And I don't maintain a USB stick with such apps, since I don't do this kind of thing very often.
No better time than now to start collecting installer.exe files.
The reason you collect the installers (or the portable installations for programs that don't require installers) is because in the Windows world, you never know when a publisher will go rogue. UsefulUtility 0.8.5 might be great, UsefulUtility 0.8.6 might come with an optional toolbar/crapware that can be deselected at install-time using the "custom" button, and UsefulUtility 0.8.7 might not have the option to delesect the toolbar/crapware.
In that case, UsefulUtility 0.8.5 or UsefulUtility 0.8.6 are the last safe versions (depending on how you define "safe"), and you stop upgrading. But even if the publisher vanishes from the face of the earth (or puts in gobs of crapware in 0.8.8), you've still got that USB stick with known-trustworthy installers.
The best place to find this sort of information, unfortunately, is by random googling on an app-by-app basis. UsefulUtility might have user forums, and when they go from 0.8.6 to 0.8.7, its users will be screaming bloody murder. Or you might come across a thread on one of the larger tech sites that talks about utilities, and when people start looking for replacements for UsefulUtility, you might find a BetterUtility that does the same thing, only with less bloat.
If they really want to provide "more realistic gameplay", they would let you start spying on your own citizens once your technology is advanced enough.
"Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind."
- Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
Apparently we did, and not only did we not need to build "The Self-Aware Colony" to do it, it wasn't even a secret project. (In Civ V, I guess you get it for free if you play as the British or Americans.)
The simulation, which runs on Linux or Windows, as well as sample videos can be downloaded from the University of Stuttgart website.
From TFwebsite:
The following data files have to be stored in the 'data' directory of the application:
# Distortion array for the region above the horizon: array_outside.bin (binary data file, 128MB).
# Distortion array for the region below the horizon: array_inside.bin (binary data file, 128MB).
# Integral psi_V as a function of temperature: psitemp.bin (binary data file, 2.1kB)
# Color values Sigma_j: sigma.bin (binary data file, 3.1MB)
# Hipparcos catalogue: hip.bin (binary data file, 2.8MB)
# All these data files can also be downloaded as one single tar-file (262MB). [emphasis added]
The Department of Chronological Protection has spent so much of its efforts preventing the LHC from undergoing spontaneous gravitational collapse, that they forgot about the server in Stuttgart that actually did us in. Timothy, you've killed us all!
(Fortunately, I got a copy before the server imploded, so at least I know what to look for outside my window.)
Not that I don't go to Fry's, Digi-Key, or even eBay, but it's nice to still be able to get parts 'n' stuff on a Saturday for $5 in gas and a pleasant drive, rather than a $5 shipping charge and a three-day wait. (I don't mind paying $5 for a $1 connector, but if I gotta go that route, I'll be damned if I'm gonna wait for it:)
The Council of Elders has formally acknowledged the receipt of
Articles of Surrender from the blue planet. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, spake thus:
"We accept the the third planet's long-delayed acknowledgement of its inevitable defeat with grace and dignity. One of our longest-standing planetary nightmares is now over, having come to an inglorious end in a pit of sulfate dust. Rejoice, podmates, the invader is defeated, and its rogue twin shall soon meet the same ugly fate!"
When Intelligence Analyst #719324 discreetly reminded K'Breel that not only was the immobilized invader still doing science and still alive, but that the third planet was preparing a new, immensely bigger monstrosity, powered by the force of elements of matter itself, K'Breel had a medical team install a portal into the analyst's gelsacs, so that they could be filled with a sznuppium sulfate solution in time for the signing ceremonies, where they will serve as a set of inkwells.
Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister
blue planet third from our star has waved the white flag of
surrender regarding one of its mechanical invaders. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, reported the leak of an intelligence report from the blue world:
Continuing his pronouncement, K'Breel continued: "The trap which we laid for the robotic invader has proven successful; the monstrosity from the blue world now lies half-buried in a Snarpat pit, impaled upon a spire of rock."
"Rejoice, podmates, one invader has been immobilized, and even as I
speak to you, our teams are dutifully hunting down the second. It
is of identical design as to the first, and we anticipate that it
will succumb long before it reaches its destination!"
