So, imagine you have a lot of government scientists who do research in various fields.
Now imagine that the government has told them they can't attend conferences and discuss their research without a government minder being present to be sure what the scientists say is 'on message'.
And now imagine that being 'on message' is ideologically driven, and often divorced from evidence and facts -- but purely based on the beliefs of the government.
Basically they've told the scientists to STFU, and stop telling people things which contradict with what they're saying or risk being censured.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
It's most likely a corrupted profile. I heard they were working on a profile cleaner feature, but I don't know if it ever got released or not. I'd backup your Firefox with MozBackup, then run the standalone installer and hope it fixes it. If not, reinstall the old version and restore via MozBackup.
And somehow we geeks expect people like our parents and non-technical people to be able to navigate this kind of thing.
I maintain mission-critical enterprise software, and that sounds like a pain in the ass to me. Your average user is going to have no frigging idea what any of that means and give up and go back to IE.
You're never, ever, going to get me to fight on the side of Firefox on that kind of thing.:)
LOL, but now I still need to figure out how the hell to upgrade from 9.0.1, which seems to be proving quite annoying. The built in mechanism seems useless.
Feel free to use Chrome if you want.
Well, at this precise moment I'm running Firefox, Chrome and Safari all at the same time -- which is pretty much my standard configuration as I use them for different web presences and because Safari has incompetently implemented 3rd party cookie blocking. As in, there isn't actually any 3rd party cookie blocking in Safari.
No, the hilarious part is they keep saying it is working for us, or that regulations are having any of the desired effects.
If there's really a shadow economy in the trillions, any claims of being well regulated or the regulations working to any meaningful degree to protect us is a complete joke.
Ahh, the Firefox user equivalent to the IE user still using IE 6. We (the web dev community, in general) are going to leave you behind, so don't complain if things don't work right.
In fairness, Firefox version numbers have become meaningless to many of us over the last few years unless you pay really close attention.
I'm apparently running 9.0.1, but when I tell it to apply it's update it just restarts and doesn't actually do anything and leaves me with the exact same "Apply update" button in the help > about.
So I have no idea of what version I'm running in relation to anything else, don't seem to get updates when I tell it to, and have no trust in a piece of software which auto-updates itself quietly behind the scenes and do not want that.
So if the goal was to make something less confusing and easier to use and keep track of... from my perspective, that's not working well at all.
Sorry? I completely fail to see any humor in the fact that the banks of the world explicitly and openly collude to fuck us as hard as they can - And with the outright support of government, at that.
No, but what's hilarious is the continued claim they're well regulated and that the system is working.
Every single person doesn't need a solid defensible reason in order to be able to conclude there are, in fact, plenty of good reasons why you would like to have pseudonymous use of the internet.
That there are people who will be doing it for shady purposes doesn't invalidate that not everything everybody does do they want tied to their real world names and published for the world to see.
You can be not breaking any laws and still want some privacy.
Or if you have no interest in being connected to the grid and beholden to the power company which can decide to change the rates.
Cottages, remote locations, the developing world... these are all places where there may not be a grid, or where it may not be practical to connect to it.
Why should you even need to involve the utility in this if what you're looking for is a 100% off-grid solution? They're just middlemen and don't bring anything to the table except a place to store your energy... if you could do that on your own, you could basically be self sufficient.
Except if we had good storage, we could be completely separated from the grid instead of relying on being able to offload energy we can't use only to have to buy it back later.
Do we want to be driven around in a fleet of self driving cars, dispatched and tracked mercilessly by Google, thereby integrating a search history of your entire life, equipped with full time video, GPS and everything else they can jam into it??
And of course all of this gets handed over to the government, if not granted a direct feed.
If you buy a gun, and read the manual on how to fire a bullet into someone's face, the firearm manufacturer is not responsible for the murder.
And unless I plan on beating someone to death with a Cisco router, the two are unrelated.
It is illegal to shoot someone in the face, it shouldn't illegal to configure a device according to built-in functionality implemented by the vendor.
If by changing a few settings on a device (settings implemented and documented by the manufacturer) it magically becomes an infringing device, then either Cisco is selling something which infringes the patent, or the whole premise of patents has become untenable and fucked up.
If I buy a radio, I expect it to be a device which is legal to operate in any permutation I can do without altering the device. If I put the tuning dial to the left and the volume on full blast, are you seriously claiming I could have magically infringed on a patent and become liable? I would argue it was the vendor selling an infringing product from the get go, and since users can't vet the implementation to make sure it's not patent encumbered, the onus is on the vendor -- and that's where the liability should stay.
