You mean like youtube ads that shows me the same ad for every 2 minute video I watch? Thank you ad blocks for being able to block all those annoying youtube ads.
Heh, no joke. My initial response to the first sentence of your post was, "Youtube has ads??". I really forgot that it did. My attitude towards advertising and most marketing is: fuck 'em. I actually used JunkBuster back in the days of Netscape and dial-up. It was an ad-filtering proxy -- browsers at that time had plug-ins but they did not have the capability for sophisticated extensions, so this was one of the only practical ways to block ads. The old URL (I still remember it!) was internet.junkbuster.com, but it hasn't been maintained in a long time. Now it just gives a link to EPIC and two privacy-related sites. According to Wikipedia, the proxy program itself hasn't been maintained since 1998.
Junkbusters was a group that advocated against advertising in all forms, especially direct marketing (professional nuisances). They provided that filtering proxy before much else was available, they gave advice on reducing physical junk mail, and (as this was prior to the Do Not Call list) gave tips to reduce or defeat telemarketing calls, if I recall correctly.
Same AC here. I totally agree with you, copy protection schemes are utterly useless against people who are intent on breaking them. For ordinary users, things like HDCP and the CCI flag make their life difficult. For example, I can't use my HD Homerun Prime and cablecard for watching TV on Linux or my Mac. Only Windows Media Center is licensed for the DRM that's used to restrict "copy once" channels. My cable company loves to set every channel they can to "copy once" so I can't watch much of anything on my Mac or Linux systems. Basically, they inconvenience the hell out of users like me who just want to watch and record TV for their own viewing later, but they do absolutely nothing to stop actual piracy.
As for torrents, I tend to watch a lot of sports. There's no good reason I shouldn't be able to record a Formula 1 race that's on TV at like 5 AM local time on my Linux box and watch it on my Mac when I wake up. The DRM stops me from doing that, but doesn't serve it's purpose. And unfortunately, the DRM is also a pain in the ass for anyone with a set-top box that wants to connect it via HDMI to a normal computer monitor.
Sports may be one exception, but it sounds like you'd have a better and more convenient experience if you pirated whatever you want to watch (not that I would advocate such a thing, of course). This is the real-world effect of copy protection schemes. So not only do they fail to work, they encourage the very thing they were intended to prevent. It's amazing how such madness can become enshrined and institutionalized.
Pushing targeted ads just creates an echo chamber effect - you see the same type of ad over and over. One of the purposes of advertising is to expand your market to non-users. Targeted ads completely fail this.
I assume the marketers conduct surveys, hire focus groups, and use statistics to determine things like "80% of people who enjoyed W were also interested in X, Y, and Z". This could involve a great variety of things, certainly too many to constitute "the same type... over and over". While the marketers have many flaws, unfortunately stupidity isn't one of them.
But just today all news sites over Germany reported that the German BND (the direct successor of the Nazi "Organization Gehlen") has been spying on allies, too, including France and German(!) diplomats.
I can't see the point of your Nazi reference. The Federal Republic of Germany can also be considered the direct successor of Nazi Germany. It's probably more accurate to describe the Gehlen as a CIA program that recruited former members of the Nazi military in much the same way that the US military and later the space program used scientists who were active in the German war effort.
Yes, though we used (and sheltered) many more Nazis than is generally known, even to those familiar with Project Paperclip.
This is not really a surprise. One of the ways you get around domestic anti-surveillance laws is to ask some friendly allies to do it for you. Basically you spy on their citizens and they spy on yours. Each government can then say it is not infringing its own citizen's rights.
... and yet, if you (hypothetically) were to hire a hit man to perform a murder, or a thief to steal something for you, the resulting investigation would indict you for conspiracy to commit murder or conspiracy to commit larceny and you would be punished just as much as your chosen proxy.
Yet another example of one set of laws for us, and another set for "them". The concept of rule of law takes another swift kick to the balls, again.
You kind of nailed the issue, but how do you figure that the customer can foil the sociopath?
The way I see it, it's up to us, on an interpersonal level, to make sure our friends and family hear about these things especially when they're making a significant purchase.
