The journalists you're insulting are the only reason you even know about this. And despite what you seem to believe, committing large errors of fact regarding the police to the paper are a quick way to get your ass fired. Police departments are extremely sensitive to bad publicity, and newspapers are extremely sensitive to reporters who "don't let the facts get in the way of the story".
The odds of said librarian getting "severely punished" drop through the floor when this sort of story gets good media exposure, again thanks to the newspaper who broke the story.
Unless you're a tv talking head, or a fact-free syndicated columnist, being a journalist is a crap job. You get to spend all day trying to get info from people who only want to talk to you when it furthers their agenda, and you do it for little money, and no respect.
Of course they did. Journalists file FOIA requests all day long, and have to wade through mountains of forms to get information that should be freely available to any citizen, if the governement wasn't fricking corrupt. Cops are supposed to have to do the same thing for data that isn't freely available. That's the law. And after filing dozens of FOIA requests for police reports, you bet your ass they jumped on it when the cops tried to pretend like they were above the law.
On top of that journalists are in a position where they can end up in posession of information that the government wants to know, and unlike librarians, they don't have the luxury of giving that info up if they want to continue in their careers. Strong and respected privacy laws are very much in their self interest.
And finally, journalists tend to be literate library affectionados, and, as such, are well disposed toward spunky, privacy-respecting librarians.
You don't even need to go that far. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a sexy overclocker-friendly motherboard, and nearly all of those will do a controlled thermal shutdown when the temp hits the range where bad things can start happening. I doubt there is anything so sexy about the technology that it can't be adapted to laptops as well.
In the voir dire stage you can ask whatever questions you want to ask and, in this country at least, you don't have to provide a reason for dismissal. In simple civil cases they don't generally care too much who the jurors are, but in more complicated cases, especially ones where significant jail time or death is involved, they ask a lot of questions.
The only time I was ever in a case like that I was kicked almost immediately. Now, it could have been demographics and simple jury profiling, but I definitely had the impression that they'd rather not have a brainy white boy who worked at a newspaper jerking their chains when it came time to deliberate.
Pssh. Newspapers aren't obsolete. That's like saying "In depth news in handy, portable, written format" is obsolete.
The media(e.g physical paper) may die, but the content will move on to the next sexy portable format that adequately fills all the niches that dumb paper (as opposed to smart paper) fills today. Despite what the average/.er maintains, the vast bulk of the population doesn't take their laptop with them into the crapper.
Trust me on this...If newspapers could ditch the whole "Printing and Delivery" thing, they'd do it in a heartbeat. That stuff causes an amount of heartbreak you can only faintly imagine, working outside of the industry. Your data center goes down? Relocate it to your backup site an hour away...then print 100 metric tons of paper, and move it back in time to distribute it to people's lawns before 5am. It's an all-night job on a normal day. But with reliable portable e-delivery? They'd be done at midnight. They could lay off 75% of their staff, and concentrate on a better product.
Of course, it occurs to me that the MPAA is whining because they want to charge MORE than that. Oy vey. The problem with ITunes is that there's no damn tail...A dollar (or ten) is too much for 80% of the stuff that could be sold.
The thing that really sold me on it was the fact that it was non-toxic. I have too many kids and animals lurking around the house for me to feel comfortable leaving a nice toxic candy-colored liquid lying around the house.
Yea, nice way to jump to conclusions. The idea that intellectuals can't be criminals is almost victorian. Or maybe they fell for the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky-non-malicious-but-intellectually-in qusitive hacker who could come up with an exploit, but never use it for EVIL.
Zero-day exploits do tend to suggest someone with specific goals, who has the resources to sit and come up with zero day exploits, and the foresight to target deployment to achieve a goal. It's not behaviour that we stereotypically associate with hackers, but there is no reason it couldn't be one person (or ten or a hundred).
Might want to try some Fluid XP coolant. It's non-conductive, so no zapped parts. It's non-corrosive, so fewer motor problems. And it's non-toxic, so if your 2-year old glugs a quart of it, all they get is blue teeth.
I've never heard anything bad about it, and it works fine for me.
