Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent.
Yes, yes... but what can be generated with open source software WITHOUT any dedicated, creative talent? Isn't that the more important question here? Creative people can produce works of genius with no technology to speak of, so who cares about that.;-P
Somebody made a configuration change, and Facebook's error checking code thought the new configuration was invalid. This code was designed to automatically correct for cache errors by querying the database to get the correct configuration - which it thought was invalid, so it would check again.
It doesn't matter what kind of database you have when you've got a system like this in place.
Obviously, their implementation of this error checking system is fatally flawed. That's why they've turned it off, until they can figure out how to do it right.
Apple did add support via InputSprocket, which enabled games to use multiple buttons (among other things), but InputSprocket was generally used only by games. Right-click support wasn't available in the Finder or most other applications without the use of third-party drivers prior to Mac OS X. Mouse manufacturers usually either provided their own Mac drivers (Logitech did this), or simply offered USB Overdrive (Microsoft did this).
Here's a forum thread with somebody asking about it.
Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible.
This may be true on Windows, but is absolutely not true on Mac OS X. Flash for Mac is a pile of crap. Before YouTube added HTML 5 support, I used a third-party hack that blocked Flash and played (most) YouTube videos using the QuickTime plugin. The performance improvement was quite dramatic. HTML5 video performs similarly. Unfortunately some videos are Flash-only, and this hack doesn't work with any other web sites.
The OS has always supported right click, since at least OS 8.6 - just plug in a 2 button mouse, or use control+click. The single button was all about lack of confusion, but it was not "enforced" if you wanted to be able to right click.
Correction: the OS has supported contextual menus since Mac OS 8.0 (1997), but right-clicking was not supported natively until Mac OS X (2001, but nobody used 10.0 because it was terrible). Prior to that, right-clicking was only supported through the use of third-party drivers (example) that simulated a control-click.
As of Mac OS X, multiple button mice (with scroll wheels) are natively supported by the operating system.
And a responsible journalist would explain this, in addition to reporting the President's statements.
While the tax cuts were passed by Congress, they were championed by President Bush whose party controlled a majority in Congress. The expiration was set to avoid Democratic opposition, but it was nevertheless set a decade ago.
A lot of Republican supporters recently have been warning the public about an "Obama tax hike", as though this President were actively promoting new legislation to raise taxes, in the same manner that the previous President actively promoted legislation to reduce taxes. President Obama's statements, while not wholly accurate, were intended to counter this misconception.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between, and it was once the role of journalists to help us find it - not to further the lies themselves.
Here's another recent example of a quote taken deliberately out of context. President Obama a couple weeks ago:
Out of context:
Taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year -- for everybody.
In context:
I’ll give you one final example of the differences between us and the Republicans, and that’s on the issue of tax cuts. Under the tax plan passed by the last administration, taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year -- for everybody. By the way, this was by design....Now, I believe we ought to make the tax cuts for the middle class permanent...
Democracy only works correctly when the voters aren't being lied to by the media. We know politicians lie all the time, but I believe it is vitally important that their lies are reported to us accurately in good faith, so that we can exercise our own judgment. This isn't biased reporting, this is deliberate deception, pure and simple.
Apple doesn't sell the iPhone as an independent stand-alone unit. They're in a partnership agreement with AT&T (and other carriers internationally), and those carriers have serious concerns about what a device as powerful as the iPhone will realistically do on their networks. They've offered unlimited data plans for other phones and never had a problem, but that was because other phones were awkward and difficult to use and people generally didn't want to use them for applications that eat up tons of bandwidth. Even with Apple's restrictions, AT&T has had to stop offering unlimited data plans.
Also, AT&T knows its own network is not secure. With full access to a powerful mobile device, hackers could find a way to cause serious network problems. Of course, hackers already have full access to such a device (they've jailbroken the iPhone), but the fewer people there are with access to this, the more comfortable AT&T feels.
Most of the time, when Apple does something consumer-unfriendly, there are one of two reasons:
1) Steve Jobs' personal sense of aesthetics clashes with yours 2) Some other company or organization is involved, and Apple has already pushed them as far as they feel they can
Although there's a hint of #1 here (Jobs doesn't want a third-party mail client available for the iPhone, because users would be confused if they had too many choices) we're mostly dealing with #2.