Disliking regulations is good and all, but the sociopaths don't need no stinking EULA, they'll just collect it secretly if they want too. Does the solution have to be a 1985 Television and over-the-air reception?
The problem with regulations is that they're imposed by the same kind of sociopaths who created these problems in the first place. They're also a shitty substitute for an informed public. I'll take a 1985 television over a 1984 telescreen any day, but with some basic understanding of networking a potentially hostile device can be contained. That's what I view as the real solution, in terms of security.
And that's the problem - sociopaths won't stop until it hurts them personally. It's why the wet dream of libertarians and some republicans doesn't work. Those ideals only exist in a universe where all are honest.
Actually the dream of a libertarian society doesn't depend on everyone being honest. A libertarian plan still includes a government and it still includes making the use of force and fraud illegal. If you thought libertarian vision was anarcho-capitalism, you've been misled by someone with a vested interest. This is a really, extremely common misunderstanding. I believe it's promoted by members of the two major parties who want to discredit libertarian thought because of the tremendous power it could cost them. It certainly wouldn't be the first time negative PR was used this way.
The best way to have that kind of society is for everyone to be tough-minded and well-informed. Smart TVs that spy on you would never sell if the average person understood what was wrong with them. It's this intellectually lazy (and arguably, moronic) tendency to buy and use devices without the slightest clue concerning how they work or what they can do that provides the conditions sociopaths crave.
That won't work very well. Most cable channels require the HDMI connection to be encrypted with HDCP.
... which has done precisely nothing to stop people from uploading torrents of their favorite shows.
I once heard it said that a monkey will stop doing something that doesn't work. This makes them smarter than the assholes who advocate useless copy protection schemes.
I see a potential market for directional (or very short-range - place atop TV) cell phone repeaters that provide the 3G/4G/whatever equivalent of a null route.
As I've advised people before, never give a smart TV its own Internet connection. Instead, use a cheap media center PC and an HDMI cable (or whatever). It will be a small portion of the cost of setting up a home theater. Then you'll have something that has serious storage, can stream whatever you like, has upgradable hardware, and easily updatable software. If you go open source, you won't have to worry about phoning home and you can put the package manager in your cron tab.
While I've advised this in the past for security purposes (I'm not on board with the whole Internet of Things for solid reasons), it's no surprise that we're seeing concrete privacy reasons as well. Corporations and the sociopaths who run them have no sense of honor or respect for their customers. That's why you can't expect them to simply ignore another chance to get advertising revenue. They're counting on the average person being too stupid and ill-informed to resist and that alone is why they don't deserve to get their way.
It would be nice to see customers rejecting this kind of practice early on, rather than waiting for it to become so bad and widespread that government finally sees an opportunity (yet one more thing to regulate!) and steps in.
"Today’s professional Internet criminals work 9-to-5 days, pay taxes, and get weekends and holidays off. The companies they work for often have dozens to hundreds of employees, pay bribes to local law enforcement and politicians, and are often seen as the employer of choice in their region. Working for companies that break into companies in other countries is often proudly worn as a patriotic badge."
Tell me again why a submarine launched Tomahawk cruise missile doesn't suddenly strike that corporate HQ one day, killing everyone in the building and reducing it to rubble and ash? It seems that these people need to be reminded of who they're messing with when they declare war against our financial system.
The people who own the financial system are definitely not the people worthy of any sort of patriotic sentiment. There is a reason Jefferson warned us about this a long time ago, because even in his time, this system wasn't new.
Incidentally, two U.S. Presidents were killed by being shot in the head in public: Abraham Lincoln and JFK. What do they both have in common? They both tried to issue interest-free money directly through the Treasury department, outside of the control of private bankers. In Lincoln's case, they were called Greenbacks. In JFK's case, they were a representative currency (dollars backed by silver). I'm sure that's a total coincidence. After all, if someone tells you that a street thug might shoot you to take the $50 in your wallet, that person is reasonable; if someone else says that banksters would kill anyone to protect their trillions-of-dollars financial empires, well that guy's just a conspiracy nut, just like those guys who said several years ago that the NSA was spying on everyone, right? It's a good thing we're all above such tin-foil hattery!
