I expected this was going to happen. I also expect that in the days to come, we're going to find that every single auto manufacturer has been cheating in some way or another, and that in the end, they're all going to say that the emissions standards were impossible to meet without cheating.
Yes, I'm actually well aware of all that, considering I owned a Teletype. It was the console device for the first computer I ever built (which was on perfboard, and 75% of it was my own design).
Mock me all you want, at least I'm not paying a premium price to be tracked with millimeter accuracy everywhere I go, and to be part of some Russian or Chinese jerks' bot-net, all so I can be amused playing twitch-games while sitting on the can at work.
The thing is complicated and takes up too much space.
It has nothing to do with that; TRS jacks/plugs are about as simple and foolproof as you can get, they've been around in one form or another for at least as long as the invention of the telephone exchange. The real reason they want to get rid of it is to attempt to close the 'analog hole' once and for all. So long as there is baseband analog audio available from a device, audio can be pirated. It's not quite as clean a copy as a direct digital copy, but it's good enough. Not having a headphone jack means it's that much harder to make analog copies of audio. Not impossible; for someone like myself and most readers of Slashdot, it's trivially easy and no headphone jack is just a minor annoyance, but for the average, non-technical person, it might be discouraging enough that they wouldn't bother.
With paper tape punch and reader, or does it have the accoustic coupler (that only fits a standard Bell desk telephone handset) 110-baud modem instead? xD By the way where are you still getting rolls of paper for it? I'm down to using paper towels stolen from the dispensers at work. xD
Any of you watch that show they spun Michael Weatherly off into, "Bull"? So far it's not such a bad show, if you like Michael Weatherly at least. Recently though I turned off a new episode partway through, because it was a story about a self-driving car developer company whose vehicle killed someone. I turned it off because the damned car had a face, and was having entire, coherent, human-level conversations with people; it was totally self-aware, had a sense of humor, etc. I couldn't stand it. Not because I didn't like the character of the car, but because I know that their totally fictional, science-fantasy representation of 'AI' is what the vast majority of people in the world think is real 'AI'. Then here comes this Slashdot pseudo-news story. People are going to buy this damned phone, thinking they're going to have a new silicon friend in their pocket to keep them company or somesuch nonsense. Seriously, people, can we please do something to educate people that what the press and the media and other people who don't know what they're talking about is calling 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually about as smart as a very smart dog, and not anywhere near being like a human?
Well, you can be a cowardly cuck and accept Miscreant-o-soft's phallus into your backside all you want, meanwhile the rest of us will continue to fight for what's right and what's ours. I hope for your sake you enjoy being a 'power bottom'.
As in 'Goodbye forever, don't let the virtual door hit you in the virtual ass on the way out'.
This week they literally forced us onto Windows 10, in the most fascist way possible: Remotely bricking our machines. Bastards. Windows 10 makes my eyes bleed..
Why is there 'news' on Facebook at all? How about they put a big disclaimer on the front page that says "Facebook is not a news source, anything posted claiming to be 'news' should not be taken seriously unless verified by actual news organizations, you have been warned"?
Okay, I'm being very flippant about it, but I stopped using cable TV about 10 years ago, started using an antenna for broadcast stations, and never looked back once. My DVR always has more sitting on it than I have time to watch. Some shows pile up, and I'll watch those during the 'dry spell' times of the year when things are in reruns anyway. I know my situation isn't available to everyone (I can have an antenna, and I can get every major network plus a range of 2nd-tier ones), but I still say if you can use an antenna effectively to get shows for free, then by all means do it.
That's the most polite term for what Miscreant-o-soft is trying to be now: Having (in their view, anyway) won the war, and (again, in their view) having subdued and subjugated the conquered, Miscreant-o-soft is now attempting to demonstrate to their new subjects that they are benevolent, that living under their rule won't be so bad, and to accomplish this utter and complete fiction, they're creating a (likely) false sense of 'choice' and 'privacy'.
