If you were correct, at any point Microsoft could have inserted a clause in the vastly different EULA's that evolve with every product release to disallow such bundling. It would be easy to insert and word properly, easy to enforce (and legally fair) and would cause less fuss than "we don't need you"-type announcements. If you're going to bundle Windows and sell Windows, we require nothing else but Windows to be installed (or all things to be optional on first boot so people can choose from a "install the crap or not" menu).
But they don't. This announcement isn't about bundlers. This is about another revenue stream. And it's at the expense of MS's largest customers (the OEM system builders). I have a feeling this may be hastily backtracked on, or cause a lot of hurt.
All the flimsiness of a cheap USB keyboard would still be outweighed by that tacky cover.
Nice idea to put the keyboard in a cover. But so ridiculously thin means it will either break or the underlying matrix will be destroyed long before the usable life of the product itself. And isn't it just recognition that tablet-only input is insufficient? All you've done is made a laptop with a fancy thin keyboard, in essence. And thin keyboards are hard to type nicely on (travel distance is one of the best metric for judging a keyboard), especially if they are on a hard surface (which is what this would need - so my portable tablet PC now needs a desk to hold the keyboard!)
I have a roll-up-able keyboard in my parts cupboard. Useful for taking to people's houses to eliminate the keyboard as a problem. Although the keys are thicker, that seems to be through choice because the base surface and connectors are't, and yet it's waterproof, roll-able, costs literally pence, etc. And, despite being 90% rubber, that's infinitely more sturdy than that 3mm thick thing they expect you to type on.
Having a keyboard is a good idea. The tablet obviously NEEDS a keyboard. Having THAT keyboard, and as your "cover" (so people will rely on it to fend off certain other objects) seems quite stupid.
I still don't see the advantage of that over, say, a laptop or even just having the tablet on its own.
I find it sad that people actually think AI or any sort of AI is actually present here, or improving when they read about things like this.
There is no intelligence here. Nothing. There's no guesswork, only statistics, rigorously calculated and applied the same every single time. It's a heuristic. It's programmed. It's immutable. It's basically a targeted improvement on a naive brute-force algorithm.
That's *not* how intelligence works. To be honest, the nearest thing to "intelligence" we've had recently is the Kinect, but only because it was based on a genetic algorithm at one point and tweaked incessantly. And even that is more brute-force and dedicated processors than anything else.
There has NEVER been, in the whole field of AI, a logical leap to join two abstract concepts. There has never been discovery or invention (no matter how minor) on the same scale as even a pigeon. No machine ever worked out something that it wasn't told how to do DOWN TO THE LETTER.
This is not AI. Your science fiction is, and for the foreseeable future still will be, just that - fiction. There's nothing a computer does today that isn't just 60's theory and ideas applied with a sufficiently large amount of processing power to come up with pretty predictable results that do not approach AI. Yes, eventually, brute-force will allow us to come to resemble intelligence but it will not be intelligence, and brute-force is the most expensive thing to apply to a problem like that (and, strangely, own our intelligence is the cheapest!).
Literally, the closest we get is genetic algorithms and lettings things just run off on their own, and we're pretty sure even that's just an illusion and not crossed the line into something we would consider actual intelligence. There's an example of a GA put to work on a chip design to distinguish two frequencies of input. When the input is of one frequency, it activates one output, when the input is of another frequency, it activates another. The GA "evolved" through generations based only on selection for those criteria and ended up with ingenious solution that took years of analysis to understand fully.
But even that isn't "intelligence", so much as blind luck and brute-force. No machine, for the next 50-100 years at least, will be able to hold even quite a boring conversation with you (go look at the transcripts of Turing Test entries from as far back as you can and now - improvement but still no magic insight that makes it seem human unless you're terminally stupid). It certainly won't have a consistent or reasoned opinion. And certainly not one that it come to by itself and wasn't just a case of it picking a contrary / popular opinion deliberately.
Prove me wrong, by all means, but sci-fi is for the TV. I still can't get my phone to recognise my voice on a simple phrase 8 times out of 10 and that has vast quantities of brute-force, previous patterns, pattern-matching code and statistics to work from. Sure, it *looks* impressive and intelligent when you say "Where is the post office?" and it analyses the waveform to think you said "post office" with 85% certainty and then stick that into a basic search to see what comes up in the local area. But it's NOT understanding what you said. Not by a long shot. If I'd said "Where's the post? Office?", it will get it completely, 100% absolutely wrong and I can't teach it to get it right even the same amount of the time that any trained animal would.
This is not AI. Please stop thinking it is. It's pseudo-related at best.
Right up until the day you find out that you were DoS'd by a compromised hospital computer on the outskirts of a student hospital network and managed to take out an entire healthcare provider in "retaliation".
Sure, they shouldn't be compromised, but you have no idea who their digital neighbours are and/or who you're actually attacking. Attacking back is one of the most stupid things to do, ever.
And one day you will get caught by the big-brother of the guy you pummel into the ground because of the digital equivalent of "we were told he was the guy who attacked us".
Meanwhile, some old grandma whose computer was used as an intermediate proxy to hide a hacker's traces (obtained by a click-and-run virus created by the hacker with barely a knowledge of how it worked) turns her machine on to find that her files were deleted / strange messages popped up / the PC was unbootable / whatever you did to them.
Or, even better, another of the hacker's targets was compromised and rather than directly attacked, it was used to goad you into attacking them so that when the police came looking, it was your IP dropping stuff into their compromised shares and not the original hacker (who could have cleared their traces).
I'm not saying it's true, but it could easily happen - this is what botnets are FOR - to hide some illicit activity that CAN be controlled by a human remotely so that you think it's coming from somewhere but it's really just a bot repeating the commands it is given from the real hacker's IP. You have no idea who you attacked or why (you could quite easily have been attacking his friends PC, for example, that he didn't want to get the blame for).
As the article suggests, you're the incomptent here, not them. You got goaded into attacking a random target that might well have just been a proxy and probably did so from an obvious IP that was traceable to you. And, guess what, I don't think "I was just retaliating for an attempted crime against myself" would have worked as a legal defence.
When I was younger, my brother came into my room and asked me to have a look at something. Some guy in an IRC chatroom claimed to be able to see all my brother's files because he was running an old version of mIRC (which, admittedly, he was).
"No problem," I said. "Get him to tell us the contents of our AUTOEXEC.BAT" (yep, that's how long ago). Cue copy-pasted unmodified AUTOEXEC.BAT from his own computer which didn't even come close to resembling the multiconfig, highly customised, DOS through Windows 98 config we'd made for our computers. Then he admitted he just wanted to "send us an update" which would have had a virus on it. Sadly, IRC pretty much reveals your IP address to everyone and most script-kiddies DIDN'T know how to proxy their connections back then.
Always wished we'd asked for a more sensitive file. It would have been much more interesting if we'd asked for some innocent-sounding file that we knew would contain his passwords or ISP login. As it was, he just got his IP banned for a while, I think.
Phone call I make? "This call may be recorded for training purposes".
Mail I send? Hell, yes, they should know what they are paying to post.
E-Mail I send? "The views in this email... blah blah blah... this email may be recorded".
Eavesdropping and brainwaves - There you have the already-imposed limit of it going "too far" anyway, and arguments into absurdity don't make your point - they just make you look stupid. "What next, they gonna come to my home and tell me I haven't been to work today and stop my salaray going into my bank account??!?!?!?"
