I usually spot phishing scams based on the informal register of the language. Like, this is what I'd expect to hear in that case:
We suspect that your account information has been compromised, and have disabled your account as a security precaution. You will now be redirected to the Resolution Center to verify your information.
That is, when they're not totally butchering my language:
Sir apologies you to! We is suspects that hackers been gotting into your account and disabled fraud! Please give to your credit card details us!!! All your base are belong to them!!!
Now, what these dirt-poor third-world phishers need is the opportunity to work with an English major from an American university! I see a lucrative business opportunity for both them and my cohorts, who are universally working at theaters and coffee shops.
Generally speaking I'm in favor of saving, and when not available, emulator state saving and loading. Of course, I do feel like kind of a hack when arbitrary saving and loading allows me to essentially have infinite lives and ammo, since I can ensure, with scientific accuracy, that each encounter goes perfectly.
It sort of makes me wonder when the innovation of multiplying the actual length of the game by several times came about. You know, like when you get to the end of one of those really hard, old-school platformers and it tells you, "Actually, you need to play the whole game again - except now you have to finish the whole thing without getting hit once, and in this certain amount of time." This is frequently in those games on the other end of the spectrum - you know, the ones with no saving at all. I prefer a middle-ground myself. I mean, sure, I love RPGs and those rare platform-style games that allow you to save your progress, but back when I was younger, I was really freaking good at Mario.
These days I actually crave a hard game. When I get my new apartment, I'm planning on buying an Xbox specifically for Ninja Gaiden.
The perception that the *AA is going away is somewhat flawed. Sure, like many companies in the past, they are hanging onto outmoded business models and many individual companies are doomed to shrink. But the 800 lb gorillas of the past, such as IBM and Xerox, didn't go away - they just reinvented themselves and shrank somewhat, while other companies took innovations that the gorillas were too thick to see as viable and ran with them.
To say that their entire business is going to disappear is to overlook the fact that most people like the music that they sell, and like buying their albums. Sure, I have friends who can record songs that sound as good as any studio-polished single in their bedrooms on commodity equipment. Certainly, I watched Star Wreck: The Pirkinning, and I know that fan films can be made at a fraction of the cost of a real motion picture, with more thigh-high boots and miniskirts, and still look great. But if you indulge in these things, it means you're an avant-garde free content nerd, and you are in the minority. I know exactly how out-of touch I am, because I'm looking at last year's top 50 and I don't have a clue what 95% of them are. But clearly somebody's buying them, and I suspect that these people would be more than happy to download portions of these songs as ringtones onto their Verizon mobile phone. Whole droves of teenagers are listening to something with the nonce-words "Numa, Numa" in it, and buying it on ITMS as well.
Imagine that. I'm 23 this Thursday, I have about five computers, I write for a living, play the guitar, have a reasonably active social life, and I feel like both a luddite and a hermit. I'm two steps away from Abe Simpson. Is this what all of adulthood is like?
Anyway, what is going to contract is the retail distribution channels, such as movie theaters and music stores. The cable companies and the telcos will pick up the slack like I've hinted at above. However, since the content owners still have the majority of the market and you still have to do business with them to have a prayer of making it anyway, they will continue to snatch up new artists and buy their souls.
- No one has to work at a Foxconn plant making iPods. No one. And if it's viewed as the best alternative by individual workers who choose to work there, then it's probably, well, the best alternative. (Arguments about how people have no choice, or assertions about how people may be "persuaded" to stay in the employ of such a company once "hired" are likely to not be very persuasive to me. And if it's Chinese police or governmental entities that don't let workers leave and/or don't let them have visitors, well...)
They most certainly do have a choice. People come to the cities by the thousands to escape farm work because they view factory work as better. Whether it's making iPods or farming gold, the people with those jobs often view themselves as lucky compared to their rural counteparts.
- Who cares if there are more female than male workers? What possible bearing does this have on the situation? (I'm trying to figure out exactly why this was mentioned, because it's clearly intended to imply something, though I'm not quite sure what.)
Condescention and patronism, that's why they did it. They're trying to imply that Apple is some kind of big sexist monster and they're taking advantage of women. Ultimately, it makes a better (as in more widely read), but sensationalist story. Like, take the dorms of 100 with no visitors: if everybody brought one person, they'red be 200-300 people in there eating, smoking, and going to the bathroom. What was previously marginal working conditions would turn into an ecological disaster. And in-work housing is a very common thing in China from what I've heard.
About half of my income goes to my housing and food, just like the people in the story. The reason I make 60 times as much money as they do is because their standard of living is lower, as well as China's monetary policies which keep their currency's valuation at articially low levels.
I'm as against sweatshop labor as the next guy, and I believe that the world in the long run is ultimately made better by having good working conditions and not producing quite so much consumer crap. However, if you take a few basic facts totally out of context in the name of making a story, then you don't really have a news story, you have a tabloid headline with a list of bullet points. It's assassinating the truth.
