What good is software that you can freely distribute if it's BAD software?
Most people don't care if they can give away their OS. Most people DO care that their OS easily accomodates file types they commonly use like PDF and MP3.
As long as Linux people try and tell the market that they can't have linux unless it's "free", Linux won't be successful in the market. Enjoy your sandbox.
Those codecs don't just magically show up in Windows or OSX - the people who create the software pay for the rights to use them. So one of these many Linux distro companies just needs to put together a distribution where these codecs have been paid for and are included as modules and charge a bit for the distro.
Blaming the laws is convenient, but not the problem.
You suppport rampant data mining, and you're apparently not that bright, therefore, rampant data mining can't be good.
You've missed the point. The problem is not whether this form of logging of phone calls is an acceptable tradeoff of privacy for security.
The problem is that the NSA *DOES NOT GET TO MAKE THIS DECISION!* We can't allow secret branches of the government, on their own, to decide what is and is not ok to do, because with that power it is inevitable that they begin to decide that things are ok that we definitely do not want them doing.
If the NSA wants some new power to conduct a new form of survielance, they need to get warrants through the judicial branch or new legislation allowing them to do it through the legislative branch and if they can't (or "don't want to") get either, then they simply should not be allowed to do it.
The biggest problem we have now is that we have the fox minding the chicken coop - the very people in the gorvernment who should be protecting our civil liberties (the justice department) are controlled by the very same people who are taking, without due process, our civil liberties.
Well, right, for ME, the whole point being an employee is to get benefits. I should have been more specific, I meant the whole point of having employees....
After you put in enough years, you get retirement.
After you put in enough years, your company, hobbled by the large labor and benefit costs that make it unable to compete with other companies, files for bankruptcy and greatly cuts back on or cancels your retirement benefits.
Quit and work for a company that treats you better?
The whole point of being an employee is that you help the company earn a better profit. That's why they pay you. If the company isn't making more money with you there than it would without you there, you DESERVE to be fired/paid less/have your job shipped overseas.
You don't deserve a job just because you want one. You deserve one because you're worth being paid to do it.
It's not that the patent office didn't have a clue. It's that they didn't have the RESOURCES, or the TECHNOLOGY.
The job of the patent examiner sucks. If the technology to do this had been available earlier, I'm sure they would have done it earlier. I doubt they have any desire to maintain the current state of suckiness, as the people it sucks the most for is them.
One of three is only 33%. That would indicate WalMart is a pretty good place to work. Many retail positions have 100% turnover. Hell, turnover at Starbucks EXCEEDS 100%.
33% only sounds like a lot because you have no idea what a realistic turnover figure for that industry is. Most people have no idea what typical compensation and benefits are, something that WalMart opponents exploit very successfully.
Most of the WalMart negative publicity is union driven. They want the dues from those walmart employees and are trying to create the impression that WalMart employees would be better if they had unions.
If you are in a position where you are considering working retail at a grocery store or hardware store or discount retailer, chances are you are better off working at WalMart than WalMart's competition.
People get on WalMart's case because many employees don't get benefits or get low wages or whatever. And that's true - people who work at WalMart have crappy wages and benefits compared to, say, computer engineers.
But people who work at WalMart have *BETTER* wages and benefits than people who work at independent grocery, hardware, greeting card, etc, stores.
Do you think your local grocery store or hardware store has mostly full-time employees with health benefits, retirement benefits, etc? They don't.
WalMart is not evil. People work at WalMart because WalMart offers the BEST pay and benefits for people with similar skillsets. The consumer gets cheaper goods. The only people hurt by WalMart are small store owners who pay their employees even LESS than WalMart does.
There are up to two people involved in an airline ticket purchase: The person taking the flight, and the person PAYING for the flight. Usually they are the same person but sometimes they are not, and if not, you want to know who both people are. It would be handy to know if the president of a terrorist-connected charity is buying airplane tickets for people, for example, so you can give those people an extra look.
