Why would I want my web browser to give me desktop notifications? Why the hell would I want a website to give me push notifications even if my browser is closed?
Somehow apparently Google decided what users really wanted was an annoying and intrusive browser, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Definitely a feature which needed to be disabled as soon as it was discovered.
Hmmm... moving huge quantities of material from your own solar system is an absolutely enormous scale.
How much energy and engineering is going to be required to move the stuff from another entire solar system? I believe when GP says "That would be a far more monumental task", it's both an understatement and an indication of just how crazy it would be.
Honestly, since the math for building a Dyson sphere is well and truly beyond me... if you can go to another solar system and bring back the stuff you need to build a Dyson sphere, do you need a Dyson sphere in the first place?
It just seems like the energies involved in moving around that much matter means you might be able to look at other solutions.
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?
And then you'll be liable under the DMCA/TPP/whatever trade agreements have been signed in secret.
See, the corporations have the American government so firmly on the payroll that the treaties being pushed by America these days are pretty much 100% skewed in favor of large corporations.
So you bypassing this? Well, you'd be an international criminal.
Because corporations have more rights than we do these days.
Apparently more stable than a block of something which sheds some matter over time, yes.
So, your choices are: 1) measure according to a physical object which can change over time, or 2) measure according to a known set of physical properties which can be reproduced.
And there's nothing to say over time as the science gets better they don't tweak this.
But, in terms of defining in terms of a measure someone can reproduce, it's gotta be better than "1kg is this artifact we made".
The origin story of Big K reads like a fairytale. The cylinder-shaped artifact was forged under the guidance of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), which stated in 1889, as if by royal decree: "This prototype shall henceforth be considered to be the unit of mass."
For over a century, the kilogram was sealed within three glass bell jars beneath the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, where it was protected from dust, moisture, fingerprints, and other corruptions of the outside world. Big K could only be retrieved by a gathering of three custodians, each with a different key. Gaze into the Crystal Ball
Forty identical sister copies were shipped abroad to calibrate kilograms worldwide. The cylinders were reunited only three times for comparison. Each time, Big K and its twins were delicately wiped with alcohol and ether, steam-cleaned, and weighed. In 1992, scientists were disturbed to discover that Big K had somehow become lighter than its siblings.
Is it trolling or flamebait to point that large companies are constantly suing one another over patents which mostly seem obvious to us, and that it's about time one of them came up short?
I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.
Patents are probably doing more to stifle innovation that foster it, precisely because they all patent even the smallest thing to have in their war chest.
Honestly, seeing the big players getting screwed in patent lawsuits gives me hope at some point they'll all wise up and start pushing for patent reform themselves.
Because as long as it's a stacked deck which makes them huge amounts of money, they have no interest in things ever changing. If the only way for things to change is by costing these guys a bunch of money, bring it on.
*sigh* I would really think those agencies would have people who are sufficiently paranoid as to not allow Flash on those computers. Or are government officials all demanding they be able to watch YouTube videos?
Flash has been a gaping series of security holes for almost 20 years now, why the hell do people keep trusting it?
Except they can now sell to 13 year olds and not have to be sold in a brown envelope, which could bring in marketing dollars, especially if the cover model appeals to teens
Which sounds like Ferrari making an economy car to appeal to the youth market... all it's really doing is diluting the existing brand.
If the way forward for Playboy is to become something which isn't Playboy so they can sell to teens, they're pretty much screwed already.
But, hey, what the hell do I care what Playboy does with their magazine or their demographic?
So, you make the magazine more attractive for advertisers, while making it less attractive to the people who would buy it... therefore reducing the value of the advertising.
If you try to make Playboy PC, there's pretty much little left of value in Playboy.
This just seems like it's shooting themselves in the foot.
First off.. it's Belgium, so not so much with the FCC.
But, really, if you assume a malicious actor, why the hell would they care?
