So what on earth makes you think that a female Doctor wouldn't get watched?
You have misunderstood what I said. I suggest reading it again.
I'd certainly watch a female Dr. Who in a heartbeat -- it's freakin' Dr. Who, of course I'd watch it, and there would be no protest. I just don't think the "lesbian tranny black Muslim" suggestion I was responding to would appeal to many people.
And that was all I was responding to.
Until someone pointed out from another post I'd added that time lords can, in fact, change gender from a regeneration, I'd assumed it wasn't possible. But I'll happily concede that I'm wrong on that point.
Hell, I think a spinoff series with the Dr's Daughter would be awesome. I'm not opposed to a female time lord at all.
Keep in mind the context of this manual. Alarmingly, the context is for a would be terrorist, guerrilla fighter, insurgent, etc.....go figure...
Not sure why you're surprised by that... the US has funded insurgencies against governments they don't like for decades.
A lot of nasty, vicious people were funded because they were opposed to the Soviets. In fact, Bin Laden and many of the people in Afghanistan were funded by the US.
The US used to fund what they'd now class as terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments they didn't like the ideology of -- which in no small part is why there's a lot of resentment in Latin America against the US.
Don't act like the last decade or so has been in a vacuum. These types of groups were actively (and sometimes secretly) funded and trained over a large number of years, and often some of the more appalling things they did were overlooked because of Cold War ideology.
That the US literally wrote the book on how to do this is of no surprise to anybody else. If you train attack dogs, you better be damned sure you can control them or they'll turn on you.
The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion.
I understand cost over-runs, but this is a full two orders of magnitude bigger. That's ridiculous.
This sounds like someone went into this with no friggin' idea of what the scope was, or knew damned well it was much larger than the client would go for, and knew they'd make it up on the "time and materials" aspects of it.
Companies like IBM sometimes know they have no chance of doing it for the stated costs and can make lots of money on the hourly stuff -- but this is ridiculous.
This is more than a billion dollars over budget.. hell, for purposes of discussion, it's about $1.2 billion over budget. That's either fraud or incompetence.
but i don't see why the doctor who could not be a lesbian tranny black Muslim in a wheelchair.
You mean besides the fact that nobody would watch it?
What is the intersection of the two sets of "Dr. Who Fans" and people who want to see "lesbian tranny black Muslim" as the Doctor? I'm betting it's vanishingly small.
Jack Harkness already gives a nod as a character with a, er, 'flexible' sexuality. It's not like they're making out like in the future homosexuals are extinct or something that doesn't happen.
You can only push so far before you lose your core audience.
I realize she's pushing for gender equality here, but the Doctor is male.
He had a wife and kids, and in the newer series someone made a partial clone of him which is now kind of his daughter. There were female time lords, be he isn't one. So why would his regenerations turn him into a female?
Now, I don't know how they'd drum up a TARDIS for her, but Jenny should still be out there in the universe.
I realize that with Doctor Who you may not need to worry about being strictly canonical, but there's never been anything to suggest (that I know of) that regenerations could flip your gender.
No matter how thin it is, no matter how fast it is, no matter how well the display can be, it is still a tablet
Well, then don't buy one, and don't bother to let us all know how underwhelmed you are -- we're underwhelmed that you're underwhelmed.
What I am looking for - especially from tech firms such as Google - is something totally new, something that is revolutionary, not evolutionary
But you have NO idea of what that would be, and you're going to sulk until such time as they do? Right.
There's nothing revolutionary anymore in cars, and unfortunately, nor for the smartphones / tablets
And for the most part, this has been true in the industry for a very long time now. The machine on my desktop now is an exceedingly boring direct descendant of the one that sat on my desk 25 years ago -- a screen, keys, and a box full of stuff to make it go.
With a 4 digit ID, you should bloody well know that. Name 5 truly revolutionary pieces of technology in the last 25 years in the realm of computers... anything which came from existing technology in any way doesn't count. Because, after all, that's just evolutionary which seems to make you sad.
Tell you what, you go build something freakin' awesome, and when you get back, we'll all piss and moan about how it's not nearly cool enough.
Your existential malaise is something best savored by yourself.