Oh yea, I'm so self serving...Wait what? I could give a rats ass what you do with your water, the only point I'm trying to make is that your water use impacts other people.
End of story.
I don't care how you get the water you use, I don't care what you're watering, I don't care how much, and I don't care how little. Every time you pull water from a system, you're changing that system...Even if you put the exact amount back into it, you'd still have changed the force of the current, the temperature of the water, the level of sediment, a million factors, and don't pretend for a SECOND that you're putting it all back. You're not.
Spraying it on your vegetables is kinda like the opposite of putting it all back. That water goes into the vegetables, it goes into the air, and maybe a fraction of it finds its way...eventually...back to where you took it from. In south georgia you have to have a permit to use water for irrigation, and it doesn't where that water comes from, as long as it ain't falling from the sky.
But go right ahead believing that what you do has zero consequences, that your water use doesn't effect anyone but you. Must be nice living in a dream world.
Wow, I just zoned on an excellent way to do the zerg...
Remember the actual zerg are the little worm things that come out of the hives, that's step one. So everyone starts out as a little worm thing, with some kind of piddly stun attack. Then you go out into the world, and stun something, then you infest it, and it mutates into a basic thing like itself, with maybe some variation depending on the stats of the actual thing. You know, infest a wolf, get a zergling, infest a big lizard, get a hydralisk, infest an elephant, get an ultralisk, etc. But there is no reason you couldn't have different types of creatures for everything.
As you level up, your little infesting worm guy gets new mutational talents, so you can change the thing you're infesting in some way. When you get killed, you lose the thing you were infesting and have to go find another one.
Wow. I always thoguht the big problem would be coming up with a way to make the zerg playable, but that would work...
Please. I'm holding out for the artificial molar that allows perfect sound reproduction through bone conduction, and removes one of the last visual cues that distinguish me from a raving lunatic: a visible phone.
I'll walk down the street talking to myself, and smacking myself in the face whenever I lose signal, and (this is the good bit) I'll never get panhandled again.
If that was actually the case, then no one in georgia would need to water their lawns. Unfortunately Georgia has been teetering on drought conditions (pdf warning) for years, and lawn watering actually is a big issue in a hot state like Georgia, because it doesn't soak right back down into the watershed, and it sure as hell doesn't replenish the aquifers. It evaporates. Poof. Gone. Georgia soil is mostly clay, and as you probably know, water doesn't travel through clay very well at all.
Georgia, btw, happens to be where I live. One of the main "crops" here is slash pine, which is what most paper is made from. TONS of papermills. Papermills use tons of water. They don't use crap water either, they pump the good stuff out of deep aquifers. We've got salt intrusion all down the damn coast, up into S. Carolina, and down into Florida. What does that mean? It means your magic well in a coastal county is full of salt, and the salt is moving inland. Why?
Ground water takes a while to replenish, and aquifers take, literally, centuries. When you pump water out of the ground, it doesn't come right back, and when it does come back, it moves in from the surrounding area and the ground water levels everywhere go down. That's the whole idea of a watershed, and there are 52 watersheds in georgia. Sounds like a lot doesn't it? Well there are 5 around atlanta, and they're all laughably overutilized. Pull that water out of the ground and dump it in a river, and some evaporates, and the rest of it flows on out to sea. Only the tiniest fraction of that water makes it back into the ground. So when you have low ground water on the coast, the ocean moves in to fill the lack.
A hundred years ago you could drill a hole in the ground, and you'd get a spring, water bubbling out on it's own. Now you drill a hole 5 times as deep, and put a big pump on it to get the same amount. We're running it down, and running it down quick, and, thanks to the attitude that we live in a land of inexaustable water, it's only getting worse.
I'm not that much of an environmentalist. I'm really not. But water is a big deal, a HUGE deal, and people who think that the supply is inexhaustable anywhere are living in a dreamworld. In the Southeast, it's a problem. In the midwest, it's a crisis, we're talking 10 years at best. It's no better in the west. We need a way to create cheap, clean water, and we need it BAD and we need it NOW. Failing that, we need people to stop blowing water on crap that doesn't matter.
