The longest journey was an adventure. Dreamfall isn't. It is half adventure, half fighting game. What is worse, the fighting game is extremely bad, you wouldn't accept this kinda fighting game in a flash format that PAYED you to play it.
That is what killed adventures, the constant insistance of adding things onto it to make it appeal to more people. Adventures were ALWAYS good sellers, but that wasn't enough, so lucasarts went 3D, and killed the adventure. Broken Sword added sneaking and platforming, and the series nearly died from it. Dreamfall added combat and we only forgave it because so few other adventures exist.
STOP ADDING ELEMENTS TO GAMES JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT.
Platformers don't suddenly add a long story segment to appeal to adventures, so why add platform gaming to adventures. Combat games don't suddenly get a rich plot to appeal to adventures, so why add combat to adventures. Action games don't suddenly add character development to their heroes, so why add action to adventures.
It ain't nothing new, leisure suit larry had a segment in it were you had to navigate down a river and avoid pigs on logs (don't ask), it was a very bad minigame. It played in a tiny window, was crap, hard to control, looked far more primitive then the main game, and just basically wasn't fun.
I don't mind mixed genre's where a game really focusses on combing two different game styles together. BUT in adventure land this doesn't happen, what happens that an extremely poor version of another game format is tacked on top. I don't mind combat in dreamfall. I mind that it is an extremely poor combat engine. It responds slowly, you have no special moves, it is just crap.
Put in a full copy of even streetfighter and I wouldn't mind, but not this 3rd rate reject of a fighting game roughly inserted in my adventure.
A fine dinner, deserves a fine wine. BUT just because I am eating dinner, does not mean you got to shove any rotted grape juice down my throat and expect me to like it.
YOU, yes YOU kept an entire population dumb and with no hope of improvement for decades and expect that all to be overcome in a single generation? You created this situation, now you get to life in it. It is called just desserts. Don't expect anyone to cry if you and your family are raped/killed by people who you have opressed for generations. You really should have thought about this when you kept blacks from education, jobs and everything else.
No matter where I take it, it beeps like it is in the presence of the dark lord himself. No idea what causes it, was like that when I first took it out of the package.
If I take a picture of you, it is a picture of YOU, but MY picture. The english language really fails here because you could also say it is your picture as in you are in the picture without actually owning said picture.
Medical records are of a person, but are created by another person reflecting that persons opinions about that other person. Who owns a record, the person who wrote it or who it is about? You can say that you want your records in your hands but you are quit right that this would remove from the doctor all the information he has collected that he could need in a lawsuit. It would be like saying, that speedcamera picture belongs to me, okay, now I got it, go ahead and prove I speeded. HAHA!
I think we barking up the wrong tree here, medical records being kept is useful, useful for the patient because a doctor can see your history. Useful for the doctor since it saves time, useful for society since you can use it to tell what is happening to the population.
What we need to do is put extremely harsh punishements in place against abuse. Sell medical data, serious jail time for EVERYONE involved, the person who stole it, who transported it, who bought it and who used it.
Because abuse is possible of something doesn't mean you get rid of something, you get rid of the abuser.
Offcourse this is hard to believe in when even the most basic save guards against abuse of our freedoms are being trampled on the world over.
They are the real pro's and will NOT shoot you just because you got a knife. That is because unlike regular police they get to train, and train, and train, and train. A regular cop is someone who was given some extremely basic weapons training ages ago, vists a static shooting range every year or so and then in a split second has to go from ordinary average day routine into making a life and death decision.
CAR ANOLOGY! (Didn't think I could do it in this story, well I can)
You are an ordinary driver, you might have one day learned about what to do if you get into a skid, you may even have taken some training, but when you are just driving around and suddenly it all goes wrong and you are expected to suddenly get that 2 tons of metal out of a high speed skid, you probably will NOT do it as the book says.
Unlike a rally driver, to whom this is routine.
IF we want our regular police to be highly capable, and react correctly in an emergency, we better be prepared to pay them for endless training. Are we? No.
Most people understand this, if you got a medical emergency, where do you go, the hospital OR your family doctor? To a building filled with strangers who deal with emergencies ALL the time, or the guy you know and trust but whose last training was 30 years ago?
The swat team did what they are trained to do, lets hope this guys cellmate does what he has been training to do. He is going to get his ports probed.
ISP's transmit data, I really don't want them to be starting to be clever. What next, RIAA requests that people are limited to X posts to usenet so they can't post large binaeries? Limit P2P traffic? Sniff traffic in general for undesired elements?
In a way, my PC becoming a spam zombie is part of the price of freedom. Do you really want the internet to be regulated?
Oh sure, you can start light, but in the end sooner or later someone will abuse it and push for ever more stringent restriction, all in the name of the common good.
For instance, limit each IP to no more then say 6 outbound connections, that should be enough, you can request more, and they will know you are a dirty P2Per who needs to be reported.
No my friend, let ISP's remain in their role as dumb data carriers, we got to fight spam another way then by given up freedom.
My account on my own domain doesn't get much spam, that is because the username is fairly unusual. HOWEVER the amount of spam the server gets is rather larger. It is offcourse rejected as it silently drops email for a non-existing account. Now it all depends on how well known your domain is, I had obscure ones that barely got touched and popular ones were I needed a seperate machine to just deal with it all. I don't even bother reading the admin email, you should as this is the official way to get in touch with you, but geez gods, who has the time to read all that crap. (Filter it an a real complaint might get dumped because a complaint about YOUR server spamming often includes the spam, triggering the filter)
You can imagine that if you operate a mailserver for a large group of people, who all go around putting their emailadress all over the place, that the amount of spam is far far greater.