If you handwave the electrical issues, magnetic accelerators are all kinds of scary. If you don't, you'd be lucky to cram the power supply for anything actually dangerous into a single support vehicle...
Unless your support vehicle is an Aegis cruiser or some such thing.
The military is always looking for new and improved ways to lob shit on people from long distance.
Oh, sure, they can make this, but I still can't find a stapler which will go through more than about 10 pages without resorting to the big monster next to the printer.;-)
Hey, if pigs didn't want to be eaten they shouldn't have evolved to be so gorram delicious.
Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense enough to disregard its own faeces.
but Russia probably wouldn't be embarrassed by someone like Snowden coming forward. They don't pretend to be "free".
No, but they'd make the same bluster about making sure he stands trial and being a traitor the US is making now.
And, as I said, in the same situation, the US probably would (and likely has) grant asylum to someone fleeing Russia. And then it just becomes more hypocrisy .
People gladly upload their passwords to Google and other companies so they'll be automatically synced to their other devices through the cloud.
I'm not one of those people -- the 'cloud' has always been synonymous with giving up control of your own data.
It moves your data into the cloud where they can rent it back to you and it means you no longer have to worry about backing up, remembering passwords, or transferring your data.
Again, not happening.
That's a major win in the eyes of most consumers, even many technical ones.
That's an unfortunate thing for those consumers then. Me, I was saying years ago that with the DMCA and who knows what else you can't trust your data to be safe in the cloud. Because way too many parties I wouldn't let into my network have access to it, and you have no way of knowing.
There's a reason why many governments do not allow use of a cloud system under the control of a US company -- because you have no real control over what they do with it, and we have plenty of evidence that if the NSA wanted it, they'd go get it.
we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda
He of the "Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than saying he'd be interested in talking" is taking his ball and going home until the US gets their way.
I'm not saying Russia isn't moving a little backwards over the last bunch of years, but let's not pretend that the US wouldn't grant asylum to someone leaving Russia under similar circumstances and call it defending freedom and liberty.
I view this as a diplomatic temper tantrum. 'Shared Agenda' in modern US diplomatic speak is code for "what we want".
I think you might see more and more countries deciding they are tired of being strong-armed into complying with what the US wants. Especially with the revelations of just exactly the scope of their spying and other activities.
This is like the guy you discovered screwing your wife cancelling your dinner invitation because you hurt his feelings when you kicked him out of your house -- there's a lot of "woe is us", but don't keep playing that victim card too much.
With the recent leaks about how Google cooperates with government surveilence; I almost wonder if blatent weaknesses like this are by design
It may not be that way by design, but it's certainly a possibility to be exploited.
Imagine if the government went to Google and said "you need to add secret code which uploads these user/passwords to us so we have them".
Google may not be directly part of a conspiracy like this, but I see no reason to keep acting like they couldn't be forced to or might not occasionally have one of their 'lapses' like when they collected all of people's wi-fi information -- sometimes hubris is as dangerous as malicious intent.
If you don't entrust them with the information, they can't become the source of someone else getting their hands on it.
It's sitting there in plain text for anybody with _physical access_ to the machine to get
Right, and exploits have never allowed people to access local files they're not supposed to. Nosiree, it's iron clad and has a perfect track record.
So no, any website can not access it, but anybody on the machine can.
Well, you can choose to believe that -- me I'll treat browsers like an untrusted entity in which stuff like that can bleed out in ways nobody planned for. We already know that cross-site cookies can be a problem.
Knowing that all those tasty passwords are sitting in a known place and unencrypted makes it a really nice target. So I'll just not put those passwords there to begin with, and cut out a possible threat. How you handle that, well, that's your problem.
You know what, when someone is physically on my machine while its logged in, they can also send emails from my account!!
If it's sitting there in plain text for anybody to get, what's to prevent a malicious web-page from asking for it?
Or are we meant to believe they made it trivial to access from the machine, but have put in super-duper security around accessing it from with the browser? Because I'm not buying that.
I know it has been discussed many times to password lock access to stored passwords, though because browsers are not user-specific, this has not been done.
I'm sorry, but there is a dedicated area for my stuff -- on Windows it's Documents and Settings, and on UNIX it's the home directory. The actual program may not be user specific, but all operating systems have a "home" area specific to users. There are no valid technical reasons why this can't be made secure, other than either having no interest in doing it, or pandering to users who just want convenience.