But while you're an agent of the company, everything you do on company time, using company facilities, that communicates outside the company? It's ALREADY being monitored. Don't like it? Don't use company resources on company time to do your online banking (Why the hell would you do that anyway, and what would you have done 20 years ago when you COULDN'T do that?). Using personal internet connections on company time may still be a breach too, because you're supposed to be fucking working.
Nobody CARES about your phone call to your wife, or how much you have in your bank. I assure you, the IT department don't give a shit and wouldn't let anyone else just eavesdrop on private things anyway. But while you're being paid to work, bloody work, and you do so as a representative of the company. That means they can know exactly WHAT you're doing while you're supposed to be working (i.e. Did you call that customer a tosser? Are you defaming them on Facebook? Have you just obtained insider info from your pal at your rival?.
And in your lunch hour? They have no more requirement to supply you with a connection to Facebook or anything else than they have to give you a pool table in the staff room. The fact that it will get sniffed is neither here nor there - they just monitor everything and it's a workplace so you're supposed to be working.
You're at work. Get over it. If it worries you, use your own device and connection./me longs for the day when WORK meant WORK, and I'm not even an employer. I can't tell you how much slacking off I see on smartphones, Facebook, etc. Fine, if nothing NEEDS to be done at that moment but then I see those same people whinging about deadlines and pressure.
Because they were also required to provide home address details of the people actually applying (i.e. the CEO's, etc.) and nothing related to the company at all.
That's the part that was published and was never supposed to be, not the address of the company (which, in UK law at least, is legally required to be displayed somewhere at all places of business which is taken to include websites too!).
And you really think that oil etc. will last another 200 years, let alone 2000 or 200,000 (the last of which is the only one where you'll actually see animals start to "adapt" in any evolutionary term - i.e. all the dead animals haven't bred successfully).
We've done a lot worse than just burn the coal and oil. Hell, most of the substances we use everyday just do not exist in nature and there are billions of pieces of plastic floating in the oceans that weren't there 50 years ago. You don't get mercury pouring into the oceans if you just leave a planet without intelligent life.
But, that aside, just what precisely do you think will change? You're going to stop the world using oils, plastics and fuels before they run out anyway? Not a chance. It will not happen. It took decades to convince people not to use CFC's in large quantities but we still use them, and only converted because it was legislated, enforced and (to be honest) wasn't that much of a hassle in the first place. Cutting out the large items is actually orders-of-magnitude more difficult and unlikely to happen. And, actually, enforcing a "veggie-only" law and outlawing meat for everyone would actually do more, be cheaper and be accepted just as much (i.e. virtually zero).
Anything we build to replace those plastics and oil that we used will also require HUGE quantities of exactly those at first in order to scale up to the point where we replace them. Don't believe the hype about "sustainable" plastics because they are pretty much unusable for all the things we NEED to use plastics for, and cost SO MUCH ENERGY we can only supply it by burning fossil fuels or uranium. It's the "electric car" phenomenon all over again - you're just shifting the use of those materials and energies somewhere else instead, not actually "saving" anything.
Pretty much the only viable solution, when you take human nature into account (and not just ordinary individuals, who can do more eco-friendly things than governments ever do, but just the fact that you can't convince a country to stop using oil any more than you can outlaw meat), is to let them burn it all off.
Do the damage now. Do it as fast as possible. Run it out. Leave us with nothing. Then the 200 years of damage is unlikely to do much (on geological scales) to the planet at all long-term, and we won't have any excuse for not doing things differently. We'd actually lose quite a lot of things we take for granted up to and including our own lives in some cases (you can't sustain population numbers like we have now without the medicine and energy use we currently have). But that's the only "logical" outcome when you look at how the world works.
Stop faffing about pretending that an extra few years of oil before we suddenly make everything eco-friendly is going to make ANY difference at all. Just burn the stuff now. All of it. Run out the plastics until the prices rises to stupendous levels and we're forced to go back to older ways (which included chopping down and burning tress, I'd like to point out), reduce the population, or revert society back to an age where people couldn't guarantee food for themselves, let alone homes.
The problems of eco-destruction are nothing to do with climate change, animal extinctions or anything else. The problem is that when we run out, you have instantaneous anarchy and a dark-ages effect of not being able to do 1% of the things we take for granted. But actually, the BIGGEST problem is that our population would be decimated worldwide almost overnight. We can't grow, transport, store and treat enough food to feed people without consuming oil and oil-products galore. And have you seen the amount of fertile land it takes to sustain one person in even a third-world country? There simply isn't enough.
So stop TRYING to pretend we can actually do anything practical which doesn't lead to the same population decimation +/- 5 years anyway, accept it and burn the damn stuff up now finding alternatives. Hell, if that means space missions to find more resources (e.g. methane or something else we can burn) and other places to live, then do it. Do it now. Stop hanging around and pissing away resources on eco-initiatives that DO NOT WORK while waiting until the point that there isn't enough f
"only works in IE7" - stupid to pitch your whole business on IE7 working and still being available. Because this implies it wouldn't work on IE 8, 9, 10 whatever version Microsoft decides to force you onto in the future. If it worked on a modern version of IE, you wouldn't have a problem at all anyway. Hell, I'd go with stupid to run anything that "relies" on IE of any version. The entire ActiveX era should have taught everyone that.
"aren't even supposed to be shopping" - and thus why should shops or the IT department cater for them when it causes hassle/costs to do so?
Use a modern browser (of any brand), and don't cry to companies that they don't support IE6 "because that's all I have".
And, again, there's nothing stopping Firefox sitting alongside IE6. I have done that for one deployment. IE6 was specified and used and forcibly limited to only access the one site that absolutely required it (stupid fecking ActiveX). Everything else had to be done in Firefox. Nobody died, the IT did exactly what it should do, and there was no crying (but there WAS a big push to a non-IE way of doing things because of the hassle it caused which ended up with the company arguing with a bank - of all places - until they changed their system. Now there are no more IE icons on anyone's desktop).
1) This is mainly a publicity stunt with an end message.
2) If your billing system can't handle something like this, you probably shouldn't be running a business of that size.
3) Do you really think they will argue if you phone up and tell them you were using Opera or Firefox with User Agent Switching and ask for the original price?
4) Hitting customers in the wallet is the BEST way to grab their attention. I guarantee the response will be larger than if they'd put a 600-pixel-high red flashing banner warning about IE7 for IE7 users of their website.
5) The point is: The people "with no choice" do have a choice. They can pay more or not order at all. Which is incentive enough, if you use this company a lot, to see about upgrading / switching to a better browser. ("Why have our costs to suppliers go up 10%? Because we use IE6? Why don't we install Firefox just for that purpose if nothing else?").
IT has hidden behind the "the IT guys won't let us" banner for too long. If your systems absolutely, categorically cannot upgrade to later versions of IE or Firefox, then you have to wonder what your IT department actually DO for a living and just how much concern they have for the safety of your business data.
It's no different to saying "Sorry, I can't stop logging in as root on an unfirewalled machine to browse Flash websites, the IT guys won't let me." - That would wash with my employers about as much as asking them to use Sinclair ZX Spectrums and pocket calculators instead of PC's. And what better way to demonstrate how out-of-touch your IT department is than to charge them MORE because of the hassle they cause OTHERS by using that old software (let alone the potential hassle they cause themselves).
