I'm a chef, I've had lots of BBQ down south, and there actually are a few places that you can get really good BBQ in Mass. You're awfully confident in your superiority for someone who can't "muster enough care about a couple of Yankee states" to even bother looking to see what's there, eh? Then again, I doubt it would be easy for one to be overconfident about their superiority if they actually check to see if it was true. Actually, I think you'd be very comfortable in NYC with that attitude.
I worked for the Harvard Law School Library and saw such a work in progress for the documents used in the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg. The process of putting this together was extrordinarily expensive and even with the HLSL donating the Server, Traffic, labor to maintain the back end code (which it still does), etc. the project ran out of funding 13,904 scans in and is currently seeking funding.
Although the metadata surrounding the scans of these books would not have to be nearly as detailed, it's worth noting that google is not a non-profit organization with a set of gigantic grants for book preservation. They needed to put together something that would make enough money to at least fund its own existence immediately.
Why did they bother? Is it enough that it's useful to many people even if it's not useful to everyone?
One could certainly put together the electronic preservation project of everyone's dreams... I wouldn't be surprised if some very smart people somewhere in academia have already designed it. Sooo if you would be so kind as to cut them a check so it doesn't have to be up to a company who's worried about it being a financially solvent program from a business perspective, I bet they'd start tomorrow.
So anyone who buys that product containing this technology anywhere on the east coast of the US including Boston and New York, where it regularly reaches 100% relative humidity, and technology companies such as RIM and Apple *heavily* market their wares, is to blame when they *haven't* submerged their devices and the company says that they have? That's absolute nonsense. You sound like someone that has "bad tech-support employer Stockholm syndrome". It's simply justification for a company who doesn't know how to solve a problem so they want to pretend it doesn't even exist and reflexively say it's the customers fault.
Being one of the people that has spent a considerable amount of time living in one of those neighborhoods I can definitively say that what this guy did was extremely dangerous and stupid. I wouldn't pull that kind of BS with someone I sorta knew while they were standing in public, let alone in a neighborhood I've never been to before. I'm surprised that the guy who had the phone wasn't using it to call his friends to get down there and kick their asses, if for no other reason than to not appear to have been rolled by 3 scrawny nerds armed with a laptop in broad daylight.
If he stole the phone in the first place, he probably wasn't the most savory character in the world. What if he was on parole/probation/suspended sentence for something serious and could have been locked up? What if he was on some crazy uppers? What if he was actually meeting a large group of his buddies on that street corner? What if he was any of the above *and* armed?
Not trying to be a troll here, but I'm guessing that those guys have never really had their asses handed to them before.
Come on... Is the freedom of information crowd really going to rally against letting people get this information on themselves because they assume that they won't understand it or use it correctly?
Also, I'm not exactly the most pro-business guy in the world but let's see if they screw up before we start talking about outlawing their industry. If there's a company out there that claims to be able to do it accurately, let them operate until there's proof otherwise. Even if they were selling inaccurate tests, though it would be completely immoral, it wouldn't exactly be a direct danger to people.
If you do the calculations (insert calculations), AT&T selling a product and related services makes AT&T money. Here's the tricky part. If VERIZON were to sell those *same* products and related services, THEY would be making the money, and not AT&T. Since AT&T considers the amount of money made to be a good indicator of company success, they greatly prefer if people give THEM money, rather than Verizon.
That's right! The computer needs to configure the user, not the other way around! Wait...
What you're saying makes *some* amount of sense when you're making policy decisions for a menu structure or something in a public or largely multiuser computing environment, but we're talking about a web browser here. Not only are the overwhelming majority of these customizations going to be made on computers (or at least user accounts or web browser profiles) that are specific to an individual person and portable, those customizations are not going to somehow disable the regular features of the browser for anyone else who uses that computer under that person's account/profile. It's also pretty likely that if people know enough about the app to customize it, they know how to use it without customization.
Could you explain what you mean by removing the profit motive? Though I may be missing something, I think that you might be oversimplifying things here.
