The fact of the matter is that there's no credible evidence here that the government was involved in most of the examples given. And no, individuals aren't "the government".
Now, one of those records might be official. The murdered child's father might have been a suspect, and the acquisition of his phone records might have been a legitimate investigative tactic which is frequently used. No, I don't like these companies. I'd rather see the records come straight out of the phone companies (after issuing the appropriate warrant, of course), but there's no reason to begrudge this as a valid investigative technique given that this is currently the mechanism by which, for example, the FBI could obtain cellular records.
I would expect that the majority of the $30m (which, keep in mind, is hubcap money in government circles) was spent in this way. If this were an NSA-like operation to gather everyone's records, it would cost orders of magnitude more and would not have been through a third party.
Well, in most cases, after the first couple of years, drops like that in EQ were all nodrop, so farming was still a problem, but not for the reasons you cite.
For trade skills, there was still a huge problem, and trade skill were never reasonably thought out in that game.
I can attest to this (though I guess my statement is original research, here;)
I used to dump a fair amount of information into Wikipedia without sources. It was true information, but it took too long to muster up proper references in many cases. Then about 6 months ago, things started to change. I was challenged on my edits far more often, and I started getting less lazy about my sources. These days, I'm strict about it, and I'm one of the people that challenges the unsourced edits, so there's definitely momentum behind the idea that "casual edits" aren't really up to snuff anymore.
EQ solved this problem partially by expanding the number of high-level areas, but it's true that blockers like the shards or the various epic drops were a major pain to get un-camped. Guilds were generally able to help there, but it was a limited benefit until EQ went instanced (pretty much as a result of the WoW beta).
I'm not saying it was NO PROBLEM AT ALL, I just think that people over-react to the idea that there's an economy, and THAT is not a problem. There were playability problems in EQ relating to farming, true. What I never saw was high-end, guild-only content getting blocked that way, though. Guilds really did help because a guildleader complaining ot customer service had much more voice than some random player. They could generally get people who were blocking high-end content to back off for fear that Sony would figure out what was going on.
I'll say what I said back in the days when this was a "problem" in EverQuest: it's not a problem, it's just a matter of supply and demand. There are people who focus on certain things. For some it's specific quests or gear. For some it's social play. For some it's just exploring the world. It can be nice to be able to "buy in" to the game and not have to do everything just to do the things you want.
During my time in EQ, I bought plat so that I could buy things for friends who were starting the game. Eventually, I started farming my own money (legitimately, from buying and selling goods). I generated hundreds of thousands of plat, all of which I gave away in the end.
Too many people try to figure out what's "wrong". There's nothing wrong, it's just that time has a value, and people are willing to pay for it.
There will always be a need for fairly low-level code. The definition of low-level will slide, but it's sliding with respect to mainstream code at an order of magnitude lower rate. For example, C++ is currently considered "low-level" in most of the industry, and having seen some very modern, high-performance C++ in the last few years, I can honestly say that interpreted languages pose no threat whatsoever in those application domains that actually need performance.
The thing is that most applications need "responsiveness" not "performance". For example, when I click on a button on a GUI, I need it to respond fast enough that it doesn't "feel" slow. If it doesn't my customers will not use the application. But that's just spot-performance, and can easily be wrapped into a low-level library that high-level code calls (as modern toolkits do).
However, I might have an application that takes in a live stream of data and do some serious thinking about it 24/7. That requires a certain level of performance (relative to the flow rate of the data, its complexity and the complexity of the "thinking" that needs to be done over it). This is a likely candidate for a low-level application.
Operating systems, real-time systems for high-data rate processing, many embedded systems, high-performance elements of video games, and many other elements of your average end-user's experience will continue to be written in low-level code. Many casual programmers will continue to write code in high-level languages, and some end-user applications are already written in high-level languages such as Perl, Python, C#, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, etc.
And yet, the single most important argument has nothing to do with the "pirates" who "steal", "share" or whatever you want to call it.
That argument is this: if there's so much of a sea change that an entire generation is willing to ignore the law in order to do someting, then there is a vast and untapped market to be won by someone who is able to puzzle out how.
We said this for years while Sony introduce MiniDisc and various other crippled electronic devices. As MP3 players started to hedge toward the mainstream, Apple saw the opening and dove for it. Now they're more popular than beer.
