I read the article and still am not clear on what the program was supposed to do. Apparently there was a piece of software in place that monitored the computers for security reasons. Lets for simplicity sakes call it a virus scanner.
Now did he write a program that DISABLED the virus scanner in some ways?
Did his own program then REPLACE this virus scanner with his own?
If so, then he is indeed in the wrong.
He should instead have written a virus scanner sitting behind or in front of the existing one to augment its capabilities. Then nothing would be wrong, the required software is still in place and working BUT his own software would be making it more secure, always presuming offcourse that his own software IS in fact more secure.
This is the crux of the matter, who says his software was better and that by him replacing the default software he made the system more secure? We got only his word for that.
See it like this, say that the dorms are required to have a fire extinguisher in every room. Now a person comes along and says that the devices ain't good enough, too small and don't work in certain conditions. What should he then do? Replace them with a model he claims to be better OR put that model NEXT to them.
I can argue till I am blue in the face with the local firechief but replacing mandated equipment and facilities is NOT going to be accepted. ADDING to them is. Just because only a handheld bottle of eye-washer is needed doesn't mean I can't install the full shower version. Just as long the bottle is still there. Just because the helmet is required at the building site doesn't mean I can't wear ear/eye protection as well, just as long as I still wear the helmet.
Granted there are problems with this, it could be that policy requires you to use the small fire extinguisher first, that you know won't work, to fight a fire and that you cannot touch your own that does work because by then you will have burnt to death.
if the existing virus scanner has an exploit weakness having your own program behind it don't work. If the policy requires the exiting security software to be the first in line, and if it itself can be exploited so that a second program behind it never gets a chance to stop the intrusion you are screwed.
Setting your own software in FRONT is probably against policy, after all if your own software is flawed then it can be exploited before the required software has a change.
It is difficult but frankly that is what you get when departments get too large. You need rules but will inevitably find that the rules restrict legitimate use. The answer? Don't use them.
What I think is however far more likely in this case is that we are talking the ancient and dreaded evil of the crushed ego. Who wants to take a bet that someone at the IT department didn't just feel peeved to have the software he/she choose as being secure exposed as being insecure? Yeah, sure, YOU would use such a comment to learn and implement a better solution. You are a saint to be sure but most people would just come down like a ton of bricks on the messenger, less their supervisor starts asking just what you are getting payed for.
What many warned about has happened. Music labels sold out to the big retailers, who could sell the CD cheaper then the dedicated music stores. So the dedicated stores lost business, being unable to compete with the big retailers.
Aparently nobody at the music labels noticed that the big retailers stocked a far smaller selection of music.
With the smaller retailers gone, the music selection available to the customers has shrunk. So what happens? The music labels do NOT immidiatly put a ban on big retailers and go down on their hands and knees and bag small retailers to forgive them.
Nope, instead they kowtow even further for the big retailers and reduce the number of albums by limiting wich artists to sign-up.
Big Retailers do what they always do, they squeeze and having learned what sells and what doesn't in their stores limit their selection. This is expected. You may notice that from time to time new flavors are launched for products. Vanilla Cola, white KitKat, etc etc. They are given a space for a while. If it sells, well it gets to keep its space. If it doesn't. It doesn't.
Music was a new product, it was launched big and now it is time to cut out the flavors that don't sell enough.
So even less music is available, leading to fewer sales to customers, leading to the big chains squeezing even harder on their selection.
How is it possible that nobody at the music labels noticed this and flat out refused to sell to the big chains on their terms? It would have been trivial. Walmart refuses to stock "controversial" CD's. So any music label could simply have refused to deal with a retailer who does not agree to stock ALL albums in its catalog. Claim it as a stance against censorship and you would even be seen as the nice guy.
But no, simply bloody minded greed and vision restricted to the next quarter over-ruled common sense and now you got the current mess.
Two different occasions. One was my private home link, that was free for me to use as I pleased and so I shared a bit of it.
The other was not, belonged to a non-profit club that a friend of my works for who I helped setup their network so they could use their laptops around the building without having to drill holes in a listed building (protected for being a monument meaning you can't just drill holes for new wires.
But basically you are saying that if you try my door and find it unlocked then it is okay for you to come in. Go ahead, try this in texas. They can shoot you there.
Before that day a new record was set by a young man. By a young a man who had submitted stories and plays that disturbed his teachers but who took no action.
What if they had?
Well, off course if they had then the shooting would not have happened so those teachers would have been totally out of order for doing something.
The job of the police is to stop crime. No it isn't. The job of the police is to arrest people AFTER they committed a crime. As Terry Pratchett put in a recent Discworld novel "we caught the guy that done it" sounds a lot better then "we caught the guy that looked like he was going to do it" especially if they say "prove it".
BUT that doesn't help much when you got 30 dead.
Saying that those people paid the price of freedom is NOT going to win you any friends.
One/.er posted a link with a small segment of the essay. It seems to me like the typical emo/teenage kid rant. Personally I think hanging is to good for them but sadly I am not the judge.
The point is however that this happened right after a tragedy wich might have been prevented. Do you want to be the person who ignores the warning signs next time? In the the U Sue of All (man that would have my english teacher calling in the special forces)?
But we don't know the whole essay. Most police officers are rather down to earth, they KNOW the world. For them to make an arrest and for it not to be all settled easily alarms me. Slashdot happily tells us that this guy is a straight-A student. That is great because we all know straight-A students do NOT flip out. What I want to know is this, did the police check him out and what the fuck did they find?
Why doesn't slashdot reportd exactly how many guns this person owns (whatever the number may be and remember, zero is an important number) and how many kilo's of ammo he has stockpiled (again remember the humble zero).
Freedom and the prevention of crime do NOT mix. Since most want both, you are going to have conflicts.
While I don't like WoW (it is polished, it does exactly what it says, it is extremely well designed but I do NOT like it) its biggest claim to fame is NOT so much that it did extremely well in getting a couple of million subscribers but that it proved everyone wrong who pre-WoW claimed that any new MMO would have to get it subscribers from other existing MMO's.
Pity then that WoW now has more subscribers then ALL mmo's that came before combined, with the fact that those earlier MMO's still exist with their own player bases.
Blizzard did NOT eat everyone elses pie, they made the pie a lot bigger.
So now the question is, is this the maximum size the pie can be OR can someone else make the pie even bigger?
Compare if you like WoW subscription figures with other content sold worldwide. Pitifull ain't it?
Compare it if you like too say cable tv. You need to pay for it monthly and it sucks up time.
Would a tv show, say a new Star Trek series that manages to get 8 million viewers WORLD WIDE to be a success or a total and absolute failure unparraelled in history?
Offcourse MMO gaming ain't a tvshow but still, the claim that WoW has captured the maximum world wide market seems a bit unlikely.
Remember those stories that women are the majority online? Yet you don't see them?
Well, I am going to claim something else. Counterstrike is a failure. Nobody plays it. It is unpopular as hell.
Sure, here on slashdot perhaps you will find a lot of players BUT seen from the total audience of people online playing games the number of counterstrike, indeed ALL fps combined, is truly pathetically small.
Blizzard enlarged the market by remaking EQ and polishing it and giving it a good design. It worked BUT someone else could do the same.
Your question smells of IBM asking themselves what the total world market was for the personal computer. Google just how fucking wrong they were because they could NOT get their heads around the fact that the small market they saw was due to their version of the personal computer (expensive and of limited use).
Vanguard is bugged, deep but unfinished. WoW is shallow but polished.
But that is not what sets them apart. The biggest difference is the playerbase. In many ways it reminds me of the difference between Operation Flashpoint and Counterstrike. Both are military first person shooters with counterstrike clearly the more polished easier to get into version. Yet if you desire to play with people whose balls have actually descended your choice is clear.
I tried Vanguard (Sony is one of the few MMO companies willing to accomadate non-credit card owners. Blizzard thanks to its huge success is lucky that stores stock its gamecards) and was amazed to find that you did not need to join a RP-preffered server to be able to be in a world were the majority of players do not use numbers in their chat.