You think the system is "Pay with credit card, no suspicion." It's not. The system is "average person pays with credit card for tickets on a flight they are taking, little suspicion". If you pay for someone else's ticket who isn't a family member or employee, that adds scrutiny. If you paid for a ticket on a flight you are not taking, more scrutiny. If you're the president of a non-profit with terrorist ties and buy a ticket for someone else (even using your credit card), that gets even more scrutiny.
Knowing who is paying for the ticket (especially when that person is not flying on that plane) is an important item that figures into assessing the risk posed by particular passengers. You don't know who is paying for the ticket when it is bought with cash, and lacking that information increases the risk posed by that passenger and thus reasonably increases the scrutiny you apply to that passenger.
Tracking the flow of money is a very important part of tracking criminals.
Pay Cash ? You automatically get flagged as suspectful. Pay with CC ? This is seen as OK. Be a frequent traveller ? You are automatically flagged as safe. Take only a one way ticket ? Be preparred for the "glove" search... Knowing the rule it would be blantantly easy to bypass this check (take a round trip, on a frequent flyer, using a CC, do it 10 times, then afterward you are a "safe" traveller...). We always laughed at the stupidity of that. I left shortly afterward so I dunno if the US kept that security concept today.
Cash is flagged as more suspicious because cash *IS* suspicious. Most poeple don't lug around $200-$700 to an actual airline counter for an airline ticket. It's more work and more risk, and if someone is doing more work for more risk so they possibly don't need to use a credit card, it makes sense to find out why.
Of course, some people up to nefarious things will be willing to pay with a credit card. Especially if they're about to fly into a building. But many people up to nefarious things will not be willing to pay with a credit card, and it's something to watch out for.
I'm all for privacy and freedom. But you have to understand that if you want to be treated anonymously, you are going to be treated anonymously! Unknown persons will always be, and should be, treated with more caution than known persons. This is common sense. Nobody should make you be known if you don't want to be, but that doesn't mean you should be treated the same as a known person too.
Saying email is broken is like saying your screwdriver is broken because it won't drive nails into wood. The real problem is most people are stupid, and don't know how to select the right tool for the job. Since you seem to advocate that the phone is better than email, I submit that you are one of those people.
Like many people on Slashdot, I work in a team of people. (Well, actually, I work in a couple different teams of people.) If I need to communicate with someone else, sometimes email is the right thing to do. Sometimes a phone call is the right thing to do. Sometimes it's best to walk down the hall and bang on their office door. I do some of each every single day.
The biggest problem with phone calls or face-to-face meetings is that you are taking up a significant chunk of the other person's time and not allowing them to pick when that time is. If I need somebody to up a software rev on a system, or I need them to review a spec, or look at and comment on some code, there is no reason to waste 5-10 minutes of their time communicating this vocally when they can get the same information in a few seconds reading an email.
The 2nd biggest problem with phone calls and face-to-face meetings is you can't have them if the other person isn't available. Maybe they went to lunch. Maybe they have another phone call. Maybe they don't wear deodorant. Email allows asynchronous, ageographical communication, and that's important.
Which brings us to the bane of my existence: Voicemail. Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
The real problem is that people like YOU don't realize that control of your money *IS* a freedom.
Want to travel out of state? Going to need money. Want to call your friends? Going to need money. Want to live indoors? Going to need money. Want to have a good lawyer? Going to need money.
For a lot of people, not having $500 makes a much more immediate and real impact on their practical freedom than the government snooping their IP traffic.
Freedom to not be forced to spend your money on stupid shit is no less important than other freedoms.
(3) Anachronistic Special Effects: Since prequels get made with special-effects technology that has evolved much beyond when the earlier movies were made, we end up seeing special effects and the general look of the movie not being in line with what we would expect how things would look in the past.
Anachronistic SPECIAL Effects? How about Anachronistic REALITY? Or are you still operating your PC with toggle switches?
I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm 27 and have been using computers for 18 years, online for 17 and on the internet since '95 or so.
