to download updates automatically and ask me when I'm ready to install them? Because I've had unsaved changes destroyed by automatic installation of updates and automatic restart of the computer under Windows XP, and I'm considering buying a computer with Windows 7.
As long as you do install them in a timely manner. Otherwise, let the OS do what it needs to do and complain to your software vendors for their buggy software. The OS notifies the applications that a restart is needed, and the applications can request to be re-launched and given back state they asked to have cached during the reboot.
Properly written apps shouldn't lose you any data on an forced OS reboot.
Windows Security Essentials covers both virus and spyware scanning, and is free. And as you said, Microsoft pushes out updates fairly regularly to their malware removal tools.
As long as you're on an up-to-date validly-licensed copy of Windows 7, and you don't do some asshat thing like shut off automatic updates, Win7 is pretty solid out of the box. MSE isn't there by default, but I believe if Windows detects you don't have some other virus scanner installed, it will list it as an important update in Windows Update.
First off, most cars already do this. I have absolutely no problem with either law enforcement or the courts being able to access them in an accident. Being able to prove claims that are being made by people involved in an accident will result in fairer trials in criminal and civil cases involving them. It'll help keep our insane insurance rates down.
And I would *much* rather see taxing on usage rather than taxing on flat rates. Right now, people with less efficient cars pay a greater percentage of fuel tax revenue, which pays for the roads. And people who rarely drive their car, or have a lot of cars, subsidize the people who actually do a ton of driving. I do about 6000 miles of driving across my four cars, and yet I pay as much money as four people who each drive 15,000 miles.
But even though that is absolutely a better taxation model, its *not* what the black boxes are for. And black boxes are *not* new, as virtually every car has them already anyway.
I'm posting from a plane cruising over Montana right now, and without turning around I can see my laptop, a MacBook, an iPad and four Kindles. That doesn't count mine in the seat pocket.
That's from a pool of 15 seats I can see.
I would guess on my walk to the can a few minutes ago there was at least one Kindle open in every row of the plan, missing maybe a small handful.
I don't doubt Amazon's claims in the least.
And if you're concerned about your book not being readable, virtually every format out there is cracked these days. You can future-proof your collection by ensuring you archive them in an unprotected format. (And keep in mind, stripping DRM for the purpose of interoperability is legally just fine, so you're not in any morally abiguous place doing so...)
Windows, like Linux, almost never actually needs to be rebooted for a setting like that to take place.
Windows, like Linux, will likely require some service to be restarted.
Now, it may be more common for someone to just restart the service in Linux, but there aren't a lot of 70 year old grandparents running Linux.
I know the command line to restart networking on both Windows and Linux. I wouldn't have to reboot either. But it sure as hell is easier to tell my parents to just reboot.
If you're logged into Facebook, almost any site can be aware of it.
Bing requires not only logging into facebook but granting Bing permission to access your profile. If you don't do that, you've got nothing to lose.
That said, if you're okay with the astronomical amount of data that Facebook keeps on you, I'm puzzled why you think giving Bing a small feed into it to make your searches better is a problem?
Slashdot Mirror
*facepalm*
Premature. English isn't that hard, kids.
I have no idea what they were thinking, but it could easily be that they know there's no way to secure the file, so why give people a false sense of security?
If you leave it in a file that is plaintext and unencrypted, perhaps people will treat it like they treat their wallet or their social security card. If you encrypt it, you've done *nothing* to help security, but have led a much broader set of users to believe you have.
When money is involved, people will make a reasonable effort in their attempts to steal it. Writing some code to use thread injection and a filesystem filter to grab it as the software decrypts it is only a slight bit more complicated for anyone who knows that level of OS internals.
A couple points:
- One video doesn't show you how a UX works
- A company like Microsoft will not change the UX on software used by a billion people without cold hard facts that its better for most of them. The scale that Microsoft invests in UX analysis and testing dwarfs what even big software companies spend on their software in general.
Its a pretty strong statement to make, from someone who has neither used it, nor done any usability testing themselves, to declare that its a big step back.
Poor patents are issued today because the system is overwhelmed by submissions from individuals and corporations paying tends of thousands per filing.
And you think things would get better by making them *free*!? If you think an idea is worth protecting, suck it up and pay the money. Tens of thousands of individuals do.
If you don't, all you need to do is publish something about it. When you had that idea in '06 (and its not anything new -- active LCD 3D wasn't uncommon even in the early 90's, and I saw this done back then!), you could've whipped up some software to do it, or tossed a blog posting online and that would've counted as prior art.
And its trivial for a carrier to tell that the data coming off your phone doesn't match mobile device usage heuristics, or is reporting unusual browser headers, or using ports that phones won't normally use.
And then they can whack you with huge fees for it. (Read your TOS)
This is the US -- evolution isn't covered in biology. What makes you think that potato pollenation would be?
Shit, I doubt most biology doctoral students would've run across that.
Unfortunately, /. has been the Fox News of the tech world for a decade now.
I think the real problem is that readers who weren't around even prior to having user accounts don't remember that it was just a site for collecting links by a bunch of friends on the Internet. Those same non-editors are still the ones tossing stories on there.
The issue is more that /. presents their employees as editors when, for 15 years, they have not been editors. While there is news to be had on /., you'll get more out of it realizing that its just a hub of a particular type of nerd group-think, and reading it with that in mind.