HA! Holy shit, you live near ATLANTA and you think that the water you're using has no effect on the rest of the state? You are so seriously wrong it's hard to even explain it. You seriously, seriously, need to go do some reading. Florida is in the worst shape on the east coast, but Georgia is a close second.
You have a magic well that's not connected to the same water table that everyone in your area uses? Screw nanotech, patent the magic well! That and some magic beans and you could change the world!
Hate to break it to you bud, but it's all the same water in the end. There was a paper company that opened up east of here, and on the day that they commenced operations private wells for 50 miles around dried up, and who got hurt? People who had seen no reason to care because their water was totally different from the water that the paper company was slurping up a million gallons at a time.
We allow pretty insecure passwords, all things considered. "password,1" would be valid, for instance, because it's longer than 8 characters and has punctuation and a number.
At the same time, we lockout after three unsuccessful attempts, and we don't allow password reuse for more than 2 years. So while the passwords tend to be on the simple side for the average user, the danger for brute forcing is nonexistent because of the low lockout.
I myself believe in obscene passwords. "Strong" password validators light up when I'm half done typing it in. But since I can fit the obscene things into my head, that's my privledge.
It always seems that way on the surface....But the temptation for cross-platform work is the only reason to really drive a buyout. The burning desire to have an iTunes compatible DS-Lite, or a wireless wii/mac one button mouse that you can wave around in the air would rear it's head pretty quickly.
They're both good companies, but I don't really see them getting together...It just wouldn't make sense unless they had some mutually envisioned killer app sitting in the wings.
A limited deal for game development/rights might be a good thing though...Of all computer lines, Macs are most similar to consoles due to their hardware homogeneity, so if they could make a deal for development, that might be a solid draw for the game-scarce Mac, and since Nintendo, like most console makers, doesn't really make much money on their hardware it could be a good deal for them as well...
Sure they can. However, if you stuck them on a dumb terminal, there would be no way that oh-so-helpful young man from tech support could talk them into uploading a "patch" onto their terminal.
Thin clients and dumb terminals are great because they don't allow users to run things on a production system. the most they could be conned into doing is changing or exposing the information that they have access to by virtue of their position, and that kind of thing is usually pretty easy to audit.
Well, technically, and I don't agree with this, but there is a higher level of game content that there is for movie content (which sucks hard. I've never felt my mind sprain from playing a video game, but there are some movies I wish to god I could unwatch.), so they could say, "If this content was known, this would have been rated AO OMGTHINKOFTHECHILDREN"...And beyond that, it's supposed to say underneath the rating the stuff that justifies the rating, like "Violence, Language, Boobies" or something, and since it didn't say "Strong Sexual Content" there is the possibility that some stupid parent who is okay with violence but not sex bought the game for the kid and freaked out later.
True enough. Teaching millions of kids to run linux, with all those programming tools right there and available, in an environment where you can get the source and piddle with it any time you want, is bound to create a whole new level of computer savvyness.
Also, since they have to be cranked, all those kids will also have Popeye forearms.
I would like to be the first to welcome our future giant forearm/elite hacker overlords!
I think it's pretty much a fair judgement. Sure the content was there, but they didn't have any intention of making it widely available. Additionally, even though it was made available, no one accidentally stumbled across it...you had to download a patch, install it, and then play through the game to that point.
Beyond that, the game was rated M, which is the rating for 17+, which is the same age range as NC-17 which is the adult film category in the states.
It's hard to see, given all those factors, how it would be possible for them to crack down hard on the game. The superbowl thing was different, because they slipped some (arguably) adult content into an all-ages broadcast.
Nah. Congressmen are like lawyers: You've got to have some if you don't want to get screwed by your competitions. Lawyer's aren't evil per se, they're just amoral and bloodsucking.
Slashdot Mirror
The journalists you're insulting are the only reason you even know about this. And despite what you seem to believe, committing large errors of fact regarding the police to the paper are a quick way to get your ass fired. Police departments are extremely sensitive to bad publicity, and newspapers are extremely sensitive to reporters who "don't let the facts get in the way of the story".