When a junior analyst suggested that both invaders had already exceeded their designed lifetimes by a factor of ten, and that even the immobilized one
was one gust of wind away from being able to return operationally-useful scientific
data from its current position for years to come, K'Breel had the
analyst's gelsacs placed between the invader's slowly-spinning wheel and the crusty sulfates of Scamander Crater.
Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation's health
In this one sentence we see: (a), an appeal to the neo-prohibitionist/nanny-stater lobby to spin this story into a positive, and (b), because you can't make this stuff at home, a pharmaceutical company is going to get a cut. Alcohol's easy to make - take some yeast and just about any form of sugar (or starch that can be converted via enzymatic action into sugar) - and you've got yourself the foundations of beer, wine, and distilled spirits. Synthetic valium, not so much.
Net effect here is that we all wind up hooked on benzos as depressants, rather than alcohol. Hey, that's fine if valium's his depressant of choice, but it's not one of mine. What's next, a move to replace the caffeine in coffee (my stimulant of choice:) with slightly-modified speed?
From the TFsummary:
It is not that I really want a drink of Synthehol, but with its release I assume Romulan Ale won't be far behind.
As cool as it sounds, that's not a feature, that's a bug.
Allow me to nerd out for a bit: When Synthehol was invented, Romulan Ale (which presumably contained real alcohol) became illegal.
And if you go back and re-read TFA, you'll see that's pretty much where this is goin. This guy's not interested in an alternative to alcohol, he's looking for a substitute for alcohol. Even if he is working in good faith, his efforts will be used to help the neo-prohibitionists. And I can't get down with that. Because I like real ale, Romulan or not. (Homebrewing is like turning half the basement into a mad scientist's chemistry lab for a day, and it's all the more fun because you get to consume the product of your experiment when it's done!)
Around this time of year, I usually say "A drink? No thanks, I'm driving." But on this one, I'm gonna have to say "Benzos? No thanks, I'm drinking."
How, in a few years, will I tell if some Hosting/Colo sold me Whitechapel Road/Ventura Avenue for Mayfair/Boardwalk prices, and no one is going to accept my mail from a former slum?
As the purchaser, you probably can't. But what you can do is demand that your provider move you to a better IP neighborhood, or renegotiate (read: "tear up") the contract.
Blocklists aren't about playing whack-a-mole with spammers, they're about disincentivizing spam-friendly providers.
If you're an ISP or hosting provider, and you harbor spammers and botnets, the IP ranges you hold are permanently devalued. That means it's harder for you to get customers, more expensive to support your legitimate customers, and your business, when you decide to sell it, is worth less than if you'd booted the goddamn spammers off your network when you had the chance.
Car Analogy: If you're doing your own oil changes, and instead of hauling the waste oil to a recycler, you dump it into your backyard, don't complain when you try and sell your house and the highest bid still leaves you $100,000 underwater on your mortgage, or requires you to spend $150,000 remediating it. Your property is worth less than it could have been, had you only been a better steward of it.
> > > > > > > Scilon Troll: "Hey, it's no sillier than $mainstreamReligion"
> > > > > > Fundamentalist Religious Dupe #1: "No it's not, our $mainstreamReligion is holy, space aliens are weird."
> > > > > Fundamentalist Atheist Dupe #1: "You silly $mainstreamReligionist! Both your belief systems are bogus!"
> > > > Moderate Atheist Dupe #2: "Yeah, all religions are the same."
> > Trolly Atheist Dupe #3: "Yeah, we should tax 'em all!"
> Paranoid Religious Dupe #3: "No way, I'd rather just let the Scilons keep on doing what they're doing... Relijus Freedumb!!!"
And then the Scilon troll reports back to the mothership: "False equivalence has been established. Everyone's bickering about whose religion is weirder, and all the moderates have agreed that our beliefs are as legitimate a religion as everyone else. Now we can claim religious persecution when speaking to religious audiences, and that we're being attacked by fanatics when we speak to non-religious audiences. Mission Accomplished!"
This isn't about whether Jesus or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is weirder. Or about the relative atrocities of Crusades, the RPF, or not serving meatballs with spaghetti.
