So the lesson is: Dice Holdings are greedy bastards, film at 11.
My problem with ads, and trackers and all that crap is on some pages there's about 50 external entities which all know when you visit.
I have no arrangement with those external entities, and I'm not willing to allow them to track everything I do. HTTP Swicthboard in Chrome is pretty awesome for that.
If a site serves its own ads, fine. But if they come from a bunch of tracking companies which want to harvest my surfing data, absolutely not.
I have the button checked. But I also run AdBlock and other extensions all the time anyway.
Because Google ad services, Google analytics, Google tag services, RPX Now and Scorecard research can all go pound sand, and won't get loaded on ANY page I visit.
we had to rent hotel rooms nearby, for days and weeks at a time to do our testing
And accounting actually believed that? Bravo. "No, really, we're, ummm, testing. Yes, that's right. Testing. No, the room service was necessary for the testing. And the champagne."
but letting giants merge to become bigger giants NEVER helps the consumer
That's just what they tell us. In reality, it's supposed to help shareholders, and ultimately ensure executive bonuses.
Mr CEO, you've just axed 20,000 jobs, what now.... "I'm going to Disney to spend some of this huge bonus I got, and then I'm going to raise everybody's rates to increase revenue".
Exactly, because "threat to the country's national security" is such a nebulous term that it could be applied in an awful lot of cases which are very inflated applications of it.
Unless that is defined pretty rigidly, that gives them a tremendous latitude to apply it whenever they want to.
Unless you are suggesting that being foolish/ignorant/unaware makes it ok to commit crime against.
No, I'm saying your being foolish/ignorant/unaware in this case means you have only yourself to blame.
The reality is, computer attacks are automated, widespread, and more or less inevitable.
The crime is going to happen anyway. But if you don't take your own reasonable steps to ensure it doesn't happen to you then don't be surprised when it happens.
I'm not saying this is true for all crimes -- but at a certain point, people need to take some responsibility for their own internet security. Because the internet is going to try to harm you anyway.
That's right. Blaming the victim has always been a popular tactic amongst the criminal classes.
If you're using an insecure system which you know is an insecure system... are you still a victim?
Say you know you're running a system which hasn't been patched for the Heartbleed bug, and you know about the issue (because, you pretty much couldn't know).
If you get hacked, you're not a victim, you're an idiot.
If you've ever publically made such a threat, there's a chance an agent will knock on your door and politely sit with you for a few hours while the president is in town.
My company sells gazpacho, gummy bears, and kazoos, and we just received a National Security Letter asking us to report if someone buys all three together.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll make my own gazpacho.;-)
Are there genuine sincere threats made on Twitter etc?
To a humorless agency with no ability to detect sarcasm... they all get treated as sincere.
Someone who's serious doesn't tweet about shooting the president, and instead goes and shoots him.
It is not unprecedented for crazy people to telegraph their particular brand of crazy in advance. In the past, they used to write letters to the editor, manifestos, and trade agreements.
With modern technology, more people can appear to be crazy in the same amount of time.
"Someone had said something to the effect of 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,'" he called, "to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.'"
According to Carter, he ended the quip with "LOL" and "JK" -- Internet shorthand for "laugh out loud" and "just kidding," respectively.
It's a real thing, it has happened already. No evidence of a crime (or even the actual intent to commit one). But someone sees it and goes "eep", and then you get dragged off to jail.
Arresting people based solely on their tweets or FB posts will very rapidly devolve into an outright ban of saying anything critical of government officials or policy -- AKA fascism.
You seem to be under the impression this isn't happening already.
It is.
So, ask me again if I think what I said is a plausible scenario. Because I said it with the full knowledge it has already happened.
After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.
It really depends on what you're veing sarcastic about from the perspective of the Secret Service.
If you sarcastically say "'some guy' should be drowned in a vat of gazpacho and gummy bears while 16 clowns play the William Tell overture on kazoos", and their job is to protect 'some guy' (fill in your own blank here)... one presumes the intent to tell the difference between random stupid things people day, and decidedly not random, actual threats to 'some guy'.
And, there have already been people who have been arrested (or at least vigorously questioned) about sarcasm they've uttered on the internet about the various safety of 'some guy/place/thing/event'.