The odds of said librarian getting "severely punished" drop through the floor when this sort of story gets good media exposure, again thanks to the newspaper who broke the story.
Unless you're a tv talking head, or a fact-free syndicated columnist, being a journalist is a crap job. You get to spend all day trying to get info from people who only want to talk to you when it furthers their agenda, and you do it for little money, and no respect.
Of course they did. Journalists file FOIA requests all day long, and have to wade through mountains of forms to get information that should be freely available to any citizen, if the governement wasn't fricking corrupt. Cops are supposed to have to do the same thing for data that isn't freely available. That's the law. And after filing dozens of FOIA requests for police reports, you bet your ass they jumped on it when the cops tried to pretend like they were above the law.
On top of that journalists are in a position where they can end up in posession of information that the government wants to know, and unlike librarians, they don't have the luxury of giving that info up if they want to continue in their careers. Strong and respected privacy laws are very much in their self interest.
And finally, journalists tend to be literate library affectionados, and, as such, are well disposed toward spunky, privacy-respecting librarians.
You don't even need to go that far. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a sexy overclocker-friendly motherboard, and nearly all of those will do a controlled thermal shutdown when the temp hits the range where bad things can start happening. I doubt there is anything so sexy about the technology that it can't be adapted to laptops as well.
In the voir dire stage you can ask whatever questions you want to ask and, in this country at least, you don't have to provide a reason for dismissal. In simple civil cases they don't generally care too much who the jurors are, but in more complicated cases, especially ones where significant jail time or death is involved, they ask a lot of questions.
The only time I was ever in a case like that I was kicked almost immediately. Now, it could have been demographics and simple jury profiling, but I definitely had the impression that they'd rather not have a brainy white boy who worked at a newspaper jerking their chains when it came time to deliberate.
Here's how to get out of it:
Lawyer: "What do you do for a living"
Me: "I'm a computer programmer, employed by a major newspaper"
Lawyer: "Okayyy, and what is your educational background?"
Me: "Philosophy and Computer Science"
Lawyer: "Next!"
Pssh. Newspapers aren't obsolete. That's like saying "In depth news in handy, portable, written format" is obsolete.
/.er maintains, the vast bulk of the population doesn't take their laptop with them into the crapper.
The media(e.g physical paper) may die, but the content will move on to the next sexy portable format that adequately fills all the niches that dumb paper (as opposed to smart paper) fills today. Despite what the average
Trust me on this...If newspapers could ditch the whole "Printing and Delivery" thing, they'd do it in a heartbeat. That stuff causes an amount of heartbreak you can only faintly imagine, working outside of the industry. Your data center goes down? Relocate it to your backup site an hour away...then print 100 metric tons of paper, and move it back in time to distribute it to people's lawns before 5am. It's an all-night job on a normal day. But with reliable portable e-delivery? They'd be done at midnight. They could lay off 75% of their staff, and concentrate on a better product.
You don't want to know where they're putting the card reader...
I can hit Best Buy and get stuff for $7.00 now.
Of course, it occurs to me that the MPAA is whining because they want to charge MORE than that. Oy vey. The problem with ITunes is that there's no damn tail...A dollar (or ten) is too much for 80% of the stuff that could be sold.
The thing that really sold me on it was the fact that it was non-toxic. I have too many kids and animals lurking around the house for me to feel comfortable leaving a nice toxic candy-colored liquid lying around the house.
Yea, nice way to jump to conclusions. The idea that intellectuals can't be criminals is almost victorian. Or maybe they fell for the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky-non-malicious-but-intellectually-in qusitive hacker who could come up with an exploit, but never use it for EVIL.
Zero-day exploits do tend to suggest someone with specific goals, who has the resources to sit and come up with zero day exploits, and the foresight to target deployment to achieve a goal. It's not behaviour that we stereotypically associate with hackers, but there is no reason it couldn't be one person (or ten or a hundred).
Might want to try some Fluid XP coolant. It's non-conductive, so no zapped parts. It's non-corrosive, so fewer motor problems. And it's non-toxic, so if your 2-year old glugs a quart of it, all they get is blue teeth.
