This sounds somewhat improbable. How did it generate a username and password for you, for example?
You are correct -- the App took my google credentials, and logged me into YouTube without asking and sent me an email welcoming me to YouTube.
I subsequently deleted the account in the YouTub app, re-launched it, and it did it again.
I subsequently disabled the YouTube app. An application which doesn't ask my permission before it signs me into something isn't something I want.
If I was to hit YouTube without being signed in, it would work fine -- but I didn't ask to be signed in, and have no desire to sign into YouTube.
Just because Google thinks their stuff is awesome and I should be signed up for it all, doesn't mean I agree -- I don't want their stupid Google+ either.
Actually I postulated and backed my postulation up with actual evidence to support it.
No, you backed it up with other like minded people who believe the same thing.
That doesn't make it fact or evidence any more than one religious person citing that other people believe in religion as 'proof' of god. Yes, other people believe the same thing, but other people believing something doesn't make it a fact.
FTFY
Again, yawn. In most countries the citizens don't want other citizens walking around with guns either.
You Americans love your guns and your romanticized idea of the cowboy gunslinger, that much is true. But if you think of places where people are walking around armed as a general rule, those countries aren't safer as a result -- they're unsafe already. Afghanistan, Somalia... generally places which are pretty lawless.
Name me one other 'civilized' Western country where the populace walks around armed that isn't in the middle of civil war, because I'm honestly hard pressed to think of one besides the US.
The Lernstift pen incorporates an ARM Cortex processor, a WiFi module, and a motion sensor, and is designed to correct penmanship, spelling, and grammar errors as you write
Let me start of by saying "what the hell?", and move on to pointing out that auto-correct on mobile keyboards is a pain in the ass, and in a pen would only be worse.
There's no way in hell a pen is gonna help with my atrocious penmanship. This sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
But, hey, it's vaporware, runs Linux, and is on kickstarter -- which means someone is going "oooh, gotta get me some of that".
Now get off my damned lawn, you kids and your fancy wi-fi pens. You'll put someone's eye out!
I bought a new Android tablet the other week. In clicking around I opened the YouTube application -- next thing I knew the damned thing had created an account for me on YouTube without asking me.
I don't want a YouTube account, and I didn't tell you to create one for me. Give me the damned option to run the app without a damned account.
Google has one interest, and that's harvesting as much info about you as possible. I fear my tablet will end up having a lot of the stuff disabled to keep Google at bay with their crap.
I used to like Google, but increasingly they're becoming an entity I don't put any more trust in than I absolutely must -- and unfortunately, everyone seems to be going in the same direction.
Holy crap. The biggest thing we ever had to take delivery of was an HP-9000 server, but in a case with a built in UPS and a giant backplane for the disks.
It was the size of a fridge, rolled on wheels, and needed to be wired in special because it was 220V and took a lot of juice.
My guess is there was almost 100kg of batteries alone, but it was mostly a rolling rack with a computer inside.
they proceeded to physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment, including uninfected systems, printers, cameras, keyboards and mice.
OK, be honest now, who among us hasn't wanted to do this?
Admittedly, destroying mice and keyboards is a little excessive, but I bet there's not a single person here who isn't dreaming of needlessly destroying a large quantity of computer gear in a very dramatic manner.
Because its not like you couldn't call the police if people are doing unsafe things with guns. In a lot of places there are laws about the safe handling of weapons.
And I'm sure the police and those laws were a great comfort to all of those victims of gun violence and rampage shootings, and 100% effectively prevented any deaths.
They are trying to eat their cake and have it, too.
You know, I think they're trying to eat our cake and keep their own.
It's getting to the point that I am going to have to make a major jump off Windows (again), or at least set up firewall rules which block the entire Microsoft domain.
Embedding ads and other tracking shit in the desktop is not something I'm willing to excuse.
blu-ray is currently the best way to get digital copies of films, in terms of video and audio quality anyways, which is the entire point of having it.