I call bullshit on the entire fiasco; prove to us that this is anything more than just Windows-dressing to lull people into a false sense of security.
Here in the U.S., you can still cobble together a simple AM radio receiver from 5 components (or less) plus some Hi-Z headphones and an antenna wire. It's not great quality sound, it's only monophonic, it doesn't have very sensitive reception (depending on your antenna) and is as basic as you can get -- but it's still got a certain magic to it that you can receive music, information, and news from a distance with such simple technology. So far as I remember, you can build something similar to receive FM broadcast radio with a small handful of components. It would be very sad, I think, if that all went away and you couldn't have your kid build, with some simple components, a working radio receiver, that doesn't requite a Bachelors' degree in engineering to fully understand the complete working principles of (which digital-only 'radio', essentially, does).
If you call me a 'Luddite' then you clearly don't understand the spirit of what I'm saying here. 'Newer' isn't always 'better', just like 'older' doesn't necessarily mean 'bad' or 'obsolete' or 'useless', either, and 'more complicated' has it's own connotations.
At least here in the United States, I think Congress, as well as quite a large swath of the citizenry, would have something to say about broadcast media (radio or television) becoming 'subscription only', if for no other reason than having news and emergency information available to everyone at all times, for free.
You know what? I think I was a bit harsh with you when I wrote that, and I'd like to apologize for that. I do get really annoyed laterly, though, when I write out a comment and someone misses part of the content, but that doesn't mean I should be taking it out on you. We good?
I'm just pointing out that you are implicitly assuming that if people just knew, they'd care.
No, actually, you're demonstrating that you either didn't read my entire original content, aren't capable of comprehending all of it's meaning, or don't care to comprehend the entire meaning (perhaps only wishing to understand what you want to understand) -- or perhaps you're trolling me. If it's not the latter, then go back and read it again, I assure you there is mention of a group that doesn't care.
The word 'we' in my context is meant to imply all of humanity, and perhaps all life on Earth, not any particular subset of humans.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
If you're being sarcastic, then bravo, sir, I approve. If you're serious, then, sadly, you're representative of a major part of the problem: the 'to hell with everyone else so long as I get mine' segement of the population.
I don't think the Average Person, regardless of where they live in the world, thinks far enough ahead to really care about the subject of climate change, no. The Average Person is too busy every single day trying to make a living, take care of their family, and maybe find a little joy in life, assuming they have any time left over to do that. In some places the Average Person is too busy every day trying to not get killed to even care. Meanwhile, business people, by large and far, are too busy every day in their myopic pursuit of money. Deeply religious types talk about it being "God's will" and "He has a plan for all of us" and/or "The End is coming so it won't matter", so no help from them, either. Sadly, I think we're screwed. The relatively few people there are in the world who both understand the problem, and care what happens enough to do something about it, are such a small minority that they can't really do anything themselves, even if they weren't constantly shouted down and prevented from actually doing anything anyway.
You seem to think Slashdot is a debate forum or a research organization. It is neither; it is a place where pseudo-news stories are posted, and where people comment in whatever ways they see fit, usually their opinions. I have neither the time nor the desire to engage in pointless debate with people I've never met and never will meet, nor do I have the time or desire to do metric tonnes of research just to back up and 'justify' my opinions to people I have never and will never meet. In short you're taking this way too seriously and I really don't want to play. If you don't like my opinions then that's your problem not mine.:-)
That's more or less the strategy they seem to be using here. Of course what I believe is that there are people who will pay to see a movie, and there are people who won't pay to see a movie, and you're not going to convince, coerce, or otherwise force them to change their minds about not paying. What the MPAA wants to do is change hearts and minds to their way of thinking, but they're using the stick instead of the carrot. Also, they're not acknowledging that there are people who will never have their minds changed regardless of what tactics you use.