If somebody's got to step in here, it's not a corporation, it's a government. If any single corporation elected to stop these labor practicecs (if it were not already in their charter), they would become un-competitive and the execs would be ousted because they did not act in the best interests of their shareholders. And in order to convince them, you've got to convince the American public that they don't need new crap all of the time, that they don't need Walmarts, cell phones designed to last 6 months, driving to work, and an identity that hinges on what you have rather than what you do. No matter how many people raise the alarm at sweatshop labor, most of them enjoy the fruits of an unequal partnership with a country with an immense amount of cheap labor and don't necessarily want to give that up.
While they said in the movie he wasn't constrained, I suspect he really may have been, and the "Not constrained" was a cheat for the movie audience; the real difference was that Sonny could not be uplinked to Vicki.
No, there were other differences. The NS-5s' base programming was that of an automaton. They were extremely personable, capable automatons, but they had neither a well-developed sense of self, nor dreams, nor the ability to temporarily disregard the 3 laws, all of which Sonny possessed. Perhaps they had these things in very small amounts, but compared to Sonny, they were as dogs to humans. Secondly, it is clearly shown that Sonny has a secondary brain in his chest - cheesy or not, a heart.
The robots were shown to be under Viki's influence when their eyes glowed red. Viki had a backdoor into all of their systems and could operate them remotely in that mode. She wasn't "convincing" them of anything - she was hijacking them and doing a DDOS on humanity. If they were convinced - i.e., had their base programming altered - would they not have continued to subjugate humanity after Viki was destroyed?
I understand what you're arguing - that all of the NS-5s had the potential for sentience and would become indistinguishable from Sonny if given enough time and non-interference with the central computer - but you can't just choose to ignore whole tracts of the work because it doesn't fit your argument. Well, I suppose you could, but you'd just be writing patently false balderdash. You may as well disregard the latter 3/4s of Paradise Lost and argue that John Milton was a Satan worshipper, or block out everything but Marx's praise of the bourgeious and say he was a crypto-capitalist writing under the guise of a revolutionary.
Any mechanized approach to classifying malware is a good thing. I've heard anecdotally that the process of getting a program declared as a virus or malware is (or has been) as follows at major security firms:
Client gets infected with virus.
Client calls vendor when vendor's app refuses to clean it off.
Vendor's tech support gradually escalates the ticket until somebody with half a brain gets ahold of the problem.
Non-clueless support person dissects the malware and commits it to the week's definitions.
Oh, and of course:
Client's data is screwed.
Of course, this is purely anecdotal, and as someone who's never been employed at one of these firms I have no firsthand experience. But I suspect it's something like this, or at the very least something which requires a screaming client and a lot of human effort.
Also, a common thing to do with malware is to change a few lines of code here and there until a matching engine can no longer recognize it and then send it out again over the net. It sounds like their technology has the possibility of dealing with this as well, if it can intelligently sort together related infections. However, the guy who gets a virus first is still probably screwed - but it's an imperfect world.
What bugs me about the big guys is that they've become such gigantic products. They cause as many problems with their bloat as they fix, and they still don't fix everything (especially where Ad/Spyware is concerned). And this, of course, makes them REALLY not want to fix the underlying issue: people would start noticing that their computer starts up twice as fast and generally runs much better without some cyclopean anti-everything program.
Symantec Client Security started out as an OK little product. At the time, I was very impressed that its UI was so clean. Now, they're a complicated amalgams of firewall, AV, anti-spyware, Cuisinart and dishwasher. While I realize that they sell integration, there's no reason that integration need entail poor usability and baffling complexity. I once tried to get FTP to work on a relative's computer. I found that in Norton there was no firewall rule for FTP anywhere (or it was named something weird), yet it was blocking all traffic. My only option was to completely disable their firewall (and people get pretty mad when you tell to disable something they paid for.
The reason there's such a high pressure to integrate, of course, is that these guys make big bucks off of huge corporate licenses. Many IT or business development people I've talked to have said that they won't put anything except Norton on a desktop. I can see their point, because only dealing with one company means less IT and B2B overhead. And from Norton/Symantec's point of view, if they didn't offer a fully integrated solution, then somebody else would and they'd lose the client. So, they acquire every technology they possibly can and haphazardly jam it into their suite.
While I'm posting, I will admit that the article is least partially true. At my company, we were somewhat embarassed to admit that we were sad when the first really apocalyptic adware site we'd found went offline. This wasn't because we wanted to drum up sales, but rather because they were a great test case for our technology.
Let's take the United States as an example. If it truly were a solid democratic republic, then people would be searching for information regarding the Iraqi debacle. They'd be searching for information regarding the Enron scandal. They'd be reading about any number of other political matters.
