I don't get the hoopla about how this will change the "industry". This
was a case of blatant infringement, much like the Tom Petty issue. If you
could not hear that for yourself, then perhaps you should be following
another "industry" for your entertainment needs.
Sure, no problem. Just give me a minute here.
Pay Attention Everyone! Would everybody who disagrees with this legal opinion please stop listen to all music, now
and forever!
This is necessitated because moehoward doesn't "get" the "hoopla". Thank you for your co-operation.
OK, that should sort out your cognitive dissonance problem. Is there anything else I can help you with while I'm here?
Incorrect, not shocking. Evolution doesn't become any more or less true if it becomes a political issue in churches. The laws of physics don't change if you're a wealthy industry that can afford to fight back politically against physicists
Do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, we're not trying hard enough?
I say we form a commitment, here and now, to vote the Law of Gravity out of office at the next election and replace it with something more in tune with the 21st Century. We'll see how long it takes to get flying cars and Mars colonies once we have a law of gravity that works with us rather than against us.
Once we've done that, I expect we'll find the First Law or Thermodynamics will suddenly be willing to compromise its principles a little. And as for General Relativity, don't get me started!
The Linux fanboys can scream and curse me all they want, but time will prove me right.
Well obviously they're going to curse you. I mean you have just single-handedly ensured the demise of SteamOS
by virtue of grumpily posting a pessimistic opinion on a nerdy discussion board. Because that's the way Cause And Effect works, right?
It takes real effort to support multiple init systems, so the question becomes, is it worth it?
Define "worth". I mean, can you put a dollar value on not fragmenting the whole Linux community, for instance?
The people actually doing the work in many distributions don't think it is.
Some of the people. The Debian decision was only carried by the chairman's casting vote.
So in that case at least people doing the actual work seem pretty damn undecided to me.
You can either work to change that by putting in your own time/money,
try to convince them that it is worth the time, or just use systemd.
*Yawn* Or I can use Gentoo or Slackware or (pretty soon) Devuan. Currently I'm using Gentoo and a systemd-free Wheezy. I do hope you're not going to tell me that disqualifies me from having an opinion here?
If systemd is as good as its supporters suggest, then it'll become widely adopted without all this ballyhoo. Conversely, if it's failings are severe enough that it can't gain widespread acceptance without politicising the entire debate, then I don't want it anywhere near me.
This is exactly what is happening. Distribution maintainers are choosing to use systemd because they find it the best of the options available.
Well, except for the whole "without all this ballyhoo", since that is definitely happening. And without the implied
unanimity of opinion on the part of the developers: see the previous point about Debian. So, you know, no that isn't
exactly what's happening. Sorry.
Also, once again, the only people I see making this political are those who seem to find
systemd emotionally repulsive.
It takes two to make for a political debate. We can argue about who started it if you like, but it still
takes two. Like the two of us, for instance. Now personally I don't think that either of us are aguing
based on primarily emotional or aesthetic grounds. Of course, we can talk about that a bit more if you
want.
But if you want a purely technical argument, immature software still under heavy development, lacking an interface spec should be sufficient for most reasonable people.
All of the arguments I've seen in favor of systemd are purely of the "it works better and has more features" variety.
Meh. There's also been plenty along the lines of "systemd just works and if you're too stupid to see it then that's your problem because it's already been decided by people far more intelligent than you so just sit down and shut up already".
If fact, absent the rudeness, that's pretty much the substance of your own argument, if you don't mind me saying so.
Literally the only argument I've seen that is even close to reasonable
is that some people like text logs and journald is a binary log format,
and fixing that requires adding one line to a config file.
Please, someone explain this to me.
I'll give it a shot
See, traditionally, this isn't how things are done in the Linux
world. Generally, if you have a snazzy idea for an init system (for
example) what you'd do is offer it as an option and let users decide.
The idea is to minimise the changes that will be made by the new
system (other than improvements to the boot system). That way
people who are interested in the new technology can try it and
report benefits, problems, make suggestions and, if the new software
really provides tangible improvements, more people will start using it
and in time it'll probably end up as the default init system
on a good many distros. Even then, you'd expect other init-systems to
be available as options.
What doesn't work so well on the whole is taking your new init system,
declaring that anyone who can't see its benefits is either an idiot or
a luddite, and bringing political pressure to bear to get distros to
adopt your baby as the default choice. Especially at the same time as
trying to tie it into as many other pieces of software as possible
thus making it very difficult to replace it with any of the alternatives.