Of course there's the more practical matter of whether it's really worthwhile to kill people and commit what foreign nations would call an act of war, merely because a few domestic corporations had shitty security since they failed to appreciate that the public Internet is a hostile network. Generally, we don't kill people for financial or other property crimes, and we aren't supposed to sanction them in any way at all without a trial (preceded by an extradition if necessary).
If you're going to pull an "America, FUCK YEAH!", please understand that "America" used to actually mean something, and in particular it meant we don't do certain things -- like punish people without due process -- just because more authoritarian nations might do such things. That was once the sort of thing we observed other nations doing, frowned upon, and considered ourselves better than. Believe it or not, the collective culture once valued the visceral satisfaction of swift vengeance less than it valued the sanctity of our founding principles. A good history book will talk about this, and the sad thing is, you would need one to hear about such things today.
We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.
That depends. If they're using them against Americans, then it's not what the NSA is supposed to do. The NSA has been caught spying on Americans before, so skepticism is IMO warranted.
Skepticism was warranted long before that happened because those in positions of power are never to be trusted.
Too bad that we do not teach logic in our schools.
If they did that, politics would have to actually make sense. There's far too much invested in never allowing that to happen.
I'd recommend The Art of Deception by Nicholas Capaldi. It's an introductory book about logic and critical thinking, written (for educational purposes) from the point of view of someone trying to intentionally deceive an audience.
The just flat our refuse all evidence, even with the worst case scenarios accidents at Chernobyl and Fukashima, the millions of lives saved by using nuclear power. And this is with the handicap their efforts have wrought by preventing the adoption of new designs and technology to the point where we are planning on running reactors until they are 80 years old. Imagine if we were on 6th or 7th generation reactors? Imagine if we were allowed to use breeder reactors? Nobody would be talking about using fossil fuels for electricity production.
I'd like to see a real-world test of the feasibility of a thorium reactor. It produces electricity and completely eliminates any concern about weapons-grade fissile material.
The sandboxed web browser will keep this from happening as it will only occur virtually. Close the browser and - poof - its normal again.
... until a vulnerability is also found in the sandbox, which will probably be 32-bit if it's a wrapper for a 32-bit browser.
What are the architectural reasons why Windows doesn't behave more like multi-lib on Linux? Is it just the fact that recompilation is not an option because most Windows software is closed-source? Or are these business/design decisions getting in the way, once again? Specifically I would like to know what the significant differences are between WoW64 and the implementation of multi-lib on Linux. Considering that these tend to run on the same hardware, it comes down to design decisions.
When downloading chrome choose to download it for another platform and there is a 64-bit version.
For firefox you'd either have to choose one of their nightly 64-bit versions or settle with Waterfox which usually lags behind a few versions.
I just compile Firefox from source since this is a Gentoo system. It's a 64-bit system, so Firefox gets compiled as a 64-bit program. See how simple it can be when you have source? For those who invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, I wish them the best of luck. Every secure machine is one less potential botnet member.
They don't pull over white people jogging in a subdivision street.
People get verbal warnings about unsafe behavior all the time. The difference is that some people say "Thanks, have a nice day" and some say "RACIAL PROFILING! I'M BEING OPPRESSED!"
I don't know about you... but if a cop gave me a verbal warning, I would show some respect and change my behavior and be on my merry way. That's because a cop can always find some excuse to come down on you hard, if you piss them off. There's just too many laws on the books and it's too easy for them to do that. I want to encourage the use of warnings and the best way to do that is to demonstrate that they work.
These are based on FBI statistics, which is telling because as a police agency, the FBI might have an incentive to overstate the level of violent crime in order to justify their budgets. Yet they clearly show that the violent crime rate is steadily declining. In the first paragraph this page mentions that the violent crime rate in 2010 was 1/3 the rate of 1994. This has been the trend for a long time now. Hell, I've even heard strange New Age types talking about how this is a sign that we have "entered the Age of Aquarius".
Doesn't matter. The speed limit on that road was 30 MPH (you can see the sign in the video). She clearly wasn't going 30 MPH while she walked in the traffic lane, so she was obstructing traffic.