I'm not your personal research monkey. If you want 'proof' then I suggest you go through the Slashdot archives and read all the news stories about exploits and weaknesses in smartphones, and how easily they can be compromised by apps, even those that come from sources you should be able to trust (and how some phones even have malware installed on them from the factory). Add to this how you have zero control over the OS your phone is running, and how there are parts of the firmware you can't change or even access, because they're not open-source. You can be in denial about it all you want, you can scoff at me and ridicule me all you want, but it doesn't change any of the above and you damned well know it.
The only way I'd ever use a smartphone, regardless of how powerful it's processor was, how much RAM it had, and how much storage it had, as a general-purpose computer, is if I could install any OS and software I wanted to on it. Otherwise your 'computer' has essentially zero security -- because it's a smartphone. I'm sure I'm far from being alone in thinking this. So-called 'smartphones' are pretty dumb when it comes to security; you'd be dumb to put your entire life onto one and use it like a general-purpose computer.
I just checked, and approximately half of the citizens of the United States are on Facebook; who is this 'they' that you speak of, then? Damned near a simple majority of everyone in the U.S.? Numbers grew quickly and seemingly out-of-control? No end in sight? Keeps mutating? Sounds like cancer to me. Can we get some chemo up in this thing, please?
Can you imagine how much worse the rest of the net would be if all those morons were jumping up and down going 'look at me, look at me' everywhere but facebook?
It would look like the late 1990's to early 2000's'; they'd all have blogs, or personal web pages. Do you remember those? Or are you too young to know about them? As-is I imagine they'd go infest places like Reddit or Huffington Post or similar.. or maybe they'd all go back to LiveJournal.
If you're looking at Facebook as a 'containment unit' for the attention-seeking, then you're not seeing the problem: The Cancer that is Facebook keeps growing and mutating, and it's cannibalizing it's userbase to use as both fuel and building materials, like any self-respecting cancer does. The difference between an actual cancer and Facebook, though, is that while a cancer may kill it's host when it grows beyond a certain limit, Facebook will, if it's growth continues, supplant the organism itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I expected this was going to happen. I also expect that in the days to come, we're going to find that every single auto manufacturer has been cheating in some way or another, and that in the end, they're all going to say that the emissions standards were impossible to meet without cheating.
Yes, I'm actually well aware of all that, considering I owned a Teletype. It was the console device for the first computer I ever built (which was on perfboard, and 75% of it was my own design).
Mock me all you want, at least I'm not paying a premium price to be tracked with millimeter accuracy everywhere I go, and to be part of some Russian or Chinese jerks' bot-net, all so I can be amused playing twitch-games while sitting on the can at work.
The thing is complicated and takes up too much space.
It has nothing to do with that; TRS jacks/plugs are about as simple and foolproof as you can get, they've been around in one form or another for at least as long as the invention of the telephone exchange. The real reason they want to get rid of it is to attempt to close the 'analog hole' once and for all. So long as there is baseband analog audio available from a device, audio can be pirated. It's not quite as clean a copy as a direct digital copy, but it's good enough. Not having a headphone jack means it's that much harder to make analog copies of audio. Not impossible; for someone like myself and most readers of Slashdot, it's trivially easy and no headphone jack is just a minor annoyance, but for the average, non-technical person, it might be discouraging enough that they wouldn't bother.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
With paper tape punch and reader, or does it have the accoustic coupler (that only fits a standard Bell desk telephone handset) 110-baud modem instead? xD
By the way where are you still getting rolls of paper for it? I'm down to using paper towels stolen from the dispensers at work. xD
Does it have an SD slot and a removable battery. If not, still a non buy.
Never mind that, is it still as full of security holes as a colander, like every other so-called 'smartphone'? If so, then still a non-buy.