I don't find these figures at all suprising, I happen to know several people who still work for ISP's and I have been hearing this for a long time. Oh it might be 90% or it might be 99%, it is a HUGE amount and out of control.
Don't think to lightly of it either, YOUR isp bill has to pay for techies with no other job then to keep email going (without spam even national ISP's could do this with a partimer), pay for ever more powerfull hardware to handle it all, pay for then bandwidth etc etc.
It is easy for you to say that YOU don't get much spam on YOUR account, but we are talking here about figures reported by systerm administrators for large networks.
To give you a basic idea how bad it is, couple of years ago I decided to monitor the traffic from our mailservers at a large company. Like most offices we close at night, so you would expect a downfall in the amount of traffic right? WRONG. No way was that legit email, we were a local office with no real business emailing to the rest of the world. So how come the mailserver didn't show a massive drop in traffic and load at night? Spam.
So who gets 95% spam? The poor smuck running your mailserver.
Is it really that figure? Oh that depends on so much, how well is your domain known, how widely are your email accounts spread etc etc, lets just say that we have for a long had to deal with the fact that the fast majority of emails are spam.
OH YES YOU CAN, stop thinking that video is.avi you moron. It all depends on the video container. Some allow playing right from the start (mpg). In fact if you got a non-crap video player EVERY video can be played without it being complete, the only thing that doesn't work in forinstance avi is skipping forward.
I used to use this plenty of times back when I had a backbone for an internet connection, streaming avi from FTP, oh yeah, life was good back then.
Oh and if windows still refuses to open a file you are downloading, get a proper OS.
With bittorrents MPG's can even be viewed if have just one large enough segment.
Video can't be viewed before they are fully downloaded, geez, new much?
You are furthermore an idiot because you apparently think that desktops are the only computers. I am not just talking about servers here, but things like industrial controllers and embedded devices. Grow up MS kiddy.
There was a move years ago that cars could be impounded AND scrapped on the spot. Laugh that one off as your 1 million dollar car is crushed.
Didn't work for long, this targetted the rich and rich people got power. Just accept that there is a law for the normal people and no law for the rich. There is no exception to this.
1) Tearing down billboards means nothing, it is just a publicity stunt.
2) That is called a paid vacation, you ALWAYS study how to do things in far away WARM places. Greenland runs things very well, but is rarely studied.
3) A fool is easily pleased.
4) Who cares
5) Lets wait for point 6
6) So what you are saying is that brazillian women are desperate for american men? Because american men got better income and can take them out of the dumb that is brazille? Reminds me off japan, if you are NOT obviously there just to score with asian girls, you will be amazingly succesfull because even the most macho western male is an improvement over the japanese male.
7) So I guess you won't be having the last laugh.
8) Well, how capable is brazil of fighting a war anyway? From what little I know, brazil is far more corrupt on a day to day basis, with nothing happening without a bribe, at least that is different in the US, corruption is more or less restricted to the top.
Frankly your defence of brazil seems to be as insane as the loonies you get defending bush. Wake up and smell the roses, brazil is a corrupt hell hole, wasn't it a brazillian who got shot on the tube in london, an ILLEGAL brazillian? Why are people living illegally abroad if their home country is such a paradise?
Change our lives in the next few years (hey that is what the article says, blame the editors)? Might be tricky, since we don't actually have e-paper available right now, and no clear date when it will be either, how exactly is it going to chance our lives?
THE BLOODY STUFF DOESN'T EXIST YET.
I am sure a cure for cancer will change our lives, but it doesn't exist yet, so it won't be in the next few years.
Real paper is incredibily cheap and can be easily recycled, do we really want to replace it with something that is more expensive, and can't? I for one can't really see the benefit of having e-paper used to package my groceries.
As for e-books, well we all know how well those worked right? The problem is simple, the readers just ain't books (too expensive and well just not books) and the contents are too fucking expensive. Just because we pay a premium for paperbacks does not mean we will pay the same for a tiny amount of data.
Books unlike say CD's got tremendous extra value for some reason. Maybe it is because most bookstores don't blast our ears with crap music that the idiot behind the counter happens to like, and most bookstores actually bother to hire people who like their job. I like going to my local bookstore, the musicstore BAH.
Simply put the problem is that we don't "mind" the price we pay for our fiction right now. Especially since the alternatives ain't realistically priced. Uploading less then 1/10 of a MB to me does NOT inspire me to pay EXACTLY the same amount, if not MORE then for the dead-tree version. Why yes, I do think the Apple is ripping people off with iTunes, why do you ask?
I can see the costs of producing a dead-tree copy I buy in a brick&mortar store, I can't see them in e-book websites. WHERE ARE THE HUGE SAVINGS GOING? Savings in having to print books, stock them, distribute them, stock them again, take unsold copies back, etc etc. WHO IS RAKING IN THE CASH? Wanna bet it ain't the author?
So I am left with a very expensive reader, that can't stand being wet, or being sat on or having the cat sleep on it (my cat is a bit old and sometimes wakes up a bit too late), I don't think bleaching the wet spot works well on electronics) that if I forget it, I am out NOT just the reader but ALSO the collection of books, so I have to rebuy them at EXACTLY the same price as the dead-tree versions.
LOWER THE GODDAMN PRICE! That is when e-paper will change our lives.
The only way I can see this taking off is combined with the move to make textbooks freely available. Give each student an ebook reader, publish the textbooks online for free and voila, huge savings to education.
But if e-books continue to be sold at 20 bucks for fiction, then no, it won't take off.
MS is evil and wants to maintain its absolute control on the desktop market (Windows Office Gaming) and extend this control elsewhere.
It lies and it cheats to get this, recent ISO mess, Halo2 for Vista only, dirext10 for Vista only, bribing officials, well just read slashdot.