It's called a speed limit for a reason, dork. It means that you may legally go no more than 30 MPH on that stretch of road. Now that we have that out of the way, it is entirely reasonable for a cop to stop a pedestrian walking in traffic to advise them that they should stick to the sidewalk for safety reasons. This not grounds for a civil rights lawsuit.
Actually most areas do have traffic laws against traveling too slowly. This is particularly an issue in parts of Florida in which many elderly people live. You'd have to go very slowly to get such a ticket though. Around here it's something like 20mph under the speed limit, assuming good conditions (obviously this isn't an issue during, say, a snowstorm).
Whether that would apply to a pedestrian is another issue, however, but my point is: this isn't a strange or unusual concept. Personally, when I am walking down a street, I assume that any drivers may be drunk, crazy, distracted by their precious cell phones, stupid, etc. and I also assume they do not see me. I routinely see people walking down the middle of the road, expecting cars to move into the wrong side of the road to avoid them. I think this is stupid and lazy. When that's me walking, I use the sidewalk and if there is no sidewalk, I walk in the grass, off the road and away from the vehiclular traffic. The idea of putting my life and limb into the hands of every random stranger who happens by is just bad strategy, and I don't share that kind of sense of entitlement so virulent today.
... and people who want to be able to protect themselves against an armed assailant. Home invasion is the classic scenario here. Your bravery and bare hands won't do much good against bullets.
But I agree that instigating violence with a firearm is a cowardly act. In that sense, you (and the band 311) are right that guns are for pussies.
Of course the big metal-wrapped bumpers, the word POLICE emblazoned across the back, a uniformed person inside wearing a gun, and an obscene amount of bright flashing lights mounted all over the outside of the car are all examples of urban camouflage intended to conceal their location, right?
... that you won't see until after they've used radar to measure your speed, at which point it's too late to slow down if you were speeding.
The cops are just annoyed that such apps may make their speed traps less effective. Understand that speeding is a huge source of revenue for local and state governments, so the politicians at that level put a lot of pressure on the cops to keep those tickets flowing. It's not unreasonable to say that many local/state budgets would break without this revenue. Ironically, speed in and of itself is almost never a cause of accidents. Accidents are caused by things like failing to yield, drunk driving, and following too closely, but then I digress.
The bullshit about "putting officers' lives in danger" is just propaganda. It's designed to portray the police and anything they desire as the Good Guys (TM), and anyone obstructing their revenue-generation activities as the Bad Guys (TM). It's standard PR practice. The reality is, no one wants to fuck with the cops. They're the very last choice of target for psychos looking to do violence. In fact, posing a threat to them is a recognized suicide method, as an AC pointed out earlier. What's not so well known is that police work is not even in the top ten most dangerous jobs. So yes, this excuse of theirs is just more authoritarian bullshit. No one acquainted with the facts would believe it.
Not to be too cynical, but I don't suspect the company behind this app is so much a "moral company" as it is a front for a law firm(s).
So... are you saying it's a bad thing that lawyers are targeting corrupt cops? Isn't that about as moral as a company can get? It's the Chris Hansen of companies.
Not sure if it works the same in the UK, but in the U.S. at least, that kind of data would be very valuable to lawyers wanting to sue the city/state for damages; and it would also be very valuable as a way to connect with potential clients.
"Have your encounter with the police overseen by a lawyer looking to sue them" seems like a pretty good deal for the user, even better than just having it recorded in fact.
I just can't support this popular tendency to read meaning into the words of another that is not there.
He never once said it was a bad thing. He simply identified himself as a cynic, and proceeded to demonstrate this cynicism by pointing out that "moral" may not be the best way to describe the behavior observed. That's all that happened. Whether he believes said behavior is a good thing or a bad thing was left unsaid. It is abundantly possible for it to be a good thing and still be motivated by something other than a concern for morality.
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You mean like youtube ads that shows me the same ad for every 2 minute video I watch? Thank you ad blocks for being able to block all those annoying youtube ads.
