We don't have any confidence they can either. And if they're not confident they can secure it, and we're not confident they can secure it.. how about we simply don't deploy the damned thing?
If everybody is rushing to roll out the awesome new digital infrastructure, and nobody believes it will be secure.. maybe it's not so fucking awesome?
We don't want a system which doesn't protect us from privacy and security breaches. So don't make one. Why is everybody in such a rush to deploy shitty technology all the time?
Sorry, but I don't want a car or anything else with a badly designed level of security which everybody knows is a badly designed layer of security. At that point it's more about marketing than it is technology.
Just say no. The world will survive without one more incompetently implemented piece of digital integration nobody really cares about.
Maybe it's about time these lawmakers who say it's perfectly OK to spy on us finally became valid targets themselves? Because as long as these self-important clowns think they're immune from this, and spying is for the little people, they'll continue to make decisions knowing they're not included in them.
When the lawmakers start realizing the extend of this surveillance and the like, maybe they'll start making intelligent policies.
That they're suddenly crying foul says they've mostly been able to be outside of it, which means they're not looking at the issue the same as the rest of us. Make this shit real to them, and then see the kind of decisions they make.
So to lawmakers and people who have previously been exempt from spying who suddenly are shocked they're included: boo fucking hoo.
Don't come to the rest of us for any damned sympathy.
In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
Has it ever gotten to this point?
Well, legal discovery comes close.
I'm just thinking if I ran a company and another country wanted to send their goons in to look at my hardware and proprietary data, I'd want to be able to legally tell them to fuck off.
Which goes something like this: Oracle sues, you file a defense, Oracle files a motion for discovery, you file a motion to not... blah blah blah... sooner or later the court says yay or nay. If you're lucky, it's nay and it ends. If you're not so lucky the court orders some branch of law enforcement to ensure you hand stuff over. They go through your shit with a fine toothed comb.
There is a threat of men with guns, but this is implied by layers. There is the chance to tell them to fuck off. But sooner or later, if the court order is, the men with guns are actual law enforcement appointed to ensure you comply.
It all looks very civil, but at the end of the day, it's less than it seems.
Oh, and don't forget, the software is covered under copyright, so those men with guns? That's kind of ICE or the FBI.
The companies have made damned sure they have a real stick, instead of just a bunch of lawyers. And then it comes down to who has a bigger war chest and the meanest lawyers.
Oracle, has stacked that deck long ago.
But don't make the mistake of thinking somewhere along the line isn't the real threat of real armed people. They just try to save that for later when all other options run out.
Oracle isn't making empty threats. They will bring a considerable amount of evil upon you if they choose.
My wild and unfounded guess: lawyerly speak in the license and contract which says "we own joo bitches".
If you're running their software, their highly tuned team of lawyers specializing in extortion have written all the documents such that you give them permission.
That's just a guess, and it's only my opinion, so it's not technically libel or slander against these alleged lawyers whose specialty is extortion.
But, it all comes down to the license and the contract. And EULAs allow them to change the terms any time they like.
Say no, and they might move on to the next highly specialized team of lawyers. And then it gets ugly.
Most people who have dealt with Oracle often find themselves wondering how Oracle has never been charged under the RICO act.
They're a shakedown organization.
As much as I like an Oracle database, I've seen several situations in which Oracle is the most dishonest group of people to work with, and their licensing is pretty much "give us all the fucking money".
Sometimes it just seems like they make shit up as they go.
Running an unpatched Windows connected to the internet is just about the dumbest thing you can do with a computer other than chaining it to yourself and jumping off of a bridge.
Directly connected to the intertubes, you're correct.
But with a sufficient amount of the MS crap disabled so it isn't trying to be "helpful", not running every piece of crap on the internet, and generally not doing naive and stupid things... you'd be amazed at how many of those vectors simply don't exist.
