On an average day I see lots more Flash content than HTML5
Well, on an average day I see precisely zero flash content, because I don't even have it installed.:-P
I don't know what you mean with "virtual industry standard".
I think he means as in de-facto, as in most people use it but it's not a 'standard' that is enforced.
Unfortunately, most forms of "rich content" on the internet is what has caused me to be uninterested in Flash in the first place -- well, that and the fact that it's been a security hole for well over a decade.
Procedures are better followed and cops who violate rules are more easily punished.
That's the funniest thing I've read all week.
Cops still act like they can confiscate cameras and make you delete images, they still beat people for no good reason, and they do still do all of the shit they always did.
Now they've learned to do it out of frame of the dashboard camera.
In the meantime, they might actually find missing people or spot criminals, which is definitely a public good.
Oh, won't someone think of the children? As long as someone is keeping the children safe, everything must be good, right?
Sorry, but while it's possible to find one or more cases where this is of benefit, there are far more cases where it will be used to our detriment. Until they can make damned sure they won't abuse it, making excuses for a few cases where it will be helpful is just playing into their hands.
Arbitrary search and seizure anywhere within 200 miles of a border might catch some bad people, but mostly it's just encroaching on rights and sucks.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety
I am sorry, but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.
So, you're an expert on Cuba and have been there? Or are you mostly extrapolating on what you've been told like most people here?
I've been to Cuba, several times in fact -- for the most part, the people are awesome, friendly people, who are in the economic state they're in because of the US embargo. A people who don't want Guantanamo base on their soil, but the US injected an amendment to the Cuban constitution unilaterally guaranteeing them that right. So a little left over colonialism for you.
Cuba isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But they do educate their citizens, and give them health care, and do they best they can manage. In parts of the US, the life and death is just as bad, because the poor are mostly left to fend for themselves and the state has no interest in looking out for them.
Yes, Cuba is a military dictatorship -- but you know what, they were before Castro when it was Batista, it's just that the previous dictatorship was friendly to the US.
Back in power, Batista suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans
He mostly got rich while the rest of the country starved and were treated like slave labor.
America has only ever disliked dictators who dislike them, but they've been happy to put in a few over the years. If you really think Castro overthrew a benign, democratic government, you're wrong by a long shot.
Unfortunately, 50 odd years on, and people still think "ZOMG, teh Communists" instead of having any actual historical context for how Cuba got where she is now.
I'd argue that, as a company, I don't want ANY one individual, not even the CEO, to be counted as 'irreplaceable'. What if the OP was killed in a car crash tomorrow? Had a heart attack or stroke?
Which would be great if companies would staff accordingly.
But I suspect many of us have seen places where they only have one or two people who do literally everything, and won't invest in having more people or training.
Sometimes, companies set themselves up for massive failure by causing one person to be irreplaceable, and then suddenly discovering they can't when they need to.
Most businesses are very short-term in terms of planning. I suspect this one is no different.
I was thinking the same question, but realized that if you think of the functional application of the mitochondria then it is like modular software
I'm no biologist... but pretty much every time someone on Slashdot tries to use a computer analogy for stuff like this, it proves to be horribly wrong.
There is no cost to file a complaint under six strikes, UNLESS you appeal. Therefore, you must appeal in order to discourage complaints.
And not appealing is tacitly saying "yeah, I did that".
This boils down to "a 3rd party has made an allegation with no actual proof, we're going to assume this is true". If you didn't download copyrighted stuff, you'll need to appeal every time you get one of these at your own expense.
And I have no faith whatsoever that the copyright folks are doing good evidence gathering -- so this system is something which will get abused as the *AAs claim that everybody has been doing it and don't provide proof. And judges have already started to question the legal quality of their 'proof'.
Given that ISPs already had safe harbor provisions under the DMCA, this is just a move by the ISPs to make it not their problem. They've just pushed the cost of enforcement onto the consumer, and the ISP gets to wash their hands of it.
This is such a broken system as to be a joke, and it pushes the burden of proof onto the accused to prove they didn't.
When they got a computer, I told them in no uncertain terms I couldn't be their tech support -- because I have no idea what happened on the machine, and I can't see the machine, and them saying "it is broken, make it go" won't help me figure out the problem.
I made it very clear to them that it isn't possible for me to tell them over the phone WTF is wrong with their computer and how to fix it.
So either set them up with something so locked down they can't do anything -- and risk them getting annoyed with you. Or tell them to go to Nerds on Site or one of those things. Or bring it into staples.