Heh, no joke. My initial response to the first sentence of your post was, "Youtube has ads??". I really forgot that it did. My attitude towards advertising and most marketing is: fuck 'em. I actually used JunkBuster back in the days of Netscape and dial-up. It was an ad-filtering proxy -- browsers at that time had plug-ins but they did not have the capability for sophisticated extensions, so this was one of the only practical ways to block ads. The old URL (I still remember it!) was internet.junkbuster.com, but it hasn't been maintained in a long time. Now it just gives a link to EPIC and two privacy-related sites. According to Wikipedia, the proxy program itself hasn't been maintained since 1998.
Junkbusters was a group that advocated against advertising in all forms, especially direct marketing (professional nuisances). They provided that filtering proxy before much else was available, they gave advice on reducing physical junk mail, and (as this was prior to the Do Not Call list) gave tips to reduce or defeat telemarketing calls, if I recall correctly.
Am I the only one who remembers them?
Same AC here. I totally agree with you, copy protection schemes are utterly useless against people who are intent on breaking them. For ordinary users, things like HDCP and the CCI flag make their life difficult. For example, I can't use my HD Homerun Prime and cablecard for watching TV on Linux or my Mac. Only Windows Media Center is licensed for the DRM that's used to restrict "copy once" channels. My cable company loves to set every channel they can to "copy once" so I can't watch much of anything on my Mac or Linux systems. Basically, they inconvenience the hell out of users like me who just want to watch and record TV for their own viewing later, but they do absolutely nothing to stop actual piracy.
As for torrents, I tend to watch a lot of sports. There's no good reason I shouldn't be able to record a Formula 1 race that's on TV at like 5 AM local time on my Linux box and watch it on my Mac when I wake up. The DRM stops me from doing that, but doesn't serve it's purpose. And unfortunately, the DRM is also a pain in the ass for anyone with a set-top box that wants to connect it via HDMI to a normal computer monitor.
Sports may be one exception, but it sounds like you'd have a better and more convenient experience if you pirated whatever you want to watch (not that I would advocate such a thing, of course). This is the real-world effect of copy protection schemes. So not only do they fail to work, they encourage the very thing they were intended to prevent. It's amazing how such madness can become enshrined and institutionalized.
Pushing targeted ads just creates an echo chamber effect - you see the same type of ad over and over. One of the purposes of advertising is to expand your market to non-users. Targeted ads completely fail this.
I assume the marketers conduct surveys, hire focus groups, and use statistics to determine things like "80% of people who enjoyed W were also interested in X, Y, and Z". This could involve a great variety of things, certainly too many to constitute "the same type ... over and over". While the marketers have many flaws, unfortunately stupidity isn't one of them.
It is no more effective than security theatre at the airport...just makes you feel warm and fuzzy
Erm... which part of the TSA make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Sometimes the guy doing the pat downs is bearded and sweaty
Hey man, whatever floats your boat. I'm not here to judge. :-)
But just today all news sites over Germany reported that the German BND (the direct successor of the Nazi "Organization Gehlen") has been spying on allies, too, including France and German(!) diplomats.
I can't see the point of your Nazi reference. The Federal Republic of Germany can also be considered the direct successor of Nazi Germany. It's probably more accurate to describe the Gehlen as a CIA program that recruited former members of the Nazi military in much the same way that the US military and later the space program used scientists who were active in the German war effort.
Yes, though we used (and sheltered) many more Nazis than is generally known, even to those familiar with Project Paperclip.
This is not really a surprise. One of the ways you get around domestic anti-surveillance laws is to ask some friendly allies to do it for you. Basically you spy on their citizens and they spy on yours. Each government can then say it is not infringing its own citizen's rights.
... and yet, if you (hypothetically) were to hire a hit man to perform a murder, or a thief to steal something for you, the resulting investigation would indict you for conspiracy to commit murder or conspiracy to commit larceny and you would be punished just as much as your chosen proxy.
Yet another example of one set of laws for us, and another set for "them". The concept of rule of law takes another swift kick to the balls, again.
You kind of nailed the issue, but how do you figure that the customer can foil the sociopath?
