Okay, am I the only one that thinks that if you can't design something that renders text onto a screen without it turning into the Ocean's Eleven of computer security, you're doing it wrong? Be honest now guys. [...]
But text... really guys, I mean, really?
Slashdot, one of the geekiest sites with sysadmins who are should know how to do it right... doesn't even *allow* Unicode, apparently due in part to some spoofing or other security risks.
Never mind "doing it wrong", Slashdot isn't even *trying*. There should be no excuse after all this time. It's just text, after all. Right?
Or perhaps modern text processing/rendering is much more complex and complicated than you think.
Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
I wonder if the increased reliability in Japan has to do with being prone to frequent earthquakes. Consider how other posters have complained about losing power after simple rain or wind, even in parts of some major North American cities. Five-9s reliability in a normal, relatively quake-light year may be the difference in keeping most of the grid running even after a moderate tremor (i.e. nowhere near as extreme as the 2011 quake), or getting it back up and running more quickly.
I've got no idea why the long slow spaceship stuff to classical music works in 2001 but attempts to redo it in Star Trek: The motionless picture and Mission to Mars come off as shit. They even redid the rotating set thing in Mission to Mars almost shot for shot and it just doesn't seem to work on the big screen while in 2001 it has you in wonder even watching on a small TV set.
One big reason was that by the time ST:TMP came out (1979), Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica had shown audiences a far more exciting (though completely unrealistic) portrayal of action in space. It's only gotten more ridiculous since, although Babylon 5 did an excellent job making realistic space physics part of the show (spinning station and ship sections to simulate gravity, Earth's fighters using 16 thrusters to realistically operate in all six degrees of freedom). And AFAIK only Firefly has attempted to follow 2001 in showing space scenes in complete silence.
He might be referring to the very last episode of Enterprise, where key events were part of a holodeck simulation being run by Riker and Troi during the events of the TNG episode "The Pegasus".
I don't think that suggests the entire *series* was a holodeck storyline, but I think gmuslera's comment was more more tongue-in-cheek anyway.
What inconsistencies does Enterprise introduce? Nothing really comes to mind...
I think that they mean the entire Temporal Cold War story-arc.
I guess that must have happened after I quit watching. Not really quit, I just wasn't motivated enough to chase its time slot all around. Could've also TiVo'd it I guess, but again, lacked motivation to press necessary buttons.
It did have a good start.
The Temporal cold war plot point was established in the pilot episode of Enterprise, so you must've quit very early into that series and forgot about it.
When I heard they decided to introduce time travel as a key arc in a *prequel* to shows we already had, implying there wasn't enough interesting pre-Federation history to sustain the show on its own, I wrote off the entire series.
Don't show a space station next to earth one movie, with a massive infrastructure, then show the Enterprise and another ship have their illegal fight between Federation warships right next to earth, so close that the Enterprises crashes into the earth in the same movie!
If my memory of that sequence is correct, it was far, far worse than that. They were locked in combat not close to earth, but close to the moon, and then once crippled and drifting they "fell" towards Earth and hit atmosphere in a matter of minutes. If they started drifting while in Earth orbit I'd give them a pass, but even allowing for Hollywood's compressing timeframes for pacing purposes (today's audiences especially won't put up with the more accurate space physics e.g. the lengthy docking sequences seen in 2001), falling from the moon to Earth was excessive and atrocious writing.
It's pretty sad when Nixon starts looking good, if for no other reason than he resigned after his abuse of office became clear, rather than wait to be removed.
Re:Ballmer is evidence of the role of luck in life
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 1
Based on his overall personality, I strongly suspect that if Steve Ballmer hadn't just happened to be college buddies with BillG and Paul Allen, chances are pretty good he'd be selling used cars somewhere and enjoying the nearest football team. Instead, we're going to take him seriously for the rest of his natural life and possible beyond.
This'll bolster your "he'd be selling used cars" argument, *and* make it harder to take him seriously. Ballmer selling Windows v1
It is a "deflection" because the fact my car/government is almost as bad as yours does NOT change the fact yours is horrible.
