Not quite. He was commenting on the price the Fed was selling its helium at, which was set by legislation and has not changed. While it was approximately 25% higher than market price at the time of the act, it has since acted as a ceiling on the price of helium.
Is anyone else tremendously amused at the method these guys have chosen to get their message out? I don't necessarily disagree with them - specifically, I usually only believe in full disclosure being necessary when an exploit is already in use in the wild - but it seems to me that they're just going to polarize the debate against their own position. IT security geeks are notably stubborn, defiant, etc., and being attacked over this will only entrench them further in their position. And to add to this, the 'attack' is frankly negligible - your blog will be defaced! Of course, you will certainly have backups now that we've warned you, but it'll still be defaced for up to a few hours!
I'm sorry, but this is plainly obvious. Now there are a lot of useful comments in this thread about IT ageism and all that, but the wording of the submission is plain as day to anyone who cares to read between the lines: For continuing in IT you mention no particular positives, and harp on the negative aspect of having to stay up to date and 're-invent yourself'. Whereas w.r.t. management you only say that you seriously enjoy doing it and are seriously considering spending the rest of your working life on it.
Ermmmm....
Granted, you then go on to imply that management is for senile old men, but this only serves to clarify to your audience why you're having this issue: you have deep-seated preconceptions as to what type of people actually go into management, and while you respect the work itself and would like to shine in that respect, you can't get past your own mental blocks of seeing them all as Dilbert-styled PHBs.
Well, by the power vested in me by Slashdot, I officially set you free. Go forth and manage, AND stay up to date on tech, and be the good manager that will render Dilbert obsolete. Use all the grey matter you have - and frankly you will need to - to properly challenge your talented techie workers while using them to the best of their abilities and making the latter obvious to those above you.
I wish you all the best in your management career. Remember, while it's not the same as tech work, don't be afraid to treat it the same when it comes to research - there are innumerable useful books written to help ease you into management coming from any techie standpoint.
This is a great piece about the Section 301 Report. Basically, this is pure political posturing because we haven't implemented the DMCA - the actual data about piracy and copyright violation does not lend any substance to Canada's placement on that watch list.
Traffic shaping! It's fine if they do or don't do it, but will companies PLEASE start being up-front about it? Put as much spin on the damn thing as you want, just at least mention it if you're doing it.
We don't have all the info yet. All we know so far is that AT&T is a client of "MEC Interaction" and that this company has then used Audience Science. There's no way to know for sure yet that they were placing ads based on DPI, or giving info about their customers' browsing habits - it is every single bit as probable that their advertising firm merely placed ads with the behavioral-based advertising network.
Now, there's still a slight disconnect between her testimony (which lambasts behavioral advertising as a whole) and the company contracting Audience Science via a third party, but it's extremely possible that this is being interpreted in the worst possible light [to sell pageviews?] Grain of salt, people.
This is a particular case, given that it is dealing with a psychological test. In many or most cases these rely on the test-taker not knowing the exact questions ahead of time. As you're dealing with over 10% of the test here, it's not all that far-fetched to say that foreknowledge of these questions could skew the results in a statistically significant way.
This would count as causing harm or devaluing the original work (by causing prospective clients [the government] to doubt its results), which are direct reasons for fair use not to apply. Of course, IANAL and you should seek one, etc, but it seems to me that this is not that unreasonable a claim. A single question? Sure. 75 of them? Probably not so much.
How does that work exactly? i.e. will instant messaging apps (Beejive) be able to get new messages pushed to them and notify you of this while you're doing something else, or will this only lengthen battery life when actively using such apps?
But the key signals they're picking out of the air don't include the layout. For bonus paranoia points (and since fairly elementary pattern recognition can be applied to this issue), use a rotation of 3 or more keyboard layouts changing at random intervals with a very minor on-screen notification. Now they need to be rocking TEMPEST, which has a much shorter range than this technique according to TFA.
(Extra tinfoil points for reprogramming your keyboard's microcontroller to rotate the key codes away from the default for your model. Extra extra points for using a new schema whose usage pattern would be reasonably close to the expected.)
