I read news feeds from around the world and post comments to crackbook about them with links to the articles.
The US news is the *last* thing I read, because it is the *least* informative and the *most biased.*
For example: Not one word about the anti-NSA protests in US media. Still. Yet there were articles about the protests from Al Jazeera, Russia Times, and France 24.
I pity Americans. You're led around like sheep and you're too naval-gazing to realize how misinformed you are.
It's sad to see the US turning into a police state. Or perhaps it's too late, that's been done, and they're just dotting the I's and crossing the T's.
If this evidence is deemed acceptable, you can expect the scope of the surveillance to expand dramatically as there is suddenly a reason for tapping the people in-country: prosecution. You can expect widespread surveillance to capture gang bangers, drug dealers, and probably even the guy next door who works "under the table" to avoid paying the IRS.
Modern technology gives the government powers far over and above anything that has ever been available before when it comes to monitoring the population. And not merely monitoring, but controlling. Unlike with television, the "message" you get on the internet can be customized and tailored based on where and how you're surfing from. Newspaper sites have already been doing this for years, tailogring the news based on which nation someone is surfing from.
I must admit I would never have predicted the abuses that I'm seeing happen. There was so much hope for the benefits of the internet when it was starting that no one ever really discussed the potential for abuse. Worse, you can't even try to stop the abuse because if you implement the end-to-end encryption that can prevent it, the government comes down on the companies involved to force them to stop. You're not allowed to maintain your privacy through a service like LavaBit in this new surveillance society.
There was a Sylvester Stallone movie years ago that porttrayed an idyllic society above ground where it was illegal to even swear, and where in-room monitors spat out tickets for such offenses automatically.
Is that where our world is headed? Towards a stale and staid managed society where any crime is a major shock because the people have stopped even thinking about performing criminal acts because they expect to be caught immediately if they try? It sounds like a lifestyle of fear and repression far beyond anything even the Nazis or East Germany ever dreamed of.
I'd say that it all starts with this case, but we all know that's not true. It started years ago, when the surveillance began. This case is merely a continuation of the world government's mission to enslave humanity.
I've done software development for such systems, and I am not a "professional engineer". I'm a professional computer programmer with a BSc in computer science.
The thing people forget is that with so many nations doing the spying, everyone is a foreigner to many of those nations. Even if your home country isn't spying on you, the neighbours are. And if they find anything interesting about your traffic, they let your home country know about it through "bi-lateral security agreements".
i.e. Every country spies on it's own citizens by proxy.
Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Germany. France. The UK.
There don't seem to be any exceptions. Over-reaching spy agencies seem to be the norm right now, despite their illegality.
Who is to blame for the fact that no nation other than the US has come up with a paradigm or service that the whole world has decided they need?
I'm as much against US domination of global politics and economic issues as anyone, but I don't blame the US for the fact that they have a lot of successful internet businesses. No one is forcing anyone to use their services. There are competitors in other nations (e.g. Baidu) that haven't spread outside their local markets. There are forums and services which cater to local markets.
It's not like you can claim that it's so outrageously expensive to register a.com that no one from another nation can compete -- far from it.
If you want someone to blame, look to your own citizens who'd rather pony up the cash for an American service rather than buying locally. Take a look at your local services and ask yourself why they aren't achieving greater market share.
I think you'll find they all have one problem in comparison to their American counterparts: they suck donkey balls.
Sounds like another case of the WMD aluminum tubes they found in Iraq, which were way too weak to be used for a centrifuge for enriching uranium. But it was a good enough excuse for the US to go to war.
Caps are nothing more than an excuse to gouge the customer. If they were anything about the actual costs of delivering bandwidth, then if you ran over the cap, the cost for excess bandwidth would be on par with the cost of the original data block that came with the subscription.
For example, let's say the cap was set at 200GB/month for $50. If you ran over and it was about covering costs, then an extra gigabyte would cost you about 25 cents. But it doesn't. It costs many, many, many times what the basic allotment does.
It's all predicated on the theory that if you only screw some of the people, there won't be enough of them bitching about it to cost you customers. But it is, nonetheless, straight forward gouging.
The core system gets accelerated graphics from more vendors. The core system gets tweaked for better real-time responsiveness. The core system gets more eyes debugging it for stability. The core system has another vendor contributing fixes and patches.
Only to a fanatical raving lunatic is this a "problem."
Oh, yeah. We're talking about Stallman. You don't get any more fanatical than that, though I don't consider the man a lunatic by any stretch of the imagination.
For me, the deciding factor in purchasing a printer has always been the cost of toner cartridges. I found far too many vendors were willing to "dump" a printer for a cheap price and then soak you on toner later.
Surprise, surprise: my last (and current) printer is an HP LaserJet 1200. Toner is now getting hard to find after nearly a decade of use, but is still available for around $90 a cartridge, which lasts a good 2 years or so at my print volume.
If someone cracks into a system, they get charged with illegal use of computer resources. if someone violates the EULA for a website, they can be similarly charged.
I see no reason why these PR firms couldn't therefore be charged with similar violations in court.