Unlike many cities in the UK, particularly London, my city, Seattle, does not have CCTV on every fucking street corner.
And now you demonstrate the very hubris you accuse BSAtHome of having. Also ignoring canadian_right's actual point, by still refusing to acknowledge your own country's failings.
(and before you start, I'm not from the US *or* UK, though we're not far behind the both of you in trashing our people's rights)
That would be an ideal solution, but checking the car between each customer use is probably not going to be practical.
Chemical/odor sensors in key areas should be able to easily tell if anything unpleasant has been left in the car. It's a small space, smells will circulate pretty quickly before the offending passenger even reaches their destination.
Heck, there'll probably be a tamper-resistant sensor built-in to the driver's side to ensure the driver has acceptable alcohol levels on their breath before it lets you drive manually.
How was GP "factually incorrect"? It was his *opinion* that "a lot of" (not "all", not even "majority/most") Obama critics would be defending these actions had Romney won instead.
You counter with a single example: yourself. It's commendable that you did what you've done, and as GP said, "bravo" for being consistent. It in no way invalidates what GP wrote.
You at the other side of the pond have generated a farce beyond fantasy
An amazing statement considering recent events in the UK with respect to the Snowden story. Hubris.
Nice deflection attempt. Knee-jerk "you're no better!" defensiveness, and it wasn't even aimed at "you" but at USA the country.
The US claims to be better than the rest, including its western allies, yet it can't even set the proper standard for itself nor own up to its obvious current failures.
Pageview, maybe. Revenue from ad clicks and impressions? Nope.
Myself, I've explicitly adblocked CBC (and few other sites) because their "pre-moderators" often let obvious trolls keep commenting, while comments of mine that are actually on-topic, or far more civil if I'm replying to correct a troll's misinformation, are blocked.
I've seen some vile stuff posted under Facebook social comments, with "real name" and pictures attached.
Either those trolls are actually using fake names and photos in their FB profile, or they truly don't care or are even proud of the fact they're complete assholes.
And $50k would put it at the meat of the pack of cars from all but the discount lines. $50k isn't a lot of money for a car in 2013.
Loki_1929 specifically talked about working towards an "every-man's car" price of $30K, which happens to be the 2012 average cost of a car or light truck. The "every-man" isn't going to buy a sports or luxury car, so why include them in your pack but exclude discount lines in your comparison?
So, I disagree that $50K isn't a lot of money for a car in 2013. Even hybrid and electric cars from Honda, Toyota and Nissan are in the $25K-$35K range.
Guess he should have assigned the rights to a small publishing company then, managed by the estate. The print, recording and broadcast companies are very good about enforcing their "rights" and contracts long after the original content creator has passed on.
> and how would voting for the other asshole have been any better?
It couldn't have been much worse. You might say 2008 was worse, but even awful Bush, in his first six years, looks better than Obama's first six years by most objective measures. That's comparing Obama to one of the worst presidents in history.
Romney at least appeared COMPETENT, though kind of slimy. He really reminds me of Bill Clinton in that way. On the economy, for example, everybody wants for there to be more jobs. Romney, having something of a clue, would probably create more jobs. He wouldn't be focused on union jobs, if that matters to you, but non-union jobs are better than no jobs.
Republican presidential candidates for both 2008 and 2012 were perfectly fine and had proven competencies, even if they totally compromised their own principles in their bid for their party's nomination. Their choices for vice-presidential running mates, however, showed how out of touch they were.
Sarah Palin: not chosen for her track record, but to appear progressive to soft Democrat supporters after Obama won the Democratic nomination.
Paul Ryan: trying to fool independent and soft Democrat voters didn't work, so drop all pretences and try and ensure far-right Republican support instead... ignoring that they'd have voted Republican no matter what, and they could have secured soft Democrat voters this time with a moderate-right VP instead.