Any of you watch that show they spun Michael Weatherly off into, "Bull"? So far it's not such a bad show, if you like Michael Weatherly at least. Recently though I turned off a new episode partway through, because it was a story about a self-driving car developer company whose vehicle killed someone. I turned it off because the damned car had a face, and was having entire, coherent, human-level conversations with people; it was totally self-aware, had a sense of humor, etc. I couldn't stand it. Not because I didn't like the character of the car, but because I know that their totally fictional, science-fantasy representation of 'AI' is what the vast majority of people in the world think is real 'AI'. Then here comes this Slashdot pseudo-news story. People are going to buy this damned phone, thinking they're going to have a new silicon friend in their pocket to keep them company or somesuch nonsense. Seriously, people, can we please do something to educate people that what the press and the media and other people who don't know what they're talking about is calling 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually about as smart as a very smart dog, and not anywhere near being like a human?
Well, you can be a cowardly cuck and accept Miscreant-o-soft's phallus into your backside all you want, meanwhile the rest of us will continue to fight for what's right and what's ours. I hope for your sake you enjoy being a 'power bottom'.
Electrical tape over your camera, friend. Problem solved.
As in 'Goodbye forever, don't let the virtual door hit you in the virtual ass on the way out'.
This week they literally forced us onto Windows 10, in the most fascist way possible: Remotely bricking our machines. Bastards. Windows 10 makes my eyes bleed..
Why is there 'news' on Facebook at all? How about they put a big disclaimer on the front page that says "Facebook is not a news source, anything posted claiming to be 'news' should not be taken seriously unless verified by actual news organizations, you have been warned"?
Okay, I'm being very flippant about it, but I stopped using cable TV about 10 years ago, started using an antenna for broadcast stations, and never looked back once. My DVR always has more sitting on it than I have time to watch. Some shows pile up, and I'll watch those during the 'dry spell' times of the year when things are in reruns anyway. I know my situation isn't available to everyone (I can have an antenna, and I can get every major network plus a range of 2nd-tier ones), but I still say if you can use an antenna effectively to get shows for free, then by all means do it.
That's the most polite term for what Miscreant-o-soft is trying to be now: Having (in their view, anyway) won the war, and (again, in their view) having subdued and subjugated the conquered, Miscreant-o-soft is now attempting to demonstrate to their new subjects that they are benevolent, that living under their rule won't be so bad, and to accomplish this utter and complete fiction, they're creating a (likely) false sense of 'choice' and 'privacy'.
I call bullshit on the entire fiasco; prove to us that this is anything more than just Windows-dressing to lull people into a false sense of security.
Here in the U.S., you can still cobble together a simple AM radio receiver from 5 components (or less) plus some Hi-Z headphones and an antenna wire. It's not great quality sound, it's only monophonic, it doesn't have very sensitive reception (depending on your antenna) and is as basic as you can get -- but it's still got a certain magic to it that you can receive music, information, and news from a distance with such simple technology. So far as I remember, you can build something similar to receive FM broadcast radio with a small handful of components. It would be very sad, I think, if that all went away and you couldn't have your kid build, with some simple components, a working radio receiver, that doesn't requite a Bachelors' degree in engineering to fully understand the complete working principles of (which digital-only 'radio', essentially, does).
If you call me a 'Luddite' then you clearly don't understand the spirit of what I'm saying here.
'Newer' isn't always 'better', just like 'older' doesn't necessarily mean 'bad' or 'obsolete' or 'useless', either, and 'more complicated' has it's own connotations.
At least here in the United States, I think Congress, as well as quite a large swath of the citizenry, would have something to say about broadcast media (radio or television) becoming 'subscription only', if for no other reason than having news and emergency information available to everyone at all times, for free.
You know what? I think I was a bit harsh with you when I wrote that, and I'd like to apologize for that. I do get really annoyed laterly, though, when I write out a comment and someone misses part of the content, but that doesn't mean I should be taking it out on you. We good?
I'm just pointing out that you are implicitly assuming that if people just knew, they'd care.