Few things irritate me as much as parents taking the avoidance of bad influences to an extreme. When your kids leave your reach and are exposed to TV for the first time, can you be sure they'll be able to enjoy it in moderation rather than make up for lost time?
Teaching a child to enjoy reading is fantastic. Teaching them to enjoy reading rather than watching the latest drivel on Fox is even better - but you can't do this if there isn't a TV in the house. Values taught in a 'clean room' setting do not always stand up when later exposed to real world influences. Not to mention that there are good things to be had on the television, such as BBC documentaries, pieces on the Discovery channel, etc. Use these to teach them critical thought while you're at it.
If you can't get your child to differentiate between good TV and bad TV, then sure, you may be better off without it at all. But don't blame the television set for your failing as a parent in this.
I would be very curious to know which angle they're looking to pursue at the end of this story. Honestly, as someone who's downloaded a piece or two of software, I would be surprised if the lack of DRM itself made any significant dent in the amount of piracy centered around this game. That said:
1) In Canada at least, this game is selling for $30 at retail. That's 30 CAD (~22 USD) as opposed to the flat 50 USD on steam. A very good argument in favor of lowered piracy rates right there, clouding any results.
2) This doesn't even begin to take into account the "try before you buy" crowd/theory (however you want to look at it.) If we were to presume that a) the majority of pirates download games to try, and buy them if they're good and b) that PoP is a good game and c) that these particular pirates would be yet more inclined to buy a good game at the lower $30 CAD price than $50 USD, if in Canada - then... you would see exactly the same amount of piracy but more sales. That is a very hard correlation/causation argument and not one I see the anti-DRM suits winning, frankly.
So.. essentially, what I'm left with as a conclusion is that this is a PR stunt. No more, no less. Any conclusions they draw or announce as to the effect of DRM on game piracy are likely purely tangential, statistically unsound, and a post-primary-push PR effort.
Honestly, the debate seems moot, given your extremely pertinent point re: feral children and the morality thereof.
Really, to do this in anything resembling good conscience, we'll have to raise the child semi-normally, and as soon as we do that it's not even close to an 'outside observer'. I find it funny the way so many articles seem to treat this as essentially raising a dead neanderthal so we can see how neanderthals would view us, when really all we'd be doing is bringing otherwise extinct DNA into modern society. Whoop dee doo?
Give it to them for home as a bonus. Management won't really care, in-office productivity won't take any hits (except maybe right after hyped releases) and other employees won't see it and so won't care.
Plus their families can enjoy it as well, where applicable.
This comment being modded +5 Insightful scares me more than any other part of this discussion.
The idea that simply not wanting to be easily snooped upon is legitimate probable cause and justification for any kind of police action, in the eyes of both law enforcement and the public... chills me to the bone.
Most people I know turn up their volume on their PMPs to drown out ambient noise - for example they use them on the bus, while sitting at the back in a huge crowd of people who are either talking or wearing their own excessively loud music. Or they're walking down a busy street and find car noises less pleasant than metallica. So they crank up their shitty ipod earbuds to drown this out, where a simple pair of GOOD earbuds would cancel out [a large part of] the noise and make this unnecessary.
The whole issue has come about because of a bug in CISCO equipment which BT use which is affecting use of IPv6 for some of AAISP's customers. It only affects some of BT's network. Even though we believe this bug was identified and fixed by CISCO a long time ago, BT appear to be refusing to rectify the problem, preferring to simply say they do not support IPv6.
So in short, as soon as they start having to pay more for IPv4 blocks, they'll update their firmware. Merely some billable network admin hours, not millions of pounds wasted as the summary implies.
Your closing statement makes you sound like the worst kind of fear-mongering politician looking to use "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" as a sledge to hammer through whatever they want. Doubting/questioning concerns on a regular basis is a necessary part of a free-thinking, rational society.
On that note: Prove that it is not rare. Define "not rare": 1/100 children exposed to them? 1/1000? 1/20000? I would hazard a guess putting it closer to the last number, but I'm curious where you would peg it (and whether you have any supporting evidence.)