And there were many who'd voted Obama in 2008 who were already disillusioned with his broken promises. Making Ryan a VP candidate proved that current Republican ideals were far too right-wing for them, so they had to stick with Obama.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
Combine that statement with wait times in some places of half an hour to over 8 hours to cast a ballot, and you now have an answer for why so many people don't even bother going out to vote anymore. There aren't anywhere near enough idealistic people who'll wait in line long enough to cast votes for a "non-evil" candidate who has nearly zero chance of winning.
An aside: such astronomical wait times make the US presidential election process look about as bad as developing countries with emerging or pseudo-democracies. Except the US and its states and counties have had a few centuries to identify and fix wait-time issues, so there's zero excuses for such incompetence (or malicious intent, if the unspoken goal in some districts is disenfranchising "undesirable" voters).
(most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!)
You say that as if Mac users are more ignorant or something. Most *Windows* users (a far larger sample) don't know what version they're using. That's a far worse showing since there's only been 4 major choices for consumers in the last 10 years (XP, Vista, 7, 8) compared to OSX's 8 major versions.
For Mac, Windows and Android, the average person's (correct) answer as to what major OS version they're using is "whatever it came with when I bought it." (iOS on the other hand has an extremely high adoption rate for the latest major OS versions, over 90%, according to app store visit stats).
At least Hayden didn't go overboard like Canada's then-public safety minister, Conservative Vic Toews, who actually did claim that online surveillance opponents supported child pornographers. That caused a very severe backlash from his own party's supporters, some of whom were against the legislation as much as the "liberals" were, if for different reasons.
It would've been easier for sites not to invoke multiple popup and pop-under windows with ads in each of them. But that's what many sites did, it got so annoying that popup blocking plugins were made to prevent this, and then blocking functionality was built into the browsers themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, am I the only one that thinks that if you can't design something that renders text onto a screen without it turning into the Ocean's Eleven of computer security, you're doing it wrong? Be honest now guys. [...]
But text... really guys, I mean, really?
Slashdot, one of the geekiest sites with sysadmins who are should know how to do it right... doesn't even *allow* Unicode, apparently due in part to some spoofing or other security risks.
Never mind "doing it wrong", Slashdot isn't even *trying*. There should be no excuse after all this time. It's just text, after all. Right?
Or perhaps modern text processing/rendering is much more complex and complicated than you think.
Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
I wonder if the increased reliability in Japan has to do with being prone to frequent earthquakes. Consider how other posters have complained about losing power after simple rain or wind, even in parts of some major North American cities. Five-9s reliability in a normal, relatively quake-light year may be the difference in keeping most of the grid running even after a moderate tremor (i.e. nowhere near as extreme as the 2011 quake), or getting it back up and running more quickly.
Of course. We may do every kind of atrocity, for it is in the name of peace and democracy.
But not in the name of the Doctor!
I've got no idea why the long slow spaceship stuff to classical music works in 2001 but attempts to redo it in Star Trek: The motionless picture and Mission to Mars come off as shit. They even redid the rotating set thing in Mission to Mars almost shot for shot and it just doesn't seem to work on the big screen while in 2001 it has you in wonder even watching on a small TV set.
One big reason was that by the time ST:TMP came out (1979), Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica had shown audiences a far more exciting (though completely unrealistic) portrayal of action in space. It's only gotten more ridiculous since, although Babylon 5 did an excellent job making realistic space physics part of the show (spinning station and ship sections to simulate gravity, Earth's fighters using 16 thrusters to realistically operate in all six degrees of freedom). And AFAIK only Firefly has attempted to follow 2001 in showing space scenes in complete silence.
He might be referring to the very last episode of Enterprise, where key events were part of a holodeck simulation being run by Riker and Troi during the events of the TNG episode "The Pegasus".
I don't think that suggests the entire *series* was a holodeck storyline, but I think gmuslera's comment was more more tongue-in-cheek anyway.
What inconsistencies does Enterprise introduce? Nothing really comes to mind...
I think that they mean the entire Temporal Cold War story-arc.
I guess that must have happened after I quit watching. Not really quit, I just wasn't motivated enough to chase its time slot all around. Could've also TiVo'd it I guess, but again, lacked motivation to press necessary buttons.