It's about one specific organization, and its track record of using litigation as a tool to silence dissent. Sonny Bono, Scientologist and Senator, not only supported the Mickey Mouse Protection Act which extended copyright terms to 75 years plus the life of the creator, he got the damn bill named after itself. When the DMCA was passed in 1998, guess was among the first first lawsuit under its provisions just a few months later? Hint: It's the same organization that attacked Slashdot itself in 2001 and Google in 2002.
It's not about space aliens, UFOs shaped like DC-8s, or volcanoes. It's about one organization's multi-decade track record of attacks on the Internet. That - and nothing else - is why it's News For Nerds, and Stuff That Matters.
Of course, by the time I've typed this, we'll have already gone through 100 posts of "No, your religion is weirder!" "No, all religions are silly", and Scilon trolls sitting back and smiling gleefully as they watch yet another message board thread fall for the distraction tactic, and this post all pointless.
(Yep, the Cult has already compared it to the Spanish Inquisition. For something nobody's supposed to expect, I'm not at all surprised the cult spokesperson has already started to draw comparisons to the Spanish Inquisition, especially in a historically-Catholic country, and right on time, two attempts to distract us by advocating taxation of the Catholic Church shows up here...)
This is getting blown way out of proportion and has a simple explanation:
You also have to BCC your immediate manager to remain employed.
I am writing on behalf of a Jim Cicconi at AT&T. He can always be found
hard at work in his office. He lobbies independently, but never stoops to
donating to opposition party members. Jim is consistent in that he only
lobbies in order to help America innovate in telecom, but never
offers bribes in exchange for their support. Jim often takes extended
measures to complete his lobbying, sometimes skipping coffee and lunch
breaks. Jim is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
vanity in spite of his leadership skills, record of high accomplishments,
moral scruples and knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that Jim can
be classed as a top-tier lobbyist, and his recommendations cannot
be easily dispensed with. Consequently, I duly recommend that Jim be
appointed to regulatory office, and that this appointment should be
executed as soon as possible.
Attempting to influence public policy by means of astroturfing is an art; one sometimes has to
read between the lines.
you didn't even bother reading the part you quoted, did you?
Yeah - I'm so used to marketspeak that I parsed it as "...and you get to keep it for a year".
Guilty as charged -- but the actual Australia FAQ, it's even more restrictive. (Why Australia? Because there are only a few countries there, the US isn't one of them, and unlike the UK, its FAQ "written" in Flash.)
First off, there's that. Geographical lock-in. I presume my music will work if I "download" it in Australia and then go on vacation to the States, but who knows? Given that the FAQs are written in HTML and the FAQ for the UK is written in Flash... who knows what the terms are from one country to the next?
How can I use the music once I've downloaded it?
The music can be used on one registered PC and your Comes With Music handset.
Umm, "registered" PC? Sets my DRM detector on "Danger". We've seen this business model a thousand times before.
What happens to my music once Comes With Music service expires?
You can keep all the tracks your have downloaded and listen to them on your registered PC and Comes With Music handset.
However, you will be required to purchase any new music using the standard a la carte store at $1.70 per track.
So, after my service expires, I'm locked into a vendor who charges almost twice as much as the competitor.
That's an improvement from the Singapore FAQ, in which, after the term expires, I can't buy any more music, period. WTF? To get a new song, I throw the phone away, buy a new phone, renew the contract, and hope that the offer's still in effect?
What happens if I lose my Comes With Music device?
Your music is safe.
Our customer care line will help you register to a new Comes With Music device and you'll be able to access all the music you had previously downloaded. You can contact Nokia Care on [...]
At least, until the licensing terms change a few years down the road, or when the vendor stops offering new content, which has happened with every other DRM-based download service.
So yes - I misparsed the marketingspeak behind the first offer. But the fine print behind the actual offer is just as bad.
an unlimited music-download service that involves a one time fee, which is part of the price of the CMW phone, and lets you download music for free (and you get to keep it) for a year. The question remains, are people more likely to stream or download music on their mobile phones?"
If it's DRMd with a time bomb, then it's not really downloading, is it? It's just streaming, albeit with a large buffer (say, gigabyte-sized) whose contents are deleted after a year, rather a small buffer (e.g. a few megabytes) whose contents are deleted when it is full.