At sometimes it seems quite insane doing things that don't even make sense. Ask youreselve this, could Vista's lack luster uptake by due to its anti-piracy controls? How many of the typical early adoptors are in Windows case, pirates? It is widely assumed that MS gained its dominance thanks to its software being widely pirated, Vista can't be pirated, and it is not spreading as fast as MS thought it would. Mmm, a link?
Anyway, no matter how insane and self destructive MS at times might appear to be, it is also a normal business, run by people who despite their faults (normal people don't throw chairs) are reasonably good at their job (Everybody should be willing to admit that Gates got some amazing deals at the start of his career) and part of that is giving the customer what it wants. Granted this is MS, so it takes a while.
Opensource software development has a very large real world demand. More and more people are starting to realize that if you have access to the source, then you are finally in control of your own destiny, no more discontinuation of support, no more forced upgrades that ruin compatibility. Apache may for instance decide to go to version 2 completly BUT anyone can continue on version 1 as long as they want (hiring a dev to fix any bugs is actually not that expensive).
MS therefore has a simple choice, adopt, or loose customers. All someone at MS had to do was wait for Steve Ballmer to stop frothing at the mouth for a moment and get the plan through. It doesn't actually cost MS anything, and it allows them to add another bullet item to their sales list.
Don't count on this having any significant effect other then making MS salesreps lives a little easier. You won't see any significant bits of MS code going opensource. Just enough to keep people hooked on MS.
It ain't paranoia when dealing with MS, they are out to get everyone.
GCC and Bash are opensource, you can get them to run on ANYTHING you bloody well want too. So if you want to use code that only compiles under gcc then all you need to do is get gcc to work on your system. Have you checked how many systems gcc works on? Go ahead, I will wait. Wow, long list eh?
Now compare this with closed source, lets say C#, how many systems does MS compiler run on? Oh, only windows. Wow that was quick.
Same with their IE, it ain't the problem that IE does things differently, it is that nobody really knows and can't copy that behaviour. THe problem ain't that IE does things differently as such, it is that they don't publish how to do it, so everybody else is left with browsers that run their "enhancements" slightly differently and end up with messed up pages.
All your post has done is to show WHY opensource is so essential. Frankly if this is the best attack you can muster against GNU, then we can sit back and relax, we won.
Makes perfect sense. The less the sunspot activity, the less heat the sun puts out. So the less heat the earth receives. Yes the earth is still warming up. Geez, how dumb can you be.
Okay, newbies, usenet.com is NOT usenet
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Geez, what is this, digg? usenet.com is just a company that gives payed access to usenet. The RIAA can't sue usenet anymore then it could sue HTTP (not that it wouldn't want to) but it sure as hell can sue Usenet.com the same as it can sue a company employing a webserver that hosts copyrighted files.
I have no idea if usenet.com can be considered guilty under current laws, they do have the files in question on their servers and charge people money to download them, so they are directly profitting from these files. On the other hand, by the nature of usenet they have no control over what appears on their servers (they better not be blocking kiddie porn or they lost that defence).
Are they a phone company just passing information, or are they a filesharer profitting from doing so.
Intresting case BUT stop pretending that the RIAA is stupid enough to sue USENET, it is sueing a company that sells access to usenet. People here are quick to blame politicians for not knowing enough, but count the posts that don't even seem to know the difference between these two.
Well, I am people, and I only seen those games and be instantly repelled. Halo as well.
I guess we have to wait till the Halo movie to see who the real winner is. Mario Brothers is already a loser, D&D (representing western RPG, my kind of game) is severly wounded but had a small comeback (second movie was passable), Final Fantasy was okay if part of it was just Aliens with less slime.
Just because YOU are a nintendo fanboy doesn't mean PEOPLE are. Just as easily I could point out that some of the alltime classics in gaming are ALL pc gamers. Greatest flightsim, greatest adventure (Sierra style), greatest RPG (western style).
While I don't like Halo, saying that Halo is less then any of the games you mention is a bit fanboyish. People still talk about Spacewar, doesn't make it a better game then any of the ones you mentioned.
Stop pretending you speak for everyone else, you like genre X, others don't. For some reason I think Halo and Mario are so different that those who like one will automatically not like the other (que person who likes both).
How can you expect consistent moderation? Because of the way the system works, the first mod can effectively hide a post from other modders (yes they advice you to mod at -1 but who does that?) so wether a post gets seen or not depends on who gets to see it first. Mod it down, and it is gone. Mod it up, and more people see it, this includes downward modders but also upward modders, so it totally depends on the first mod.
Then there is the fact that moderation is totally random. So random that sometimes I get them constantly while othertimes I go for weeks without. Meta moderation is even worse.
Then there is mods themselves, not the moderators, but the way you can mod. There is no simple "FALSE" mod. or "you are an idiot" mod. Or a "True" mod. Flamebait and troll are way to often used to mean "I don't agree with you." Insightfull and intresting far too often for someone just stating the facts.
So don't expect sense from the moderation system, just accept that some of the best posts will disappear forever because a mod didn't like it, and that some crap will be modded up.
Gentoo (a linux distro that compiles from source) has all its packages in a simple directory structure with files for each package. That is a LOT of files. The intresting thing to see is just how much speed up you can get using the various filesystems on offer. Reiserfs really makes a HUGE difference to the speed. Same HD, same kernel, same drivers, just a different filesystem and you can easily get a tenfold increase over other journalled filesystems.
Same with compiling, I know mount/tmp on tmpfs (ram disk) and the speed increase is enormous.
HOWEVER, I now have a ext for boot, jfs for / (no real reason, I just like how it handles itself reiserfs for/usr/portage tmpfs for/tmp and/var/tmp (and I really should choose a new one for / and pick jfs or xfs for my movie collection). Somehow I think that this is just a bit harder to support then NTFS for everything.