Trying to keep someone else's computer running from a long distance is a huge pain in the ass, and quite frustrating for all concerned.
Both my parents and I are happy with this arrangement -- me especially.;-)
This has had the happy consequences that my father has had to things like identify that there is such a thing as a printer driver, that they're necessary to make printers work, and that they need to be installed. After years of being a technophobe, he's starting to have to understand a little more of the whys and wherefores.
When Facebook started injecting "sponsored content" into the news feed, I started getting quite annoyed and letting the owners of that content know in my comments to their link.
As much as Facebook wants to sell ads, if the people whose ads are there are getting angry comments, they might figure out that people don't want it.
When you start injecting ads into things people can comment on, you might quickly discover the people those ads are being sent to don't give a crap about you and your product. These ads are intrusive enough that people notice them and don't like them.
Even worse than the vulnerabilities are the _constant_ nagging for updates.
And proclivity for trying to install the Ask.com toolbar.
Currently that is my biggest beef with Java -- after the fact that it seems to be glaringly insecure, and I can't figure out if they broke it, or it was always broken.:-P
The US Congress has already started regulating some of these misuses.
Sure, but with enough cash and lobbyists, they'll come around -- just like they did for every other industry which asks to be deregulated.
The Freedom of Genetic Information for Commerical Purposes Act will give them whatever they want... and then the governments will want the data of course, but all hush hush and without a warrant.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my hat needs another layer of tinfoil, and I'm contemplating a design for a matching codpiece.
Of course, one of the immediate things people will need to worry about is misuse of this. One can easily see the insurance companies making everybody take one of these, and then refusing you coverage based on your genetics.
These kinds of things can have unintended consequences pretty quickly, and the privacy and legal implications of these kinds of tests cheap and routine haven't all been worked out.
I can certainly see all sorts of potential for abuse of this. I wouldn't be eager to sign up for this, but, I do tend to the tinfoil hat end of the spectrum on these things.
Not being universally applied does not make it a "trite, meaningless statement." It just means that there are a lot of people out there who have absolutely no respect for one another.
I'm not saying there isn't value to the expression... but it's not a natural law or anything like that, and people don't seem to follow it for the most part.
It's a moral observation that it would be better if we played nicely, but in the end, it's a sound bite -- which pretty much makes it a platitude. It's a nice sentiment, I just see no evidence for it in actual human behavior in general.
Then there's the whole thorny issue of who gets to decide 'right' and 'wrong' -- the Amish, or the Pastafarians?
The examples I cited are meant to be glaring examples of how, collectively, people have decided that "two wrongs don't make a right" depends on who is deciding it -- because humans clearly do the opposite all the time.
So, by virtue of being something which is a good idea, not a natural law, and rarely applied in human society... I'll stick with platitude. I'm not saying it's a bad idea or wrong, but so much of human society is based on the exact opposite principles that to pretend it's some enduring tenet of human behavior is a little naive.
It's things like this which make me say "all categorical statements are wrong or incomplete".;-)
Well, you have to clarify which SCO you meant. It's had several incarnations.
The SCO which sold software (Caldera Linux and some others) wasn't an NPE.
The litigious bastards which have been the last two (I think) iterations of SCO have in fact been NPEs in that they transferred their claims to a company who existed solely to sue.
There is no single entity which has continuously been SCO in all of this, and at least a few of them have been NPEs.
Two wrongs never, ever make a right, no matter how much one may try to justify it.
So, explain the death penalty then. Or, for that matter, the entire Iraq, er, 'conflict' since it ultimately had nothing to do with the stated reasons. Some people believe god has told them that revenge is good (an eye for an eye).
People try all the time to commit a second wrong in response to the first one.
It's a nice platitude, but it's far from universally applied. People like revenge and retaliation. Infer what you will about human nature from that.
Re-reading that part, I do see it now... but unless you happen to know off the top of your head the names of military jets, Super Hornet doesn't mean anything to you.
And since I know very little about fighter jets, I didn't realize it was a plane which already exists.
From the inception, the F-35 seemed to me like it was doomed to failure.
It was a massive development project which was set up in such a way as to try to convince allies to buy this plane before any existed and have them fund the development. It was supposed to have several different variants including a VTOL one.
It's been plagued with cost overruns, delays, and almost everything else. It's always struck me as an obscenely expensive plane with a lot of risks, and as countries are starting to ask "do we really want this", it could leave those still in the program with mounting costs since it's no longer being paid for by as many governments.