I would prefer to download music, neither of the two solutions offers downloadable content; merely different implementations of ephemeral/disposable content (that is, streaming).
By the time either of these solutions comes to market, you'll be able to just upload existing MP3s to a phone with open firmware, and use the phone's CPU to decode the MP3s for playback.
My answer, therefore, is Mu.
When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed,
Translation: People who typed "en." to bring up the last few times they'd visited en.wikipedia.org, "fi" to bring up the last few times they'd visited "finance.google.com", or "fa" for either "fark.com" or "failblog.org", were sick and tired of having to deal with "English, ASCII, and Unicode", "How to manage a thousand Files of data", and "The Awfulbar is a Failure because it mixes URLs, "TITLE" fields in bookmarks and TITLE headers all into one giant mishmash of UI hell."
It's got nothing to do with pr0n, it's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
What's the first thing experienced Windows users do when they sit down in front of a new machine? They turn off the "Disable infrequently-used menu options" option in the Start Menu, and again in all of the MS Office apps.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
Please watch this video and reconsider your habit of texting while driving.
...and on behalf of your co-workers, friends, and family, this comic (SFW), and reconsider your habit of IMing your personal conversations and your work-related conversations.
Everything from a working Difference Engine to the Crays and Connection Machines that we kids dreamed about in the 80s. A fully-functional PDP-1; it still plays Slug Russel's "Space War". Within an hour's drive of anywhere in the Bay Area.
I'll see your computers and raise you some nukes. Next time you're in Vegas for some trade show or conference, take a day and see the Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Thankfully, there's nothing fully-functional here, but there lots of fascinating artifacts nonetheless. Everything from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, to bits and pieces of a NERVA nuclear rocket prototype, to engineers' notebooks filled with humorous mementos of projects they'd worked on, to Doc Edgerton's impossibly-fast cameras. Within a 10 minute cab ride from the Strip.
Although both museums have material suitable for laypeople and/or children, they're targeted primarily at adults with engineering backgrounds. Expect to spend at least 3 hours at each of 'em.
Nukes are pretty cool, but you can have a lot more fun with a bunch of used pinball machine parts. And everything is fully functional in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Hey, you're already in Vegas -- flashing lights and wacky sounds are what it's all about. You won't need a DeLorean to go back in time, and it'll cost a lot less per hour than the blackjack tables.
Citizens of our peaceful red world stand engorged with pride, as confirmation
has come in that the second of the robotic invaders from the blue
planet has been immobilized. K'Breel, speaker for the Council of Elders, made the announcement
from his flagship:
When we embarked upon this campaign, we
had no idea how long it would take. Having buried the first monstrosity
up to its wheels in the ashes of legions of the blue planet's soldiers, our
Kinetic Bombardment Force has turned its attention to the region infested by the monstrosity's evil twin. Rejoice, podmates, for even the blue planet's own puerile propaganda illustrates that their second robotic monstrosity now stands paralyzed with fear!
When a journalist suggested that the blue planet's robot had
merely paused to inspect a meteorite, K'Breel had the traitor's
gelsacs stapled to the heat shield of his flagship, and initiated
re-entry procedures.
US District Judge Vaughn Walker has given indications that he is increasingly skeptical of the government's arguments in this case. In what might just be a coincidence of timing, today the long-awaited report from the DOJ inspector general to the US Congress about the wiretapping program was declassified and released.
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced legal analysis including legislation, lobbying, and litigation. If you'd like a circular describing these research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your lawyer, and ask for one!"
- With apologies to any crypto geeks who got hired by talking to their grandmothers about mathematics on an open line:)
Last year's bunch of guys in Guy Fawkes masks taking on the Cult of Scientology was just the warmup. This year, the sport of nerds is geopolitics.
This week, we had Twitter replace CNN for live coverage of breaking news, Fark replacing the talking heads for analysis, Anonymous being linked to from The Pirate^WPersian Bay for ways to distribute images of preconfigured proxy servers, and to distribute video, and, the rest of/b/ actually helping by selectively flipping the DDOS switch on and off on Iranian government websites.
It's like Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End come to life.
Once upon a time, there was a little frog who lived at the zoo.