Well, it is a digital copy in that it has bits, but it's not a portable digital copy. With iTunes, you can get the movie and put it on any of your devices -- iPod, iPad, iPhone and play them wherever you like, and on as many devices as you own.
I don't consider a disc to be a digital copy.
how is locking it to iproducts a better way?
Well, the Digital Copy which you can get from iTunes and with many new movies is better than nothing, and it's a damned sight better than the Ultraviolet crap -- because you apparently can't watch an Ultraviolet movie on a plane because it needs to connect to the server. Which, pretty much invalidates the whole purpose of the portable digital copy for me. Ultraviolet doesn't give you any ability to actually use it from what I can tell, and my one experience with it told me it's not something I'm prepared to mess with.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but short of going through the long process of ripping films yourself, or downloading from the internet, you can at least get a legal copy you can take with you.
So, if you want to buy the movie in a store (like some of us do), and be able to immediately get a legal, portable copy of the movie to take with you, it falls into the "good enough" category. Because for me, being able to watch a movie on a plane or in my hotel room or anywhere I don't have an internet connection is something worth paying having.
Plus there is the small issue that once your iPad1 is updated to iOS5, apps crash all the time as the iPad1 does not have enough memory any more. And you can't roll back to iOS 4.
Whatever person marked this as flamebait is an overzealous fanboi -- this pretty much exactly describes what happened with my first gen iPad.
Everything crashes all the time, and the device has become rather useless and slow from what it started out as.
I'm going to try to reset it to factory and see what I end up with -- if it goes all the way back to the way I got it, I might not even take the OS upgrade, and just put a skeleton set of software on it and leave it that way.
Like the poster, I'm looking into Android alternatives to the iPad.
You mean like not having a budget, and spending literally trillions of dollars a year more than you take in?
So, in effect you're saying "since government can be inefficient, we should scrap all rules which keep corporations from committing outright theft"? Yeah, that'll fix the problems.
Whether the government enforces prohibition or imposes high taxes on cigarettes or anything at all for that matter, people find ways to find the products at a cheaper price and the government 'cracks down' on that because it wants a much bigger cut
The government isn't just regulating stock markets because they want a cut.
They regulate them because there is a widespread opportunity for fraud and the bullshit from the Asset Backet Paper Commodities which were worthless but some how were getting passed off as AAA debt. It was a shell game of moving around the money until it was someone else's problem.
This isn't trying to "satisfy a market demand", this is trying to sidestep the entire market and play under a different set of rules than everybody else.
Banks and their high-frequency trading is just trying to take a cut out of the market before anyone else gets a chance. Why should trading institutions have privileged access to the market to pad out their own bottom line and skim the money off before everyone else can?
But, based on your posting history, you probably think it should be perfectly OK to manipulate the markets for their own ends.
On top of that: they switch from one open source license to another one.
Well, traditionally SleepyCat has been under a more BSD-like license, this is more of a GPL variant.
With the BSD license you could basically incorporate the BerkelyDB into a commercial product, with the GPL one you have a few more restrictions. So there is more than just "from one open source to another".
If what you're storing is key/value pairs, SleepyCat/BerkeleyDB is a really useful database.
Since there's two schools of thought on which is better, not everyone is going to like the shift to a GPL based one.
It seems that the service has the taxi community in an uproar, who believe that Lyft ride-share drivers should be required to obtain the permits similar to those required of taxi drivers.
Carpooling should have the same license as a taxi?
Sadly, the major players have no interest in open platforms. So your choices become "live in a cave and stop using technology", "find the middle ground you can live with", or "just use it and stop caring".
Obviously the 1st and 3rd choices suck, and the 2nd one is difficult, and quite possibly a losing battle.
Thee and me tilting at windmills won't change the way most people go about doing this. I'm not saying we should stop trying, but sometimes a little pragmatism can come in handy.
