What else is there? It's not like you can back up to a SAN, and then stick the SAN in a courier bag and send it to remote storage. Optical? Too small. The magical "cloud" doesn't stack up well for security compared to a physical safe. Flash is promising, but still not there in terms of reliablity.
When they come up with a compact, reliable, portable storage medium I'll be the first one to toss tapes out the window. The idea of running backups to some credit-card sized SD cards is appealing.
My three year old loves the damn thing, and he's savvy enough to get out of whatever game I want him to be in, and start up other stuff...Had to turn the sound on so I'd know when "Angry Birds" became "Assassins Creed"
Say what you will about Apple, the fricking UI is intuitive to toddlers. I mean, jesus christ!
It's even more amusing if you know why she wanted the weird format in the first place: it was so the "book" could be printed in fewer runs through the press, so she could have color on more pages, and still be affordable.
So yea, she'd have hated the Kindle. I personally hate the Kindle because it's a single function device, and because the ebook format is still so overpriced.
Wood was everywhere 100 years ago. They used it for everything, and in quantities that we can hardly imagine. Plywood? Who needs that crap when you have unlimited high quality hardwood boards?
When it became scarce, people sought alternatives with a level of inventiveness and imagination that is hard to conceive, to the point where we are surrounded every day with wood substitutes, and hardly even notice.
People use up easy resources, then move on to more complex ones as the complex resources become more economical. It's just supply and demand.
Actually, wrt to banking transactions, I'm cautious enough due to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that I won't open a bank session when I have any other tabs open.
These days, with the XP bonuses, it takes about 11 days of playing to make it to level 80, assuming you're reasonably efficient, and you don't have any +xp leveling gear.
So yea, mere days. Mind you, it may take someone a year to rack up 260 hours of play time, but I've seen people do it in less than two weeks.
Interviewer: "So, I'll need to see your Facebook page" Me: "I don't have one." Interviewer: "I know it's probably not something that you want all employers to see , but we're not 'narcs', we just want to know if you're a 'culture' fit." Me: "No, really. I don't have one. I never understood the draw." Interviewer: "You know, this is really not the sort of attitude we look for in a potential hire." Me: "...If you Google my name, you get one hit, and it's not Facebook." Interviewer: "I'm not going to show anyone."
People always say this, but no one ever says, "Hey, wait a minute, we're not talking about TV."
TV advertising is a wholly different beast. You're talking about a handful of free channels that are available to everyone in the damn country: a huge captive audience, who is forced to sit through 15 to 30 seconds of moving pictures with sound.
Those ads are pretty fucking lucrative, no lie. Internet ads? Not so much. Facebook's bandwidth, staffing, hardware, and electrical bills stagger the mind, and they make pennies per ad. You need to do the math. Facebook didn't make a profit until they started pimping you with targeted ads.
Just like college. When the administration wanted to do something unpopular, they did something WILDLY unpopular, let people protest for a while, and then rolled it back to what they wanted in the first place, telling everyone that their voices had been heard.
Look, it's a business. They're there to make money. The only thing they have that they can make money with, is your user information. The desire for them to pimp it to the highest bidder is overwhelming. It wouldn't matter if they put Jesus Christ in charge of the company, in six weeks he'd be selling your info to porn companies.
If you want to have a service that is accountable to you, you need to have a service that is beholden to you. A service that you pay for. This is the dark side of free-as-in-beer: they don't need to give a shit about you. Who are you? Some sheep who bowed to the pressure to put all their life in some random shmucks application. You're not going anywhere. If you had willpower or good judgment, you wouldn't have put all your info there in the first place.
It blows my mind to see people on fricking Slashdot acting like a bunch of unsavvy children, "How could they use my info! Boo hoo, I feel so dirty!"
If you went out and created a profile, and put a ton of content on a free service with the misconception that they were your friend, and had your best interests at heart, you are a fool.
I wrote a book. You decided you didn't like chapter 3, so you cut it out and redistributed it for free.
I decided you were right, and redistributed YOUR version, and charged for it.
What part of what is being sold is yours? None. DRM is something added to the code. Removing it doesn't mean that you have some kind of ownership over whats left...Even if you added code to remove DRM functionality, it doesn't mean that you own what's left.