This is just a piss-poor implementation of security, and it's why I don't trust a browser to retain passwords for me, and never have. I rank it right up there with giving Facebook my password so they can log into my email and find friends -- not happening, because I don't trust them with my password.
If this guy is the head of 'security' for Chrome, he's either incompetent at that, or Google as a general rule have a shitty idea about what security should be and he's of the opinion this is "good enough".
But since Google mostly just wants to collect all of your data, it may not be of value to them to lock it down in any meaningful way.
The device can be created at home very cheaply and consists of a plastic dog bowl that's been inverted, with the outer wall covered with a layer of dyed-black surgical tape.
After years of research and government grants, we have invented... a black dog bowl.;-)
Or pay a license fee to sing happy birthday, or pay to buy clean water, or Mickey Mouse being granted perpetual copyright, or patenting everything so it's not possible to make anything without paying some asshat royalties for a patent so obvious anybody could tell you how to do it.
almost every new ultra luxury building has 20% apartments set aside for low income
Because they still have to deal with the pesky laws which make some attempt at equality and fairness.
But don't worry, they're slowly chipping away at them -- they've already convinced everybody that a "border stop" can be 100+ miles from a border and that we need to be scanned, fingerprinted, cataloged, and monitored for our own safety.
Do you honestly believe there aren't people who would happily pass laws which say "screw the poor, money is power"?
There's tons of people who believe government should only enforce property rights and contract law -- at which point the rest of the world can go pound sand, or eventually decide that system isn't working for them and don't want to play by those rules because there's no benefit to them.
It doesn't have to happen exactly as it does in the fiction... but you can already see many elements of it happening now.
And large corporations control far more money than that.
Convince a government or two that for on-going national security your leaders need to be someplace safe from terrorists and opposing views, and they'll throw money at it too.
You don't think Wall Street couldn't come up with the capital to make sure our overlords aren't whisked away? They'll just find a way to transfer more money from us to them. Fox News and the Republicans would be the first to agree with this, because it's all about corporate profits.
An actual space station might be a tad much, but it's always possible for the wealthy to find ways to insulate themselves from the rest of us.
Yes, but now we have multi-national corporations and the treaties they write on behalf of government.
Dystopian futures fall into "oppressive government" or "oppressive corporations" -- and we're proceeding on track for the corporations to do what governments have been unable to do for hundreds of years.
Because when Comcast is planning on giving you 'friendly' tips you're about to violate copyright, and industry groups write the text of your treaties to their own benefit -- unless you can reverse that, that's where we're heading. As governments become the policy and enforcement arm for industry, they have more and more say into how things work.
Slashdot Mirror
One more nail in the coffin of a product which has been dying since it was released.
Come on guys, just how bad of a job are you doing these days?
I'd argue a significant chunk of us are the core audience for this show. Many of us have probably watched it for a long time.
I'm also not opposed to a female Doctor, and never said so -- it was the whole laundry list of minorities I was responding to as being absurd.
You have misunderstood what I said. I suggest reading it again.
I'd certainly watch a female Dr. Who in a heartbeat -- it's freakin' Dr. Who, of course I'd watch it, and there would be no protest. I just don't think the "lesbian tranny black Muslim" suggestion I was responding to would appeal to many people.
And that was all I was responding to.
Until someone pointed out from another post I'd added that time lords can, in fact, change gender from a regeneration, I'd assumed it wasn't possible. But I'll happily concede that I'm wrong on that point.
Hell, I think a spinoff series with the Dr's Daughter would be awesome. I'm not opposed to a female time lord at all.
Not sure why you're surprised by that ... the US has funded insurgencies against governments they don't like for decades.
A lot of nasty, vicious people were funded because they were opposed to the Soviets. In fact, Bin Laden and many of the people in Afghanistan were funded by the US.
The US used to fund what they'd now class as terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments they didn't like the ideology of -- which in no small part is why there's a lot of resentment in Latin America against the US.
Don't act like the last decade or so has been in a vacuum. These types of groups were actively (and sometimes secretly) funded and trained over a large number of years, and often some of the more appalling things they did were overlooked because of Cold War ideology.