I'm not addressing other companies here, I'm addressing Apple, and someone (who is probably trolling, but has been modde insightful by the faithful)
Well, let's face it -- this is Slashdot. 30% will hate everything a given company does with no good reason, 30% will love everything a given company does with no good reason, 20% or so use lots of different things but aren't 'faithful' and buy on merit, 26.3% of us will just say "get off my lawn" and bitch about everything, about 42% will buy on the basis of "oooh, shiny", and 100% will piss and moan about the decision making process of other people being horribly flawed, irrational, and untenable.
You'll also find no correlation between how Slashdot does this, and how the rest of the world does since we tend to be polarized to the point of being collective screeching monkeys.
Yes, Apple led the way in terms of providing a closed shop they control. And, yes, as you point out, everyone is trying to do exactly the same thing right now.
I'm jut saying that instead of this pointless pissing contest everytime someone mentions Apple or Microsoft and we divide off into camps of idiots -- go no the assumption they're all greedy bastards who don't give a shit about your security and privacy.
Weigh the technology on how useful it is to you and your needs, balanced with how much you care about various bullshit any of them have done in the past and what you can do to mitigate it.
But don't think any tech company nowadays has your best interests at heart. Me, I'm just as apt to run both my Google Nexus and my iPad in airplane mode most of the time to minimize the stuff it is doing when I'm not looking.
Apple doesn't care about your security, it cares about your money.
News flash: that's all any of them care about.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Sony, Netflix, Samsung, Oracle, Nokia, Motorolla... every single damned one of them (and more) only cares about your money.
They will often sacrifice your security in order to make it easier for them to intrude on your privacy. Or they're so grossly incompetent to implement any actual security as to make it worthless. The only security they'll put effort into is their own DRM.
If you completely trust any of them, you've misplaced your faith. You can trust them to varying degrees as you see fit, but don't think for a minute this is unique to Apple.
None of these companies deserve blanket trust, some deserve some guarded trust where you disable/enable as you need them, and some of them you should probably neither trust nor reward with your money.
But every single damned one of them has one goal, and one goal only -- to maximize profits, and in the process, monetize anything about you they have access to.
Is it wife and grandparent-babysitter user friendly?
The wife can operate it just fine -- turn on the amp, select one of 4 input sources, turn on the input source. It aint rocket science. The amp does the video switching, it'a a pretty common setup for a home theatre.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a landlocked navy and a complaints department that can't do anything.
Glad to see that China suffers under the same bureaucratic crap as the rest of the world. Possibly even more.
You are correct -- the App took my google credentials, and logged me into YouTube without asking and sent me an email welcoming me to YouTube.
I subsequently deleted the account in the YouTub app, re-launched it, and it did it again.
I subsequently disabled the YouTube app. An application which doesn't ask my permission before it signs me into something isn't something I want.
If I was to hit YouTube without being signed in, it would work fine -- but I didn't ask to be signed in, and have no desire to sign into YouTube.
Just because Google thinks their stuff is awesome and I should be signed up for it all, doesn't mean I agree -- I don't want their stupid Google+ either.
No, you backed it up with other like minded people who believe the same thing.
That doesn't make it fact or evidence any more than one religious person citing that other people believe in religion as 'proof' of god. Yes, other people believe the same thing, but other people believing something doesn't make it a fact.
Again, yawn. In most countries the citizens don't want other citizens walking around with guns either.
You Americans love your guns and your romanticized idea of the cowboy gunslinger, that much is true. But if you think of places where people are walking around armed as a general rule, those countries aren't safer as a result -- they're unsafe already. Afghanistan, Somalia ... generally places which are pretty lawless.
Name me one other 'civilized' Western country where the populace walks around armed that isn't in the middle of civil war, because I'm honestly hard pressed to think of one besides the US.
Yawn ... so you say.
Not everyone believes that having more people walking around with guns will reduce violence.
Most countries don't want their citizens walking around armed.
Let me start of by saying "what the hell?", and move on to pointing out that auto-correct on mobile keyboards is a pain in the ass, and in a pen would only be worse.