If it's cheap and easy to do it, people probably will. It's not like the FCC (or any other agency) has the ability to prevent the attacks just by saying you're not allowed to do it.
To counter the malware aspect of ads, if you do nothing with the downloaded binary data then your chances of getting any sort of infection from it is effectively zero.
Except if I don't trust it, why the hell would I download it? Why would I waste bandwidth on crap I don't want or trust?
The ad sources have already demonstrated themselves to be shady and not trustworthy.
The average web site seems to think 20+ external sites all tracking what you do is OK. Sorry, but I am not here to support the business model of 20 tracking companies who have nothing to do with me.
I won't click on the ads, and I sure as hell will keep blocking the hell out of them. If a website shows me the thing to turn on cookies, or enable javascript, or tells me that I can't see their site with an adblocker... I'll simply leave.
All those external entities on a website who want my data can fully expect that I will block them as much as I can.
It's absolutely mind-boggling the sheer amount of CRAP in the average web-page, and once you start running the blockers and seeing just how much there is, the idea of turning off those blockers seems idiotic.
And Microsoft has an ARM version of the NT Kernel. The problem is never the OS, its the fact that the software for x86 can't run on ARM
And apparently nobody has ever ported a compiler to the ARM platform?
This legacy crap of x86 is tedious... people have been cross-compiling software for decades.
It's just the people who slavishly can't do anything not x86 (Microsoft) who keep us tethered to this.
I'm pretty sure Apple could port a lot of their own software relatively quickly. Again, this is something people have done for decades.
I've personally worked on several products which compiled to multiple hardware platforms from the exact same codebase. It's not like nobody has ever done it before.
Can we stop clinging to a decades old platform because people are too lazy to deal with it not being x86?
The political fascination with coding is ridiculous. The last time I checked, we still need plumbers, electricians, welders, and equipment operators as well. Why not make those skills mandatory as well?
Why?
Because there aren't billionaire plumbers with the ear of government who are loudly saying kids must learn to run pipe for the economy to succeed.
This is "which rich people are driving this agenda?". The tech billionaires all want to be handed a large, cheap labor pool... and as a result are framing the debate in terms of national prosperity.
The reality is, they're not looking for the prosperity of these kids. They're looking at having these kids be a cheap fucking work force.
These kids are the new serfs of the "knowledge economy".
I fail to see this as anything other than trying to drive down the cost of skilled labor by pretending you can have a large somewhat-skilled labor force.
Honestly, at what time in the time you've been using Slashdot with that 6 digit ID have you ever seen evidence of the editors at Slashdot doing any of this stuff?
Honestly, you might as well be shocked and appalled that bears shit in the woods.
If you're an American (or frankly, any innocent person) anywhere in the world who isn't an active member of a foreign terrorist organization or an agent of a foreign power, the Intelligence Community DOES NOT CARE ABOUT and actually DOES NOT WANT your data
And there you have it ladies and gentlemen... you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
If you're now so jaded that you don't actually believe the US and its allies, and their principles, are something worth defending and fighting for
If you believe you defend these things by undermining what they actually mean, then I'm afraid you don't deserve to have these things defended since you've already given up on them.
If Americans are saying "well, gee, it's OK if the government has the ability to trample my rights, but it's OK because terrorists", then it's time to stop fucking pretending you have these things left to defend... and the US should get on with failing utterly so the rest of the world can stop pretending you're not full of shit.
Because increasingly Americans seem to think them being the enemy of the freedoms of everybody on the planet is OK.
Here's a hint, it isn't.
Everything you said screams "we as Americans have already give up, but as long as we have the illusion of security we don't give a fuck about the underlying principles".
So, please, if you're going to abandon those principles, don't talk about defending them. Because it's either delusional or dishonest. Everything about this undermines those principles American claim to cling to.
When they outlaw encryption, only outlaws will have encryption.
Enjoy the indefinite detention as you're held as a terrorist for failing to decrypt. A little "parallel construction"/perjury to trump up some charges if you don't play along.