If the movie and record industries would get their collective heads out of their asses and think about this problem as a demonstration of a vast reservior of market potential, they could, I am sure, create a new golden age of entertainment profits.
How?
I'm not sure. There are literally dozens of ways, and I'm probably not in the right place to figure out which is best.
Serialized movies that are released, freely downloadable to the net, as soon as the next installment is released in theaters, with "collecteds" being released semi-anually on DVD along with various extras (modeled on the comics industry that long ago realized that kids sharing comics was helping, not hurting)
Movies that are created collaboratively, and then released under a free license. This plays off of the one major advantage left to them: control over distribution.
Movies that are first released in a low-res, WiP format to the Net, and then re-released in finished form to theaters ONLY if they do well online (movies guaranteed not to completely suck... what an idea)
Movies where ALL of the footage and all of the models for CG and all of the drawings, music, etc. are released for download via a peer-to-peer system such as torrent, and the best edit is released in theaters and on DVD
In other words, make movies a service with real value-add. Use the marketing and distribution channels to full advantage while harnessing the file-sharers as viral marketing. MAKE LEMONADE!
However, IMHO, this will never happen. Movies will continue to be made the way they are made now. It will take a new industry (one which has been growing steadily since the 1970s) to take advantage of this. I'm seeing the indie community on the east coast start to figure this out. The studios have tried to take over the indie film community, but every time they almost do, it changes and slips out of their hands. Eventually, someone's going to change the rules, and the studios will simple cease to be relevant.
The metrics from Netcraft are hard to read with respect to OS. They don't publish a free OS graph that I've found, and you can't assume that any particular percentage of Apache hosts are running on any particular OS.
All this tells you is that the majority of "sites" (that being a nebulous term) are using Apache on some OS as at least their front-line Web servers. They might still be back-ending to whatever, and that would not show up.
Personally, I don't think you can use Netcraft for any purpose other than to say "IIS and Apache are the most popular Web servers."
I have to disagree. I know that this message might be seen as humorous, but it's not.
The way I prevent my system from being compromised is:
1. I rarely boot Windows (only when needed for games or specific hardware controlers) 2. When I do, I use firefox as a browser, and thunderbird for mail 3. I keep it updated via Microsoft's update service 4. I firewall all of my machines on a NAT segment that allows no incoming sessions 5. I never open attachments that I wasn't expecting 6. I never run binaries from untrusted sites
I haven't had a spyware / virus / whatever problem since about 1996.
Then again, I had a grub-related problem recently and haven't been motivated to fix my Windows XP installation so that it can boot for a month. Eventually I need to do so in order to re-sync my Garmin I-Que.
Windows is about as safe as the boy in the bubble: as long as you understand that it's not safe to expose it to anything so dangerous as fresh cut grass or the sun, it's fairly easy to keep it alive.
Let me summarize the "google is evil" camp's concerns for you so that you can understand where the gp was coming from:
a. All for-profit companies are motivated by profit alone b. Any pretense to the contrary is a lie (or at best, will be discarded later in favor of profit) c. Google has stated that their guiding ethic is "don't be evil" d. Given a. and b., Google is suckering people e. d. proves that they are evil
My problems with this have always been:
a. Most public companies are forced to do whatever they can for profit by the shareholders. b. Google's "don't be evil" ethic is written into their S-1. c. a. only works when shareholders are not warned of the potential loss of value up-front. d. Given b. and c., Google has and obligation to "do whatever it takes", but as modified by their S-1's statement from a. e. The logic of e., above, is circular at best.
I would never bet money that things won't change, but the "google is evil" crowd just seems to be made up of the paranoid types who are swayed by shiny things, to me. With companies like G.E. and Halliburton in the world, I don't think Google is the right choice for the focus of our concerns.
Page loads are faster for very large articles that have hundreds of responses
The indentation is a bit harder to make out for threading, but I imagine that comes with the benefit that deeply nested conversations won't be so squeezed
The default font is much smaller on my display than the origianl (I'll have to look at overlaying my own CSS to fix that, since most sites are fine)
Getting the moderation scores away from the subject, IMHO, will lead to less emphasis on their meaning. I filter to a 3, and beyond that, I'd rather just read without the score being a major factor.