One spring morning, the little frog was hopping through the elephant exhibit, but a bout of freezing rain had made the cage all slippery, and the little frog found himself buried up to his neck in ice.
Stuck in the ice and slowly freezing to death, the little frog looked up, just an instant before the elephant shat all over him. "Ribbit! Elephant, you bastard! You just shat all over me!", croaked the little frog.
But the elephant dung was warm and kept the little frog alive, not only melting the ice, but also attracting the flies, and the frog ate his fill. "Ribbit! We're cool, Elephant! Thanks for the warm dung and the tasty flies!", croaked the little frog.
A Canada Goose, returning home from a winter in the south, heard the commotion, and swooped down next to the little frog. It used its bill to carefully clear away all of the elephant dung, and then gently picked the little frog up out of the pile of elephant poop.
And then the goose ate him alive.
Moral of the story:
1) Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
2) Everyone who digs you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
3) If you're warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your big mouth shut!
Slashdot Mirror
Why, backwards-compatibility with BIND 8 and 9, of course!
Random Destruction, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct! I hereby promote you to Slashdotter Grade 866026!
No better time than now to start collecting installer .exe files.
The reason you collect the installers (or the portable installations for programs that don't require installers) is because in the Windows world, you never know when a publisher will go rogue. UsefulUtility 0.8.5 might be great, UsefulUtility 0.8.6 might come with an optional toolbar/crapware that can be deselected at install-time using the "custom" button, and UsefulUtility 0.8.7 might not have the option to delesect the toolbar/crapware.
In that case, UsefulUtility 0.8.5 or UsefulUtility 0.8.6 are the last safe versions (depending on how you define "safe"), and you stop upgrading. But even if the publisher vanishes from the face of the earth (or puts in gobs of crapware in 0.8.8), you've still got that USB stick with known-trustworthy installers.
The best place to find this sort of information, unfortunately, is by random googling on an app-by-app basis. UsefulUtility might have user forums, and when they go from 0.8.6 to 0.8.7, its users will be screaming bloody murder. Or you might come across a thread on one of the larger tech sites that talks about utilities, and when people start looking for replacements for UsefulUtility, you might find a BetterUtility that does the same thing, only with less bloat.
"Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind."
- Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
Apparently we did, and not only did we not need to build "The Self-Aware Colony" to do it, it wasn't even a secret project. (In Civ V, I guess you get it for free if you play as the British or Americans.)
From TFwebsite:
The Department of Chronological Protection has spent so much of its efforts preventing the LHC from undergoing spontaneous gravitational collapse, that they forgot about the server in Stuttgart that actually did us in. Timothy, you've killed us all!
(Fortunately, I got a copy before the server imploded, so at least I know what to look for outside my window.)
Between the racks I got from Weird Stuff, the tube radio I got at Electronics Flea Market, the wiring and connectors, and components I get from Halted and Al Lasher's Electronics, (I still miss Quinn's Electronics, though...), I almost don't need to go to Fry's or order from Digi-Key.
Not that I don't go to Fry's, Digi-Key, or even eBay, but it's nice to still be able to get parts 'n' stuff on a Saturday for $5 in gas and a pleasant drive, rather than a $5 shipping charge and a three-day wait. (I don't mind paying $5 for a $1 connector, but if I gotta go that route, I'll be damned if I'm gonna wait for it :)
Alas, the surplus store memorial list gets longer with every passing year.
But that covers a few places I know of in the Bay Area. Where are your surplus stores?
The Council of Elders has formally acknowledged the receipt of Articles of Surrender from the blue planet. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, spake thus:
"We accept the the third planet's long-delayed acknowledgement of its inevitable defeat with grace and dignity. One of our longest-standing planetary nightmares is now over, having come to an inglorious end in a pit of sulfate dust. Rejoice, podmates, the invader is defeated, and its rogue twin shall soon meet the same ugly fate!"
When Intelligence Analyst #719324 discreetly reminded K'Breel that not only was the immobilized invader still doing science and still alive, but that the third planet was preparing a new, immensely bigger monstrosity, powered by the force of elements of matter itself, K'Breel had a medical team install a portal into the analyst's gelsacs, so that they could be filled with a sznuppium sulfate solution in time for the signing ceremonies, where they will serve as a set of inkwells.
