Use Firefox. Keep the biggest attack vectors up to date (Adobe stuff in particular). Get rid of Java entirely unless you desperately need it; in that case, keep it up to date religiously. Use Adblock Plus (or equivalent) to block ads which sometimes carry malicious code. Don't do stupid things online. Don't run executables unless you absolutely know they're safe. Don't install pirated software since pirated software sometimes comes with lovely surprise infections. Use a limited user account for your daily activities and an administrator account only for maintenance tasks or to run software that won't work under the limited account. Always use a NAT router between the computer and the Internet, and don't run any open wireless network with that PC attached.
It's largely just a matter of (A) don't do obviously dumb things and (B) don't run everything as an administrator in the first place. Remember that antivirus and security software is a final line of defense; everything else is basically a problem with the user's behavior or knowledge, and if you are careful and follow good security practices in the first place, you aren't at any significantly greater risk than you are now.
One more thing: if someone really wants to break in, they will. XP or 7 or 8 or 8.1 and all the updates in the world won't matter in such a case, so my final piece of advice: don't piss anyone off that might want to come after you.
I was somewhat aware of this problem as well. That's why I would have no problem running a "Netflix daemon" on my machine that would use a relatively small portion of my bandwidth to cache Netflix data. If enough people did the same it would render the platform you describe entirely obsolete.
This is the problem with removing net neutrality: the service providers will be double-dipping. Each endpoint pays a service provider for a certain level of connection to THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and the only speed limitations should be the lowest level of upstream/downstream bandwidth paid for by one endpoint or another.
Without this "hands off" approach, service providers can say "pay us for a certain amount of speed accessing THE ENTIRE INTERNET" and then say to Netflix or others "pay us to be allowed to send to our customer at a certain level of speed, even though you've already paid another provider for the same thing." That means that the end customers ARE NOT receiving what they paid for unless the sender pays the tariff.
This should absolutely be fought tooth and nail, because in the end ALL costs fall upon the end consumer. I, for one, would be more than willing to set up something at my end that helps Netflix host its streams in a distributed fashion as is done with torrent downloads.
This is not the proper place to have a full discussion about what you've typed (especially since Slashdot will lock the comments soon) but I should at least contest the overall sentiment. A "war on douchebags" (so to speak) is no different than a "war on drugs" or "war on terror." You cannot eliminate people being jerks. No one will ever succeed with goals like "make people stop being unfair." It is an impossible goal, largely because the definition of things like "fairness" and "manners" and any number of other social moral judgments are subjective and highly fluid. Who decides where the boundaries are? Who gets to tune what constitutes equality? There is no one person that can sit in that chair and be truly "fair," especially with so much of the composition of equality being compromises, and in the absence of compromise there is only favoritism. To illustrate: in exchange for men giving up certain things for equality, will women do the same, i.e. all women (in the U.S.) at age 18 being legally required to sign up for selective service?
As long as people have autonomy, they will behave in the way that they want to behave. The only three ways to eliminate that are to allow them to make a profound personal mistake that teaches them to behave that way, to convince them to make an effort to change their own behavior, or to take away their autonomy. The first is out of anyone's control while the third is on the same overall moral level as things like Big Brother, Hitler, or eugenics, leaving the second option: convincing someone to change.
Feminism as it manifests publicly doesn't change anything; it violently pushes away the people it would need to convince to change. Until feminists can come to the table with a civil and convincing set of arguments, the only people who will listen will be the feminist echo chamber.
One final note: most of the oppression of women today comes from other women, not men. Who do you think operates all of those beauty magazines? If you want to see how modern female oppression really works, this comic illustrates it best (even though there are some English usage issues.)
The Science Daily link compares the harassment of female supervisors to the harassment of female non-supervisors. Your assertion is that women are vastly more harassed than "anyone else" which implicitly means "men." I don't see any way that this backs your assertion. As for the ABC News story, I read their full polling data and the issue of sexual harassment is presented as something that is generally only done by a male to a female, so sexual harassment of males (required to show that "women are vastly more harassed than men") is not present in the data, and therefore cannot support your assertion.