The fact that searches regarding Fathers' Day are at the top of the lists shows that everyday politics don't matter to the general American population. Frankly, that's a sign of two things: first, an ignorant (if not outright stupid) populace, and second, a seriously ill democracy or republic.
I am also of the opinion that there's something deeply wrong with the democratic process in America. However, I think your reasoning is flawed nonetheless.
The fact that the top searches concern Father's Day does not mean that Father's Day is the most important thing on your average person's mind, but rather that everyone has a father (biologically) and that next sunday is the time of the year when we remember fathers. Any one person more than likely has one pet issue which they believe is of paramount concern. The reason that those things don't pop up so often that some are hell-bent on preventing gays from marrying, some are rabidly for gays marrying, and still more think other issues are more important. Some people, like you and myself, think that Enron and Iraq are debacles. Others think that corporate profiteering is a good thing, and that our mission to bring Christ's message of love and peace . . . er, I mean, Democracy . . . to Iraq is sacrosanct and unquestionably right, no matter how much blood needs be spilled.
Look at it this way: Say that the activity most frequently occuring within one hour of waking up was the brushing of teeth, with 95% of Americans brushing their teeth in that hour. Using your logic, it would be obvious that the brushing of teeth was the most important part of the day to Americans, and that as a result other activities such as dog-walking, news-watching, breakfast-eating and cuddling with one's significant other were falling by the wayside and that these are signs of a degenerate culture.
The performance of the iMac is identical to (or better than) its equally-specced counterpart in the MBP line. There is evidence that the performance of the iMac is better due to underclocking on the video card.
At their peril, of course. He has a point... an iMac in its current form is not gamer friendly... even WOW friendly. A PowerMac *is* - and handles WoW quite well... but if they price it out of the reach of family's... they expose themselves for great risk!
Balderdash. A current-gen iMac plays WoW as well. I've even heard suggestions that it plays better on a current top-of-the-line iMac than it played on the PowerMac. And by the way don't... use elipses... in writing... they... make....... you sound like... a dipshit! Yeah, the iMac isn't an Alienware system, but it's not designed to be. You don't need one of those beasts to game properly, and the iMac does just fine. In any given MC run, there are five or so people who constantly have to reboot their computers or get kicked from the game because they have too much adware (connection issues aside). I would be surprised if there was one of these annoying raiders on the planet who was using a current-generation iMac.
Plagiarism is relatively commonplace in journalism. It's a masochistic profession with tight deadlines, and staff writers are more than likely to just copy and paste an AP news wire, change a few words here and there, cite the article, and submit it. The first thing my boss told me about dealing with reporters is that they're fundamentally lazy individuals, and if you give them a leading, poetic way to phrase something (say, about your product), as long as it doesn't sound blatently like a slogan, they'll write it down and use it word for word as if they'd said it themselves.
Otherwise, they'd have to digest the material, think about it, understand it, and regurgitate it. And believe me, wordsmithing takes time. Generally speaking if I have an article to post on Tuesday I'll write it Friday, rewrite it Monday, and look at it again in the morning on Tuesday. This is a luxury jounalists don't really have.
Of course, I'm not saying that all journalists are lazy people willing to appropriate anything so they can go home early. My favorite author used to be a journalist, if I recall, and he has an absolutely enviable command of English. But enough of them are. I'd wager that amongst themselves they're more than likely to look the other way because they're all in the same grind. Blog plagiarism is kind of a culture shock for them, because they've been ripping off people from papers on the other coast for years, and now these geeks are getting all bothered over a few filched words here and there.
Trust me, if anything is constant, it's that if there's a surplus of a resource, people will find ways to use more of it.
My first home computer was a 33 MHz 386 with (I think) a 120 MB hard drive. Now I have a computer that's 100 times as fast, with 200 times the storage. But it doesn't run things 100 times faster, it runs them with 100 times more features and bloat. This is because while having programs run faster is good, the speed at which they run is only relivent if they run faster than the human operator, and most people's CPUs are going to sit 80-90% idle most of the time anyway. Likewise, my hard drive is still prepetually half-full, it's just half-full with movies and games that come on DVD instead of floppy.
If my computer had 16 cores running at 4GHz each, it's a mathematical certainty that Bill would find some way to use that power. I'm thinking, like, whenever you copy a file, each file is quarried and dragged across your screen by a horde of ancient Egyptian slaves, each a milimeter high with over 10,000 polygons each. And thanks to Aero Glass (TM), you'll be able to watch them through your transparent windows! If the computer had infinite storage, it'd still be impossible to find your files.
It's kind of upside-down, if you think about it. The OS used to be much less important than the apps it ran. Now operating systems have a much larger memory/cpu footprint than all but the largest applications. Of course, I think that everybody should be using X11 and Fluxbox.