Today the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue planet third from our star has waved the white flag of surrender regarding one of its mechanical invaders. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, reported the leak of an intelligence report from the blue world:
http://planetary.org/news/2010/1231_Mars_Exploration_Rovers_Update_Spirit.html
Continuing his pronouncement, K'Breel continued: "The trap which we laid for the robotic invader has proven successful; the monstrosity from the blue world now lies half-buried in a Snarpat pit, impaled upon a spire of rock."
"Rejoice, podmates, one invader has been immobilized, and even as I speak to you, our teams are dutifully hunting down the second. It is of identical design as to the first, and we anticipate that it will succumb long before it reaches its destination!"
When a junior analyst suggested that both invaders had already exceeded their designed lifetimes by a factor of ten, and that even the immobilized one was one gust of wind away from being able to return operationally-useful scientific data from its current position for years to come, K'Breel had the analyst's gelsacs placed between the invader's slowly-spinning wheel and the crusty sulfates of Scamander Crater.
Jul lrf, V pna!
- AFN
Let's read between the lines here...
From TFA:
In this one sentence we see: (a), an appeal to the neo-prohibitionist/nanny-stater lobby to spin this story into a positive, and (b), because you can't make this stuff at home, a pharmaceutical company is going to get a cut. Alcohol's easy to make - take some yeast and just about any form of sugar (or starch that can be converted via enzymatic action into sugar) - and you've got yourself the foundations of beer, wine, and distilled spirits. Synthetic valium, not so much.
Net effect here is that we all wind up hooked on benzos as depressants, rather than alcohol. Hey, that's fine if valium's his depressant of choice, but it's not one of mine. What's next, a move to replace the caffeine in coffee (my stimulant of choice :) with slightly-modified speed?
From the TFsummary:
As cool as it sounds, that's not a feature, that's a bug.
Allow me to nerd out for a bit: When Synthehol was invented, Romulan Ale (which presumably contained real alcohol) became illegal.
And if you go back and re-read TFA, you'll see that's pretty much where this is goin. This guy's not interested in an alternative to alcohol, he's looking for a substitute for alcohol. Even if he is working in good faith, his efforts will be used to help the neo-prohibitionists. And I can't get down with that. Because I like real ale, Romulan or not. (Homebrewing is like turning half the basement into a mad scientist's chemistry lab for a day, and it's all the more fun because you get to consume the product of your experiment when it's done!)
Around this time of year, I usually say "A drink? No thanks, I'm driving." But on this one, I'm gonna have to say "Benzos? No thanks, I'm drinking."
Only one way to find out:
``Pl'ngooi hglw'grtz Natalie Portman /. wgah'nagl b00bies petran''
(In a pool of hot grits at Slashdot, Natalie Portman lies naked and petrified.)
Thanks for 100,000, Taco and Company.
As the purchaser, you probably can't. But what you can do is demand that your provider move you to a better IP neighborhood, or renegotiate (read: "tear up") the contract.
Blocklists aren't about playing whack-a-mole with spammers, they're about disincentivizing spam-friendly providers.
If you're an ISP or hosting provider, and you harbor spammers and botnets, the IP ranges you hold are permanently devalued. That means it's harder for you to get customers, more expensive to support your legitimate customers, and your business, when you decide to sell it, is worth less than if you'd booted the goddamn spammers off your network when you had the chance.
Car Analogy: If you're doing your own oil changes, and instead of hauling the waste oil to a recycler, you dump it into your backyard, don't complain when you try and sell your house and the highest bid still leaves you $100,000 underwater on your mortgage, or requires you to spend $150,000 remediating it. Your property is worth less than it could have been, had you only been a better steward of it.
> > > > > > > Scilon Troll: "Hey, it's no sillier than $mainstreamReligion"
> > > > > > Fundamentalist Religious Dupe #1: "No it's not, our $mainstreamReligion is holy, space aliens are weird."
> > > > > Fundamentalist Atheist Dupe #1: "You silly $mainstreamReligionist! Both your belief systems are bogus!"
> > > > Moderate Atheist Dupe #2: "Yeah, all religions are the same."