My machine is behind a firewall. Since my wife and I each have our own wifi, both of our routers are behind the firewall my ISP provides (because we don't trust that), I'm two physical links away from the actual internet. Further, I don't use IE unless it's a site I know I can 100% trust, and those are pretty rate. The rest of my browsers are fairly locked down, and don't tend to trust much. I have no Flash at all on the machine
I have turned off all forms of autorun. Anything sketchy is ran inside of a VM which is even more locked down. The overwhelming majority of attack vectors are eliminated by not using that stuff. I don't allow automatic application of updates.
For the last 10-15 years, I patch at most every month or two, because I don't reboot just because Microsoft wants me to.
Do you know how many times I've gotten malware in that time? None. Nada. Zip. Do I think I'm magic and immune? Absolutely not. Do I think eliminating some of the crap from the equation which seems to consistently be an attack vector helps? Hell yeah.
But on my Windows 8.1 box, I am pretty much reduced to having to read every single update to confirm Microsoft isn't pulling a fast one and slipping in something which claims to be important for Windows, when in fact it's important for Microsoft.
Which means the updates to work around vulnerabilities mostly caused by Microsoft's badly done "innovation" isn't a problem when you don't rely on Microsoft's badly done innovation which adds security holes in the first place.
The problems are as often as not created by Microsoft. And I've found disabling and not using stuff I have no need for eliminates a lot of risk.
But once they started hiding the true nature of updates to push out stuff which is entirely about them, you pretty much have to start treating Microsoft as hostile. And I'd rather take my chances with a machine I've locked down than whatever the clowns and Microsoft think they've created which is supposed to be useful.
Because time and time again, what Microsoft calls "useful" or "convenient" translates into "big giant security hole of badly written software".
What I am saying is you might be looking at increasingly specialized resources, and in my experience the more specialized the field, the less useful Google can be, and the more likely the people who control that information are to lock it down.
Unfortunately, the more beholden to a source of information you are, the less flexibility you have to say "okthxbai" and just click the back button.
And then you have to decide which you are more willing to part with, your money or the information you wish you had.
Part of the problem is you seem to be looking for domain-specific/academic stuff... and that stuff seems to be much more likely to be paywalled.
Unfortunately, the general rule is the more specialized something is, and the harder it is to find elsewhere, the less you can work around such stuff.
I suspect most people aren't looking for stuff that specialized, and if you are, you probably have an academic/professional reason to be doing so. In which case, Google might not be the best source for those searches.
That kind of stuff tends to get locked up far more.
You know, it really depends on how you define "home theater".
If you mean the sloped floor, 12 recliners, the commercial popcorn machine, the in-floor lighting, and the Han Solo in carbonite replica on the wall? Yeah, probably not so many people with those.
If you mean "that reasonable sized TV in front of the sofa which might also have your video game, a Blu Ray player, and a couple of speakers", then I think a LOT of people have that these days. Most people call it "the living room". And the stuff required to do that these days is relatively cheap -- you can buy a home theater in a box from Wal Mart for not much at all. When you realize "living room" is where most people will use this, you have a much more realistic understanding of what it needs to be.
What people don't have is a big giant empty room they can use for exactly one purpose.
So, what needs to happen is figuring out what the average living room size is, how much free space can be had in that, and make the technology such that it can work in that space. Just expecting users to have a 15'x15' space? That pretty much means you have no idea and are just hoping, because that's a fairly big area.
You know, what needs to happen is it doesn't have such a huge space requirement.
Because, while people do set aside space for home theater, it usually has to be a multi-purpose space for most of us.
So, yes, I've got the big screen and several recliners. But that's also where I keep the electronics, my DVD collection, a book shelf, lamps, and a few other things.
VR is never going to be so compelling that people have a separate VR room from their media room. Even a modest size TV/media/games room needs to be multipurpose. Nobody has the luxury of that much space sitting around for no other purpose. If they do, they're not who we're worrying about.
So, what really has to happen is these guys have to realize that we can't all set up a dedicated VR cave. We have to put this stuff in along with existing stuff, and we can't change the existing stuff to suit this.
If the assumption is we'll be able to carve up a 15'x15' empty space which is used for nothing but VR, then the chance of consumer adoption on any meaningful scale is pretty much nil.