That the US literally wrote the book on how to do this is of no surprise to anybody else. If you train attack dogs, you better be damned sure you can control them or they'll turn on you.
I understand cost over-runs, but this is a full two orders of magnitude bigger. That's ridiculous.
This sounds like someone went into this with no friggin' idea of what the scope was, or knew damned well it was much larger than the client would go for, and knew they'd make it up on the "time and materials" aspects of it.
Companies like IBM sometimes know they have no chance of doing it for the stated costs and can make lots of money on the hourly stuff -- but this is ridiculous.
This is more than a billion dollars over budget .. hell, for purposes of discussion, it's about $1.2 billion over budget. That's either fraud or incompetence.
You mean besides the fact that nobody would watch it?
What is the intersection of the two sets of "Dr. Who Fans" and people who want to see "lesbian tranny black Muslim" as the Doctor? I'm betting it's vanishingly small.
Jack Harkness already gives a nod as a character with a, er, 'flexible' sexuality. It's not like they're making out like in the future homosexuals are extinct or something that doesn't happen.
You can only push so far before you lose your core audience.
I realize she's pushing for gender equality here, but the Doctor is male.
He had a wife and kids, and in the newer series someone made a partial clone of him which is now kind of his daughter. There were female time lords, be he isn't one. So why would his regenerations turn him into a female?
Now, I don't know how they'd drum up a TARDIS for her, but Jenny should still be out there in the universe.
I realize that with Doctor Who you may not need to worry about being strictly canonical, but there's never been anything to suggest (that I know of) that regenerations could flip your gender.
Well, then don't buy one, and don't bother to let us all know how underwhelmed you are -- we're underwhelmed that you're underwhelmed.
But you have NO idea of what that would be, and you're going to sulk until such time as they do? Right.
And for the most part, this has been true in the industry for a very long time now. The machine on my desktop now is an exceedingly boring direct descendant of the one that sat on my desk 25 years ago -- a screen, keys, and a box full of stuff to make it go.
With a 4 digit ID, you should bloody well know that. Name 5 truly revolutionary pieces of technology in the last 25 years in the realm of computers ... anything which came from existing technology in any way doesn't count. Because, after all, that's just evolutionary which seems to make you sad.
Tell you what, you go build something freakin' awesome, and when you get back, we'll all piss and moan about how it's not nearly cool enough.
Your existential malaise is something best savored by yourself.
Oh, sure, I only bought my last gen Nexus 7 about a month ago.
Bastards!! ;-)
Oh well, maybe the wife can inherit this one once I decide to splash out on the updated one in a few months or so.
Unless your support vehicle is an Aegis cruiser or some such thing.
The military is always looking for new and improved ways to lob shit on people from long distance.
Dude, Whoosh! It's a movie reference there, hoss.
Oh, sure, they can make this, but I still can't find a stapler which will go through more than about 10 pages without resorting to the big monster next to the printer. ;-)
Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense enough to disregard its own faeces.
It had to be said. ;-)
No, but they'd make the same bluster about making sure he stands trial and being a traitor the US is making now.
And, as I said, in the same situation, the US probably would (and likely has) grant asylum to someone fleeing Russia. And then it just becomes more hypocrisy .
Nope. Not happening.
I'm not one of those people -- the 'cloud' has always been synonymous with giving up control of your own data.
Again, not happening.
That's an unfortunate thing for those consumers then. Me, I was saying years ago that with the DMCA and who knows what else you can't trust your data to be safe in the cloud. Because way too many parties I wouldn't let into my network have access to it, and you have no way of knowing.
There's a reason why many governments do not allow use of a cloud system under the control of a US company -- because you have no real control over what they do with it, and we have plenty of evidence that if the NSA wanted it, they'd go get it.
To hell with that.
He of the "Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than saying he'd be interested in talking" is taking his ball and going home until the US gets their way.
I'm not saying Russia isn't moving a little backwards over the last bunch of years, but let's not pretend that the US wouldn't grant asylum to someone leaving Russia under similar circumstances and call it defending freedom and liberty.
I view this as a diplomatic temper tantrum. 'Shared Agenda' in modern US diplomatic speak is code for "what we want".
I think you might see more and more countries deciding they are tired of being strong-armed into complying with what the US wants. Especially with the revelations of just exactly the scope of their spying and other activities.
