I need to start watching WWE! Seriously it's funny to me that the the opening paragraph hypes the "eight-foot tall robots" under a photo that was probably purposefully staged to not make the host look smaller than the bots behind him so as not to bruise his ego or something. Pure speculation on my part of course. Don't bring your WWE robot buddies to my house to beat me up, Mr Jericho!
They didn't say they want Mr Hamill to be the central character, geeze. Any information coming out at his point is going to be very preliminary. Let's not get our nerd rage up just yet.
I just used their reimbursement calculator, and they say I should expect about $67 back. Hey, it's better than nothing, but my own conservative calculation indicates that if I was getting 25mpg instead of the 20 I'm getting, they'd owe me over $450. Oh well. At least my wife's Tucson gets the mileage we expected.
I bought my 2011 Elantra in great part ot the claimed MPG rating, and have been sorely disappointed. I consistently get 20-21 MPG while the rating was in the mid 30s.
I admit I do almost all city driving, but my 1999 Civic got 29-30 mpg for its life doing basically the same thing for 11 years, so it's not a hard number to hit.
I've complained to the Hyundai dealer and everyone I speak to gives me a different answer: "lying salesmen", "break-in period", "cheap gas", etc.
I've tried cheap, mid-price, and top-end gas for extended periods over the 12k miles I've driven it and the mileage hasn't improved one iota since the day I drove it off the lot.
The mechanics have "checked it out" twice and both times said it's working perfectly.
Needless to say I won't be buying Hyundai again unless they cut me a check to cover the lost 100 miles per tank. If I'm lucky I expect I'll get a tenth of that.
Anyone that's used the Redbox rental kiosk by my house has seen this. That thing is never calibrated, and the cursor is well over an inch from where you touch. It's so bad that you almost can't hit the scroll arrow on the left side of the screen because touching at the very edge of the monitor barely gets the cursor to the arrow graphic's right edge.
The summary says November 3rd, but the linked article says November 13th. I'll assume the original article is correct.
And how could you not mention the confirmed upgrade to the Nexus 7? That just moved it from my "interested" to my "must buy" column.
"Google is also upgrading the Nexus 7 tablet. The 16GB version of the 7-inch device is now $199, and is joined by a 32GB version retailing for $249. There’s also the option of HSPA+ mobile in addition to WiFi, which adds a bit of cost. Like the Nexus 4, it runs Android 4.2." (http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/google-rolls-out-new-nexus-smartphones-tablets/)
Why should god be able to circumvent the rules just because his cake is the universe?
Questions like this just demonstrate a failure to understand the basis of monotheistic western religion. The christian god doesn't "circumvent" the rules, he *makes* the rules. He could snap his fingers or wiggle his nose and the whole universe would spring into or out of existence instantly. He could, just by thinking about it, make every human on earth suddenly believe in him wholeheartedly and without doubt. He simply chooses not to.
It's the government's job to correct injustice, and if injustice exists within the government then that is where the change must start. No matter how corrupt the government, vigilantism is worse.
No, it's everyone's job to fight injustice. It's the government's job to enforce the law.
You are conflating justice and law in the same way that some people cry "censorship" when a web site deletes their post because the mods don't like it. It's only censorship when the government prevents you from communicating your message. When a private entity doesn't let you use their resources to communicate, it's just them conducting business as they see fit, which they have a right to do.
It's not Visa's job, nor their duty, to be a "common carrier" of financial transactions, neutral and blind to who uses it. Unlike the phone, wireless, and cable companies, Visa doesn't have a government granted monopoly on a limited resource. Therefore they have no duty to the people to provide their service to all comers.
I'm sure everyone will yell "hip hip, horray!" to this, but it's bad for reasons that aren't obvious. When you have a financial network which has more or less a monopoly on electronic transactions making decisions about who can and cannot make transactions based on arbitrary criterion, the door is opened wide for abuse.