And again, I feel I should reiterate: Please don't be one of those people who just says "This is how it is. If you doubt this or argue otherwise, you're just wrong." Unless you're commenting to the effect that the sky is blue.
This was my reaction. I'd mod you up if you weren't already at +5 - The last thing you want a dev team saying a month before launch is "We need to get the game done." It screams of becoming one of those games that needs a few months' worth of patches and/or mods before becoming truly enjoyable (see: Messiah, Oblivion, and countless others,) and gets panned by all the critics before that happens - dooming it to poor sales and no further sequels.
Mind you, that would likely result in a late-in-life cult status not unlike the first two games, and while the folks at NMA might hate Bethesda for the game's state at launch, I'm sure a lot of them would have a fantastic time tweaking everything and playing each other's better-than-the-original variations later on.
On that note, is there any -easy- way to check addon compatibility before upgrading to FF3, i.e. other than looking each addon up again? As I understand it they all have a builtin version range, why can't I just go to my addon list and see the compatibility of each addon?
I know the summary mentions the program is one of two of its kind in North America, but the tagline is still a little too disingenuous when you consider that the program's canadian counterpart - the McGill Institute of Air & Space Law recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Even if American law is all you want to count, someone must certainly have graduated from the IASL and gone on to pass an American Bar exam..
You've completely misread this issue - they're throttling RESELLER lines now. You know, the only 'competing' ISPs who need to buy directly from Bell, who were previously not throttling anything and loudly advertising this fact to compete Bell who was already throttling torrents. And thus Bell is now throttling end-users with whom they have no contract, directly interfering with their competitors' business.
Not only that, but they're throttling ALL encrypted traffic, albeit apparently only outside business hours, with a very small whitelist with few entries (mainly VoIP.) So VPN, SSH, SFTP are all now throttled as well. So your connections are suffering exactly as much as the next guy's hentai downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. He was commenting on the price the Fed was selling its helium at, which was set by legislation and has not changed. While it was approximately 25% higher than market price at the time of the act, it has since acted as a ceiling on the price of helium.
Is anyone else tremendously amused at the method these guys have chosen to get their message out? I don't necessarily disagree with them - specifically, I usually only believe in full disclosure being necessary when an exploit is already in use in the wild - but it seems to me that they're just going to polarize the debate against their own position. IT security geeks are notably stubborn, defiant, etc., and being attacked over this will only entrench them further in their position. And to add to this, the 'attack' is frankly negligible - your blog will be defaced! Of course, you will certainly have backups now that we've warned you, but it'll still be defaced for up to a few hours!
I'm sorry, but this is plainly obvious. Now there are a lot of useful comments in this thread about IT ageism and all that, but the wording of the submission is plain as day to anyone who cares to read between the lines: For continuing in IT you mention no particular positives, and harp on the negative aspect of having to stay up to date and 're-invent yourself'. Whereas w.r.t. management you only say that you seriously enjoy doing it and are seriously considering spending the rest of your working life on it.
Ermmmm....
Granted, you then go on to imply that management is for senile old men, but this only serves to clarify to your audience why you're having this issue: you have deep-seated preconceptions as to what type of people actually go into management, and while you respect the work itself and would like to shine in that respect, you can't get past your own mental blocks of seeing them all as Dilbert-styled PHBs.
Well, by the power vested in me by Slashdot, I officially set you free. Go forth and manage, AND stay up to date on tech, and be the good manager that will render Dilbert obsolete. Use all the grey matter you have - and frankly you will need to - to properly challenge your talented techie workers while using them to the best of their abilities and making the latter obvious to those above you.
I wish you all the best in your management career. Remember, while it's not the same as tech work, don't be afraid to treat it the same when it comes to research - there are innumerable useful books written to help ease you into management coming from any techie standpoint.
This is a great piece about the Section 301 Report. Basically, this is pure political posturing because we haven't implemented the DMCA - the actual data about piracy and copyright violation does not lend any substance to Canada's placement on that watch list.