No, actually, you're demonstrating that you either didn't read my entire original content, aren't capable of comprehending all of it's meaning, or don't care to comprehend the entire meaning (perhaps only wishing to understand what you want to understand) -- or perhaps you're trolling me. If it's not the latter, then go back and read it again, I assure you there is mention of a group that doesn't care.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
If you're being sarcastic, then bravo, sir, I approve. If you're serious, then, sadly, you're representative of a major part of the problem: the 'to hell with everyone else so long as I get mine' segement of the population.
I don't think the Average Person, regardless of where they live in the world, thinks far enough ahead to really care about the subject of climate change, no. The Average Person is too busy every single day trying to make a living, take care of their family, and maybe find a little joy in life, assuming they have any time left over to do that. In some places the Average Person is too busy every day trying to not get killed to even care. Meanwhile, business people, by large and far, are too busy every day in their myopic pursuit of money. Deeply religious types talk about it being "God's will" and "He has a plan for all of us" and/or "The End is coming so it won't matter", so no help from them, either. Sadly, I think we're screwed. The relatively few people there are in the world who both understand the problem, and care what happens enough to do something about it, are such a small minority that they can't really do anything themselves, even if they weren't constantly shouted down and prevented from actually doing anything anyway.
You seem to think Slashdot is a debate forum or a research organization. It is neither; it is a place where pseudo-news stories are posted, and where people comment in whatever ways they see fit, usually their opinions. I have neither the time nor the desire to engage in pointless debate with people I've never met and never will meet, nor do I have the time or desire to do metric tonnes of research just to back up and 'justify' my opinions to people I have never and will never meet. In short you're taking this way too seriously and I really don't want to play. If you don't like my opinions then that's your problem not mine. :-)
..until morale improves.
That's more or less the strategy they seem to be using here. Of course what I believe is that there are people who will pay to see a movie, and there are people who won't pay to see a movie, and you're not going to convince, coerce, or otherwise force them to change their minds about not paying. What the MPAA wants to do is change hearts and minds to their way of thinking, but they're using the stick instead of the carrot. Also, they're not acknowledging that there are people who will never have their minds changed regardless of what tactics you use.
I'm not your personal research monkey. If you want 'proof' then I suggest you go through the Slashdot archives and read all the news stories about exploits and weaknesses in smartphones, and how easily they can be compromised by apps, even those that come from sources you should be able to trust (and how some phones even have malware installed on them from the factory). Add to this how you have zero control over the OS your phone is running, and how there are parts of the firmware you can't change or even access, because they're not open-source. You can be in denial about it all you want, you can scoff at me and ridicule me all you want, but it doesn't change any of the above and you damned well know it.
The only way I'd ever use a smartphone, regardless of how powerful it's processor was, how much RAM it had, and how much storage it had, as a general-purpose computer, is if I could install any OS and software I wanted to on it. Otherwise your 'computer' has essentially zero security -- because it's a smartphone. I'm sure I'm far from being alone in thinking this. So-called 'smartphones' are pretty dumb when it comes to security; you'd be dumb to put your entire life onto one and use it like a general-purpose computer.
Can you imagine how much worse the rest of the net would be if all those morons were jumping up and down going 'look at me, look at me' everywhere but facebook?
It would look like the late 1990's to early 2000's'; they'd all have blogs, or personal web pages. Do you remember those? Or are you too young to know about them? As-is I imagine they'd go infest places like Reddit or Huffington Post or similar.. or maybe they'd all go back to LiveJournal.
If you're looking at Facebook as a 'containment unit' for the attention-seeking, then you're not seeing the problem: The Cancer that is Facebook keeps growing and mutating, and it's cannibalizing it's userbase to use as both fuel and building materials, like any self-respecting cancer does. The difference between an actual cancer and Facebook, though, is that while a cancer may kill it's host when it grows beyond a certain limit, Facebook will, if it's growth continues, supplant the organism itself.
The future does not look so bright for Facebook as they will probably suffer the same fate as usenet.
Sounds like a positive outcome to me. The world would be better off without the cancer that is Facebook.