I don't understand how questioning your assertion qualifies as "woman hating." So far you've failed to produce anything that backs your assertion in the slightest. But hey, feel free to call me names if that makes you feel better.
Females are the most highly privileged group of human beings on the planet. Feminism and other women do a thousand times more to hold women down and take away any given woman's agency than men do. There is nothing good about what is known as "feminism" today. Granted, any social group will have exceptions, but when you have massive feminist groups like NOW angrily demanding someone lose their job for writing a newspaper article that simply goes against their agenda, and when sites like Reddit and Tumblr are practically infested with violent dictatorial special snowflakes proudly shouting that they're feminists, the argument that "feminism" is the gentle kind with good intentions simply doesn't fly anymore. Your idea of what constitutes today's feminism is a grand fantasy that simply does not occur in the wild.
Sadly, as idiotic as people are about such things, that might actually work. Even plain cooked chicken is marketed as "gluten free" now. Hey, it's truthful, at least...why not extend it to technology? "Samsung Galaxy S5...gluten free, fat free, sugar free, high in minerals!"
She shows her true colors in her own account of the situation. Men watching (with visibly discernible interest) people who are performing entertaining acts is "gawking" with all the "I wish to have sex with this hula hoopist at full force in her mouth, vagina, and ass" connotation that specific term carries. Yep, that's bitchy lunatic social justice inflammation at its finest. It may seem disgusting but it's quite down-to-earth and realistic, even more so with the implications of male-to-female sexism in a situation where a female is the primary instigator of the other female's stress.
What people don't get is how PCI + ACPI have made modern computing possible, and how ARM systems suffer terribly precisely because no such equivalents to these exist in the ARM ecosystem (excluding some PCI bridges, but that's only one piece of the puzzle.) Before PCI (and ignoring EISA et al) all peripheral devices in a computer had to be configured manually. You had to know your Sound Blaster 16 used I/O port 220, IRQ 5, 8-bit DMA 1, and 16-bit DMA 5, and tell each one of your DOS programs or your Windows audio driver all of these things.
Granted, some improvements came along the way, but they were troublesome and didn't always work as intended (Plug-and-Play ISA, for example). PCI was the first ubiquitous chipset-to-peripheral bus interface specification that provided all the information needed to figure out any given PCI device's hardware configuration with obnoxious amounts of detail (lspci -vv if you don't believe me).
ACPI was brought in to clean up the other autoconfiguration-unfriendly interfaces that were lying around. Advanced Power Management was the biggest one that comes to mind, though things like MPS were pulled in also. A whole host of highly system-specific information comes in through ACPI and that's what makes it fairly easy to write a "run anywhere" operating system for systems that have ACPI and PCI. It's not perfect by any means, but without it there would be a bunch of proprietary ways to, say, send a "laptop lid was closed" event to the operating system.
ARM does stuff like this with a pile of GPIO pins which are configured differently for every single bloody device that the otherwise identical ARM SoC is engineered around. You can thank ACPI and PCI in large part for keeping us from needing a specially tweaked OS kernel for every single model of PC that gets released. I'm glad they exist, however ridiculous they can seem at times.
You made an assertion, therefore the onus is on you to prove the validity of the assertion. Your links don't support your assertion at all and at least one seems to support the opposite of what you are claiming. Provide something to look at that supports your premise; that's all I've asked for, and what you provided didn't even touch your premise. There can't be a factual discussion if anyone is to simply assume everything we hear is correct without proof.
I'd also add that the second link and its age suggests that men have been oppressed by society for decades, as they are not comfortable speaking up when harmed due to societal pressures that perhaps would label them "weak" in some way. I'll be adding it to my list of sources for proving long-term pervasive male oppression by American society.
The first one doesn't support your statement. There is no information about male harassment at all, only female harassment, and the content is comparing how often women are harassed based on male-to-female ratios; "women are harassed far more than anyone else" is not covered at all.
The second link is over 20 years out of date, is based on surveys (which go back into the 80s), and doesn't seem to support your statement, particularly since one of the points given is: "It seems that when men are privately surveyed whether or not they've experienced unwanted sexual attention, a relatively high percentage of them say yes (approaching the percentage of women). However, the percentage is a lot lower (but still significant) when only the number of formal complaints are considered."