Important clarification for any sarcasm impaired law enforcement agencies:
The above example was contrived to be the most outrageous (and therefore least plausible) example I could think of.
You won't know I wasn't joking until you're awash in used condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends undergarments air lifted from my herd of flying elephants. The elephant poop is just a freebie since the Depends don't fit the elephants.
Or, why not just allow free speech? Why do we have to identify sarcasm? Maybe part of the expression of the message is its ambiguity.
Well, as much as I don't like to defend it...
Imagine that the Secret Service is, oh, I don't know, responsible for assessing threats to various people.
Now, some random internet loon says "grrr, I'm so angry I want to air drop a million pounds of used condoms, Snickers wrappers and Depends undergarments onto Capitol Hill in protest" -- now, you have two possibilities:
1) The random internet loon is blowing off steam, but in no way has either the desire or the resources to actually do this. 2) The random internet loon has just made a tangible threat.
And, since we've already seen stories about people who get arrested for making what they thought was an obviously flippant remark, this becomes a problem.
Of course, as with any automated system... the false positives and false negatives will be what really kills it.
Because you will have instances where someone makes a genuine threat, and it is flagged as sarcasm. And, you will also have cases where what should be clearly interpreted as sarcasm will be interpreted as real.
So, then you either get actual attacks happening nobody took seriously. Or the men in dark sunglasses hauling you off in the night for questioning because they're 100% convinced that your threat to drop the condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends on Capitol Hill was real.
The automated detection of sarcasm and derision will be one of the fastest growing segments in the new economy.
Already at least 3 startups have begun with this included in their mission statement, along with a stated goal of relieving venture capitalists from the burden of their investment money.
It is of vital national importance that we identify who is merely being a dismissive arrogant douchebag, and who is at risk of inadvertently hurting someone else's feelings so we send them for re-education and thought alignment. It will also help to identify people who haven't yet fully swallowed the kool-aid and don't believe that the government is, in fact, here to help us, uphold the Constitution, and defend our rights.
The US Secret Service is going to aggressively fund a second mandate to decode the mysteries of eye rolling, sneering, and derisive snorts.
This should further embolden the usage of widespread warrantless collection of our personal information with the knowledge that law enforcement agencies will be able to accurately detect sarcasm and redirect scarce resources to fondling young children and old people in airport security lines.
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department indicated that popular internet forum Slashdot, as well as Digg and 4Chan will be used as exemplars for this technology, as these have been identified as the single largest sources of snark on the interwebs since Al Gore invented it.
It has been further reported that Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has said he welcomes this new initiative in the spirit of cooperation between the two countries, and that Kim Jon Un is hoping this will lead to a normalization of relations as it will allow the US to realize that North Korea was only kidding.
Yup. It is a zero sum game. Therefore the trade agreements will make absolutely no overall difference.
Oh, it makes a difference... just not the one they tell us it will make.
These agreements tend to push more money up into the hands of corporations, and move more jobs away (thereby gutting the economy) and leaving the citizens with nothing.
Basically, they're a sham to make wealthy corporations wealthier, and force the rest of us to be in a downward spiral of wages as everything moves to someplace cheaper to do it.
What they don't do it bring us the prosperity and jobs they claim it will. It's all a big scam, predicated on bullshit economics which keep being proven false.
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of auto workers that lost their jobs to robots since the 1980's.
Or have had their jobs off-shored and eliminated.
To the people who lose the jobs, it's pretty much the same thing. You've been replaced with something which is cheaper and works more hours for less than you will.
Since this is the program initiative, and has nothing to do with the trademark Oracle owns on a CPU architecture... they would get told to go screw themselves pretty quickly.
A trademark is only meaningful in the specific field you have it in. And the SPARC CPU has nothing specifically to do with robotics. And, it has nothing to do with multi-government initiatives to promote and develop technologies and their adoption.
In this case, SPARC is the name of the program to promote the use of robotics.
Larry Ellison can go piss up a rope. If you think Oracle filed suit against the EU for what they've named an initiative and wouldn't get thrown out of court and get their knuckles slapped, you'd be mistaken.
No more than Iggy Pop can sue you for using part of his name.
I would bet there is precisely zero legal grounds for Oracle to do anything about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it is, that way the XBone can constantly send Microsoft your viewing data.