I have a decent sized TV room... if I took all of my furniture out of it, I could have a 15'x15' space. But then I wouldn't have my TV room. And I have 9'x9' empty space which can be available, which compared to many many such rooms is pretty generous.
Realistically, for home use, if they can't cram that into a 4'x4' area on the low end, or a 6'x6' for most people, you will quickly discover most people can't give you much more than that. But 15'x15'??? I doubt many people could come anywhere near that.
As I said in a post elsewhere in this thread, I have around 9 feet from the front of my TV to my sofa. When I calibrate my Kinect, it wants me to stand not much more than about 10" in front of my sofa.
So I have a huge amount of dead space where I could (and should) be standing, but it stupidly assumed I have about 5-6 more feet. I could (and should) be able to stand 2-3 feet closer to the TV.
I don't consider my TV space to be small, but if there's a way to override the Kinect on the XBox 360 and say "dammit, I don't need to be this far back", I've never found it.
It's kind of annoying, actually. My entire media room is about 17'x14' or something, which I think is a big space. The problem is I think that space needs to include furniture, and Microsoft seems to have assumed it doesn't.
And I'm betting most kids and families simply don't have as much space as the Kinect seems to expect.
Well, let me respond to that. As much as you're trying to be humorous, a 15'x15' of open space is rather large.
In my case, my media room is in my basement.
My TV/video game space is about 17' wide x 15' front to back. In that space, I have a sofa, a recliner, a loveseat, plus all of my stereo and TV gear. Pretty much around the perimeter walls.
I can stand 6 feet from my TV, be 3 feet in front of my sofa, and have 6 feet on either side of me. When I put it together I thought "woo hoo, a big giant space". My wife likes to play those Kinect dancing games, and we figured for parties we could have 3-4 people side by side, and that would allow for some big goofy fun.
Know what we discovered? The Kinect on my XBox 360 wants me to stand so far back from the TV that I'm 3" in front of the sofa. Why? I have no idea, because I have gobs of space in front of the TV. Apparently I need to be 9 feet from the damned camera, leaving a huge amount of dead space I could otherwise be using for play space. So I have all this dead space it doesn't think I should be in.
An empty 15'x15' space is 225 square feet. That's a LOT of space to allocate to be empty. I've got essentially a 9' deep x 10' wide open space in front of my TV. By any reasonable metric, that's a pretty big open space. There's tons of space to move around in it.
But if I can't get my Kinect to let me play in that space where I have plenty of room to move around in, who the heck is going to have an empty 15'x15' space in their home to leave for VR?
This sounds like an impossibly stupid assumption. I have what I consider to be a fairly big space, which is close to this. But it also has to include the furniture, electronics, people, and everything else.
For any home application, anything which assumes a 15'x15' empty space is completely missing the point.
And maybe I've failed with my google-fu, but if I can't make my Kinect work in a smaller space which still has a massive amount of dead space, I'm skeptical most people will ever be able to come anywhere near having 225 square feet of empty playspace.
And, yet, it apparently works. As in people have done it before. And, if dropping them in the parking lot doesn't work, stamp a logo on them, put them in a package with official looking marketing glossy, and send them as targeted attacks.
See, the problem is the humans are always the weak links in your chain.
Of course, you can't target what machines might be impacted. But if the general plan is mayhem, that's always easy to achieve.
That's why my XBox 360 got disconnected from the network, and why I'll never own an XBone.
Suddenly my video games had ads inside of them. Sorry, not interested.
My XBox 360 got disconnected from the network, and has never been connected since. And unless they've significantly changed the new version, it sounds like you need either a constant or a frequent internet connection. In which case I don't want one.
I don't want a gaming console with an internet connection if it means ads and analytics. And if our base operating systems are introducing all of this telemetry and tracking shit to benefit Microsoft, I don't with to play that game either.
Microsoft seems to be crapping all over the idea of who owns the computer. If Windows 10 is free but all this crap comes along as baggage, then I sure as hell am never going to upgrade to Windows 10.