See, non-compliant citizens will be presumed guilty and treated as a security risk. Just to be safe you understand.
So, I applaud the sentiment, and agree with you. But it's worth pointing out that the kinds of governments who want this shit will simply find ways to compel you, or otherwise ruin your damned life. They won't play nicely, and they won't do it publicly.
I'm not sure most Americans realize the extent to which their rights and freedoms no longer exist in the same way they believe they do.
We accept for now there is public pushback against our planned fascism, for now we will back off on this, but in the future we reserve the right to proceed further with the fascism.
I'm sorry, but if the US government is essentially just saying "fascism is only temporarily on hold", the US is already fucked.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide; give us your papers please, comrade.
Let's be perfectly clear here: If you get a highschool diploma, and stop your education... you will not be programming computers.
If you think you're going to have a bunch of kids coming out of highschool who are the programming workforce of the future... you have decided to set your kids future up so that they will be the low-paid programmers who only have a highschool diploma.
Somehow we've let a bunch of rich people who work in technology to convince the world that everybody needs to know how to program a computer. And this is largely so they can have a large workforce of cheap fucking labor.
The people telling us this don't give a shit about your kids. They give a shit about driving down wages for their own profits.
Not everyone is so butthurt about the potential to look stupid as you clearly are..
It's not looking stupid which concerns me.. I look stupid fairly constantly. That doesn't bother me.
But the whole ream of security issues caused by letting a website have the password for your email account absolutely hurts my brain. Under what other circumstances would you hand that password over to anybody? Ideally none, but suddenly a website asks for it and people do it.
The problem is the internet requires a level of paranoia which doesn't come natural to most people. Failing to assume the internet is constantly trying to fuck you over is a perilous mistake.
But, make no mistake about it, the internet is a place which does not have your best interests at heart. Which means you have to have a fairly constant mind-set that it's a potentially hostile place.
Slashdot Mirror
Settings > Show Advanced Settings > Privacy > Content Settings > Notifications.
Pretty much I went through that whole Content Settings section and selected "oh hell no" on day one of having Chrome.
Let a web page give push notifications to my desktop? No, hell no, oh god no, please fuck off and go away no. Just no.
I just want a damned web browser. That's it.
Why would I want my web browser to give me desktop notifications? Why the hell would I want a website to give me push notifications even if my browser is closed?
Somehow apparently Google decided what users really wanted was an annoying and intrusive browser, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Definitely a feature which needed to be disabled as soon as it was discovered.
Hmmm ... moving huge quantities of material from your own solar system is an absolutely enormous scale.
How much energy and engineering is going to be required to move the stuff from another entire solar system? I believe when GP says "That would be a far more monumental task", it's both an understatement and an indication of just how crazy it would be.
Honestly, since the math for building a Dyson sphere is well and truly beyond me ... if you can go to another solar system and bring back the stuff you need to build a Dyson sphere, do you need a Dyson sphere in the first place?
It just seems like the energies involved in moving around that much matter means you might be able to look at other solutions.
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?
And then you'll be liable under the DMCA/TPP/whatever trade agreements have been signed in secret.
See, the corporations have the American government so firmly on the payroll that the treaties being pushed by America these days are pretty much 100% skewed in favor of large corporations.
So you bypassing this? Well, you'd be an international criminal.
Because corporations have more rights than we do these days.
Apparently more stable than a block of something which sheds some matter over time, yes.
So, your choices are: 1) measure according to a physical object which can change over time, or 2) measure according to a known set of physical properties which can be reproduced.
And there's nothing to say over time as the science gets better they don't tweak this.
But, in terms of defining in terms of a measure someone can reproduce, it's gotta be better than "1kg is this artifact we made".
I mean, this is what we have now:
So, it's gotta be more stable than an artifact.
Is it trolling or flamebait to point that large companies are constantly suing one another over patents which mostly seem obvious to us, and that it's about time one of them came up short?