The whole article is also rather biased, as it claims that those two entry-level positions are a measurement of IT in general. It's like trying to claim that you interviewed a bunch of mechanics at garages, and from that you can draw conclusions about the engineers who design cars.
And thanks to that experience I've not lost any data, only time. I've already recovered the OS, installed the extra packages I need, and am posting this from Debian. The last two pieces of software I need are downloading now, and the source code for my pet project is all in SourceForge repositories so I'll have it back in a development-worthy state by the end of the day.
I think it's the interpretation of the stats that's interesting.
I read it as "the majority of businesses who bought Office 2003 haven't switched in all these years." Neither up nor down for open source office formats, but a slam against Microsoft for failing to introduce any kind of "must have" features in over a decade.
Back in the day, a network operating system was something that could run a file, print, and sometimes database services. Nowadays when the firmware of printers and NAS devices provide those services, I question the use of the term NOS at all.
Sure you can use different firmware bases for network hardware, but it's not like you can arbitrarily install whatever you want on such devices.
What AAA really means is that a lot more money has been spent on details of graphics and sound, not that so much extra effort has been put into the gameplay. As a result, a lot of so-called AAA titles are no more fun to play than the games from the $20 bin.
Like movies, the advertising and hype budget for a AAA title makes it different from the "average" game. And like the movie industry, that big advertising budget brings in the buyers. Unfortunately, much like an overhyped movie, it also results in a lot of disappointed potential fans who expected more from the game after all the buildup.
Do we need AAA titles? Of course not. But as long as there is the lure of winning the "big gamble" by producing a half billion dollar sales hit title, there will be those who'd rather invest in that gamble than focusing on a handful of lesser titles which would cost the same amount.
However, one should never make the mistake of thinking that these trivial little games on cell phones are going to decimate the hard core gaming market. Just because "Angry Birds" has millions of dollars in total sales doesn't mean it's competitive with something like "Half Life." They're totally different styles of games, and satisfy different audiences.
Slashdot Mirror
I read news feeds from around the world and post comments to crackbook about them with links to the articles.
The US news is the *last* thing I read, because it is the *least* informative and the *most biased.*
For example: Not one word about the anti-NSA protests in US media. Still. Yet there were articles about the protests from Al Jazeera, Russia Times, and France 24.
I pity Americans. You're led around like sheep and you're too naval-gazing to realize how misinformed you are.
Your IQ, on the other hand, is accurately represented by your slashdot post rating.
Zero.
That's why there was such good coverage of the anti-NSA protests from American media yesterday, right?
It's sad to see the US turning into a police state. Or perhaps it's too late, that's been done, and they're just dotting the I's and crossing the T's.
If this evidence is deemed acceptable, you can expect the scope of the surveillance to expand dramatically as there is suddenly a reason for tapping the people in-country: prosecution. You can expect widespread surveillance to capture gang bangers, drug dealers, and probably even the guy next door who works "under the table" to avoid paying the IRS.
Modern technology gives the government powers far over and above anything that has ever been available before when it comes to monitoring the population. And not merely monitoring, but controlling. Unlike with television, the "message" you get on the internet can be customized and tailored based on where and how you're surfing from. Newspaper sites have already been doing this for years, tailogring the news based on which nation someone is surfing from.
I must admit I would never have predicted the abuses that I'm seeing happen. There was so much hope for the benefits of the internet when it was starting that no one ever really discussed the potential for abuse. Worse, you can't even try to stop the abuse because if you implement the end-to-end encryption that can prevent it, the government comes down on the companies involved to force them to stop. You're not allowed to maintain your privacy through a service like LavaBit in this new surveillance society.
There was a Sylvester Stallone movie years ago that porttrayed an idyllic society above ground where it was illegal to even swear, and where in-room monitors spat out tickets for such offenses automatically.
Is that where our world is headed? Towards a stale and staid managed society where any crime is a major shock because the people have stopped even thinking about performing criminal acts because they expect to be caught immediately if they try? It sounds like a lifestyle of fear and repression far beyond anything even the Nazis or East Germany ever dreamed of.
I'd say that it all starts with this case, but we all know that's not true. It started years ago, when the surveillance began. This case is merely a continuation of the world government's mission to enslave humanity.
Bullshit.
I've done software development for such systems, and I am not a "professional engineer". I'm a professional computer programmer with a BSc in computer science.
The thing people forget is that with so many nations doing the spying, everyone is a foreigner to many of those nations. Even if your home country isn't spying on you, the neighbours are. And if they find anything interesting about your traffic, they let your home country know about it through "bi-lateral security agreements".
i.e. Every country spies on it's own citizens by proxy.
Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Germany. France. The UK.
There don't seem to be any exceptions. Over-reaching spy agencies seem to be the norm right now, despite their illegality.
Welcome to the NWO.
Who is to blame for the fact that no nation other than the US has come up with a paradigm or service that the whole world has decided they need?