I'm not really sure that it's any more realistic to try and make spamming unprofitable than it would be to make any other successful form of marketing unprofitable, let alone one that is almost free.
We could just as easily say that the solution to stopping welfare abuse would be to remove the financial incentive to doing so... but without actually suggesting anything useful to come to that end, it's a pretty useless comment.
As a blatant fuckup of a student (emotional difficulties, a difficult family life and difficult neighborhood mostly contributed... let's just say i listened to a LOT of nine inch nails), I would often go from messing up somewhere near the first part of the year, to realizing that it would be almost impossible to get back on track and just blowing off the rest of the year. I would have certainly pulled through with enough ass beatings by the folks in charge if it was actually possible.
Was it my fault? If by fault you mean 'responsibility to complete the schoolwork' then yes, it was my responsibility to complete the schoolwork, and I didn't. Was it my fault that I was a hopeless teenager in a tough situation in a toxic environment that didn't see the value of the schoolwork (or the HS diploma) presented? Some of it was, but mostly it was not.
I could have (and actually did a few years later) absolutely whipped ass in those pathetically easy high school classes if I had actually tried. It probably would have been the difference between telling them all to fuck off and just not attending school for almost a year (what I did) vs reluctantly getting back on track.
I'm assuming that the high school experiences of the overwhelming majority of people here were probably in mostly non-violent areas with at least mediocre schools and fairly supportive families... I'm not saying that lacking these things is an excuse for dropping out of high school or getting a free ride, but you probably don't realize just how different of an experience high school is when you've got lots of other negative (but attractive to a fucked up teenager) options around, without support from the people who you really need it from both inside and outside of the school.
What these kids have to face is fundamentally harder than what you had to face, and frankly your success or failure in your high school experience shouldn't dictate the rules for theirs. Does that make rounding up to 50 the right answer? Probably not... but something needs to be done to address this.
Actually, considering that this almost guarantees that he does support warrantless wiretapping, saying something like "McCain adviser supports asking telecoms for assistance" would be akin to replacing "Man shoots 3 family members dead" with "Man pushes lever on small mechanical device in the privacy of his own home". Is it accurate? Absolutely. Just because you like the man doesn't mean that people who disagree with him are lying. At least be happy that he seems to be a good guy overall and he's not feeding us a line.
Well, once you throw kids in there you're getting a little more complicated... but the "If you can't find joy in your job and you can't find another job with comparable income, then find joy in your family. (read: you're screwed job wise)" is totally fatalistic. Also, I've noticed that in this regard people often use their kids as a blanket excuse for where their money goes... yet they're driving a 45k dollar car (well, it's uh... safer!), live in a large house in an expensive neighborhood (wouldn't want those kids playing with the ruffians in that lower-middle middle-class neighborhood down the road! It's all about the kids! I swear!), have an expensive cell phone, wear moderately expensive clothes, etc etc
The truth is that you're not going to be as good at your new career as you are at your current career, until you've been in your new career as long as your old career. That is compounded by the fact that in IT, you generally get compensated for your skills more heavily than in other industries (such as the service industry, or in farming). That being said, I would assume that your new passion isn't going to be working at the concession counter at the local movie theater with no interest in working your way up to manager. You will be able to get good at it, and make some money.
When my family's income level changed drastically when I was a kid, switching from a moderately sized 3 bedroom middle class house to an apartment wasn't something that I jumped for joy about, but it wasn't exactly a traumatic experience. Switching from name brand to generic sure didn't kill me. My parents never drove brand new higher-end cars. My new bike was always used. We bought the cheap toilet paper. Plain old analog toothbrushes. My mom made some terrific budget food, and dinner was often leftovers. I never went to disney world. And you know what? Thanks in large part to a happy, loving, attentive family, regardless of the amount of cash they brought in, I'm a totally well adjusted, happy, productive human being.
Thanks to escalation of wealth, people have the tendency to believe that what they make is the bare minimum that they could do it on. Even if they were to get a 10k raise, after the honeymoon period, that would be the new base level. Sit down, get to the bare essentials and see what it would really cost you to live a bare-bones life, and add on top of that.