I guess it's time to disable Windows Updates entirely on my Windows 8.1 desktop.
Sorry, but no. Don't want crap like this, don't want Windows 10. It's my computer and not yours.
None of their damned analytics, or telemtry, or ads, or other invasive shit they're doing.
I might apply critical updates, but increasingly they've gone to great lengths to hide what the updates are really doing.
I'll take my chances with a desktop behind a firewall that I don't run stupid shit on. But I fear it is no longer possible to trust Microsoft, or allow them to have their bullshit idea that it is their computer and they'll do as they please with it.
I'll stick with my Windows 8.1 which has had Classic Shell installed and all of their romper-room interface crap turned off. Increasingly, I don't see any value in Windows 10 at all, and in fact I see it as hostile.
Thanks, Microsoft. This will be my last Windows desktop unless I run it in a VM.
Look at the "War On Drugs", they filled the prisons with people who smoked or sold pot, and it didn't even scratch the surface. If anything all it did was increase drug use.
And fill up prisons. All those tasty for-profit prisons which currently make billions of dollars. Sorry, but absolutely nobody in America is listening to the argument that all it would do is fill up prisons. Hell, by now those profitable prisons are probably a big lobby unto themselves... because shareholder value is now dependent on throwing people in prisons. If anything they need more people thrown in prisons to meet revenue growth.
Look around you, the TPP and every other trade treaty the US has been involved in for the last 10 years specifically adds more criminal liability for copyright.
That's what they're for. The US government lets the copyright industries write the damned treaties and laws.
Eavesdrop now under guise of national security, control later under the guise of national security. Not much difference. Given time, America is well on their way to the same shit.
If you're neither American nor Russian, neither of these is a good idea. And we trust neither of you in the long run.
But let's not pretend there's a fundamental difference.
Also, I assume you want your Dyson sphere to be at the radius your original planet was at. Why would we include Mars in it? Don't we want it at the same distance from the sun as we are now? No more no less?
To make Mars habitable ofc.
Hmmm... perhaps you and I have different notions of a Dyson sphere.
In my scenario, you denude the solar system for building materials. There is no planet inside of Earth's orbit, and chances anything rocky outside of Earth has been ground up as well. And while you're at it, Earth gets ground up too. You and up with a sphere 1AU in diameter, so that the amount of sunlight reaching the inside surface of that sphere is the same as reaches Earth, thereby assuring you can still grow crops. It's kind of a purpose built bubble you now call home.
You sure as hell don't end up with a bunch of planets orbiting inside of a sphere. You don't warm up Mars. You don't have other big rocks big enough to live on.
There is no solar system, there are no planets... you rip the entire solar system apart (except the sun of course), and re-purpose the raw materials to make your sphere. You live on the inside of the sphere.
Am I missing something in the definition of Dyson sphere? Because a shell in which all of your planets orbit isn't anywhere near lining up with my understanding of one.
A shell whose material came from every rock in your solar system is what you have. It's a sand and gravel pit on the scale of a solar system.
In this scenario, nobody gives a crap about the climate of Mars, because there simply is no Mars left to give a crap about.
I've never though it was a plausible thing. But I've always understood you no longer have the things which used to be your solar system by the time you're done.
So, if you chew up the entire solar system, is there enough mass then? Because that's how I understand it.
Keep in mind that they are using it to push chrome apps as desktop apps
Yeah, not bloody interested.
It's a web browser. It needs to stay as a web browser. Don't try to integrate with my desktop. Don't create new vectors for shitware to get inroads into my OS. Show me a damned web page, and then STFU.
Stop trying to make the #*()%^$&*( web browser part of my desktop. It doesn't belong there, and I'm not interested in it.
It's "innovative" stuff like this which turns into security holes.
Slashdot Mirror
And they know it.
Which means you have to ask the question: why the hell should we accept they are "experts"?
This screams of an industry saying "we have no idea how to do this properly, but we're going to do it anyway".