The way I see it, it's up to us, on an interpersonal level, to make sure our friends and family hear about these things especially when they're making a significant purchase.
Disliking regulations is good and all, but the sociopaths don't need no stinking EULA, they'll just collect it secretly if they want too. Does the solution have to be a 1985 Television and over-the-air reception?
The problem with regulations is that they're imposed by the same kind of sociopaths who created these problems in the first place. They're also a shitty substitute for an informed public. I'll take a 1985 television over a 1984 telescreen any day, but with some basic understanding of networking a potentially hostile device can be contained. That's what I view as the real solution, in terms of security.
And that's the problem - sociopaths won't stop until it hurts them personally. It's why the wet dream of libertarians and some republicans doesn't work. Those ideals only exist in a universe where all are honest.
Actually the dream of a libertarian society doesn't depend on everyone being honest. A libertarian plan still includes a government and it still includes making the use of force and fraud illegal. If you thought libertarian vision was anarcho-capitalism, you've been misled by someone with a vested interest. This is a really, extremely common misunderstanding. I believe it's promoted by members of the two major parties who want to discredit libertarian thought because of the tremendous power it could cost them. It certainly wouldn't be the first time negative PR was used this way.
The best way to have that kind of society is for everyone to be tough-minded and well-informed. Smart TVs that spy on you would never sell if the average person understood what was wrong with them. It's this intellectually lazy (and arguably, moronic) tendency to buy and use devices without the slightest clue concerning how they work or what they can do that provides the conditions sociopaths crave.
That won't work very well. Most cable channels require the HDMI connection to be encrypted with HDCP.
... which has done precisely nothing to stop people from uploading torrents of their favorite shows.
I once heard it said that a monkey will stop doing something that doesn't work. This makes them smarter than the assholes who advocate useless copy protection schemes.
A partnership between hardware manufacturers and cellphone companies is likely to emerge.
Fight for your bitcoins!
I see a potential market for directional (or very short-range - place atop TV) cell phone repeaters that provide the 3G/4G/whatever equivalent of a null route.
As I've advised people before, never give a smart TV its own Internet connection. Instead, use a cheap media center PC and an HDMI cable (or whatever). It will be a small portion of the cost of setting up a home theater. Then you'll have something that has serious storage, can stream whatever you like, has upgradable hardware, and easily updatable software. If you go open source, you won't have to worry about phoning home and you can put the package manager in your cron tab.
While I've advised this in the past for security purposes (I'm not on board with the whole Internet of Things for solid reasons), it's no surprise that we're seeing concrete privacy reasons as well. Corporations and the sociopaths who run them have no sense of honor or respect for their customers. That's why you can't expect them to simply ignore another chance to get advertising revenue. They're counting on the average person being too stupid and ill-informed to resist and that alone is why they don't deserve to get their way.
It would be nice to see customers rejecting this kind of practice early on, rather than waiting for it to become so bad and widespread that government finally sees an opportunity (yet one more thing to regulate!) and steps in.
From TFA:
"Today’s professional Internet criminals work 9-to-5 days, pay taxes, and get weekends and holidays off. The companies they work for often have dozens to hundreds of employees, pay bribes to local law enforcement and politicians, and are often seen as the employer of choice in their region. Working for companies that break into companies in other countries is often proudly worn as a patriotic badge."
Tell me again why a submarine launched Tomahawk cruise missile doesn't suddenly strike that corporate HQ one day, killing everyone in the building and reducing it to rubble and ash? It seems that these people need to be reminded of who they're messing with when they declare war against our financial system.
The people who own the financial system are definitely not the people worthy of any sort of patriotic sentiment. There is a reason Jefferson warned us about this a long time ago, because even in his time, this system wasn't new.
Incidentally, two U.S. Presidents were killed by being shot in the head in public: Abraham Lincoln and JFK. What do they both have in common? They both tried to issue interest-free money directly through the Treasury department, outside of the control of private bankers. In Lincoln's case, they were called Greenbacks. In JFK's case, they were a representative currency (dollars backed by silver). I'm sure that's a total coincidence. After all, if someone tells you that a street thug might shoot you to take the $50 in your wallet, that person is reasonable; if someone else says that banksters would kill anyone to protect their trillions-of-dollars financial empires, well that guy's just a conspiracy nut, just like those guys who said several years ago that the NSA was spying on everyone, right? It's a good thing we're all above such tin-foil hattery!
