> I like this. Good advertising should be surreptitious, sneaking up in the reader's conscience and adjusting their behaviour without requiring much thought. > "No one ever had to pay thousands of dollars in license penalties for using Linux" > "No one had to re-activate their software when using Linux"
Have you seen the great new Apple Switch ad? It features a Vista firewall intercepting every sentence Mac & PC say to each other and requiring confirmation for each one.
> But of course this is little help to those in my profession who insist upon wrapping up (obfuscating) everything they do in layers of 'abstraction'.
Several years ago I had my 'real world' introduction to object oriented programming when I worked on a financial management application developed and used by a large Wall St. brokerage house.
The C++ code had classes 15-20 layers deep, each layer adding just one tiny bit of functionality to the layer it inherited from. It was a nightmare, taking 15-20 minutes to figure out what any function/method call would do by tracing the classes up and down the hierarchy.
Code throughout the project called on classes at any level in the hierarchy's depending on the precise behavior it wanted at the given point. But there were so many classes with so little to differentiate what they did that it was impossible to remember the difference between FixedIncomeStreamTreeNodeHelper and FixedIncomeStreamTreeLinkedNodeHelper for example.
> Now, I might be remembering Castle Wolfenstein's controls wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember using two hands on the keyboard. So perhaps Shultz wouldn't have been killing you so much if you hadn't wasted a hand on the drive?:)
I'm tempted to say I played Castle Wolfenstein with one hand for other reasons, but I can't come up with any explanation that doesn't make me sound really creepy and perverted.
> How do you process YAML or JSON in Javascript (eg. in a browser)? Most browsers have built-in support for processing XML
Wow, that must be great having support for XML built into Javascript. Oh, by the way, JSON is expressed in valid Javascript syntax. That means JSON is already Javascript. No libraries or support necessary.
Sorry for the snarkiness. 'Been struggling with some XML code. That always puts me in a bad mood.
That reminds me of the good old days playing Castle Wolfenstein (1, not 3D) on my Apple II. I played with one finger hooked under the floppy drive door. If Shultz popped up and shot me I could flip the drive open faster than it would write my death to the drive. Nowadays of course most games let you save your state and don't remove your saves if you get killed.
I applaud the idea of giving people the freedom to do what they please with the media they have purchased. This idea has a great motivation. I wish it could work, however, as much as I like the idea, someone will do the following: Purchase two copies under different names. Compare the two bit-for bit. Anywhere the bits are different, set the bit to a random value. Watermark destroyed. Video intact.
Dear Mom,
If you are reading this message it means that either
(a) I am dead. Sorry, I love you, and tell Dad I'm sorry we always fight. I never told you... I am a gay pedophile. I couldn't find a way to tell you, but now that I am dead I suppose I'd rather you know the truth. Also, Dad has been cheating on you with Mrs. McCartney for years. Don't take that shit from him any more. Tell him to stop it or leave him! You deserve better!
or
(b) I have a bug in my dead-man's-switch script. If this is the case, please ignore this message.
Actually, the plan isn't to create antimatter rats, its to create antimatter hamsters and roll them into enemy buildings in magnetic hamster balls. When the enemy sees the hamster roll in they will experience an irresistible urge to squeal 'cute!' and open the ball. When the ball is opened, the magnetic isolation is broken and uArmageddon (tm) ensues.
> This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die. >> Just stuff them inside old milk cartons. It's my silent form of public disobedience.
Why on Earth would you buy a bulb that is friendlier to the environment, just to "protest" by throwing Mercury in your trash? Here's an idea, why don't you step it up a notch and buy an electric car, then light it on fire and drive it into a drinking water aquifer?
So now as a countermeasure someone will produce a tool to scramble the lowest order/frequency information in the file. For example, randomize the lowest order bit in an image, randomly exchanging black[#020202] and black [#020302]. For videos and music randomize the lowest frequency that is below the threshold of viewing. It will take horsepower to reencode the files, but it only has to be done once. You only need to change one bit for a fingerprint to fail.