We don't have any confidence they can either. And if they're not confident they can secure it, and we're not confident they can secure it .. how about we simply don't deploy the damned thing?
If everybody is rushing to roll out the awesome new digital infrastructure, and nobody believes it will be secure .. maybe it's not so fucking awesome?
We don't want a system which doesn't protect us from privacy and security breaches. So don't make one. Why is everybody in such a rush to deploy shitty technology all the time?
Sorry, but I don't want a car or anything else with a badly designed level of security which everybody knows is a badly designed layer of security. At that point it's more about marketing than it is technology.
Just say no. The world will survive without one more incompetently implemented piece of digital integration nobody really cares about.
Now get off my damned lawn.
LOL, honestly, just scrape a couple of decades of Weekly World News.
It's had to do better.
Indeed, kicking it old school ... throw in the odd pickled egg, smoked meat, and ketchup and you can be a foodie.
They say that like it's a bad thing.
Maybe it's about time these lawmakers who say it's perfectly OK to spy on us finally became valid targets themselves? Because as long as these self-important clowns think they're immune from this, and spying is for the little people, they'll continue to make decisions knowing they're not included in them.
When the lawmakers start realizing the extend of this surveillance and the like, maybe they'll start making intelligent policies.
That they're suddenly crying foul says they've mostly been able to be outside of it, which means they're not looking at the issue the same as the rest of us. Make this shit real to them, and then see the kind of decisions they make.
So to lawmakers and people who have previously been exempt from spying who suddenly are shocked they're included: boo fucking hoo.
Don't come to the rest of us for any damned sympathy.
Well, legal discovery comes close.
Which goes something like this: Oracle sues, you file a defense, Oracle files a motion for discovery, you file a motion to not ... blah blah blah ... sooner or later the court says yay or nay. If you're lucky, it's nay and it ends. If you're not so lucky the court orders some branch of law enforcement to ensure you hand stuff over. They go through your shit with a fine toothed comb.
There is a threat of men with guns, but this is implied by layers. There is the chance to tell them to fuck off. But sooner or later, if the court order is, the men with guns are actual law enforcement appointed to ensure you comply.
It all looks very civil, but at the end of the day, it's less than it seems.
Oh, and don't forget, the software is covered under copyright, so those men with guns? That's kind of ICE or the FBI.
The companies have made damned sure they have a real stick, instead of just a bunch of lawyers. And then it comes down to who has a bigger war chest and the meanest lawyers.
Oracle, has stacked that deck long ago.
But don't make the mistake of thinking somewhere along the line isn't the real threat of real armed people. They just try to save that for later when all other options run out.
Oracle isn't making empty threats. They will bring a considerable amount of evil upon you if they choose.
My wild and unfounded guess: lawyerly speak in the license and contract which says "we own joo bitches".
If you're running their software, their highly tuned team of lawyers specializing in extortion have written all the documents such that you give them permission.
That's just a guess, and it's only my opinion, so it's not technically libel or slander against these alleged lawyers whose specialty is extortion.
But, it all comes down to the license and the contract. And EULAs allow them to change the terms any time they like.
Say no, and they might move on to the next highly specialized team of lawyers. And then it gets ugly.
Is anybody surprised by this?
Most people who have dealt with Oracle often find themselves wondering how Oracle has never been charged under the RICO act.
They're a shakedown organization.
As much as I like an Oracle database, I've seen several situations in which Oracle is the most dishonest group of people to work with, and their licensing is pretty much "give us all the fucking money".
Sometimes it just seems like they make shit up as they go.
Directly connected to the intertubes, you're correct.
But with a sufficient amount of the MS crap disabled so it isn't trying to be "helpful", not running every piece of crap on the internet, and generally not doing naive and stupid things ... you'd be amazed at how many of those vectors simply don't exist.