That goes doubly when, as is the case with systemd, we have an immature solution under heavy development, with no firm specification, and developers who have a reputation for being less than helpful. This isn't Microsoft. Solutions don't get invented by some privileged few and adopted because Word comes down from On High. They get adopted
because a lot of people use them and find them useful.
And any time it looks like someone is trying to subvert that process... well, it makes a lot of people skittish. And in those cases, I'd just as soon not have the offending package on my computers.
If systemd is as good as its supporters suggest, then it'll become widely adopted without all this ballyhoo. Conversely, if it's failings are severe enough that it can't gain widespread acceptance without politicising the entire debate, then I don't want it anywhere near me.
So, someone hires you to work on a file sharing network. And this is conspiracy? I mean there was a time when "file sharing" was a legitimate thing to do and didn't automatically imply copyright infringement.
Even if it did, I doubt Kim Dotcom said "hey, how'd you like to join a conspiracy to enable copyright infringement?" I think it was more likely "I want to hire a database programmer"
I know it's kind of hip to say "well what do you expect?", but really this seems punitive vindictive and disproportionate.
I mean if this can happen when you write code in good faith for someone who used it for purposes later deemed illegal... that kind of puts us all in the frame. I mean, corporate ethics being what they are and all that.
Well, it worked, didn't it? He made 45 years of programmers afraid to use a GOTO unless in dire need.
Well, he definitely got the point across. And it was a point that needed making, certainly.
It's as valid today as when he spoke it.
Is it? The problem was never with the goto statement per se. The problem
was huge monolithic code blocks with flow control effectively obfuscated
by arbitrary gotos.
The thing is, this was before the days of structured programming, let
alone OO. One goto in a 20 line function is not going to bring about a
return to those evils. And even if we all decided tomorrow that gotos
were all right after all, it's unlikely that we'd all return to writing
10,000 line subroutines controlled only by gotos.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to write spaghetti code without
a single goto. You can use exceptions, delegates, lambdas and inheritance
to make a far more confusing mess than Djikstra ever dreamed possible.
Overall, I think it was a valid point and well made, but I honestly question its relevance in the context of modern languages and practices.
People forget that Djiksrtra wrote his famous missive back when the dominant languages were PL/1 and Fortran and goto was the main mechanism for flow control.
Dijkstra's point was perfectly sensible and a valid at the time. I'm just not sure that it deserves to be elevated to the status of Eleventh Commandment.
They don't want Net Neutrality, so anything and everything bad that happens is going to be down to Net Neutrality.
Trouble in the Ukraine escalates into WW3? Net Neutrality would be to blame. A dinosaur killer asteroid on collision course with Earth? All cause by market instabilities due to Net Neutrality. Osama Bin Laden returns from the dead and starts making more Dr Evil broadcasts? Net Neutrality. That's what you get..
In fact, if the Large Haddock Collider was to collide too many Haddocks at once and cause a singularity that went on to devour the planet, it's a fair bet that the last man alive would be a Verizon marketroid who would survive just long enough to launch a deep space probe that broadcast "it's all the fault of Net Neutrality"
One does not, nor did they, need Legos to do this.
Quite right. In fact they pretty much imply that in TFS/TFA:
The design improves on previous insect manipulators because it's cheap, customizable, and easy to build.
So the point is not so much that they used Lego to do something that could not be otherwise achieved, but rather that the Lego solution was cheaper, simpler and more flexible.
But yeah. It could absolutely be done, and presumably has been, without the use of Lego.
The hardest lesson to learn as a programmer is that "not invented here" is code for "I am too arrogant to use someone else's solution."
Well sure. No one should ever invent anything without written permission from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, countersigned by Bill Gates, His Holiness the Pope and the ghost of Alan Turing. I mean everyone knows that!
Seriously, I quite agree with Dutch Gun's point that we all build on the work of others. I just think that blindly accepting third party solutions can be just as bad as blindly rejecting them. And if no-one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd probably still be coding in COBOL
Virtual Reality Experiment Wants To Put White People In Black Bodies
See, this is exactly the sort of thing that Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been warning us all about. First of all you try and simulate reality. Then your program gets smart enough that it starts to formulate desires. Next thing you know it wants to experiment with brain transplants and bioengineering techniques. Before you know it...
Wait... what's that, you say? The headline should read "Virtual Reality experimenters want to give white users black avatars?"