That being said, you don't necessarily have to quit your job right away if you choose something that wouldn't require it. Let's say you want to work in cabinetry. What's to stop you from starting out doing that on the weekends by yourself? Apprentice. Go to trade school at night. Hell, choose something professional and go to college for another degree at night. Being in IT, especially someone whose comfortable with contracting gives you tremendous flexibility in this regard. Pick up little contracts here and there to bring the bulk of the money while you're doing your thing. Switch to a comparable paying job temporarily that doesn't require you to be on-call so you can take classes without a pager going off... or don't. It's really no big deal. Think about the long term goals, not the short term relief of saying "fuck it all".
Part of why I'm a happy, well adjusted person is because I don't work in IT anymore. I went to school for culinary arts full time, while I was working full time, and wouldn't trade a second of it. I'm working my way up to Chef in a kitchen now and couldn't be happier. Is it hard work? Absolutely. Do my knees and feet constantly throb? Yep. Is my lifestyle as posh as it was when I was making significantly more money? Definitely not. Would I trade any of it for the spare cash to blow on a car upgrade or some stupid iPhone gadget? Wouldn't even think about it.
I'm sorry but I really can't agree with you on this. Normally when I post in response to something I try really hard to bring the other person's point of view into the post and emphasize where I agree, I really hate it when people are confrontational for the sake of being confrontational... but I really just don't 'get' what you're saying.
First, let's be perfectly clear that you're saying the hot button term 'cell phones' in your comment when given your example, you should use the term "outside lives". If they're playing a multiplayer game, chances are they're at home and it could have just as easily been their landline.
This is something that I've never understood... When you're talking potential 'real life' importance vs. video game importance, how could you possibly be self centered enough to side with your own entertainment over what could be a potentially important situation for the person that you're playing with? If you decide to have a (work/social/family) life which allows you to ignore the phone in favor of entertainment, then go for it. Some people do not have this luxury.
For example:
- I work in higher-level technical support for an high dollar application that is mission-critical for most companies that use it, and have knowledge and understanding that is specific to me. My answering my phone on first try is another person that doesn't get paged, and if it's my specialty, probably an IT guy somewhere in the world that isn't going to have to work over the weekend. If it's work, I'm going to answer.
- My girlfriend is almost in remission from ovarian cancer. Any sudden bleeding or change in pain-level while she's at work could potentially be something that could turn our lives upside down... but usually it's just "hey, wanna grab a drink later", or "I really need to vent right now". As a waitress she's got an often tiresome and frustrating job, and supporting her in that, as she does with me and my job, is more important than my entertainment as well. If it's my girlfriend, I'm going to answer.
- I have sick relatives, family money issues, etc. etc. etc. that may all need my immediate attention. Having family needs taken care of is much more important to me than my own entertainment. If it's family, I'm going to answer.
Does this mean that I somehow shouldn't be able to play online video games to relax for a couple hours per week, at the risk of making an online friend's 20 minutes potentially less fun than they could have been if something hadn't come up?
Sure, I'm not going to sit there and BS with a friend that I see every day for 5 or 10 minutes while people online are waiting for me, but the amount of narcissism that it takes to honestly say that I just need to "Learn to live without my cell phone" for your video gaming convenience is just staggering. If you really tried, you probably could find a group of like minded people to play multiplayer games with, such as retired people, people with jobs that don't have to take their work home with them, don't have families or their families don't need to contact them often, high school students, or the unemployed.
Don't shit on people for having their priorities straight.
Not that i agree with their actions, and I absolutely abhor the idea of censorship through the DNS system, but I've got some food for thought: Would this have been tagged cowardice if they had taken down an anti christian site under threats by the KKK? Or a anti-jewish site under legal threat from the jewish ADL? I tend to doubt it.
Not trying to make any particular political statement, or say that those situations are entirely comparable, but I think that the cowardice tag nicely portrays this aspect of the the adversarial relationship between the western (primarily US) and Islamic worlds at this point in time... Cowardice not only would indicate that they were doing the wrong thing, but also essentially challenging the "manliness" of the company making the decision.