I used to spar with a friend when I was in high school. He was one of the young marines, or whatever they call them, and so he knew how to fight. I had no clue, but I put my heart into it. It was a lot of fun, and I had no hope of ever hurting him (though I did manage to flip him once, nearly by accident).
Looking back, though, I think that if we had both been untrained it would have been uglier.
Still, I wonder why we're all assuming these people are untrained. The majority may be, but it only takes one or two competent fighters to organize the rest and make it a realitvely reasonable thing to do. Sure, people are going to get hurt... if you want to avoid that, don't fight, but you can cut the odds down of there being anything particularly serious.
I was not just being pedantic. I come from the old-school world where store-and-forward means something like UUCP, so the phrase "store-and-forward ethernet" sounded like an oxymoron to me.
If store-and-forward is indeed used in two very different contexts, it might be helpful for someone to update the Wikipedia article on store and forward with current, and accurate meanings.
Problems also include the use of the term "store and forward Ethernet" (WTF does that mean?!) and the fact that Ethernet channel bonding has been around for about 10 years.
In an effort to remain compatible with software designed to decode IFD-table based TIFF files, the largest possible Windows Media(TM) Photo file is 2**32 bytes in length. This limit will be addressed in a future update.
The technical details of the Windows Media(TM) Photo compression algorithm are documented in the Windows Media(TM) Photo Device Porting Kit (see Preface.)
Licensing of the porting kit is unknown to me, buy my guess would be that this is an expensive add-on.
Because Windows Media(TM) Photo uses an advanced compression scheme, there is no simple way for applications to directly access specific portions the stored photo data other than through the appropriate codec interfaces.
Objectives for Introducing a New Still Image Format
Today's file formats for continuous tone images present many limitations in maintaining the highest image quality or delivering the most optimal system performance. Windows Media(TM) Photo was designed to remove these limitations. The design objectives include:
High performance, embedded system friendly compression
Small memory footprint
Simple, integer-only operations (no divides)
Industry-leading compression quality
Lossless or lossy compression using the same algorithm
Support a very wide range of pixel formats:
Monochrome, RGB, CMYK or n-Channel image representation
8 or 16-bit unsigned integer
16 or 32-bit signed integer
16 or 32-bit floating point
Several packed bit formats
1bpc monochrome
5 or 10bpc RGB
RGBE Radiance
Simple, extensible TIFF-like container structure
Planar or interleaved alpha channel
Embedded ICC Profile
EXIF and XMP metadata
Windows Media(TM) Photo is the only format that offers high dynamic range image encoding, lossless or lossy compression, multiple color formats, and performance that enables practical in-device implementation.
Well, technically BDB is a DBMS. It's not an RDBMS, because it lacks relational table management features, but it is most certainly a DBMS (and far more powerful than many of the most popular commercial DBMSes of just a few decades ago).
There's a problem here. You are viewing one end of the political spectrum saying, "our blogs aren't being listed on Google News, that's censorship!"
Are there blogs on the other end of the political spectrum that aren't being listed? Does Google have a way to submit new sources? Are the sources not being listed because they rank low via the search algorithm that Google uses?
Don't confuse a rant for factual information about Google News.
...the character animation was odd and crude. The voice acting and dialog not just lack any logic or consistency but were flat out annoying. One would wonder why they spent all those resources and time on creating this animation but didn't care to get a decent screenplay at first.... all effects and the story sucks.
I'm not suggesting lying to someone, I'm suggesting that you're just ranting in a way that is hurtful to the people involved (that's not me, BTW), and accomplishes nothing. Why must people tear down the work of others? "I didn't like it" is one thing. "I found the characters kind of flat" is valid opinion. But, "the story sucks" is mindless arm-waving at the expense of the hard work of others. It accomplishes nothing. With people like you bashing anything that comes out that is even vaguely off-center from mainstream, one wonders why anyone but Hollywood schlock artists would bother.
Except that it's not a cliched argument. It's just a fact. It's trivial to cut down anything that you want. Holes can be picked in anything. I don't listen to reviewers who spend their time finding flaws to complain about. Some of my favorite films, in fact, have poor sound or bad music or a weak plot or some other flaw or combination of flaws. The question is: who IS the target audience. That's harder to figure out than it is to pick nits.
