Yes, I am too, and there are a lot of other ISPs (ones that aren't so professional or as consumer-friendly) that would like Speakeasy to just go away. Tiered service is as bold an example of a Congressional sellout as one could imagine, the DMCA not withstanding. Let's hope they manage to not screw us all up.
Actually, it's because the vast majority of their customers never use the promised resources and don't notice the fact that the ISP is technically fibbing. Unfortunately, since the advent of Gnutella and Bit Torrent millions of people are noticing that they aren't receiving the service levels they were expecting. Browsing, email and instant messaging don't give you any real feedback about line conditions... but just run a few torrents and it becomes painfully obvious when the performance isn't there. The fact that ISP's business models (and profit margins) depend upon the bulk of their customers not using what they were told they were paying for doesn't change the fact that they are paying for it. If bandwidth-intensive applications continue to be popular (and usage shows no sign of slowing down in spite of numerous lawsuits to the contrary) the big ISPs may very well have to change their offerings. Either that, or build out their networks to the point where they can sustain the traffic. Neither option appeals to them, so they're trying to take the easy way out by labeling certain customers as "bandwidth hogs" or "account abusers" and maintaining undisclosed usage limits (to intimidate customers into limiting their consumption.) That works to a degree, but when the number of bandwidth hogs begins to number in the tens of millions there's definitely a problem.
Easy to do if you're in a broadband-competitive area (I am, and I have Comcast, and if things aren't working to my satisfaction I call them up and say the magic word "Speakeasy".) I know people that only have one option for broadband, and things can get a mite more difficult (I'm not picking on Comcast alone, seems like most broadband providers are only as co-operative as they have to be in a particular service area.)
I just find it pretty shocking that Best Buy doesn't seem to have any set policy regarding handling of sensitive data.
Maybe they do... doesn't mean underpaid employees give a damn about it.
Any employee capable of replacing a hard drive should be capable of understanding the importance of the data that may be on it.
Those employees probably understand the importance better than the original owners, after all, that kind of information is worth real money. In the right hands it's certainly worth a hell of a lot more than a second-hand hard disk.
Caveat emptor, I guess. I feel sorry for the victims, of course: it sucks being in the position of not knowing who might have all your most private files. However, in effect they trusted some unknown person at a Best Buy not to take complete advantage of them. Hell, even when aren't stealing hard drives from their customers I don't trust Best Buy not to screw them over anyway. Many's the time I bought something there, took it home, and found out that it was used and had just been stuffed back into the box and re-shrinkwrapped, and when I tried to return it all I could get was a store credit. So I guess I'm not surprised this happened. I haven't shopped Best Buy in years and this just makes me glad I took my business elsewhere.
Doesn't matter whether you use your brain or not, or whether you get infected or not, if you have a good backup policy and follow it. Shit happens: this, to me, is effectively no different than a hard drive crash. In other words, either you've stashed your important files somewhere safe... or you haven't.
In other words, you're a Java bigot that looks down upon those that don't agree with your choice of tools. It used to be C bigots that irritated me the most (the "if you can't do it in C it isn't worth doing" mindset), but now it seems that most of them have moved to C# and have finally realized the benefits of a decent GUI development system. A friend of mine once put it this way: "Welcome to VB you pompous assholes." VB6 and VB.Net have their place, and calling people that use them bozos won't win you any points (although you'll probably garner some karma from like-minded mods.) But the biggest argument to me isn't that VB6 is a black box (from an empirical standpoint it's about as thoroughly understood as it's possible for a black box to be, and.Net isn't much more open), but that VB6 has been end-of-lifed. Obviously, it's not wise to make a significant investment in new development using an unsupported tool chain. Still... at least it's no longer a moving target, and in spite of your rhetoric to the contrary there's still a large base of established VB coding talent. Much of it is migrating to.Net or Java, true, but there's a shitload of VB6 code out there and plenty of companies willing to shell out good money to maintain and develop with it. Purists such as yourself may not care for that, but there it is.
Not everyone needs to work on the bleeding edge, and not everyone that doesn't is an idiot.