Yes, if I beat you senseless with the radio, I've committed assault, which is illegal. But saying I could infringe on a patent by adjusting settings that were shipped to me by the vendor is bordering on the irrational.
Either the patent is a complete joke and fails the obviousness test, or the patent system is a complete joke and fails the rationality test.
Just because a piece of equipment allows you to infringe, doesn't make the manufacturer the infringer.
So, if I take a manufacturer supported set of configurations, and I end up configuring my environment so that I'm infringing a patent this has nothing to do with the vendor?
That makes no sense to me. If the Cisco manuals tell me how to configure the gear like that, then why am I magically infringing on a patent?
To me this sounds like saying if I twiddle the nobs on my car's heating system, if I end up with a configuration which violates a patent then somehow I'm legally liable. If the unique claims in a patent can be infringed by changing configurations on a device I bought which is essentially a black box, then the patent is either a joke, or this is an issue between the vendor and the patent owner.
"This device is fine, but if you put this knob to the left and this knob to the right, you are legally infringing on a patent".
To me, when I buy a product, the configuration options in it are part of the device. At which point I expect that the people who made the device made a legal, conforming product that I can then use.
If I was a company getting sued for patent infringement, I'd immediately sue Cisco on the basis that what they sold me was something they weren't legally allowed to.
This is just insane. (Yes, I know you're not defending it, I'm just totally baffled by this)
They use the same math behind the Vista file copying progress bar to judge its distance.
Well, in fairness, any "x minutes to completion" is based on a projection -- you'd need to invent time travel to actually get it 100% right. This is true on any platform with a progress bar with a completion time in it.
So, at any given time you can make an estimate, but that's about it. If other things are happening which affect the estimate, it will change.
Mostly they're there to give you something to look at and let you know it hasn't died.
Oh, definitely -- we got the mother in law a Nexus 7, because what she really needed was something simple, which connected via wifi, and allowed her to get to the web and her email.
For many many people, these will probably cover everything they'll ever need to do and more.
I'm saying it's more limited in that it wants to be connected to the internet all the time and is highly dependent on the Google stuff. But for a lot of people, that is still probably all they'll need.
Slashdot Mirror
So, imagine you have a lot of government scientists who do research in various fields.
Now imagine that the government has told them they can't attend conferences and discuss their research without a government minder being present to be sure what the scientists say is 'on message'.
And now imagine that being 'on message' is ideologically driven, and often divorced from evidence and facts -- but purely based on the beliefs of the government.
Basically they've told the scientists to STFU, and stop telling people things which contradict with what they're saying or risk being censured.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
And somehow we geeks expect people like our parents and non-technical people to be able to navigate this kind of thing.
I maintain mission-critical enterprise software, and that sounds like a pain in the ass to me. Your average user is going to have no frigging idea what any of that means and give up and go back to IE.
LOL, but now I still need to figure out how the hell to upgrade from 9.0.1, which seems to be proving quite annoying. The built in mechanism seems useless.
Well, at this precise moment I'm running Firefox, Chrome and Safari all at the same time -- which is pretty much my standard configuration as I use them for different web presences and because Safari has incompetently implemented 3rd party cookie blocking. As in, there isn't actually any 3rd party cookie blocking in Safari.
No, the hilarious part is they keep saying it is working for us, or that regulations are having any of the desired effects.
If there's really a shadow economy in the trillions, any claims of being well regulated or the regulations working to any meaningful degree to protect us is a complete joke.
They threatened me and my family, and the only way I can escape prison or a firing squad is to publicly denounce this.
I do not believe this is anything other than agreeing to repeat the party line under duress.
In fairness, Firefox version numbers have become meaningless to many of us over the last few years unless you pay really close attention.
I'm apparently running 9.0.1, but when I tell it to apply it's update it just restarts and doesn't actually do anything and leaves me with the exact same "Apply update" button in the help > about.
So I have no idea of what version I'm running in relation to anything else, don't seem to get updates when I tell it to, and have no trust in a piece of software which auto-updates itself quietly behind the scenes and do not want that.
So if the goal was to make something less confusing and easier to use and keep track of ... from my perspective, that's not working well at all.
No, but what's hilarious is the continued claim they're well regulated and that the system is working.
Every single person doesn't need a solid defensible reason in order to be able to conclude there are, in fact, plenty of good reasons why you would like to have pseudonymous use of the internet.
That there are people who will be doing it for shady purposes doesn't invalidate that not everything everybody does do they want tied to their real world names and published for the world to see.
You can be not breaking any laws and still want some privacy.