Slashdot Mirror
A red herring? Not really.
The fact of the matter is that there's no credible evidence here that the government was involved in most of the examples given. And no, individuals aren't "the government".
Now, one of those records might be official. The murdered child's father might have been a suspect, and the acquisition of his phone records might have been a legitimate investigative tactic which is frequently used. No, I don't like these companies. I'd rather see the records come straight out of the phone companies (after issuing the appropriate warrant, of course), but there's no reason to begrudge this as a valid investigative technique given that this is currently the mechanism by which, for example, the FBI could obtain cellular records.
I would expect that the majority of the $30m (which, keep in mind, is hubcap money in government circles) was spent in this way. If this were an NSA-like operation to gather everyone's records, it would cost orders of magnitude more and would not have been through a third party.
Well, in most cases, after the first couple of years, drops like that in EQ were all nodrop, so farming was still a problem, but not for the reasons you cite.
For trade skills, there was still a huge problem, and trade skill were never reasonably thought out in that game.
I can attest to this (though I guess my statement is original research, here ;)
I used to dump a fair amount of information into Wikipedia without sources. It was true information, but it took too long to muster up proper references in many cases. Then about 6 months ago, things started to change. I was challenged on my edits far more often, and I started getting less lazy about my sources. These days, I'm strict about it, and I'm one of the people that challenges the unsourced edits, so there's definitely momentum behind the idea that "casual edits" aren't really up to snuff anymore.
EQ solved this problem partially by expanding the number of high-level areas, but it's true that blockers like the shards or the various epic drops were a major pain to get un-camped. Guilds were generally able to help there, but it was a limited benefit until EQ went instanced (pretty much as a result of the WoW beta).
I'm not saying it was NO PROBLEM AT ALL, I just think that people over-react to the idea that there's an economy, and THAT is not a problem. There were playability problems in EQ relating to farming, true. What I never saw was high-end, guild-only content getting blocked that way, though. Guilds really did help because a guildleader complaining ot customer service had much more voice than some random player. They could generally get people who were blocking high-end content to back off for fear that Sony would figure out what was going on.
I'll say what I said back in the days when this was a "problem" in EverQuest: it's not a problem, it's just a matter of supply and demand. There are people who focus on certain things. For some it's specific quests or gear. For some it's social play. For some it's just exploring the world. It can be nice to be able to "buy in" to the game and not have to do everything just to do the things you want.
During my time in EQ, I bought plat so that I could buy things for friends who were starting the game. Eventually, I started farming my own money (legitimately, from buying and selling goods). I generated hundreds of thousands of plat, all of which I gave away in the end.
Too many people try to figure out what's "wrong". There's nothing wrong, it's just that time has a value, and people are willing to pay for it.
There will always be a need for fairly low-level code. The definition of low-level will slide, but it's sliding with respect to mainstream code at an order of magnitude lower rate. For example, C++ is currently considered "low-level" in most of the industry, and having seen some very modern, high-performance C++ in the last few years, I can honestly say that interpreted languages pose no threat whatsoever in those application domains that actually need performance.
The thing is that most applications need "responsiveness" not "performance". For example, when I click on a button on a GUI, I need it to respond fast enough that it doesn't "feel" slow. If it doesn't my customers will not use the application. But that's just spot-performance, and can easily be wrapped into a low-level library that high-level code calls (as modern toolkits do).
However, I might have an application that takes in a live stream of data and do some serious thinking about it 24/7. That requires a certain level of performance (relative to the flow rate of the data, its complexity and the complexity of the "thinking" that needs to be done over it). This is a likely candidate for a low-level application.
Operating systems, real-time systems for high-data rate processing, many embedded systems, high-performance elements of video games, and many other elements of your average end-user's experience will continue to be written in low-level code. Many casual programmers will continue to write code in high-level languages, and some end-user applications are already written in high-level languages such as Perl, Python, C#, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, etc.
That argument is this: if there's so much of a sea change that an entire generation is willing to ignore the law in order to do someting, then there is a vast and untapped market to be won by someone who is able to puzzle out how.