The article made it seem as though they didn't even go that far though, noting that they specifically didn't record the referring URL. If that's the case, it'd be hard to imagine that they would have recorded other parts of the header, though the article didn't specify. What's scary is that they made it sound almost like they just put the link out there, recorded any IP addresses that requested the URL, talked to ISPs of the owners and then went on raids. Anyone who took any vaguely reasonable steps to conceal their identity would be saved totally fine, but I imagine that anyone running a TOR relay should be very worried.
For the record, I just got rid of my (non iphone) smartphone to buy a cellphone that was primarily a cell phone. I don't own any apple computers, or even an ipod. I'm not an apple fanboy. That said:
Working for a large company in the software industry, it's refreshing to see someone actually opt out of having another bullet point on their feature list to keep the integrity of their product. Having flash perform badly on their phones may bump up their sales by 20% in the quarter when the youtube fanatics hear about it, but it'll hurt them not too long after when they realize that the feature they bought it for works poorly. I know that my company would have much better quality products if we thought beyond the next quarter or two's marketing plan.
And to the people who rib apple for having created a device that won't run flash... Let's look at the minimum system requirements for the current version of Linux flash:
Modern processor (800MHz or faster) 512MB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory with a *recommended* Intel Pentium 4 2.33GHz processor (or equivalent) 128MB of RAM 64MB of VRAM
Almost a gigahertz processor and half a gig of ram? This would have bumped everything but the bleeding edge off the map 10 years ago on processor speed and ram alone, and 128MB of graphics memory? Forget about it... and the recommended stats (which for some reason are lower than the minimum system requirements in RAM and VRAM... http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ maybe the low processor speed requires more mem?) on processor speed exclude many desktops sitting in homes today.
This is a CELL PHONE people!:)
Maybe on a half-technical cell phone review site i'd expected the reactionary "I can't believe they don't support flash" attitude as if they were just being lazy about it, but on a website where supposedly technical people understand the actual limitations that they run into with this stuff, come on.
Ok, as far as I'm concerned the name of this story may as well be "Guy doesn't see email when one of his bunk amazon.com orders was canceled."
Firstly, this is one person's account of the matter. We've got no idea if this got caught in his spam filter, if he had just changed the MX records on his domain and made a typo, if he accidentally deleted the email as he drunkenly checked his mail at 2am on a saturday and hit that delete button one too many times when deleting the offers of "G3nuine R3plicas"... oh who knows. Anyone in IT here knows how many reasons there may be for an email not being seen by an end user, and many of them involve the end user saying "uhh, whoops" and then suddenly getting amnesia as the indignant help desk call (or in this case Slashdot post) gets made pleading their case. Maybe if we had independent confirmation from a slew of people that didn't receive email from them about this then it might be an issue for their technical or customer service staff to take a look at.
The poster paints the picture of a sinister and knowing amazon.com staff purposefully leading thousands of innocent Parisian jazz fans down the path of pain and frustration as they reel them in with an obviously mistakenly cheap product (Ha!), delay their orders (ha-HAH!) and then covering up their tracks(Mwahahah!)... It just doesn't pan out. Sorry dude, you thought you could pull one over on them and they didn't let you. You might be used to dealing with "customer is always right" corporations that probably would have just given it to you, (and if you weren't attempting to screw them out of 95.8% of a $500 item, they may have anyway) but frankly I think that they're as big of a problem in our society as people like you are. (Mainly because they tend to cultivate the greed and overblown sense of entitlement that people like you have)
Aparently we at "harvard" are not supposed to use spellcheckers... I did not recieve such a memo. Also, with this particular subject, you probably would want to lie about being from the college up the street, MIT. Not only do they have a much better robotics program, It is much easier to spell.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a chef, I've had lots of BBQ down south, and there actually are a few places that you can get really good BBQ in Mass. You're awfully confident in your superiority for someone who can't "muster enough care about a couple of Yankee states" to even bother looking to see what's there, eh? Then again, I doubt it would be easy for one to be overconfident about their superiority if they actually check to see if it was true. Actually, I think you'd be very comfortable in NYC with that attitude.