So if they can identify these botnets, and they know this spam is coming from them...
Do they know what IP addresses these bots are connecting from? Is it possible to make a blacklist? How can I avoid accepting mail from these 2.5 million computers?
1) you have clearly failed to understand what "sub" means 2) Apple doesn't sell a laptop for less than $999 (excluding discounts/clearance sales/refurbished specials), and this is what you need to keep in mind when you consider the possibility of an Apple netbook. $400 laptops don't exist in the Apple world.
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
If one's belief is in the existence of a god, then the existence of aliens doesn't present any sort of problem.
If, on the other hand, one's belief is in the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great I AM, and furthermore you believe that God sent His only begotten Son to die as a sacrifice for our sins, and that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, well then, you might have a pretty significant problem indeed. You see, while the Bible may not explicitly declare that there are no aliens, it seems to suggest that when God created the earth and everything on it, He did not also create some other inhabited planet (did Jesus die to save the aliens from their sins too? Did God reveal Himself through His Word on their planet too?).
When the very nature of your entire existence and purpose for being is built upon this foundation, it would certainly be confusing to have it suddenly torn out from under you. This would be no simple matter of "oh, I just learned something new about the world, I guess there were a few things I was mistaken about." It would be closer to... well, think of Jim Carrey's character in The Truman Show, suddenly discovering that his entire life has been a lie, that nothing he's ever known has been real, that all his hopes and dreams are utterly meaningless. How do you react to that? Of course you eventually learn to deal with it and move on, as Truman does at the end of the film, but before then, you're likely to do some wild and unpredictable things.
Of course, the UFO doesn't have to actually be real in order to cause this sort of unpredictable behavior. I'm sure there's some other explanation for whatever this was, but if people thought it was really a UFO, some crazy things probably would have happened. That's what Churchill wanted to avoid.
Thanks for pointing this out. Of course you're right; WikiLeaks did their best. If somebody approaches the Pentagon for help with redacting sensitive information before releasing it to the public, ignoring them isn't going to make them not release the information; the Pentagon should have taken this more seriously.
Responsible disclosure is absolutely not too much to ask for.
I think that reporting war crimes is the only responsible thing to do. If you don't like that, perhaps you should encourage the military not to commit them in the first place.
Unfortunately you've misunderstood what "responsible disclosure" means.
War crimes should be reported. Mishandling of public resources should be reported. Deception and outright lies to the American people should be reported. However, a lot of people in the military and intelligence services have been doing their jobs correctly and responsibly, and their safety depends on some information about them and their activities being kept secret. Having information about abuse disclosed to the public is useful to society, but disclosing secrets about appropriate and correct activities is very harmful to innocent people and does not benefit us at all. Responsible disclosure means disclosing the former without disclosing the latter.
Of course, there are a few who would argue that since the war in Iraq is unjust, any who participate in it, regardless of how honorably they perform their duties, simply deserve whatever fate awaits them. I personally don't agree with that. Rumsfeld and his ilk should hang, but the troops deserve our support.
You're missing the point. Yeah, we have some more advanced knowledge now, that George Washington couldn't have taught himself. But a large percentage of the US population doesn't know anything about the basic level of geometry that Washington had a firm grasp on - even if they did sit through geometry classes in high school, and manage to guess correctly on enough multiple-choice test questions that they didn't flunk.
No they didn't, they still have the remote-delete feature, and have at no point permanently removed this "feature" from the Kindle.
To clarify, by "original issue" I was referring to Amazon not being able to sell "1984", which prompted them to use the remote-delete feature, which I'm sure they have no intention of ever removing.
For those who missed it, Amazon screwed something up and determined that they couldn't sell "1984" on the Kindle, despite the fact that they had already been selling it, so they activated a remote-delete feature nobody knew they had, and removed the e-book from all of their customers' Kindles. Amazon soon resolved the original issue, then offered an apology and either a replacement or a check for $30 to affected customers. Had it been any other book, the whole thing wouldn't have been so ridiculously ironic...
So where did he get the idea AT&T might sue? Did they tell him they might sue? Did someone else with inside knowledge of AT&T's plans tell him they might sue? Did some random person think to themselves, "hey, AT&T could sue!" and told him it was a possibility? Did he make it up himself and lie about it?