Your argument goes wrong for a variety of reasons. First, it's based on an incorrect premise. Visa and Mastercard don't have a "more or less monopoly" on electronic transactions. You mention Paypal, which is an alternative, and there are a number of other ways to pay online, like Amex, Dwolla, Bitcoin, PayByCash, Noca, WorldPay, etc. Visa and Mastercard may currently have the bulk of transactions, but I suspect that would change pretty fast if they started cutting off payment access for political speech or other groups that take donations, as opposed to illegal activity.
Second, while your point about Wikileaks is an important one, but it’s not as cut and dried as you make it sound. Wikileaks does indeed encourage illegal activity (as opposed to a PAC), which is against Visa’s EULA. But that’s partly just the justification they needed to use. If a series of three-letter agencies come knocking on your company’s door “asking” you to stop doing business with someone they've branded a criminal, most people won't blame you if you do as “asked”.
If you don't like the fact that leaking state secrets is illegal, then complain to your government, not the businesses that the govt pressures to shut ‘em down. However, while Visa can hide behind legality in the case of fraudsters, scammers, pedophiles, and leakers, they can't use that same argument to stop payments to racists, sexists, or communists, because none of those things are illegal in the US. There could be issues in places like France and Germany, where certain speech is illegal, but you have to respect the wishes of the people that choose to outlaw such things.
I don't see a slippery slope here, I see the slightly fuzzy lines that exist in every international business situation between legal and illegal activity. Finally, comparing a business decision like this to vigilantism is ridiculous. If I own a store and I don't want to do business with the neighborhood drug dealer, I’m not being a vigilante; I'm exercising my freedom of association. Visa isn't hunting down scammers and breaking their fingers so they can’t type. They are simply refusing to do business with them as any company has the right to do.
Of course "exploit" is fundamentally a subjective label, so of course it can't be "solved," outside some more formal definition of "exploit" that will inevitably fall short of people's wishes.
Exploits are like weeds. If it's my garden and I don't want it growing there, it's a weed. If it's my computer and I don't want it running there, it's an exploit, or a virus, or malware, etc.
We all know of the dividing line for free speech where you maybe don't allow people to yell "fire" in a crowded theater because it causes panic and someone might get hurt.
Well, if people weren't stupid, they wouldn't panic, and this situation wouldn't arise, right? You could yell "fire" in every crowded theater in the country and people would simply stand up and file out in an orderly fashion and then get annoyed that their movie was interrupted.
But that's not how people work, even in a highly civilized and educated country, so we use the law to help accommodate the ignorant behavior people are prone to.
No one seems willing to admit that maybe there's a corollary here. We know full well that some ignorant people will do bad things when you yell "Allah rapes babies in the name of Muhammad" and put it all over the internet. Does that mean people shouldn't be allowed to do so?
I don't know. It's a slippery slope. But maybe even free speech purists like myself need to look at the fact that we don't live in a perfect world where everyone can be expected to behave rationally, and we need to make adjustments for that fact.
Sure, ok, but what makes more sense to give to art students: a book with a bunch of empty boxes, or an "off-the-shelf" book with pictures of the art? Whatever benefit they supposedly get from a custom-made book they should be able to get from lecture and teachers notes, at least compared to the bother and expense of the shite they ended up with.
I call BS on the school. I took an Art History class in the US maybe 5 years ago, and it was chock full of really good reprints of famous works throughout history. The book cost me like $80.
...but if society was more comfortable with the idea than that restriction would be removed.
If society is comfortable with the speech you are using, it may not be a useful form of protest. The whole point of "freedom of speech" as espoused by the founding fathers was to allow people to express ideas that others are *not* comfortable with.
It's not really freedom if you are "free" to do anything you want as long as it's ok with everyone else.
Sorry, Good is already heavily integrated into our environment (unfortunately, not my call). Does the native exchange support include app-level or device level encryption and remote wipe capability? Maybe that's why they wanted it. Who knows what the muckity mucks base their decisions off of. But it's good to know there's better native support than I thought, at least.