Can't argue with you there. Nothing gets your ideas (or ideals) dismissed so quickly as being successfully labelled a fanatic or a fruitcake. And if you do want to be taken seriously, for Heaven's sake don't give your opponents any ammunition.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of similar bits of hilarity in any language, but feel free to have some fun at our expense. In any event, what you're describing is something quite different from the discussion at hand. The deliberate redefinition of language to serve a political agenda to the detriment of the individual is not the same as words that are used out of long-standing habit to describe an unpleasant bodily function.
In particular, the FSF's moralistic opposition to DRM (digital rights management) technologies, which first manifested itself in early drafts of Version 3 of the GPL (Gnu General Public License), seems now to have been elevated to the point of evangelical dogma.
Very true, and I believe that what is now called "Gifted" used to be called "Special Ed". Apparently, at some point parents wised up to that one, and a new euphemism had to be found. I don't remember offhand, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there was an even earlier misappellation. Below is an excerpt from a George Carlin routine that dealt with this very issue (click here for the full routine):
I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invented a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.
Either poor reporting, or accurate reporting of a misinformed or agenda-ridden professor's opinions.
The violent impulses I learned in childhood didn't have diddley-squat to do with cartoons or movies (didn't have video games then) they had to do with a few brainless assholes with underdeveloped sex organs (most of whom were almost too stupid to breathe under their own power) trying repeatedly to beat me to a bloody pulp. So believe me when I say that if I have anything bottled up real people were responsible for it, not Foghorn Leghorn or Tom & Jerry. Any kid that can't tell cartoon violence from real violence needs to get the shit kicked out of him a few times... I guarantee that will clear up any confusion, and relegate Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd to the graveyard of stupid scientific theories. If anything, watching bad guys get their asses kicked while watching Spiderman, Superman, Jonny Quest and a dozen other of the cool cartoons we had back in the mid-sixties had the opposite effect than what this PC professor is professing, and I suspect the same applies to video games. Of course, in the name of "protecting the children" they took all the fun cartoons away and replaced them with tripe like "Powerpuff Girls". It's all the rage to dump on cartoons and movies nowadays, rather than face facts and deal with the deeper socio-economic issues that are turning our youth to violence. I swear, there are times when I truly believe that our culture is so complacent, so politically correct, so blind to itself that it has become incapable of even acknowledging the problems that exist within it, much less actually attending to them.
Your example of the console market misses the mark a little. The real reason that such products are so solid has less to do with the limited hardware as it has to do with proper design and coding practices, and some of the best quality control in any software industry. Publishers insist upon that, for the reason that if a cartridge or DVD-ROM game has a fatal error in it customers return their discs or cartridges in droves. That costs millions. The penalty for failure is high, very high, since there is no way to patch the game after it has been shipped and burned to read-only media.
That may change as more and more consoles get Internet-enabled and publishers begin to use writable media. Expect to see a "www.nintendoupdate.com" or maybe a "www.playstationupdate.com" at that point. I'm serious... once console makers have the ability to require an Internet connection they'll become as addicted to the "patch mentality" as any other software vendor. That's because patching after initial release is cheaper than thorough testing prior to that release, and the penalty for failure is significantly reduced when a nasty bug can be patched away in a few seconds.
The point I'm making is this: software companies write software that is as reliable as the particular marketplace for that software requires. Microsoft was consistently shipping flaky crap right up 'til the introduction of Window 2000, because their customers weren't demanding anything better. But the market changed, stability became a hot-button issue in the wired world, and Microsoft improved their offerings substantially. Ultimately, corporate investment in software quality is best encouraged by healthy competition, user awareness of how things should be and, most important of all, user awareness of problems in the products they buy. Now, I know that using automotive analogies is risky but... auto makers are required by law to inform consumers when dangerous flaws are discovered. Yet software companies can sweep known serious bugs under the rug and just simply never address them. If that were not the case, if the law required software vendors to keep their customers apprised of significant bugs, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that software quality would rise across the board.
You're in good company. It really pisses me off that we Americans invented so much stuff that was just sold off for a quick buck to some foreign company, or just blatantly ripped off and sold back to us for a song just to destroy what competitive capability we had left (i.e., "dumping.) There really isn't much point in making a significant investment in R&D if you're not going to use it to benefit your domestic industries. There's even less point in making such an investment just to benefit someone else's domestic industries, since that becomes little more than expensive foreign aid that comes back to bite your own citizens in their collective asses. International trade is just a highly-stylized form of warfare anyway, and the one thing you don't do in war is give the enemy anything for free. Make him pay for whatever he takes. Otherwise you have a "foot in self shoot" situation, which is where we are right now.