From the start, this was a program designed to get everybody to help pay for a pie-in-the-sky plane which was completely unproven. This is just a program to line the contractor's pockets, and for the US to try to get someone else to help pay for it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people warned about how this would happen, but they got ignored. If anybody thinks this it's a surprise that F-35 program has been ridiculously expensive with very little results, they haven't been paying attention. And unless Boeing already has a plane in the works, I'm not sure I'd believe their claims of being able to do it cheaper any more than Lockheed's.
Great; I got intercepted by my company's web filter for trying to access a porn site for that link to sascase dot com.
I find a lot of corporate web filters are incredibly stupid.
I once tried to go the web site for a local yoga place, and the filter claimed it was 'alternative spirituality' or something, like that matters. Blue Goat or something I think it was. I sent them an email telling them categorizing the site like that was stupid, and they eventually did fix it.
From what I've seen, an awful lot of these filters are just so broadly stupid as to become bad jokes. I've even seen a couple which seem to have been written by the Amish or some religious group, as they seemed to be ridiculously biased against, well, everything that wasn't puppies and kittens.
But if I pay the full retail price, I expect to be able to enjoy the game in full experience. Paying twice for the privilege of playing an already paid game is not an option for me.
I've decided that games which require an internet connection are complete non-starters for me for similar reasons -- because when I started getting ads in my XBox games I decided that Microsoft and the game publishers can screw themselves and disconnected it from the network.
I absolutely hate the trend to put everything into these stupid micro transactions. First I buy the game, then I discover that it's geared in such a way that you can't achieve anything without constantly buying more crap.
The only EA game I'm playing these days is one of the Tiger Woods golf games -- and it's heavily geared to buying shit and steering you towards premium content. It pretty constantly puts up notifications of all the awesome paid shit I'm missing out on.
Me, if the package doesn't say requires an internet connection, I'll consider the game. And once I'm there and don't even have my console hooked to a network.. the micro transactions can just piss off because there's no way I'm participating.
I'm not here to be advertised to or monetized in my game play. I've bought the game, and you don't get anything else from me. If your game required an internet connection, it won't have gotten bought in the first place. If your game can't be played effectively without in-game purchases, well, that's what reviews are for.
But the terrifying fact I'm trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: According to the DOJ's testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn't like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making "an example" out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
This is awful. The idea that copyright (and in fact ideas about copyright) should be enforced as vigorously as this is absurd.
America has started doing show trials now of people who haven't committed crimes on the basis that their ideas are radical and dangerous?
The copyright lobby has won, apparently. And doing anything contrary to their wishes will cause the government to go after you.
Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here. I'm not sure how free of a society you can be when commercial interests lead to something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, on an average day I see precisely zero flash content, because I don't even have it installed. :-P
I think he means as in de-facto, as in most people use it but it's not a 'standard' that is enforced.
Unfortunately, most forms of "rich content" on the internet is what has caused me to be uninterested in Flash in the first place -- well, that and the fact that it's been a security hole for well over a decade.
That's the funniest thing I've read all week.
Cops still act like they can confiscate cameras and make you delete images, they still beat people for no good reason, and they do still do all of the shit they always did.
Now they've learned to do it out of frame of the dashboard camera.
Oh, won't someone think of the children? As long as someone is keeping the children safe, everything must be good, right?
Sorry, but while it's possible to find one or more cases where this is of benefit, there are far more cases where it will be used to our detriment. Until they can make damned sure they won't abuse it, making excuses for a few cases where it will be helpful is just playing into their hands.
Arbitrary search and seizure anywhere within 200 miles of a border might catch some bad people, but mostly it's just encroaching on rights and sucks.
So, you're an expert on Cuba and have been there? Or are you mostly extrapolating on what you've been told like most people here?
I've been to Cuba, several times in fact -- for the most part, the people are awesome, friendly people, who are in the economic state they're in because of the US embargo. A people who don't want Guantanamo base on their soil, but the US injected an amendment to the Cuban constitution unilaterally guaranteeing them that right. So a little left over colonialism for you.
Cuba isn't perfect, not by a long shot. But they do educate their citizens, and give them health care, and do they best they can manage. In parts of the US, the life and death is just as bad, because the poor are mostly left to fend for themselves and the state has no interest in looking out for them.
Yes, Cuba is a military dictatorship -- but you know what, they were before Castro when it was Batista, it's just that the previous dictatorship was friendly to the US.
He mostly got rich while the rest of the country starved and were treated like slave labor.
America has only ever disliked dictators who dislike them, but they've been happy to put in a few over the years. If you really think Castro overthrew a benign, democratic government, you're wrong by a long shot.