Yeah, but those have spigots ... totally different. ;-)
And you're an asshole, apparently. Go fuck yourself.
Or if you have no interest in being connected to the grid and beholden to the power company which can decide to change the rates.
Cottages, remote locations, the developing world ... these are all places where there may not be a grid, or where it may not be practical to connect to it.
Why should you even need to involve the utility in this if what you're looking for is a 100% off-grid solution? They're just middlemen and don't bring anything to the table except a place to store your energy ... if you could do that on your own, you could basically be self sufficient.
Except if we had good storage, we could be completely separated from the grid instead of relying on being able to offload energy we can't use only to have to buy it back later.
Yes, yes it is. :-P
Though, I'm sure if you're really jonesing you can probably track it down with Google.
LOL ... my citation is Rule 34.
As far as example links ... I'm sure Google can help you with that.
You know, after 25 years of using the internet ... some days I'm not sure I'm ready for all of it.
There's some strange stuff out there.
OK, tinfoil hat perspective time:
Do we want to be driven around in a fleet of self driving cars, dispatched and tracked mercilessly by Google, thereby integrating a search history of your entire life, equipped with full time video, GPS and everything else they can jam into it??
And of course all of this gets handed over to the government, if not granted a direct feed.
That almost is cyberpunk.
Just saying, but this creeps me out.
Yes, we should get all of our students used to unpaid overtime now.
Instead of relying on a teacher to teach the material, we'll ask them to learn it on their own.
Really, what fraction of students are going to watch a video of a lecture (ecch, sounds horrible) outside of school hours?
Yeah, because nobody anticipated hooking those up to networking gear.
And nobody is making a copyright claim?
And unless I plan on beating someone to death with a Cisco router, the two are unrelated.
It is illegal to shoot someone in the face, it shouldn't illegal to configure a device according to built-in functionality implemented by the vendor.
If by changing a few settings on a device (settings implemented and documented by the manufacturer) it magically becomes an infringing device, then either Cisco is selling something which infringes the patent, or the whole premise of patents has become untenable and fucked up.
If I buy a radio, I expect it to be a device which is legal to operate in any permutation I can do without altering the device. If I put the tuning dial to the left and the volume on full blast, are you seriously claiming I could have magically infringed on a patent and become liable? I would argue it was the vendor selling an infringing product from the get go, and since users can't vet the implementation to make sure it's not patent encumbered, the onus is on the vendor -- and that's where the liability should stay.
Yes, if I beat you senseless with the radio, I've committed assault, which is illegal. But saying I could infringe on a patent by adjusting settings that were shipped to me by the vendor is bordering on the irrational.
Either the patent is a complete joke and fails the obviousness test, or the patent system is a complete joke and fails the rationality test.
So, if I take a manufacturer supported set of configurations, and I end up configuring my environment so that I'm infringing a patent this has nothing to do with the vendor?
That makes no sense to me. If the Cisco manuals tell me how to configure the gear like that, then why am I magically infringing on a patent?
To me this sounds like saying if I twiddle the nobs on my car's heating system, if I end up with a configuration which violates a patent then somehow I'm legally liable. If the unique claims in a patent can be infringed by changing configurations on a device I bought which is essentially a black box, then the patent is either a joke, or this is an issue between the vendor and the patent owner.
"This device is fine, but if you put this knob to the left and this knob to the right, you are legally infringing on a patent".
To me, when I buy a product, the configuration options in it are part of the device. At which point I expect that the people who made the device made a legal, conforming product that I can then use.
If I was a company getting sued for patent infringement, I'd immediately sue Cisco on the basis that what they sold me was something they weren't legally allowed to.
This is just insane. (Yes, I know you're not defending it, I'm just totally baffled by this)
Well, in fairness, any "x minutes to completion" is based on a projection -- you'd need to invent time travel to actually get it 100% right. This is true on any platform with a progress bar with a completion time in it.
So, at any given time you can make an estimate, but that's about it. If other things are happening which affect the estimate, it will change.
Mostly they're there to give you something to look at and let you know it hasn't died.
Well, this is, what, the 3rd time it's been 'official'?
I think I'll wait a few months before I believe it's officially official.
That's not to say this isn't highly cool -- I just am quite certain I've seen several variations on this over the last few years.
Oh, definitely -- we got the mother in law a Nexus 7, because what she really needed was something simple, which connected via wifi, and allowed her to get to the web and her email.
For many many people, these will probably cover everything they'll ever need to do and more.
I'm saying it's more limited in that it wants to be connected to the internet all the time and is highly dependent on the Google stuff. But for a lot of people, that is still probably all they'll need.