Remember when Apple owned the word processing market? MS go very standards-friendly and very much into cross-platform this and interoperable-that.
Of course, it only lasted for about as long as it took for Word to dominate the market and then goodbye RTF and "hey guys, how about we make a mockery of the ISO standards process?"
I think what we're seeing here is MS in defensive mode. They'll embrace open source, open standards open sesame, whatever it takes until they're where they want to be in the market. And then, same old same old.
That said, I'm willing to be proven wrong. Time will tell:)
The future is in electronic distribution, and software services that collect information. It's not a great future, but it has been created by a population that is willing to trade their privacy for free stuff.
A population that is currently willing to make that trade. I think it's only a matter of time before we see a popular backlash against all this pervasive snooping.
Still, I agree that software licensing is unlikely to continue to yield Microsoft scale money into the future. There's so much good, free software out there that it's getting harder and harder for MS to justify the margins they traditionally charge
wouldn't be surprised to see them start to give Windows away in the future.
Hmm... makes sense for the home market, where most users get their OS "free" with the computer and if they do upgrade, it's generally from a friend of a friend who "has a disk".
PC manufacturers do pay, of course, and with desktop sales shrinking, the risk here is probably minimal. In fact if the MS tax is eliminated it could do a lot to stem the rise of Android. Or at least ensure MS' place as a player in the mobile arena.
The problem though is going to be corporate customers. The ones with thousands of desktop systems that do pay. Big corps tend to be conservative about IT upgrades, and by giving Windows away MS would be sacrificing that revenue stream. They're probably reluctant to do that.
Of course, they could just drop the price of the Home Edition (or whatever they're calling it today) to zero and charge for the Pro one. But then they need to make the home edition good enough to be useful, but not so good that business would be happy using it. That's not compromise that's worked well for them in the past.
Maybe we'll see it licenced as "free for personal use". That would be something!:)
GNOME saw an opertunity to get a bunch of Open Source Zelots in a frenzy over a closed source commercial platform for - GASP - making money and flew with it.
What a bunch of non-issues, non-news, DRAMA...
Roughly translated: "My side didn't win and it's not faaairr! WHAAAAAA!!!!!"
My point was that it's much simpler when you have direct control over the node.
Entry or exit? I mean sure, if you connect to Silk Road and you're unlucky enough to enter through an NSA node at one and and exit through another one, then you're probably toast. But as I understand it, the number of subverted nodes is still fairly small compared to the total number. Which brings us back to the GP's point about security increasing with the number of nodes.
Cookies and javascript are not the only ways to track you. Doesn't Facebook require cookies to be enabled?
The weak link there is Facebook. I don't think anyone's seriously proposing FB as a champion of individual privacy.
And yes, there are ways other than JS and cookies to track people. But they tend to involve things like traffic analysis which is time consuming and requires human surveillance. Little Johnny who just wants to connect to the Pirate Bay from his mum's basement is probably fairly secure.
As much as Tor can help, there is no such thing as being perfectly anonymous on the internet
See, this is the crux of the matter, really. Security is a relative value. It's not like "oh, it's possible to circumvent this measure therefore it is of no value". It's "I know this channel is potentially insecure, but it's sure as hell better than communicating in plaintext, and hopefully the bad guys will go after easier targets".
It's like having a lock on your font door. They won't keep the government out, but there's all sorts of good reasons for having them installed.
Tor becomes less effective when corporations are running the nodes. Nothing like funneling all your data through an untrusted proxy. Besides, didn't the NSA already show us that Tor does little to protect anonymity?
I think they demonstrated that Tor can be beaten, but that doesn't necessarily imply that defeating it is simple or cost-effective for most cases.
The way I see if, if you're running Silk Road X.Y then it's probably worth their while to take the time and trouble needed to find you. If all you want to do is stop your mobile phone company from tracking every site you visit over 3G (speaking purely hypothetically, of course) then without evidence of any illegal activity, they're unlikely to bother..
Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean it's useless, you know?
Between cookies and other tracking methods, all those website already know who you are, regardless of how the traffic got there.
Yeah. If only there was a way to disable cookies and javascript in a web browser. You know, like the Tor browser does by default?
Is it really the release cycle, or is it that you feel that Firefox isn't listening to its customers.
Oh, it's the customers, definitely. Actually, can we say "users" rather than "customers?"
Otherwise we get into the whole basis of the customers being advertisers and buyers of profiling data
and the users being the "product". I couldn't care less about the "customers" by that definition.
