What really pisses me off is when hardware with web access (i.e. my dsl modem) can't render properly under Firefox. WTF? I have to drop back to IE just to get everything displaying properly. There's absolutely no excuse for using fancy tricks in a damn administration console. If anything should be browser-agnostic, this is it!
This isn't an Onion article, this is a real proposal? I might go along with it if they fit the kids with explosive collars like Battle Royale. "Go ahead, Junior. Kick the back of my seat one more time."
But seriously, what the hell? At least the train service is still sane, or at least was the last time I took it. Arrive at the Amtrak station, hand over your luggage, take your seat. You're get there and are on your train inside ten minutes. "But what if terrorists hijack the train? They might try crashing it into buildings! Think of the children!"
This is just one more thing for the 15 year olds who think they're e-badasses because they use Linux to brag about.
"Oh yeah? Who designed your WinBlow$ file system? Just some monopolist? My file system was designed by a murderer. I totally have you beat."
Yeah? The guy who owns my OS, he doesn't just kill people, he kills whole companies! He just takes what he wants from them and when they sue, he buys them out! Original gangsta, Billy G.
Maybe he was angry with her because she was having an affair. He bought a gun out of anger, but didn't want to kill her. He goes home, to find her with her lover. In a struggle with the lover, the lover the lover wrests the gun from Hans. He's got the gun pointed at Hans, who reveals that his wife has in fact ANOTHER lover. In anger, the lover shoots Nina and flees. Hans has no idea who he was, and Nina dies sadly in his arms. The only way he can avoid blame for the murder (having just legally purchased the gun) is to bury Nina himself. In the end, Hans feels responsible for her death, having driven her away from him due to his obsession with work, and of course, the foolish decision to buy the guy. He sees only too late that he should forgiven her for such a minor human flaw, and if he had, then he would still be with her.
You left out the part where he's tutoring a small-time crook in prison and that crook says he shared a cell with another con who claimed he murdered some computer geek's wife and now the geek is doing time for the murder. Hans would have started helping out the guards with their computer problems, then the warden gets him involved in a lucrative spamming operation that rakes in millions under the table. And after the warden has the tutored con killed, Hans plots his escape through a storm sewer, withdrawing all the profits from the bank and mailing a package to the papers implicating the warden in spam and murder.
The other networks have to turn it into a fucking soap opera giving you a 20 minute tear-jerker biography of the damn athlete before each event. That cuts into time that could be better spent, I don't know, covering the actual Olympics? There are so many sports that don't even make it on television.
I have one of those rrnet ethernet devices for the C64. They are great fun. I tried to make a post to a phpBB and it took me about 40 minutes to navigate to the thread I wanted to post in, then it crashed. O sweet glory.
Wow. I guess you have a far lower threshold for fun than I.
Thieves will now have to block the antennae of their purloined plunder. But how's this for an idea: geo-locking hardware like this? "Here's your GPS coordinates. Stray outside of this area, you stop working." Thieves will soon learn that taking something like this will brick it.
I also like the idea of equipping cars with wireless stuff like this. The owner reports it missing, the car starts reporting its location to the cops and they can nab the perps.
What makes the web and the internet "our" thing is the freedom of information, not the particular content it arrives in. People can use static text or embedded flash videos or whatever, it's an argument for techies and purists as to what's best. My concern is about what governments and corporations will try to do to stifle things.
I remember what it was like before the internet (at least before I was on it.) Local dial-up BBS's, that's it. Want national or international chatter? Get on Fidonet and wait days for messages to percolate through the system. My first net experience was with a freebie offering through the library, dial-up on a text interface. It was amazing. By the time I got on the proper net through a local ISP with a graphical browser, wow! What a difference.
The reason why the net has been so great is because it came about as an academic exercise and the corporations really didn't twig onto it until the basic work had already been done.
You know what the future portends at this point? It's not just a boot stomping on a human face forever, the person whose face is getting stomped is stuck with the reincarnation of AOL.
If the corporations get their way, our internet experience will be as naff as what we deal with on the cell phones. They'll bill us $1 per GB, charge extra for access to premium sites, and with this trusted computing bullshit, we won't even have control over our own fucking PC's anymore. It's one thing to have trusted computing and managed code on a game console like the Xbox, it's another to have my PC just as crippled. We won't even be able to say "It's my property, I can do what I want with it" because the EULA will trump that.
As far as computers go, we say "well, we can always install some flavor of Linux, that'll work!" Yeah? As suggested in another topic here, the trusted computing shit wil be built into the CPU, either there will be no way t get around it or it will be some sort of expensive hardware hack where you risk frying your motherboard to make it work.