Of course there's the more practical matter of whether it's really worthwhile to kill people and commit what foreign nations would call an act of war, merely because a few domestic corporations had shitty security since they failed to appreciate that the public Internet is a hostile network. Generally, we don't kill people for financial or other property crimes, and we aren't supposed to sanction them in any way at all without a trial (preceded by an extradition if necessary).
If you're going to pull an "America, FUCK YEAH!", please understand that "America" used to actually mean something, and in particular it meant we don't do certain things -- like punish people without due process -- just because more authoritarian nations might do such things. That was once the sort of thing we observed other nations doing, frowned upon, and considered ourselves better than. Believe it or not, the collective culture once valued the visceral satisfaction of swift vengeance less than it valued the sanctity of our founding principles. A good history book will talk about this, and the sad thing is, you would need one to hear about such things today.
That would be MS seasoned security pros. The rest of us know better.
Yes, but it's so Easy To Use!
We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.
That depends. If they're using them against Americans, then it's not what the NSA is supposed to do. The NSA has been caught spying on Americans before, so skepticism is IMO warranted.
Skepticism was warranted long before that happened because those in positions of power are never to be trusted.
Now if they could just stop calling Linux "SteamOS"
Just as soon as they stop calling Linux "Android" and "PCLinuxOS" etc...
Too bad that we do not teach logic in our schools.
If they did that, politics would have to actually make sense. There's far too much invested in never allowing that to happen.
I'd recommend The Art of Deception by Nicholas Capaldi. It's an introductory book about logic and critical thinking, written (for educational purposes) from the point of view of someone trying to intentionally deceive an audience.
The just flat our refuse all evidence, even with the worst case scenarios accidents at Chernobyl and Fukashima, the millions of lives saved by using nuclear power. And this is with the handicap their efforts have wrought by preventing the adoption of new designs and technology to the point where we are planning on running reactors until they are 80 years old. Imagine if we were on 6th or 7th generation reactors? Imagine if we were allowed to use breeder reactors? Nobody would be talking about using fossil fuels for electricity production.
I'd like to see a real-world test of the feasibility of a thorium reactor. It produces electricity and completely eliminates any concern about weapons-grade fissile material.
The sandboxed web browser will keep this from happening as it will only occur virtually. Close the browser and - poof - its normal again.
... until a vulnerability is also found in the sandbox, which will probably be 32-bit if it's a wrapper for a 32-bit browser.
What are the architectural reasons why Windows doesn't behave more like multi-lib on Linux? Is it just the fact that recompilation is not an option because most Windows software is closed-source? Or are these business/design decisions getting in the way, once again? Specifically I would like to know what the significant differences are between WoW64 and the implementation of multi-lib on Linux. Considering that these tend to run on the same hardware, it comes down to design decisions.
When downloading chrome choose to download it for another platform and there is a 64-bit version. For firefox you'd either have to choose one of their nightly 64-bit versions or settle with Waterfox which usually lags behind a few versions.
I just compile Firefox from source since this is a Gentoo system. It's a 64-bit system, so Firefox gets compiled as a 64-bit program. See how simple it can be when you have source? For those who invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, I wish them the best of luck. Every secure machine is one less potential botnet member.
They don't pull over white people jogging in a subdivision street.
People get verbal warnings about unsafe behavior all the time. The difference is that some people say "Thanks, have a nice day" and some say "RACIAL PROFILING! I'M BEING OPPRESSED!"
I don't know about you ... but if a cop gave me a verbal warning, I would show some respect and change my behavior and be on my merry way. That's because a cop can always find some excuse to come down on you hard, if you piss them off. There's just too many laws on the books and it's too easy for them to do that. I want to encourage the use of warnings and the best way to do that is to demonstrate that they work.
I see that your Google-fu is weak. Try this link for a good start.