But I think they could usefully listen to their users rather more than they do.
And who are the customers, really? The extension developers, or the people that use it on a daily basis to surf the web?
That's an easy one. The customers are me. I mean, I'm not the only user
(or ex-user really, although all my machines aren't quite switched over yet).
Anyway, I'm not the only user they had, but I'm the main one that I'm prepared
to get annoyed about. Of course, if it was just me, I'd probably have moved to
(say) Pale Moon and forgotten about it. But there do seem to be an awful lot
of Mozilla users who share my disappointment with the project overall.
In my opinion, the customers are the people who browse the web.
Can't fault you there, mate.
And if I look at it as that kind of customer, I am quite happy with Firefox and its release schedule.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! If the important thing is the users, then what does the release schedule have to do with anything?
Much less your personal opinion of the release schedule. I mean I can see "happy with the release schedule, irrelevant as it may be"
but you kind of lost me on the "happy with Firefox" bit. As if that followed automatically from the definition of "customers". And the way you made it sound like "the users are important, therefore Firefox is still cool and Australis isn't a widely loathed abomination inflicted upon the userbase by an increasingly out-of-touch dev team".
I mean I'm sure that's not what you meant, but it certainly came across like that.
Sure, sometimes something breaks, but they are keen to fix many of these problems.
Cool. Now if only the problems they were keen to fix were the ones their users were keen to see fixed,
this wouldn't be controversial at all.
Well yeah. If I sell you a potato peeler and it doesn't peel potatoes, you shouldn't have to upgrade in order to peel a spud.
The trouble is it's harder to clearly define requirements in the software world. In IT a lot of those bug reports would concern the peeler's inability to cope with Grapefruit. Or with Potato 2.0 the peel of which is made from 4 inch steel for security reasons. Or with a potato three miles in diameter.
You can't reasonably expect a single product to cover all those use cases. I won't deny that some vendors take advantage, but the situation is far from as cut and dried as you suggest.
Individual speech is the thing protected by the Constitution. Organized
pressure to fire somebody from their job is not free speech, it's
mob rule.
Hum. My own personal vision of "mob rule" involves fewer petitions and
more burning cars, looted stores and people hanged from lamp-posts for
wearing the wrong colour socks. Maybe that's just me.
So, just to clarify: are we free to say anything we like, so long as there's
no danger of anyone losing their job? Or is it that we're free to say
"so and so ought to get the sack" so long as we don't talk to anyone
else about it. To the extent that that isn't a contradiction in terms, obviously.
Seriously: how do you distinguish between "organized pressure" and a
genuine grass roots movement. I can't imagine any definition that doesn't
boil down do "organized pressure groups are the ones I don't like".
Personally, I happen to think Mr. Eich got a bit of a raw deal.
I still think you're barking up the wrong tree with this approach.
Every good example you gave had mod tools released by the developers. Those aren't free to make, ya know.
True, but not always relevant.
You have to take into account that some of these tools, Skyrim's Creation
Kit for example, are used in house by the developers to create the
game in the first place.
So while they do have a development cost, that cost is part of the
cost of developing the game. By the time the tools are released to
modders, they don't owe the developers a penny, nor is there any particular saving in keeping them in-house.
The cost of releasing the tools to modders is still non-zero, of
course. In the case of Skyrim, Bethesda had to remove integration with Perforce and with the Havok SDK (the name
of which escapes me) before they could legally release the CK. But that's just a fraction of any costs incurred in developing the tools.
Now if you're talking about a company that uses one toolset in-house and develops a separate tool for the modders,
in that case you'd have a much stronger point. But but it doesn't apply to Skyrim, Fallout 3 or the other Bethesda/Obsidian games.
If I was a fanboy, I'd be telling you that there was nothing wrong with metro. And you were simply too incompetent to use the "improved UI."
Heh. The linux community has it's fair share of those, too, sad to say:)
I just find it funny (and I'm not pointing a finger at you here) how the same people can view something as a damning indictment in one context and a saving grace in another. I've thought this for a while, it was just your post brought it to mind.
And really, if you couldn't be bothered to replace the awful UI for something else, that's your own problem.
You know, that makes you sound a lot like a Linux fanboy:
"All you have you have to do is recompile the kernel. And if you can't be bothered to change something
as simple as a desktop environment, then there's no hope for you."