I worked for the Harvard Law School Library and saw such a work in progress for the documents used in the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg. The process of putting this together was extrordinarily expensive and even with the HLSL donating the Server, Traffic, labor to maintain the back end code (which it still does), etc. the project ran out of funding 13,904 scans in and is currently seeking funding.
Although the metadata surrounding the scans of these books would not have to be nearly as detailed, it's worth noting that google is not a non-profit organization with a set of gigantic grants for book preservation. They needed to put together something that would make enough money to at least fund its own existence immediately.
Why did they bother? Is it enough that it's useful to many people even if it's not useful to everyone?
One could certainly put together the electronic preservation project of everyone's dreams... I wouldn't be surprised if some very smart people somewhere in academia have already designed it. Sooo if you would be so kind as to cut them a check so it doesn't have to be up to a company who's worried about it being a financially solvent program from a business perspective, I bet they'd start tomorrow.
So anyone who buys that product containing this technology anywhere on the east coast of the US including Boston and New York, where it regularly reaches 100% relative humidity, and technology companies such as RIM and Apple *heavily* market their wares, is to blame when they *haven't* submerged their devices and the company says that they have? That's absolute nonsense. You sound like someone that has "bad tech-support employer Stockholm syndrome".
It's simply justification for a company who doesn't know how to solve a problem so they want to pretend it doesn't even exist and reflexively say it's the customers fault.
Being one of the people that has spent a considerable amount of time living in one of those neighborhoods I can definitively say that what this guy did was extremely dangerous and stupid. I wouldn't pull that kind of BS with someone I sorta knew while they were standing in public, let alone in a neighborhood I've never been to before. I'm surprised that the guy who had the phone wasn't using it to call his friends to get down there and kick their asses, if for no other reason than to not appear to have been rolled by 3 scrawny nerds armed with a laptop in broad daylight.
If he stole the phone in the first place, he probably wasn't the most savory character in the world. What if he was on parole/probation/suspended sentence for something serious and could have been locked up? What if he was on some crazy uppers? What if he was actually meeting a large group of his buddies on that street corner? What if he was any of the above *and* armed?
Not trying to be a troll here, but I'm guessing that those guys have never really had their asses handed to them before.
Come on... Is the freedom of information crowd really going to rally against letting people get this information on themselves because they assume that they won't understand it or use it correctly?
Also, I'm not exactly the most pro-business guy in the world but let's see if they screw up before we start talking about outlawing their industry. If there's a company out there that claims to be able to do it accurately, let them operate until there's proof otherwise. Even if they were selling inaccurate tests, though it would be completely immoral, it wouldn't exactly be a direct danger to people.
Here's the CliffsNotes version.
If you do the calculations (insert calculations), AT&T selling a product and related services makes AT&T money. Here's the tricky part. If VERIZON were to sell those *same* products and related services, THEY would be making the money, and not AT&T. Since AT&T considers the amount of money made to be a good indicator of company success, they greatly prefer if people give THEM money, rather than Verizon.
Inappropriate comparisons are the new Ford.
That's right! The computer needs to configure the user, not the other way around! Wait...
What you're saying makes *some* amount of sense when you're making policy decisions for a menu structure or something in a public or largely multiuser computing environment, but we're talking about a web browser here. Not only are the overwhelming majority of these customizations going to be made on computers (or at least user accounts or web browser profiles) that are specific to an individual person and portable, those customizations are not going to somehow disable the regular features of the browser for anyone else who uses that computer under that person's account/profile. It's also pretty likely that if people know enough about the app to customize it, they know how to use it without customization.
Could you explain what you mean by removing the profit motive? Though I may be missing something, I think that you might be oversimplifying things here.
I'm not really sure that it's any more realistic to try and make spamming unprofitable than it would be to make any other successful form of marketing unprofitable, let alone one that is almost free.
We could just as easily say that the solution to stopping welfare abuse would be to remove the financial incentive to doing so... but without actually suggesting anything useful to come to that end, it's a pretty useless comment.