My machine is behind a firewall. Since my wife and I each have our own wifi, both of our routers are behind the firewall my ISP provides (because we don't trust that), I'm two physical links away from the actual internet. Further, I don't use IE unless it's a site I know I can 100% trust, and those are pretty rate. The rest of my browsers are fairly locked down, and don't tend to trust much. I have no Flash at all on the machine
I have turned off all forms of autorun. Anything sketchy is ran inside of a VM which is even more locked down. The overwhelming majority of attack vectors are eliminated by not using that stuff. I don't allow automatic application of updates.
For the last 10-15 years, I patch at most every month or two, because I don't reboot just because Microsoft wants me to.
Do you know how many times I've gotten malware in that time? None. Nada. Zip. Do I think I'm magic and immune? Absolutely not. Do I think eliminating some of the crap from the equation which seems to consistently be an attack vector helps? Hell yeah.
But on my Windows 8.1 box, I am pretty much reduced to having to read every single update to confirm Microsoft isn't pulling a fast one and slipping in something which claims to be important for Windows, when in fact it's important for Microsoft.
Which means the updates to work around vulnerabilities mostly caused by Microsoft's badly done "innovation" isn't a problem when you don't rely on Microsoft's badly done innovation which adds security holes in the first place.
The problems are as often as not created by Microsoft. And I've found disabling and not using stuff I have no need for eliminates a lot of risk.
But once they started hiding the true nature of updates to push out stuff which is entirely about them, you pretty much have to start treating Microsoft as hostile. And I'd rather take my chances with a machine I've locked down than whatever the clowns and Microsoft think they've created which is supposed to be useful.
Because time and time again, what Microsoft calls "useful" or "convenient" translates into "big giant security hole of badly written software".
One might say 'crusty'.
Of course not.
What I am saying is you might be looking at increasingly specialized resources, and in my experience the more specialized the field, the less useful Google can be, and the more likely the people who control that information are to lock it down.
Unfortunately, the more beholden to a source of information you are, the less flexibility you have to say "okthxbai" and just click the back button.
And then you have to decide which you are more willing to part with, your money or the information you wish you had.
Part of the problem is you seem to be looking for domain-specific/academic stuff ... and that stuff seems to be much more likely to be paywalled.
Unfortunately, the general rule is the more specialized something is, and the harder it is to find elsewhere, the less you can work around such stuff.
I suspect most people aren't looking for stuff that specialized, and if you are, you probably have an academic/professional reason to be doing so. In which case, Google might not be the best source for those searches.
That kind of stuff tends to get locked up far more.
Yup, the back button us my usual response to that.
While I'm there I add any sites to my ScriptSafe and HTTP Switchboard definitions.
The rest isn't my problem, and I pose no further burden to the website.
Everybody is happy.
You know, it really depends on how you define "home theater".
If you mean the sloped floor, 12 recliners, the commercial popcorn machine, the in-floor lighting, and the Han Solo in carbonite replica on the wall? Yeah, probably not so many people with those.
If you mean "that reasonable sized TV in front of the sofa which might also have your video game, a Blu Ray player, and a couple of speakers", then I think a LOT of people have that these days. Most people call it "the living room". And the stuff required to do that these days is relatively cheap -- you can buy a home theater in a box from Wal Mart for not much at all. When you realize "living room" is where most people will use this, you have a much more realistic understanding of what it needs to be.
What people don't have is a big giant empty room they can use for exactly one purpose.
So, what needs to happen is figuring out what the average living room size is, how much free space can be had in that, and make the technology such that it can work in that space. Just expecting users to have a 15'x15' space? That pretty much means you have no idea and are just hoping, because that's a fairly big area.
You know, what needs to happen is it doesn't have such a huge space requirement.
Because, while people do set aside space for home theater, it usually has to be a multi-purpose space for most of us.
So, yes, I've got the big screen and several recliners. But that's also where I keep the electronics, my DVD collection, a book shelf, lamps, and a few other things.
VR is never going to be so compelling that people have a separate VR room from their media room. Even a modest size TV/media/games room needs to be multipurpose. Nobody has the luxury of that much space sitting around for no other purpose. If they do, they're not who we're worrying about.