This is like the guy you discovered screwing your wife cancelling your dinner invitation because you hurt his feelings when you kicked him out of your house -- there's a lot of "woe is us", but don't keep playing that victim card too much.
It may not be that way by design, but it's certainly a possibility to be exploited.
Imagine if the government went to Google and said "you need to add secret code which uploads these user/passwords to us so we have them".
Google may not be directly part of a conspiracy like this, but I see no reason to keep acting like they couldn't be forced to or might not occasionally have one of their 'lapses' like when they collected all of people's wi-fi information -- sometimes hubris is as dangerous as malicious intent.
If you don't entrust them with the information, they can't become the source of someone else getting their hands on it.
Right, and exploits have never allowed people to access local files they're not supposed to. Nosiree, it's iron clad and has a perfect track record.
Well, you can choose to believe that -- me I'll treat browsers like an untrusted entity in which stuff like that can bleed out in ways nobody planned for. We already know that cross-site cookies can be a problem.
Knowing that all those tasty passwords are sitting in a known place and unencrypted makes it a really nice target. So I'll just not put those passwords there to begin with, and cut out a possible threat. How you handle that, well, that's your problem.
If it's sitting there in plain text for anybody to get, what's to prevent a malicious web-page from asking for it?
Or are we meant to believe they made it trivial to access from the machine, but have put in super-duper security around accessing it from with the browser? Because I'm not buying that.
I'm sorry, but there is a dedicated area for my stuff -- on Windows it's Documents and Settings, and on UNIX it's the home directory. The actual program may not be user specific, but all operating systems have a "home" area specific to users. There are no valid technical reasons why this can't be made secure, other than either having no interest in doing it, or pandering to users who just want convenience.
This is just a piss-poor implementation of security, and it's why I don't trust a browser to retain passwords for me, and never have. I rank it right up there with giving Facebook my password so they can log into my email and find friends -- not happening, because I don't trust them with my password.
If this guy is the head of 'security' for Chrome, he's either incompetent at that, or Google as a general rule have a shitty idea about what security should be and he's of the opinion this is "good enough".
But since Google mostly just wants to collect all of your data, it may not be of value to them to lock it down in any meaningful way.
After years of research and government grants, we have invented ... a black dog bowl. ;-)
Or pay a license fee to sing happy birthday, or pay to buy clean water, or Mickey Mouse being granted perpetual copyright, or patenting everything so it's not possible to make anything without paying some asshat royalties for a patent so obvious anybody could tell you how to do it.
No sir, those things could never happen.
It's about way more than movies.
Because they still have to deal with the pesky laws which make some attempt at equality and fairness.
But don't worry, they're slowly chipping away at them -- they've already convinced everybody that a "border stop" can be 100+ miles from a border and that we need to be scanned, fingerprinted, cataloged, and monitored for our own safety.
Do you honestly believe there aren't people who would happily pass laws which say "screw the poor, money is power"?
There's tons of people who believe government should only enforce property rights and contract law -- at which point the rest of the world can go pound sand, or eventually decide that system isn't working for them and don't want to play by those rules because there's no benefit to them.
It doesn't have to happen exactly as it does in the fiction ... but you can already see many elements of it happening now.
And large corporations control far more money than that.
Convince a government or two that for on-going national security your leaders need to be someplace safe from terrorists and opposing views, and they'll throw money at it too.
You don't think Wall Street couldn't come up with the capital to make sure our overlords aren't whisked away? They'll just find a way to transfer more money from us to them. Fox News and the Republicans would be the first to agree with this, because it's all about corporate profits.
An actual space station might be a tad much, but it's always possible for the wealthy to find ways to insulate themselves from the rest of us.
Yes, but now we have multi-national corporations and the treaties they write on behalf of government.
Dystopian futures fall into "oppressive government" or "oppressive corporations" -- and we're proceeding on track for the corporations to do what governments have been unable to do for hundreds of years.
Because when Comcast is planning on giving you 'friendly' tips you're about to violate copyright, and industry groups write the text of your treaties to their own benefit -- unless you can reverse that, that's where we're heading. As governments become the policy and enforcement arm for industry, they have more and more say into how things work.