You actually have to point your activated camera at the terminal, so you can't be hijacked by some rogue transmitter using a zero day flaw to root your phone via the NFC chip when you happen to pass within range.
Indeed. It seems to me that NFC is inherently insecure, which is why I don't trust it enough to use it. A transaction involving the camera should be safer, unless there's some God-like hacker out there sending encoded lightning flashes from the sky.
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it... Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude...
This sounds confused. Just about the only android devices that don't have data service are e-readers, which are pretty safe from any evil impositions. As for Android 4.3, the restrictions are for profiles that *you* impose. If it's a single user device, you don't have to use them. And, of course, if you don't care for the way Google implements Android, there's always the choice of CyanogenMod/AOSP if you don't like the idea of Firefox OS or Linux distros for mobile.
As for the no-server limitation, it all depends on what you're doing with it. If you are using bandwidth provided at no cost by Google, it's a bit inconsiderate to hog resources with a high-traffic server, making them unavailable to others. If all you're doing is running a little mail server for a handful of users, I doubt if Google could give a fuck.
I'd imagine karma points on/. to be the equivalent to any form of currency. It takes years of quality posting to bring up that karma and that's a lot of work. It's worth something...
Only if you believe it to have value. I've accumulated far more karma over the years here than I can ever "use", for no other reason than because I'm too lazy to be bothered creating another ID to replace this rather tired one. Having karma points simply means you're not wasting your life (and everyone else's time) by being a troll.
Here's a protip: if karma's important to you, stop posting as AC.
It comes as no surprise that the first post is a bump to vi(m), and I (for one), don't really care that much. Whatever rocks your boat, say I.
But the GUIfication of emacs is sad. The beauty of emacs is that as a text editor, it runs happily in console mode as well as in X11.
I came across an instance not long ago when having installed a server system (i.e. without X11) from binaries, I fired up emacs to edit a config file, and it spat errors due to missing gtk libraries. That really pissed me off.
The good news is that TECO, the direct ancestor to emacs still exists. The thing about TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector) is that although the wetware address space needs to be quite large to remember all those line-transmission-noise commands, if you use it a lot for a month or two, your muscle memory kicks in automatically. There is no menu, no GUI, no cruft, just a lean, fast and really scriptable editor that gets the job done.
but that does not mean that Chinese today hold a grudge against American people for it.
This may be true of the Chinese, but the GP's claim that "from what I've seen, having been across much of eastern Asia, the US is generally well regarded" completely disregards history from well within my lifetime.
This might not be generally known within the US, but what we refer to as the Vietnam War is known in Vietnam as the "American War". It's just too convenient to forget who was the aggressor.
particularly when your OS has an average life expectancy of 6-12 months
Really? Let's have a look.
The current 3.x kernel series has been going for only 2 years or so, so maybe I'll give you that.
The 2.6 kernel (started 2004) is still actively supported. The 2.4 kernel (started 2001) had its latest update in May of this year. I would say that sort of indicates more commitment to long term support than just about any other software available.
Back in the '90s (I remember) you had to give some about how well your hardware would be supported, but nowadays pretty much anything worth having works just fine with Linux.
In the 18 or so years that I've been running Linux, the only distros where I've had "everything crash" (other than when I've done something stupid, of course, which doesn't count) as the result of a bad update have been (in chronological order) with RedHat and Arch. Slackware never (ever) breaks, Debian is reliable, my LFS and Gentoo systems have been reliable (if tedious to maintain), and I can never persuade myself to stick with Ubuntu for long enough before it pisses me off.
In any case, this is both stupid and insane by the U.S congress doing this.
It's not Congress. It's a "30-member Senate Appropriations Committee" adopting an "amendment to a spending bill that would direct Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with congressional committees". Which seems like a bit of a tortuous path, so maybe we can hope this will amount to nothing more than a bit of breast-beating before wiser heads prevail.
Business Insider have a somewhat cynical take on Snowden's asylum claim which I think is worth reading.
The article is worth reading, but in claiming that [Snowden] "is asking for asylum in a country that continues to openly squash dissent", it neglects to mention that at this point, his options are becoming limited.
Perhaps you could try writing a letter to someone, and maybe get one in return? People love physical mail, and have for a thousand years
I agree, and there are a few like-minded curmudgeons still around. There are even some of us (including myself) who still own real pens (fountain and/or dipper) and actually know how to use them.