First teach them programming concepts using Karel the robot for about half a semester. That will give them an easy intro to the ideas without dealing with any real-world irritations. Then move them over to any decent language like Python, Pascal, a modern BASIC etc. Stay away from C and C++ for beginners unless you want to explain what a segmentation fault is.
> We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one WE HAD VERIZON AND LOVED IT
> However, I was pissed about the lack of real OBEX profiles BUT WE WANTED THE FEATURE "OBEX"
> took the $350 hit on the early termination and went to T-Mobile SO WE SWITCHED TO T-MOBILE IT COST US $350
> The coverage with T-Mobile is definitely not as good as Verizon's THE COVERAGE IS WORSE
> We're paying more overall WE ARE PAYING MORE
> it's lacking full OBEX support for a damn good reason WE STILL DON'T HAVE THE FEATURE "OBEX"
When asked what MySpace would do if a sex offender simply signed up with a fake name, the MySpace spokesman paused, blinked a few times, and replied 'these go to eleven.'
> Are there any serious contenders for a new, secure, non-spammable store-and-forward messaging system being worked on?
Yes, someone has an idea for a mail system where the sender stores the message on HIS mail server, and basically sends a link to the mail to the recipient. The recipient's mail client fetches the mail when the user wants to read it. The sender is thus responsible for the resources for storing email. Sending millions of emails would overload the spammers mail server. spam-bot home computers would put a large enough burden on the ISP that the ISP would notice and be forced to lock out the PC until it was cleaned up.
The downside is this requires a method of sending and receicing email that is totally incompatible with the current SMTP system. Of course it could be added gracefully to mail clients and servers running alongside existing SMTP, but it would be difficult to gain critical mass.
But... as I write this I am thinking that a spammer could write a mail server that sends links but doesn't actually store any mail. When a client request comes in to fetch an email it could generate a copy of today's spam. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...
As President, Bill's unique way of attacking competitors would be... interesting...
"Today President Gates announced that the United States will accept Spanish as an official second language, however the officially accepted Spanish will be an extended version of the language that offers benefits lacking in the original. Such benefits include grammar that has been simplified by removing gender modified versions of words, and optional forms of words that are pronounced in a way that is more compatible with English."
Uno=One-O. Dos=Twos. Tres=Threes. etc.
"President Gates also announced that now that America is compatible with Spanish speakers we will be extending our borders to include all of Mexico and some of Central America." "When asked about any plans for Canada, President Gates replied, 'Oh... isn't Canada already part of the U.S.?"
> Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones > is it time for a new name
No it's not. How about we call the damn thing a 'Cell Phone' and make it work for voice calls? How about decent sound quality without sounding like I'm talking in a wind tunnel? How about not dropping calls in the middle of a damn conversation? How about the little turd stops flashing 'call missed' without ever ringing in the first place?!
Oh yeah, I forgot... BECAUSE YOU WANT A 10 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA IN YOUR DAMN PHONE! AND YOU, YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO YOUR MP3s ON YOUR DAMN PHONE! AND YOU OVER THERE, YOU WANT TO PAY A COUPLE OF DOLLARS SO YOU CAN HEAR A MIDI BEEP-F'ING-BEEP THE THEME SONG FROM HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL WHEN IT RINGS! AND YOU WANT AN F'ING RING OF GEOSYNCHRONOUS SATELLITES IN ORBIT MONITORING YOUR F'ING LOCATION 24 HOURS A DAY TO WITHIN 50 FEET SO YOU CAN GET BURGER KING ADS FLASHING ALL OVER YOUR 2" SCREEN EVERY TIME YOU WALK PAST A FAST FOOD JOINT LIKE YOU COULDN'T SMELL THE CHARRED FLESH BEFORE YOUR PHONE ALERTED YOU TO IT'S PRESENCE! AND YOU WANT TO DROOL OVER A 0.5 INCH KATE AND SAWYER GETTING JIGGY ON LAST NIGHT'S LOST WHILE YOU STAND IN LINE AT MOTOR VEHICLES.