I always thought Linux was supposed to be bad because users couldn't be expected to
have that knowledge and that windows was supposed to be better because that sort
of hackery was generally unnecessary.
If you don't know who has your credit card data, at any given time, including your children, perhaps you should start there! Why yes I do take due diligence and confirm every charge on my credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts. Do you not? If not, do you trust your children with that information?
Not a problem I have, really. I don't have kids, and the cats haven't learned how to use my plastic yet. But, hey, you just congratulate yourself for being so diligent. I'm sure it's relevant to the discussion somehow.
This a technological window kids are exploiting because their parents gave them sufficiently advanced technology. Sometimes parents should tell their kids no. Don't do that, or I'll take that smartphone away.
I think the issue is more that the payment system didn't allow enough feedback for the parents to determine that their credit cards remained authorised for in-game purchases. And While it's all very well to read the riot act to your teenage son for abusing your card, it's hard to do that to a six-yearold that didn't realise all that extra time on candy crush was costing his mother actual money.
I'm also not convinced that disclaiming purchases on a card is an adequate substitute for a payment system that allows you to manage access to cards securely.
As much as people want to lambast Google for this, and I'm sure they'll now change it to auth for every app install, the idea of controlling this problem starts in the home.
I don't know about lambasting them, and I agree that if they've got any sense they'll fix this asap. I just I don't think they're entirely without responsibility. And I certainly don't think you can dismiss the issue by saying "ho hum - all the parents fault" as the GP attempted to do.
No, it whould be : create a different account for your child without access to your mails, facebook, [...] and credit card !
None of which would have made any difference in this case. The problem is not that the credit card authorisation is stored on the device. The problem is A) that once authorised, further transactions are accepted without the need for further authorisation for a 30 minute period, and B) that there doesn't seem to be any any way for a parent to determine that in advance, or to cancel the authorisation.
So they way to be responsible here comes down to "don't make in game purchases to your child". Which brings us back to the point that you might as well avoid Google devices and choose something that doesn't have this exposure.
Or, you know, they could say "whoops, our bad" and just fix it. That would work too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, no problem. Just give me a minute here.
Pay Attention Everyone! Would everybody who disagrees with this legal opinion please stop listen to all music, now and forever! This is necessitated because moehoward doesn't "get" the "hoopla". Thank you for your co-operation.
OK, that should sort out your cognitive dissonance problem. Is there anything else I can help you with while I'm here?
Do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, we're not trying hard enough?
I say we form a commitment, here and now, to vote the Law of Gravity out of office at the next election and replace it with something more in tune with the 21st Century. We'll see how long it takes to get flying cars and Mars colonies once we have a law of gravity that works with us rather than against us.
Once we've done that, I expect we'll find the First Law or Thermodynamics will suddenly be willing to compromise its principles a little. And as for General Relativity, don't get me started!
Well obviously they're going to curse you. I mean you have just single-handedly ensured the demise of SteamOS by virtue of grumpily posting a pessimistic opinion on a nerdy discussion board. Because that's the way Cause And Effect works, right?
Seriously, a bit of perspective here?
Define "worth". I mean, can you put a dollar value on not fragmenting the whole Linux community, for instance?
Some of the people. The Debian decision was only carried by the chairman's casting vote. So in that case at least people doing the actual work seem pretty damn undecided to me.
*Yawn* Or I can use Gentoo or Slackware or (pretty soon) Devuan. Currently I'm using Gentoo and a systemd-free Wheezy. I do hope you're not going to tell me that disqualifies me from having an opinion here?
Well, except for the whole "without all this ballyhoo", since that is definitely happening. And without the implied unanimity of opinion on the part of the developers: see the previous point about Debian. So, you know, no that isn't exactly what's happening. Sorry.
It takes two to make for a political debate. We can argue about who started it if you like, but it still takes two. Like the two of us, for instance. Now personally I don't think that either of us are aguing based on primarily emotional or aesthetic grounds. Of course, we can talk about that a bit more if you want.
But if you want a purely technical argument, immature software still under heavy development, lacking an interface spec should be sufficient for most reasonable people.
Meh. There's also been plenty along the lines of "systemd just works and if you're too stupid to see it then that's your problem because it's already been decided by people far more intelligent than you so just sit down and shut up already".
If fact, absent the rudeness, that's pretty much the substance of your own argument, if you don't mind me saying so.
I'll give it a shot
See, traditionally, this isn't how things are done in the Linux world. Generally, if you have a snazzy idea for an init system (for example) what you'd do is offer it as an option and let users decide.