Unfortunately, 50 odd years on, and people still think "ZOMG, teh Communists" instead of having any actual historical context for how Cuba got where she is now.
Which would be great if companies would staff accordingly.
But I suspect many of us have seen places where they only have one or two people who do literally everything, and won't invest in having more people or training.
Sometimes, companies set themselves up for massive failure by causing one person to be irreplaceable, and then suddenly discovering they can't when they need to.
Most businesses are very short-term in terms of planning. I suspect this one is no different.
Yeah, but this one is hilarious and highlights the "yes dear" we've come to associate with married men.
If he makes some money out of it, all the better. But it is brilliant comedy.
I'm no biologist ... but pretty much every time someone on Slashdot tries to use a computer analogy for stuff like this, it proves to be horribly wrong.
Except in the case of Australians, having this go through outlook.com means all of your mail is accessible to the US government under the Patriot Act.
So, for anybody not in the US, decisions to do this kind of thing is a bad thing. And depending on data-privacy laws, could be construed as illegal.
Just look at any Wal Mart ...
And your assertion doesn't make it incorrect either.
It has been in use for quite some time.
Language evolves, you're going to have to learn to deal with that. Hone in has been in use for literally decades.
2) ???
3) Profit
And not appealing is tacitly saying "yeah, I did that".
This boils down to "a 3rd party has made an allegation with no actual proof, we're going to assume this is true". If you didn't download copyrighted stuff, you'll need to appeal every time you get one of these at your own expense.
And I have no faith whatsoever that the copyright folks are doing good evidence gathering -- so this system is something which will get abused as the *AAs claim that everybody has been doing it and don't provide proof. And judges have already started to question the legal quality of their 'proof'.
Given that ISPs already had safe harbor provisions under the DMCA, this is just a move by the ISPs to make it not their problem. They've just pushed the cost of enforcement onto the consumer, and the ISP gets to wash their hands of it.
This is such a broken system as to be a joke, and it pushes the burden of proof onto the accused to prove they didn't.
I certainly assume it is ... every thing you install these days wants to install some form of search bar or browser plugin.
The answer is always "no".
I live about 1000 miles from my parents.
When they got a computer, I told them in no uncertain terms I couldn't be their tech support -- because I have no idea what happened on the machine, and I can't see the machine, and them saying "it is broken, make it go" won't help me figure out the problem.
I made it very clear to them that it isn't possible for me to tell them over the phone WTF is wrong with their computer and how to fix it.
So either set them up with something so locked down they can't do anything -- and risk them getting annoyed with you. Or tell them to go to Nerds on Site or one of those things. Or bring it into staples.
Trying to keep someone else's computer running from a long distance is a huge pain in the ass, and quite frustrating for all concerned.
Both my parents and I are happy with this arrangement -- me especially. ;-)
This has had the happy consequences that my father has had to things like identify that there is such a thing as a printer driver, that they're necessary to make printers work, and that they need to be installed. After years of being a technophobe, he's starting to have to understand a little more of the whys and wherefores.
When Facebook started injecting "sponsored content" into the news feed, I started getting quite annoyed and letting the owners of that content know in my comments to their link.
As much as Facebook wants to sell ads, if the people whose ads are there are getting angry comments, they might figure out that people don't want it.
When you start injecting ads into things people can comment on, you might quickly discover the people those ads are being sent to don't give a crap about you and your product. These ads are intrusive enough that people notice them and don't like them.
And proclivity for trying to install the Ask.com toolbar.
Currently that is my biggest beef with Java -- after the fact that it seems to be glaringly insecure, and I can't figure out if they broke it, or it was always broken. :-P
Sure, but with enough cash and lobbyists, they'll come around -- just like they did for every other industry which asks to be deregulated.
The Freedom of Genetic Information for Commerical Purposes Act will give them whatever they want ... and then the governments will want the data of course, but all hush hush and without a warrant.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my hat needs another layer of tinfoil, and I'm contemplating a design for a matching codpiece.
Of course, one of the immediate things people will need to worry about is misuse of this. One can easily see the insurance companies making everybody take one of these, and then refusing you coverage based on your genetics.
These kinds of things can have unintended consequences pretty quickly, and the privacy and legal implications of these kinds of tests cheap and routine haven't all been worked out.
I can certainly see all sorts of potential for abuse of this. I wouldn't be eager to sign up for this, but, I do tend to the tinfoil hat end of the spectrum on these things.
I'm not saying there isn't value to the expression ... but it's not a natural law or anything like that, and people don't seem to follow it for the most part.