I don't think you understand the business market or the iPad. The iPad can be managed centrally. You can control which apps may be installed. You can do remote wipes, and you can install apps outside of the App Store. From a business perspective, there's not all that much to dislike about the iPad. It can't join AD, but then, neither can any other mobile device that isn't a laptop.
From a corporate IT perspective the biggest problem with the iPad is the need for yet another third party app and server to provide secure email in an exchange environment.
First we had to install a BES server because everyone had a blackberry. But setup is easy and maintenance is minimal. The fix for literally 90% of the problems we see with blackberries is "pull the battery out for 10 seconds then put it back in".
With iDevices you have to install something like a "Good" server, then install the Good application, and the Good reader application, and then set up new accounts for each device, and constantly take calls from people who forgot their password for the app.
the fix for probably 75% of the problems with the app is "uninstall and reinstall it" which wouldn't be a big deal if the process didn't also require IT to regenerate a provisioning PIN for the user too.
IMO the whole thing is a hack designed to shoe-horn a non-business friendly device into a business environment because the people in charge want their shiny at work as well as at home.
Putting someone up and buying them food doesn't also pay their mortgage, etc, so it sounds like a pretty crappy deal to me. I could totally see the desire to watch someone work and see how they do, but that's what contractors are for. You hire them, work them for a week or two, and if you don't like them, you make a phone call and they magically disappear. If you do like them, then you eventually hire them.
Publishers *didn't* care until Apple came along and showed them how they could (illegally) fix prices and make more money.
Or maybe they did care a little, but didn't think they could do anything about it.
But then Apple came in and said "We will sell your books also, but we want a 30% cut, which is way more than Amazon, so you're going to need to come up with a better solution so you can keep making a profit after we take our enormously ridiculous skim. And here's how..."
Slashdot Mirror
I need to start watching WWE!
Seriously it's funny to me that the the opening paragraph hypes the "eight-foot tall robots" under a photo that was probably purposefully staged to not make the host look smaller than the bots behind him so as not to bruise his ego or something.
Pure speculation on my part of course. Don't bring your WWE robot buddies to my house to beat me up, Mr Jericho!
They didn't say they want Mr Hamill to be the central character, geeze. Any information coming out at his point is going to be very preliminary. Let's not get our nerd rage up just yet.
I just used their reimbursement calculator, and they say I should expect about $67 back. Hey, it's better than nothing, but my own conservative calculation indicates that if I was getting 25mpg instead of the 20 I'm getting, they'd owe me over $450. Oh well. At least my wife's Tucson gets the mileage we expected.
I bought my 2011 Elantra in great part ot the claimed MPG rating, and have been sorely disappointed. I consistently get 20-21 MPG while the rating was in the mid 30s.
I admit I do almost all city driving, but my 1999 Civic got 29-30 mpg for its life doing basically the same thing for 11 years, so it's not a hard number to hit.
I've complained to the Hyundai dealer and everyone I speak to gives me a different answer: "lying salesmen", "break-in period", "cheap gas", etc.
I've tried cheap, mid-price, and top-end gas for extended periods over the 12k miles I've driven it and the mileage hasn't improved one iota since the day I drove it off the lot.
The mechanics have "checked it out" twice and both times said it's working perfectly.
Needless to say I won't be buying Hyundai again unless they cut me a check to cover the lost 100 miles per tank. If I'm lucky I expect I'll get a tenth of that.
Anyone that's used the Redbox rental kiosk by my house has seen this. That thing is never calibrated, and the cursor is well over an inch from where you touch. It's so bad that you almost can't hit the scroll arrow on the left side of the screen because touching at the very edge of the monitor barely gets the cursor to the arrow graphic's right edge.
The summary says November 3rd, but the linked article says November 13th. I'll assume the original article is correct.
And how could you not mention the confirmed upgrade to the Nexus 7? That just moved it from my "interested" to my "must buy" column.