The idea is to minimise the changes that will be made by the new system (other than improvements to the boot system). That way people who are interested in the new technology can try it and report benefits, problems, make suggestions and, if the new software really provides tangible improvements, more people will start using it and in time it'll probably end up as the default init system on a good many distros. Even then, you'd expect other init-systems to be available as options.
What doesn't work so well on the whole is taking your new init system, declaring that anyone who can't see its benefits is either an idiot or a luddite, and bringing political pressure to bear to get distros to adopt your baby as the default choice. Especially at the same time as trying to tie it into as many other pieces of software as possible thus making it very difficult to replace it with any of the alternatives.
That goes doubly when, as is the case with systemd, we have an immature solution under heavy development, with no firm specification, and developers who have a reputation for being less than helpful. This isn't Microsoft. Solutions don't get invented by some privileged few and adopted because Word comes down from On High. They get adopted because a lot of people use them and find them useful.
And any time it looks like someone is trying to subvert that process ... well, it makes a lot of people skittish. And in those cases, I'd just as soon not have the offending package on my computers.
If systemd is as good as its supporters suggest, then it'll become widely adopted without all this ballyhoo. Conversely, if it's failings are severe enough that it can't gain widespread acceptance without politicising the entire debate, then I don't want it anywhere near me.
So, someone hires you to work on a file sharing network. And this is conspiracy? I mean there was a time when "file sharing" was a legitimate thing to do and didn't automatically imply copyright infringement.
Even if it did, I doubt Kim Dotcom said "hey, how'd you like to join a conspiracy to enable copyright infringement?" I think it was more likely "I want to hire a database programmer"
I know it's kind of hip to say "well what do you expect?", but really this seems punitive vindictive and disproportionate.
I mean if this can happen when you write code in good faith for someone who used it for purposes later deemed illegal ... that kind of puts us all in the frame. I mean, corporate ethics being what they are and all that.
Damn.
Well, he definitely got the point across. And it was a point that needed making, certainly.
Is it? The problem was never with the goto statement per se. The problem was huge monolithic code blocks with flow control effectively obfuscated by arbitrary gotos.
The thing is, this was before the days of structured programming, let alone OO. One goto in a 20 line function is not going to bring about a return to those evils. And even if we all decided tomorrow that gotos were all right after all, it's unlikely that we'd all return to writing 10,000 line subroutines controlled only by gotos.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to write spaghetti code without a single goto. You can use exceptions, delegates, lambdas and inheritance to make a far more confusing mess than Djikstra ever dreamed possible.
Overall, I think it was a valid point and well made, but I honestly question its relevance in the context of modern languages and practices.
People forget that Djiksrtra wrote his famous missive back when the dominant languages were PL/1 and Fortran and goto was the main mechanism for flow control.
Dijkstra's point was perfectly sensible and a valid at the time. I'm just not sure that it deserves to be elevated to the status of Eleventh Commandment.
They don't want Net Neutrality, so anything and everything bad that happens is going to be down to Net Neutrality.
Trouble in the Ukraine escalates into WW3? Net Neutrality would be to blame. A dinosaur killer asteroid on collision course with Earth? All cause by market instabilities due to Net Neutrality. Osama Bin Laden returns from the dead and starts making more Dr Evil broadcasts? Net Neutrality. That's what you get..
In fact, if the Large Haddock Collider was to collide too many Haddocks at once and cause a singularity that went on to devour the planet, it's a fair bet that the last man alive would be a Verizon marketroid who would survive just long enough to launch a deep space probe that broadcast "it's all the fault of Net Neutrality"
Quite right. In fact they pretty much imply that in TFS/TFA:
So the point is not so much that they used Lego to do something that could not be otherwise achieved, but rather that the Lego solution was cheaper, simpler and more flexible.
But yeah. It could absolutely be done, and presumably has been, without the use of Lego.
Well sure. No one should ever invent anything without written permission from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, countersigned by Bill Gates, His Holiness the Pope and the ghost of Alan Turing. I mean everyone knows that!
Seriously, I quite agree with Dutch Gun's point that we all build on the work of others. I just think that blindly accepting third party solutions can be just as bad as blindly rejecting them. And if no-one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd probably still be coding in COBOL
See, this is exactly the sort of thing that Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been warning us all about. First of all you try and simulate reality. Then your program gets smart enough that it starts to formulate desires. Next thing you know it wants to experiment with brain transplants and bioengineering techniques. Before you know it...