I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi ... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.
Patents are probably doing more to stifle innovation that foster it, precisely because they all patent even the smallest thing to have in their war chest.
Honestly, seeing the big players getting screwed in patent lawsuits gives me hope at some point they'll all wise up and start pushing for patent reform themselves.
Because as long as it's a stacked deck which makes them huge amounts of money, they have no interest in things ever changing. If the only way for things to change is by costing these guys a bunch of money, bring it on.
*sigh* I would really think those agencies would have people who are sufficiently paranoid as to not allow Flash on those computers. Or are government officials all demanding they be able to watch YouTube videos?
Flash has been a gaping series of security holes for almost 20 years now, why the hell do people keep trusting it?
Which sounds like Ferrari making an economy car to appeal to the youth market ... all it's really doing is diluting the existing brand.
If the way forward for Playboy is to become something which isn't Playboy so they can sell to teens, they're pretty much screwed already.
But, hey, what the hell do I care what Playboy does with their magazine or their demographic?
So, you make the magazine more attractive for advertisers, while making it less attractive to the people who would buy it ... therefore reducing the value of the advertising.
If you try to make Playboy PC, there's pretty much little left of value in Playboy.
This just seems like it's shooting themselves in the foot.
So after 60+ years Playboy is going to make themselves completely irrelevant? I mean, who is actually going to buy it now?
Sure, the internet is full of smut, but Playboy was always a little classier.
Now they're, what exactly? I just don't see people wanting to buy Playboy with no nudity. At that point, get a Victoria's Secret catalog.
First off .. it's Belgium, so not so much with the FCC.
But, really, if you assume a malicious actor, why the hell would they care?
If it's cheap and easy to do it, people probably will. It's not like the FCC (or any other agency) has the ability to prevent the attacks just by saying you're not allowed to do it.
Except if I don't trust it, why the hell would I download it? Why would I waste bandwidth on crap I don't want or trust?
The ad sources have already demonstrated themselves to be shady and not trustworthy.
The average web site seems to think 20+ external sites all tracking what you do is OK. Sorry, but I am not here to support the business model of 20 tracking companies who have nothing to do with me.
I won't click on the ads, and I sure as hell will keep blocking the hell out of them. If a website shows me the thing to turn on cookies, or enable javascript, or tells me that I can't see their site with an adblocker ... I'll simply leave.
All those external entities on a website who want my data can fully expect that I will block them as much as I can.
It's absolutely mind-boggling the sheer amount of CRAP in the average web-page, and once you start running the blockers and seeing just how much there is, the idea of turning off those blockers seems idiotic.
And apparently nobody has ever ported a compiler to the ARM platform?
This legacy crap of x86 is tedious ... people have been cross-compiling software for decades.
It's just the people who slavishly can't do anything not x86 (Microsoft) who keep us tethered to this.
I'm pretty sure Apple could port a lot of their own software relatively quickly. Again, this is something people have done for decades.
I've personally worked on several products which compiled to multiple hardware platforms from the exact same codebase. It's not like nobody has ever done it before.
Can we stop clinging to a decades old platform because people are too lazy to deal with it not being x86?
You think that's traumatic ... humans shit in houses. In freakin' houses!!
And fish? You're not ready to hear about the fish.
Why?
Because there aren't billionaire plumbers with the ear of government who are loudly saying kids must learn to run pipe for the economy to succeed.
This is "which rich people are driving this agenda?". The tech billionaires all want to be handed a large, cheap labor pool ... and as a result are framing the debate in terms of national prosperity.
The reality is, they're not looking for the prosperity of these kids. They're looking at having these kids be a cheap fucking work force.
These kids are the new serfs of the "knowledge economy".
I fail to see this as anything other than trying to drive down the cost of skilled labor by pretending you can have a large somewhat-skilled labor force.
But ... but ... if the criminals had all learned to code there'd be no crime, and everybody would have jobs!! It's true, I saw it on the internet!