That's how you know you're dealing with a highly unreasonable "social justice warrior" and shouldn't listen to her any further. This woman is the only person who assigned the "ultra creepiness" factor to the simple actions of the men looking in a direction. When you have a problem with people watching other people that are doing something at a party that is supposed to receive attention, you are the one with the problem. Not the watchers, not the actors.
All the eco-friendly stuff is ignored by building codes, so while this toilet might exist and have potential, good luck getting it to pass local codes for permitting. Whether you want to build a membrane structure (like a yurt) or use composting toilets or harvest rainwater or use solar for your electricity, you'll have a hard time getting any of it approved. If they're going to make toilets like this, they need to make an effort to get building codes across the country fixed to allow lower-footprint solutions. In many places it's even illegal to live with solar/wind alone and they will come after you if you're not connected to the power grid.
I've only played that emulated, and I didn't find many of the games I tried to be worth playing except Ikaruga. I don't think that a screen in the controller is very helpful because ultimately one is going to be looking at the screen on...well, uh, the screen. It doesn't make sense to me as to why someone would want a screen and then a completely different screen that requires changing the entire field of view, so I deem it useless, especially in a world slam full of 1080p displays that have more than sufficient pixel density to show everything you'd ever need in the game.
No gaming control pad should have a touchscreen. It was absolutely ridiculous on the Wii U and it'd be ridiculous here...especially considering none of the Steam games out already (that I know of) take advantage of such a feature and TBH I find that touchscreens are one of the worst gaming input devices in existence. Actually, touchscreens are the worst modern input devices bar none, excluding point of sale use cases. Tossing the touchscreen is a great choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I understood that all the updates have standalone installers; couldn't you install the standalone for the WUAU fix and THEN run all the other updates?
"Any potential vector for badness" includes all software that exists.
Use Firefox. Keep the biggest attack vectors up to date (Adobe stuff in particular). Get rid of Java entirely unless you desperately need it; in that case, keep it up to date religiously. Use Adblock Plus (or equivalent) to block ads which sometimes carry malicious code. Don't do stupid things online. Don't run executables unless you absolutely know they're safe. Don't install pirated software since pirated software sometimes comes with lovely surprise infections. Use a limited user account for your daily activities and an administrator account only for maintenance tasks or to run software that won't work under the limited account. Always use a NAT router between the computer and the Internet, and don't run any open wireless network with that PC attached.
It's largely just a matter of (A) don't do obviously dumb things and (B) don't run everything as an administrator in the first place. Remember that antivirus and security software is a final line of defense; everything else is basically a problem with the user's behavior or knowledge, and if you are careful and follow good security practices in the first place, you aren't at any significantly greater risk than you are now.
One more thing: if someone really wants to break in, they will. XP or 7 or 8 or 8.1 and all the updates in the world won't matter in such a case, so my final piece of advice: don't piss anyone off that might want to come after you.
It requires systemd, ergo I could care less.
I was somewhat aware of this problem as well. That's why I would have no problem running a "Netflix daemon" on my machine that would use a relatively small portion of my bandwidth to cache Netflix data. If enough people did the same it would render the platform you describe entirely obsolete.
This is the problem with removing net neutrality: the service providers will be double-dipping. Each endpoint pays a service provider for a certain level of connection to THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and the only speed limitations should be the lowest level of upstream/downstream bandwidth paid for by one endpoint or another.
Without this "hands off" approach, service providers can say "pay us for a certain amount of speed accessing THE ENTIRE INTERNET" and then say to Netflix or others "pay us to be allowed to send to our customer at a certain level of speed, even though you've already paid another provider for the same thing." That means that the end customers ARE NOT receiving what they paid for unless the sender pays the tariff.
This should absolutely be fought tooth and nail, because in the end ALL costs fall upon the end consumer. I, for one, would be more than willing to set up something at my end that helps Netflix host its streams in a distributed fashion as is done with torrent downloads.