Someone tell me there's a solution that doesn't boil down to wishful thinking.
I know XP has been cracked. My point is that even if it were as easy as swapping out the no-cd hacked exe in a video game, it's still more work than Win2K required. And for those not up to speed with XP cracks, it can be very time-consuming to research and implement. The casual non-geek pirate is where Microsoft maintains their stranglehold, why bother learning of or about OO when Microsoft Office is stealable/er, free? Lock that puppy down and people will have more need of OO.
I truly believe this will be the next major battle in the arms race between those who wish to control information and people, and those that want freedom, and might very well be the last if they succeed. They've already committed themselves to this path and fired the first shot with the inclusion of the outboard "T.C." chip on many/most(?) motherboards. If they succeed in fully rolling this system out, times will surely get "interesting" indeed, in that bad old Chinese curse kind of way.
So how do we get around it? It sounds like hacktivism isn't enough here and the politicians have amply demonstrated that they refuse to listen to us. What next?
I would be worried that OO.o might get overlooked for pirated copies of MS Office. Thankfully, Microsoft has finally stopped using their own pirated software as an advertising expense. The harder they make it to pirate, the more folks will move to OO.o. After all, if all those people who were pirating it in the first place can't pirate (and still don't want to pay), what are they going to use?
this is very true. I know for myself that XP has been much more difficult to crack and keep cracked -- some people may say it's trivial but even they would have to admit that it's more work than running win2K. So when I need to give a cheapie OS to someone running cheapie hardware, Ubuntu is a no-brainer. It works, it works well, and is easier for them to deal with than XP's constant DRM breakage. I also like the study that showed Windows malware infestations and botnets have grown since illegal copies cannot phone home for updates, they remain unpatched and vulnerable in the wild and will be compromised.
If Office goes to the subscription model, it will be much more inconvenient to pirate. Go, Microsoft!
And the thing is, dinosaurs didn't even use toothpaste. That's how far out of whack the laws are with the technology - toothpaste and dinosaurs don't even exist in the same world. How can a dinosaur even attempt to squeeze the toothpaste back in to the tube - the toothpaste is millions of years away in the future, being squeezed out more and more while the dinosaur is powerless to stop it. All it can do is waggle its little front legs and roar in frustration. For all it's mighty strength and razor-sharp teeth, it is impotent in the face of future toothpaste.
So are you saying that we must acquit? Please do it before someone's head explodes.
Every last bit. In fact, even if we just throw the stuff away, mining it from trash dumps will be cheaper than mining it from the ground.
I have no idea whether this will actually prove out but in one of my stories set in the far future I had trash dumps as the new oil wells. Fusion energy meant power was cheap but mass transmutation of baser elements into rarer ones proved economically infeasible. But they did have fusion decomposers which mean that garbage mines could easily be mined for materials. Just chunk trash into the decomposer, it cranks the heat up to something ridiculous while spinning the contents. The volatiles are siphoned off for reclamation and what's in the decomposer is layers of sedimentation, banded by atomic weight.
I'm no engineer so I don't have any idea how that would really pan out but it's a thought!
It looks like they won't be satisfied until they can charge an "entertainment tax" that everyone on earth has to pay simply for being alive. And of course, dictate exactly how much that tax must be.
Citizen! Did you see Love Guru, the hit new Mike Meyers comedy?
No.
Traitor! The cost of a ticket has already been debited from your account.
WTF!
Citizen! Have you seen the latest Halloween, the hit new Michael Meyers slasher?
No.
Eh, can't really fault you on that one, it sucked. We're still deducting the cost of a ticket but crediting it to a better movie.
AT&T took down their ad, but it was pretty funny in a sick sort of way. If you didn't catch their new ad, it was on their bill-pay site last week. I kept a little archive of it here [readingfordummies.com]. Enjoy.
It was funny in the same way giving a new inmate a tube of astroglide as a cell-warming present is funny. Chalk this up as another great moment in advertising WTF's.
Slashdot Mirror
How long until people get sued for pirating Ubuntu?
Does this mean I should stop crucifying Microsoft's policies?
If they keep coming back to life after three days, then yes.
What really pisses me off is when hardware with web access (i.e. my dsl modem) can't render properly under Firefox. WTF? I have to drop back to IE just to get everything displaying properly. There's absolutely no excuse for using fancy tricks in a damn administration console. If anything should be browser-agnostic, this is it!
A troll? You idiot, Colbert makes the latent homoerotic comments all the time. It's all part of the joke.