But the truth, for the most part, is that the postal service has largely become simply the vehicle by which the goodies that we order over the internet get delivered to our homes. Apart from that, 99% of the stuff I get via snail-mail is bills I would much rather get via email. (I don't have a problem with junk mail, since living out in the country means it costs real money to waste people's time.)
I don't know about Ubuntu being that popular, but this story seems to be. We had this one on/. only four days ago. Editors asleep at the wheel again...:-|
In Australia, it has always been normal to have a mailbox at the front gate, regardless of whether you live in town or country. I don't believe anyone has an expectation that the postman will deliver to the front door.
In my case, it's a bit of a pain since my front gate is 2km from my house, but our mail-lady more than makes up for that by collecting as well as delivering mail. All I have to do is put my (stamped) mail to be delivered in the mailbox, and put any sort of flag on the outside. Not that I need to do this very often, but the option is so civilised as to be almost unbelievable in this day and age.
Google's claim seems a bit questionable to me in any case. My Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which I rooted and flashed to stock Android 4.2 a while back, and is currently running 4.2.2) hasn't picked up any very recent updates.
My understanding is that the Nexus devices without OEM builds of the OS should enter the pipeline for updates directly from Google, and my phone reports having checked for updates within the last 6 hours. In my case, I don't have any binaries downloaded from non-Google sources (other than a couple of things I'm working on myself from time to time), so I'm not really worried, but even so...
In any case, PDF is a crap format for e-books. You're stuck with the layout that the document creator imposed, and if it doesn't fit the display of your chosen reader well (as is usually the case), then it can make the book hard to read.
When I was first shopping for an e-reader, I chose the Sony device because it supported by far the widest range of formats. However, now I know better, and my policy is to buy/download ePubs exclusively. (The Sony devices are still nice, though.) The exceptions I have occasionally picked up (.lit or.mobi) are easily converted to ePub by Calibre, and if I need to do any further tweaking, I can easily do so either with Calibre or with Sigil.
...eBook also more convenient not causing problems to breathe compared to a 3000+ large page monster...
I would have been infinitely grateful if there had been a decent ebook device with both large format and colour display when I was doing my undergrad degrees in biochemistry and biotechnology. Those seriously heavyweight (not to mention expensive) textbooks are of no use whatsoever on a monochrome display, and they need lots of screen-space.
However, despite the fact that I am a bit of a luddite and a late adopter, I have come to actually prefer the interface of my Sony reader to dead-tree copies of novels (where the restrictions mentioned earlier don't apply). The only exceptions to this preference are when the publisher takes the trouble to produce a high quality paper copy. This doesn't happen very often, and I have far too many novels from as recent a vintage as the '80s which are falling apart due to the acid content of the paper.
Twenty years ago, I predicted that we would have a kind of "Dark Age" whereby many paper-bound texts would disappear as a result of their chemical properties, but that was before ePubs appeared on the scene. Now my hope is that the electronic form of these books may just rescue them from oblivion.
...until the degree of brutality reaches to levels that everyone can see.
Which takes us back to the final sentence of TFS:
How much bloodshed will it take for America to realize such a disproportionate response is unwarranted and disastrous?"
Trouble is, what everybody can see and what can be done about it are two different things. If you have a State that is content to say FUCK YOU, then, well, you're fucked. It really doesn't make any difference whether or not you protest, the behaviour will remain the same. There are only two things you can do about such treatment, and one of those (most likely) will make you a criminal as far as the law is concerned. The other, of course, is to do nothing. Good luck with that.
There is no point in placing asinine hope in democratic processes: we have been shown (time and again) that where these exist (!), they will be subverted by those who do not have your best interests at heart.
Slashdot Mirror
You actually have to point your activated camera at the terminal, so you can't be hijacked by some rogue transmitter using a zero day flaw to root your phone via the NFC chip when you happen to pass within range.
Indeed. It seems to me that NFC is inherently insecure, which is why I don't trust it enough to use it. A transaction involving the camera should be safer, unless there's some God-like hacker out there sending encoded lightning flashes from the sky.
Winter in Russia is quiet[sic] beautiful, and it's also the cheapest time to get a flight. I paid $600 to fly from New York to Moscow in February.
I don't think Snowden is looking for cheap flights to New York just at the moment.
Maybe it's not, but Russia isn't pissed at him at the moment, so it's still better than being in the US.
Exactly. We only have to look at Bradley Manning to see what treatment Snowden is likely to face if the US gets its claws into him.