In British English, store is rarely used (unless it literally stores something and occasionally we call something a superstore but that's more likely to be a supermarket)..shop would probably work a lot better for us. But then, we have.uk and could shove it under that so there's really no need for these things at all.
I'm no more likely to go to a.store than a.com. In fact, just the opposite (why support someone's profit margins when they piss away money on.store and then charge ME for it, indirectly?). And, in fact, nothing changes here. I still don't know the URL for a lot of shops I use. Hell, I keep going to freecode.org instead of.com half the time. What draws me to and keeps me on a website is not the name, not the URL, but they damn product and how I find it (i.e. Google, bookmarks, etc.). Everything else is pointless.
Hell, there's a famous site called MoonFruit.com (I think it's.com anyway) for sending greetings cards, I can choose moneysupermarket to get car insurance (because that name makes a lot of sense!) and the best examples: Google. Facebook. Twitter. Nonsensical or spuriously-connected words. Having a TLD of any kind outside of the usual.co.uk /.com range (don't get me started on.uk.com!) actually just makes me wary of dealing with you. Because I know you probably spent a lot of money on a worthless domain and that will be reflected in your prices.
The point is probably that it wouldn't be "anyone's" firmware. What they are saying is that you can get a personal key, which you can manually add to your machines as a trusted key. For $99.
It doesn't mean that you can take you personal key and automatically install it on every computer and thus destroy their trusted boot mechanism or "replace" the Microsoft key with your own. You still can't tamper with the OS on any machine for which you don't have permission or access to modify the trusted boot keys. All you can do is affect machines you already control (i.e. you get to pay for the privilege of installing your own OS on your own computer).
That said, I think Red Hat are being too blinkered here. The whole point of the fight against UEFI is not that you can get a key, it's that you need to be able build machines where you CAN change the key, add your own, or turn off the damn functionality yourself. And those machines need to be the default standard, not some "premium" service available only to the Google's and Dell's of the world.
Hopefully, the whole trusted-key junk will die a death soon or someone will enforce a standard that lets you turn it off. Why *can't* I be given machine that can boot whatever the hell it likes, including legacy OS? That's a question for big businesses that has real implications for keeping their systems running. If I were running a military-grade system, yeah, UEFI boot with trusted keys is a good extra layer to have, but on a home PC (and thus, in ten year's time, everyone's tablets, smarphones, etc. following suit)?
I'm sorry, but if you could have done it ten years ago, maybe you should have. And released the product, and get bought out, and made lots of money, and proved everyone wrong. Hell, you still have a lot of time because Samba still has a LONG way to do yet.
Samba's AD implementation has been a long time coming but personally EVERY prior attempt I've seen, including quite a lot of samba-tng, was horrendously hacky. Having to install and configure perfectly 5-6 entirely independent dependencies is not a good recipe to test or debug code on (one tweak to one config file and samba would stop working for a user and it could take hours to spot that difference and massive amounts of reinstalling, reconfiguring and sending logs and configs back and forth). I took several looks at solutions over the intervening years but nothing was even close to risking the time to install them, let alone test the results. And believe me, I looked at anything and everything that came up.
From what I saw, most of the patching to get things like samba-tng etc. working code-wise was horrendously hacky and basically the equivalent of rewriting the spec - while Kerberos might be paid lip-service by MS, their variants are quite different and not the kind of thing you want polluting an otherwise independent codebase.
Trying to get patches to 5+ different projects in order to fix your non-standards-compliant implementation of a protocol sounds like a political nightmare from the start, let alone doing it for the sake of purely Windows hangers-on. At no point did anybody just fork those projects and create their own versions, either, except to rewrite independent implementations. Not reinventing the wheel does not take a genius, and I have no doubt that EVERY step possible to avoid that was taken.
Without even looking into the details, I would consider it Plan B to have to push massive amounts of patches to five other HUGE projects just to get something close to beginning working so you can start testing, in terms of actually getting something out to others for them to use in stable systems (for testing, debugging, sure, use whatever hacky solutions you like).
Fact is that over the last ten years NOBODY else has actually stepped forward and done this work, except for proprietary, closed-source solutions (all of which have problems - hell, even Apple's implementation is basically borked) and Samba.
Projects forks are ten-a-penny on large OS projects but yet nobody stood up and said "Damn, he's right, let's fork samba-tng to get this stuff going and worry about the politics later!". And at any point, you could suck in the Samba4 work for yourself to help you diagnose, test against, etc.
I hear a lot of "I could have", but never much "I did". I'm not saying I could do the work at all, but the vast majority of the people who actually stepped up to the plate were in the Samba team. And nobody else, on any other open-source project, "beat" them to it - even with the help of the EU courts and Microsoft itself. That suggests that maybe the task was slightly more tricky than just slapping things together.
AD implementations are also not the kind of thing you take chances with. If one machine dies because of a dodgy kernel, who cares, you can do something about it. If your AD structure trashes itself mid-day because of a bad failover to a Samba DC, or a long, slow, push of faulty and subtlely-broken packets makes things irrecoverable, you have a lot more to answer for. That means that even the post-Samba-3 solutions to AD's that I tried would have required YEARS of personal testing before I actually trusted them (and would most probably only see deployment on their own isolated network and AD and then slowly, over years, creep to the point where I was confident on just replacing everything with them).
If alternatives existed, and the work was possible, it takes literally MINUTES to set up a code mirror and post your patches and then you can spam it to hell and let people choose their own prefer
One man. One vote. Which, in my country, gives you one 65-millionth of an opinion in every decision.
You may not have "voted" for it explicitly, but I bet you "didn't vote" for some boring by-law related to the keeping of cockatoos explicitly either. What you did, stupidly, was vote for someone you don't know, who (may have) formed a small portion of government who (collectively, and with utter rivals) agreed to laws over the course of DECADES that subjected you to EU law too.
People seriously misunderstand democracy and politics. Hence we end up with people like you thinking they "vote" for any particular cause at all and not just some random local joe you've never met who can do what they like once they get voted in and themselves only form a tiny, tiny percentage of the governing body.
Nearly ten years ago, I joined this site. I have quite a low ID by the standards of most of the comments I see on articles now, so maybe I've just been here long and aren't in touch with "nerds" any more.
I don't know a single "nerd" who has an iota of interest in "business intelligence". I'm not even sure I could tell you what it is, short of a poxy management fad that I hope never to have to deal with.
And if you're no longer "news for nerds", I don't think I'll bother to come back. Seriously. That's not why I signed up, not why I look at the site and not why I paid to get rid of the advertising all those years ago.
SlashTV was your first hint of what you were doing wrong. Enforcing change without consultation and without listening to your readership. But, hell, you did it anyway, and then tried to apologise for doing it (when it would have taken seconds to get rid of it). Now this crap.
Sorry, a few month's ago, I vowed to minimise my visits to this site to only those articles I have a direct interest in and cannot find elsewhere. As it turned out, that would have left me no reason to come here but I did so out of nostalgia. But now? Business-crap? Really?
There's needing to pay the bills and there's selling out your readers. This is the latter. I have no interest in it. Purely out of a profound sense of nostalgia and fondness for what this site used to be, I may pop back to see if you've realised your mistake and got back to the core of your readership, but the chances seem slim now.