Traffic shaping! It's fine if they do or don't do it, but will companies PLEASE start being up-front about it? Put as much spin on the damn thing as you want, just at least mention it if you're doing it.
We don't have all the info yet. All we know so far is that AT&T is a client of "MEC Interaction" and that this company has then used Audience Science. There's no way to know for sure yet that they were placing ads based on DPI, or giving info about their customers' browsing habits - it is every single bit as probable that their advertising firm merely placed ads with the behavioral-based advertising network.
Now, there's still a slight disconnect between her testimony (which lambasts behavioral advertising as a whole) and the company contracting Audience Science via a third party, but it's extremely possible that this is being interpreted in the worst possible light [to sell pageviews?] Grain of salt, people.
This is a particular case, given that it is dealing with a psychological test. In many or most cases these rely on the test-taker not knowing the exact questions ahead of time. As you're dealing with over 10% of the test here, it's not all that far-fetched to say that foreknowledge of these questions could skew the results in a statistically significant way. This would count as causing harm or devaluing the original work (by causing prospective clients [the government] to doubt its results), which are direct reasons for fair use not to apply. Of course, IANAL and you should seek one, etc, but it seems to me that this is not that unreasonable a claim. A single question? Sure. 75 of them? Probably not so much.
How does that work exactly? i.e. will instant messaging apps (Beejive) be able to get new messages pushed to them and notify you of this while you're doing something else, or will this only lengthen battery life when actively using such apps?
But the key signals they're picking out of the air don't include the layout. For bonus paranoia points (and since fairly elementary pattern recognition can be applied to this issue), use a rotation of 3 or more keyboard layouts changing at random intervals with a very minor on-screen notification. Now they need to be rocking TEMPEST, which has a much shorter range than this technique according to TFA.
(Extra tinfoil points for reprogramming your keyboard's microcontroller to rotate the key codes away from the default for your model. Extra extra points for using a new schema whose usage pattern would be reasonably close to the expected.)
Few things irritate me as much as parents taking the avoidance of bad influences to an extreme. When your kids leave your reach and are exposed to TV for the first time, can you be sure they'll be able to enjoy it in moderation rather than make up for lost time? Teaching a child to enjoy reading is fantastic. Teaching them to enjoy reading rather than watching the latest drivel on Fox is even better - but you can't do this if there isn't a TV in the house. Values taught in a 'clean room' setting do not always stand up when later exposed to real world influences. Not to mention that there are good things to be had on the television, such as BBC documentaries, pieces on the Discovery channel, etc. Use these to teach them critical thought while you're at it. If you can't get your child to differentiate between good TV and bad TV, then sure, you may be better off without it at all. But don't blame the television set for your failing as a parent in this.
I apologise, meant to post plaintext but neglected to preview.
I would be very curious to know which angle they're looking to pursue at the end of this story. Honestly, as someone who's downloaded a piece or two of software, I would be surprised if the lack of DRM itself made any significant dent in the amount of piracy centered around this game. That said: 1) In Canada at least, this game is selling for $30 at retail. That's 30 CAD (~22 USD) as opposed to the flat 50 USD on steam. A very good argument in favor of lowered piracy rates right there, clouding any results. 2) This doesn't even begin to take into account the "try before you buy" crowd/theory (however you want to look at it.) If we were to presume that a) the majority of pirates download games to try, and buy them if they're good and b) that PoP is a good game and c) that these particular pirates would be yet more inclined to buy a good game at the lower $30 CAD price than $50 USD, if in Canada - then... you would see exactly the same amount of piracy but more sales. That is a very hard correlation/causation argument and not one I see the anti-DRM suits winning, frankly. So.. essentially, what I'm left with as a conclusion is that this is a PR stunt. No more, no less. Any conclusions they draw or announce as to the effect of DRM on game piracy are likely purely tangential, statistically unsound, and a post-primary-push PR effort.
Honestly, the debate seems moot, given your extremely pertinent point re: feral children and the morality thereof.