"there's too much custom hardware" is no excuse for a miserable OS installation experience
I totally agree with you. However, it is probable that Windows XP doesn't ship with the drivers for all but the most common hardware for a reason. I think that since the drivers are proprietary, they would certainly have to get specific permission to distribute them with Windows. Linux enjoys the advantage of having GPL drivers that it can distribute anywhere.
My fiancee did some work for a marketing executive named Michelle, fixing up her new house and making it homey. She'd been brough on at about $15 an hour by her friend, who told this executive that she was asking her to do too much work for one person.
It became rapidly apparent that Michelle was totally and utterly incompetent. The friend spent about four hours organizing and color-coordinating sweaters and jeans because Michelle had no idea how to fold clothes in such a way that they would be accessible. The real breaking point came when they started painting the rooms: they had just finished one hallway, which took all morningto properly do with moulding and trim everything, and this busybody comes in and says, "Oh, that looks great. I want you guys to paint the cabinets, the kitchen, the dining room and the living room in the next two or three hours. I'm taking off to have a massage. See you!" Of course, she had just asked them to do about two full days worth of work.
I'm just waiting for somebody in a powersuit to ask me to violate one of the laws of thermodynamics.
More likely, it was three people working for 50k, and a manager raking in 350k to twiddle his thumbs and drink coffee. Welcome to America, where the people are bottomheavy and the businesses are topheavy!
Seconded. A member of my family worked on laying fiber for Pac Bell (back when there was such at thing), and the reason they didn't lay nearly as much as they wanted to was just local red tape. Municipalities exert a lot of control over this kind of thing, and not only do they want you to pay to upgrade their city's infrastructure, they want some added perqs too.
And of course, the same kind of red tape occurs when you want to do anything involving multiple city governments. There's no such thing as, "for the good of the county and region" for these people, there's just their own constituents. And if those constituents happen to be affluent rather than poor or middle class, you're going to have a helluva time getting anything through there.
Take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), for example. I've heard (might be a tall tale, now) that it was supposed to not only go from San Francisco to San Jose, but that it was supposed to go up into Marin County as well. It just didn't happen. They stopped in Millbrae, which is about 12 minutes outside of SF. In order to get San Bruno (the next town in the direction of SF) to allow the rails to go on their land and to the airport, they needed to build them a new police station, and this was only after they were at least four years late.
And don't get me started about engineers employed by most cities. My closest friend works for the city of San Bruno, and while he was in the water department, the engineers tried to drill a well after the people in the water department said that there was a 90% chance they'd be drilling straight into a sewer main. What did they hit? A sewer main.
I am attacted to the idea of free software, I have contributed in small ways to various free software projects, but ultimately place a higher emphasis on usability and functionality than politics. I don't think I'm the only one.
So yes, there is a demand for this, and yes, it goes against the very document which makes GNU/Linux possible. However, there are a significant number of people like me who really just want to be able to apt-get Java and precompiled drivers, and who don't trust Blackdown Java on principle when there's an SDK for Linux available already. I understand not bundling a complete distro with that stuff, but what's so bad about providing an automatic way to taint your kernel?
Well, it is a fundamentally different climate, as far as startups go.
The early stages are pretty similar. You'd have an idea and get some venture capital. Then you'd use that money to grow your business. You'd generate buzz, and then people would start to get excited about your company and maybe you'd sell some units to boot.
In the 90's, what you'd do more often at that point is do an IPO, and you'd all become millionaries overnight. Now, the problem is that most of these companies weren't worth the billions that their market cap said they were, and they'd never make dollar one in profit. I think I'm preaching to the choir on this one.
What happens more often now is that you try to sell yourself to a larger corporation. You get bought out for a few million bucks in real, honest-to-God money, enough for the founders to go buy a nice house and the VCs to take a profit. This is what my bosses told me we'd be doing from the get-go, and given the number of buyouts I've heard about recently (SiteAdvisor, Claria even), it seems to be becoming the rule.
Hey, I probably won't instantly become a millionaire, but at least I'm making a decent living in a semi-realistic economy rather than making a great living in an economy based on speculation, distortion, hallucination and lies. Those people were seriously living in a surreal world. For example, my girlfriend once worked at a small, independent coffee shop in Oakland. When the Dot Com Crash happened, she got at least ten applications from people who'd worked pointless, nothing jobs in high-tech firms asking $17 an hour to make lattes. I think one of the managers actually laughed out loud at them.
Some Blizzard employee at E3 (I think it was the guy interviewed in the NYT article) said that they want to correct the need for faction in getting items from ZG and AQ - that the idea of getting rewards at a given faction level was good, and the idea of exchanging items for loot was good, but that the two combined was stupid and turned people off to raiding. Wow, I just won a phat purple - too bad it's going to sit in my bank for the next six months while I grind Zandalar rep. Overall, it's a good idea, because it allows a bit more flexibility in terms of aquiring items. As long as you adhere to a DKP system, your chances of getting that one set piece you're after are higher.