In fact, the majority of players in Vanguard use plain english, are polite and helpfull and even those who still got crap nicks like 'warlord' at least manage to spell it correctly.
If you ever played WoW, well. You know.
Pity then that the game is so fucking bugged. In between the bugs it is actualy fun, and has a lot to offer. I might even say that it is a ton of fun, compared to wow's 1 kilo of fun. Pity that vanguard also gives you two tons of bugs while WoW has by now reduced it to a few grams.
So why am I not playing WoW? Two reasons, the population but mostly the kill X till Y drops and X turns out to be a number just short of infinity. Vanguard improves on both counts but geez gods, FIX THE BUGS.
But what about LOTRO. Well, I am looking at it. Just that so far I can't see any class I like to play. I wonder what route it will take. For me the real killer thing I am looking for in a MMO is for it to be playable and for it to reserve a few servers with a queens english only policy and a naming policy that is enforced with permanent bans. Enter a stupid nick and BAM, banned. No warning, no suggestions, no arguing. Instant ban.
On the other hand, you could just make it an 18+ server. Make that 30+. Nobody born in the 80's or later allowed. And get OF MY LAWN!
Console sales are all very nice and all BUT what counts is the sale of software for that console.
I personally think that it says an awfull lot about the game industry that the top scorer for march was God of War 2 for the PS2.
What then does this tell us? That an ancient console beats EVERY SINGLE current console, handheld and regular, in sales?
Oh and number 2 and 3 in software sales (console) went to the 360.
So where is the success of the Wii?
Granted the Wii ain't subsidised, so Nintendo doesn't need to sell X titles per console just to get their money back but still, if the Wii ends up un-used then Nintendo could still end up with a loser. Lots of hardware sales but no software sales.
In a way, its success could even make this more likely. Exactly how many of the games now being rushed to the Wii are going to be piss poor cynical cash-ins? Genuine Wii games will take time to emerge but if Nintendo can't proof it can get games sold they won't be developed especially if the cheap quickie attempts die the death they deserve.
None of this means that the Wii is going to fail, just that pure console sale figures so far don't mean much.
The only one who should really worry at the moment is Sony, the PS3 isn't scoring with the either hardware or software sales. Pity I suppose but with the PS2 still doing well, perhaps they can afford the wait.
That at least is fact. When the soviet union fell, russia was supposed to enter a new age of capatalism helped by the west. Did it?
Offcourse not, if you track back it almost seems like the US tried everything it could to make sure Russia would NOT succeed.
And why should it. Post WW2 the US helped its former enemies Germany and Japan back on its feet and gained two powerfull rivals in business. And no, that is NOT good news when you are an export nation. But luckily both germany and japan are heavily depeneded on foreign natural resources meaning trade routes wich they have no hope of securing on their own so they need the US to remain powerfull.
China is ever worse but at least they got that huge population to feed and while less resource dependent then Germany and Japan still, hopefully, can be controlled.
But just imagine Russia pulling a economic recovery ala Germany or Japan. It got the people, it got MORE then enough land and is swimming in every kind of resource you could want.
It is even worse, even under the heel of dictatorship it managed to be suprisingly inventive, just what would happen if it became "westernized"?
A western russia could be the deathblow to the US dominance over the world through economics.
The west LOVES putin. He is sure to keep Russia down, and relatively harmless. Well apart from that pesky russian mafia and the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons. But hey, at least the market is safe.
The wiki article explains a build in protection against any errors BUT also mentions that these weren't actually needed because the measurements were acurate enough not to need them. It does NOT mention what the measurements were.
Or put another way, the "how they did it" that the article described wasn't actually used, how they managed to be so accurate that they weren't needed goes unexplained.
Frankly, one of the reasons I absolutely detest windows is because everytime I am forced to use it, I also sooner or later run into having to replace that shitty piece of shit with something and it ALWAYS trying to come back in one form or another.
I suppose I am alone in this but I absolutly HATE that even to get it running you have to agree to an EULA that has been proven to take extreme liberties with your rights, despite the fact that you already had to agree to a EULA when windows was installed.
Then there is the fact that it doesn't even follow MS own interface style, that it for some reason seems to think that a Mp3 player needs to take up a quarter of the screen. That it is slow, that it is buggy, and that it is just plain ugly and riddled with sales pitches.
And you WANT this on linux?
No, my dear friend, the proper response to "MS doesn't release Windows Media Player for Linux" is "Thank you kind and mercifull god, we are not worthy of your generous nature".
Now get down on your knees and show proper gratitude. Sore knees? You got it good. Windows users also got to bend over, but it ain't just their knees that are sore.
The article doesn't say it was, in fact it notes the details are extremely sketchy.
Furthermore, if I drop my wallet, does everyone here just assume that I don't want it anymore and you are therefore free to take it?
I had at one time a public access point, it was identified as "Free basic web access, be nice" or something and was run through a linux box wich filtered and limited access quite a bit AND logged everything. I did it mostly out of curiousity. Just what would people access through a connection provided by someone they didn't know?
The answer was suprisingly mundane. Mostly email and light browsing. The location was in Amsterdam in an apartment near the "kalvertoren" a few years ago. For the non-dutch this is in the heart of amsterdam, yes within walking distance of the red-light district. This is holland, everything is in walking distance.
HOWEVER I have also found in more recent years that if you leave an AP open for general use, some people WILL not automatically limit themselves to minimum use. Cue the by now old trick of simply filtering a specific users access to replace all their image requests with tubgirl (if you think goatse is bad, google for it).
Still simply securing your network ain't always enough. At least some wifi security can be easily bypassed. At what point do we say "this is secured enough, you are now commiting a crime".
Personally I think it is bad sign if a bike stolen from an open garden gets a response from the police that you should have a 1 meter high fence, that is locked and the bike should have secured to something. Perhaps some people like to live in a world were everything has to be secured, I prefer to just lock up those that cannot understand the difference between something you own and something someone else owns. Either way, it seems we need an awfull lot of locks in this world.
You are saying that if you leave your door open, that is an invite? If you don't have a fence around your garden, just anyone can use it? God forbid you leave your car unlocked for a sec while loading/unloading. People will be borrowing it in a sec! What about simply dropping your wallet by accident. Obviously you didn't want it anymore, so I can just take it?
Perhaps I am just old but I still think that you don't take what belongs to someone else. Don't give me the crap about not knowing the difference between a public access point someone created to share his/her connection with anyone passingby and a private wifi connection that just hasn't been locked up to the point it becomes unusuable. Surely you can tell the difference between a private house door and a shop door?
And no, this is NOT like listening to their music OR even like listening in on their wifi transmissions. IF you transmit data into my space you could argue that I therefore have permission to receive that data. It is sorta sensible, don't accuse me of eavesdropping if you are shouting out a conversation into my ear.
HOWEVER, wifi is two way communication. This person was NOT just receiving the data they "played too loudly" he was happily sending data back and interacting with the system.
This would be like the neighbour listening to YOUR music, using your system, from his own house, uninvited. Perhaps you find that okay, prove it, and post your address.
The entire problem is in the two-way nature of wifi communication. This turns it away from "your apple tree overhands my garden, so any apples over my part belong the me" type of law, into "I am planting apple trees in your garden AND taking the apples" type of law.
What does a tv-station, or anyone supplying content payed for by ads sell. Answer, ads.
Slashdot itself does NOT sell you newsstories. How could they, the service is free. Rather they sell advertising to people selling a product.
Now who does the ads. Who tells a company what ad policy to follow. An ad agency offcourse. What do they sell? The product of whoever hires them you say? Don't be silly, ad agencies sell ads.
A plastic surgeon sells plastic surgery, NOT health. They will therefore ALWAYS find something wrong with the way you look, because improving your looks is what they sell.
Offcourse surgeons have got somekind of oath, but ad agencies do not.
They want to sell their product and will ADVERTISE to do so. The problem is that ad agencies are very good at selling ads, it is after all their core business. Sadly their customers, to whom ads are NOT their core business, are not to good at it.