So, what really has to happen is these guys have to realize that we can't all set up a dedicated VR cave. We have to put this stuff in along with existing stuff, and we can't change the existing stuff to suit this.
If the assumption is we'll be able to carve up a 15'x15' empty space which is used for nothing but VR, then the chance of consumer adoption on any meaningful scale is pretty much nil.
I have a decent sized TV room ... if I took all of my furniture out of it, I could have a 15'x15' space. But then I wouldn't have my TV room. And I have 9'x9' empty space which can be available, which compared to many many such rooms is pretty generous.
Realistically, for home use, if they can't cram that into a 4'x4' area on the low end, or a 6'x6' for most people, you will quickly discover most people can't give you much more than that. But 15'x15'??? I doubt many people could come anywhere near that.
Annoyingly large. At least on the XBox 360.
As I said in a post elsewhere in this thread, I have around 9 feet from the front of my TV to my sofa. When I calibrate my Kinect, it wants me to stand not much more than about 10" in front of my sofa.
So I have a huge amount of dead space where I could (and should) be standing, but it stupidly assumed I have about 5-6 more feet. I could (and should) be able to stand 2-3 feet closer to the TV.
I don't consider my TV space to be small, but if there's a way to override the Kinect on the XBox 360 and say "dammit, I don't need to be this far back", I've never found it.
It's kind of annoying, actually. My entire media room is about 17'x14' or something, which I think is a big space. The problem is I think that space needs to include furniture, and Microsoft seems to have assumed it doesn't.
And I'm betting most kids and families simply don't have as much space as the Kinect seems to expect.
Well, let me respond to that. As much as you're trying to be humorous, a 15'x15' of open space is rather large.
In my case, my media room is in my basement.
My TV/video game space is about 17' wide x 15' front to back. In that space, I have a sofa, a recliner, a loveseat, plus all of my stereo and TV gear. Pretty much around the perimeter walls.
I can stand 6 feet from my TV, be 3 feet in front of my sofa, and have 6 feet on either side of me. When I put it together I thought "woo hoo, a big giant space". My wife likes to play those Kinect dancing games, and we figured for parties we could have 3-4 people side by side, and that would allow for some big goofy fun.
Know what we discovered? The Kinect on my XBox 360 wants me to stand so far back from the TV that I'm 3" in front of the sofa. Why? I have no idea, because I have gobs of space in front of the TV. Apparently I need to be 9 feet from the damned camera, leaving a huge amount of dead space I could otherwise be using for play space. So I have all this dead space it doesn't think I should be in.
An empty 15'x15' space is 225 square feet. That's a LOT of space to allocate to be empty. I've got essentially a 9' deep x 10' wide open space in front of my TV. By any reasonable metric, that's a pretty big open space. There's tons of space to move around in it.
But if I can't get my Kinect to let me play in that space where I have plenty of room to move around in, who the heck is going to have an empty 15'x15' space in their home to leave for VR?
This sounds like an impossibly stupid assumption. I have what I consider to be a fairly big space, which is close to this. But it also has to include the furniture, electronics, people, and everything else.
For any home application, anything which assumes a 15'x15' empty space is completely missing the point.
And maybe I've failed with my google-fu, but if I can't make my Kinect work in a smaller space which still has a massive amount of dead space, I'm skeptical most people will ever be able to come anywhere near having 225 square feet of empty playspace.
And, yet, it apparently works. As in people have done it before. And, if dropping them in the parking lot doesn't work, stamp a logo on them, put them in a package with official looking marketing glossy, and send them as targeted attacks.
See, the problem is the humans are always the weak links in your chain.
Of course, you can't target what machines might be impacted. But if the general plan is mayhem, that's always easy to achieve.
That's why my XBox 360 got disconnected from the network, and why I'll never own an XBone.
Suddenly my video games had ads inside of them. Sorry, not interested.
My XBox 360 got disconnected from the network, and has never been connected since. And unless they've significantly changed the new version, it sounds like you need either a constant or a frequent internet connection. In which case I don't want one.