Hummph Grrrr Grunt... someone wipe the spittle off my chin while I convulse on the floor in a fit of consumer rage and SIGNAL LOST...
Damn! I am a younger man (41) and I hate to think in the next three years I'm going to become an arthritic old fart planning my life around my decaying body.
I climb mountains, jog, work out, roller blade, and jump in leaf piles with my kids. Maybe you should put down the controller and take a walk around the block. You'll feel like you're 43 again.
Is this problem really so hard that nobody can write the software without a major cluster-f***k?
From my experiences with large IT consulting firms, I'd be willing to bet the politics between the health-care company & departments, state & federal regulators, IT company & departments etc is what screwed these projects up.
If someone could write a health care management system that is complete, functional, meets all regulations, and is easy to write legacy plug-ins to they would be able to grab a big chunk of the BILLIONS being otherwise wasted on these efforts, and help the healthcare industry to boot. It would take someone with some resources to do it, but it would be worth the effort. The key, I think, is the project has to be insulated from political interference, which probably means it will be written WITHOUT a specific customer in place to screw it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Your Anti-label is great until it grows big enough and you cash out, join the RIAA, and own a mansion and a yacht.
> I like this. Good advertising should be surreptitious, sneaking up in the reader's conscience and adjusting their behaviour without requiring much thought.
> "No one ever had to pay thousands of dollars in license penalties for using Linux"
> "No one had to re-activate their software when using Linux"
Have you seen the great new Apple Switch ad? It features a Vista firewall intercepting every sentence Mac & PC say to each other and requiring confirmation for each one.
> "Ah well you see..." [totally obvious and unnecessary explanation of film follows]
You must be a blast at parties.
"Yes, you see the cubes floating in your drink are actually a frozen form of water."
> But of course this is little help to those in my profession who insist upon wrapping up (obfuscating) everything they do in layers of 'abstraction'.
Several years ago I had my 'real world' introduction to object oriented programming when I worked on a financial management application developed and used by a large Wall St. brokerage house.
The C++ code had classes 15-20 layers deep, each layer adding just one tiny bit of functionality to the layer it inherited from. It was a nightmare, taking 15-20 minutes to figure out what any function/method call would do by tracing the classes up and down the hierarchy.
Code throughout the project called on classes at any level in the hierarchy's depending on the precise behavior it wanted at the given point. But there were so many classes with so little to differentiate what they did that it was impossible to remember the difference between FixedIncomeStreamTreeNodeHelper and FixedIncomeStreamTreeLinkedNodeHelper for example.
> Now, I might be remembering Castle Wolfenstein's controls wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember using two hands on the keyboard. So perhaps Shultz wouldn't have been killing you so much if you hadn't wasted a hand on the drive? :)
I'm tempted to say I played Castle Wolfenstein with one hand for other reasons, but I can't come up with any explanation that doesn't make me sound really creepy and perverted.
> How do you process YAML or JSON in Javascript (eg. in a browser)? Most browsers have built-in support for processing XML
Wow, that must be great having support for XML built into Javascript.
Oh, by the way, JSON is expressed in valid Javascript syntax. That means JSON is already Javascript. No libraries or support necessary.
Sorry for the snarkiness. 'Been struggling with some XML code. That always puts me in a bad mood.
That reminds me of the good old days playing Castle Wolfenstein (1, not 3D) on my Apple II.
I played with one finger hooked under the floppy drive door. If Shultz popped up and shot me I could flip the drive open faster than it would write my death to the drive. Nowadays of course most games let you save your state and don't remove your saves if you get killed.
> Would you consider a candidate's stand on privacy important enough to sway your vote?
Consider me swayed. She's got my vote.
And I was a republican before the AntiPresident got into office.