We said this for years while Sony introduce MiniDisc and various other crippled electronic devices. As MP3 players started to hedge toward the mainstream, Apple saw the opening and dove for it. Now they're more popular than beer.
If the movie and record industries would get their collective heads out of their asses and think about this problem as a demonstration of a vast reservior of market potential, they could, I am sure, create a new golden age of entertainment profits.
How?
I'm not sure. There are literally dozens of ways, and I'm probably not in the right place to figure out which is best.
- Serialized movies that are released, freely downloadable to the net, as soon as the next installment is released in theaters, with "collecteds" being released semi-anually on DVD along with various extras (modeled on the comics industry that long ago realized that kids sharing comics was helping, not hurting)
- Movies that are created collaboratively, and then released under a free license. This plays off of the one major advantage left to them: control over distribution.
- Movies that are first released in a low-res, WiP format to the Net, and then re-released in finished form to theaters ONLY if they do well online (movies guaranteed not to completely suck... what an idea)
- Movies where ALL of the footage and all of the models for CG and all of the drawings, music, etc. are released for download via a peer-to-peer system such as torrent, and the best edit is released in theaters and on DVD
In other words, make movies a service with real value-add. Use the marketing and distribution channels to full advantage while harnessing the file-sharers as viral marketing. MAKE LEMONADE!However, IMHO, this will never happen. Movies will continue to be made the way they are made now. It will take a new industry (one which has been growing steadily since the 1970s) to take advantage of this. I'm seeing the indie community on the east coast start to figure this out. The studios have tried to take over the indie film community, but every time they almost do, it changes and slips out of their hands. Eventually, someone's going to change the rules, and the studios will simple cease to be relevant.
The metrics from Netcraft are hard to read with respect to OS. They don't publish a free OS graph that I've found, and you can't assume that any particular percentage of Apache hosts are running on any particular OS.
All this tells you is that the majority of "sites" (that being a nebulous term) are using Apache on some OS as at least their front-line Web servers. They might still be back-ending to whatever, and that would not show up.
Personally, I don't think you can use Netcraft for any purpose other than to say "IIS and Apache are the most popular Web servers."
I have to disagree. I know that this message might be seen as humorous, but it's not.
The way I prevent my system from being compromised is:
1. I rarely boot Windows (only when needed for games or specific hardware controlers)
2. When I do, I use firefox as a browser, and thunderbird for mail
3. I keep it updated via Microsoft's update service
4. I firewall all of my machines on a NAT segment that allows no incoming sessions
5. I never open attachments that I wasn't expecting
6. I never run binaries from untrusted sites
I haven't had a spyware / virus / whatever problem since about 1996.
Then again, I had a grub-related problem recently and haven't been motivated to fix my Windows XP installation so that it can boot for a month. Eventually I need to do so in order to re-sync my Garmin I-Que.
Windows is about as safe as the boy in the bubble: as long as you understand that it's not safe to expose it to anything so dangerous as fresh cut grass or the sun, it's fairly easy to keep it alive.
Let me summarize the "google is evil" camp's concerns for you so that you can understand where the gp was coming from:
a. All for-profit companies are motivated by profit alone
b. Any pretense to the contrary is a lie (or at best, will be discarded later in favor of profit)
c. Google has stated that their guiding ethic is "don't be evil"
d. Given a. and b., Google is suckering people
e. d. proves that they are evil
My problems with this have always been:
a. Most public companies are forced to do whatever they can for profit by the shareholders.
b. Google's "don't be evil" ethic is written into their S-1.
c. a. only works when shareholders are not warned of the potential loss of value up-front.
d. Given b. and c., Google has and obligation to "do whatever it takes", but as modified by their S-1's statement from a.
e. The logic of e., above, is circular at best.
I would never bet money that things won't change, but the "google is evil" crowd just seems to be made up of the paranoid types who are swayed by shiny things, to me. With companies like G.E. and Halliburton in the world, I don't think Google is the right choice for the focus of our concerns.
- Page loads are faster for very large articles that have hundreds of responses
- The indentation is a bit harder to make out for threading, but I imagine that comes with the benefit that deeply nested conversations won't be so squeezed
- The default font is much smaller on my display than the origianl (I'll have to look at overlaying my own CSS to fix that, since most sites are fine)
- Getting the moderation scores away from the subject, IMHO, will lead to less emphasis on their meaning. I filter to a 3, and beyond that, I'd rather just read without the score being a major factor.