Really, to do this in anything resembling good conscience, we'll have to raise the child semi-normally, and as soon as we do that it's not even close to an 'outside observer'. I find it funny the way so many articles seem to treat this as essentially raising a dead neanderthal so we can see how neanderthals would view us, when really all we'd be doing is bringing otherwise extinct DNA into modern society. Whoop dee doo?
Saw this one recently, by Andrew Savige. He did use a Perl module to generate the regex itself, but even so!
/. won't allow that many "junk" characters.. let's hope that doesn't cripple this entire discussion.)
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-EyeDrops/lib/Acme/EyeDrops.pm#99_Bottles_of_Beer
(I would quote the final result but
Give it to them for home as a bonus. Management won't really care, in-office productivity won't take any hits (except maybe right after hyped releases) and other employees won't see it and so won't care.
Plus their families can enjoy it as well, where applicable.
This comment being modded +5 Insightful scares me more than any other part of this discussion. The idea that simply not wanting to be easily snooped upon is legitimate probable cause and justification for any kind of police action, in the eyes of both law enforcement and the public... chills me to the bone.
Most people I know turn up their volume on their PMPs to drown out ambient noise - for example they use them on the bus, while sitting at the back in a huge crowd of people who are either talking or wearing their own excessively loud music. Or they're walking down a busy street and find car noises less pleasant than metallica. So they crank up their shitty ipod earbuds to drown this out, where a simple pair of GOOD earbuds would cancel out [a large part of] the noise and make this unnecessary.
So in short, as soon as they start having to pay more for IPv4 blocks, they'll update their firmware. Merely some billable network admin hours, not millions of pounds wasted as the summary implies.
Your closing statement makes you sound like the worst kind of fear-mongering politician looking to use "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" as a sledge to hammer through whatever they want. Doubting/questioning concerns on a regular basis is a necessary part of a free-thinking, rational society.
On that note: Prove that it is not rare. Define "not rare": 1/100 children exposed to them? 1/1000? 1/20000? I would hazard a guess putting it closer to the last number, but I'm curious where you would peg it (and whether you have any supporting evidence.)
And again, I feel I should reiterate: Please don't be one of those people who just says "This is how it is. If you doubt this or argue otherwise, you're just wrong." Unless you're commenting to the effect that the sky is blue.
This was my reaction. I'd mod you up if you weren't already at +5 - The last thing you want a dev team saying a month before launch is "We need to get the game done." It screams of becoming one of those games that needs a few months' worth of patches and/or mods before becoming truly enjoyable (see: Messiah, Oblivion, and countless others,) and gets panned by all the critics before that happens - dooming it to poor sales and no further sequels.
Mind you, that would likely result in a late-in-life cult status not unlike the first two games, and while the folks at NMA might hate Bethesda for the game's state at launch, I'm sure a lot of them would have a fantastic time tweaking everything and playing each other's better-than-the-original variations later on.
How exactly does this solve our dependence on coal power plants?
I find your comment about the registration and tracking of typewriters telling, when put in context.
On that note, is there any -easy- way to check addon compatibility before upgrading to FF3, i.e. other than looking each addon up again? As I understand it they all have a builtin version range, why can't I just go to my addon list and see the compatibility of each addon?
I know the summary mentions the program is one of two of its kind in North America, but the tagline is still a little too disingenuous when you consider that the program's canadian counterpart - the McGill Institute of Air & Space Law recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Even if American law is all you want to count, someone must certainly have graduated from the IASL and gone on to pass an American Bar exam..
You've completely misread this issue - they're throttling RESELLER lines now. You know, the only 'competing' ISPs who need to buy directly from Bell, who were previously not throttling anything and loudly advertising this fact to compete Bell who was already throttling torrents. And thus Bell is now throttling end-users with whom they have no contract, directly interfering with their competitors' business.
More info on this in Geist's latest post, covering the Canadian ISP Association's filing to the regulatory body.
Not only that, but they're throttling ALL encrypted traffic, albeit apparently only outside business hours, with a very small whitelist with few entries (mainly VoIP.) So VPN, SSH, SFTP are all now throttled as well. So your connections are suffering exactly as much as the next guy's hentai downloads.