He is hiding something. The police had a warrant to search his computer, which means they convinced someone in authority that they had reason to believe he was hiding something. When they asked him to cooperate, he chose to go to jail instead.
Whatever is behind that encryption must be pretty bad if he figures that's better than letting a policeman see it.
Sorry, but suspected criminals do not have the right not to be investigated. Democracy depends on the rule of law; if you let people go unprosecuted because you decide to elevate their right to privacy over everyone else's right not to be a victim of crime, you are undermining the very society that guarantees all your rights in the first place.
Someone is under the illusion that Windows has an inadequate scripting system for the sysadmin
So far as I can tell, this includes most Windows sysadmins, who continue to click around inefficiently or hack together great fragile batch file monstrosities.
It doesn't matter how good PowerShell is if nobody knows how to use it. And it turns out that PowerShell is too difficult for most Windows sysadmins to use. After all, one of the main reasons why Windows took off in the server market is because it could be administered by cheaper admins than Unix. Guess what? Turns out you get what you pay for...
I think you'll find a graph can be used to display large amounts of information in a small(variable) area, and it makes the data easier to interpret and anomalies easier to spot.
That's true, but has absolutely nothing to do with what he said. GUIs do not usually display graphs. They usually display a little message box saying "An error occurred. Please try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator."
Portability precludes the -print0 option to find and -0 option to xargs.
With the exception of special cases like configure, it's relatively rare for a single script to be run on multiple different types of Unix. Oh, sure, it happens, but most scripts are used for a single task, and most people who reuse scripts only work with one platform, and most people who work with multiple platforms use them for different things.
I would think that in most cases where someone is writing a script on a computer whose find has -print0, that script can safely use -print0.
That's just because you haven't written a decent GUI for those options yet, it doesn't mean it couldn't be done if one wanted to.
Sure, and such things exist.
However, they are a hell of a lot more complicated than drag-and-drop. And that's the point.
GUIs are unquestionably faster for simple things. Copy this file here. Select this word that's miles away from the input cursor. That kind of thing. However, the benefit of using a GUI decreases rapidly as the complexity of the operation increases. And for admin/configuration-type tasks, the traditional approaches have advantages of their own; e.g. most GUIs provide very poor search facilities. I would far rather grep through a directory of well-commented text files than hunt by hand through tab after tab of nested dialog hell.
All iOS apps that ask for location info generate a permissions dialog.
Oh, that's OK then. That's totally secure. It's not like 99% of all computer users blindly click "yes" on every dialog that appears without so much as glancing at the message or anything.
Wait, Apple actually steal your money when someone asks for a refund?
It's not stealing if you explicitly agreed to let them do it. Which you did, if you're developing for iOS.
And people are willing to develop for them?
Apparently. I assume they have weighed up the potential profits from a captive audience of iPhone/iPad owners against the potential downsides of Apple's draconian policies and have calculated that they'll still make a nice profit even if Apple are dicks.
I mean, iPhone/iPad owners are the perfect market. By the very fact of that ownership, they prove that they have plenty of disposable income, are eager to part with it in exchange for shiny things, and are not given to shopping around trying to save money. If you can't profit off people like that, you may as well give up.
Blocking "amateur" is interesting. The first page of Google results I get for the word doesn't include anything remotely NSFW -- but the related searches list is almost entirely related to amateur porn. I wonder if that's what's triggering the block.
I certainly can't believe that Google would go with a static blacklist this complicated.
The only thing you can reasonably expect is that you get the same priority as everyone else paying the same price.
Exactly. Which is NOT what would happen in the scenario posed in TFA. If I want to watch iPlayer, and some other customer paying the same price wants to watch YouTube, then we should get the same service; my ISP should not deliberately downgrade my service just because the BBC hasn't bribed them not to.
If their legal theory had held up, next thing we know we'd have had homeowners facing 10+ years in prison for "wiretapping" burglars' conversations on CCTV.
(Ooh, and the burglar was whistling "Happy Birthday", so you're liable for $160,000 in damages to the RIAA as well...)
It's hardly "stealing" if something is put up on a public-facing website, such that anyone visiting the website sees a link straight to the file, which does not even have any access restrictions or password protection.
What kind of idiot stores their site backup in the public HTML directory? I guess we just found out.
So they're making room for someone else to dominate the market of ubiquitous internet access.
Such as who, exactly?