I am starting to get emails where it is very difficult to tell if they are real or not - both fake emails that look real and REAL emails that look fake. Figuring out which is which takes time, and about a month ago I actually fell for my first phishing scam about 2 months ago (for an eBay password; I had just gotten up and didn't realize the email that looked EXACTLY like the other seller question emails I get wasn't legit. I wouldnt have fallen for it if it asked for a SS number or something.)
But why should I have to spend time figuring these things out? If there was a service that marked certified mail in one color and non-certified mail in another and gave certified mail delivery priority, that's a good thing. Saves me time, and makes spam less profitable, saving me more time.
What's amusing is the article cites examples of "convergence" like 80's PC platforms, and then uses that to say online games will "converge" so you can migrate from one to the other.
Anybody freely moving software from their Amiga or Commodore to their PC?
Yea, didn't think so. MMORPG's won't converge - at best many will simply die and one will "win".
This article is nothing but "Need to write something for this issue to keep my job. Hrm, how about baseless random future predictions?"
I've made up a few reasons while ignoring all the reasons it won't happen. By not giving you a source of the reasons, you might buy this as being anything other than attention whoring.
Think about it. We all elect 100 people who represent our local values. We elect one guy who represents our national values. We make that one guy pick somebody the other guys have to approve, and one approved, that person, along with 8 buddies, gets to make the final, unappealable decisions on everything. You can't threaten to pull a Supreme Court judge's campaign contributions. You can't scare the populace into replacing half of the Supreme Court at once.
We should not bitch about the Supreme Court making the rules. If the Supreme Court doesn't make the rules, who are we going to have do it? Congress? Yeah, they're way better.
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I don't see how not paying for a product developed by someone else is a lack of freedom.
How about freedom from unintuative, time-consuming configuration files and install processes?
What good is software that you can freely distribute if it's BAD software?
Most people don't care if they can give away their OS. Most people DO care that their OS easily accomodates file types they commonly use like PDF and MP3.
As long as Linux people try and tell the market that they can't have linux unless it's "free", Linux won't be successful in the market. Enjoy your sandbox.
Those codecs don't just magically show up in Windows or OSX - the people who create the software pay for the rights to use them. So one of these many Linux distro companies just needs to put together a distribution where these codecs have been paid for and are included as modules and charge a bit for the distro.
Blaming the laws is convenient, but not the problem.
You suppport rampant data mining, and you're apparently not that bright, therefore, rampant data mining can't be good.
You've missed the point. The problem is not whether this form of logging of phone calls is an acceptable tradeoff of privacy for security.
The problem is that the NSA *DOES NOT GET TO MAKE THIS DECISION!* We can't allow secret branches of the government, on their own, to decide what is and is not ok to do, because with that power it is inevitable that they begin to decide that things are ok that we definitely do not want them doing.
If the NSA wants some new power to conduct a new form of survielance, they need to get warrants through the judicial branch or new legislation allowing them to do it through the legislative branch and if they can't (or "don't want to") get either, then they simply should not be allowed to do it.
The biggest problem we have now is that we have the fox minding the chicken coop - the very people in the gorvernment who should be protecting our civil liberties (the justice department) are controlled by the very same people who are taking, without due process, our civil liberties.
Well, right, for ME, the whole point being an employee is to get benefits. I should have been more specific, I meant the whole point of having employees....
But I think you figured that.
After you put in enough years, you get retirement.
After you put in enough years, your company, hobbled by the large labor and benefit costs that make it unable to compete with other companies, files for bankruptcy and greatly cuts back on or cancels your retirement benefits.
Quit and work for a company that treats you better?
The whole point of being an employee is that you help the company earn a better profit. That's why they pay you. If the company isn't making more money with you there than it would without you there, you DESERVE to be fired/paid less/have your job shipped overseas.
You don't deserve a job just because you want one. You deserve one because you're worth being paid to do it.
Apparently, the Dolphins only managed to respond to their name 9 out of 14 times.
This infringes on my patent for "A System of Peer Evaluation of Prior Art of Patent Applications". The USPTO will be hearing from my lawyers!