I applaud the idea of giving people the freedom to do what they please with the media they have purchased. This idea has a great motivation. I wish it could work, however, as much as I like the idea, someone will do the following:
Purchase two copies under different names.
Compare the two bit-for bit. Anywhere the bits are different, set the bit to a random value.
Watermark destroyed. Video intact.
> "Giant Rabbits To Feed North Korea"
>> *wipes dust from title*
>> "Giant Rabbits To Feed On North Korea"
HAHAHA mod parent up!
Dear Mom,
If you are reading this message it means that either
(a) I am dead. Sorry, I love you, and tell Dad I'm sorry we always fight. I never told you... I am a gay pedophile. I couldn't find a way to tell you, but now that I am dead I suppose I'd rather you know the truth. Also, Dad has been cheating on you with Mrs. McCartney for years. Don't take that shit from him any more. Tell him to stop it or leave him! You deserve better!
or
(b) I have a bug in my dead-man's-switch script. If this is the case, please ignore this message.
Actually, the plan isn't to create antimatter rats, its to create antimatter hamsters and roll them into enemy buildings in magnetic hamster balls. When the enemy sees the hamster roll in they will experience an irresistible urge to squeal 'cute!' and open the ball. When the ball is opened, the magnetic isolation is broken and uArmageddon (tm) ensues.
> This makes it illegal to throw them in the garbage when they do die.
>> Just stuff them inside old milk cartons. It's my silent form of public disobedience.
Why on Earth would you buy a bulb that is friendlier to the environment, just to "protest" by throwing Mercury in your trash?
Here's an idea, why don't you step it up a notch and buy an electric car, then light it on fire and drive it into a drinking water aquifer?
So now as a countermeasure someone will produce a tool to scramble the lowest order/frequency information in the file. For example, randomize the lowest order bit in an image, randomly exchanging black[#020202] and black [#020302]. For videos and music randomize the lowest frequency that is below the threshold of viewing. It will take horsepower to reencode the files, but it only has to be done once. You only need to change one bit for a fingerprint to fail.
And the arms race goes on...
First teach them programming concepts using Karel the robot for about half a semester. That will give them an easy intro to the ideas without dealing with any real-world irritations. Then move them over to any decent language like Python, Pascal, a modern BASIC etc. Stay away from C and C++ for beginners unless you want to explain what a segmentation fault is.
Am I paraphrasing you correctly here?
> We both had E815's through Verizon and loved the phones for the build quality, the hackability and the design just being a -solid- one
WE HAD VERIZON AND LOVED IT
> However, I was pissed about the lack of real OBEX profiles
BUT WE WANTED THE FEATURE "OBEX"
> took the $350 hit on the early termination and went to T-Mobile
SO WE SWITCHED TO T-MOBILE
IT COST US $350
> The coverage with T-Mobile is definitely not as good as Verizon's
THE COVERAGE IS WORSE
> We're paying more overall
WE ARE PAYING MORE
> it's lacking full OBEX support for a damn good reason
WE STILL DON'T HAVE THE FEATURE "OBEX"
Ummmm.... congratulations on your wise move?
> However unfortunately there are other things that are MORE profitable
Yeah, but you can only play wrestling and 'Sting! Giant Mosquitos From Hell' for so long before you lose your identity as a "Sci-Fi" channel.
When asked what MySpace would do if a sex offender simply signed up with a fake name, the MySpace spokesman paused, blinked a few times, and replied 'these go to eleven.'
> Are there any serious contenders for a new, secure, non-spammable store-and-forward messaging system being worked on?
Yes, someone has an idea for a mail system where the sender stores the message on HIS mail server, and basically sends a link to the mail to the recipient. The recipient's mail client fetches the mail when the user wants to read it.
The sender is thus responsible for the resources for storing email. Sending millions of emails would overload the spammers mail server. spam-bot home computers would put a large enough burden on the ISP that the ISP would notice and be forced to lock out the PC until it was cleaned up.