Until then, ta ta. Enjoy your "business intelligence" site and crappy videos. I think that The Reg will be my next refuge, but Slashdot has been invaded by big business far too much, trying to monetise what they know rather than what's here.
I'm afraid you are assuming that any of those three has anything to do with a person's genetic makeup. All evidence points contrary (or homosexual people would be very rare, for example, and only mutated-gene cases would exist at the moment and who would never breed - for example Down's Syndrome sufferers are often rendered infertile because the next generation from them will suffer even worse consequences, but they still exist because the genes still mutate from otherwise "healthy" parents - so you'd still have the occasional homosexual person even if homosexuality was completely genetic but nowhere near as many as statistics suggest there are).
And even there, homosexual people can not only adopt, they can have children with their own genes. It's called IVF and we've been using it for decades. They can use their own genetic material to have a child with 50% of their own DNA, even if that baby is born to someone else.
Not everything is about your genes. Sometimes it's just about your particular body. If you take drugs at a certain age, you are more likely to be addicted that at other ages, regardless of genetic makeup. Maybe there's a combination of "gullibility" / "influenced by peer pressure" genes, but those won't directly lead to drugs in even a majority of cases of that gene.
The choice not to have children is much more an economic, political, and social decision than anything to do with genetics. You can say that *infertility* could be genetic in some cases (and it's certainly hereditary, as the old joke goes!), but again IVF means that the genes will never disappear even in a mutation-free population. But the CHOICE to have children in an otherwise healthy couple is almost 0% genetics. Thus you can't "breed" or "evolve" those genes either way.
If you put a child in a particularly-planned environment, you can "make" them have drug overdoses, choose not to have children, or even become homosexual "of their own free will", with appropriate conditioning. Something like 80% of the human race will happily press a button that they genuinely believe is administering electric shocks to another human (even long after the other human stops responding or cries out for mercy) JUST BECAUSE A MAN IN A WHITE COAT TOLD THEM IT WAS OKAY. It's a very famous, very reproducible, very consistent experiment.
Most "human" traits are not from a genetic basis, but social and intellectual. And not even exclusive to humans (homosexual animals exist, for instance, as well as ones that "choose" never to mate).
Not because we deploy SAM's to protect a major event. No. I sort of expect that at the moment, to be honest, and it's no worse than all the SAM's that are probably around and we *don't* know about.
I've lost faith BECAUSE WE TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT ON THE NEWS.
Hell, we've even given the locations away, just about.
You're a military. Act like one. That means you protect us and keep the "how" a secret except to the people to whom you're directly accountable (and, no, I don't expect a military to be DIRECTLY accountable to the general public because that's just silly).
It means you don't DO press releases at all, certainly not ones that describe in some detail the exact location and hardware you intend to deploy. You're a bloody military. Even as misinformation this is TOO public and, as the news reaction has shown, too scary to tell the little people. You have self-created a whole new "terror" to scare them with, probably to justify your budget.
There's already a no-fly zone over the Olympics. The people assume that's enforced somehow in the event of dumb, copycat airplane hijacking that might be aimed at the stadium. They "know" you have something to deal with it (though the majority would assume jets of some kind) but they DON'T need to have it splashed over the news to scare them even more in a time when terrorism is already getting FAR TOO MUCH PRESS. Terrorists create terror. That's their intention. Give them press and they can do it. Take the press away and they're just some nutters with a bomb (which is perceived as entirely less a threat to the average man).
What you say is that the military "has taken steps to insure safety", "has deployed a number of strategic units to combat X", "will enforce a no-fly zone" or even "doesn't discuss arrangements made for reasons of national security".
There's no security in obscurity (as I'm sure some geek will point it), but there is a way to induce panic and TERROR in the general population by shouting your mouth off in order to "justify" your budget. Because now, if there is a terrorist attack using that method - you're going to need to do it at EVERY public event. And if there's a terrorist attack of another kind, it will be "Why didn't you see it?", "Why did you waste money on that when the threat was elsewhere?", etc. And if there is no terrorist attack, you just created one by putting a SAM on top of a tower block and broadcasting about it.
But if you'd have kept to the "official party line" of the military since God-knows-when, there'd be no panic, no problem, and you could do your job without having to have PR people comb every detail of what you say first.
In my local bookshop, for less than a pound, I can read books written directly by any number of serial killers, gang-leaders, rapists, you name it, about their murder and torture of others.
Next to them, I can read many more written by others ABOUT the same thing, usually with some sort of endorsement. Next to that, I can read stories, true or fiction, about child abuse, neglect and a myriad other things. One that I did see was from someone who became a US politician after growing up in the ghetto and basically being used as a child prostitute (It was a while ago - something about her name being Cookie, I think).
So, in that climate, I don't see exactly what the release of such a book would do that couldn't already be found elsewhere. Sure, Hitler actually managed to bring a whole country down using his ideology, but that was AFTER it was written.
I've always held that the German/French stance of stopping people talking about, reading about, selling "memorabilia" of these things only makes things WORSE.
What they should have done is renamed all toilets "Nazi's". And then use the Nazi symbol as that to denote a toilet. The world would see the change in opinion of the country that did so, the Naziists would immediately stop "worshipping" the name/symbol (and hopefully the ideology), and you solve the problem of what to do with the car park that's believed to be the modern location of Hitler's "grave". Turn it into a giant public toilet.
Do you really think that children (or adults) would "get the wrong message" or want to be associated with the word Nazi or its symbology after that?
I did all that you mention. They weren't obvious (hell, finding settings was a bit of a pain in itself and not "intuitive"). It wasn't enough. Auto-hide is not the same as not having the fecking option at all (e.g. the mail icon - WHY?!).
I've been using desktops since Windows 3.0. This is not user-error, this is "you've put things in fecking stupid places and I can't find them without hunting" and also "you don't HAVE an option to do what I want" (e.g. made the fecking side-bar work how I want - couldn't even get rid of the workspaces icon on the version I had).
I just bought my first ever smartphone last month. It's a Samsung Android phone. It works. I can use it. I can move shit around and find my way around it quite easily.
I'm not too old to try something new. I'm too old to have time to go through this shit every time someone has a bright idea when I was more productive than ever with the previous incarnation, and where every iteration I've ever tried makes me less productive.
I spent most of the time in Unity right-clicking on things hoping there were more options to turn shit off and put useful things on. I assumed it was all just hidden away somewhere and I could find it. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that that was *IT* in terms of interface.
Fuck typing the names of programs into a dialog box. That assumes I know what the bloody thing is called. I just want to categorise stuff and thus keep all related things visible without having to handle special interfaces to do so.
Ubuntu has become the thing that it was supposed to be an alternative too: Fucking stupid design ideas destroying existing productivity for the sake of something shiny.
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Funny, I've had four of them in my office for about a week now, with the brief of setting them up with our Google Apps for Educators accounts.
We didn't do anything special, just rang up our normal mobile supplier and they gave us four business contracts and posted the phones out same day.
Official launch in the US, maybe?
If you were correct, at any point Microsoft could have inserted a clause in the vastly different EULA's that evolve with every product release to disallow such bundling. It would be easy to insert and word properly, easy to enforce (and legally fair) and would cause less fuss than "we don't need you"-type announcements. If you're going to bundle Windows and sell Windows, we require nothing else but Windows to be installed (or all things to be optional on first boot so people can choose from a "install the crap or not" menu).