Also, did AT&T decide not to sue because they looked at the situation, considered their best course of action, and determined that suing wasn't the right thing to do? Or did they decide to sue, but then changed their minds when word got out because they knew it would make them look bad?
You know, it's remarkable that no one ever made a Windows virus that would bypass the Windows display drivers and set deliberately screwy video settings, permanently destroying everybody's monitors. At that time, getting malware onto a Windows machine was fairly trivial (compared to how difficult it is today, if that puts things in perspective).
#!/usr/bin/perl for $a(1,46){for $b(0..7){$c=0;$_?hex substr(q), "ef7fa1866706ca", Just another Perl Hacker, ("eff02289402844"),2*$_+$a,2)&2**(7-$b): $_["phroggy"] and $c+=2**(7-$_)for(0..7);$d.=chr $c;}}print"$d\n";
This kind of crap automatically leaves me seriously considering an iPhone. Why in the hell is a company like Apple more successful in keeping bloatware off their phones? Why are Google and Microsoft incapable of demanding their products be free of this stuff? It's in their best interests.
It's because Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive prick, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. He's been doing this for years. If it doesn't meet his approval, he'll throw things at you.
Oh, those are available, sure. Some of them are vaguely healthy-ish, and they're certainly faster and cheaper than what I can make from scratch (for small quantities - cooking from scratch gets cheaper when you scale it up). But if you grew up with parents who didn't know how to cook and couldn't afford to go to nice restaurants, it's quite likely you've never had duck in plum sauce with fried rice before, and have no idea whether it would taste good or not. Exposure to eating good food is even more important than learning how to cook good food; if you know what you want to make, figuring out how to make it isn't that hard.
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Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent.
Yes, yes... but what can be generated with open source software WITHOUT any dedicated, creative talent? Isn't that the more important question here? Creative people can produce works of genius with no technology to speak of, so who cares about that. ;-P
No.
Somebody made a configuration change, and Facebook's error checking code thought the new configuration was invalid. This code was designed to automatically correct for cache errors by querying the database to get the correct configuration - which it thought was invalid, so it would check again.
It doesn't matter what kind of database you have when you've got a system like this in place.
Obviously, their implementation of this error checking system is fatally flawed. That's why they've turned it off, until they can figure out how to do it right.
Apple did add support via InputSprocket, which enabled games to use multiple buttons (among other things), but InputSprocket was generally used only by games. Right-click support wasn't available in the Finder or most other applications without the use of third-party drivers prior to Mac OS X. Mouse manufacturers usually either provided their own Mac drivers (Logitech did this), or simply offered USB Overdrive (Microsoft did this).
Here's a forum thread with somebody asking about it.
Worse still, differences in CPU performance with HTML5 when compared to Flash have been shown to be negligible.
This may be true on Windows, but is absolutely not true on Mac OS X. Flash for Mac is a pile of crap. Before YouTube added HTML 5 support, I used a third-party hack that blocked Flash and played (most) YouTube videos using the QuickTime plugin. The performance improvement was quite dramatic. HTML5 video performs similarly. Unfortunately some videos are Flash-only, and this hack doesn't work with any other web sites.
The OS has always supported right click, since at least OS 8.6 - just plug in a 2 button mouse, or use control+click. The single button was all about lack of confusion, but it was not "enforced" if you wanted to be able to right click.
Correction: the OS has supported contextual menus since Mac OS 8.0 (1997), but right-clicking was not supported natively until Mac OS X (2001, but nobody used 10.0 because it was terrible). Prior to that, right-clicking was only supported through the use of third-party drivers (example) that simulated a control-click.
As of Mac OS X, multiple button mice (with scroll wheels) are natively supported by the operating system.
And a responsible journalist would explain this, in addition to reporting the President's statements.
While the tax cuts were passed by Congress, they were championed by President Bush whose party controlled a majority in Congress. The expiration was set to avoid Democratic opposition, but it was nevertheless set a decade ago.