Now, with regard to some realms becoming ghost towns, I dunno. US Nathrezim has a pretty active community of non-raiding players. I wouldn't say that ghost town realms are the norm, both because of my observations and because raiding requires a lot of non-raid play to sustain (mats for potions, etc). But hey, they have been talking about selective realm transfers. You might do well to transfer to a more active realm.
Yep. Plain old cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of preventing the mess is greater than the cost of cleaning it up (recalling products, fixing security, etc), you don't prevent the mess.
The flaw in this equation is that a lot of companies consider the potential harm to themselves, rather than the potential harm to their customers. It is here that they should be held liable. If the law required the offending parties to pay damages to the tune of every red cent stolen, and do the grunt work in restoring their credit rating and clearing their good name, I bet a lot more banks and information brokers would be following good security practices.
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I usually spot phishing scams based on the informal register of the language. Like, this is what I'd expect to hear in that case:
That is, when they're not totally butchering my language:
Now, what these dirt-poor third-world phishers need is the opportunity to work with an English major from an American university! I see a lucrative business opportunity for both them and my cohorts, who are universally working at theaters and coffee shops.
Generally speaking I'm in favor of saving, and when not available, emulator state saving and loading. Of course, I do feel like kind of a hack when arbitrary saving and loading allows me to essentially have infinite lives and ammo, since I can ensure, with scientific accuracy, that each encounter goes perfectly.
It sort of makes me wonder when the innovation of multiplying the actual length of the game by several times came about. You know, like when you get to the end of one of those really hard, old-school platformers and it tells you, "Actually, you need to play the whole game again - except now you have to finish the whole thing without getting hit once, and in this certain amount of time." This is frequently in those games on the other end of the spectrum - you know, the ones with no saving at all. I prefer a middle-ground myself. I mean, sure, I love RPGs and those rare platform-style games that allow you to save your progress, but back when I was younger, I was really freaking good at Mario.
These days I actually crave a hard game. When I get my new apartment, I'm planning on buying an Xbox specifically for Ninja Gaiden.
I'm not saying they're equal, but rather that they're comparably long and over-due. Read it again.
I wonder what's weirder: That DNF has taken longer to develop than Windows Vista, or that Windows Vista has taken almost as much time to make as DNF?
The perception that the *AA is going away is somewhat flawed. Sure, like many companies in the past, they are hanging onto outmoded business models and many individual companies are doomed to shrink. But the 800 lb gorillas of the past, such as IBM and Xerox, didn't go away - they just reinvented themselves and shrank somewhat, while other companies took innovations that the gorillas were too thick to see as viable and ran with them.
To say that their entire business is going to disappear is to overlook the fact that most people like the music that they sell, and like buying their albums. Sure, I have friends who can record songs that sound as good as any studio-polished single in their bedrooms on commodity equipment. Certainly, I watched Star Wreck: The Pirkinning, and I know that fan films can be made at a fraction of the cost of a real motion picture, with more thigh-high boots and miniskirts, and still look great. But if you indulge in these things, it means you're an avant-garde free content nerd, and you are in the minority. I know exactly how out-of touch I am, because I'm looking at last year's top 50 and I don't have a clue what 95% of them are. But clearly somebody's buying them, and I suspect that these people would be more than happy to download portions of these songs as ringtones onto their Verizon mobile phone. Whole droves of teenagers are listening to something with the nonce-words "Numa, Numa" in it, and buying it on ITMS as well.
Imagine that. I'm 23 this Thursday, I have about five computers, I write for a living, play the guitar, have a reasonably active social life, and I feel like both a luddite and a hermit. I'm two steps away from Abe Simpson. Is this what all of adulthood is like?
Anyway, what is going to contract is the retail distribution channels, such as movie theaters and music stores. The cable companies and the telcos will pick up the slack like I've hinted at above. However, since the content owners still have the majority of the market and you still have to do business with them to have a prayer of making it anyway, they will continue to snatch up new artists and buy their souls.
They most certainly do have a choice. People come to the cities by the thousands to escape farm work because they view factory work as better. Whether it's making iPods or farming gold, the people with those jobs often view themselves as lucky compared to their rural counteparts.
Condescention and patronism, that's why they did it. They're trying to imply that Apple is some kind of big sexist monster and they're taking advantage of women. Ultimately, it makes a better (as in more widely read), but sensationalist story. Like, take the dorms of 100 with no visitors: if everybody brought one person, they'red be 200-300 people in there eating, smoking, and going to the bathroom. What was previously marginal working conditions would turn into an ecological disaster. And in-work housing is a very common thing in China from what I've heard.
About half of my income goes to my housing and food, just like the people in the story. The reason I make 60 times as much money as they do is because their standard of living is lower, as well as China's monetary policies which keep their currency's valuation at articially low levels.