P.S. Our government and our corporate leaders also have much they need to answer for. Some atonement is in order, I think.
Yes, but "doing their best job" is, ideally, not supposed to involve lying, cheating or stealing, nor are they required to perform illegal or unethical activity simply because their idiotic or malicious client requests it. If they do, it's because they want the money that client is paying them. On the other hand, when you hear a defense attorney babbling nonsense about his felonious client's sterling character it's generally an attempt to offset any potential jury/media bias, and that's a very real factor in jury selection and the outcome of a well-publicized trial.
For now. This has gone back and forth so many times I feel like I'm watching a game of ping-pong. There are enough powerful interests involved that this issue that continued vigilance will be required.
Well, if we truly believe that it is better to set a criminal free than imprison an innocent man, we have to accept that some accused bad guys will go free. The scales of justice can be biased either way (and they swing pretty far the other way in other parts of the world.) I can live with some crooks getting a free pass now and then, because if I am ever wrongfully accused of a crime, the odds are in my favor.
Actually, the whole human race has a history of the big guy lording it over the little guy. Beating the shit out of the little guy... slicing him, dicing him, and pounding him into the ground. Now, you can say that "we have a history in this country..." but remember that America's legal system was expressly set up to limit that kind of behavior, and it worked damn well for a long time. Truly, from that perspective life was better here that it ever was in most other nations. Unfortunately, that system is breaking down, and it's the lawyers that are bloody well making it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am too, and there are a lot of other ISPs (ones that aren't so professional or as consumer-friendly) that would like Speakeasy to just go away. Tiered service is as bold an example of a Congressional sellout as one could imagine, the DMCA not withstanding. Let's hope they manage to not screw us all up.
Actually, it's because the vast majority of their customers never use the promised resources and don't notice the fact that the ISP is technically fibbing. Unfortunately, since the advent of Gnutella and Bit Torrent millions of people are noticing that they aren't receiving the service levels they were expecting. Browsing, email and instant messaging don't give you any real feedback about line conditions ... but just run a few torrents and it becomes painfully obvious when the performance isn't there. The fact that ISP's business models (and profit margins) depend upon the bulk of their customers not using what they were told they were paying for doesn't change the fact that they are paying for it. If bandwidth-intensive applications continue to be popular (and usage shows no sign of slowing down in spite of numerous lawsuits to the contrary) the big ISPs may very well have to change their offerings. Either that, or build out their networks to the point where they can sustain the traffic. Neither option appeals to them, so they're trying to take the easy way out by labeling certain customers as "bandwidth hogs" or "account abusers" and maintaining undisclosed usage limits (to intimidate customers into limiting their consumption.) That works to a degree, but when the number of bandwidth hogs begins to number in the tens of millions there's definitely a problem.
What does gramma need with 3Mbps anyway?!
Irrelevant. They sold her on 3 Mbps, they aren't delivering it. It's not my business or yours what she wants it for.
I'd vote with my dollars appropriately.
Easy to do if you're in a broadband-competitive area (I am, and I have Comcast, and if things aren't working to my satisfaction I call them up and say the magic word "Speakeasy".) I know people that only have one option for broadband, and things can get a mite more difficult (I'm not picking on Comcast alone, seems like most broadband providers are only as co-operative as they have to be in a particular service area.)
As I recall a junior engineer approved the change without consulting with more experienced engineers.
How'd you like to be that guy.
I just find it pretty shocking that Best Buy doesn't seem to have any set policy regarding handling of sensitive data.
... doesn't mean underpaid employees give a damn about it.
Maybe they do
Any employee capable of replacing a hard drive should be capable of understanding the importance of the data that may be on it.
Those employees probably understand the importance better than the original owners, after all, that kind of information is worth real money. In the right hands it's certainly worth a hell of a lot more than a second-hand hard disk.