But they don't. This announcement isn't about bundlers. This is about another revenue stream. And it's at the expense of MS's largest customers (the OEM system builders). I have a feeling this may be hastily backtracked on, or cause a lot of hurt.
All the flimsiness of a cheap USB keyboard would still be outweighed by that tacky cover.
Nice idea to put the keyboard in a cover. But so ridiculously thin means it will either break or the underlying matrix will be destroyed long before the usable life of the product itself. And isn't it just recognition that tablet-only input is insufficient? All you've done is made a laptop with a fancy thin keyboard, in essence. And thin keyboards are hard to type nicely on (travel distance is one of the best metric for judging a keyboard), especially if they are on a hard surface (which is what this would need - so my portable tablet PC now needs a desk to hold the keyboard!)
I have a roll-up-able keyboard in my parts cupboard. Useful for taking to people's houses to eliminate the keyboard as a problem. Although the keys are thicker, that seems to be through choice because the base surface and connectors are't, and yet it's waterproof, roll-able, costs literally pence, etc. And, despite being 90% rubber, that's infinitely more sturdy than that 3mm thick thing they expect you to type on.
Having a keyboard is a good idea. The tablet obviously NEEDS a keyboard. Having THAT keyboard, and as your "cover" (so people will rely on it to fend off certain other objects) seems quite stupid.
I still don't see the advantage of that over, say, a laptop or even just having the tablet on its own.
Yeah, because "Sky" for buildings is such a unique and non-generic name.
And unless they own the trademark in China too, it's doubtful they could even TRY to do anything about it.
I find it sad that people actually think AI or any sort of AI is actually present here, or improving when they read about things like this.
There is no intelligence here. Nothing. There's no guesswork, only statistics, rigorously calculated and applied the same every single time. It's a heuristic. It's programmed. It's immutable. It's basically a targeted improvement on a naive brute-force algorithm.
That's *not* how intelligence works. To be honest, the nearest thing to "intelligence" we've had recently is the Kinect, but only because it was based on a genetic algorithm at one point and tweaked incessantly. And even that is more brute-force and dedicated processors than anything else.
There has NEVER been, in the whole field of AI, a logical leap to join two abstract concepts. There has never been discovery or invention (no matter how minor) on the same scale as even a pigeon. No machine ever worked out something that it wasn't told how to do DOWN TO THE LETTER.
This is not AI. Your science fiction is, and for the foreseeable future still will be, just that - fiction. There's nothing a computer does today that isn't just 60's theory and ideas applied with a sufficiently large amount of processing power to come up with pretty predictable results that do not approach AI. Yes, eventually, brute-force will allow us to come to resemble intelligence but it will not be intelligence, and brute-force is the most expensive thing to apply to a problem like that (and, strangely, own our intelligence is the cheapest!).
Literally, the closest we get is genetic algorithms and lettings things just run off on their own, and we're pretty sure even that's just an illusion and not crossed the line into something we would consider actual intelligence. There's an example of a GA put to work on a chip design to distinguish two frequencies of input. When the input is of one frequency, it activates one output, when the input is of another frequency, it activates another. The GA "evolved" through generations based only on selection for those criteria and ended up with ingenious solution that took years of analysis to understand fully.
But even that isn't "intelligence", so much as blind luck and brute-force. No machine, for the next 50-100 years at least, will be able to hold even quite a boring conversation with you (go look at the transcripts of Turing Test entries from as far back as you can and now - improvement but still no magic insight that makes it seem human unless you're terminally stupid). It certainly won't have a consistent or reasoned opinion. And certainly not one that it come to by itself and wasn't just a case of it picking a contrary / popular opinion deliberately.
Prove me wrong, by all means, but sci-fi is for the TV. I still can't get my phone to recognise my voice on a simple phrase 8 times out of 10 and that has vast quantities of brute-force, previous patterns, pattern-matching code and statistics to work from. Sure, it *looks* impressive and intelligent when you say "Where is the post office?" and it analyses the waveform to think you said "post office" with 85% certainty and then stick that into a basic search to see what comes up in the local area. But it's NOT understanding what you said. Not by a long shot. If I'd said "Where's the post? Office?", it will get it completely, 100% absolutely wrong and I can't teach it to get it right even the same amount of the time that any trained animal would.
This is not AI. Please stop thinking it is. It's pseudo-related at best.
Right up until the day you find out that you were DoS'd by a compromised hospital computer on the outskirts of a student hospital network and managed to take out an entire healthcare provider in "retaliation".
Sure, they shouldn't be compromised, but you have no idea who their digital neighbours are and/or who you're actually attacking. Attacking back is one of the most stupid things to do, ever.
And one day you will get caught by the big-brother of the guy you pummel into the ground because of the digital equivalent of "we were told he was the guy who attacked us".
Meanwhile, some old grandma whose computer was used as an intermediate proxy to hide a hacker's traces (obtained by a click-and-run virus created by the hacker with barely a knowledge of how it worked) turns her machine on to find that her files were deleted / strange messages popped up / the PC was unbootable / whatever you did to them.
Or, even better, another of the hacker's targets was compromised and rather than directly attacked, it was used to goad you into attacking them so that when the police came looking, it was your IP dropping stuff into their compromised shares and not the original hacker (who could have cleared their traces).
I'm not saying it's true, but it could easily happen - this is what botnets are FOR - to hide some illicit activity that CAN be controlled by a human remotely so that you think it's coming from somewhere but it's really just a bot repeating the commands it is given from the real hacker's IP. You have no idea who you attacked or why (you could quite easily have been attacking his friends PC, for example, that he didn't want to get the blame for).
As the article suggests, you're the incomptent here, not them. You got goaded into attacking a random target that might well have just been a proxy and probably did so from an obvious IP that was traceable to you. And, guess what, I don't think "I was just retaliating for an attempted crime against myself" would have worked as a legal defence.
When I was younger, my brother came into my room and asked me to have a look at something. Some guy in an IRC chatroom claimed to be able to see all my brother's files because he was running an old version of mIRC (which, admittedly, he was).
"No problem," I said. "Get him to tell us the contents of our AUTOEXEC.BAT" (yep, that's how long ago). Cue copy-pasted unmodified AUTOEXEC.BAT from his own computer which didn't even come close to resembling the multiconfig, highly customised, DOS through Windows 98 config we'd made for our computers. Then he admitted he just wanted to "send us an update" which would have had a virus on it. Sadly, IRC pretty much reveals your IP address to everyone and most script-kiddies DIDN'T know how to proxy their connections back then.
Always wished we'd asked for a more sensitive file. It would have been much more interesting if we'd asked for some innocent-sounding file that we knew would contain his passwords or ISP login. As it was, he just got his IP banned for a while, I think.
Phone call I make? "This call may be recorded for training purposes".
Mail I send? Hell, yes, they should know what they are paying to post.
E-Mail I send? "The views in this email... blah blah blah... this email may be recorded".
Eavesdropping and brainwaves - There you have the already-imposed limit of it going "too far" anyway, and arguments into absurdity don't make your point - they just make you look stupid. "What next, they gonna come to my home and tell me I haven't been to work today and stop my salaray going into my bank account??!?!?!?"