Wait ... what's that, you say? The headline should read "Virtual Reality experimenters want to give white users black avatars?"
Why didn't they say that in the first place?
It doesn't always end badly either.
Remember when Apple owned the word processing market? MS go very standards-friendly and very much into cross-platform this and interoperable-that.
Of course, it only lasted for about as long as it took for Word to dominate the market and then goodbye RTF and "hey guys, how about we make a mockery of the ISO standards process?"
I think what we're seeing here is MS in defensive mode. They'll embrace open source, open standards open sesame, whatever it takes until they're where they want to be in the market. And then, same old same old.
That said, I'm willing to be proven wrong. Time will tell :)
A population that is currently willing to make that trade. I think it's only a matter of time before we see a popular backlash against all this pervasive snooping.
Still, I agree that software licensing is unlikely to continue to yield Microsoft scale money into the future. There's so much good, free software out there that it's getting harder and harder for MS to justify the margins they traditionally charge
Hmm... makes sense for the home market, where most users get their OS "free" with the computer and if they do upgrade, it's generally from a friend of a friend who "has a disk".
PC manufacturers do pay, of course, and with desktop sales shrinking, the risk here is probably minimal. In fact if the MS tax is eliminated it could do a lot to stem the rise of Android. Or at least ensure MS' place as a player in the mobile arena.
The problem though is going to be corporate customers. The ones with thousands of desktop systems that do pay. Big corps tend to be conservative about IT upgrades, and by giving Windows away MS would be sacrificing that revenue stream. They're probably reluctant to do that.
Of course, they could just drop the price of the Home Edition (or whatever they're calling it today) to zero and charge for the Pro one. But then they need to make the home edition good enough to be useful, but not so good that business would be happy using it. That's not compromise that's worked well for them in the past.
Maybe we'll see it licenced as "free for personal use". That would be something! :)
Roughly translated: "My side didn't win and it's not faaairr! WHAAAAAA!!!!!"
Entry or exit? I mean sure, if you connect to Silk Road and you're unlucky enough to enter through an NSA node at one and and exit through another one, then you're probably toast. But as I understand it, the number of subverted nodes is still fairly small compared to the total number. Which brings us back to the GP's point about security increasing with the number of nodes.
The weak link there is Facebook. I don't think anyone's seriously proposing FB as a champion of individual privacy.
And yes, there are ways other than JS and cookies to track people. But they tend to involve things like traffic analysis which is time consuming and requires human surveillance. Little Johnny who just wants to connect to the Pirate Bay from his mum's basement is probably fairly secure.
See, this is the crux of the matter, really. Security is a relative value. It's not like "oh, it's possible to circumvent this measure therefore it is of no value". It's "I know this channel is potentially insecure, but it's sure as hell better than communicating in plaintext, and hopefully the bad guys will go after easier targets".
It's like having a lock on your font door. They won't keep the government out, but there's all sorts of good reasons for having them installed.
I think they demonstrated that Tor can be beaten, but that doesn't necessarily imply that defeating it is simple or cost-effective for most cases.
The way I see if, if you're running Silk Road X.Y then it's probably worth their while to take the time and trouble needed to find you. If all you want to do is stop your mobile phone company from tracking every site you visit over 3G (speaking purely hypothetically, of course) then without evidence of any illegal activity, they're unlikely to bother..
Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean it's useless, you know?
Yeah. If only there was a way to disable cookies and javascript in a web browser. You know, like the Tor browser does by default?
Oh, it's the customers, definitely. Actually, can we say "users" rather than "customers?" Otherwise we get into the whole basis of the customers being advertisers and buyers of profiling data and the users being the "product". I couldn't care less about the "customers" by that definition. But I think they could usefully listen to their users rather more than they do.
That's an easy one. The customers are me. I mean, I'm not the only user (or ex-user really, although all my machines aren't quite switched over yet). Anyway, I'm not the only user they had, but I'm the main one that I'm prepared to get annoyed about. Of course, if it was just me, I'd probably have moved to (say) Pale Moon and forgotten about it. But there do seem to be an awful lot of Mozilla users who share my disappointment with the project overall.