The first mistake is to convuse adversting with factual data. If you read about some new ad method, or direct marketing research, remember that this is ADVERTISING for ads.
I could be an honest plastic surgeon, and tell you you are ugly to the bone and no amount of cutting is going to improve it. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
I could be an honest ad seller, and tell you your product just isn't wanted and trying to get more people to buy it is just not going to happen. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
Remember, that almost all research being done on the effectivness off ads is being done by the ad agencies themselves OR companies closely related to them.
Does an ad BEFORE the main program count the same as one during the program? Does a commercial break count the same as a flash commercial? How about a commercial shown DURING the program (seen them on US tv rips, an ad graphic blocking about half the screen).
Oh and in holland, when I was young, there were NO commercials on sunday. There are now. So at least in this little country ad length has gone up by a gazillion percent on sunday.
The most notably side-effect of ads on sunday is that classic cartoons like bug bunny are no longer aired as often to fill out the the couple of minutes that were left in an hour were the american shows tend to have commercials. Yes, kids, back in the day we had our tv programs run non-stop, and at the beginning and the end, there was a cartoon.
Rose colored glasses you say? Ain't that hard, when things were indeed rosey.
As a downside, we only had the one tv station back then. In holland if you wanted two tv stations, you watched a foreign channel, british, german or belgian depending on were you lived.
Ah, good days. Funny, I watched more tv when there was one station then now that I got over 20.
As you mention, google has ads. Quick question, is google a search company (developing and selling seach related technology) OR is it an ad seller (selling ad space to people and getting people to view those ads)
The answer is offcourse simple, google is an ad seller, in similar ways as tv-stations (those paid for by ads anyway are).
In a way its business model is almost like that of CNN. CNN doesn't create the news (well, it ain't been proven at least:p ), like google they have a "system" in place that allows them to gather the news, display it, attract eyeballs and then show ads to those eyeballs. So google gathers websites rather then news, still all about getting eyeballs to view ads.
Your comment about tv ads is inaccurate. You forgot to mention radio. I don't know how the US runs its radio stations but in holland it seems like every hour ends with 5 minutes of obnoxious ads, then 1 minute news, and another 5 minutes of obnoxious ads. Some stations even got ads at other times. ENOUGH, MP3player time!
BUT the only alternative is to pay for your content in another way, the BBC method (license fees), the dutch method (payed through regular taxes), the cable subscription way. Don't matter, somehow the content has to be payed for because the people involved in producing it expect to be paid.
Youtube ain't changing that. In fact youtube being now owned by google is probably someday soon going to displays ads as well. Offcourse they can display fewer ads, since they do not actually have to pay for any production.
That is roughly similar to how I can sell stolen goods for less as well.
The problem with the ad-supported services model is that it only works if there isn't an alternative way of getting the service. Before "the net" you had two choices. Watch content via the ad method OR buy it directly.
Filesharing has changed that.
Youtube has NOT. Youtube is just an other ad-supported service. Fewer ads, but ads nonetheless (well at least that is what everyone presumes).
He cares because exposure on youtube gives him popularity, wich increases HIS earning potential. Very sensible off course BUT why should the actuall owner of the show care?
Imagine if you like a supermarket, say the meat department feels SURE that they can have more success if they were allowed to re-arrange the isles, the placement of the registers, in fact overhaul the entire way the shop is being run. Yippie? OR would the actuall owner of the store perhaps wonder if what is good for the meat department is good for the entire store?
NBC has a business model. It don't really matter wether you agree with it or not, or even if it is the right one, or wether new tech is making it obsolete. It is THEIR business model and theirs to follow or change by their choice.
It to a degree depends on giving people restricted access to their content so they can in turn expose those people to ads for wich they are paid.
NBC's primary income comes from selling ads, NOT from tv shows. They are just the way to get people to watch the ads.
The popularity of a tv-show therefore only matters if you get people to watch ads. Youtube does NOT run NBC ads, therefore it don't help NBC.
Their MIGHT be a side-effect, that because people saw a NBC show on youtube they will watch the regular version with ads included BUT there is a huge risk. What if people just expect ALL the NBC's shows to be on youtube instead and stop watching the ad-laden tv-shows all together. Those people that claim that exposure to shows on youtube leads to increased television watching are ignoring that it could just as easily just lead to more youtube watching.
Imagine if you like of a thirdparty pulled all the content of slashdot and re-published it without slashdot ads leading to massive exposure. Sure individual story submitters might be pleased BUT would CowboyNeal welcome this? Would he be told that people reading slashdot stories somewhere else is going to lead to increased traffic to his own site? Slashdot stories are NOT there because CowboyNeal wants you to know about thing, but because they are the way to get you to see ads.
NBC and the likes are fighting for their business model, selling ads by offering free content. If someone else redisplays that content they can't sell ads. It is perfectly simple. Perhaps their business model is bound to die off (unlikely, youtube == google and google gives free content in exchange for watching paid ads as its core business model) but they are under no obligation to hurry it along.
I wonder what Jon Stewart and Lorne Micheals would say if their tv stations came to them and said, "hi, we are going to stop broadcasting your shows on tv with ads and just post them directly to youtube instead, your salery? Well, negotiate that with google, they are the ones displaying the ads."
IF youtube display's NBC programs then NBC becomes NOT a television studio but "merely" a producer. This is not unusual, there are plently of tv-producers who do NOT own the means of actually broadcasting what they create, (at least they do in europe) and they sell it to companies/organistions that can. If youtube wants to show NBC programs, with their own ads inserted, they need to pay NBC for the production.
Anything less just doesn't make sense from NBC's point of view.
Unless offcourse Jon Stewarts and the likes are going to do their work for free. Not bloody likely is it?
Especially those that agree with you. The reason is very simple, if you accept as fact something because it is what you like to hear, you are far more likely to accept lies.
If you are a X-winger and read a X-wing newspaper a lie told by that newspaper has a far greater chance of being accepted. Same goes in reverse, if someone says something that you do NOT agree with, you owe it to yourselve to have a healthy distrust, of YOURSELVE!
Always be willing to accept that what you think is true is wrong, and that what you think is wrong is true.
NEVER trust a single source of information to give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So Wikipedia is an excellent tool for teaching. Teach students to ALWAYS check the correctness of information, just because you read an article in a "respectable" newspaper doesn't mean you don't have to check the facts.
And if you encounter something you think is false, still be willing to check it out, just in case your information is in fact wrong.
If you manage to teach students this, you might even be able to teach some the next step. Just because A is a lie does not make B a truth. Just because the US lied about WMD does not mean Saddam told the truth. Just because the axis powers were scum does not mean that the allies were/are the nicest guys on the face of the earth.
You might even get people to understand that because someone is the enemy of my enemy does NOT mean they are my friend, and even that someone who doesn't agree with you is NOT necesarlly your enemy.
OR we could just spoonfeed students the accepted facts and be done with it. After all it worked for thousands of years.
First off because I do NOT disagree with you that there are capable windows programmers. The particular company of my past did have one, he left.
On the other hand, I have had to rescue sites from windows to often to have any real confidence in.asp or whatever programmers. Offcourse this NOT fair, after all if the site was running perfectly, I would not be called upon to salvage it right?
There are windows shops, and trying to sell linux (or anything non-MS) is liking pulling teeth, your own. No thanks. I just work for companies/bosses, that get it. Sadly sometimes this changes (in the above case because departments got merged) and then it is time to leave rather then get bogged down in a long battle that you can't win unless you have the support of upper management.
Time is too short.
By all means, use whatever works for you.
But I still like to commment on your points.
Offcourse it is hard to find good developers, PHP or otherwise. Especially "linux" developers KNOW how hard it is to work in a windows enviroment, so they stay put were they are. Even if I qualified for your company, you could not hire me. Because I know that rather then being a developer I would constantly have to sell/defend linux in your mostly windows shop. No thanks.
Depends on what you are looking at I suppose. It is the old netcraft battle and every side can claim victory by specifying what can be claimed as a qualifying site for their software.