This is not the proper place to have a full discussion about what you've typed (especially since Slashdot will lock the comments soon) but I should at least contest the overall sentiment. A "war on douchebags" (so to speak) is no different than a "war on drugs" or "war on terror." You cannot eliminate people being jerks. No one will ever succeed with goals like "make people stop being unfair." It is an impossible goal, largely because the definition of things like "fairness" and "manners" and any number of other social moral judgments are subjective and highly fluid. Who decides where the boundaries are? Who gets to tune what constitutes equality? There is no one person that can sit in that chair and be truly "fair," especially with so much of the composition of equality being compromises, and in the absence of compromise there is only favoritism. To illustrate: in exchange for men giving up certain things for equality, will women do the same, i.e. all women (in the U.S.) at age 18 being legally required to sign up for selective service?
As long as people have autonomy, they will behave in the way that they want to behave. The only three ways to eliminate that are to allow them to make a profound personal mistake that teaches them to behave that way, to convince them to make an effort to change their own behavior, or to take away their autonomy. The first is out of anyone's control while the third is on the same overall moral level as things like Big Brother, Hitler, or eugenics, leaving the second option: convincing someone to change.
Feminism as it manifests publicly doesn't change anything; it violently pushes away the people it would need to convince to change. Until feminists can come to the table with a civil and convincing set of arguments, the only people who will listen will be the feminist echo chamber.
One final note: most of the oppression of women today comes from other women, not men. Who do you think operates all of those beauty magazines? If you want to see how modern female oppression really works, this comic illustrates it best (even though there are some English usage issues.)
Humanism is real. Humanism is powerful. Humanism is something everyone can and should support.
Feminism is only about women. It even says so on the box.
The Science Daily link compares the harassment of female supervisors to the harassment of female non-supervisors. Your assertion is that women are vastly more harassed than "anyone else" which implicitly means "men." I don't see any way that this backs your assertion. As for the ABC News story, I read their full polling data and the issue of sexual harassment is presented as something that is generally only done by a male to a female, so sexual harassment of males (required to show that "women are vastly more harassed than men") is not present in the data, and therefore cannot support your assertion.
I don't understand how questioning your assertion qualifies as "woman hating." So far you've failed to produce anything that backs your assertion in the slightest. But hey, feel free to call me names if that makes you feel better.
Females are the most highly privileged group of human beings on the planet. Feminism and other women do a thousand times more to hold women down and take away any given woman's agency than men do. There is nothing good about what is known as "feminism" today. Granted, any social group will have exceptions, but when you have massive feminist groups like NOW angrily demanding someone lose their job for writing a newspaper article that simply goes against their agenda, and when sites like Reddit and Tumblr are practically infested with violent dictatorial special snowflakes proudly shouting that they're feminists, the argument that "feminism" is the gentle kind with good intentions simply doesn't fly anymore. Your idea of what constitutes today's feminism is a grand fantasy that simply does not occur in the wild.
Sadly, as idiotic as people are about such things, that might actually work. Even plain cooked chicken is marketed as "gluten free" now. Hey, it's truthful, at least...why not extend it to technology? "Samsung Galaxy S5...gluten free, fat free, sugar free, high in minerals!"
She shows her true colors in her own account of the situation. Men watching (with visibly discernible interest) people who are performing entertaining acts is "gawking" with all the "I wish to have sex with this hula hoopist at full force in her mouth, vagina, and ass" connotation that specific term carries. Yep, that's bitchy lunatic social justice inflammation at its finest. It may seem disgusting but it's quite down-to-earth and realistic, even more so with the implications of male-to-female sexism in a situation where a female is the primary instigator of the other female's stress.
"Proto-rapist?" What the FUCK is that supposed to mean? Nothing to see here, typical feminazi lexicon salad.
What people don't get is how PCI + ACPI have made modern computing possible, and how ARM systems suffer terribly precisely because no such equivalents to these exist in the ARM ecosystem (excluding some PCI bridges, but that's only one piece of the puzzle.) Before PCI (and ignoring EISA et al) all peripheral devices in a computer had to be configured manually. You had to know your Sound Blaster 16 used I/O port 220, IRQ 5, 8-bit DMA 1, and 16-bit DMA 5, and tell each one of your DOS programs or your Windows audio driver all of these things.