I've never heard anything bad about it, and it works fine for me.
It's supply and demand. Where there is a demand, there is always someone who is willing to profit by being the supply.
You can't fight economics.
Oh yea, I'm so self serving...Wait what? I could give a rats ass what you do with your water, the only point I'm trying to make is that your water use impacts other people.
End of story.
I don't care how you get the water you use, I don't care what you're watering, I don't care how much, and I don't care how little. Every time you pull water from a system, you're changing that system...Even if you put the exact amount back into it, you'd still have changed the force of the current, the temperature of the water, the level of sediment, a million factors, and don't pretend for a SECOND that you're putting it all back. You're not.
Spraying it on your vegetables is kinda like the opposite of putting it all back. That water goes into the vegetables, it goes into the air, and maybe a fraction of it finds its way...eventually...back to where you took it from. In south georgia you have to have a permit to use water for irrigation, and it doesn't where that water comes from, as long as it ain't falling from the sky.
But go right ahead believing that what you do has zero consequences, that your water use doesn't effect anyone but you. Must be nice living in a dream world.
Wow, I just zoned on an excellent way to do the zerg...
Remember the actual zerg are the little worm things that come out of the hives, that's step one. So everyone starts out as a little worm thing, with some kind of piddly stun attack. Then you go out into the world, and stun something, then you infest it, and it mutates into a basic thing like itself, with maybe some variation depending on the stats of the actual thing. You know, infest a wolf, get a zergling, infest a big lizard, get a hydralisk, infest an elephant, get an ultralisk, etc. But there is no reason you couldn't have different types of creatures for everything.
As you level up, your little infesting worm guy gets new mutational talents, so you can change the thing you're infesting in some way. When you get killed, you lose the thing you were infesting and have to go find another one.
Wow. I always thoguht the big problem would be coming up with a way to make the zerg playable, but that would work...
Please. I'm holding out for the artificial molar that allows perfect sound reproduction through bone conduction, and removes one of the last visual cues that distinguish me from a raving lunatic: a visible phone.
I'll walk down the street talking to myself, and smacking myself in the face whenever I lose signal, and (this is the good bit) I'll never get panhandled again.
If that was actually the case, then no one in georgia would need to water their lawns. Unfortunately Georgia has been teetering on drought conditions (pdf warning) for years, and lawn watering actually is a big issue in a hot state like Georgia, because it doesn't soak right back down into the watershed, and it sure as hell doesn't replenish the aquifers. It evaporates. Poof. Gone. Georgia soil is mostly clay, and as you probably know, water doesn't travel through clay very well at all.
Georgia, btw, happens to be where I live. One of the main "crops" here is slash pine, which is what most paper is made from. TONS of papermills. Papermills use tons of water. They don't use crap water either, they pump the good stuff out of deep aquifers. We've got salt intrusion all down the damn coast, up into S. Carolina, and down into Florida. What does that mean? It means your magic well in a coastal county is full of salt, and the salt is moving inland. Why?
Ground water takes a while to replenish, and aquifers take, literally, centuries. When you pump water out of the ground, it doesn't come right back, and when it does come back, it moves in from the surrounding area and the ground water levels everywhere go down. That's the whole idea of a watershed, and there are 52 watersheds in georgia. Sounds like a lot doesn't it? Well there are 5 around atlanta, and they're all laughably overutilized. Pull that water out of the ground and dump it in a river, and some evaporates, and the rest of it flows on out to sea. Only the tiniest fraction of that water makes it back into the ground. So when you have low ground water on the coast, the ocean moves in to fill the lack.
A hundred years ago you could drill a hole in the ground, and you'd get a spring, water bubbling out on it's own. Now you drill a hole 5 times as deep, and put a big pump on it to get the same amount. We're running it down, and running it down quick, and, thanks to the attitude that we live in a land of inexaustable water, it's only getting worse.