It's not that the patent office didn't have a clue. It's that they didn't have the RESOURCES, or the TECHNOLOGY.
The job of the patent examiner sucks. If the technology to do this had been available earlier, I'm sure they would have done it earlier. I doubt they have any desire to maintain the current state of suckiness, as the people it sucks the most for is them.
One of three is only 33%. That would indicate WalMart is a pretty good place to work. Many retail positions have 100% turnover. Hell, turnover at Starbucks EXCEEDS 100%.
33% only sounds like a lot because you have no idea what a realistic turnover figure for that industry is. Most people have no idea what typical compensation and benefits are, something that WalMart opponents exploit very successfully.
Most of the WalMart negative publicity is union driven. They want the dues from those walmart employees and are trying to create the impression that WalMart employees would be better if they had unions.
Is not working at WalMart.
If you are in a position where you are considering working retail at a grocery store or hardware store or discount retailer, chances are you are better off working at WalMart than WalMart's competition.
People get on WalMart's case because many employees don't get benefits or get low wages or whatever. And that's true - people who work at WalMart have crappy wages and benefits compared to, say, computer engineers.
But people who work at WalMart have *BETTER* wages and benefits than people who work at independent grocery, hardware, greeting card, etc, stores.
Do you think your local grocery store or hardware store has mostly full-time employees with health benefits, retirement benefits, etc? They don't.
WalMart is not evil. People work at WalMart because WalMart offers the BEST pay and benefits for people with similar skillsets. The consumer gets cheaper goods. The only people hurt by WalMart are small store owners who pay their employees even LESS than WalMart does.
over 24 Giglis!
Nobody can afford a Gigli.
But who is going to train the sharks?
There are up to two people involved in an airline ticket purchase: The person taking the flight, and the person PAYING for the flight. Usually they are the same person but sometimes they are not, and if not, you want to know who both people are. It would be handy to know if the president of a terrorist-connected charity is buying airplane tickets for people, for example, so you can give those people an extra look.
You think the system is "Pay with credit card, no suspicion." It's not. The system is "average person pays with credit card for tickets on a flight they are taking, little suspicion". If you pay for someone else's ticket who isn't a family member or employee, that adds scrutiny. If you paid for a ticket on a flight you are not taking, more scrutiny. If you're the president of a non-profit with terrorist ties and buy a ticket for someone else (even using your credit card), that gets even more scrutiny.
Knowing who is paying for the ticket (especially when that person is not flying on that plane) is an important item that figures into assessing the risk posed by particular passengers. You don't know who is paying for the ticket when it is bought with cash, and lacking that information increases the risk posed by that passenger and thus reasonably increases the scrutiny you apply to that passenger.
Tracking the flow of money is a very important part of tracking criminals.
Pay Cash ? You automatically get flagged as suspectful. Pay with CC ? This is seen as OK. Be a frequent traveller ? You are automatically flagged as safe. Take only a one way ticket ? Be preparred for the "glove" search... Knowing the rule it would be blantantly easy to bypass this check (take a round trip, on a frequent flyer, using a CC, do it 10 times, then afterward you are a "safe" traveller...). We always laughed at the stupidity of that. I left shortly afterward so I dunno if the US kept that security concept today.
Cash is flagged as more suspicious because cash *IS* suspicious. Most poeple don't lug around $200-$700 to an actual airline counter for an airline ticket. It's more work and more risk, and if someone is doing more work for more risk so they possibly don't need to use a credit card, it makes sense to find out why.
Of course, some people up to nefarious things will be willing to pay with a credit card. Especially if they're about to fly into a building. But many people up to nefarious things will not be willing to pay with a credit card, and it's something to watch out for.
I'm all for privacy and freedom. But you have to understand that if you want to be treated anonymously, you are going to be treated anonymously! Unknown persons will always be, and should be, treated with more caution than known persons. This is common sense. Nobody should make you be known if you don't want to be, but that doesn't mean you should be treated the same as a known person too.