It's not a typo in the headline, it was submitted by "Tokey" from Metalocalypse.
Hey, I thought of a clever name... internetpol. It's like interpol but for the intern... Wait, that's a pretty cool idea isn't it? Let's run with it.
untrue. You have been able to permanently delete things since about 3 months into gmail's launch.
As a blatant fuckup of a student (emotional difficulties, a difficult family life and difficult neighborhood mostly contributed... let's just say i listened to a LOT of nine inch nails), I would often go from messing up somewhere near the first part of the year, to realizing that it would be almost impossible to get back on track and just blowing off the rest of the year. I would have certainly pulled through with enough ass beatings by the folks in charge if it was actually possible.
Was it my fault? If by fault you mean 'responsibility to complete the schoolwork' then yes, it was my responsibility to complete the schoolwork, and I didn't. Was it my fault that I was a hopeless teenager in a tough situation in a toxic environment that didn't see the value of the schoolwork (or the HS diploma) presented? Some of it was, but mostly it was not.
I could have (and actually did a few years later) absolutely whipped ass in those pathetically easy high school classes if I had actually tried. It probably would have been the difference between telling them all to fuck off and just not attending school for almost a year (what I did) vs reluctantly getting back on track.
I'm assuming that the high school experiences of the overwhelming majority of people here were probably in mostly non-violent areas with at least mediocre schools and fairly supportive families... I'm not saying that lacking these things is an excuse for dropping out of high school or getting a free ride, but you probably don't realize just how different of an experience high school is when you've got lots of other negative (but attractive to a fucked up teenager) options around, without support from the people who you really need it from both inside and outside of the school.
What these kids have to face is fundamentally harder than what you had to face, and frankly your success or failure in your high school experience shouldn't dictate the rules for theirs. Does that make rounding up to 50 the right answer? Probably not... but something needs to be done to address this.
Actually, considering that this almost guarantees that he does support warrantless wiretapping, saying something like "McCain adviser supports asking telecoms for assistance" would be akin to replacing "Man shoots 3 family members dead" with "Man pushes lever on small mechanical device in the privacy of his own home". Is it accurate? Absolutely. Just because you like the man doesn't mean that people who disagree with him are lying. At least be happy that he seems to be a good guy overall and he's not feeding us a line.
And when you get to the other side, you have delicious seafood stew.
Well, once you throw kids in there you're getting a little more complicated... but the "If you can't find joy in your job and you can't find another job with comparable income, then find joy in your family. (read: you're screwed job wise)" is totally fatalistic. Also, I've noticed that in this regard people often use their kids as a blanket excuse for where their money goes... yet they're driving a 45k dollar car (well, it's uh... safer!), live in a large house in an expensive neighborhood (wouldn't want those kids playing with the ruffians in that lower-middle middle-class neighborhood down the road! It's all about the kids! I swear!), have an expensive cell phone, wear moderately expensive clothes, etc etc
The truth is that you're not going to be as good at your new career as you are at your current career, until you've been in your new career as long as your old career. That is compounded by the fact that in IT, you generally get compensated for your skills more heavily than in other industries (such as the service industry, or in farming). That being said, I would assume that your new passion isn't going to be working at the concession counter at the local movie theater with no interest in working your way up to manager. You will be able to get good at it, and make some money.
When my family's income level changed drastically when I was a kid, switching from a moderately sized 3 bedroom middle class house to an apartment wasn't something that I jumped for joy about, but it wasn't exactly a traumatic experience. Switching from name brand to generic sure didn't kill me. My parents never drove brand new higher-end cars. My new bike was always used. We bought the cheap toilet paper. Plain old analog toothbrushes. My mom made some terrific budget food, and dinner was often leftovers. I never went to disney world. And you know what? Thanks in large part to a happy, loving, attentive family, regardless of the amount of cash they brought in, I'm a totally well adjusted, happy, productive human being.
Thanks to escalation of wealth, people have the tendency to believe that what they make is the bare minimum that they could do it on. Even if they were to get a 10k raise, after the honeymoon period, that would be the new base level. Sit down, get to the bare essentials and see what it would really cost you to live a bare-bones life, and add on top of that.