Overall, I like it. Congrats to the winner!I can just see it... "today, a man was sentenced to death after a jury of his p33rz found that he was 'fscked up.'"
"Results 1 - 10 of about 69 for mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw. (0.17 seconds)"
Nuff said.
I used to spar with a friend when I was in high school. He was one of the young marines, or whatever they call them, and so he knew how to fight. I had no clue, but I put my heart into it. It was a lot of fun, and I had no hope of ever hurting him (though I did manage to flip him once, nearly by accident).
Looking back, though, I think that if we had both been untrained it would have been uglier.
Still, I wonder why we're all assuming these people are untrained. The majority may be, but it only takes one or two competent fighters to organize the rest and make it a realitvely reasonable thing to do. Sure, people are going to get hurt... if you want to avoid that, don't fight, but you can cut the odds down of there being anything particularly serious.
I was not just being pedantic. I come from the old-school world where store-and-forward means something like UUCP, so the phrase "store-and-forward ethernet" sounded like an oxymoron to me.
If store-and-forward is indeed used in two very different contexts, it might be helpful for someone to update the Wikipedia article on store and forward with current, and accurate meanings.
Problems also include the use of the term "store and forward Ethernet" (WTF does that mean?!) and the fact that Ethernet channel bonding has been around for about 10 years.
You just pasted a block of text that says there's no information on the porting kit, which we knew.
Some down sides from the same source:
In an effort to remain compatible with software designed to decode IFD-table based TIFF files, the largest possible Windows Media(TM) Photo file is 2**32 bytes in length. This limit will be addressed in a future update.
The technical details of the Windows Media(TM) Photo compression algorithm are documented in the Windows Media(TM) Photo Device Porting Kit (see Preface.)
Licensing of the porting kit is unknown to me, buy my guess would be that this is an expensive add-on.
Because Windows Media(TM) Photo uses an advanced compression scheme, there is no simple way for applications to directly access specific portions the stored photo data other than through the appropriate codec interfaces.
Smells like lock-in.
Objectives for Introducing a New Still Image Format
Today's file formats for continuous tone images present many limitations in maintaining the highest image quality or delivering the most optimal system performance. Windows Media(TM) Photo was designed to remove these limitations. The design objectives include:
Windows Media(TM) Photo is the only format that offers high dynamic range image encoding, lossless or lossy compression, multiple color formats, and performance that enables practical in-device implementation.
Well, technically BDB is a DBMS. It's not an RDBMS, because it lacks relational table management features, but it is most certainly a DBMS (and far more powerful than many of the most popular commercial DBMSes of just a few decades ago).
There's a problem here. You are viewing one end of the political spectrum saying, "our blogs aren't being listed on Google News, that's censorship!"
Are there blogs on the other end of the political spectrum that aren't being listed? Does Google have a way to submit new sources? Are the sources not being listed because they rank low via the search algorithm that Google uses?
Don't confuse a rant for factual information about Google News.
I am not offended. Just too busy to carry on one-sided conversations.
I don't think my responses are actually being read, here, so there's little point in continuing. Have a nice day.
Did you re-read your post? Let me review:
I'm not suggesting lying to someone, I'm suggesting that you're just ranting in a way that is hurtful to the people involved (that's not me, BTW), and accomplishes nothing. Why must people tear down the work of others? "I didn't like it" is one thing. "I found the characters kind of flat" is valid opinion. But, "the story sucks" is mindless arm-waving at the expense of the hard work of others. It accomplishes nothing. With people like you bashing anything that comes out that is even vaguely off-center from mainstream, one wonders why anyone but Hollywood schlock artists would bother.
Except that it's not a cliched argument. It's just a fact. It's trivial to cut down anything that you want. Holes can be picked in anything. I don't listen to reviewers who spend their time finding flaws to complain about. Some of my favorite films, in fact, have poor sound or bad music or a weak plot or some other flaw or combination of flaws. The question is: who IS the target audience. That's harder to figure out than it is to pick nits.