But while you're an agent of the company, everything you do on company time, using company facilities, that communicates outside the company? It's ALREADY being monitored. Don't like it? Don't use company resources on company time to do your online banking (Why the hell would you do that anyway, and what would you have done 20 years ago when you COULDN'T do that?). Using personal internet connections on company time may still be a breach too, because you're supposed to be fucking working.
Nobody CARES about your phone call to your wife, or how much you have in your bank. I assure you, the IT department don't give a shit and wouldn't let anyone else just eavesdrop on private things anyway. But while you're being paid to work, bloody work, and you do so as a representative of the company. That means they can know exactly WHAT you're doing while you're supposed to be working (i.e. Did you call that customer a tosser? Are you defaming them on Facebook? Have you just obtained insider info from your pal at your rival?.
And in your lunch hour? They have no more requirement to supply you with a connection to Facebook or anything else than they have to give you a pool table in the staff room. The fact that it will get sniffed is neither here nor there - they just monitor everything and it's a workplace so you're supposed to be working.
You're at work. Get over it. If it worries you, use your own device and connection. /me longs for the day when WORK meant WORK, and I'm not even an employer. I can't tell you how much slacking off I see on smartphones, Facebook, etc. Fine, if nothing NEEDS to be done at that moment but then I see those same people whinging about deadlines and pressure.
Because they were also required to provide home address details of the people actually applying (i.e. the CEO's, etc.) and nothing related to the company at all.
That's the part that was published and was never supposed to be, not the address of the company (which, in UK law at least, is legally required to be displayed somewhere at all places of business which is taken to include websites too!).
And you really think that oil etc. will last another 200 years, let alone 2000 or 200,000 (the last of which is the only one where you'll actually see animals start to "adapt" in any evolutionary term - i.e. all the dead animals haven't bred successfully).
Geological scales.
We've done a lot worse than just burn the coal and oil. Hell, most of the substances we use everyday just do not exist in nature and there are billions of pieces of plastic floating in the oceans that weren't there 50 years ago. You don't get mercury pouring into the oceans if you just leave a planet without intelligent life.
But, that aside, just what precisely do you think will change? You're going to stop the world using oils, plastics and fuels before they run out anyway? Not a chance. It will not happen. It took decades to convince people not to use CFC's in large quantities but we still use them, and only converted because it was legislated, enforced and (to be honest) wasn't that much of a hassle in the first place. Cutting out the large items is actually orders-of-magnitude more difficult and unlikely to happen. And, actually, enforcing a "veggie-only" law and outlawing meat for everyone would actually do more, be cheaper and be accepted just as much (i.e. virtually zero).
Anything we build to replace those plastics and oil that we used will also require HUGE quantities of exactly those at first in order to scale up to the point where we replace them. Don't believe the hype about "sustainable" plastics because they are pretty much unusable for all the things we NEED to use plastics for, and cost SO MUCH ENERGY we can only supply it by burning fossil fuels or uranium. It's the "electric car" phenomenon all over again - you're just shifting the use of those materials and energies somewhere else instead, not actually "saving" anything.
Pretty much the only viable solution, when you take human nature into account (and not just ordinary individuals, who can do more eco-friendly things than governments ever do, but just the fact that you can't convince a country to stop using oil any more than you can outlaw meat), is to let them burn it all off.
Do the damage now. Do it as fast as possible. Run it out. Leave us with nothing. Then the 200 years of damage is unlikely to do much (on geological scales) to the planet at all long-term, and we won't have any excuse for not doing things differently. We'd actually lose quite a lot of things we take for granted up to and including our own lives in some cases (you can't sustain population numbers like we have now without the medicine and energy use we currently have). But that's the only "logical" outcome when you look at how the world works.
Stop faffing about pretending that an extra few years of oil before we suddenly make everything eco-friendly is going to make ANY difference at all. Just burn the stuff now. All of it. Run out the plastics until the prices rises to stupendous levels and we're forced to go back to older ways (which included chopping down and burning tress, I'd like to point out), reduce the population, or revert society back to an age where people couldn't guarantee food for themselves, let alone homes.
The problems of eco-destruction are nothing to do with climate change, animal extinctions or anything else. The problem is that when we run out, you have instantaneous anarchy and a dark-ages effect of not being able to do 1% of the things we take for granted. But actually, the BIGGEST problem is that our population would be decimated worldwide almost overnight. We can't grow, transport, store and treat enough food to feed people without consuming oil and oil-products galore. And have you seen the amount of fertile land it takes to sustain one person in even a third-world country? There simply isn't enough.
So stop TRYING to pretend we can actually do anything practical which doesn't lead to the same population decimation +/- 5 years anyway, accept it and burn the damn stuff up now finding alternatives. Hell, if that means space missions to find more resources (e.g. methane or something else we can burn) and other places to live, then do it. Do it now. Stop hanging around and pissing away resources on eco-initiatives that DO NOT WORK while waiting until the point that there isn't enough f
Then, again, you have spotted the problem.
"only works in IE7" - stupid to pitch your whole business on IE7 working and still being available. Because this implies it wouldn't work on IE 8, 9, 10 whatever version Microsoft decides to force you onto in the future. If it worked on a modern version of IE, you wouldn't have a problem at all anyway. Hell, I'd go with stupid to run anything that "relies" on IE of any version. The entire ActiveX era should have taught everyone that.
"aren't even supposed to be shopping" - and thus why should shops or the IT department cater for them when it causes hassle/costs to do so?
Use a modern browser (of any brand), and don't cry to companies that they don't support IE6 "because that's all I have".
And, again, there's nothing stopping Firefox sitting alongside IE6. I have done that for one deployment. IE6 was specified and used and forcibly limited to only access the one site that absolutely required it (stupid fecking ActiveX). Everything else had to be done in Firefox. Nobody died, the IT did exactly what it should do, and there was no crying (but there WAS a big push to a non-IE way of doing things because of the hassle it caused which ended up with the company arguing with a bank - of all places - until they changed their system. Now there are no more IE icons on anyone's desktop).
1) This is mainly a publicity stunt with an end message.
2) If your billing system can't handle something like this, you probably shouldn't be running a business of that size.
3) Do you really think they will argue if you phone up and tell them you were using Opera or Firefox with User Agent Switching and ask for the original price?
4) Hitting customers in the wallet is the BEST way to grab their attention. I guarantee the response will be larger than if they'd put a 600-pixel-high red flashing banner warning about IE7 for IE7 users of their website.
5) The point is: The people "with no choice" do have a choice. They can pay more or not order at all. Which is incentive enough, if you use this company a lot, to see about upgrading / switching to a better browser. ("Why have our costs to suppliers go up 10%? Because we use IE6? Why don't we install Firefox just for that purpose if nothing else?").
IT has hidden behind the "the IT guys won't let us" banner for too long. If your systems absolutely, categorically cannot upgrade to later versions of IE or Firefox, then you have to wonder what your IT department actually DO for a living and just how much concern they have for the safety of your business data.
It's no different to saying "Sorry, I can't stop logging in as root on an unfirewalled machine to browse Flash websites, the IT guys won't let me." - That would wash with my employers about as much as asking them to use Sinclair ZX Spectrums and pocket calculators instead of PC's. And what better way to demonstrate how out-of-touch your IT department is than to charge them MORE because of the hassle they cause OTHERS by using that old software (let alone the potential hassle they cause themselves).