The downside is this requires a method of sending and receicing email that is totally incompatible with the current SMTP system. Of course it could be added gracefully to mail clients and servers running alongside existing SMTP, but it would be difficult to gain critical mass.
But... as I write this I am thinking that a spammer could write a mail server that sends links but doesn't actually store any mail. When a client request comes in to fetch an email it could generate a copy of today's spam. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...
As President, Bill's unique way of attacking competitors would be... interesting...
"Today President Gates announced that the United States will accept Spanish as an official second language, however the officially accepted Spanish will be an extended version of the language that offers benefits lacking in the original. Such benefits include grammar that has been simplified by removing gender modified versions of words, and optional forms of words that are pronounced in a way that is more compatible with English."
Uno=One-O.
Dos=Twos.
Tres=Threes.
etc.
"President Gates also announced that now that America is compatible with Spanish speakers we will be extending our borders to include all of Mexico and some of Central America."
"When asked about any plans for Canada, President Gates replied, 'Oh... isn't Canada already part of the U.S.?"
> And the enemy doesn't learn, in contrast to a certain real-life conflict
Of course not. You have to enlist to play level 2.
Level 2 is MUCH harder, and if you lose, you actually die.
> Today, it almost seems that voice calls are the least-used function of most phones
> is it time for a new name
No it's not. How about we call the damn thing a 'Cell Phone' and make it work for voice calls? How about decent sound quality without sounding like I'm talking in a wind tunnel? How about not dropping calls in the middle of a damn conversation? How about the little turd stops flashing 'call missed' without ever ringing in the first place?!
Oh yeah, I forgot... BECAUSE YOU WANT A 10 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA IN YOUR DAMN PHONE! AND YOU, YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO YOUR MP3s ON YOUR DAMN PHONE! AND YOU OVER THERE, YOU WANT TO PAY A COUPLE OF DOLLARS SO YOU CAN HEAR A MIDI BEEP-F'ING-BEEP THE THEME SONG FROM HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL WHEN IT RINGS! AND YOU WANT AN F'ING RING OF GEOSYNCHRONOUS SATELLITES IN ORBIT MONITORING YOUR F'ING LOCATION 24 HOURS A DAY TO WITHIN 50 FEET SO YOU CAN GET BURGER KING ADS FLASHING ALL OVER YOUR 2" SCREEN EVERY TIME YOU WALK PAST A FAST FOOD JOINT LIKE YOU COULDN'T SMELL THE CHARRED FLESH BEFORE YOUR PHONE ALERTED YOU TO IT'S PRESENCE! AND YOU WANT TO DROOL OVER A 0.5 INCH KATE AND SAWYER GETTING JIGGY ON LAST NIGHT'S LOST WHILE YOU STAND IN LINE AT MOTOR VEHICLES.
Hummph Grrrr Grunt... someone wipe the spittle off my chin while I convulse on the floor in a fit of consumer rage and SIGNAL LOST...
> I am an older man (44)
Damn! I am a younger man (41) and I hate to think in the next three years I'm going to become an arthritic old fart planning my life around my decaying body.
I climb mountains, jog, work out, roller blade, and jump in leaf piles with my kids.
Maybe you should put down the controller and take a walk around the block. You'll feel like you're 43 again.
> Final releasa had no reported bugs for at least 6 months.
Jar-Jar, is that you?
Is this problem really so hard that nobody can write the software without a major cluster-f***k?
From my experiences with large IT consulting firms, I'd be willing to bet the politics between the health-care company & departments, state & federal regulators, IT company & departments etc is what screwed these projects up.
If someone could write a health care management system that is complete, functional, meets all regulations, and is easy to write legacy plug-ins to they would be able to grab a big chunk of the BILLIONS being otherwise wasted on these efforts, and help the healthcare industry to boot.
It would take someone with some resources to do it, but it would be worth the effort.
The key, I think, is the project has to be insulated from political interference, which probably means it will be written WITHOUT a specific customer in place to screw it up.