Windows has to do LOTS of things and has to do them reasonably, that is actually a lot harder then do a single thing and do it really well. I think the problem here is that windows does more then just copy the file but actually tries to process the file and then doesn't properly release the memory. MS LOVES doing this, it is the MS way, it can't leaves files alone, it must read them so you can see how many minutes a song has, the dimensions of the image or the creator of that movie. This case makes it clear because anti-virus software also LOVES to read files while they are being moved around. That is its job, but it means that this is FAR from the straight copy your old systems did.
MS has always had troubles with file operations, just try to copy a large amount of files, it will takes ages to get ready to even start copying it, way more then is reasonable. Its system just ain't designed for it. Take the undo option, if you think about it, that is a memory hog waiting to happen, does it really have to remember ALL those thousands of file that a single command can generate? Ouch.
First your firewall, useless (against storm). One of the attack paths of storm is to get YOU the user to visit an infected site, often by sending you an email. Unless your firewall somehow knows ALL infected sites and blocks them all (unlikely) the email will arrive, and the site will be visited and the trojan loaded. You could setup a firewall that protects against this, but you don't have one, because if you did, you wouldn't have to ask, you would know. Firewalls only help against worm attacks, were an outside computer probes your network for weaknesses. IF you configure your firewall extremely rigidly and only allow known traffic through it, then malware on your network could be blinded, unable to connect to any command parts of the storm network. It is possible to use for instance iptables (linux) to inspect all packages going through it and simply drop unwanted traffic. Since storm now apparently uses encrypted p2p(edonkey) traffic this shouldn't even be too hard. This would however result in a less userfriendly network. The only experience I got was in a setup that ONLY wanted regular HTTP traffic, and this meant a LOT of stuff failed, even web traffic because not all web application create proper headers. (I wonder what the recent MS stealth update means for windows, did this traffic pass unseen through software firewalls?)
Then your AV software. Forget about it, storm mutates itself. Since AV software mostly works with signatures, it can never be uptodate enough. I read a report that it changes every half hour. How the hell are you going to keep your signature data that uptodate?
Windows patches. They ain't uptodate thanks to MS dreaded patch tuesday. THis means that a security hole can EASILY be unpatched for weeks. COnsidering this is MS we are talking about, practice is far longer. You will be the target of exploits MS does not know about yet, won't develop a patch for for months, that they will delay for weeks to deploy and for which the AV companies do not have signature.
Anyway the most recent big security hole involves PDF's, that is Adobe, nothing to do with MS. You have to be uptodate on EVERYTHING. That includes EVERY codec, every handler EVERY single piece of code on your computer. Have an image browser installed? Are you sure that not a single on of the image codecs it uses has a flaw? If you update one image browser are you sure that not one single program on your computer still uses an old library that is still vulnerable? Remember, if a storm attack only infects a fraction of a percentage of computers, they still got hundreds of thousands of machines.
START TO GET THE PICTURE?
Basically you are like a good soldier, who keeps his gun clean, doesn't screw with hookers and stays awake on guard asking how well he standsup to a full out nuclear war. YOU ARE TOAST PRIVATE!
But there is hope, the most common form of infection is still through user interaction. YOU have to open the PDF, you have to execute the exe/scr/sh/dmg/whatever, you have to visit the link. The most powerfull attack is social engineering, get that soldier in his invincible armour to pickup a grenade and eat it.
The really odd thing is that you do not even have to be paranoid to avoid it. Just don't click on things. IF somebody sends you a story headline, visit the BBC site yourselve. If somebody wants to send you pictures of some celeb flashing her aging bits, don't. There is plenty of fresh porn with nice looking girls out there (cheggit.net).
So what do you need to stay safe?
Mostly, your brain. Disable every bit of automation in software and instead let your brain do the thinking. NEVER just use automatic install (spyware) and never allow for instance outlook to preload crap or preview stuff. Email is for text, not webpages. But mostly ask yourselve WHO is sending me this, and WHY. One of the most amazing attacks I seen was by sending a "joke" attachment to people in your address book. Here is a hint, I am dutch. My brother I
Compare it to the original and dare to ask WHY google beat everyone else in the market, because its design was (still is) by far the cleanest. It is simple, it is to the point, it is what people want.
The end page looks a lot like all the other search engines out there, bloated pieces of crap, and this guy didn't even include annoying ads and popup requests to signup.
No, if google had done their original search page like this, they would have been just another search engine.
Why yes I raped you, but telling that to the jury would just violate your privacy, so I won't. Ain't I a nice guy.
These companies violated the law, and now claim that confessing to that, violates the law?
I shot you in the head, but I won't take you to the hospital in a car because well, I don't have a driving license and I don't want to break the law.
The sooner this US goverment is taken down and replaced the better. I guess it is clear how republicans think, screw a girl IMPEACH, screw the nation, you are a hero!
Dell sells hardware and resells software. They make their money on the hardware. They WANT to sell machines, they care far less about software.
So Dell was faced with a simple problem, they had X customers, Y (where Y is a subset of X) wanted windows on their machine, Z (where Z is a subset of X) wanted linux. The linux customer was not happy with Dells offering and was even taking its business elsewhere. When Z grew large enough, Dell no longer wanted to loose that number of customers. So they started selling linux.
It helped that both MS and Intel got into trouble with the law, but mostly it is just a story about demand and supply, the customers demand, Dell supplies. What do you know, sometimes capatalism works.
As for reputation, I actualy meet people who refuse to buy cheaper AMD hardware because they are "clones" and instead buy compaq. Oh the irony.
Slashdot Mirror
The longest journey was an adventure. Dreamfall isn't. It is half adventure, half fighting game. What is worse, the fighting game is extremely bad, you wouldn't accept this kinda fighting game in a flash format that PAYED you to play it.