Caveat emptor, I guess. I feel sorry for the victims, of course: it sucks being in the position of not knowing who might have all your most private files. However, in effect they trusted some unknown person at a Best Buy not to take complete advantage of them. Hell, even when aren't stealing hard drives from their customers I don't trust Best Buy not to screw them over anyway. Many's the time I bought something there, took it home, and found out that it was used and had just been stuffed back into the box and re-shrinkwrapped, and when I tried to return it all I could get was a store credit. So I guess I'm not surprised this happened. I haven't shopped Best Buy in years and this just makes me glad I took my business elsewhere.
Doesn't matter whether you use your brain or not, or whether you get infected or not, if you have a good backup policy and follow it. Shit happens: this, to me, is effectively no different than a hard drive crash. In other words, either you've stashed your important files somewhere safe ... or you haven't.
Now aren't you glad I'm not writing viruses?
How do we know you're not?
Space shuttle guidance systems.
... and the bozos that like VB.
.Net isn't much more open), but that VB6 has been end-of-lifed. Obviously, it's not wise to make a significant investment in new development using an unsupported tool chain. Still ... at least it's no longer a moving target, and in spite of your rhetoric to the contrary there's still a large base of established VB coding talent. Much of it is migrating to .Net or Java, true, but there's a shitload of VB6 code out there and plenty of companies willing to shell out good money to maintain and develop with it. Purists such as yourself may not care for that, but there it is.
Not everyone needs to work on the bleeding edge, and not everyone that doesn't is an idiot.
In other words, you're a Java bigot that looks down upon those that don't agree with your choice of tools. It used to be C bigots that irritated me the most (the "if you can't do it in C it isn't worth doing" mindset), but now it seems that most of them have moved to C# and have finally realized the benefits of a decent GUI development system. A friend of mine once put it this way: "Welcome to VB you pompous assholes." VB6 and VB.Net have their place, and calling people that use them bozos won't win you any points (although you'll probably garner some karma from like-minded mods.) But the biggest argument to me isn't that VB6 is a black box (from an empirical standpoint it's about as thoroughly understood as it's possible for a black box to be, and
Can't argue with you there. Nothing gets your ideas (or ideals) dismissed so quickly as being successfully labelled a fanatic or a fruitcake. And if you do want to be taken seriously, for Heaven's sake don't give your opponents any ammunition.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of similar bits of hilarity in any language, but feel free to have some fun at our expense. In any event, what you're describing is something quite different from the discussion at hand. The deliberate redefinition of language to serve a political agenda to the detriment of the individual is not the same as words that are used out of long-standing habit to describe an unpleasant bodily function.
In particular, the FSF's moralistic opposition to DRM (digital rights management) technologies, which first manifested itself in early drafts of Version 3 of the GPL (Gnu General Public License), seems now to have been elevated to the point of evangelical dogma.
That doesn't mean they're wrong.
Click on #15, Euphemisms.
Very true, and I believe that what is now called "Gifted" used to be called "Special Ed". Apparently, at some point parents wised up to that one, and a new euphemism had to be found. I don't remember offhand, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there was an even earlier misappellation. Below is an excerpt from a George Carlin routine that dealt with this very issue (click here for the full routine):
I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invented a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.
Either poor reporting, or accurate reporting of a misinformed or agenda-ridden professor's opinions.
... I guarantee that will clear up any confusion, and relegate Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd to the graveyard of stupid scientific theories. If anything, watching bad guys get their asses kicked while watching Spiderman, Superman, Jonny Quest and a dozen other of the cool cartoons we had back in the mid-sixties had the opposite effect than what this PC professor is professing, and I suspect the same applies to video games. Of course, in the name of "protecting the children" they took all the fun cartoons away and replaced them with tripe like "Powerpuff Girls". It's all the rage to dump on cartoons and movies nowadays, rather than face facts and deal with the deeper socio-economic issues that are turning our youth to violence. I swear, there are times when I truly believe that our culture is so complacent, so politically correct, so blind to itself that it has become incapable of even acknowledging the problems that exist within it, much less actually attending to them.
The violent impulses I learned in childhood didn't have diddley-squat to do with cartoons or movies (didn't have video games then) they had to do with a few brainless assholes with underdeveloped sex organs (most of whom were almost too stupid to breathe under their own power) trying repeatedly to beat me to a bloody pulp. So believe me when I say that if I have anything bottled up real people were responsible for it, not Foghorn Leghorn or Tom & Jerry. Any kid that can't tell cartoon violence from real violence needs to get the shit kicked out of him a few times
"I challenged the entire QA department to a Bat Leth contest. They will trouble us no longer."