Why do you hate America?
Honestly, at what time in the time you've been using Slashdot with that 6 digit ID have you ever seen evidence of the editors at Slashdot doing any of this stuff?
Honestly, you might as well be shocked and appalled that bears shit in the woods.
It's not like this is new.
So much disambiguation needed.
Complex-Living Brain Simulation ... the brain simulation lives in a complex.
Complex Living-Brain Simulation ... it's complex and simulates a "living brain".
Complex-Living-Brain Simulation ... a simulation of brains which live in complexes.
I'd like to say I expect better from the Guardian. I'd like to, but I can't.
And there you have it ladies and gentlemen ... you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
If you believe you defend these things by undermining what they actually mean, then I'm afraid you don't deserve to have these things defended since you've already given up on them.
If Americans are saying "well, gee, it's OK if the government has the ability to trample my rights, but it's OK because terrorists", then it's time to stop fucking pretending you have these things left to defend ... and the US should get on with failing utterly so the rest of the world can stop pretending you're not full of shit.
Because increasingly Americans seem to think them being the enemy of the freedoms of everybody on the planet is OK.
Here's a hint, it isn't.
Everything you said screams "we as Americans have already give up, but as long as we have the illusion of security we don't give a fuck about the underlying principles".
So, please, if you're going to abandon those principles, don't talk about defending them. Because it's either delusional or dishonest. Everything about this undermines those principles American claim to cling to.
Alive. Free. Protected by the Constitution. Not living under a fascist government.
"For now".
Enjoy those freedom fries, suckers.
When they outlaw encryption, only outlaws will have encryption.
Enjoy the indefinite detention as you're held as a terrorist for failing to decrypt. A little "parallel construction"/perjury to trump up some charges if you don't play along.
See, non-compliant citizens will be presumed guilty and treated as a security risk. Just to be safe you understand.
So, I applaud the sentiment, and agree with you. But it's worth pointing out that the kinds of governments who want this shit will simply find ways to compel you, or otherwise ruin your damned life. They won't play nicely, and they won't do it publicly.
I'm not sure most Americans realize the extent to which their rights and freedoms no longer exist in the same way they believe they do.
We accept for now there is public pushback against our planned fascism, for now we will back off on this, but in the future we reserve the right to proceed further with the fascism.
I'm sorry, but if the US government is essentially just saying "fascism is only temporarily on hold", the US is already fucked.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide; give us your papers please, comrade.
Let's be perfectly clear here: If you get a highschool diploma, and stop your education ... you will not be programming computers.
If you think you're going to have a bunch of kids coming out of highschool who are the programming workforce of the future ... you have decided to set your kids future up so that they will be the low-paid programmers who only have a highschool diploma.
Somehow we've let a bunch of rich people who work in technology to convince the world that everybody needs to know how to program a computer. And this is largely so they can have a large workforce of cheap fucking labor.
The people telling us this don't give a shit about your kids. They give a shit about driving down wages for their own profits.
Second keepass as I've used it for work for several years.
Copy around your own encrypted database. Don't entrust some damned service with your passwords.
There's several variations on this kind of thing. No subscription, and nobody else has your passwords.
It's also got a really nice feature where it can put your password into the paste buffer for only 10 seconds or so, and then it disappears.
Using a web-based service to track your passwords seems more dangerous than useful to me.
It's not looking stupid which concerns me .. I look stupid fairly constantly. That doesn't bother me.
But the whole ream of security issues caused by letting a website have the password for your email account absolutely hurts my brain. Under what other circumstances would you hand that password over to anybody? Ideally none, but suddenly a website asks for it and people do it.
The problem is the internet requires a level of paranoia which doesn't come natural to most people. Failing to assume the internet is constantly trying to fuck you over is a perilous mistake.
But, make no mistake about it, the internet is a place which does not have your best interests at heart. Which means you have to have a fairly constant mind-set that it's a potentially hostile place.