This isn't an Onion article, this is a real proposal? I might go along with it if they fit the kids with explosive collars like Battle Royale. "Go ahead, Junior. Kick the back of my seat one more time."
But seriously, what the hell? At least the train service is still sane, or at least was the last time I took it. Arrive at the Amtrak station, hand over your luggage, take your seat. You're get there and are on your train inside ten minutes. "But what if terrorists hijack the train? They might try crashing it into buildings! Think of the children!"
Of course. Any action forced at gunpoint - or other threat of punishment from a force-wielding body - should be granted amnesty.
Hear that, Stephen Colbert? You can finally give in to those homoerotic urges, it's not really gay since you were doing it at gunpoint.
This is just one more thing for the 15 year olds who think they're e-badasses because they use Linux to brag about.
"Oh yeah? Who designed your WinBlow$ file system? Just some monopolist? My file system was designed by a murderer. I totally have you beat."
Yeah? The guy who owns my OS, he doesn't just kill people, he kills whole companies! He just takes what he wants from them and when they sue, he buys them out! Original gangsta, Billy G.
Maybe he was angry with her because she was having an affair. He bought a gun out of anger, but didn't want to kill her. He goes home, to find her with her lover. In a struggle with the lover, the lover the lover wrests the gun from Hans. He's got the gun pointed at Hans, who reveals that his wife has in fact ANOTHER lover. In anger, the lover shoots Nina and flees. Hans has no idea who he was, and Nina dies sadly in his arms. The only way he can avoid blame for the murder (having just legally purchased the gun) is to bury Nina himself. In the end, Hans feels responsible for her death, having driven her away from him due to his obsession with work, and of course, the foolish decision to buy the guy. He sees only too late that he should forgiven her for such a minor human flaw, and if he had, then he would still be with her.
You left out the part where he's tutoring a small-time crook in prison and that crook says he shared a cell with another con who claimed he murdered some computer geek's wife and now the geek is doing time for the murder. Hans would have started helping out the guards with their computer problems, then the warden gets him involved in a lucrative spamming operation that rakes in millions under the table. And after the warden has the tutored con killed, Hans plots his escape through a storm sewer, withdrawing all the profits from the bank and mailing a package to the papers implicating the warden in spam and murder.
only an API of evil, Darth!
Bill Gates: If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Stalman: I'm willing to risk it! *hum!* *slash!* *thump!*
The other networks have to turn it into a fucking soap opera giving you a 20 minute tear-jerker biography of the damn athlete before each event. That cuts into time that could be better spent, I don't know, covering the actual Olympics? There are so many sports that don't even make it on television.
I have one of those rrnet ethernet devices for the C64. They are great fun. I tried to make a post to a phpBB and it took me about 40 minutes to navigate to the thread I wanted to post in, then it crashed. O sweet glory.
Wow. I guess you have a far lower threshold for fun than I.
Thieves will now have to block the antennae of their purloined plunder. But how's this for an idea: geo-locking hardware like this? "Here's your GPS coordinates. Stray outside of this area, you stop working." Thieves will soon learn that taking something like this will brick it.
I also like the idea of equipping cars with wireless stuff like this. The owner reports it missing, the car starts reporting its location to the cops and they can nab the perps.
I hear they have real life pirates there to fight, boats and parrots and everything.
What makes the web and the internet "our" thing is the freedom of information, not the particular content it arrives in. People can use static text or embedded flash videos or whatever, it's an argument for techies and purists as to what's best. My concern is about what governments and corporations will try to do to stifle things.
I remember what it was like before the internet (at least before I was on it.) Local dial-up BBS's, that's it. Want national or international chatter? Get on Fidonet and wait days for messages to percolate through the system. My first net experience was with a freebie offering through the library, dial-up on a text interface. It was amazing. By the time I got on the proper net through a local ISP with a graphical browser, wow! What a difference.
The reason why the net has been so great is because it came about as an academic exercise and the corporations really didn't twig onto it until the basic work had already been done.
You know what the future portends at this point? It's not just a boot stomping on a human face forever, the person whose face is getting stomped is stuck with the reincarnation of AOL.
If the corporations get their way, our internet experience will be as naff as what we deal with on the cell phones. They'll bill us $1 per GB, charge extra for access to premium sites, and with this trusted computing bullshit, we won't even have control over our own fucking PC's anymore. It's one thing to have trusted computing and managed code on a game console like the Xbox, it's another to have my PC just as crippled. We won't even be able to say "It's my property, I can do what I want with it" because the EULA will trump that.