Granted, some improvements came along the way, but they were troublesome and didn't always work as intended (Plug-and-Play ISA, for example). PCI was the first ubiquitous chipset-to-peripheral bus interface specification that provided all the information needed to figure out any given PCI device's hardware configuration with obnoxious amounts of detail (lspci -vv if you don't believe me).
ACPI was brought in to clean up the other autoconfiguration-unfriendly interfaces that were lying around. Advanced Power Management was the biggest one that comes to mind, though things like MPS were pulled in also. A whole host of highly system-specific information comes in through ACPI and that's what makes it fairly easy to write a "run anywhere" operating system for systems that have ACPI and PCI. It's not perfect by any means, but without it there would be a bunch of proprietary ways to, say, send a "laptop lid was closed" event to the operating system.
ARM does stuff like this with a pile of GPIO pins which are configured differently for every single bloody device that the otherwise identical ARM SoC is engineered around. You can thank ACPI and PCI in large part for keeping us from needing a specially tweaked OS kernel for every single model of PC that gets released. I'm glad they exist, however ridiculous they can seem at times.
You made an assertion, therefore the onus is on you to prove the validity of the assertion. Your links don't support your assertion at all and at least one seems to support the opposite of what you are claiming. Provide something to look at that supports your premise; that's all I've asked for, and what you provided didn't even touch your premise. There can't be a factual discussion if anyone is to simply assume everything we hear is correct without proof.
I'd also add that the second link and its age suggests that men have been oppressed by society for decades, as they are not comfortable speaking up when harmed due to societal pressures that perhaps would label them "weak" in some way. I'll be adding it to my list of sources for proving long-term pervasive male oppression by American society.
The first one doesn't support your statement. There is no information about male harassment at all, only female harassment, and the content is comparing how often women are harassed based on male-to-female ratios; "women are harassed far more than anyone else" is not covered at all. The second link is over 20 years out of date, is based on surveys (which go back into the 80s), and doesn't seem to support your statement, particularly since one of the points given is: "It seems that when men are privately surveyed whether or not they've experienced unwanted sexual attention, a relatively high percentage of them say yes (approaching the percentage of women). However, the percentage is a lot lower (but still significant) when only the number of formal complaints are considered."
[citation needed]
That's how you know you're dealing with a highly unreasonable "social justice warrior" and shouldn't listen to her any further. This woman is the only person who assigned the "ultra creepiness" factor to the simple actions of the men looking in a direction. When you have a problem with people watching other people that are doing something at a party that is supposed to receive attention, you are the one with the problem. Not the watchers, not the actors.
Women are not the sole targets of harassment.
Communications monopolies and building codes.
All the eco-friendly stuff is ignored by building codes, so while this toilet might exist and have potential, good luck getting it to pass local codes for permitting. Whether you want to build a membrane structure (like a yurt) or use composting toilets or harvest rainwater or use solar for your electricity, you'll have a hard time getting any of it approved. If they're going to make toilets like this, they need to make an effort to get building codes across the country fixed to allow lower-footprint solutions. In many places it's even illegal to live with solar/wind alone and they will come after you if you're not connected to the power grid.
I've only played that emulated, and I didn't find many of the games I tried to be worth playing except Ikaruga. I don't think that a screen in the controller is very helpful because ultimately one is going to be looking at the screen on...well, uh, the screen. It doesn't make sense to me as to why someone would want a screen and then a completely different screen that requires changing the entire field of view, so I deem it useless, especially in a world slam full of 1080p displays that have more than sufficient pixel density to show everything you'd ever need in the game.
No gaming control pad should have a touchscreen. It was absolutely ridiculous on the Wii U and it'd be ridiculous here...especially considering none of the Steam games out already (that I know of) take advantage of such a feature and TBH I find that touchscreens are one of the worst gaming input devices in existence. Actually, touchscreens are the worst modern input devices bar none, excluding point of sale use cases. Tossing the touchscreen is a great choice.
18 USC 2257 doesn't apply to pictures you don't publish.