DRM as a whole is a waste. You're hurting honest people, and mildly inconveniencing dishonest people.
I think the "best" way to go about such things is to go about it like Blizzard tends to: hardly any DRM, but good luck playing multiplayer without a valid key (the bnet-only multiplayer thing is an obvious extension of this).
I think that sort of thing strikes a balance between people who want to try it out, and people who are playing it to the point where they ought to have paid. The situation with the Demigod launch was terrible (the pirate's argument that more players adds value to the game breaks down when the excess of players kills the server.)
People complaining about the price of games, etc, I have no sympathy for. They get cheap, if you wait. You want it early? It's going to cost more. You don't get to pirate it just because you can't afford to pay for it.
The problem with rational ethical discussion is that people fixate on edge cases.
Is killing people wrong? Yes. Well what about the death penalty? What about self defense? What about killing one person to save a million people?
Sure, there is room for debate there, but those don't represent the majority of cases. The question with killing is personal: should you or your family members be allowed to be murdered, out of the blue, for no reason? No.
See? It's easy. The same logic applies here: Is pirating video games wrong? Yes. Well what if I can't play it because of shitty DRM? What if I lost the media? What if I think the company that made it is morally bankrupt?
The situation that needs consideration is the personal situation: if you made a game, would you want someone obtaining a copy without paying for it, assuming that you've set a price on the game? No.
Once you agree on the basic premise, then you can have a rational discussion about the fringe cases that may or may not prove to be exceptions to the rule.
I hate these threads, and I never comment, but goddamn if that's not the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
People who develop applications for the iPhone don't get to whine that the platform isn't open any more than anyone who develops for any OS, or any game console, gets to whine that the platform isn't open.
Even if you're only developing for linux, you don't get to choose which version of glibc is included in each new distro, just so you don't have to update your code.
If your product isn't a goddamn operating system that only runs on a hardware platform that is also yours, you are dependent on a third party. End. Of. Story.
How many deaths are attributable to pollution from coal power? How many deaths are attributable to diseases that are commonly acquired from mining coal?
They don't need to worry about him. He confessed to buying stolen goods, published pictures of said stolen goods, used information obtained from the memory of said stolen goods...He's done. They couldn't get any better information from him than he's already given them.
They need to find the guy who stole it in the first place, and to do that, they need to confiscate some stuff.
Well, you can't subpoena someones brain. That's not how it works. And the journalist hasn't done anything wrong by printing what they printed (assuming it's not sedition or anything actually illegal): that's within their first amendment rights.
Assuming their is a crime (like the Valerie Plame thing) the wrong-doer in these cases is the source, and the journalist CAN in many states be subpoena'd and asked to name their source. If they say no, they're in contempt of court, and can be thrown in jail.
So the journalist hasn't done anything wrong until they've refused to name their source, and that can't happen until the legal proceedings start.
In this case, if the person who had found the phone had taken it, analysed it, and told Gizmodo about it, Gizmodo would be in a decent position. They just printed what someone else told them, and that's legit. They could even evoke the "protecting a source" law and refuse to name the guy.
The problem here is that they didn't do any of that. The guy who picked up the phone didn't tell them hardly anything, he just sold 'em the phone, and they then did all the analysis themselves. That opens them up to a world of liability, and it's a great example of why Journalism is a four-year degree.
They're seizing his equipment as being involved in a felony, right out of the gate. It has nothing to do with the law as stated, which is only about protecting sources.
For a "protecting your source" law to come in to play, legal action has to have already started and the journalist has to have refused to provide a judge or federally warranted offical the required information. That's where the contempt stuff comes into play.
California's laws are much more lenient than those for most of the rest of the country, which, yes, is good.
However, they don't apply in this case. If they're charging him with a felony, they're charging him with grand theft, or with corporate espionage. Has nothing to do with protecting his "source", and has everything to do with him obtaining property that doesn't belong to him. If they can prove he paid for it, he's fucked.
Slashdot Mirror
What else is there? It's not like you can back up to a SAN, and then stick the SAN in a courier bag and send it to remote storage. Optical? Too small. The magical "cloud" doesn't stack up well for security compared to a physical safe. Flash is promising, but still not there in terms of reliablity.
When they come up with a compact, reliable, portable storage medium I'll be the first one to toss tapes out the window. The idea of running backups to some credit-card sized SD cards is appealing.