> > Trolly Atheist Dupe #3: "Yeah, we should tax 'em all!"
> Paranoid Religious Dupe #3: "No way, I'd rather just let the Scilons keep on doing what they're doing... Relijus Freedumb!!!"
And then the Scilon troll reports back to the mothership: "False equivalence has been established. Everyone's bickering about whose religion is weirder, and all the moderates have agreed that our beliefs are as legitimate a religion as everyone else. Now we can claim religious persecution when speaking to religious audiences, and that we're being attacked by fanatics when we speak to non-religious audiences. Mission Accomplished!"
This isn't about whether Jesus or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster is weirder. Or about the relative atrocities of Crusades, the RPF, or not serving meatballs with spaghetti.
It's about one specific organization, and its track record of using litigation as a tool to silence dissent. Sonny Bono, Scientologist and Senator, not only supported the Mickey Mouse Protection Act which extended copyright terms to 75 years plus the life of the creator, he got the damn bill named after itself. When the DMCA was passed in 1998, guess was among the first first lawsuit under its provisions just a few months later? Hint: It's the same organization that attacked Slashdot itself in 2001 and Google in 2002.
It's not about space aliens, UFOs shaped like DC-8s, or volcanoes. It's about one organization's multi-decade track record of attacks on the Internet. That - and nothing else - is why it's News For Nerds, and Stuff That Matters.
Of course, by the time I've typed this, we'll have already gone through 100 posts of "No, your religion is weirder!" "No, all religions are silly", and Scilon trolls sitting back and smiling gleefully as they watch yet another message board thread fall for the distraction tactic, and this post all pointless.
(Yep, the Cult has already compared it to the Spanish Inquisition. For something nobody's supposed to expect, I'm not at all surprised the cult spokesperson has already started to draw comparisons to the Spanish Inquisition, especially in a historically-Catholic country, and right on time, two attempts to distract us by advocating taxation of the Catholic Church shows up here...)
But it felt good to rant for a bit.
I am writing on behalf of a Jim Cicconi at AT&T. He can always be found
hard at work in his office. He lobbies independently, but never stoops to
donating to opposition party members. Jim is consistent in that he only
lobbies in order to help America innovate in telecom, but never
offers bribes in exchange for their support. Jim often takes extended
measures to complete his lobbying, sometimes skipping coffee and lunch
breaks. Jim is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
vanity in spite of his leadership skills, record of high accomplishments,
moral scruples and knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that Jim can
be classed as a top-tier lobbyist, and his recommendations cannot
be easily dispensed with. Consequently, I duly recommend that Jim be
appointed to regulatory office, and that this appointment should be
executed as soon as possible.
Attempting to influence public policy by means of astroturfing is an art; one sometimes has to
read between the lines.
Yeah - I'm so used to marketspeak that I parsed it as "...and you get to keep it for a year".
Guilty as charged -- but the actual Australia FAQ, it's even more restrictive. (Why Australia? Because there are only a few countries there, the US isn't one of them, and unlike the UK, its FAQ "written" in Flash.)
First off, there's that. Geographical lock-in. I presume my music will work if I "download" it in Australia and then go on vacation to the States, but who knows? Given that the FAQs are written in HTML and the FAQ for the UK is written in Flash... who knows what the terms are from one country to the next?
Umm, "registered" PC? Sets my DRM detector on "Danger". We've seen this business model a thousand times before.
So, after my service expires, I'm locked into a vendor who charges almost twice as much as the competitor.
That's an improvement from the Singapore FAQ, in which, after the term expires, I can't buy any more music, period. WTF? To get a new song, I throw the phone away, buy a new phone, renew the contract, and hope that the offer's still in effect?
At least, until the licensing terms change a few years down the road, or when the vendor stops offering new content, which has happened with every other DRM-based download service.
So yes - I misparsed the marketingspeak behind the first offer. But the fine print behind the actual offer is just as bad.
If it's DRMd with a time bomb, then it's not really downloading, is it? It's just streaming, albeit with a large buffer (say, gigabyte-sized) whose contents are deleted after a year, rather a small buffer (e.g. a few megabytes) whose contents are deleted when it is full.