Not one of their existing competitors, who have been even more eager to do exactly the same thing.
So who exactly is going to manage to set up a new competing mobile broadband network, and where are they going to get the massive sums of money required to pay for the kind of infrastructure that will be necessary?
Remember, we're not just talking about having wifi hotspots in the center of a single metropolis. We're talking about being able to access the internet pretty much anywhere where people live.
Apple seems to have [...] taken time to redesign the way we use computers on a daily basis. I'm personally waiting for the gPad -- I refuse to buy an Apple product
Wow, this is seriously impressive. The Reality Distortion Field is now so powerful that even Apple haters are spewing breathless hype!
Ten years from now, when Steam no longer works or supports your game, you'll find out that you were just renting it.
Just recently, when I found that a game I bought more than ten years ago no longer worked because the CD was broken, I was playing it anyway within mere minutes -- because it was available on Steam.
Will it still be playable in another 10 years? I don't know, but I have no reason to assume it won't be -- and so what if it isn't? I want to play it now, and Steam gave me that opportunity where physical media didn't.
All this legislation would do is drive piracy more underground and more distributed and more encrypted.
That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.
Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.
If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.
This is called "prejudice". In most circles it's considered a negative thing.
DRM, product activation, and Internet-access requirement render Steam a non-starter.
Why? You clearly have access to the Internet. Product activation is completely invisible and automatic. As for DRM, well, I realise some people hate it on religious grounds, but it's really not that bad.
Sure, one day in the hypothetical future Valve's servers could disappear, leaving you unable to play your games any more. This is no different from non-DRM-encumbered games you own on physical media, which could stop working at any time due to loss of or damage to the CDs.
Denying yourself jam today and tomorrow because of the hypothetical possibility that you might only be able to get it today is just silly.
(Personally, I've actually bought copies on Steam of older games I also own on physical media. It's only a few bucks, and the convenience of being able to install the game at the click of a button -- instead of having to dig around for the disk and then hope it still works -- is well worth the money. Strange, really: this suppsoedly evil DRM platform means I can play games I own more easily than the DRM-free versions!)
There's many good games I would have liked to have purchased (starting with Half Life 2). Guess I'll never know what it would have been like to play that game.
Slashdot Mirror
Which position did you have in mind?
He is hiding something. The police had a warrant to search his computer, which means they convinced someone in authority that they had reason to believe he was hiding something. When they asked him to cooperate, he chose to go to jail instead.
Whatever is behind that encryption must be pretty bad if he figures that's better than letting a policeman see it.
Sorry, but suspected criminals do not have the right not to be investigated. Democracy depends on the rule of law; if you let people go unprosecuted because you decide to elevate their right to privacy over everyone else's right not to be a victim of crime, you are undermining the very society that guarantees all your rights in the first place.
So far as I can tell, this includes most Windows sysadmins, who continue to click around inefficiently or hack together great fragile batch file monstrosities.
It doesn't matter how good PowerShell is if nobody knows how to use it. And it turns out that PowerShell is too difficult for most Windows sysadmins to use. After all, one of the main reasons why Windows took off in the server market is because it could be administered by cheaper admins than Unix. Guess what? Turns out you get what you pay for ...
That's true, but has absolutely nothing to do with what he said. GUIs do not usually display graphs. They usually display a little message box saying "An error occurred. Please try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator."
With the exception of special cases like configure, it's relatively rare for a single script to be run on multiple different types of Unix. Oh, sure, it happens, but most scripts are used for a single task, and most people who reuse scripts only work with one platform, and most people who work with multiple platforms use them for different things.
I would think that in most cases where someone is writing a script on a computer whose find has -print0, that script can safely use -print0.
Sure, and such things exist.
However, they are a hell of a lot more complicated than drag-and-drop. And that's the point.
GUIs are unquestionably faster for simple things. Copy this file here. Select this word that's miles away from the input cursor. That kind of thing. However, the benefit of using a GUI decreases rapidly as the complexity of the operation increases. And for admin/configuration-type tasks, the traditional approaches have advantages of their own; e.g. most GUIs provide very poor search facilities. I would far rather grep through a directory of well-commented text files than hunt by hand through tab after tab of nested dialog hell.
Oh, that's OK then. That's totally secure. It's not like 99% of all computer users blindly click "yes" on every dialog that appears without so much as glancing at the message or anything.