It did have a good start.
The Temporal cold war plot point was established in the pilot episode of Enterprise, so you must've quit very early into that series and forgot about it.
When I heard they decided to introduce time travel as a key arc in a *prequel* to shows we already had, implying there wasn't enough interesting pre-Federation history to sustain the show on its own, I wrote off the entire series.
Don't show a space station next to earth one movie, with a massive infrastructure, then show the Enterprise and another ship have their illegal fight between Federation warships right next to earth, so close that the Enterprises crashes into the earth in the same movie!
If my memory of that sequence is correct, it was far, far worse than that. They were locked in combat not close to earth, but close to the moon, and then once crippled and drifting they "fell" towards Earth and hit atmosphere in a matter of minutes. If they started drifting while in Earth orbit I'd give them a pass, but even allowing for Hollywood's compressing timeframes for pacing purposes (today's audiences especially won't put up with the more accurate space physics e.g. the lengthy docking sequences seen in 2001), falling from the moon to Earth was excessive and atrocious writing.
It's pretty sad when Nixon starts looking good, if for no other reason than he resigned after his abuse of office became clear, rather than wait to be removed.
Based on his overall personality, I strongly suspect that if Steve Ballmer hadn't just happened to be college buddies with BillG and Paul Allen, chances are pretty good he'd be selling used cars somewhere and enjoying the nearest football team. Instead, we're going to take him seriously for the rest of his natural life and possible beyond.
This'll bolster your "he'd be selling used cars" argument, *and* make it harder to take him seriously. Ballmer selling Windows v1
It is a "deflection" because the fact my car/government is almost as bad as yours does NOT change the fact yours is horrible.
Unlike many cities in the UK, particularly London, my city, Seattle, does not have CCTV on every fucking street corner.
And now you demonstrate the very hubris you accuse BSAtHome of having. Also ignoring canadian_right's actual point, by still refusing to acknowledge your own country's failings.
(and before you start, I'm not from the US *or* UK, though we're not far behind the both of you in trashing our people's rights)
That would be an ideal solution, but checking the car between each customer use is probably not going to be practical.
Chemical/odor sensors in key areas should be able to easily tell if anything unpleasant has been left in the car. It's a small space, smells will circulate pretty quickly before the offending passenger even reaches their destination.
Heck, there'll probably be a tamper-resistant sensor built-in to the driver's side to ensure the driver has acceptable alcohol levels on their breath before it lets you drive manually.
How was GP "factually incorrect"? It was his *opinion* that "a lot of" (not "all", not even "majority/most") Obama critics would be defending these actions had Romney won instead.
You counter with a single example: yourself. It's commendable that you did what you've done, and as GP said, "bravo" for being consistent. It in no way invalidates what GP wrote.
According to some delusional partisans on the far-right, Bush Jr was a RINO. Even Reagan was a RINO.
Call them on it, and they have no clue how to define a "true Republican" other than "even more conservative than the last Republican president."
You at the other side of the pond have generated a farce beyond fantasy
An amazing statement considering recent events in the UK with respect to the Snowden story. Hubris.
Nice deflection attempt. Knee-jerk "you're no better!" defensiveness, and it wasn't even aimed at "you" but at USA the country.
The US claims to be better than the rest, including its western allies, yet it can't even set the proper standard for itself nor own up to its obvious current failures.
Pageview, maybe. Revenue from ad clicks and impressions? Nope.
Myself, I've explicitly adblocked CBC (and few other sites) because their "pre-moderators" often let obvious trolls keep commenting, while comments of mine that are actually on-topic, or far more civil if I'm replying to correct a troll's misinformation, are blocked.
I've seen some vile stuff posted under Facebook social comments, with "real name" and pictures attached.
Either those trolls are actually using fake names and photos in their FB profile, or they truly don't care or are even proud of the fact they're complete assholes.
And $50k would put it at the meat of the pack of cars from all but the discount lines. $50k isn't a lot of money for a car in 2013.