I don't want a gaming console with an internet connection if it means ads and analytics. And if our base operating systems are introducing all of this telemetry and tracking shit to benefit Microsoft, I don't with to play that game either.
Microsoft seems to be crapping all over the idea of who owns the computer. If Windows 10 is free but all this crap comes along as baggage, then I sure as hell am never going to upgrade to Windows 10.
I guess it's time to disable Windows Updates entirely on my Windows 8.1 desktop.
Sorry, but no. Don't want crap like this, don't want Windows 10. It's my computer and not yours.
None of their damned analytics, or telemtry, or ads, or other invasive shit they're doing.
I might apply critical updates, but increasingly they've gone to great lengths to hide what the updates are really doing.
I'll take my chances with a desktop behind a firewall that I don't run stupid shit on. But I fear it is no longer possible to trust Microsoft, or allow them to have their bullshit idea that it is their computer and they'll do as they please with it.
I'll stick with my Windows 8.1 which has had Classic Shell installed and all of their romper-room interface crap turned off. Increasingly, I don't see any value in Windows 10 at all, and in fact I see it as hostile.
Thanks, Microsoft. This will be my last Windows desktop unless I run it in a VM.
Why should we assume they're sincerely-held views, instead of someone with an ideological agenda?
Pretty much the only people saying it's not happening seem to be on the payroll of oil companies, or otherwise stand to make money off the status quo.
So, we question if they're actually "sincerely-held views", or merely self serving bullshit.
And fill up prisons. All those tasty for-profit prisons which currently make billions of dollars. Sorry, but absolutely nobody in America is listening to the argument that all it would do is fill up prisons. Hell, by now those profitable prisons are probably a big lobby unto themselves ... because shareholder value is now dependent on throwing people in prisons. If anything they need more people thrown in prisons to meet revenue growth.
Look around you, the TPP and every other trade treaty the US has been involved in for the last 10 years specifically adds more criminal liability for copyright.
That's what they're for. The US government lets the copyright industries write the damned treaties and laws.
This shit is already happening.
Bah!! Bullshit.
Eavesdrop now under guise of national security, control later under the guise of national security. Not much difference. Given time, America is well on their way to the same shit.
If you're neither American nor Russian, neither of these is a good idea. And we trust neither of you in the long run.
But let's not pretend there's a fundamental difference.
Hmmm ... perhaps you and I have different notions of a Dyson sphere.
In my scenario, you denude the solar system for building materials. There is no planet inside of Earth's orbit, and chances anything rocky outside of Earth has been ground up as well. And while you're at it, Earth gets ground up too. You and up with a sphere 1AU in diameter, so that the amount of sunlight reaching the inside surface of that sphere is the same as reaches Earth, thereby assuring you can still grow crops. It's kind of a purpose built bubble you now call home.
You sure as hell don't end up with a bunch of planets orbiting inside of a sphere. You don't warm up Mars. You don't have other big rocks big enough to live on.
There is no solar system, there are no planets ... you rip the entire solar system apart (except the sun of course), and re-purpose the raw materials to make your sphere. You live on the inside of the sphere.
Am I missing something in the definition of Dyson sphere? Because a shell in which all of your planets orbit isn't anywhere near lining up with my understanding of one.
A shell whose material came from every rock in your solar system is what you have. It's a sand and gravel pit on the scale of a solar system.
In this scenario, nobody gives a crap about the climate of Mars, because there simply is no Mars left to give a crap about.
I've never though it was a plausible thing. But I've always understood you no longer have the things which used to be your solar system by the time you're done.
So, if you chew up the entire solar system, is there enough mass then? Because that's how I understand it.
Yeah, not bloody interested.
It's a web browser. It needs to stay as a web browser. Don't try to integrate with my desktop. Don't create new vectors for shitware to get inroads into my OS. Show me a damned web page, and then STFU.
Stop trying to make the #*()%^$&*( web browser part of my desktop. It doesn't belong there, and I'm not interested in it.
It's "innovative" stuff like this which turns into security holes.