It's not stealing if you explicitly agreed to let them do it. Which you did, if you're developing for iOS.
Apparently. I assume they have weighed up the potential profits from a captive audience of iPhone/iPad owners against the potential downsides of Apple's draconian policies and have calculated that they'll still make a nice profit even if Apple are dicks.
I mean, iPhone/iPad owners are the perfect market. By the very fact of that ownership, they prove that they have plenty of disposable income, are eager to part with it in exchange for shiny things, and are not given to shopping around trying to save money. If you can't profit off people like that, you may as well give up.
Just wait till Luke removes Darth Vader's mask in this version!
Make that one two-film epic saga, one rehash of the first film with extra teddy bears, and nothing else ever again.
Blocking "amateur" is interesting. The first page of Google results I get for the word doesn't include anything remotely NSFW -- but the related searches list is almost entirely related to amateur porn. I wonder if that's what's triggering the block.
I certainly can't believe that Google would go with a static blacklist this complicated.
Exactly. Which is NOT what would happen in the scenario posed in TFA. If I want to watch iPlayer, and some other customer paying the same price wants to watch YouTube, then we should get the same service; my ISP should not deliberately downgrade my service just because the BBC hasn't bribed them not to.
If their legal theory had held up, next thing we know we'd have had homeowners facing 10+ years in prison for "wiretapping" burglars' conversations on CCTV.
(Ooh, and the burglar was whistling "Happy Birthday", so you're liable for $160,000 in damages to the RIAA as well ...)
It's hardly "stealing" if something is put up on a public-facing website, such that anyone visiting the website sees a link straight to the file, which does not even have any access restrictions or password protection.
What kind of idiot stores their site backup in the public HTML directory? I guess we just found out.
Such as who, exactly?
Not one of their existing competitors, who have been even more eager to do exactly the same thing.
So who exactly is going to manage to set up a new competing mobile broadband network, and where are they going to get the massive sums of money required to pay for the kind of infrastructure that will be necessary?
Remember, we're not just talking about having wifi hotspots in the center of a single metropolis. We're talking about being able to access the internet pretty much anywhere where people live.
Really? I haven't seen many other "non-apologies" that begin with the words "First of all we would like to apologize".
Maybe they edited the site since you posted.
Because he's a Slashdotter. Taking illogically extreme positions as kneejerk responses to relatively minor tech-related annoyances is what we do.
And you'd be in trouble if you wanted to watch four movies in one month ...
PC and console games can do this because all modern gaming PCs and consoles have the necessary hardware built in to connect to the internet.
This cannot happen for other media, such as DVDs and Blu-Rays, because the hardware that plays those does not support it.
I really don't think anyone trying to introduce another new physical media format would meet with much success ...
Wow, this is seriously impressive. The Reality Distortion Field is now so powerful that even Apple haters are spewing breathless hype!
When they got over 11 inches they were big. The point at which they got bug was when Microsoft made all the vendors an offer they couldn't refuse.
It's official, then: WikiLeaks is the new child porn.
You must be so proud, Mr Assange!
Just recently, when I found that a game I bought more than ten years ago no longer worked because the CD was broken, I was playing it anyway within mere minutes -- because it was available on Steam.
Will it still be playable in another 10 years? I don't know, but I have no reason to assume it won't be -- and so what if it isn't? I want to play it now, and Steam gave me that opportunity where physical media didn't.
Guns are for wimps. Real men hunt with spears and bows.
That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.
Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.
If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.
That's what the media industry is hoping, anyway.
This is called "prejudice". In most circles it's considered a negative thing.
Why? You clearly have access to the Internet. Product activation is completely invisible and automatic. As for DRM, well, I realise some people hate it on religious grounds, but it's really not that bad.
Sure, one day in the hypothetical future Valve's servers could disappear, leaving you unable to play your games any more. This is no different from non-DRM-encumbered games you own on physical media, which could stop working at any time due to loss of or damage to the CDs.
Denying yourself jam today and tomorrow because of the hypothetical possibility that you might only be able to get it today is just silly.
(Personally, I've actually bought copies on Steam of older games I also own on physical media. It's only a few bucks, and the convenience of being able to install the game at the click of a button -- instead of having to dig around for the disk and then hope it still works -- is well worth the money. Strange, really: this suppsoedly evil DRM platform means I can play games I own more easily than the DRM-free versions!)
It was probably sour anyway.