"Google is also upgrading the Nexus 7 tablet. The 16GB version of the 7-inch device is now $199, and is joined by a 32GB version retailing for $249. There’s also the option of HSPA+ mobile in addition to WiFi, which adds a bit of cost. Like the Nexus 4, it runs Android 4.2." (http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/google-rolls-out-new-nexus-smartphones-tablets/)
Why should god be able to circumvent the rules just because his cake is the universe?
Questions like this just demonstrate a failure to understand the basis of monotheistic western religion. The christian god doesn't "circumvent" the rules, he *makes* the rules. He could snap his fingers or wiggle his nose and the whole universe would spring into or out of existence instantly. He could, just by thinking about it, make every human on earth suddenly believe in him wholeheartedly and without doubt. He simply chooses not to.
Too bad he's kind of a dick.
It's the government's job to correct injustice, and if injustice exists within the government then that is where the change must start. No matter how corrupt the government, vigilantism is worse.
No, it's everyone's job to fight injustice. It's the government's job to enforce the law.
You are conflating justice and law in the same way that some people cry "censorship" when a web site deletes their post because the mods don't like it. It's only censorship when the government prevents you from communicating your message. When a private entity doesn't let you use their resources to communicate, it's just them conducting business as they see fit, which they have a right to do.
It's not Visa's job, nor their duty, to be a "common carrier" of financial transactions, neutral and blind to who uses it. Unlike the phone, wireless, and cable companies, Visa doesn't have a government granted monopoly on a limited resource. Therefore they have no duty to the people to provide their service to all comers.
I'm sure everyone will yell "hip hip, horray!" to this, but it's bad for reasons that aren't obvious. When you have a financial network which has more or less a monopoly on electronic transactions making decisions about who can and cannot make transactions based on arbitrary criterion, the door is opened wide for abuse.
Your argument goes wrong for a variety of reasons. First, it's based on an incorrect premise. Visa and Mastercard don't have a "more or less monopoly" on electronic transactions. You mention Paypal, which is an alternative, and there are a number of other ways to pay online, like Amex, Dwolla, Bitcoin, PayByCash, Noca, WorldPay, etc. Visa and Mastercard may currently have the bulk of transactions, but I suspect that would change pretty fast if they started cutting off payment access for political speech or other groups that take donations, as opposed to illegal activity.
Second, while your point about Wikileaks is an important one, but it’s not as cut and dried as you make it sound. Wikileaks does indeed encourage illegal activity (as opposed to a PAC), which is against Visa’s EULA. But that’s partly just the justification they needed to use. If a series of three-letter agencies come knocking on your company’s door “asking” you to stop doing business with someone they've branded a criminal, most people won't blame you if you do as “asked”.
If you don't like the fact that leaking state secrets is illegal, then complain to your government, not the businesses that the govt pressures to shut ‘em down.
However, while Visa can hide behind legality in the case of fraudsters, scammers, pedophiles, and leakers, they can't use that same argument to stop payments to racists, sexists, or communists, because none of those things are illegal in the US. There could be issues in places like France and Germany, where certain speech is illegal, but you have to respect the wishes of the people that choose to outlaw such things.
I don't see a slippery slope here, I see the slightly fuzzy lines that exist in every international business situation between legal and illegal activity.
Finally, comparing a business decision like this to vigilantism is ridiculous. If I own a store and I don't want to do business with the neighborhood drug dealer, I’m not being a vigilante; I'm exercising my freedom of association. Visa isn't hunting down scammers and breaking their fingers so they can’t type. They are simply refusing to do business with them as any company has the right to do.
Of course "exploit" is fundamentally a subjective label, so of course it can't be "solved," outside some more formal definition of "exploit" that will inevitably fall short of people's wishes.
Exploits are like weeds. If it's my garden and I don't want it growing there, it's a weed. If it's my computer and I don't want it running there, it's an exploit, or a virus, or malware, etc.
We all know of the dividing line for free speech where you maybe don't allow people to yell "fire" in a crowded theater because it causes panic and someone might get hurt.
Well, if people weren't stupid, they wouldn't panic, and this situation wouldn't arise, right? You could yell "fire" in every crowded theater in the country and people would simply stand up and file out in an orderly fashion and then get annoyed that their movie was interrupted.