A lot of Republican supporters recently have been warning the public about an "Obama tax hike", as though this President were actively promoting new legislation to raise taxes, in the same manner that the previous President actively promoted legislation to reduce taxes. President Obama's statements, while not wholly accurate, were intended to counter this misconception.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between, and it was once the role of journalists to help us find it - not to further the lies themselves.
Here's another recent example of a quote taken deliberately out of context. President Obama a couple weeks ago:
Out of context:
Taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year -- for everybody.
In context:
I’ll give you one final example of the differences between us and the Republicans, and that’s on the issue of tax cuts. Under the tax plan passed by the last administration, taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year -- for everybody. By the way, this was by design. ...Now, I believe we ought to make the tax cuts for the middle class permanent...
YouTube
Full transcript
Democracy only works correctly when the voters aren't being lied to by the media. We know politicians lie all the time, but I believe it is vitally important that their lies are reported to us accurately in good faith, so that we can exercise our own judgment. This isn't biased reporting, this is deliberate deception, pure and simple.
Apple doesn't sell the iPhone as an independent stand-alone unit. They're in a partnership agreement with AT&T (and other carriers internationally), and those carriers have serious concerns about what a device as powerful as the iPhone will realistically do on their networks. They've offered unlimited data plans for other phones and never had a problem, but that was because other phones were awkward and difficult to use and people generally didn't want to use them for applications that eat up tons of bandwidth. Even with Apple's restrictions, AT&T has had to stop offering unlimited data plans.
Also, AT&T knows its own network is not secure. With full access to a powerful mobile device, hackers could find a way to cause serious network problems. Of course, hackers already have full access to such a device (they've jailbroken the iPhone), but the fewer people there are with access to this, the more comfortable AT&T feels.
Most of the time, when Apple does something consumer-unfriendly, there are one of two reasons:
1) Steve Jobs' personal sense of aesthetics clashes with yours
2) Some other company or organization is involved, and Apple has already pushed them as far as they feel they can
Although there's a hint of #1 here (Jobs doesn't want a third-party mail client available for the iPhone, because users would be confused if they had too many choices) we're mostly dealing with #2.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
That, Sir, is the nerdiest Scripture reference I have seen to date. Well done.
So if they can identify these botnets, and they know this spam is coming from them...
Do they know what IP addresses these bots are connecting from? Is it possible to make a blacklist? How can I avoid accepting mail from these 2.5 million computers?
1) you have clearly failed to understand what "sub" means
2) Apple doesn't sell a laptop for less than $999 (excluding discounts/clearance sales/refurbished specials), and this is what you need to keep in mind when you consider the possibility of an Apple netbook. $400 laptops don't exist in the Apple world.
is that 160 kilobits per second, or 160 kilobytes per second?
You might need to multiply or divide by 8. Units are important.
1. If you believe in god, why would the existence of aliens prove that god doesn't exist?
If one's belief is in the existence of a god, then the existence of aliens doesn't present any sort of problem.
If, on the other hand, one's belief is in the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great I AM, and furthermore you believe that God sent His only begotten Son to die as a sacrifice for our sins, and that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, well then, you might have a pretty significant problem indeed. You see, while the Bible may not explicitly declare that there are no aliens, it seems to suggest that when God created the earth and everything on it, He did not also create some other inhabited planet (did Jesus die to save the aliens from their sins too? Did God reveal Himself through His Word on their planet too?).
When the very nature of your entire existence and purpose for being is built upon this foundation, it would certainly be confusing to have it suddenly torn out from under you. This would be no simple matter of "oh, I just learned something new about the world, I guess there were a few things I was mistaken about." It would be closer to... well, think of Jim Carrey's character in The Truman Show, suddenly discovering that his entire life has been a lie, that nothing he's ever known has been real, that all his hopes and dreams are utterly meaningless. How do you react to that? Of course you eventually learn to deal with it and move on, as Truman does at the end of the film, but before then, you're likely to do some wild and unpredictable things.
Of course, the UFO doesn't have to actually be real in order to cause this sort of unpredictable behavior. I'm sure there's some other explanation for whatever this was, but if people thought it was really a UFO, some crazy things probably would have happened. That's what Churchill wanted to avoid.
Thanks for pointing this out. Of course you're right; WikiLeaks did their best. If somebody approaches the Pentagon for help with redacting sensitive information before releasing it to the public, ignoring them isn't going to make them not release the information; the Pentagon should have taken this more seriously.