There's no way in hell a pen is gonna help with my atrocious penmanship. This sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
But, hey, it's vaporware, runs Linux, and is on kickstarter -- which means someone is going "oooh, gotta get me some of that".
Now get off my damned lawn, you kids and your fancy wi-fi pens. You'll put someone's eye out!
I bought a new Android tablet the other week. In clicking around I opened the YouTube application -- next thing I knew the damned thing had created an account for me on YouTube without asking me.
I don't want a YouTube account, and I didn't tell you to create one for me. Give me the damned option to run the app without a damned account.
Google has one interest, and that's harvesting as much info about you as possible. I fear my tablet will end up having a lot of the stuff disabled to keep Google at bay with their crap.
I used to like Google, but increasingly they're becoming an entity I don't put any more trust in than I absolutely must -- and unfortunately, everyone seems to be going in the same direction.
No, they're the ones who are supposed to defend the privacy and security of personal information, you're thinking of GCHQ.
Governments and really large corporations usually have departments whose job is to prevent the stuff done by another department.
Holy crap. The biggest thing we ever had to take delivery of was an HP-9000 server, but in a case with a built in UPS and a giant backplane for the disks.
It was the size of a fridge, rolled on wheels, and needed to be wired in special because it was 220V and took a lot of juice.
My guess is there was almost 100kg of batteries alone, but it was mostly a rolling rack with a computer inside.
OK, be honest now, who among us hasn't wanted to do this?
Admittedly, destroying mice and keyboards is a little excessive, but I bet there's not a single person here who isn't dreaming of needlessly destroying a large quantity of computer gear in a very dramatic manner.
And I'm sure the police and those laws were a great comfort to all of those victims of gun violence and rampage shootings, and 100% effectively prevented any deaths.
You know, I think they're trying to eat our cake and keep their own.
It's getting to the point that I am going to have to make a major jump off Windows (again), or at least set up firewall rules which block the entire Microsoft domain.
Embedding ads and other tracking shit in the desktop is not something I'm willing to excuse.
No, they'll just all follow suit with Wal Mart and make sure nobody ever gets enough hours to tip over that threshold.
Well, it is a digital copy in that it has bits, but it's not a portable digital copy. With iTunes, you can get the movie and put it on any of your devices -- iPod, iPad, iPhone and play them wherever you like, and on as many devices as you own.
I don't consider a disc to be a digital copy.
Well, the Digital Copy which you can get from iTunes and with many new movies is better than nothing, and it's a damned sight better than the Ultraviolet crap -- because you apparently can't watch an Ultraviolet movie on a plane because it needs to connect to the server. Which, pretty much invalidates the whole purpose of the portable digital copy for me. Ultraviolet doesn't give you any ability to actually use it from what I can tell, and my one experience with it told me it's not something I'm prepared to mess with.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but short of going through the long process of ripping films yourself, or downloading from the internet, you can at least get a legal copy you can take with you.
So, if you want to buy the movie in a store (like some of us do), and be able to immediately get a legal, portable copy of the movie to take with you, it falls into the "good enough" category. Because for me, being able to watch a movie on a plane or in my hotel room or anywhere I don't have an internet connection is something worth paying having.
Whatever person marked this as flamebait is an overzealous fanboi -- this pretty much exactly describes what happened with my first gen iPad.
Everything crashes all the time, and the device has become rather useless and slow from what it started out as.
I'm going to try to reset it to factory and see what I end up with -- if it goes all the way back to the way I got it, I might not even take the OS upgrade, and just put a skeleton set of software on it and leave it that way.
Like the poster, I'm looking into Android alternatives to the iPad.
So, in effect you're saying "since government can be inefficient, we should scrap all rules which keep corporations from committing outright theft"? Yeah, that'll fix the problems.
You're an idiot.
The government isn't just regulating stock markets because they want a cut.