That is what killed adventures, the constant insistance of adding things onto it to make it appeal to more people. Adventures were ALWAYS good sellers, but that wasn't enough, so lucasarts went 3D, and killed the adventure. Broken Sword added sneaking and platforming, and the series nearly died from it. Dreamfall added combat and we only forgave it because so few other adventures exist.
STOP ADDING ELEMENTS TO GAMES JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT.
Platformers don't suddenly add a long story segment to appeal to adventures, so why add platform gaming to adventures. Combat games don't suddenly get a rich plot to appeal to adventures, so why add combat to adventures. Action games don't suddenly add character development to their heroes, so why add action to adventures.
It ain't nothing new, leisure suit larry had a segment in it were you had to navigate down a river and avoid pigs on logs (don't ask), it was a very bad minigame. It played in a tiny window, was crap, hard to control, looked far more primitive then the main game, and just basically wasn't fun.
I don't mind mixed genre's where a game really focusses on combing two different game styles together. BUT in adventure land this doesn't happen, what happens that an extremely poor version of another game format is tacked on top. I don't mind combat in dreamfall. I mind that it is an extremely poor combat engine. It responds slowly, you have no special moves, it is just crap.
Put in a full copy of even streetfighter and I wouldn't mind, but not this 3rd rate reject of a fighting game roughly inserted in my adventure.
A fine dinner, deserves a fine wine. BUT just because I am eating dinner, does not mean you got to shove any rotted grape juice down my throat and expect me to like it.
YOU, yes YOU kept an entire population dumb and with no hope of improvement for decades and expect that all to be overcome in a single generation? You created this situation, now you get to life in it. It is called just desserts. Don't expect anyone to cry if you and your family are raped/killed by people who you have opressed for generations. You really should have thought about this when you kept blacks from education, jobs and everything else.
No matter where I take it, it beeps like it is in the presence of the dark lord himself. No idea what causes it, was like that when I first took it out of the package.
If I take a picture of you, it is a picture of YOU, but MY picture. The english language really fails here because you could also say it is your picture as in you are in the picture without actually owning said picture.
Medical records are of a person, but are created by another person reflecting that persons opinions about that other person. Who owns a record, the person who wrote it or who it is about? You can say that you want your records in your hands but you are quit right that this would remove from the doctor all the information he has collected that he could need in a lawsuit. It would be like saying, that speedcamera picture belongs to me, okay, now I got it, go ahead and prove I speeded. HAHA!
I think we barking up the wrong tree here, medical records being kept is useful, useful for the patient because a doctor can see your history. Useful for the doctor since it saves time, useful for society since you can use it to tell what is happening to the population.
What we need to do is put extremely harsh punishements in place against abuse. Sell medical data, serious jail time for EVERYONE involved, the person who stole it, who transported it, who bought it and who used it.
Because abuse is possible of something doesn't mean you get rid of something, you get rid of the abuser.
Offcourse this is hard to believe in when even the most basic save guards against abuse of our freedoms are being trampled on the world over.
After all, what is the point.
What should worry you is when you start getting spam for cemetery plots.
They are the real pro's and will NOT shoot you just because you got a knife. That is because unlike regular police they get to train, and train, and train, and train. A regular cop is someone who was given some extremely basic weapons training ages ago, vists a static shooting range every year or so and then in a split second has to go from ordinary average day routine into making a life and death decision.
CAR ANOLOGY! (Didn't think I could do it in this story, well I can)
You are an ordinary driver, you might have one day learned about what to do if you get into a skid, you may even have taken some training, but when you are just driving around and suddenly it all goes wrong and you are expected to suddenly get that 2 tons of metal out of a high speed skid, you probably will NOT do it as the book says.
Unlike a rally driver, to whom this is routine.
IF we want our regular police to be highly capable, and react correctly in an emergency, we better be prepared to pay them for endless training. Are we? No.
Most people understand this, if you got a medical emergency, where do you go, the hospital OR your family doctor? To a building filled with strangers who deal with emergencies ALL the time, or the guy you know and trust but whose last training was 30 years ago?
The swat team did what they are trained to do, lets hope this guys cellmate does what he has been training to do. He is going to get his ports probed.
I Like THIS! Even better then talking like a pirate day. About goddamned fucking time we got some countermeasures against the damned PC nutcases.
ISP's transmit data, I really don't want them to be starting to be clever. What next, RIAA requests that people are limited to X posts to usenet so they can't post large binaeries? Limit P2P traffic? Sniff traffic in general for undesired elements?
In a way, my PC becoming a spam zombie is part of the price of freedom. Do you really want the internet to be regulated?
Oh sure, you can start light, but in the end sooner or later someone will abuse it and push for ever more stringent restriction, all in the name of the common good.
For instance, limit each IP to no more then say 6 outbound connections, that should be enough, you can request more, and they will know you are a dirty P2Per who needs to be reported.
No my friend, let ISP's remain in their role as dumb data carriers, we got to fight spam another way then by given up freedom.
My account on my own domain doesn't get much spam, that is because the username is fairly unusual. HOWEVER the amount of spam the server gets is rather larger. It is offcourse rejected as it silently drops email for a non-existing account. Now it all depends on how well known your domain is, I had obscure ones that barely got touched and popular ones were I needed a seperate machine to just deal with it all. I don't even bother reading the admin email, you should as this is the official way to get in touch with you, but geez gods, who has the time to read all that crap. (Filter it an a real complaint might get dumped because a complaint about YOUR server spamming often includes the spam, triggering the filter)
You can imagine that if you operate a mailserver for a large group of people, who all go around putting their emailadress all over the place, that the amount of spam is far far greater.