Interesting considering they pretty said from the beginning it was mandatory and couldn't be disabled.
This is just Microsoft changing their direction with this yet again.
Does it still exist? Do they still make games for it?
Then it really isn't dead.
In our house, Kinect is pretty much only used for my wife's dancing games to exercise in the winter.
For that, it's kind of a fun (if not dorky looking) thing.
So the lesson is: Dice Holdings are greedy bastards, film at 11.
My problem with ads, and trackers and all that crap is on some pages there's about 50 external entities which all know when you visit.
I have no arrangement with those external entities, and I'm not willing to allow them to track everything I do. HTTP Swicthboard in Chrome is pretty awesome for that.
If a site serves its own ads, fine. But if they come from a bunch of tracking companies which want to harvest my surfing data, absolutely not.
I have the button checked. But I also run AdBlock and other extensions all the time anyway.
Because Google ad services, Google analytics, Google tag services, RPX Now and Scorecard research can all go pound sand, and won't get loaded on ANY page I visit.
Or, maybe the kinds of tasks the Kinect is doing are best suited for the GPU?
Since it's motion tracking and vision, that sounds like graphics to me.
Isn't that what those "airport improvement fees" are for?
Many many airports already essentially tack on a surcharge for that.
And I'm sure the airlines pay them. And the parking fees.
And accounting actually believed that? Bravo. "No, really, we're, ummm, testing. Yes, that's right. Testing. No, the room service was necessary for the testing. And the champagne."
That's just what they tell us. In reality, it's supposed to help shareholders, and ultimately ensure executive bonuses.
Mr CEO, you've just axed 20,000 jobs, what now .... "I'm going to Disney to spend some of this huge bonus I got, and then I'm going to raise everybody's rates to increase revenue".
Well, there's lots of worst cases.
Say, Obama is actually the lead of an alien invasion force who plans on harvesting Earthlings as food. That would suck.
Or that another Bush will get elected to the presidency. That would definitely suck. Someone would have to invade Iraq again.
Or they'll cancel Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. That would be terrible.
Exactly, because "threat to the country's national security" is such a nebulous term that it could be applied in an awful lot of cases which are very inflated applications of it.
Unless that is defined pretty rigidly, that gives them a tremendous latitude to apply it whenever they want to.
No, I'm saying your being foolish/ignorant/unaware in this case means you have only yourself to blame.
The reality is, computer attacks are automated, widespread, and more or less inevitable.
The crime is going to happen anyway. But if you don't take your own reasonable steps to ensure it doesn't happen to you then don't be surprised when it happens.
I'm not saying this is true for all crimes -- but at a certain point, people need to take some responsibility for their own internet security. Because the internet is going to try to harm you anyway.
If you're using an insecure system which you know is an insecure system ... are you still a victim?
Say you know you're running a system which hasn't been patched for the Heartbleed bug, and you know about the issue (because, you pretty much couldn't know).
If you get hacked, you're not a victim, you're an idiot.
Don't worry, all it will really do is create a depressed piece of software that says "Life! Don't talk to me about life."
Awesome!! Someone to play Candy Land with.
I'll make tea.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll make my own gazpacho. ;-)
Wait, that's just more dismissive banter. You're lying. ;-)
To a humorless agency with no ability to detect sarcasm ... they all get treated as sincere.
It is not unprecedented for crazy people to telegraph their particular brand of crazy in advance. In the past, they used to write letters to the editor, manifestos, and trade agreements.
With modern technology, more people can appear to be crazy in the same amount of time.
Well ... gee ... let me think.
This kid:
It's a real thing, it has happened already. No evidence of a crime (or even the actual intent to commit one). But someone sees it and goes "eep", and then you get dragged off to jail.
You seem to be under the impression this isn't happening already.
It is.
So, ask me again if I think what I said is a plausible scenario. Because I said it with the full knowledge it has already happened.
It really depends on what you're veing sarcastic about from the perspective of the Secret Service.
If you sarcastically say "'some guy' should be drowned in a vat of gazpacho and gummy bears while 16 clowns play the William Tell overture on kazoos", and their job is to protect 'some guy' (fill in your own blank here) ... one presumes the intent to tell the difference between random stupid things people day, and decidedly not random, actual threats to 'some guy'.