Responsible disclosure is absolutely not too much to ask for.
I think that reporting war crimes is the only responsible thing to do. If you don't like that, perhaps you should encourage the military not to commit them in the first place.
Unfortunately you've misunderstood what "responsible disclosure" means.
War crimes should be reported. Mishandling of public resources should be reported. Deception and outright lies to the American people should be reported. However, a lot of people in the military and intelligence services have been doing their jobs correctly and responsibly, and their safety depends on some information about them and their activities being kept secret. Having information about abuse disclosed to the public is useful to society, but disclosing secrets about appropriate and correct activities is very harmful to innocent people and does not benefit us at all. Responsible disclosure means disclosing the former without disclosing the latter.
Of course, there are a few who would argue that since the war in Iraq is unjust, any who participate in it, regardless of how honorably they perform their duties, simply deserve whatever fate awaits them. I personally don't agree with that. Rumsfeld and his ilk should hang, but the troops deserve our support.
You're missing the point. Yeah, we have some more advanced knowledge now, that George Washington couldn't have taught himself. But a large percentage of the US population doesn't know anything about the basic level of geometry that Washington had a firm grasp on - even if they did sit through geometry classes in high school, and manage to guess correctly on enough multiple-choice test questions that they didn't flunk.
Blanket statements will get you in trouble.
Not all of them!
Amazon soon resolved the original issue
No they didn't, they still have the remote-delete feature, and have at no point permanently removed this "feature" from the Kindle.
To clarify, by "original issue" I was referring to Amazon not being able to sell "1984", which prompted them to use the remote-delete feature, which I'm sure they have no intention of ever removing.
For those who missed it, Amazon screwed something up and determined that they couldn't sell "1984" on the Kindle, despite the fact that they had already been selling it, so they activated a remote-delete feature nobody knew they had, and removed the e-book from all of their customers' Kindles. Amazon soon resolved the original issue, then offered an apology and either a replacement or a check for $30 to affected customers. Had it been any other book, the whole thing wouldn't have been so ridiculously ironic...
So where did he get the idea AT&T might sue? Did they tell him they might sue? Did someone else with inside knowledge of AT&T's plans tell him they might sue? Did some random person think to themselves, "hey, AT&T could sue!" and told him it was a possibility? Did he make it up himself and lie about it?
Also, did AT&T decide not to sue because they looked at the situation, considered their best course of action, and determined that suing wasn't the right thing to do? Or did they decide to sue, but then changed their minds when word got out because they knew it would make them look bad?
You know, it's remarkable that no one ever made a Windows virus that would bypass the Windows display drivers and set deliberately screwy video settings, permanently destroying everybody's monitors. At that time, getting malware onto a Windows machine was fairly trivial (compared to how difficult it is today, if that puts things in perspective).
#!/usr/bin/perl
for $a(1,46){for $b(0..7){$c=0;$_?hex substr(q), "ef7fa1866706ca",
Just another Perl Hacker, ("eff02289402844"),2*$_+$a,2)&2**(7-$b):
$_["phroggy"] and $c+=2**(7-$_)for(0..7);$d.=chr $c;}}print"$d\n";
This kind of crap automatically leaves me seriously considering an iPhone. Why in the hell is a company like Apple more successful in keeping bloatware off their phones? Why are Google and Microsoft incapable of demanding their products be free of this stuff? It's in their best interests.
It's because Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive prick, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. He's been doing this for years. If it doesn't meet his approval, he'll throw things at you.
It's open, just not to you. But doesn't feel so much better to be fucked over by a corporation that uses Open Source software ?
Apple is a corporation that uses open source software. Where do you think WebKit came from?
Oh, those are available, sure. Some of them are vaguely healthy-ish, and they're certainly faster and cheaper than what I can make from scratch (for small quantities - cooking from scratch gets cheaper when you scale it up). But if you grew up with parents who didn't know how to cook and couldn't afford to go to nice restaurants, it's quite likely you've never had duck in plum sauce with fried rice before, and have no idea whether it would taste good or not. Exposure to eating good food is even more important than learning how to cook good food; if you know what you want to make, figuring out how to make it isn't that hard.