It's a moral observation that it would be better if we played nicely, but in the end, it's a sound bite -- which pretty much makes it a platitude. It's a nice sentiment, I just see no evidence for it in actual human behavior in general.
Then there's the whole thorny issue of who gets to decide 'right' and 'wrong' -- the Amish, or the Pastafarians?
The examples I cited are meant to be glaring examples of how, collectively, people have decided that "two wrongs don't make a right" depends on who is deciding it -- because humans clearly do the opposite all the time.
So, by virtue of being something which is a good idea, not a natural law, and rarely applied in human society ... I'll stick with platitude. I'm not saying it's a bad idea or wrong, but so much of human society is based on the exact opposite principles that to pretend it's some enduring tenet of human behavior is a little naive.
It's things like this which make me say "all categorical statements are wrong or incomplete". ;-)
Well, you have to clarify which SCO you meant. It's had several incarnations.
The SCO which sold software (Caldera Linux and some others) wasn't an NPE.
The litigious bastards which have been the last two (I think) iterations of SCO have in fact been NPEs in that they transferred their claims to a company who existed solely to sue.
There is no single entity which has continuously been SCO in all of this, and at least a few of them have been NPEs.
So, explain the death penalty then. Or, for that matter, the entire Iraq, er, 'conflict' since it ultimately had nothing to do with the stated reasons. Some people believe god has told them that revenge is good (an eye for an eye).
People try all the time to commit a second wrong in response to the first one.
It's a nice platitude, but it's far from universally applied. People like revenge and retaliation. Infer what you will about human nature from that.
Re-reading that part, I do see it now ... but unless you happen to know off the top of your head the names of military jets, Super Hornet doesn't mean anything to you.
And since I know very little about fighter jets, I didn't realize it was a plane which already exists.
From the inception, the F-35 seemed to me like it was doomed to failure.
It was a massive development project which was set up in such a way as to try to convince allies to buy this plane before any existed and have them fund the development. It was supposed to have several different variants including a VTOL one.
It's been plagued with cost overruns, delays, and almost everything else. It's always struck me as an obscenely expensive plane with a lot of risks, and as countries are starting to ask "do we really want this", it could leave those still in the program with mounting costs since it's no longer being paid for by as many governments.
From the start, this was a program designed to get everybody to help pay for a pie-in-the-sky plane which was completely unproven. This is just a program to line the contractor's pockets, and for the US to try to get someone else to help pay for it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people warned about how this would happen, but they got ignored. If anybody thinks this it's a surprise that F-35 program has been ridiculously expensive with very little results, they haven't been paying attention. And unless Boeing already has a plane in the works, I'm not sure I'd believe their claims of being able to do it cheaper any more than Lockheed's.
I find a lot of corporate web filters are incredibly stupid.
I once tried to go the web site for a local yoga place, and the filter claimed it was 'alternative spirituality' or something, like that matters. Blue Goat or something I think it was. I sent them an email telling them categorizing the site like that was stupid, and they eventually did fix it.
From what I've seen, an awful lot of these filters are just so broadly stupid as to become bad jokes. I've even seen a couple which seem to have been written by the Amish or some religious group, as they seemed to be ridiculously biased against, well, everything that wasn't puppies and kittens.
I've decided that games which require an internet connection are complete non-starters for me for similar reasons -- because when I started getting ads in my XBox games I decided that Microsoft and the game publishers can screw themselves and disconnected it from the network.
I absolutely hate the trend to put everything into these stupid micro transactions. First I buy the game, then I discover that it's geared in such a way that you can't achieve anything without constantly buying more crap.
The only EA game I'm playing these days is one of the Tiger Woods golf games -- and it's heavily geared to buying shit and steering you towards premium content. It pretty constantly puts up notifications of all the awesome paid shit I'm missing out on.
Me, if the package doesn't say requires an internet connection, I'll consider the game. And once I'm there and don't even have my console hooked to a network .. the micro transactions can just piss off because there's no way I'm participating.
I'm not here to be advertised to or monetized in my game play. I've bought the game, and you don't get anything else from me. If your game required an internet connection, it won't have gotten bought in the first place. If your game can't be played effectively without in-game purchases, well, that's what reviews are for.
This is awful. The idea that copyright (and in fact ideas about copyright) should be enforced as vigorously as this is absurd.
America has started doing show trials now of people who haven't committed crimes on the basis that their ideas are radical and dangerous?
The copyright lobby has won, apparently. And doing anything contrary to their wishes will cause the government to go after you.
Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here. I'm not sure how free of a society you can be when commercial interests lead to something like this.