As far as computers go, we say "well, we can always install some flavor of Linux, that'll work!" Yeah? As suggested in another topic here, the trusted computing shit wil be built into the CPU, either there will be no way t get around it or it will be some sort of expensive hardware hack where you risk frying your motherboard to make it work.
Someone tell me there's a solution that doesn't boil down to wishful thinking.
I know XP has been cracked. My point is that even if it were as easy as swapping out the no-cd hacked exe in a video game, it's still more work than Win2K required. And for those not up to speed with XP cracks, it can be very time-consuming to research and implement. The casual non-geek pirate is where Microsoft maintains their stranglehold, why bother learning of or about OO when Microsoft Office is stealable/er, free? Lock that puppy down and people will have more need of OO.
I truly believe this will be the next major battle in the arms race between those who wish to control information and people, and those that want freedom, and might very well be the last if they succeed. They've already committed themselves to this path and fired the first shot with the inclusion of the outboard "T.C." chip on many/most(?) motherboards. If they succeed in fully rolling this system out, times will surely get "interesting" indeed, in that bad old Chinese curse kind of way.
So how do we get around it? It sounds like hacktivism isn't enough here and the politicians have amply demonstrated that they refuse to listen to us. What next?
I would be worried that OO.o might get overlooked for pirated copies of MS Office. Thankfully, Microsoft has finally stopped using their own pirated software as an advertising expense. The harder they make it to pirate, the more folks will move to OO.o. After all, if all those people who were pirating it in the first place can't pirate (and still don't want to pay), what are they going to use?
this is very true. I know for myself that XP has been much more difficult to crack and keep cracked -- some people may say it's trivial but even they would have to admit that it's more work than running win2K. So when I need to give a cheapie OS to someone running cheapie hardware, Ubuntu is a no-brainer. It works, it works well, and is easier for them to deal with than XP's constant DRM breakage. I also like the study that showed Windows malware infestations and botnets have grown since illegal copies cannot phone home for updates, they remain unpatched and vulnerable in the wild and will be compromised.
If Office goes to the subscription model, it will be much more inconvenient to pirate. Go, Microsoft!
And the thing is, dinosaurs didn't even use toothpaste. That's how far out of whack the laws are with the technology - toothpaste and dinosaurs don't even exist in the same world. How can a dinosaur even attempt to squeeze the toothpaste back in to the tube - the toothpaste is millions of years away in the future, being squeezed out more and more while the dinosaur is powerless to stop it. All it can do is waggle its little front legs and roar in frustration. For all it's mighty strength and razor-sharp teeth, it is impotent in the face of future toothpaste.
So are you saying that we must acquit? Please do it before someone's head explodes.
Easy:
1/ Lift musical instrument high into the air.
2/ Let go.
3/ Viola - energy from gravity!
Corrected.
Every last bit. In fact, even if we just throw the stuff away, mining it from trash dumps will be cheaper than mining it from the ground.
I have no idea whether this will actually prove out but in one of my stories set in the far future I had trash dumps as the new oil wells. Fusion energy meant power was cheap but mass transmutation of baser elements into rarer ones proved economically infeasible. But they did have fusion decomposers which mean that garbage mines could easily be mined for materials. Just chunk trash into the decomposer, it cranks the heat up to something ridiculous while spinning the contents. The volatiles are siphoned off for reclamation and what's in the decomposer is layers of sedimentation, banded by atomic weight.
I'm no engineer so I don't have any idea how that would really pan out but it's a thought!
SSD's are like 8 frickin' times longer than ISD's, of course they'd be more powerful.
Thank you for letting our managers hire people who want to do this job, instead of those just killing time. ...he said on slashdot.
Hey, these posts don't write themselves! (or at least i'm too lazy to write a posting eliza bot)
It looks like they won't be satisfied until they can charge an "entertainment tax" that everyone on earth has to pay simply for being alive. And of course, dictate exactly how much that tax must be.
Citizen! Did you see Love Guru, the hit new Mike Meyers comedy?
No.
Traitor! The cost of a ticket has already been debited from your account.
WTF!
Citizen! Have you seen the latest Halloween, the hit new Michael Meyers slasher?
No.
Eh, can't really fault you on that one, it sucked. We're still deducting the cost of a ticket but crediting it to a better movie.
WTF!
And after Firefox 3.1 comes Firefox 95!
DO NOT WANT!!!!!
AT&T took down their ad, but it was pretty funny in a sick sort of way. If you didn't catch their new ad, it was on their bill-pay site last week. I kept a little archive of it here [readingfordummies.com]. Enjoy.
It was funny in the same way giving a new inmate a tube of astroglide as a cell-warming present is funny. Chalk this up as another great moment in advertising WTF's.