So true,and since your shop sells windows, you will sell more windows because "linux" developers will stay the fuck away because they do not constantly want to compete with the MS team. On the other hand the same is true for "linux" shops. So the customer ends up being advised by a windows or linux shop purely on the chance of wich shop he talks too. Oh well, objective advice is overrated anyway.
Can you imagine what it islike to be blind by closing your eyes for a day, even a week?
No. When you are blind, you can never open your eyes, ever again. No matter how long you pretend to be blind, you can always open your eyes.
Can you imagine what it is like to be poor because you spend a few years living on a minimum income, say as a student?
No, the truly poor are not poor for just a few years, they are poor for their entire lives. Just slumming it for a few years does NOT count as the same experience. The worsed thing about being poor is that after enought time has passed everything starts to break down and you cannot afford to replace it. Even the laziest student won't be a student for that long.
Can you judge how good public transport is because you leave your car at home and take the bus to the office?
No, to truly judge public transport, you must be totally dependant on it with NO alternative and then not just take it to the downtown office BUT out into factory zones at odd hours.
WHAT THE FUCK AM I ON ABOUT?
Disconnect. Our "leaders", the people making the decisions about what blind people need, are not blind. The people who make decisions about wellfare, are not poor. The people deciding public transport police, have a car.
It is becoming rarer and rarer for a politician to have a background in the real world. Not that that accounts for much. Remember my comment about student poverty and how it doesn't count? A dock worker turned politician STILL isn't a life time physical laborer, he got out. He cannot understand what it is like to do that job for the rest of his life because he didn't.
Coupled to this is the yes-man effect. You tend to surround yourselve with people like yourselve. Who of you with a job hang out with the unemployed, let alone the homeless? Do you think politicians are any different? And any of those special efforts, like someone living on the street for a week, are ultimately futile because they are NOT real. It is no different then claiming you know what it is like to be blind because you closed your eyes. Only the blind know what it is truly like.
It is not just politicians, the press (the people who are supposed to watch the politicians) are in the same boat. EVERY reporter, has a job, as a reporter. Ever noticed how car related stories get much more press then public transport related stories? How many reporters do you think exist without access to a car?
A few years ago a dutch telivison star (for the KRO) made a bit of a fuss about discrimination against muslims. Two tiny details, one of the other presentators for his station had been caught on film refusing access to a muslim family (restaurant owner and food show presenter Joop Braakhekke (last name as best as I remember)) and another detail, not a single name in the credits of the shows he was in, was remotely foreign. Dutch TV production is not exactly being overrun by "regular" immigrants, only the (sorry) token nigger types. Oh, and they all thend to live in an area of holland that is fairly rich (gooi) and therefore extremely lacking in immigrant groups.
They share this with the politicians.
Mmm, and yet, these two groups, politicians and the press are supposed to lead/inform the "real" people?
You can call it what you like, disconnect with the voter, ivory tower, elitism, the simple fact is that our leaders, and the watchers of our leaders do NOT have to catch an early bus that takes 2 hours to take you to work, haven't lived paycheck to paycheck for decades and haven't done a real job were you get your hands dirty.
It don't really matter wether you are talking left or right wing. NO right wing politician is REALLY a business man. They are working for the state, drawing a state salary and haven't run a company in years. Left wingers are NOT poor, have not worked a "real" job in years and have spent at least several years around the rich and powerfull.
Talking with the voter is a pain and you got all those nice loby
Your "logic" is flawed to the extreme mostly because you seem to have swallowed the DRM spin whole.
I will ask you these questions. Would you find the security you describe to be important in place like say hospitals and/or financial institutions?
If yes, then aswner my next question, why do most of these BAN Vista and such from being used with their sensitive data?
Because DRM takes the control of the content away from the owner of the machine and puts it in the hands of some outside party.
It started with Windows XP I think when an update to Media Player had the clause that MS was to be allowed full access to the machine, and any data on it, or accesible to it.
Exactly how do you match you business need to stop spies with giving MS or anyother DRM controller on your new AMD machine with security?
You are very right that the owner needs to be in control of their machine. DRM in general and this AMD drm in specific does NOT allow this.
After all if the owner, YOU, controlled the DRM, how could the media companies control it as well? Word of honor? In fact your business needs rule out ANY third party controlled DRM.
Just not in the way you think. Muslims and blacks are fighting and killing each other. So?
It is extremely hard to see why a white european should care OR for that matter even if he cared what the fuck he could do about it.
Who exactly do you propose we shoot?
Because that is the only way to deal with this kinda situation, go in and kill the most agressive party and basically enforce "don't fight or we will kill you".
At the moment some claim that it is the black population that is receiving the worsed of it, so are you saying, in 2007, that the US (because the EU is to chicken shit) should start another war against muslims?
Even americans aren't that insane. *me looks at the americans*
Well, they might be that insane but they can't afford another war that you can't win.
Because the sad fact is this, you CANNOT end a force by conflict UNLESS you use extreme force and that is no longer acceptable. If the US intervenes and just one muslim child is claimed to have been killed (it is well known that muslims claims in this area are about as trustworthy as ANY propaganda claim has been in the whole of human history) the shit will hit the fan and it will face the exact same problems as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The website you linked to reminds me an awfull lot of similar sites urging the western leaders to save the poor koerds. That went awfully well remember? Do you promise this time to remember what your bleeding heart cried out today when next week a US plane drops a bomb and some photographer show the corpse of a child (and again at another bombsite, several days later?)
No you won't and western leaders know this. They rather take the short, easily forgotten critisim of doing nothing. Because they know people like you, can't be counted upon to accept what needs to be done.
You pick 1947 as the date. Why not 1945, because that might just show what arab/muslim forces did to the jews who had lived there for hundred of years? And why just that region, why not the entire middle east, so that it would also show the larger number of jews who were driven from arab/muslim countries, some of whom resetled in british controlled areas (what Israel was before it became independent) and of whom nobody seems to speak. If palestinians have the right to return why not jews who fled from arab countries?
And would your project also show that many of the palestinians did something roughly similar to this. April 1940, germans and their sympathisers leave The Netherlands, May 1940, german forces attacked The Netherlands. June 1940, in move that shocks the world, dutch forces not just repel the german attack but are halfway to berlin. 1941 to present, dutch/germans who "fled" holland to not be caught in the attack of their allies with the idea that they would go back and claim everything after the dutch had been wiped of the face of the earth, now want compensation.
Sorry, nope.
Learn some real history about the area first.
Oh and remeber, in darfur, it is those lovely muslims that never hurt anyone and follow a peacefull religion that are just defending themselves against the nasty black people, by killing them before they can do anything. Makes sense.
It is kinda funny that the same african (black african nations) that are against america for its role in northern africa at the same time want the US to intervene in Darfur, were the problems are caused by the those same north african nations.
Africa: "Evil US is killing our muslim brothers, Nice US please kill those muslims that are killing our black brothers."
My grocer already knows my order when he sees me coming. Not that he gets them then for me. He already has gotten them ready because he knows when I arrive.
Invasion of privacy OR bloody good service I happily pay his slighly higher then average prices for?
It is caused by the water dropping down, releases ton of carbons. As for wind power, those blades are made of carbon and they just evaporate in the sun. Nasty stuff.
When will people finally get it into their head that the move to electric/hydrogen cars means that you break the direct link between your source of energy, and the energy to put in a moving vehicle?
A wind powered car would be inconvenient, by an electric car whose electricity comes from windpower isn't.
A country like greenland could use geothermal energy to create hydrogen and ship it to the rest of the world.
But yeah, some power plants currently use carbon based fuels, so electricity causes carbon pollution. We wouldn't want to confuse you.
They got a bundle of devices for that purpose, it is called a R A D I O. You will be amazed but they have these onboard for the express purpose of allowing ground to air and even air to ground communication. Amazing eh? What will they invent next!
And yes, in an emergency the airline CAN and WILL contact passengers in flight AND/OR contact people on the ground if the circumstances require it.
But I got another shocker for you, 99.99% of calls just ain't that urgent. In fact 99.99% of calls ain't even urgent enough for people to be willing to pay for the sattelite phone that a lot of long distance flights have carried for years.