I'm as much against US domination of global politics and economic issues as anyone, but I don't blame the US for the fact that they have a lot of successful internet businesses. No one is forcing anyone to use their services. There are competitors in other nations (e.g. Baidu) that haven't spread outside their local markets. There are forums and services which cater to local markets.
It's not like you can claim that it's so outrageously expensive to register a .com that no one from another nation can compete -- far from it.
If you want someone to blame, look to your own citizens who'd rather pony up the cash for an American service rather than buying locally. Take a look at your local services and ask yourself why they aren't achieving greater market share.
I think you'll find they all have one problem in comparison to their American counterparts: they suck donkey balls.
Sounds like another case of the WMD aluminum tubes they found in Iraq, which were way too weak to be used for a centrifuge for enriching uranium. But it was a good enough excuse for the US to go to war.
"But we have tubes!!!"
Cranky old man causes shit in lineups. News at 11.
WTF is this doing on Slashdot?
'nuff said
Caps are nothing more than an excuse to gouge the customer. If they were anything about the actual costs of delivering bandwidth, then if you ran over the cap, the cost for excess bandwidth would be on par with the cost of the original data block that came with the subscription.
For example, let's say the cap was set at 200GB/month for $50. If you ran over and it was about covering costs, then an extra gigabyte would cost you about 25 cents. But it doesn't. It costs many, many, many times what the basic allotment does.
It's all predicated on the theory that if you only screw some of the people, there won't be enough of them bitching about it to cost you customers. But it is, nonetheless, straight forward gouging.
But bad acting was part of the charm of the original series.
And no one in their right mind with a shred of honesty would ever claim that the acting was good on the original series.
How is this a "problem"?
The core system gets accelerated graphics from more vendors. The core system gets tweaked for better real-time responsiveness. The core system gets more eyes debugging it for stability. The core system has another vendor contributing fixes and patches.
Only to a fanatical raving lunatic is this a "problem."
Oh, yeah. We're talking about Stallman. You don't get any more fanatical than that, though I don't consider the man a lunatic by any stretch of the imagination.
You chose a framework once: Qt.
You chose a product the second time.
Therein lies the difference. The latter is at the mercy of one corporation's budget and marketting decisions.
For me, the deciding factor in purchasing a printer has always been the cost of toner cartridges. I found far too many vendors were willing to "dump" a printer for a cheap price and then soak you on toner later.
Surprise, surprise: my last (and current) printer is an HP LaserJet 1200. Toner is now getting hard to find after nearly a decade of use, but is still available for around $90 a cartridge, which lasts a good 2 years or so at my print volume.
If someone cracks into a system, they get charged with illegal use of computer resources. if someone violates the EULA for a website, they can be similarly charged.
I see no reason why these PR firms couldn't therefore be charged with similar violations in court.
The math.
If you're into cryptography, you can do the math. You don't have to take Bruce's word for it.
The whole article is also rather biased, as it claims that those two entry-level positions are a measurement of IT in general. It's like trying to claim that you interviewed a bunch of mechanics at garages, and from that you can draw conclusions about the engineers who design cars.
But heaven forbid you should show a nipple!
And thanks to that experience I've not lost any data, only time. I've already recovered the OS, installed the extra packages I need, and am posting this from Debian. The last two pieces of software I need are downloading now, and the source code for my pet project is all in SourceForge repositories so I'll have it back in a development-worthy state by the end of the day.
Yo. Fucktard. I've been living in Unix land since the mid-eighties. Ubuntu fucked up, not me.
I got in my bitching about the failed Ubuntu upgrade before Crackbook died.:)
Installing Debian...
(Yes, I know it's off topic, but it's gratifying to have the gripe out there with no one able to defend Ubuntu.)
I think it's the interpretation of the stats that's interesting.
I read it as "the majority of businesses who bought Office 2003 haven't switched in all these years." Neither up nor down for open source office formats, but a slam against Microsoft for failing to introduce any kind of "must have" features in over a decade.
Back in the day, a network operating system was something that could run a file, print, and sometimes database services. Nowadays when the firmware of printers and NAS devices provide those services, I question the use of the term NOS at all.
Sure you can use different firmware bases for network hardware, but it's not like you can arbitrarily install whatever you want on such devices.
What AAA really means is that a lot more money has been spent on details of graphics and sound, not that so much extra effort has been put into the gameplay. As a result, a lot of so-called AAA titles are no more fun to play than the games from the $20 bin.
Like movies, the advertising and hype budget for a AAA title makes it different from the "average" game. And like the movie industry, that big advertising budget brings in the buyers. Unfortunately, much like an overhyped movie, it also results in a lot of disappointed potential fans who expected more from the game after all the buildup.
Do we need AAA titles? Of course not. But as long as there is the lure of winning the "big gamble" by producing a half billion dollar sales hit title, there will be those who'd rather invest in that gamble than focusing on a handful of lesser titles which would cost the same amount.
However, one should never make the mistake of thinking that these trivial little games on cell phones are going to decimate the hard core gaming market. Just because "Angry Birds" has millions of dollars in total sales doesn't mean it's competitive with something like "Half Life." They're totally different styles of games, and satisfy different audiences.