That being said, you don't necessarily have to quit your job right away if you choose something that wouldn't require it. Let's say you want to work in cabinetry. What's to stop you from starting out doing that on the weekends by yourself? Apprentice. Go to trade school at night. Hell, choose something professional and go to college for another degree at night. Being in IT, especially someone whose comfortable with contracting gives you tremendous flexibility in this regard. Pick up little contracts here and there to bring the bulk of the money while you're doing your thing. Switch to a comparable paying job temporarily that doesn't require you to be on-call so you can take classes without a pager going off... or don't. It's really no big deal. Think about the long term goals, not the short term relief of saying "fuck it all".
Part of why I'm a happy, well adjusted person is because I don't work in IT anymore. I went to school for culinary arts full time, while I was working full time, and wouldn't trade a second of it. I'm working my way up to Chef in a kitchen now and couldn't be happier. Is it hard work? Absolutely. Do my knees and feet constantly throb? Yep. Is my lifestyle as posh as it was when I was making significantly more money? Definitely not. Would I trade any of it for the spare cash to blow on a car upgrade or some stupid iPhone gadget? Wouldn't even think about it.
And back in my day, we didn't have weekends! And we loved it! And by the way, get off my damn lawn! I just seeded!
I'm sorry but I really can't agree with you on this. Normally when I post in response to something I try really hard to bring the other person's point of view into the post and emphasize where I agree, I really hate it when people are confrontational for the sake of being confrontational... but I really just don't 'get' what you're saying.
First, let's be perfectly clear that you're saying the hot button term 'cell phones' in your comment when given your example, you should use the term "outside lives". If they're playing a multiplayer game, chances are they're at home and it could have just as easily been their landline.
This is something that I've never understood... When you're talking potential 'real life' importance vs. video game importance, how could you possibly be self centered enough to side with your own entertainment over what could be a potentially important situation for the person that you're playing with? If you decide to have a (work/social/family) life which allows you to ignore the phone in favor of entertainment, then go for it. Some people do not have this luxury.
For example:
- I work in higher-level technical support for an high dollar application that is mission-critical for most companies that use it, and have knowledge and understanding that is specific to me. My answering my phone on first try is another person that doesn't get paged, and if it's my specialty, probably an IT guy somewhere in the world that isn't going to have to work over the weekend. If it's work, I'm going to answer.
- My girlfriend is almost in remission from ovarian cancer. Any sudden bleeding or change in pain-level while she's at work could potentially be something that could turn our lives upside down... but usually it's just "hey, wanna grab a drink later", or "I really need to vent right now". As a waitress she's got an often tiresome and frustrating job, and supporting her in that, as she does with me and my job, is more important than my entertainment as well. If it's my girlfriend, I'm going to answer.
- I have sick relatives, family money issues, etc. etc. etc. that may all need my immediate attention. Having family needs taken care of is much more important to me than my own entertainment. If it's family, I'm going to answer.
Does this mean that I somehow shouldn't be able to play online video games to relax for a couple hours per week, at the risk of making an online friend's 20 minutes potentially less fun than they could have been if something hadn't come up?
Sure, I'm not going to sit there and BS with a friend that I see every day for 5 or 10 minutes while people online are waiting for me, but the amount of narcissism that it takes to honestly say that I just need to "Learn to live without my cell phone" for your video gaming convenience is just staggering. If you really tried, you probably could find a group of like minded people to play multiplayer games with, such as retired people, people with jobs that don't have to take their work home with them, don't have families or their families don't need to contact them often, high school students, or the unemployed.
Don't shit on people for having their priorities straight.
Not that i agree with their actions, and I absolutely abhor the idea of censorship through the DNS system, but I've got some food for thought:
Would this have been tagged cowardice if they had taken down an anti christian site under threats by the KKK? Or a anti-jewish site under legal threat from the jewish ADL? I tend to doubt it.