Loki_1929 specifically talked about working towards an "every-man's car" price of $30K, which happens to be the 2012 average cost of a car or light truck. The "every-man" isn't going to buy a sports or luxury car, so why include them in your pack but exclude discount lines in your comparison?
So, I disagree that $50K isn't a lot of money for a car in 2013. Even hybrid and electric cars from Honda, Toyota and Nissan are in the $25K-$35K range.
Guess he should have assigned the rights to a small publishing company then, managed by the estate. The print, recording and broadcast companies are very good about enforcing their "rights" and contracts long after the original content creator has passed on.
Apple seems to restrict major new APIs to their own apps for one or two major iOS revisions before making them available to 3rd party app developers.
Heck, they arguably did the same for apps in general--3rd parties couldn't even develop native apps until iOS v2 in July 2008.
Some choice comments definitely put him on the far-right on hot-button social issues.
> and how would voting for the other asshole have been any better?
It couldn't have been much worse. You might say 2008 was worse, but even awful Bush, in his first six years, looks better than Obama's first six years by most objective measures. That's comparing Obama to one of the worst presidents in history.
Romney at least appeared COMPETENT, though kind of slimy. He really reminds me of Bill Clinton in that way. On the economy, for example, everybody wants
for there to be more jobs. Romney, having something of a clue, would probably create more jobs. He wouldn't be focused on union jobs, if that matters to you, but non-union jobs are better than no jobs.
Republican presidential candidates for both 2008 and 2012 were perfectly fine and had proven competencies, even if they totally compromised their own principles in their bid for their party's nomination. Their choices for vice-presidential running mates, however, showed how out of touch they were.
Sarah Palin: not chosen for her track record, but to appear progressive to soft Democrat supporters after Obama won the Democratic nomination.
Paul Ryan: trying to fool independent and soft Democrat voters didn't work, so drop all pretences and try and ensure far-right Republican support instead... ignoring that they'd have voted Republican no matter what, and they could have secured soft Democrat voters this time with a moderate-right VP instead.
And there were many who'd voted Obama in 2008 who were already disillusioned with his broken promises. Making Ryan a VP candidate proved that current Republican ideals were far too right-wing for them, so they had to stick with Obama.
Well done, Republicans.
Only in theory, not in practice. Without ranked voting, a vote for a 3rd party candidate is effectively a vote against whoever your second choice is, so voters are often faced with voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
Combine that statement with wait times in some places of half an hour to over 8 hours to cast a ballot, and you now have an answer for why so many people don't even bother going out to vote anymore. There aren't anywhere near enough idealistic people who'll wait in line long enough to cast votes for a "non-evil" candidate who has nearly zero chance of winning.
An aside: such astronomical wait times make the US presidential election process look about as bad as developing countries with emerging or pseudo-democracies. Except the US and its states and counties have had a few centuries to identify and fix wait-time issues, so there's zero excuses for such incompetence (or malicious intent, if the unspoken goal in some districts is disenfranchising "undesirable" voters).
(most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!)
You say that as if Mac users are more ignorant or something. Most *Windows* users (a far larger sample) don't know what version they're using. That's a far worse showing since there's only been 4 major choices for consumers in the last 10 years (XP, Vista, 7, 8) compared to OSX's 8 major versions.
For Mac, Windows and Android, the average person's (correct) answer as to what major OS version they're using is "whatever it came with when I bought it." (iOS on the other hand has an extremely high adoption rate for the latest major OS versions, over 90%, according to app store visit stats).
Hyperbole? Hardly.
At least Hayden didn't go overboard like Canada's then-public safety minister, Conservative Vic Toews, who actually did claim that online surveillance opponents supported child pornographers. That caused a very severe backlash from his own party's supporters, some of whom were against the legislation as much as the "liberals" were, if for different reasons.
It would've been easier for sites not to invoke multiple popup and pop-under windows with ads in each of them. But that's what many sites did, it got so annoying that popup blocking plugins were made to prevent this, and then blocking functionality was built into the browsers themselves.
So there's definitely precedent.