When I was in Spanish class I got marked down for cheating off the hispanic stoner behind me, and I liked it!
All you kids with your interwebs, and your babbling fishes can get off my lawn!
My three year old loves the damn thing, and he's savvy enough to get out of whatever game I want him to be in, and start up other stuff...Had to turn the sound on so I'd know when "Angry Birds" became "Assassins Creed"
Say what you will about Apple, the fricking UI is intuitive to toddlers. I mean, jesus christ!
It's even more amusing if you know why she wanted the weird format in the first place: it was so the "book" could be printed in fewer runs through the press, so she could have color on more pages, and still be affordable.
So yea, she'd have hated the Kindle. I personally hate the Kindle because it's a single function device, and because the ebook format is still so overpriced.
Wood was everywhere 100 years ago. They used it for everything, and in quantities that we can hardly imagine. Plywood? Who needs that crap when you have unlimited high quality hardwood boards?
When it became scarce, people sought alternatives with a level of inventiveness and imagination that is hard to conceive, to the point where we are surrounded every day with wood substitutes, and hardly even notice.
People use up easy resources, then move on to more complex ones as the complex resources become more economical. It's just supply and demand.
Actually, wrt to banking transactions, I'm cautious enough due to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that I won't open a bank session when I have any other tabs open.
These days, with the XP bonuses, it takes about 11 days of playing to make it to level 80, assuming you're reasonably efficient, and you don't have any +xp leveling gear.
So yea, mere days. Mind you, it may take someone a year to rack up 260 hours of play time, but I've seen people do it in less than two weeks.
I was in an amusing job interview the other day:
Interviewer: "So, I'll need to see your Facebook page"
Me: "I don't have one."
Interviewer: "I know it's probably not something that you want all employers to see , but we're not 'narcs', we just want to know if you're a 'culture' fit."
Me: "No, really. I don't have one. I never understood the draw."
Interviewer: "You know, this is really not the sort of attitude we look for in a potential hire."
Me: "...If you Google my name, you get one hit, and it's not Facebook."
Interviewer: "I'm not going to show anyone."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
People always say this, but no one ever says, "Hey, wait a minute, we're not talking about TV."
TV advertising is a wholly different beast. You're talking about a handful of free channels that are available to everyone in the damn country: a huge captive audience, who is forced to sit through 15 to 30 seconds of moving pictures with sound.
Those ads are pretty fucking lucrative, no lie. Internet ads? Not so much. Facebook's bandwidth, staffing, hardware, and electrical bills stagger the mind, and they make pennies per ad. You need to do the math. Facebook didn't make a profit until they started pimping you with targeted ads.
Just like college. When the administration wanted to do something unpopular, they did something WILDLY unpopular, let people protest for a while, and then rolled it back to what they wanted in the first place, telling everyone that their voices had been heard.
Works every time. People are dumb.
Look, it's a business. They're there to make money. The only thing they have that they can make money with, is your user information. The desire for them to pimp it to the highest bidder is overwhelming. It wouldn't matter if they put Jesus Christ in charge of the company, in six weeks he'd be selling your info to porn companies.
If you want to have a service that is accountable to you, you need to have a service that is beholden to you. A service that you pay for. This is the dark side of free-as-in-beer: they don't need to give a shit about you. Who are you? Some sheep who bowed to the pressure to put all their life in some random shmucks application. You're not going anywhere. If you had willpower or good judgment, you wouldn't have put all your info there in the first place.
It blows my mind to see people on fricking Slashdot acting like a bunch of unsavvy children, "How could they use my info! Boo hoo, I feel so dirty!"
If you went out and created a profile, and put a ton of content on a free service with the misconception that they were your friend, and had your best interests at heart, you are a fool.
Funny, I thought he was referring to the print media industry, which has been around for the last 500 years or so.
Bull. Shit.
I wrote a book. You decided you didn't like chapter 3, so you cut it out and redistributed it for free.
I decided you were right, and redistributed YOUR version, and charged for it.
What part of what is being sold is yours? None. DRM is something added to the code. Removing it doesn't mean that you have some kind of ownership over whats left...Even if you added code to remove DRM functionality, it doesn't mean that you own what's left.