I absolutely agree, keep the bloody cellphones of the phone. Lost productivity == time to get some shuteye to combat the jetlag. Geez, you are 1 mile up and all you can think of is talking on a phone? Real men shag the stewardess. And slashdotters can beg the stewardess if they can please see the cockpit.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the article and still am not clear on what the program was supposed to do. Apparently there was a piece of software in place that monitored the computers for security reasons. Lets for simplicity sakes call it a virus scanner.
Now did he write a program that DISABLED the virus scanner in some ways?
Did his own program then REPLACE this virus scanner with his own?
If so, then he is indeed in the wrong.
He should instead have written a virus scanner sitting behind or in front of the existing one to augment its capabilities. Then nothing would be wrong, the required software is still in place and working BUT his own software would be making it more secure, always presuming offcourse that his own software IS in fact more secure.
This is the crux of the matter, who says his software was better and that by him replacing the default software he made the system more secure? We got only his word for that.
See it like this, say that the dorms are required to have a fire extinguisher in every room. Now a person comes along and says that the devices ain't good enough, too small and don't work in certain conditions. What should he then do? Replace them with a model he claims to be better OR put that model NEXT to them.
I can argue till I am blue in the face with the local firechief but replacing mandated equipment and facilities is NOT going to be accepted. ADDING to them is. Just because only a handheld bottle of eye-washer is needed doesn't mean I can't install the full shower version. Just as long the bottle is still there. Just because the helmet is required at the building site doesn't mean I can't wear ear/eye protection as well, just as long as I still wear the helmet.
Granted there are problems with this, it could be that policy requires you to use the small fire extinguisher first, that you know won't work, to fight a fire and that you cannot touch your own that does work because by then you will have burnt to death.
if the existing virus scanner has an exploit weakness having your own program behind it don't work. If the policy requires the exiting security software to be the first in line, and if it itself can be exploited so that a second program behind it never gets a chance to stop the intrusion you are screwed.
Setting your own software in FRONT is probably against policy, after all if your own software is flawed then it can be exploited before the required software has a change.
It is difficult but frankly that is what you get when departments get too large. You need rules but will inevitably find that the rules restrict legitimate use. The answer? Don't use them.
What I think is however far more likely in this case is that we are talking the ancient and dreaded evil of the crushed ego. Who wants to take a bet that someone at the IT department didn't just feel peeved to have the software he/she choose as being secure exposed as being insecure? Yeah, sure, YOU would use such a comment to learn and implement a better solution. You are a saint to be sure but most people would just come down like a ton of bricks on the messenger, less their supervisor starts asking just what you are getting payed for.
What many warned about has happened. Music labels sold out to the big retailers, who could sell the CD cheaper then the dedicated music stores. So the dedicated stores lost business, being unable to compete with the big retailers.
Aparently nobody at the music labels noticed that the big retailers stocked a far smaller selection of music.
With the smaller retailers gone, the music selection available to the customers has shrunk. So what happens? The music labels do NOT immidiatly put a ban on big retailers and go down on their hands and knees and bag small retailers to forgive them.
Nope, instead they kowtow even further for the big retailers and reduce the number of albums by limiting wich artists to sign-up.
Big Retailers do what they always do, they squeeze and having learned what sells and what doesn't in their stores limit their selection. This is expected. You may notice that from time to time new flavors are launched for products. Vanilla Cola, white KitKat, etc etc. They are given a space for a while. If it sells, well it gets to keep its space. If it doesn't. It doesn't.
Music was a new product, it was launched big and now it is time to cut out the flavors that don't sell enough.
So even less music is available, leading to fewer sales to customers, leading to the big chains squeezing even harder on their selection.
How is it possible that nobody at the music labels noticed this and flat out refused to sell to the big chains on their terms? It would have been trivial. Walmart refuses to stock "controversial" CD's. So any music label could simply have refused to deal with a retailer who does not agree to stock ALL albums in its catalog. Claim it as a stance against censorship and you would even be seen as the nice guy.
But no, simply bloody minded greed and vision restricted to the next quarter over-ruled common sense and now you got the current mess.
Well, allow me to say just this: HA HA.
Two different occasions. One was my private home link, that was free for me to use as I pleased and so I shared a bit of it.
The other was not, belonged to a non-profit club that a friend of my works for who I helped setup their network so they could use their laptops around the building without having to drill holes in a listed building (protected for being a monument meaning you can't just drill holes for new wires.
But basically you are saying that if you try my door and find it unlocked then it is okay for you to come in. Go ahead, try this in texas. They can shoot you there.
Before that day a new record was set by a young man. By a young a man who had submitted stories and plays that disturbed his teachers but who took no action.
What if they had?
Well, off course if they had then the shooting would not have happened so those teachers would have been totally out of order for doing something.
The job of the police is to stop crime. No it isn't. The job of the police is to arrest people AFTER they committed a crime. As Terry Pratchett put in a recent Discworld novel "we caught the guy that done it" sounds a lot better then "we caught the guy that looked like he was going to do it" especially if they say "prove it".
BUT that doesn't help much when you got 30 dead.
Saying that those people paid the price of freedom is NOT going to win you any friends.
One /.er posted a link with a small segment of the essay. It seems to me like the typical emo/teenage kid rant. Personally I think hanging is to good for them but sadly I am not the judge.
The point is however that this happened right after a tragedy wich might have been prevented. Do you want to be the person who ignores the warning signs next time? In the the U Sue of All (man that would have my english teacher calling in the special forces)?
But we don't know the whole essay. Most police officers are rather down to earth, they KNOW the world. For them to make an arrest and for it not to be all settled easily alarms me. Slashdot happily tells us that this guy is a straight-A student. That is great because we all know straight-A students do NOT flip out. What I want to know is this, did the police check him out and what the fuck did they find?
Why doesn't slashdot reportd exactly how many guns this person owns (whatever the number may be and remember, zero is an important number) and how many kilo's of ammo he has stockpiled (again remember the humble zero).
Freedom and the prevention of crime do NOT mix. Since most want both, you are going to have conflicts.
While I don't like WoW (it is polished, it does exactly what it says, it is extremely well designed but I do NOT like it) its biggest claim to fame is NOT so much that it did extremely well in getting a couple of million subscribers but that it proved everyone wrong who pre-WoW claimed that any new MMO would have to get it subscribers from other existing MMO's.
Pity then that WoW now has more subscribers then ALL mmo's that came before combined, with the fact that those earlier MMO's still exist with their own player bases.
Blizzard did NOT eat everyone elses pie, they made the pie a lot bigger.
So now the question is, is this the maximum size the pie can be OR can someone else make the pie even bigger?
Compare if you like WoW subscription figures with other content sold worldwide. Pitifull ain't it?
Compare it if you like too say cable tv. You need to pay for it monthly and it sucks up time.
Would a tv show, say a new Star Trek series that manages to get 8 million viewers WORLD WIDE to be a success or a total and absolute failure unparraelled in history?
Offcourse MMO gaming ain't a tvshow but still, the claim that WoW has captured the maximum world wide market seems a bit unlikely.
Remember those stories that women are the majority online? Yet you don't see them?
Well, I am going to claim something else. Counterstrike is a failure. Nobody plays it. It is unpopular as hell.
Sure, here on slashdot perhaps you will find a lot of players BUT seen from the total audience of people online playing games the number of counterstrike, indeed ALL fps combined, is truly pathetically small.
Blizzard enlarged the market by remaking EQ and polishing it and giving it a good design. It worked BUT someone else could do the same.
Your question smells of IBM asking themselves what the total world market was for the personal computer. Google just how fucking wrong they were because they could NOT get their heads around the fact that the small market they saw was due to their version of the personal computer (expensive and of limited use).
Vanguard is bugged, deep but unfinished. WoW is shallow but polished.
But that is not what sets them apart. The biggest difference is the playerbase. In many ways it reminds me of the difference between Operation Flashpoint and Counterstrike. Both are military first person shooters with counterstrike clearly the more polished easier to get into version. Yet if you desire to play with people whose balls have actually descended your choice is clear.