The acquisition *hasn't happened yet*.
Just to be crystal clear. Buying a company is a LONG process. A company that size, it could *easily* be a year or more.
Decades ago, they did. These days they're sophisticated, networked computers calculating odds across the entire casino to keep the payout percentage *exactly* at the state mandated minimum while adjusting payout patterns to keep slot players in their seat.
So you are wonderning why they aren't random? When you take in a billion in cash, and the state mandates you pay back 97% of it, you're talking about a change in statistics shifting 30 million dollars in profits. Missing that percentage by .01% is still $300k. Going under, you are breaking the law. With millions of dollars at stake when skating that line, no one is going to leave it to random chance.
No, you are full of shit. Slot machines are not random, in any sense. Modern ones are networked, and vary their payouts based on the playing patterns in the machines around them. Play slowing down? People moving between machines (ever wonder WHY there are slot club cards?), the computers will dole out various sized jackpots to keep people in their seat. If an entire row is full of people who aren't moving around and are cycling a lot of money? Payouts will drop.
Its all totally legal, as long as the slot machines meet the local laws' requirements for payout percentages.
Is it also asshat to set Automatic Updates to download updates automatically and ask me when I'm ready to install them? Because I've had unsaved changes destroyed by automatic installation of updates and automatic restart of the computer under Windows XP, and I'm considering buying a computer with Windows 7.
As long as you do install them in a timely manner. Otherwise, let the OS do what it needs to do and complain to your software vendors for their buggy software. The OS notifies the applications that a restart is needed, and the applications can request to be re-launched and given back state they asked to have cached during the reboot.
Properly written apps shouldn't lose you any data on an forced OS reboot.
Windows Security Essentials covers both virus and spyware scanning, and is free. And as you said, Microsoft pushes out updates fairly regularly to their malware removal tools.
As long as you're on an up-to-date validly-licensed copy of Windows 7, and you don't do some asshat thing like shut off automatic updates, Win7 is pretty solid out of the box. MSE isn't there by default, but I believe if Windows detects you don't have some other virus scanner installed, it will list it as an important update in Windows Update.
Take the tinfoil hat off.
First off, most cars already do this. I have absolutely no problem with either law enforcement or the courts being able to access them in an accident. Being able to prove claims that are being made by people involved in an accident will result in fairer trials in criminal and civil cases involving them. It'll help keep our insane insurance rates down.
And I would *much* rather see taxing on usage rather than taxing on flat rates. Right now, people with less efficient cars pay a greater percentage of fuel tax revenue, which pays for the roads. And people who rarely drive their car, or have a lot of cars, subsidize the people who actually do a ton of driving. I do about 6000 miles of driving across my four cars, and yet I pay as much money as four people who each drive 15,000 miles.
But even though that is absolutely a better taxation model, its *not* what the black boxes are for. And black boxes are *not* new, as virtually every car has them already anyway.
...And you don't think *that* would lead to a major war?
Not when we need to borrow money to pay for it.
Infinite expense and risk?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Perhaps until today you just weren't paying any attention to it.
I'm posting from a plane cruising over Montana right now, and without turning around I can see my laptop, a MacBook, an iPad and four Kindles. That doesn't count mine in the seat pocket.
That's from a pool of 15 seats I can see.
I would guess on my walk to the can a few minutes ago there was at least one Kindle open in every row of the plan, missing maybe a small handful.
I don't doubt Amazon's claims in the least.
And if you're concerned about your book not being readable, virtually every format out there is cracked these days. You can future-proof your collection by ensuring you archive them in an unprotected format. (And keep in mind, stripping DRM for the purpose of interoperability is legally just fine, so you're not in any morally abiguous place doing so...)
I've never had any problem with converting from azw to anything else, or anything else to Mobi and losing anything.
Hell, a library loaner in Adobe format converted to MOBI looks better than half the crap these days on the Kindle, since Topaz format took over.
And if you don't mind giving the finger to the publishers for pricing ebooks at or above print costs, you can keep 'em after.
Strange, having two hands on my keyboard sounds good, but talking on the phone wasn't my first thought for what to do with the other hand.
Windows, like Linux, almost never actually needs to be rebooted for a setting like that to take place.
Windows, like Linux, will likely require some service to be restarted.
Now, it may be more common for someone to just restart the service in Linux, but there aren't a lot of 70 year old grandparents running Linux.
I know the command line to restart networking on both Windows and Linux. I wouldn't have to reboot either. But it sure as hell is easier to tell my parents to just reboot.
If you want to fixate on one fact that pretty close to no one actually cares about, then yes. That's a triumph of DRM.
If you're logged into Facebook, almost any site can be aware of it.
Bing requires not only logging into facebook but granting Bing permission to access your profile. If you don't do that, you've got nothing to lose.
That said, if you're okay with the astronomical amount of data that Facebook keeps on you, I'm puzzled why you think giving Bing a small feed into it to make your searches better is a problem?
Its the logout link under the Facebook icon.
If you don't log into FB and grant Bing permissions to your social feed, you won't get any of it.
But for a lot of people, its pretty damn handy.
IIRC, and I may not be, I think core memory needs refreshing, too... odds are there's no data at all in it at this point.
I haven't mowed my lawn in almost two years.
I might need an A10 with depleted uranium shells to get through it.