Not trying to make any particular political statement, or say that those situations are entirely comparable, but I think that the cowardice tag nicely portrays this aspect of the the adversarial relationship between the western (primarily US) and Islamic worlds at this point in time... Cowardice not only would indicate that they were doing the wrong thing, but also essentially challenging the "manliness" of the company making the decision.
Just a thought.
s/saved\ totally\ fine/totally\ fine/
The article made it seem as though they didn't even go that far though, noting that they specifically didn't record the referring URL. If that's the case, it'd be hard to imagine that they would have recorded other parts of the header, though the article didn't specify.
What's scary is that they made it sound almost like they just put the link out there, recorded any IP addresses that requested the URL, talked to ISPs of the owners and then went on raids. Anyone who took any vaguely reasonable steps to conceal their identity would be saved totally fine, but I imagine that anyone running a TOR relay should be very worried.
For the record, I just got rid of my (non iphone) smartphone to buy a cellphone that was primarily a cell phone. I don't own any apple computers, or even an ipod. I'm not an apple fanboy. That said:
:)
Working for a large company in the software industry, it's refreshing to see someone actually opt out of having another bullet point on their feature list to keep the integrity of their product. Having flash perform badly on their phones may bump up their sales by 20% in the quarter when the youtube fanatics hear about it, but it'll hurt them not too long after when they realize that the feature they bought it for works poorly. I know that my company would have much better quality products if we thought beyond the next quarter or two's marketing plan.
And to the people who rib apple for having created a device that won't run flash... Let's look at the minimum system requirements for the current version of Linux flash:
Modern processor (800MHz or faster) 512MB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory
with a *recommended*
Intel Pentium 4 2.33GHz processor (or equivalent) 128MB of RAM 64MB of VRAM
Almost a gigahertz processor and half a gig of ram? This would have bumped everything but the bleeding edge off the map 10 years ago on processor speed and ram alone, and 128MB of graphics memory? Forget about it... and the recommended stats (which for some reason are lower than the minimum system requirements in RAM and VRAM... http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ maybe the low processor speed requires more mem?) on processor speed exclude many desktops sitting in homes today.
This is a CELL PHONE people!
Maybe on a half-technical cell phone review site i'd expected the reactionary "I can't believe they don't support flash" attitude as if they were just being lazy about it, but on a website where supposedly technical people understand the actual limitations that they run into with this stuff, come on.
scientific american frontier covered this. Couldn't tell you when, but I'm almost positive that they did.
Ok, as far as I'm concerned the name of this story may as well be "Guy doesn't see email when one of his bunk amazon.com orders was canceled."
Firstly, this is one person's account of the matter. We've got no idea if this got caught in his spam filter, if he had just changed the MX records on his domain and made a typo, if he accidentally deleted the email as he drunkenly checked his mail at 2am on a saturday and hit that delete button one too many times when deleting the offers of "G3nuine R3plicas"... oh who knows. Anyone in IT here knows how many reasons there may be for an email not being seen by an end user, and many of them involve the end user saying "uhh, whoops" and then suddenly getting amnesia as the indignant help desk call (or in this case Slashdot post) gets made pleading their case. Maybe if we had independent confirmation from a slew of people that didn't receive email from them about this then it might be an issue for their technical or customer service staff to take a look at.
The poster paints the picture of a sinister and knowing amazon.com staff purposefully leading thousands of innocent Parisian jazz fans down the path of pain and frustration as they reel them in with an obviously mistakenly cheap product (Ha!), delay their orders (ha-HAH!) and then covering up their tracks(Mwahahah!)... It just doesn't pan out. Sorry dude, you thought you could pull one over on them and they didn't let you. You might be used to dealing with "customer is always right" corporations that probably would have just given it to you, (and if you weren't attempting to screw them out of 95.8% of a $500 item, they may have anyway) but frankly I think that they're as big of a problem in our society as people like you are. (Mainly because they tend to cultivate the greed and overblown sense of entitlement that people like you have)
Aparently we at "harvard" are not supposed to use spellcheckers... I did not recieve such a memo. Also, with this particular subject, you probably would want to lie about being from the college up the street, MIT. Not only do they have a much better robotics program, It is much easier to spell.