Saying email is broken is like saying your screwdriver is broken because it won't drive nails into wood. The real problem is most people are stupid, and don't know how to select the right tool for the job. Since you seem to advocate that the phone is better than email, I submit that you are one of those people.
Like many people on Slashdot, I work in a team of people. (Well, actually, I work in a couple different teams of people.) If I need to communicate with someone else, sometimes email is the right thing to do. Sometimes a phone call is the right thing to do. Sometimes it's best to walk down the hall and bang on their office door. I do some of each every single day.
The biggest problem with phone calls or face-to-face meetings is that you are taking up a significant chunk of the other person's time and not allowing them to pick when that time is. If I need somebody to up a software rev on a system, or I need them to review a spec, or look at and comment on some code, there is no reason to waste 5-10 minutes of their time communicating this vocally when they can get the same information in a few seconds reading an email.
The 2nd biggest problem with phone calls and face-to-face meetings is you can't have them if the other person isn't available. Maybe they went to lunch. Maybe they have another phone call. Maybe they don't wear deodorant. Email allows asynchronous, ageographical communication, and that's important.
Which brings us to the bane of my existence: Voicemail. Any organization that has email service should get rid of their voicemail service for internal communication. Voicemail takes longer to get, it takes longer to listen to, and doesn't do anything for you that email doesn't.
The real problem is that people like YOU don't realize that control of your money *IS* a freedom.
Want to travel out of state? Going to need money. Want to call your friends? Going to need money. Want to live indoors? Going to need money. Want to have a good lawyer? Going to need money.
For a lot of people, not having $500 makes a much more immediate and real impact on their practical freedom than the government snooping their IP traffic.
Freedom to not be forced to spend your money on stupid shit is no less important than other freedoms.
(3) Anachronistic Special Effects: Since prequels get made with special-effects technology that has evolved much beyond when the earlier movies were made, we end up seeing special effects and the general look of the movie not being in line with what we would expect how things would look in the past.
Anachronistic SPECIAL Effects? How about Anachronistic REALITY? Or are you still operating your PC with toggle switches?
I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm 27 and have been using computers for 18 years, online for 17 and on the internet since '95 or so.
I am starting to get emails where it is very difficult to tell if they are real or not - both fake emails that look real and REAL emails that look fake. Figuring out which is which takes time, and about a month ago I actually fell for my first phishing scam about 2 months ago (for an eBay password; I had just gotten up and didn't realize the email that looked EXACTLY like the other seller question emails I get wasn't legit. I wouldnt have fallen for it if it asked for a SS number or something.)
But why should I have to spend time figuring these things out? If there was a service that marked certified mail in one color and non-certified mail in another and gave certified mail delivery priority, that's a good thing. Saves me time, and makes spam less profitable, saving me more time.
It's called Real Life. Graphics and sound are EXCELLENT.
There's a lot of time spent mindlessly earning gold though, and the biggest problem with it is the lack of a save feature.
What's amusing is the article cites examples of "convergence" like 80's PC platforms, and then uses that to say online games will "converge" so you can migrate from one to the other.
Anybody freely moving software from their Amiga or Commodore to their PC?
Yea, didn't think so. MMORPG's won't converge - at best many will simply die and one will "win".
This article is nothing but "Need to write something for this issue to keep my job. Hrm, how about baseless random future predictions?"
Translation:
I've made up a few reasons while ignoring all the reasons it won't happen. By not giving you a source of the reasons, you might buy this as being anything other than attention whoring.
Think about it. We all elect 100 people who represent our local values. We elect one guy who represents our national values. We make that one guy pick somebody the other guys have to approve, and one approved, that person, along with 8 buddies, gets to make the final, unappealable decisions on everything. You can't threaten to pull a Supreme Court judge's campaign contributions. You can't scare the populace into replacing half of the Supreme Court at once.
We should not bitch about the Supreme Court making the rules. If the Supreme Court doesn't make the rules, who are we going to have do it? Congress? Yeah, they're way better.
The FBI/CIA may not have the manpower to keep a file on you, but the NSA has the manpower to write a program to keep a file on you.