I don't find these figures at all suprising, I happen to know several people who still work for ISP's and I have been hearing this for a long time. Oh it might be 90% or it might be 99%, it is a HUGE amount and out of control.
Don't think to lightly of it either, YOUR isp bill has to pay for techies with no other job then to keep email going (without spam even national ISP's could do this with a partimer), pay for ever more powerfull hardware to handle it all, pay for then bandwidth etc etc.
It is easy for you to say that YOU don't get much spam on YOUR account, but we are talking here about figures reported by systerm administrators for large networks.
To give you a basic idea how bad it is, couple of years ago I decided to monitor the traffic from our mailservers at a large company. Like most offices we close at night, so you would expect a downfall in the amount of traffic right? WRONG. No way was that legit email, we were a local office with no real business emailing to the rest of the world. So how come the mailserver didn't show a massive drop in traffic and load at night? Spam.
So who gets 95% spam? The poor smuck running your mailserver.
Is it really that figure? Oh that depends on so much, how well is your domain known, how widely are your email accounts spread etc etc, lets just say that we have for a long had to deal with the fact that the fast majority of emails are spam.
OH YES YOU CAN, stop thinking that video is .avi you moron. It all depends on the video container. Some allow playing right from the start (mpg). In fact if you got a non-crap video player EVERY video can be played without it being complete, the only thing that doesn't work in forinstance avi is skipping forward.
I used to use this plenty of times back when I had a backbone for an internet connection, streaming avi from FTP, oh yeah, life was good back then.
Oh and if windows still refuses to open a file you are downloading, get a proper OS.
With bittorrents MPG's can even be viewed if have just one large enough segment.
Video can't be viewed before they are fully downloaded, geez, new much?
So by your logic, gcc works on 100% of computers.
You are furthermore an idiot because you apparently think that desktops are the only computers. I am not just talking about servers here, but things like industrial controllers and embedded devices. Grow up MS kiddy.
There was a move years ago that cars could be impounded AND scrapped on the spot. Laugh that one off as your 1 million dollar car is crushed.
Didn't work for long, this targetted the rich and rich people got power. Just accept that there is a law for the normal people and no law for the rich. There is no exception to this.
1) Tearing down billboards means nothing, it is just a publicity stunt.
2) That is called a paid vacation, you ALWAYS study how to do things in far away WARM places. Greenland runs things very well, but is rarely studied.
3) A fool is easily pleased.
4) Who cares
5) Lets wait for point 6
6) So what you are saying is that brazillian women are desperate for american men? Because american men got better income and can take them out of the dumb that is brazille? Reminds me off japan, if you are NOT obviously there just to score with asian girls, you will be amazingly succesfull because even the most macho western male is an improvement over the japanese male.
7) So I guess you won't be having the last laugh.
8) Well, how capable is brazil of fighting a war anyway? From what little I know, brazil is far more corrupt on a day to day basis, with nothing happening without a bribe, at least that is different in the US, corruption is more or less restricted to the top.
Frankly your defence of brazil seems to be as insane as the loonies you get defending bush. Wake up and smell the roses, brazil is a corrupt hell hole, wasn't it a brazillian who got shot on the tube in london, an ILLEGAL brazillian? Why are people living illegally abroad if their home country is such a paradise?
Change our lives in the next few years (hey that is what the article says, blame the editors)? Might be tricky, since we don't actually have e-paper available right now, and no clear date when it will be either, how exactly is it going to chance our lives?
THE BLOODY STUFF DOESN'T EXIST YET.
I am sure a cure for cancer will change our lives, but it doesn't exist yet, so it won't be in the next few years.
Real paper is incredibily cheap and can be easily recycled, do we really want to replace it with something that is more expensive, and can't? I for one can't really see the benefit of having e-paper used to package my groceries.
As for e-books, well we all know how well those worked right? The problem is simple, the readers just ain't books (too expensive and well just not books) and the contents are too fucking expensive. Just because we pay a premium for paperbacks does not mean we will pay the same for a tiny amount of data.
Books unlike say CD's got tremendous extra value for some reason. Maybe it is because most bookstores don't blast our ears with crap music that the idiot behind the counter happens to like, and most bookstores actually bother to hire people who like their job. I like going to my local bookstore, the musicstore BAH.
Simply put the problem is that we don't "mind" the price we pay for our fiction right now. Especially since the alternatives ain't realistically priced. Uploading less then 1/10 of a MB to me does NOT inspire me to pay EXACTLY the same amount, if not MORE then for the dead-tree version. Why yes, I do think the Apple is ripping people off with iTunes, why do you ask?
I can see the costs of producing a dead-tree copy I buy in a brick&mortar store, I can't see them in e-book websites. WHERE ARE THE HUGE SAVINGS GOING? Savings in having to print books, stock them, distribute them, stock them again, take unsold copies back, etc etc. WHO IS RAKING IN THE CASH? Wanna bet it ain't the author?
So I am left with a very expensive reader, that can't stand being wet, or being sat on or having the cat sleep on it (my cat is a bit old and sometimes wakes up a bit too late), I don't think bleaching the wet spot works well on electronics) that if I forget it, I am out NOT just the reader but ALSO the collection of books, so I have to rebuy them at EXACTLY the same price as the dead-tree versions.
LOWER THE GODDAMN PRICE! That is when e-paper will change our lives.
The only way I can see this taking off is combined with the move to make textbooks freely available. Give each student an ebook reader, publish the textbooks online for free and voila, huge savings to education.
But if e-books continue to be sold at 20 bucks for fiction, then no, it won't take off.
MS is evil and wants to maintain its absolute control on the desktop market (Windows Office Gaming) and extend this control elsewhere.