These are based on FBI statistics, which is telling because as a police agency, the FBI might have an incentive to overstate the level of violent crime in order to justify their budgets. Yet they clearly show that the violent crime rate is steadily declining. In the first paragraph this page mentions that the violent crime rate in 2010 was 1/3 the rate of 1994. This has been the trend for a long time now. Hell, I've even heard strange New Age types talking about how this is a sign that we have "entered the Age of Aquarius".
Doesn't matter. The speed limit on that road was 30 MPH (you can see the sign in the video). She clearly wasn't going 30 MPH while she walked in the traffic lane, so she was obstructing traffic.
It's called a speed limit for a reason, dork. It means that you may legally go no more than 30 MPH on that stretch of road. Now that we have that out of the way, it is entirely reasonable for a cop to stop a pedestrian walking in traffic to advise them that they should stick to the sidewalk for safety reasons. This not grounds for a civil rights lawsuit.
Actually most areas do have traffic laws against traveling too slowly. This is particularly an issue in parts of Florida in which many elderly people live. You'd have to go very slowly to get such a ticket though. Around here it's something like 20mph under the speed limit, assuming good conditions (obviously this isn't an issue during, say, a snowstorm).
Whether that would apply to a pedestrian is another issue, however, but my point is: this isn't a strange or unusual concept. Personally, when I am walking down a street, I assume that any drivers may be drunk, crazy, distracted by their precious cell phones, stupid, etc. and I also assume they do not see me. I routinely see people walking down the middle of the road, expecting cars to move into the wrong side of the road to avoid them. I think this is stupid and lazy. When that's me walking, I use the sidewalk and if there is no sidewalk, I walk in the grass, off the road and away from the vehiclular traffic. The idea of putting my life and limb into the hands of every random stranger who happens by is just bad strategy, and I don't share that kind of sense of entitlement so virulent today.
Guns are for pussies.
... and people who want to be able to protect themselves against an armed assailant. Home invasion is the classic scenario here. Your bravery and bare hands won't do much good against bullets.
But I agree that instigating violence with a firearm is a cowardly act. In that sense, you (and the band 311) are right that guns are for pussies.
Of course the big metal-wrapped bumpers, the word POLICE emblazoned across the back, a uniformed person inside wearing a gun, and an obscene amount of bright flashing lights mounted all over the outside of the car are all examples of urban camouflage intended to conceal their location, right?
... that you won't see until after they've used radar to measure your speed, at which point it's too late to slow down if you were speeding.
The cops are just annoyed that such apps may make their speed traps less effective. Understand that speeding is a huge source of revenue for local and state governments, so the politicians at that level put a lot of pressure on the cops to keep those tickets flowing. It's not unreasonable to say that many local/state budgets would break without this revenue. Ironically, speed in and of itself is almost never a cause of accidents. Accidents are caused by things like failing to yield, drunk driving, and following too closely, but then I digress.
The bullshit about "putting officers' lives in danger" is just propaganda. It's designed to portray the police and anything they desire as the Good Guys (TM), and anyone obstructing their revenue-generation activities as the Bad Guys (TM). It's standard PR practice. The reality is, no one wants to fuck with the cops. They're the very last choice of target for psychos looking to do violence. In fact, posing a threat to them is a recognized suicide method, as an AC pointed out earlier. What's not so well known is that police work is not even in the top ten most dangerous jobs. So yes, this excuse of theirs is just more authoritarian bullshit. No one acquainted with the facts would believe it.
So... are you saying it's a bad thing that lawyers are targeting corrupt cops? Isn't that about as moral as a company can get? It's the Chris Hansen of companies.
"Have your encounter with the police overseen by a lawyer looking to sue them" seems like a pretty good deal for the user, even better than just having it recorded in fact.
I just can't support this popular tendency to read meaning into the words of another that is not there.
He never once said it was a bad thing. He simply identified himself as a cynic, and proceeded to demonstrate this cynicism by pointing out that "moral" may not be the best way to describe the behavior observed. That's all that happened. Whether he believes said behavior is a good thing or a bad thing was left unsaid. It is abundantly possible for it to be a good thing and still be motivated by something other than a concern for morality.