Natural to you, maybe.
In British English, store is rarely used (unless it literally stores something and occasionally we call something a superstore but that's more likely to be a supermarket). .shop would probably work a lot better for us. But then, we have .uk and could shove it under that so there's really no need for these things at all.
I'm no more likely to go to a .store than a .com. In fact, just the opposite (why support someone's profit margins when they piss away money on .store and then charge ME for it, indirectly?). And, in fact, nothing changes here. I still don't know the URL for a lot of shops I use. Hell, I keep going to freecode.org instead of .com half the time. What draws me to and keeps me on a website is not the name, not the URL, but they damn product and how I find it (i.e. Google, bookmarks, etc.). Everything else is pointless.
Hell, there's a famous site called MoonFruit.com (I think it's .com anyway) for sending greetings cards, I can choose moneysupermarket to get car insurance (because that name makes a lot of sense!) and the best examples: Google. Facebook. Twitter. Nonsensical or spuriously-connected words. Having a TLD of any kind outside of the usual .co.uk / .com range (don't get me started on .uk.com!) actually just makes me wary of dealing with you. Because I know you probably spent a lot of money on a worthless domain and that will be reflected in your prices.
The point is probably that it wouldn't be "anyone's" firmware. What they are saying is that you can get a personal key, which you can manually add to your machines as a trusted key. For $99.
It doesn't mean that you can take you personal key and automatically install it on every computer and thus destroy their trusted boot mechanism or "replace" the Microsoft key with your own. You still can't tamper with the OS on any machine for which you don't have permission or access to modify the trusted boot keys. All you can do is affect machines you already control (i.e. you get to pay for the privilege of installing your own OS on your own computer).
That said, I think Red Hat are being too blinkered here. The whole point of the fight against UEFI is not that you can get a key, it's that you need to be able build machines where you CAN change the key, add your own, or turn off the damn functionality yourself. And those machines need to be the default standard, not some "premium" service available only to the Google's and Dell's of the world.
Hopefully, the whole trusted-key junk will die a death soon or someone will enforce a standard that lets you turn it off. Why *can't* I be given machine that can boot whatever the hell it likes, including legacy OS? That's a question for big businesses that has real implications for keeping their systems running. If I were running a military-grade system, yeah, UEFI boot with trusted keys is a good extra layer to have, but on a home PC (and thus, in ten year's time, everyone's tablets, smarphones, etc. following suit)?
I'm sorry, but if you could have done it ten years ago, maybe you should have. And released the product, and get bought out, and made lots of money, and proved everyone wrong. Hell, you still have a lot of time because Samba still has a LONG way to do yet.
Samba's AD implementation has been a long time coming but personally EVERY prior attempt I've seen, including quite a lot of samba-tng, was horrendously hacky. Having to install and configure perfectly 5-6 entirely independent dependencies is not a good recipe to test or debug code on (one tweak to one config file and samba would stop working for a user and it could take hours to spot that difference and massive amounts of reinstalling, reconfiguring and sending logs and configs back and forth). I took several looks at solutions over the intervening years but nothing was even close to risking the time to install them, let alone test the results. And believe me, I looked at anything and everything that came up.
From what I saw, most of the patching to get things like samba-tng etc. working code-wise was horrendously hacky and basically the equivalent of rewriting the spec - while Kerberos might be paid lip-service by MS, their variants are quite different and not the kind of thing you want polluting an otherwise independent codebase.
Trying to get patches to 5+ different projects in order to fix your non-standards-compliant implementation of a protocol sounds like a political nightmare from the start, let alone doing it for the sake of purely Windows hangers-on. At no point did anybody just fork those projects and create their own versions, either, except to rewrite independent implementations. Not reinventing the wheel does not take a genius, and I have no doubt that EVERY step possible to avoid that was taken.
Without even looking into the details, I would consider it Plan B to have to push massive amounts of patches to five other HUGE projects just to get something close to beginning working so you can start testing, in terms of actually getting something out to others for them to use in stable systems (for testing, debugging, sure, use whatever hacky solutions you like) .
Fact is that over the last ten years NOBODY else has actually stepped forward and done this work, except for proprietary, closed-source solutions (all of which have problems - hell, even Apple's implementation is basically borked) and Samba.
Projects forks are ten-a-penny on large OS projects but yet nobody stood up and said "Damn, he's right, let's fork samba-tng to get this stuff going and worry about the politics later!". And at any point, you could suck in the Samba4 work for yourself to help you diagnose, test against, etc.
I hear a lot of "I could have", but never much "I did". I'm not saying I could do the work at all, but the vast majority of the people who actually stepped up to the plate were in the Samba team. And nobody else, on any other open-source project, "beat" them to it - even with the help of the EU courts and Microsoft itself. That suggests that maybe the task was slightly more tricky than just slapping things together.
AD implementations are also not the kind of thing you take chances with. If one machine dies because of a dodgy kernel, who cares, you can do something about it. If your AD structure trashes itself mid-day because of a bad failover to a Samba DC, or a long, slow, push of faulty and subtlely-broken packets makes things irrecoverable, you have a lot more to answer for. That means that even the post-Samba-3 solutions to AD's that I tried would have required YEARS of personal testing before I actually trusted them (and would most probably only see deployment on their own isolated network and AD and then slowly, over years, creep to the point where I was confident on just replacing everything with them).
If alternatives existed, and the work was possible, it takes literally MINUTES to set up a code mirror and post your patches and then you can spam it to hell and let people choose their own prefer
I'd be more worried if I were Steam, to be honest. I hope their prior art was taken into account.
A fan uses a handful of watts. Literally. But your graphics card can easily pull hundreds of watts.
A fan, dirty or not, is the least of your worries power-wise. Most storage devices take more than they do.
Again - yet another case of worrying about minor pittances when you're pulling kilowatts from your house heating / air conditioning for hours on end.
Welcome to democracy.
One man. One vote. Which, in my country, gives you one 65-millionth of an opinion in every decision.
You may not have "voted" for it explicitly, but I bet you "didn't vote" for some boring by-law related to the keeping of cockatoos explicitly either. What you did, stupidly, was vote for someone you don't know, who (may have) formed a small portion of government who (collectively, and with utter rivals) agreed to laws over the course of DECADES that subjected you to EU law too.
People seriously misunderstand democracy and politics. Hence we end up with people like you thinking they "vote" for any particular cause at all and not just some random local joe you've never met who can do what they like once they get voted in and themselves only form a tiny, tiny percentage of the governing body.
Nearly ten years ago, I joined this site. I have quite a low ID by the standards of most of the comments I see on articles now, so maybe I've just been here long and aren't in touch with "nerds" any more.
I don't know a single "nerd" who has an iota of interest in "business intelligence". I'm not even sure I could tell you what it is, short of a poxy management fad that I hope never to have to deal with.
And if you're no longer "news for nerds", I don't think I'll bother to come back. Seriously. That's not why I signed up, not why I look at the site and not why I paid to get rid of the advertising all those years ago.
SlashTV was your first hint of what you were doing wrong. Enforcing change without consultation and without listening to your readership. But, hell, you did it anyway, and then tried to apologise for doing it (when it would have taken seconds to get rid of it). Now this crap.