I'm not that much of an environmentalist. I'm really not. But water is a big deal, a HUGE deal, and people who think that the supply is inexhaustable anywhere are living in a dreamworld. In the Southeast, it's a problem. In the midwest, it's a crisis, we're talking 10 years at best. It's no better in the west. We need a way to create cheap, clean water, and we need it BAD and we need it NOW. Failing that, we need people to stop blowing water on crap that doesn't matter.
HA! Holy shit, you live near ATLANTA and you think that the water you're using has no effect on the rest of the state? You are so seriously wrong it's hard to even explain it. You seriously, seriously, need to go do some reading. Florida is in the worst shape on the east coast, but Georgia is a close second.
You have a magic well that's not connected to the same water table that everyone in your area uses? Screw nanotech, patent the magic well! That and some magic beans and you could change the world!
Hate to break it to you bud, but it's all the same water in the end. There was a paper company that opened up east of here, and on the day that they commenced operations private wells for 50 miles around dried up, and who got hurt? People who had seen no reason to care because their water was totally different from the water that the paper company was slurping up a million gallons at a time.
We allow pretty insecure passwords, all things considered. "password,1" would be valid, for instance, because it's longer than 8 characters and has punctuation and a number.
At the same time, we lockout after three unsuccessful attempts, and we don't allow password reuse for more than 2 years. So while the passwords tend to be on the simple side for the average user, the danger for brute forcing is nonexistent because of the low lockout.
I myself believe in obscene passwords. "Strong" password validators light up when I'm half done typing it in. But since I can fit the obscene things into my head, that's my privledge.
It always seems that way on the surface....But the temptation for cross-platform work is the only reason to really drive a buyout. The burning desire to have an iTunes compatible DS-Lite, or a wireless wii/mac one button mouse that you can wave around in the air would rear it's head pretty quickly.
They're both good companies, but I don't really see them getting together...It just wouldn't make sense unless they had some mutually envisioned killer app sitting in the wings.
A limited deal for game development/rights might be a good thing though...Of all computer lines, Macs are most similar to consoles due to their hardware homogeneity, so if they could make a deal for development, that might be a solid draw for the game-scarce Mac, and since Nintendo, like most console makers, doesn't really make much money on their hardware it could be a good deal for them as well...
Sure they can. However, if you stuck them on a dumb terminal, there would be no way that oh-so-helpful young man from tech support could talk them into uploading a "patch" onto their terminal.
Thin clients and dumb terminals are great because they don't allow users to run things on a production system. the most they could be conned into doing is changing or exposing the information that they have access to by virtue of their position, and that kind of thing is usually pretty easy to audit.
Well, technically, and I don't agree with this, but there is a higher level of game content that there is for movie content (which sucks hard. I've never felt my mind sprain from playing a video game, but there are some movies I wish to god I could unwatch.), so they could say, "If this content was known, this would have been rated AO OMGTHINKOFTHECHILDREN"...And beyond that, it's supposed to say underneath the rating the stuff that justifies the rating, like "Violence, Language, Boobies" or something, and since it didn't say "Strong Sexual Content" there is the possibility that some stupid parent who is okay with violence but not sex bought the game for the kid and freaked out later.
True enough. Teaching millions of kids to run linux, with all those programming tools right there and available, in an environment where you can get the source and piddle with it any time you want, is bound to create a whole new level of computer savvyness.
Also, since they have to be cranked, all those kids will also have Popeye forearms.
I would like to be the first to welcome our future giant forearm/elite hacker overlords!
I think it's pretty much a fair judgement. Sure the content was there, but they didn't have any intention of making it widely available. Additionally, even though it was made available, no one accidentally stumbled across it...you had to download a patch, install it, and then play through the game to that point.
Beyond that, the game was rated M, which is the rating for 17+, which is the same age range as NC-17 which is the adult film category in the states.
It's hard to see, given all those factors, how it would be possible for them to crack down hard on the game. The superbowl thing was different, because they slipped some (arguably) adult content into an all-ages broadcast.
Nah. Congressmen are like lawyers: You've got to have some if you don't want to get screwed by your competitions. Lawyer's aren't evil per se, they're just amoral and bloodsucking.