I tried Vanguard (Sony is one of the few MMO companies willing to accomadate non-credit card owners. Blizzard thanks to its huge success is lucky that stores stock its gamecards) and was amazed to find that you did not need to join a RP-preffered server to be able to be in a world were the majority of players do not use numbers in their chat.
In fact, the majority of players in Vanguard use plain english, are polite and helpfull and even those who still got crap nicks like 'warlord' at least manage to spell it correctly.
If you ever played WoW, well. You know.
Pity then that the game is so fucking bugged. In between the bugs it is actualy fun, and has a lot to offer. I might even say that it is a ton of fun, compared to wow's 1 kilo of fun. Pity that vanguard also gives you two tons of bugs while WoW has by now reduced it to a few grams.
So why am I not playing WoW? Two reasons, the population but mostly the kill X till Y drops and X turns out to be a number just short of infinity. Vanguard improves on both counts but geez gods, FIX THE BUGS.
But what about LOTRO. Well, I am looking at it. Just that so far I can't see any class I like to play. I wonder what route it will take. For me the real killer thing I am looking for in a MMO is for it to be playable and for it to reserve a few servers with a queens english only policy and a naming policy that is enforced with permanent bans. Enter a stupid nick and BAM, banned. No warning, no suggestions, no arguing. Instant ban.
On the other hand, you could just make it an 18+ server. Make that 30+. Nobody born in the 80's or later allowed. And get OF MY LAWN!
Console sales are all very nice and all BUT what counts is the sale of software for that console.
I personally think that it says an awfull lot about the game industry that the top scorer for march was God of War 2 for the PS2.
What then does this tell us? That an ancient console beats EVERY SINGLE current console, handheld and regular, in sales?
Oh and number 2 and 3 in software sales (console) went to the 360.
So where is the success of the Wii?
Granted the Wii ain't subsidised, so Nintendo doesn't need to sell X titles per console just to get their money back but still, if the Wii ends up un-used then Nintendo could still end up with a loser. Lots of hardware sales but no software sales.
In a way, its success could even make this more likely. Exactly how many of the games now being rushed to the Wii are going to be piss poor cynical cash-ins? Genuine Wii games will take time to emerge but if Nintendo can't proof it can get games sold they won't be developed especially if the cheap quickie attempts die the death they deserve.
None of this means that the Wii is going to fail, just that pure console sale figures so far don't mean much.
The only one who should really worry at the moment is Sony, the PS3 isn't scoring with the either hardware or software sales. Pity I suppose but with the PS2 still doing well, perhaps they can afford the wait.
That at least is fact. When the soviet union fell, russia was supposed to enter a new age of capatalism helped by the west. Did it?
Offcourse not, if you track back it almost seems like the US tried everything it could to make sure Russia would NOT succeed.
And why should it. Post WW2 the US helped its former enemies Germany and Japan back on its feet and gained two powerfull rivals in business. And no, that is NOT good news when you are an export nation. But luckily both germany and japan are heavily depeneded on foreign natural resources meaning trade routes wich they have no hope of securing on their own so they need the US to remain powerfull.
China is ever worse but at least they got that huge population to feed and while less resource dependent then Germany and Japan still, hopefully, can be controlled.
But just imagine Russia pulling a economic recovery ala Germany or Japan. It got the people, it got MORE then enough land and is swimming in every kind of resource you could want.
It is even worse, even under the heel of dictatorship it managed to be suprisingly inventive, just what would happen if it became "westernized"?
A western russia could be the deathblow to the US dominance over the world through economics.
The west LOVES putin. He is sure to keep Russia down, and relatively harmless. Well apart from that pesky russian mafia and the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons. But hey, at least the market is safe.
The wiki article explains a build in protection against any errors BUT also mentions that these weren't actually needed because the measurements were acurate enough not to need them. It does NOT mention what the measurements were.
Or put another way, the "how they did it" that the article described wasn't actually used, how they managed to be so accurate that they weren't needed goes unexplained.
Frankly, one of the reasons I absolutely detest windows is because everytime I am forced to use it, I also sooner or later run into having to replace that shitty piece of shit with something and it ALWAYS trying to come back in one form or another.
I suppose I am alone in this but I absolutly HATE that even to get it running you have to agree to an EULA that has been proven to take extreme liberties with your rights, despite the fact that you already had to agree to a EULA when windows was installed.
Then there is the fact that it doesn't even follow MS own interface style, that it for some reason seems to think that a Mp3 player needs to take up a quarter of the screen. That it is slow, that it is buggy, and that it is just plain ugly and riddled with sales pitches.
And you WANT this on linux?
No, my dear friend, the proper response to "MS doesn't release Windows Media Player for Linux" is "Thank you kind and mercifull god, we are not worthy of your generous nature".
Now get down on your knees and show proper gratitude. Sore knees? You got it good. Windows users also got to bend over, but it ain't just their knees that are sore.
The article doesn't say it was, in fact it notes the details are extremely sketchy.
Furthermore, if I drop my wallet, does everyone here just assume that I don't want it anymore and you are therefore free to take it?
I had at one time a public access point, it was identified as "Free basic web access, be nice" or something and was run through a linux box wich filtered and limited access quite a bit AND logged everything. I did it mostly out of curiousity. Just what would people access through a connection provided by someone they didn't know?
The answer was suprisingly mundane. Mostly email and light browsing. The location was in Amsterdam in an apartment near the "kalvertoren" a few years ago. For the non-dutch this is in the heart of amsterdam, yes within walking distance of the red-light district. This is holland, everything is in walking distance.
HOWEVER I have also found in more recent years that if you leave an AP open for general use, some people WILL not automatically limit themselves to minimum use. Cue the by now old trick of simply filtering a specific users access to replace all their image requests with tubgirl (if you think goatse is bad, google for it).
Still simply securing your network ain't always enough. At least some wifi security can be easily bypassed. At what point do we say "this is secured enough, you are now commiting a crime".
Personally I think it is bad sign if a bike stolen from an open garden gets a response from the police that you should have a 1 meter high fence, that is locked and the bike should have secured to something. Perhaps some people like to live in a world were everything has to be secured, I prefer to just lock up those that cannot understand the difference between something you own and something someone else owns. Either way, it seems we need an awfull lot of locks in this world.
You are saying that if you leave your door open, that is an invite? If you don't have a fence around your garden, just anyone can use it? God forbid you leave your car unlocked for a sec while loading/unloading. People will be borrowing it in a sec! What about simply dropping your wallet by accident. Obviously you didn't want it anymore, so I can just take it?
Perhaps I am just old but I still think that you don't take what belongs to someone else. Don't give me the crap about not knowing the difference between a public access point someone created to share his/her connection with anyone passingby and a private wifi connection that just hasn't been locked up to the point it becomes unusuable. Surely you can tell the difference between a private house door and a shop door?
And no, this is NOT like listening to their music OR even like listening in on their wifi transmissions. IF you transmit data into my space you could argue that I therefore have permission to receive that data. It is sorta sensible, don't accuse me of eavesdropping if you are shouting out a conversation into my ear.
HOWEVER, wifi is two way communication. This person was NOT just receiving the data they "played too loudly" he was happily sending data back and interacting with the system.
This would be like the neighbour listening to YOUR music, using your system, from his own house, uninvited. Perhaps you find that okay, prove it, and post your address.
The entire problem is in the two-way nature of wifi communication. This turns it away from "your apple tree overhands my garden, so any apples over my part belong the me" type of law, into "I am planting apple trees in your garden AND taking the apples" type of law.
What does a tv-station, or anyone supplying content payed for by ads sell. Answer, ads.
Slashdot itself does NOT sell you newsstories. How could they, the service is free. Rather they sell advertising to people selling a product.
Now who does the ads. Who tells a company what ad policy to follow. An ad agency offcourse. What do they sell? The product of whoever hires them you say? Don't be silly, ad agencies sell ads.
A plastic surgeon sells plastic surgery, NOT health. They will therefore ALWAYS find something wrong with the way you look, because improving your looks is what they sell.