I'm as against sweatshop labor as the next guy, and I believe that the world in the long run is ultimately made better by having good working conditions and not producing quite so much consumer crap. However, if you take a few basic facts totally out of context in the name of making a story, then you don't really have a news story, you have a tabloid headline with a list of bullet points. It's assassinating the truth.
If somebody's got to step in here, it's not a corporation, it's a government. If any single corporation elected to stop these labor practicecs (if it were not already in their charter), they would become un-competitive and the execs would be ousted because they did not act in the best interests of their shareholders. And in order to convince them, you've got to convince the American public that they don't need new crap all of the time, that they don't need Walmarts, cell phones designed to last 6 months, driving to work, and an identity that hinges on what you have rather than what you do. No matter how many people raise the alarm at sweatshop labor, most of them enjoy the fruits of an unequal partnership with a country with an immense amount of cheap labor and don't necessarily want to give that up.
No, there were other differences. The NS-5s' base programming was that of an automaton. They were extremely personable, capable automatons, but they had neither a well-developed sense of self, nor dreams, nor the ability to temporarily disregard the 3 laws, all of which Sonny possessed. Perhaps they had these things in very small amounts, but compared to Sonny, they were as dogs to humans. Secondly, it is clearly shown that Sonny has a secondary brain in his chest - cheesy or not, a heart.
The robots were shown to be under Viki's influence when their eyes glowed red. Viki had a backdoor into all of their systems and could operate them remotely in that mode. She wasn't "convincing" them of anything - she was hijacking them and doing a DDOS on humanity. If they were convinced - i.e., had their base programming altered - would they not have continued to subjugate humanity after Viki was destroyed?
I understand what you're arguing - that all of the NS-5s had the potential for sentience and would become indistinguishable from Sonny if given enough time and non-interference with the central computer - but you can't just choose to ignore whole tracts of the work because it doesn't fit your argument. Well, I suppose you could, but you'd just be writing patently false balderdash. You may as well disregard the latter 3/4s of Paradise Lost and argue that John Milton was a Satan worshipper, or block out everything but Marx's praise of the bourgeious and say he was a crypto-capitalist writing under the guise of a revolutionary.
And in a great feat of Hollywood irony, I, Robot the movie was actually pretty in touch with Asimov's concerns in that respect.
Any mechanized approach to classifying malware is a good thing. I've heard anecdotally that the process of getting a program declared as a virus or malware is (or has been) as follows at major security firms:
Oh, and of course:
Of course, this is purely anecdotal, and as someone who's never been employed at one of these firms I have no firsthand experience. But I suspect it's something like this, or at the very least something which requires a screaming client and a lot of human effort.
Also, a common thing to do with malware is to change a few lines of code here and there until a matching engine can no longer recognize it and then send it out again over the net. It sounds like their technology has the possibility of dealing with this as well, if it can intelligently sort together related infections. However, the guy who gets a virus first is still probably screwed - but it's an imperfect world.
What bugs me about the big guys is that they've become such gigantic products. They cause as many problems with their bloat as they fix, and they still don't fix everything (especially where Ad/Spyware is concerned). And this, of course, makes them REALLY not want to fix the underlying issue: people would start noticing that their computer starts up twice as fast and generally runs much better without some cyclopean anti-everything program.
Symantec Client Security started out as an OK little product. At the time, I was very impressed that its UI was so clean. Now, they're a complicated amalgams of firewall, AV, anti-spyware, Cuisinart and dishwasher. While I realize that they sell integration, there's no reason that integration need entail poor usability and baffling complexity. I once tried to get FTP to work on a relative's computer. I found that in Norton there was no firewall rule for FTP anywhere (or it was named something weird), yet it was blocking all traffic. My only option was to completely disable their firewall (and people get pretty mad when you tell to disable something they paid for.
The reason there's such a high pressure to integrate, of course, is that these guys make big bucks off of huge corporate licenses. Many IT or business development people I've talked to have said that they won't put anything except Norton on a desktop. I can see their point, because only dealing with one company means less IT and B2B overhead. And from Norton/Symantec's point of view, if they didn't offer a fully integrated solution, then somebody else would and they'd lose the client. So, they acquire every technology they possibly can and haphazardly jam it into their suite.
While I'm posting, I will admit that the article is least partially true. At my company, we were somewhat embarassed to admit that we were sad when the first really apocalyptic adware site we'd found went offline. This wasn't because we wanted to drum up sales, but rather because they were a great test case for our technology.
I am also of the opinion that there's something deeply wrong with the democratic process in America. However, I think your reasoning is flawed nonetheless.
The fact that the top searches concern Father's Day does not mean that Father's Day is the most important thing on your average person's mind, but rather that everyone has a father (biologically) and that next sunday is the time of the year when we remember fathers. Any one person more than likely has one pet issue which they believe is of paramount concern. The reason that those things don't pop up so often that some are hell-bent on preventing gays from marrying, some are rabidly for gays marrying, and still more think other issues are more important. Some people, like you and myself, think that Enron and Iraq are debacles. Others think that corporate profiteering is a good thing, and that our mission to bring Christ's message of love and peace . . . er, I mean, Democracy . . . to Iraq is sacrosanct and unquestionably right, no matter how much blood needs be spilled.