And, there have already been people who have been arrested (or at least vigorously questioned) about sarcasm they've uttered on the internet about the various safety of 'some guy/place/thing/event'.
Important clarification for any sarcasm impaired law enforcement agencies:
The above example was contrived to be the most outrageous (and therefore least plausible) example I could think of.
You won't know I wasn't joking until you're awash in used condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends undergarments air lifted from my herd of flying elephants. The elephant poop is just a freebie since the Depends don't fit the elephants.
Well, as much as I don't like to defend it ...
Imagine that the Secret Service is, oh, I don't know, responsible for assessing threats to various people.
Now, some random internet loon says "grrr, I'm so angry I want to air drop a million pounds of used condoms, Snickers wrappers and Depends undergarments onto Capitol Hill in protest" -- now, you have two possibilities:
1) The random internet loon is blowing off steam, but in no way has either the desire or the resources to actually do this.
2) The random internet loon has just made a tangible threat.
And, since we've already seen stories about people who get arrested for making what they thought was an obviously flippant remark, this becomes a problem.
Of course, as with any automated system ... the false positives and false negatives will be what really kills it.
Because you will have instances where someone makes a genuine threat, and it is flagged as sarcasm. And, you will also have cases where what should be clearly interpreted as sarcasm will be interpreted as real.
So, then you either get actual attacks happening nobody took seriously. Or the men in dark sunglasses hauling you off in the night for questioning because they're 100% convinced that your threat to drop the condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends on Capitol Hill was real.
The automated detection of sarcasm and derision will be one of the fastest growing segments in the new economy.
Already at least 3 startups have begun with this included in their mission statement, along with a stated goal of relieving venture capitalists from the burden of their investment money.
It is of vital national importance that we identify who is merely being a dismissive arrogant douchebag, and who is at risk of inadvertently hurting someone else's feelings so we send them for re-education and thought alignment. It will also help to identify people who haven't yet fully swallowed the kool-aid and don't believe that the government is, in fact, here to help us, uphold the Constitution, and defend our rights.
The US Secret Service is going to aggressively fund a second mandate to decode the mysteries of eye rolling, sneering, and derisive snorts.
This should further embolden the usage of widespread warrantless collection of our personal information with the knowledge that law enforcement agencies will be able to accurately detect sarcasm and redirect scarce resources to fondling young children and old people in airport security lines.
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department indicated that popular internet forum Slashdot, as well as Digg and 4Chan will be used as exemplars for this technology, as these have been identified as the single largest sources of snark on the interwebs since Al Gore invented it.
It has been further reported that Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has said he welcomes this new initiative in the spirit of cooperation between the two countries, and that Kim Jon Un is hoping this will lead to a normalization of relations as it will allow the US to realize that North Korea was only kidding.
Oh, it makes a difference ... just not the one they tell us it will make.
These agreements tend to push more money up into the hands of corporations, and move more jobs away (thereby gutting the economy) and leaving the citizens with nothing.
Basically, they're a sham to make wealthy corporations wealthier, and force the rest of us to be in a downward spiral of wages as everything moves to someplace cheaper to do it.
What they don't do it bring us the prosperity and jobs they claim it will. It's all a big scam, predicated on bullshit economics which keep being proven false.
Ecstasy and other designer drugs he created. ;-)
Or have had their jobs off-shored and eliminated.
To the people who lose the jobs, it's pretty much the same thing. You've been replaced with something which is cheaper and works more hours for less than you will.
Since this is the program initiative, and has nothing to do with the trademark Oracle owns on a CPU architecture ... they would get told to go screw themselves pretty quickly.
A trademark is only meaningful in the specific field you have it in. And the SPARC CPU has nothing specifically to do with robotics. And, it has nothing to do with multi-government initiatives to promote and develop technologies and their adoption.
In this case, SPARC is the name of the program to promote the use of robotics.
Larry Ellison can go piss up a rope. If you think Oracle filed suit against the EU for what they've named an initiative and wouldn't get thrown out of court and get their knuckles slapped, you'd be mistaken.
No more than Iggy Pop can sue you for using part of his name.
I would bet there is precisely zero legal grounds for Oracle to do anything about this.