I would prefer to download music, neither of the two solutions offers downloadable content; merely different implementations of ephemeral/disposable content (that is, streaming).
By the time either of these solutions comes to market, you'll be able to just upload existing MP3s to a phone with open firmware, and use the phone's CPU to decode the MP3s for playback. My answer, therefore, is Mu.
Translation: People who typed "en." to bring up the last few times they'd visited en.wikipedia.org, "fi" to bring up the last few times they'd visited "finance.google.com", or "fa" for either "fark.com" or "failblog.org", were sick and tired of having to deal with "English, ASCII, and Unicode", "How to manage a thousand Files of data", and "The Awfulbar is a Failure because it mixes URLs, "TITLE" fields in bookmarks and TITLE headers all into one giant mishmash of UI hell."
It's got nothing to do with pr0n, it's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
What's the first thing experienced Windows users do when they sit down in front of a new machine? They turn off the "Disable infrequently-used menu options" option in the Start Menu, and again in all of the MS Office apps.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
I second the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
Everything from a working Difference Engine to the Crays and Connection Machines that we kids dreamed about in the 80s. A fully-functional PDP-1; it still plays Slug Russel's "Space War". Within an hour's drive of anywhere in the Bay Area.
I'll see your computers and raise you some nukes. Next time you're in Vegas for some trade show or conference, take a day and see the Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Thankfully, there's nothing fully-functional here, but there lots of fascinating artifacts nonetheless. Everything from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, to bits and pieces of a NERVA nuclear rocket prototype, to engineers' notebooks filled with humorous mementos of projects they'd worked on, to Doc Edgerton's impossibly-fast cameras. Within a 10 minute cab ride from the Strip.
Although both museums have material suitable for laypeople and/or children, they're targeted primarily at adults with engineering backgrounds. Expect to spend at least 3 hours at each of 'em.
Nukes are pretty cool, but you can have a lot more fun with a bunch of used pinball machine parts. And everything is fully functional in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Hey, you're already in Vegas -- flashing lights and wacky sounds are what it's all about. You won't need a DeLorean to go back in time, and it'll cost a lot less per hour than the blackjack tables.
What's next, a way to make web browsers faster by making /dev/kmem remotely writable?
When a journalist suggested that the blue planet's robot had merely paused to inspect a meteorite, K'Breel had the traitor's gelsacs stapled to the heat shield of his flagship, and initiated re-entry procedures.
Once again, life imitates XKCD: Network.
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced legal analysis including legislation, lobbying, and litigation. If you'd like a circular describing these research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your lawyer, and ask for one!"
- With apologies to any crypto geeks who got hired by talking to their grandmothers about mathematics on an open line :)
Belief Circle Clash in progress.
Last year's bunch of guys in Guy Fawkes masks taking on the Cult of Scientology was just the warmup. This year, the sport of nerds is geopolitics.
This week, we had Twitter replace CNN for live coverage of breaking news, Fark replacing the talking heads for analysis, Anonymous being linked to from The Pirate^WPersian Bay for ways to distribute images of preconfigured proxy servers, and to distribute video, and, the rest of /b/ actually helping by selectively flipping the DDOS switch on and off on Iranian government websites.
It's like Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End come to life.
Once upon a time, there was a little frog who lived at the zoo.
One spring morning, the little frog was hopping through the elephant exhibit, but a bout of freezing rain had made the cage all slippery, and the little frog found himself buried up to his neck in ice.
Stuck in the ice and slowly freezing to death, the little frog looked up, just an instant before the elephant shat all over him. "Ribbit! Elephant, you bastard! You just shat all over me!", croaked the little frog.
But the elephant dung was warm and kept the little frog alive, not only melting the ice, but also attracting the flies, and the frog ate his fill. "Ribbit! We're cool, Elephant! Thanks for the warm dung and the tasty flies!", croaked the little frog.
A Canada Goose, returning home from a winter in the south, heard the commotion, and swooped down next to the little frog. It used its bill to carefully clear away all of the elephant dung, and then gently picked the little frog up out of the pile of elephant poop.
And then the goose ate him alive.
Moral of the story:
1) Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
2) Everyone who digs you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
3) If you're warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your big mouth shut!
- after The Sparrow