But Snowden had better be prepared for a more protracted stay in Russia (if permitted), since he is likely to be intercepted if he attempts to travel anywhere else.
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it... Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude...
This sounds confused. Just about the only android devices that don't have data service are e-readers, which are pretty safe from any evil impositions. As for Android 4.3, the restrictions are for profiles that *you* impose. If it's a single user device, you don't have to use them. And, of course, if you don't care for the way Google implements Android, there's always the choice of CyanogenMod/AOSP if you don't like the idea of Firefox OS or Linux distros for mobile.
As for the no-server limitation, it all depends on what you're doing with it. If you are using bandwidth provided at no cost by Google, it's a bit inconsiderate to hog resources with a high-traffic server, making them unavailable to others. If all you're doing is running a little mail server for a handful of users, I doubt if Google could give a fuck.
I'd imagine karma points on /. to be the equivalent to any form of currency. It takes years of quality posting to bring up that karma and that's a lot of work. It's worth something...
Only if you believe it to have value. I've accumulated far more karma over the years here than I can ever "use", for no other reason than because I'm too lazy to be bothered creating another ID to replace this rather tired one. Having karma points simply means you're not wasting your life (and everyone else's time) by being a troll.
Here's a protip: if karma's important to you, stop posting as AC.
I always thought French was a foul language... Is Russia planning to ban French?
French isn't a foul language, it's just that speaking it makes my nose bleed. ;)
Go F**k Yourself. And, after that, Go s**k your own d**k
I think you might need to get some of the crap out of your keyboard. Your "U", "I" and "C" keys seem to be outputting asterisks for some reason.
Like Tide [schneier.com].
You can't make this stuff up.
How cool is that? A currency with actual intrinsic value. Easy to launder, too.
*ducks*
but it seems much more sane to me than allowing politicians to be legally bought.
Sanity in politics? Be still, my heart.
...those 217 'no' voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 'yes' voters.
Now this is actually sort of refreshing. At least they're honest: bought politicians who stay bought.
It comes as no surprise that the first post is a bump to vi(m), and I (for one), don't really care that much. Whatever rocks your boat, say I.
But the GUIfication of emacs is sad. The beauty of emacs is that as a text editor, it runs happily in console mode as well as in X11.
I came across an instance not long ago when having installed a server system (i.e. without X11) from binaries, I fired up emacs to edit a config file, and it spat errors due to missing gtk libraries. That really pissed me off.
The good news is that TECO, the direct ancestor to emacs still exists. The thing about TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector) is that although the wetware address space needs to be quite large to remember all those line-transmission-noise commands, if you use it a lot for a month or two, your muscle memory kicks in automatically. There is no menu, no GUI, no cruft, just a lean, fast and really scriptable editor that gets the job done.
but that does not mean that Chinese today hold a grudge against American people for it.
This may be true of the Chinese, but the GP's claim that "from what I've seen, having been across much of eastern Asia, the US is generally well regarded" completely disregards history from well within my lifetime.
This might not be generally known within the US, but what we refer to as the Vietnam War is known in Vietnam as the "American War". It's just too convenient to forget who was the aggressor.
particularly when your OS has an average life expectancy of 6-12 months
Really? Let's have a look.
The current 3.x kernel series has been going for only 2 years or so, so maybe I'll give you that.
The 2.6 kernel (started 2004) is still actively supported. The 2.4 kernel (started 2001) had its latest update in May of this year. I would say that sort of indicates more commitment to long term support than just about any other software available.
Back in the '90s (I remember) you had to give some about how well your hardware would be supported, but nowadays pretty much anything worth having works just fine with Linux.
In the 18 or so years that I've been running Linux, the only distros where I've had "everything crash" (other than when I've done something stupid, of course, which doesn't count) as the result of a bad update have been (in chronological order) with RedHat and Arch. Slackware never (ever) breaks, Debian is reliable, my LFS and Gentoo systems have been reliable (if tedious to maintain), and I can never persuade myself to stick with Ubuntu for long enough before it pisses me off.
In any case, this is both stupid and insane by the U.S congress doing this.
It's not Congress. It's a "30-member Senate Appropriations Committee" adopting an "amendment to a spending bill that would direct Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with congressional committees". Which seems like a bit of a tortuous path, so maybe we can hope this will amount to nothing more than a bit of breast-beating before wiser heads prevail.
Business Insider have a somewhat cynical take on Snowden's asylum claim which I think is worth reading.