It lies and it cheats to get this, recent ISO mess, Halo2 for Vista only, dirext10 for Vista only, bribing officials, well just read slashdot.
At sometimes it seems quite insane doing things that don't even make sense. Ask youreselve this, could Vista's lack luster uptake by due to its anti-piracy controls? How many of the typical early adoptors are in Windows case, pirates? It is widely assumed that MS gained its dominance thanks to its software being widely pirated, Vista can't be pirated, and it is not spreading as fast as MS thought it would. Mmm, a link?
Anyway, no matter how insane and self destructive MS at times might appear to be, it is also a normal business, run by people who despite their faults (normal people don't throw chairs) are reasonably good at their job (Everybody should be willing to admit that Gates got some amazing deals at the start of his career) and part of that is giving the customer what it wants. Granted this is MS, so it takes a while.
Opensource software development has a very large real world demand. More and more people are starting to realize that if you have access to the source, then you are finally in control of your own destiny, no more discontinuation of support, no more forced upgrades that ruin compatibility. Apache may for instance decide to go to version 2 completly BUT anyone can continue on version 1 as long as they want (hiring a dev to fix any bugs is actually not that expensive).
MS therefore has a simple choice, adopt, or loose customers. All someone at MS had to do was wait for Steve Ballmer to stop frothing at the mouth for a moment and get the plan through. It doesn't actually cost MS anything, and it allows them to add another bullet item to their sales list.
Don't count on this having any significant effect other then making MS salesreps lives a little easier. You won't see any significant bits of MS code going opensource. Just enough to keep people hooked on MS.
It ain't paranoia when dealing with MS, they are out to get everyone.
GCC and Bash are opensource, you can get them to run on ANYTHING you bloody well want too. So if you want to use code that only compiles under gcc then all you need to do is get gcc to work on your system. Have you checked how many systems gcc works on? Go ahead, I will wait. Wow, long list eh?
Now compare this with closed source, lets say C#, how many systems does MS compiler run on? Oh, only windows. Wow that was quick.
Same with their IE, it ain't the problem that IE does things differently, it is that nobody really knows and can't copy that behaviour. THe problem ain't that IE does things differently as such, it is that they don't publish how to do it, so everybody else is left with browsers that run their "enhancements" slightly differently and end up with messed up pages.
All your post has done is to show WHY opensource is so essential. Frankly if this is the best attack you can muster against GNU, then we can sit back and relax, we won.
Makes perfect sense. The less the sunspot activity, the less heat the sun puts out. So the less heat the earth receives. Yes the earth is still warming up. Geez, how dumb can you be.
Geez, what is this, digg? usenet.com is just a company that gives payed access to usenet. The RIAA can't sue usenet anymore then it could sue HTTP (not that it wouldn't want to) but it sure as hell can sue Usenet.com the same as it can sue a company employing a webserver that hosts copyrighted files.
I have no idea if usenet.com can be considered guilty under current laws, they do have the files in question on their servers and charge people money to download them, so they are directly profitting from these files. On the other hand, by the nature of usenet they have no control over what appears on their servers (they better not be blocking kiddie porn or they lost that defence).
Are they a phone company just passing information, or are they a filesharer profitting from doing so.
Intresting case BUT stop pretending that the RIAA is stupid enough to sue USENET, it is sueing a company that sells access to usenet. People here are quick to blame politicians for not knowing enough, but count the posts that don't even seem to know the difference between these two.
Well, I am people, and I only seen those games and be instantly repelled. Halo as well.
I guess we have to wait till the Halo movie to see who the real winner is. Mario Brothers is already a loser, D&D (representing western RPG, my kind of game) is severly wounded but had a small comeback (second movie was passable), Final Fantasy was okay if part of it was just Aliens with less slime.
Just because YOU are a nintendo fanboy doesn't mean PEOPLE are. Just as easily I could point out that some of the alltime classics in gaming are ALL pc gamers. Greatest flightsim, greatest adventure (Sierra style), greatest RPG (western style).
While I don't like Halo, saying that Halo is less then any of the games you mention is a bit fanboyish. People still talk about Spacewar, doesn't make it a better game then any of the ones you mentioned.
Stop pretending you speak for everyone else, you like genre X, others don't. For some reason I think Halo and Mario are so different that those who like one will automatically not like the other (que person who likes both).
How can you expect consistent moderation? Because of the way the system works, the first mod can effectively hide a post from other modders (yes they advice you to mod at -1 but who does that?) so wether a post gets seen or not depends on who gets to see it first. Mod it down, and it is gone. Mod it up, and more people see it, this includes downward modders but also upward modders, so it totally depends on the first mod.
Then there is the fact that moderation is totally random. So random that sometimes I get them constantly while othertimes I go for weeks without. Meta moderation is even worse.
Then there is mods themselves, not the moderators, but the way you can mod. There is no simple "FALSE" mod. or "you are an idiot" mod. Or a "True" mod. Flamebait and troll are way to often used to mean "I don't agree with you." Insightfull and intresting far too often for someone just stating the facts.
So don't expect sense from the moderation system, just accept that some of the best posts will disappear forever because a mod didn't like it, and that some crap will be modded up.
Gentoo (a linux distro that compiles from source) has all its packages in a simple directory structure with files for each package. That is a LOT of files. The intresting thing to see is just how much speed up you can get using the various filesystems on offer. Reiserfs really makes a HUGE difference to the speed. Same HD, same kernel, same drivers, just a different filesystem and you can easily get a tenfold increase over other journalled filesystems.
Same with compiling, I know mount /tmp on tmpfs (ram disk) and the speed increase is enormous.