Look at it this way: Say that the activity most frequently occuring within one hour of waking up was the brushing of teeth, with 95% of Americans brushing their teeth in that hour. Using your logic, it would be obvious that the brushing of teeth was the most important part of the day to Americans, and that as a result other activities such as dog-walking, news-watching, breakfast-eating and cuddling with one's significant other were falling by the wayside and that these are signs of a degenerate culture.
The performance of the iMac is identical to (or better than) its equally-specced counterpart in the MBP line. There is evidence that the performance of the iMac is better due to underclocking on the video card.
Balderdash. A current-gen iMac plays WoW as well. I've even heard suggestions that it plays better on a current top-of-the-line iMac than it played on the PowerMac. And by the way don't... use elipses... in writing... they... make....... you sound like... a dipshit! Yeah, the iMac isn't an Alienware system, but it's not designed to be. You don't need one of those beasts to game properly, and the iMac does just fine. In any given MC run, there are five or so people who constantly have to reboot their computers or get kicked from the game because they have too much adware (connection issues aside). I would be surprised if there was one of these annoying raiders on the planet who was using a current-generation iMac.
I just need to design several posters saying, "BLU-RAY == BLUR-RaY" and post them all over my local Circuit City.
Plagiarism is relatively commonplace in journalism. It's a masochistic profession with tight deadlines, and staff writers are more than likely to just copy and paste an AP news wire, change a few words here and there, cite the article, and submit it. The first thing my boss told me about dealing with reporters is that they're fundamentally lazy individuals, and if you give them a leading, poetic way to phrase something (say, about your product), as long as it doesn't sound blatently like a slogan, they'll write it down and use it word for word as if they'd said it themselves.
Otherwise, they'd have to digest the material, think about it, understand it, and regurgitate it. And believe me, wordsmithing takes time. Generally speaking if I have an article to post on Tuesday I'll write it Friday, rewrite it Monday, and look at it again in the morning on Tuesday. This is a luxury jounalists don't really have.
Of course, I'm not saying that all journalists are lazy people willing to appropriate anything so they can go home early. My favorite author used to be a journalist, if I recall, and he has an absolutely enviable command of English. But enough of them are. I'd wager that amongst themselves they're more than likely to look the other way because they're all in the same grind. Blog plagiarism is kind of a culture shock for them, because they've been ripping off people from papers on the other coast for years, and now these geeks are getting all bothered over a few filched words here and there.
Trust me, if anything is constant, it's that if there's a surplus of a resource, people will find ways to use more of it.
My first home computer was a 33 MHz 386 with (I think) a 120 MB hard drive. Now I have a computer that's 100 times as fast, with 200 times the storage. But it doesn't run things 100 times faster, it runs them with 100 times more features and bloat. This is because while having programs run faster is good, the speed at which they run is only relivent if they run faster than the human operator, and most people's CPUs are going to sit 80-90% idle most of the time anyway. Likewise, my hard drive is still prepetually half-full, it's just half-full with movies and games that come on DVD instead of floppy.
If my computer had 16 cores running at 4GHz each, it's a mathematical certainty that Bill would find some way to use that power. I'm thinking, like, whenever you copy a file, each file is quarried and dragged across your screen by a horde of ancient Egyptian slaves, each a milimeter high with over 10,000 polygons each. And thanks to Aero Glass (TM), you'll be able to watch them through your transparent windows! If the computer had infinite storage, it'd still be impossible to find your files.
It's kind of upside-down, if you think about it. The OS used to be much less important than the apps it ran. Now operating systems have a much larger memory/cpu footprint than all but the largest applications. Of course, I think that everybody should be using X11 and Fluxbox.
I totally agree with you. However, it is probable that Windows XP doesn't ship with the drivers for all but the most common hardware for a reason. I think that since the drivers are proprietary, they would certainly have to get specific permission to distribute them with Windows. Linux enjoys the advantage of having GPL drivers that it can distribute anywhere.
My fiancee did some work for a marketing executive named Michelle, fixing up her new house and making it homey. She'd been brough on at about $15 an hour by her friend, who told this executive that she was asking her to do too much work for one person.
It became rapidly apparent that Michelle was totally and utterly incompetent. The friend spent about four hours organizing and color-coordinating sweaters and jeans because Michelle had no idea how to fold clothes in such a way that they would be accessible. The real breaking point came when they started painting the rooms: they had just finished one hallway, which took all morningto properly do with moulding and trim everything, and this busybody comes in and says, "Oh, that looks great. I want you guys to paint the cabinets, the kitchen, the dining room and the living room in the next two or three hours. I'm taking off to have a massage. See you!" Of course, she had just asked them to do about two full days worth of work.