Offcourse surgeons have got somekind of oath, but ad agencies do not.
They want to sell their product and will ADVERTISE to do so. The problem is that ad agencies are very good at selling ads, it is after all their core business. Sadly their customers, to whom ads are NOT their core business, are not to good at it.
The first mistake is to convuse adversting with factual data. If you read about some new ad method, or direct marketing research, remember that this is ADVERTISING for ads.
I could be an honest plastic surgeon, and tell you you are ugly to the bone and no amount of cutting is going to improve it. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
I could be an honest ad seller, and tell you your product just isn't wanted and trying to get more people to buy it is just not going to happen. The truth BUT I would not be making any money of you.
Remember, that almost all research being done on the effectivness off ads is being done by the ad agencies themselves OR companies closely related to them.
Does an ad BEFORE the main program count the same as one during the program? Does a commercial break count the same as a flash commercial? How about a commercial shown DURING the program (seen them on US tv rips, an ad graphic blocking about half the screen).
Oh and in holland, when I was young, there were NO commercials on sunday. There are now. So at least in this little country ad length has gone up by a gazillion percent on sunday.
The most notably side-effect of ads on sunday is that classic cartoons like bug bunny are no longer aired as often to fill out the the couple of minutes that were left in an hour were the american shows tend to have commercials. Yes, kids, back in the day we had our tv programs run non-stop, and at the beginning and the end, there was a cartoon.
Rose colored glasses you say? Ain't that hard, when things were indeed rosey.
As a downside, we only had the one tv station back then. In holland if you wanted two tv stations, you watched a foreign channel, british, german or belgian depending on were you lived.
Ah, good days. Funny, I watched more tv when there was one station then now that I got over 20.
Odd eh.
As you mention, google has ads. Quick question, is google a search company (developing and selling seach related technology) OR is it an ad seller (selling ad space to people and getting people to view those ads)
The answer is offcourse simple, google is an ad seller, in similar ways as tv-stations (those paid for by ads anyway are).
In a way its business model is almost like that of CNN. CNN doesn't create the news (well, it ain't been proven at least :p ), like google they have a "system" in place that allows them to gather the news, display it, attract eyeballs and then show ads to those eyeballs. So google gathers websites rather then news, still all about getting eyeballs to view ads.
Your comment about tv ads is inaccurate. You forgot to mention radio. I don't know how the US runs its radio stations but in holland it seems like every hour ends with 5 minutes of obnoxious ads, then 1 minute news, and another 5 minutes of obnoxious ads. Some stations even got ads at other times. ENOUGH, MP3player time!
BUT the only alternative is to pay for your content in another way, the BBC method (license fees), the dutch method (payed through regular taxes), the cable subscription way. Don't matter, somehow the content has to be payed for because the people involved in producing it expect to be paid.
Youtube ain't changing that. In fact youtube being now owned by google is probably someday soon going to displays ads as well. Offcourse they can display fewer ads, since they do not actually have to pay for any production.
That is roughly similar to how I can sell stolen goods for less as well.
The problem with the ad-supported services model is that it only works if there isn't an alternative way of getting the service. Before "the net" you had two choices. Watch content via the ad method OR buy it directly.
Filesharing has changed that.
Youtube has NOT. Youtube is just an other ad-supported service. Fewer ads, but ads nonetheless (well at least that is what everyone presumes).
He cares because exposure on youtube gives him popularity, wich increases HIS earning potential. Very sensible off course BUT why should the actuall owner of the show care?
Imagine if you like a supermarket, say the meat department feels SURE that they can have more success if they were allowed to re-arrange the isles, the placement of the registers, in fact overhaul the entire way the shop is being run. Yippie? OR would the actuall owner of the store perhaps wonder if what is good for the meat department is good for the entire store?
NBC has a business model. It don't really matter wether you agree with it or not, or even if it is the right one, or wether new tech is making it obsolete. It is THEIR business model and theirs to follow or change by their choice.
It to a degree depends on giving people restricted access to their content so they can in turn expose those people to ads for wich they are paid.
NBC's primary income comes from selling ads, NOT from tv shows. They are just the way to get people to watch the ads.
The popularity of a tv-show therefore only matters if you get people to watch ads. Youtube does NOT run NBC ads, therefore it don't help NBC.
Their MIGHT be a side-effect, that because people saw a NBC show on youtube they will watch the regular version with ads included BUT there is a huge risk. What if people just expect ALL the NBC's shows to be on youtube instead and stop watching the ad-laden tv-shows all together. Those people that claim that exposure to shows on youtube leads to increased television watching are ignoring that it could just as easily just lead to more youtube watching.
Imagine if you like of a thirdparty pulled all the content of slashdot and re-published it without slashdot ads leading to massive exposure. Sure individual story submitters might be pleased BUT would CowboyNeal welcome this? Would he be told that people reading slashdot stories somewhere else is going to lead to increased traffic to his own site? Slashdot stories are NOT there because CowboyNeal wants you to know about thing, but because they are the way to get you to see ads.
NBC and the likes are fighting for their business model, selling ads by offering free content. If someone else redisplays that content they can't sell ads. It is perfectly simple. Perhaps their business model is bound to die off (unlikely, youtube == google and google gives free content in exchange for watching paid ads as its core business model) but they are under no obligation to hurry it along.
I wonder what Jon Stewart and Lorne Micheals would say if their tv stations came to them and said, "hi, we are going to stop broadcasting your shows on tv with ads and just post them directly to youtube instead, your salery? Well, negotiate that with google, they are the ones displaying the ads."
IF youtube display's NBC programs then NBC becomes NOT a television studio but "merely" a producer. This is not unusual, there are plently of tv-producers who do NOT own the means of actually broadcasting what they create, (at least they do in europe) and they sell it to companies/organistions that can. If youtube wants to show NBC programs, with their own ads inserted, they need to pay NBC for the production.
Anything less just doesn't make sense from NBC's point of view.
Unless offcourse Jon Stewarts and the likes are going to do their work for free. Not bloody likely is it?
Especially those that agree with you. The reason is very simple, if you accept as fact something because it is what you like to hear, you are far more likely to accept lies.
If you are a X-winger and read a X-wing newspaper a lie told by that newspaper has a far greater chance of being accepted. Same goes in reverse, if someone says something that you do NOT agree with, you owe it to yourselve to have a healthy distrust, of YOURSELVE!
Always be willing to accept that what you think is true is wrong, and that what you think is wrong is true.
NEVER trust a single source of information to give you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So Wikipedia is an excellent tool for teaching. Teach students to ALWAYS check the correctness of information, just because you read an article in a "respectable" newspaper doesn't mean you don't have to check the facts.
And if you encounter something you think is false, still be willing to check it out, just in case your information is in fact wrong.
If you manage to teach students this, you might even be able to teach some the next step. Just because A is a lie does not make B a truth. Just because the US lied about WMD does not mean Saddam told the truth. Just because the axis powers were scum does not mean that the allies were/are the nicest guys on the face of the earth.
You might even get people to understand that because someone is the enemy of my enemy does NOT mean they are my friend, and even that someone who doesn't agree with you is NOT necesarlly your enemy.
OR we could just spoonfeed students the accepted facts and be done with it. After all it worked for thousands of years.
First off because I do NOT disagree with you that there are capable windows programmers. The particular company of my past did have one, he left.
On the other hand, I have had to rescue sites from windows to often to have any real confidence in .asp or whatever programmers. Offcourse this NOT fair, after all if the site was running perfectly, I would not be called upon to salvage it right?
There are windows shops, and trying to sell linux (or anything non-MS) is liking pulling teeth, your own. No thanks. I just work for companies/bosses, that get it. Sadly sometimes this changes (in the above case because departments got merged) and then it is time to leave rather then get bogged down in a long battle that you can't win unless you have the support of upper management.
Time is too short.
By all means, use whatever works for you.
But I still like to commment on your points.
Can you imagine what it islike to be blind by closing your eyes for a day, even a week?
No. When you are blind, you can never open your eyes, ever again. No matter how long you pretend to be blind, you can always open your eyes.