HOWEVER, I now have a ext for boot, jfs for / (no real reason, I just like how it handles itself reiserfs for /usr/portage tmpfs for /tmp and /var/tmp (and I really should choose a new one for / and pick jfs or xfs for my movie collection). Somehow I think that this is just a bit harder to support then NTFS for everything.
Windows has to do LOTS of things and has to do them reasonably, that is actually a lot harder then do a single thing and do it really well. I think the problem here is that windows does more then just copy the file but actually tries to process the file and then doesn't properly release the memory. MS LOVES doing this, it is the MS way, it can't leaves files alone, it must read them so you can see how many minutes a song has, the dimensions of the image or the creator of that movie. This case makes it clear because anti-virus software also LOVES to read files while they are being moved around. That is its job, but it means that this is FAR from the straight copy your old systems did.
MS has always had troubles with file operations, just try to copy a large amount of files, it will takes ages to get ready to even start copying it, way more then is reasonable. Its system just ain't designed for it. Take the undo option, if you think about it, that is a memory hog waiting to happen, does it really have to remember ALL those thousands of file that a single command can generate? Ouch.
Simple answer, complex solution.
First your firewall, useless (against storm). One of the attack paths of storm is to get YOU the user to visit an infected site, often by sending you an email. Unless your firewall somehow knows ALL infected sites and blocks them all (unlikely) the email will arrive, and the site will be visited and the trojan loaded. You could setup a firewall that protects against this, but you don't have one, because if you did, you wouldn't have to ask, you would know. Firewalls only help against worm attacks, were an outside computer probes your network for weaknesses. IF you configure your firewall extremely rigidly and only allow known traffic through it, then malware on your network could be blinded, unable to connect to any command parts of the storm network. It is possible to use for instance iptables (linux) to inspect all packages going through it and simply drop unwanted traffic. Since storm now apparently uses encrypted p2p(edonkey) traffic this shouldn't even be too hard. This would however result in a less userfriendly network. The only experience I got was in a setup that ONLY wanted regular HTTP traffic, and this meant a LOT of stuff failed, even web traffic because not all web application create proper headers. (I wonder what the recent MS stealth update means for windows, did this traffic pass unseen through software firewalls?)
Then your AV software. Forget about it, storm mutates itself. Since AV software mostly works with signatures, it can never be uptodate enough. I read a report that it changes every half hour. How the hell are you going to keep your signature data that uptodate?
Windows patches. They ain't uptodate thanks to MS dreaded patch tuesday. THis means that a security hole can EASILY be unpatched for weeks. COnsidering this is MS we are talking about, practice is far longer. You will be the target of exploits MS does not know about yet, won't develop a patch for for months, that they will delay for weeks to deploy and for which the AV companies do not have signature.
Anyway the most recent big security hole involves PDF's, that is Adobe, nothing to do with MS. You have to be uptodate on EVERYTHING. That includes EVERY codec, every handler EVERY single piece of code on your computer. Have an image browser installed? Are you sure that not a single on of the image codecs it uses has a flaw? If you update one image browser are you sure that not one single program on your computer still uses an old library that is still vulnerable? Remember, if a storm attack only infects a fraction of a percentage of computers, they still got hundreds of thousands of machines.
START TO GET THE PICTURE?
Basically you are like a good soldier, who keeps his gun clean, doesn't screw with hookers and stays awake on guard asking how well he standsup to a full out nuclear war. YOU ARE TOAST PRIVATE!
But there is hope, the most common form of infection is still through user interaction. YOU have to open the PDF, you have to execute the exe/scr/sh/dmg/whatever, you have to visit the link. The most powerfull attack is social engineering, get that soldier in his invincible armour to pickup a grenade and eat it.
The really odd thing is that you do not even have to be paranoid to avoid it. Just don't click on things. IF somebody sends you a story headline, visit the BBC site yourselve. If somebody wants to send you pictures of some celeb flashing her aging bits, don't. There is plenty of fresh porn with nice looking girls out there (cheggit.net).
So what do you need to stay safe?
Mostly, your brain. Disable every bit of automation in software and instead let your brain do the thinking. NEVER just use automatic install (spyware) and never allow for instance outlook to preload crap or preview stuff. Email is for text, not webpages. But mostly ask yourselve WHO is sending me this, and WHY. One of the most amazing attacks I seen was by sending a "joke" attachment to people in your address book. Here is a hint, I am dutch. My brother I
Compare it to the original and dare to ask WHY google beat everyone else in the market, because its design was (still is) by far the cleanest. It is simple, it is to the point, it is what people want.
The end page looks a lot like all the other search engines out there, bloated pieces of crap, and this guy didn't even include annoying ads and popup requests to signup.
No, if google had done their original search page like this, they would have been just another search engine.
Why yes I raped you, but telling that to the jury would just violate your privacy, so I won't. Ain't I a nice guy.
These companies violated the law, and now claim that confessing to that, violates the law?
I shot you in the head, but I won't take you to the hospital in a car because well, I don't have a driving license and I don't want to break the law.
The sooner this US goverment is taken down and replaced the better. I guess it is clear how republicans think, screw a girl IMPEACH, screw the nation, you are a hero!
Dell sells hardware and resells software. They make their money on the hardware. They WANT to sell machines, they care far less about software.
So Dell was faced with a simple problem, they had X customers, Y (where Y is a subset of X) wanted windows on their machine, Z (where Z is a subset of X) wanted linux. The linux customer was not happy with Dells offering and was even taking its business elsewhere. When Z grew large enough, Dell no longer wanted to loose that number of customers. So they started selling linux.
It helped that both MS and Intel got into trouble with the law, but mostly it is just a story about demand and supply, the customers demand, Dell supplies. What do you know, sometimes capatalism works.
As for reputation, I actualy meet people who refuse to buy cheaper AMD hardware because they are "clones" and instead buy compaq. Oh the irony.