But that's not how people work, even in a highly civilized and educated country, so we use the law to help accommodate the ignorant behavior people are prone to.
No one seems willing to admit that maybe there's a corollary here. We know full well that some ignorant people will do bad things when you yell "Allah rapes babies in the name of Muhammad" and put it all over the internet. Does that mean people shouldn't be allowed to do so?
I don't know. It's a slippery slope. But maybe even free speech purists like myself need to look at the fact that we don't live in a perfect world where everyone can be expected to behave rationally, and we need to make adjustments for that fact.
Sure, ok, but what makes more sense to give to art students: a book with a bunch of empty boxes, or an "off-the-shelf" book with pictures of the art? Whatever benefit they supposedly get from a custom-made book they should be able to get from lecture and teachers notes, at least compared to the bother and expense of the shite they ended up with.
I call BS on the school. I took an Art History class in the US maybe 5 years ago, and it was chock full of really good reprints of famous works throughout history. The book cost me like $80.
...but if society was more comfortable with the idea than that restriction would be removed.
If society is comfortable with the speech you are using, it may not be a useful form of protest. The whole point of "freedom of speech" as espoused by the founding fathers was to allow people to express ideas that others are *not* comfortable with.
It's not really freedom if you are "free" to do anything you want as long as it's ok with everyone else.
...the newly released and terribly blurry photos of Kate Middleton's tits? And what kinds of sounds would he add to that film?
Just what we needed... more "proof" that all space-landing related video is faked. Look how realistic we can make it look now!
Just what the conspiracy nuts ordered :)
wow. that is awesome! Thanks.
Sorry, Good is already heavily integrated into our environment (unfortunately, not my call). Does the native exchange support include app-level or device level encryption and remote wipe capability? Maybe that's why they wanted it. Who knows what the muckity mucks base their decisions off of. But it's good to know there's better native support than I thought, at least.
I don't think you understand the business market or the iPad. The iPad can be managed centrally. You can control which apps may be installed. You can do remote wipes, and you can install apps outside of the App Store. From a business perspective, there's not all that much to dislike about the iPad. It can't join AD, but then, neither can any other mobile device that isn't a laptop.
From a corporate IT perspective the biggest problem with the iPad is the need for yet another third party app and server to provide secure email in an exchange environment.
First we had to install a BES server because everyone had a blackberry. But setup is easy and maintenance is minimal. The fix for literally 90% of the problems we see with blackberries is "pull the battery out for 10 seconds then put it back in".
With iDevices you have to install something like a "Good" server, then install the Good application, and the Good reader application, and then set up new accounts for each device, and constantly take calls from people who forgot their password for the app.
the fix for probably 75% of the problems with the app is "uninstall and reinstall it" which wouldn't be a big deal if the process didn't also require IT to regenerate a provisioning PIN for the user too.
IMO the whole thing is a hack designed to shoe-horn a non-business friendly device into a business environment because the people in charge want their shiny at work as well as at home.
Putting someone up and buying them food doesn't also pay their mortgage, etc, so it sounds like a pretty crappy deal to me. I could totally see the desire to watch someone work and see how they do, but that's what contractors are for. You hire them, work them for a week or two, and if you don't like them, you make a phone call and they magically disappear. If you do like them, then you eventually hire them.
This just sounds shady to me.
Wait, shouldn't it be /. on the skis, jumping over a shark?
Well obviously you would build a back door into the project that you can use to shut it down remotely if they don't hire you, right?
Can I just send my significant other? I need a vacation.
...welcome our new robo-cheetah overlords.
Publishers *didn't* care until Apple came along and showed them how they could (illegally) fix prices and make more money.
Or maybe they did care a little, but didn't think they could do anything about it.
But then Apple came in and said "We will sell your books also, but we want a 30% cut, which is way more than Amazon, so you're going to need to come up with a better solution so you can keep making a profit after we take our enormously ridiculous skim. And here's how..."
They may not have used those exact words.