Can you imagine what it is like to be poor because you spend a few years living on a minimum income, say as a student?
No, the truly poor are not poor for just a few years, they are poor for their entire lives. Just slumming it for a few years does NOT count as the same experience. The worsed thing about being poor is that after enought time has passed everything starts to break down and you cannot afford to replace it. Even the laziest student won't be a student for that long.
Can you judge how good public transport is because you leave your car at home and take the bus to the office?
No, to truly judge public transport, you must be totally dependant on it with NO alternative and then not just take it to the downtown office BUT out into factory zones at odd hours.
WHAT THE FUCK AM I ON ABOUT?
Disconnect. Our "leaders", the people making the decisions about what blind people need, are not blind. The people who make decisions about wellfare, are not poor. The people deciding public transport police, have a car.
It is becoming rarer and rarer for a politician to have a background in the real world. Not that that accounts for much. Remember my comment about student poverty and how it doesn't count? A dock worker turned politician STILL isn't a life time physical laborer, he got out. He cannot understand what it is like to do that job for the rest of his life because he didn't.
Coupled to this is the yes-man effect. You tend to surround yourselve with people like yourselve. Who of you with a job hang out with the unemployed, let alone the homeless? Do you think politicians are any different? And any of those special efforts, like someone living on the street for a week, are ultimately futile because they are NOT real. It is no different then claiming you know what it is like to be blind because you closed your eyes. Only the blind know what it is truly like.
It is not just politicians, the press (the people who are supposed to watch the politicians) are in the same boat. EVERY reporter, has a job, as a reporter. Ever noticed how car related stories get much more press then public transport related stories? How many reporters do you think exist without access to a car?
A few years ago a dutch telivison star (for the KRO) made a bit of a fuss about discrimination against muslims. Two tiny details, one of the other presentators for his station had been caught on film refusing access to a muslim family (restaurant owner and food show presenter Joop Braakhekke (last name as best as I remember)) and another detail, not a single name in the credits of the shows he was in, was remotely foreign. Dutch TV production is not exactly being overrun by "regular" immigrants, only the (sorry) token nigger types. Oh, and they all thend to live in an area of holland that is fairly rich (gooi) and therefore extremely lacking in immigrant groups.
They share this with the politicians.
Mmm, and yet, these two groups, politicians and the press are supposed to lead/inform the "real" people?
You can call it what you like, disconnect with the voter, ivory tower, elitism, the simple fact is that our leaders, and the watchers of our leaders do NOT have to catch an early bus that takes 2 hours to take you to work, haven't lived paycheck to paycheck for decades and haven't done a real job were you get your hands dirty.
It don't really matter wether you are talking left or right wing. NO right wing politician is REALLY a business man. They are working for the state, drawing a state salary and haven't run a company in years. Left wingers are NOT poor, have not worked a "real" job in years and have spent at least several years around the rich and powerfull.
Talking with the voter is a pain and you got all those nice loby
Your "logic" is flawed to the extreme mostly because you seem to have swallowed the DRM spin whole.
I will ask you these questions. Would you find the security you describe to be important in place like say hospitals and/or financial institutions?
If yes, then aswner my next question, why do most of these BAN Vista and such from being used with their sensitive data?
Because DRM takes the control of the content away from the owner of the machine and puts it in the hands of some outside party.
It started with Windows XP I think when an update to Media Player had the clause that MS was to be allowed full access to the machine, and any data on it, or accesible to it.
Exactly how do you match you business need to stop spies with giving MS or anyother DRM controller on your new AMD machine with security?
You are very right that the owner needs to be in control of their machine. DRM in general and this AMD drm in specific does NOT allow this.
After all if the owner, YOU, controlled the DRM, how could the media companies control it as well? Word of honor? In fact your business needs rule out ANY third party controlled DRM.
How is that for a twist eh?
Just not in the way you think. Muslims and blacks are fighting and killing each other. So?
It is extremely hard to see why a white european should care OR for that matter even if he cared what the fuck he could do about it.
Who exactly do you propose we shoot?
Because that is the only way to deal with this kinda situation, go in and kill the most agressive party and basically enforce "don't fight or we will kill you".
At the moment some claim that it is the black population that is receiving the worsed of it, so are you saying, in 2007, that the US (because the EU is to chicken shit) should start another war against muslims?
Even americans aren't that insane. *me looks at the americans*
Well, they might be that insane but they can't afford another war that you can't win.
Because the sad fact is this, you CANNOT end a force by conflict UNLESS you use extreme force and that is no longer acceptable. If the US intervenes and just one muslim child is claimed to have been killed (it is well known that muslims claims in this area are about as trustworthy as ANY propaganda claim has been in the whole of human history) the shit will hit the fan and it will face the exact same problems as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The website you linked to reminds me an awfull lot of similar sites urging the western leaders to save the poor koerds. That went awfully well remember? Do you promise this time to remember what your bleeding heart cried out today when next week a US plane drops a bomb and some photographer show the corpse of a child (and again at another bombsite, several days later?)
No you won't and western leaders know this. They rather take the short, easily forgotten critisim of doing nothing. Because they know people like you, can't be counted upon to accept what needs to be done.
You pick 1947 as the date. Why not 1945, because that might just show what arab/muslim forces did to the jews who had lived there for hundred of years? And why just that region, why not the entire middle east, so that it would also show the larger number of jews who were driven from arab/muslim countries, some of whom resetled in british controlled areas (what Israel was before it became independent) and of whom nobody seems to speak. If palestinians have the right to return why not jews who fled from arab countries?
And would your project also show that many of the palestinians did something roughly similar to this. April 1940, germans and their sympathisers leave The Netherlands, May 1940, german forces attacked The Netherlands. June 1940, in move that shocks the world, dutch forces not just repel the german attack but are halfway to berlin. 1941 to present, dutch/germans who "fled" holland to not be caught in the attack of their allies with the idea that they would go back and claim everything after the dutch had been wiped of the face of the earth, now want compensation.
Sorry, nope.
Learn some real history about the area first.
Oh and remeber, in darfur, it is those lovely muslims that never hurt anyone and follow a peacefull religion that are just defending themselves against the nasty black people, by killing them before they can do anything. Makes sense.
It is kinda funny that the same african (black african nations) that are against america for its role in northern africa at the same time want the US to intervene in Darfur, were the problems are caused by the those same north african nations.
Africa: "Evil US is killing our muslim brothers, Nice US please kill those muslims that are killing our black brothers."
You got to laugh.
My grocer already knows my order when he sees me coming. Not that he gets them then for me. He already has gotten them ready because he knows when I arrive.
Invasion of privacy OR bloody good service I happily pay his slighly higher then average prices for?
God I love corner stores.
It is caused by the water dropping down, releases ton of carbons. As for wind power, those blades are made of carbon and they just evaporate in the sun. Nasty stuff.
When will people finally get it into their head that the move to electric/hydrogen cars means that you break the direct link between your source of energy, and the energy to put in a moving vehicle?
A wind powered car would be inconvenient, by an electric car whose electricity comes from windpower isn't.
A country like greenland could use geothermal energy to create hydrogen and ship it to the rest of the world.
But yeah, some power plants currently use carbon based fuels, so electricity causes carbon pollution. We wouldn't want to confuse you.
They got a bundle of devices for that purpose, it is called a R A D I O. You will be amazed but they have these onboard for the express purpose of allowing ground to air and even air to ground communication. Amazing eh? What will they invent next!
And yes, in an emergency the airline CAN and WILL contact passengers in flight AND/OR contact people on the ground if the circumstances require it.
But I got another shocker for you, 99.99% of calls just ain't that urgent. In fact 99.99% of calls ain't even urgent enough for people to be willing to pay for the sattelite phone that a lot of long distance flights have carried for years.
I absolutely agree, keep the bloody cellphones of the phone. Lost productivity == time to get some shuteye to combat the jetlag. Geez, you are 1 mile up and all you can think of is talking on a phone? Real men shag the stewardess. And slashdotters can beg the stewardess if they can please see the cockpit.