Sorry, a few month's ago, I vowed to minimise my visits to this site to only those articles I have a direct interest in and cannot find elsewhere. As it turned out, that would have left me no reason to come here but I did so out of nostalgia. But now? Business-crap? Really?
There's needing to pay the bills and there's selling out your readers. This is the latter. I have no interest in it. Purely out of a profound sense of nostalgia and fondness for what this site used to be, I may pop back to see if you've realised your mistake and got back to the core of your readership, but the chances seem slim now.
Until then, ta ta. Enjoy your "business intelligence" site and crappy videos. I think that The Reg will be my next refuge, but Slashdot has been invaded by big business far too much, trying to monetise what they know rather than what's here.
I'm afraid you are assuming that any of those three has anything to do with a person's genetic makeup. All evidence points contrary (or homosexual people would be very rare, for example, and only mutated-gene cases would exist at the moment and who would never breed - for example Down's Syndrome sufferers are often rendered infertile because the next generation from them will suffer even worse consequences, but they still exist because the genes still mutate from otherwise "healthy" parents - so you'd still have the occasional homosexual person even if homosexuality was completely genetic but nowhere near as many as statistics suggest there are).
And even there, homosexual people can not only adopt, they can have children with their own genes. It's called IVF and we've been using it for decades. They can use their own genetic material to have a child with 50% of their own DNA, even if that baby is born to someone else.
Not everything is about your genes. Sometimes it's just about your particular body. If you take drugs at a certain age, you are more likely to be addicted that at other ages, regardless of genetic makeup. Maybe there's a combination of "gullibility" / "influenced by peer pressure" genes, but those won't directly lead to drugs in even a majority of cases of that gene.
The choice not to have children is much more an economic, political, and social decision than anything to do with genetics. You can say that *infertility* could be genetic in some cases (and it's certainly hereditary, as the old joke goes!), but again IVF means that the genes will never disappear even in a mutation-free population. But the CHOICE to have children in an otherwise healthy couple is almost 0% genetics. Thus you can't "breed" or "evolve" those genes either way.
If you put a child in a particularly-planned environment, you can "make" them have drug overdoses, choose not to have children, or even become homosexual "of their own free will", with appropriate conditioning. Something like 80% of the human race will happily press a button that they genuinely believe is administering electric shocks to another human (even long after the other human stops responding or cries out for mercy) JUST BECAUSE A MAN IN A WHITE COAT TOLD THEM IT WAS OKAY. It's a very famous, very reproducible, very consistent experiment.
Most "human" traits are not from a genetic basis, but social and intellectual. And not even exclusive to humans (homosexual animals exist, for instance, as well as ones that "choose" never to mate).
I have lost faith in my country's military.
Not because we deploy SAM's to protect a major event. No. I sort of expect that at the moment, to be honest, and it's no worse than all the SAM's that are probably around and we *don't* know about.
I've lost faith BECAUSE WE TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT ON THE NEWS.
Hell, we've even given the locations away, just about.
You're a military. Act like one. That means you protect us and keep the "how" a secret except to the people to whom you're directly accountable (and, no, I don't expect a military to be DIRECTLY accountable to the general public because that's just silly).
It means you don't DO press releases at all, certainly not ones that describe in some detail the exact location and hardware you intend to deploy. You're a bloody military. Even as misinformation this is TOO public and, as the news reaction has shown, too scary to tell the little people. You have self-created a whole new "terror" to scare them with, probably to justify your budget.
There's already a no-fly zone over the Olympics. The people assume that's enforced somehow in the event of dumb, copycat airplane hijacking that might be aimed at the stadium. They "know" you have something to deal with it (though the majority would assume jets of some kind) but they DON'T need to have it splashed over the news to scare them even more in a time when terrorism is already getting FAR TOO MUCH PRESS. Terrorists create terror. That's their intention. Give them press and they can do it. Take the press away and they're just some nutters with a bomb (which is perceived as entirely less a threat to the average man).
What you say is that the military "has taken steps to insure safety", "has deployed a number of strategic units to combat X", "will enforce a no-fly zone" or even "doesn't discuss arrangements made for reasons of national security".
There's no security in obscurity (as I'm sure some geek will point it), but there is a way to induce panic and TERROR in the general population by shouting your mouth off in order to "justify" your budget. Because now, if there is a terrorist attack using that method - you're going to need to do it at EVERY public event. And if there's a terrorist attack of another kind, it will be "Why didn't you see it?", "Why did you waste money on that when the threat was elsewhere?", etc. And if there is no terrorist attack, you just created one by putting a SAM on top of a tower block and broadcasting about it.
But if you'd have kept to the "official party line" of the military since God-knows-when, there'd be no panic, no problem, and you could do your job without having to have PR people comb every detail of what you say first.
In my local bookshop, for less than a pound, I can read books written directly by any number of serial killers, gang-leaders, rapists, you name it, about their murder and torture of others.
Next to them, I can read many more written by others ABOUT the same thing, usually with some sort of endorsement. Next to that, I can read stories, true or fiction, about child abuse, neglect and a myriad other things. One that I did see was from someone who became a US politician after growing up in the ghetto and basically being used as a child prostitute (It was a while ago - something about her name being Cookie, I think).
So, in that climate, I don't see exactly what the release of such a book would do that couldn't already be found elsewhere. Sure, Hitler actually managed to bring a whole country down using his ideology, but that was AFTER it was written.
I've always held that the German/French stance of stopping people talking about, reading about, selling "memorabilia" of these things only makes things WORSE.
What they should have done is renamed all toilets "Nazi's". And then use the Nazi symbol as that to denote a toilet. The world would see the change in opinion of the country that did so, the Naziists would immediately stop "worshipping" the name/symbol (and hopefully the ideology), and you solve the problem of what to do with the car park that's believed to be the modern location of Hitler's "grave". Turn it into a giant public toilet.
Do you really think that children (or adults) would "get the wrong message" or want to be associated with the word Nazi or its symbology after that?
I did all that you mention. They weren't obvious (hell, finding settings was a bit of a pain in itself and not "intuitive"). It wasn't enough. Auto-hide is not the same as not having the fecking option at all (e.g. the mail icon - WHY?!).
I've been using desktops since Windows 3.0. This is not user-error, this is "you've put things in fecking stupid places and I can't find them without hunting" and also "you don't HAVE an option to do what I want" (e.g. made the fecking side-bar work how I want - couldn't even get rid of the workspaces icon on the version I had).
Ubuntu's interface is shit. There, I said it.
I just bought my first ever smartphone last month. It's a Samsung Android phone. It works. I can use it. I can move shit around and find my way around it quite easily.
I'm not too old to try something new. I'm too old to have time to go through this shit every time someone has a bright idea when I was more productive than ever with the previous incarnation, and where every iteration I've ever tried makes me less productive.
I spent most of the time in Unity right-clicking on things hoping there were more options to turn shit off and put useful things on. I assumed it was all just hidden away somewhere and I could find it. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that that was *IT* in terms of interface.
Fuck typing the names of programs into a dialog box. That assumes I know what the bloody thing is called. I just want to categorise stuff and thus keep all related things visible without having to handle special interfaces to do so.
Ubuntu has become the thing that it was supposed to be an alternative too: Fucking stupid design ideas destroying existing productivity for the sake of something shiny.