Your example of the console market misses the mark a little. The real reason that such products are so solid has less to do with the limited hardware as it has to do with proper design and coding practices, and some of the best quality control in any software industry. Publishers insist upon that, for the reason that if a cartridge or DVD-ROM game has a fatal error in it customers return their discs or cartridges in droves. That costs millions. The penalty for failure is high, very high, since there is no way to patch the game after it has been shipped and burned to read-only media.
... once console makers have the ability to require an Internet connection they'll become as addicted to the "patch mentality" as any other software vendor. That's because patching after initial release is cheaper than thorough testing prior to that release, and the penalty for failure is significantly reduced when a nasty bug can be patched away in a few seconds.
... auto makers are required by law to inform consumers when dangerous flaws are discovered. Yet software companies can sweep known serious bugs under the rug and just simply never address them. If that were not the case, if the law required software vendors to keep their customers apprised of significant bugs, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that software quality would rise across the board.
That may change as more and more consoles get Internet-enabled and publishers begin to use writable media. Expect to see a "www.nintendoupdate.com" or maybe a "www.playstationupdate.com" at that point. I'm serious
The point I'm making is this: software companies write software that is as reliable as the particular marketplace for that software requires. Microsoft was consistently shipping flaky crap right up 'til the introduction of Window 2000, because their customers weren't demanding anything better. But the market changed, stability became a hot-button issue in the wired world, and Microsoft improved their offerings substantially. Ultimately, corporate investment in software quality is best encouraged by healthy competition, user awareness of how things should be and, most important of all, user awareness of problems in the products they buy. Now, I know that using automotive analogies is risky but
You're in good company. It really pisses me off that we Americans invented so much stuff that was just sold off for a quick buck to some foreign company, or just blatantly ripped off and sold back to us for a song just to destroy what competitive capability we had left (i.e., "dumping.) There really isn't much point in making a significant investment in R&D if you're not going to use it to benefit your domestic industries. There's even less point in making such an investment just to benefit someone else's domestic industries, since that becomes little more than expensive foreign aid that comes back to bite your own citizens in their collective asses. International trade is just a highly-stylized form of warfare anyway, and the one thing you don't do in war is give the enemy anything for free. Make him pay for whatever he takes. Otherwise you have a "foot in self shoot" situation, which is where we are right now.
P.S. Our government and our corporate leaders also have much they need to answer for. Some atonement is in order, I think.
Yes, but "doing their best job" is, ideally, not supposed to involve lying, cheating or stealing, nor are they required to perform illegal or unethical activity simply because their idiotic or malicious client requests it. If they do, it's because they want the money that client is paying them. On the other hand, when you hear a defense attorney babbling nonsense about his felonious client's sterling character it's generally an attempt to offset any potential jury/media bias, and that's a very real factor in jury selection and the outcome of a well-publicized trial.
What does the World Health Organization have to do with this?
European Commission Reverses its Views on Patents
For now. This has gone back and forth so many times I feel like I'm watching a game of ping-pong. There are enough powerful interests involved that this issue that continued vigilance will be required.
Anyhow, someone want to offer me any conspiracy theories on why nobody cares?
Well, gee, that's obvious. It's the Soma they put in the water supply.
What were we talking about again?
Well, if we truly believe that it is better to set a criminal free than imprison an innocent man, we have to accept that some accused bad guys will go free. The scales of justice can be biased either way (and they swing pretty far the other way in other parts of the world.) I can live with some crooks getting a free pass now and then, because if I am ever wrongfully accused of a crime, the odds are in my favor.
Actually, the whole human race has a history of the big guy lording it over the little guy. Beating the shit out of the little guy ... slicing him, dicing him, and pounding him into the ground. Now, you can say that "we have a history in this country ..." but remember that America's legal system was expressly set up to limit that kind of behavior, and it worked damn well for a long time. Truly, from that perspective life was better here that it ever was in most other nations. Unfortunately, that system is breaking down, and it's the lawyers that are bloody well making it happen.