DRM as a whole is a waste. You're hurting honest people, and mildly inconveniencing dishonest people.
I think the "best" way to go about such things is to go about it like Blizzard tends to: hardly any DRM, but good luck playing multiplayer without a valid key (the bnet-only multiplayer thing is an obvious extension of this).
I think that sort of thing strikes a balance between people who want to try it out, and people who are playing it to the point where they ought to have paid. The situation with the Demigod launch was terrible (the pirate's argument that more players adds value to the game breaks down when the excess of players kills the server.)
People complaining about the price of games, etc, I have no sympathy for. They get cheap, if you wait. You want it early? It's going to cost more. You don't get to pirate it just because you can't afford to pay for it.
Q: What does the ethical relativist think about *insert ethical question here*
A: Who gives a shit?
The problem with rational ethical discussion is that people fixate on edge cases.
Is killing people wrong? Yes. Well what about the death penalty? What about self defense? What about killing one person to save a million people?
Sure, there is room for debate there, but those don't represent the majority of cases. The question with killing is personal: should you or your family members be allowed to be murdered, out of the blue, for no reason? No.
See? It's easy. The same logic applies here: Is pirating video games wrong? Yes. Well what if I can't play it because of shitty DRM? What if I lost the media? What if I think the company that made it is morally bankrupt?
The situation that needs consideration is the personal situation: if you made a game, would you want someone obtaining a copy without paying for it, assuming that you've set a price on the game? No.
Once you agree on the basic premise, then you can have a rational discussion about the fringe cases that may or may not prove to be exceptions to the rule.
Here
In a word: Bullshit.
The biggest threat to kids is family, and family friends. Those statistics make all others look small.
Wait, I thought Facebook was nothing but a hangout for pedophil...Ohhhhhhh, I get it. Nevermind.
I hate these threads, and I never comment, but goddamn if that's not the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
People who develop applications for the iPhone don't get to whine that the platform isn't open any more than anyone who develops for any OS, or any game console, gets to whine that the platform isn't open.
Even if you're only developing for linux, you don't get to choose which version of glibc is included in each new distro, just so you don't have to update your code.
If your product isn't a goddamn operating system that only runs on a hardware platform that is also yours, you are dependent on a third party. End. Of. Story.
How many deaths are attributable to pollution from coal power? How many deaths are attributable to diseases that are commonly acquired from mining coal?
Your figures are effectively worthless.
They don't need to worry about him. He confessed to buying stolen goods, published pictures of said stolen goods, used information obtained from the memory of said stolen goods...He's done. They couldn't get any better information from him than he's already given them.
They need to find the guy who stole it in the first place, and to do that, they need to confiscate some stuff.
Well, you can't subpoena someones brain. That's not how it works. And the journalist hasn't done anything wrong by printing what they printed (assuming it's not sedition or anything actually illegal): that's within their first amendment rights.
Assuming their is a crime (like the Valerie Plame thing) the wrong-doer in these cases is the source, and the journalist CAN in many states be subpoena'd and asked to name their source. If they say no, they're in contempt of court, and can be thrown in jail.
So the journalist hasn't done anything wrong until they've refused to name their source, and that can't happen until the legal proceedings start.
In this case, if the person who had found the phone had taken it, analysed it, and told Gizmodo about it, Gizmodo would be in a decent position. They just printed what someone else told them, and that's legit. They could even evoke the "protecting a source" law and refuse to name the guy.
The problem here is that they didn't do any of that. The guy who picked up the phone didn't tell them hardly anything, he just sold 'em the phone, and they then did all the analysis themselves. That opens them up to a world of liability, and it's a great example of why Journalism is a four-year degree.
They're seizing his equipment as being involved in a felony, right out of the gate. It has nothing to do with the law as stated, which is only about protecting sources.
For a "protecting your source" law to come in to play, legal action has to have already started and the journalist has to have refused to provide a judge or federally warranted offical the required information. That's where the contempt stuff comes into play.
California's laws are much more lenient than those for most of the rest of the country, which, yes, is good.
However, they don't apply in this case. If they're charging him with a felony, they're charging him with grand theft, or with corporate espionage. Has nothing to do with protecting his "source", and has everything to do with him obtaining property that doesn't belong to him. If they can prove he paid for it, he's fucked.