The article is worth reading, but in claiming that [Snowden] "is asking for asylum in a country that continues to openly squash dissent", it neglects to mention that at this point, his options are becoming limited.
Even assuming any other nation were to offer him asylum, recent history has shown that the US is extremely unlikely to allow him to get there. So his only option might be to stay where he is, and make the best of it.
Perhaps you could try writing a letter to someone, and maybe get one in return? People love physical mail, and have for a thousand years
I agree, and there are a few like-minded curmudgeons still around. There are even some of us (including myself) who still own real pens (fountain and/or dipper) and actually know how to use them.
But the truth, for the most part, is that the postal service has largely become simply the vehicle by which the goodies that we order over the internet get delivered to our homes. Apart from that, 99% of the stuff I get via snail-mail is bills I would much rather get via email. (I don't have a problem with junk mail, since living out in the country means it costs real money to waste people's time.)
I don't know about Ubuntu being that popular, but this story seems to be. We had this one on /. only four days ago. Editors asleep at the wheel again... :-|
I see we have an Apple shill here.
WTF? Go back and read my post again, you fool. Or try enrolling in an English comprehension course.
In Australia, it has always been normal to have a mailbox at the front gate, regardless of whether you live in town or country. I don't believe anyone has an expectation that the postman will deliver to the front door.
In my case, it's a bit of a pain since my front gate is 2km from my house, but our mail-lady more than makes up for that by collecting as well as delivering mail. All I have to do is put my (stamped) mail to be delivered in the mailbox, and put any sort of flag on the outside. Not that I need to do this very often, but the option is so civilised as to be almost unbelievable in this day and age.
Google's claim seems a bit questionable to me in any case. My Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which I rooted and flashed to stock Android 4.2 a while back, and is currently running 4.2.2) hasn't picked up any very recent updates.
My understanding is that the Nexus devices without OEM builds of the OS should enter the pipeline for updates directly from Google, and my phone reports having checked for updates within the last 6 hours. In my case, I don't have any binaries downloaded from non-Google sources (other than a couple of things I'm working on myself from time to time), so I'm not really worried, but even so...
My bullshitometer went into the red when I saw how he seems to imagine the radio waves go around a pond, rather than across...
In any case, PDF is a crap format for e-books. You're stuck with the layout that the document creator imposed, and if it doesn't fit the display of your chosen reader well (as is usually the case), then it can make the book hard to read.
.mobi) are easily converted to ePub by Calibre, and if I need to do any further tweaking, I can easily do so either with Calibre or with Sigil.
When I was first shopping for an e-reader, I chose the Sony device because it supported by far the widest range of formats. However, now I know better, and my policy is to buy/download ePubs exclusively. (The Sony devices are still nice, though.) The exceptions I have occasionally picked up (.lit or
...eBook also more convenient not causing problems to breathe compared to a 3000+ large page monster...
I would have been infinitely grateful if there had been a decent ebook device with both large format and colour display when I was doing my undergrad degrees in biochemistry and biotechnology. Those seriously heavyweight (not to mention expensive) textbooks are of no use whatsoever on a monochrome display, and they need lots of screen-space.
However, despite the fact that I am a bit of a luddite and a late adopter, I have come to actually prefer the interface of my Sony reader to dead-tree copies of novels (where the restrictions mentioned earlier don't apply). The only exceptions to this preference are when the publisher takes the trouble to produce a high quality paper copy. This doesn't happen very often, and I have far too many novels from as recent a vintage as the '80s which are falling apart due to the acid content of the paper.
Twenty years ago, I predicted that we would have a kind of "Dark Age" whereby many paper-bound texts would disappear as a result of their chemical properties, but that was before ePubs appeared on the scene. Now my hope is that the electronic form of these books may just rescue them from oblivion.
Is there a single American on this damned planet who knows the difference between "loose" and "lose"?
...until the degree of brutality reaches to levels that everyone can see.
Which takes us back to the final sentence of TFS:
How much bloodshed will it take for America to realize such a disproportionate response is unwarranted and disastrous?"
Trouble is, what everybody can see and what can be done about it are two different things. If you have a State that is content to say FUCK YOU, then, well, you're fucked. It really doesn't make any difference whether or not you protest, the behaviour will remain the same. There are only two things you can do about such treatment, and one of those (most likely) will make you a criminal as far as the law is concerned. The other, of course, is to do nothing. Good luck with that.
There is no point in placing asinine hope in democratic processes: we have been shown (time and again) that where these exist (!), they will be subverted by those who do not have your best interests at heart.