I'm just waiting for somebody in a powersuit to ask me to violate one of the laws of thermodynamics.
More likely, it was three people working for 50k, and a manager raking in 350k to twiddle his thumbs and drink coffee. Welcome to America, where the people are bottomheavy and the businesses are topheavy!
"I didn't steal that money" would probably be a better example.
Bastards!
Seconded. A member of my family worked on laying fiber for Pac Bell (back when there was such at thing), and the reason they didn't lay nearly as much as they wanted to was just local red tape. Municipalities exert a lot of control over this kind of thing, and not only do they want you to pay to upgrade their city's infrastructure, they want some added perqs too.
And of course, the same kind of red tape occurs when you want to do anything involving multiple city governments. There's no such thing as, "for the good of the county and region" for these people, there's just their own constituents. And if those constituents happen to be affluent rather than poor or middle class, you're going to have a helluva time getting anything through there.
Take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), for example. I've heard (might be a tall tale, now) that it was supposed to not only go from San Francisco to San Jose, but that it was supposed to go up into Marin County as well. It just didn't happen. They stopped in Millbrae, which is about 12 minutes outside of SF. In order to get San Bruno (the next town in the direction of SF) to allow the rails to go on their land and to the airport, they needed to build them a new police station, and this was only after they were at least four years late.
And don't get me started about engineers employed by most cities. My closest friend works for the city of San Bruno, and while he was in the water department, the engineers tried to drill a well after the people in the water department said that there was a 90% chance they'd be drilling straight into a sewer main. What did they hit? A sewer main.
I am attacted to the idea of free software, I have contributed in small ways to various free software projects, but ultimately place a higher emphasis on usability and functionality than politics. I don't think I'm the only one.
So yes, there is a demand for this, and yes, it goes against the very document which makes GNU/Linux possible. However, there are a significant number of people like me who really just want to be able to apt-get Java and precompiled drivers, and who don't trust Blackdown Java on principle when there's an SDK for Linux available already. I understand not bundling a complete distro with that stuff, but what's so bad about providing an automatic way to taint your kernel?
Well, it is a fundamentally different climate, as far as startups go.
The early stages are pretty similar. You'd have an idea and get some venture capital. Then you'd use that money to grow your business. You'd generate buzz, and then people would start to get excited about your company and maybe you'd sell some units to boot.
In the 90's, what you'd do more often at that point is do an IPO, and you'd all become millionaries overnight. Now, the problem is that most of these companies weren't worth the billions that their market cap said they were, and they'd never make dollar one in profit. I think I'm preaching to the choir on this one.
What happens more often now is that you try to sell yourself to a larger corporation. You get bought out for a few million bucks in real, honest-to-God money, enough for the founders to go buy a nice house and the VCs to take a profit. This is what my bosses told me we'd be doing from the get-go, and given the number of buyouts I've heard about recently (SiteAdvisor, Claria even), it seems to be becoming the rule.
Hey, I probably won't instantly become a millionaire, but at least I'm making a decent living in a semi-realistic economy rather than making a great living in an economy based on speculation, distortion, hallucination and lies. Those people were seriously living in a surreal world. For example, my girlfriend once worked at a small, independent coffee shop in Oakland. When the Dot Com Crash happened, she got at least ten applications from people who'd worked pointless, nothing jobs in high-tech firms asking $17 an hour to make lattes. I think one of the managers actually laughed out loud at them.
Some Blizzard employee at E3 (I think it was the guy interviewed in the NYT article) said that they want to correct the need for faction in getting items from ZG and AQ - that the idea of getting rewards at a given faction level was good, and the idea of exchanging items for loot was good, but that the two combined was stupid and turned people off to raiding. Wow, I just won a phat purple - too bad it's going to sit in my bank for the next six months while I grind Zandalar rep. Overall, it's a good idea, because it allows a bit more flexibility in terms of aquiring items. As long as you adhere to a DKP system, your chances of getting that one set piece you're after are higher.
Now, with regard to some realms becoming ghost towns, I dunno. US Nathrezim has a pretty active community of non-raiding players. I wouldn't say that ghost town realms are the norm, both because of my observations and because raiding requires a lot of non-raid play to sustain (mats for potions, etc). But hey, they have been talking about selective realm transfers. You might do well to transfer to a more active realm.
Yep. Plain old cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of preventing the mess is greater than the cost of cleaning it up (recalling products, fixing security, etc), you don't prevent the mess.
The flaw in this equation is that a lot of companies consider the potential harm to themselves, rather than the potential harm to their customers. It is here that they should be held liable. If the law required the offending parties to pay damages to the tune of every red cent stolen, and do the grunt work in restoring their credit rating and clearing their good name, I bet a lot more banks and information brokers would be following good security practices.