They regulate them because there is a widespread opportunity for fraud and the bullshit from the Asset Backet Paper Commodities which were worthless but some how were getting passed off as AAA debt. It was a shell game of moving around the money until it was someone else's problem.
This isn't trying to "satisfy a market demand", this is trying to sidestep the entire market and play under a different set of rules than everybody else.
Banks and their high-frequency trading is just trying to take a cut out of the market before anyone else gets a chance. Why should trading institutions have privileged access to the market to pad out their own bottom line and skim the money off before everyone else can?
But, based on your posting history, you probably think it should be perfectly OK to manipulate the markets for their own ends.
Welder, electrician, plumber ... those trades are always in demand, and can't be outsourced.
Well, traditionally SleepyCat has been under a more BSD-like license, this is more of a GPL variant.
With the BSD license you could basically incorporate the BerkelyDB into a commercial product, with the GPL one you have a few more restrictions. So there is more than just "from one open source to another".
If what you're storing is key/value pairs, SleepyCat/BerkeleyDB is a really useful database.
Since there's two schools of thought on which is better, not everyone is going to like the shift to a GPL based one.
Yeah, in which case, it's hard to see how they're NOT directly competing with Taxis.
That gets into an entirely different category -- if it was purely ride-sharing/gas-sharing that's one thing, but this is something else.
Carpooling should have the same license as a taxi?
What utter crap.
Oh, I hear you my friend.
Sadly, the major players have no interest in open platforms. So your choices become "live in a cave and stop using technology", "find the middle ground you can live with", or "just use it and stop caring".
Obviously the 1st and 3rd choices suck, and the 2nd one is difficult, and quite possibly a losing battle.
Thee and me tilting at windmills won't change the way most people go about doing this. I'm not saying we should stop trying, but sometimes a little pragmatism can come in handy.
Well, let's face it -- this is Slashdot. 30% will hate everything a given company does with no good reason, 30% will love everything a given company does with no good reason, 20% or so use lots of different things but aren't 'faithful' and buy on merit, 26.3% of us will just say "get off my lawn" and bitch about everything, about 42% will buy on the basis of "oooh, shiny", and 100% will piss and moan about the decision making process of other people being horribly flawed, irrational, and untenable.
You'll also find no correlation between how Slashdot does this, and how the rest of the world does since we tend to be polarized to the point of being collective screeching monkeys.
Yes, Apple led the way in terms of providing a closed shop they control. And, yes, as you point out, everyone is trying to do exactly the same thing right now.
I'm jut saying that instead of this pointless pissing contest everytime someone mentions Apple or Microsoft and we divide off into camps of idiots -- go no the assumption they're all greedy bastards who don't give a shit about your security and privacy.
Weigh the technology on how useful it is to you and your needs, balanced with how much you care about various bullshit any of them have done in the past and what you can do to mitigate it.
But don't think any tech company nowadays has your best interests at heart. Me, I'm just as apt to run both my Google Nexus and my iPad in airplane mode most of the time to minimize the stuff it is doing when I'm not looking.
News flash: that's all any of them care about.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Sony, Netflix, Samsung, Oracle, Nokia, Motorolla ... every single damned one of them (and more) only cares about your money.
They will often sacrifice your security in order to make it easier for them to intrude on your privacy. Or they're so grossly incompetent to implement any actual security as to make it worthless. The only security they'll put effort into is their own DRM.
If you completely trust any of them, you've misplaced your faith. You can trust them to varying degrees as you see fit, but don't think for a minute this is unique to Apple.
None of these companies deserve blanket trust, some deserve some guarded trust where you disable/enable as you need them, and some of them you should probably neither trust nor reward with your money.
But every single damned one of them has one goal, and one goal only -- to maximize profits, and in the process, monetize anything about you they have access to.
And you DO know it's a troll, right?
The wife can operate it just fine -- turn on the amp, select one of 4 input sources, turn on the input source. It aint rocket science. The amp does the video switching, it'a a pretty common setup for a home theatre.
No kids, no babysitters ... NMFP.