Can't fault you there, mate.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! If the important thing is the users, then what does the release schedule have to do with anything? Much less your personal opinion of the release schedule. I mean I can see "happy with the release schedule, irrelevant as it may be" but you kind of lost me on the "happy with Firefox" bit. As if that followed automatically from the definition of "customers". And the way you made it sound like "the users are important, therefore Firefox is still cool and Australis isn't a widely loathed abomination inflicted upon the userbase by an increasingly out-of-touch dev team".
I mean I'm sure that's not what you meant, but it certainly came across like that.
Cool. Now if only the problems they were keen to fix were the ones their users were keen to see fixed, this wouldn't be controversial at all.
Well yeah. If I sell you a potato peeler and it doesn't peel potatoes, you shouldn't have to upgrade in order to peel a spud.
The trouble is it's harder to clearly define requirements in the software world. In IT a lot of those bug reports would concern the peeler's inability to cope with Grapefruit. Or with Potato 2.0 the peel of which is made from 4 inch steel for security reasons. Or with a potato three miles in diameter.
You can't reasonably expect a single product to cover all those use cases. I won't deny that some vendors take advantage, but the situation is far from as cut and dried as you suggest.
Hum. My own personal vision of "mob rule" involves fewer petitions and more burning cars, looted stores and people hanged from lamp-posts for wearing the wrong colour socks. Maybe that's just me.
So, just to clarify: are we free to say anything we like, so long as there's no danger of anyone losing their job? Or is it that we're free to say "so and so ought to get the sack" so long as we don't talk to anyone else about it. To the extent that that isn't a contradiction in terms, obviously.
Seriously: how do you distinguish between "organized pressure" and a genuine grass roots movement. I can't imagine any definition that doesn't boil down do "organized pressure groups are the ones I don't like".
Personally, I happen to think Mr. Eich got a bit of a raw deal. I still think you're barking up the wrong tree with this approach.
True, but not always relevant.
You have to take into account that some of these tools, Skyrim's Creation Kit for example, are used in house by the developers to create the game in the first place. So while they do have a development cost, that cost is part of the cost of developing the game. By the time the tools are released to modders, they don't owe the developers a penny, nor is there any particular saving in keeping them in-house.
The cost of releasing the tools to modders is still non-zero, of course. In the case of Skyrim, Bethesda had to remove integration with Perforce and with the Havok SDK (the name of which escapes me) before they could legally release the CK. But that's just a fraction of any costs incurred in developing the tools.
Now if you're talking about a company that uses one toolset in-house and develops a separate tool for the modders, in that case you'd have a much stronger point. But but it doesn't apply to Skyrim, Fallout 3 or the other Bethesda/Obsidian games.
Heh. The linux community has it's fair share of those, too, sad to say :)
I just find it funny (and I'm not pointing a finger at you here) how the same people can view something as a damning indictment in one context and a saving grace in another. I've thought this for a while, it was just your post brought it to mind.
Ummm... "mod trolls?"
You know, that makes you sound a lot like a Linux fanboy: "All you have you have to do is recompile the kernel. And if you can't be bothered to change something as simple as a desktop environment, then there's no hope for you."
I always thought Linux was supposed to be bad because users couldn't be expected to have that knowledge and that windows was supposed to be better because that sort of hackery was generally unnecessary.
Funny how times change :)
Not a problem I have, really. I don't have kids, and the cats haven't learned how to use my plastic yet. But, hey, you just congratulate yourself for being so diligent. I'm sure it's relevant to the discussion somehow.
I think the issue is more that the payment system didn't allow enough feedback for the parents to determine that their credit cards remained authorised for in-game purchases. And While it's all very well to read the riot act to your teenage son for abusing your card, it's hard to do that to a six-yearold that didn't realise all that extra time on candy crush was costing his mother actual money.
I'm also not convinced that disclaiming purchases on a card is an adequate substitute for a payment system that allows you to manage access to cards securely.
I don't know about lambasting them, and I agree that if they've got any sense they'll fix this asap. I just I don't think they're entirely without responsibility. And I certainly don't think you can dismiss the issue by saying "ho hum - all the parents fault" as the GP attempted to do.
None of which would have made any difference in this case. The problem is not that the credit card authorisation is stored on the device. The problem is A) that once authorised, further transactions are accepted without the need for further authorisation for a 30 minute period, and B) that there doesn't seem to be any any way for a parent to determine that in advance, or to cancel the authorisation.
So they way to be responsible here comes down to "don't make in game purchases to your child". Which brings us back to the point that you might as well avoid Google devices and choose something that doesn't have this exposure.
Or, you know, they could say "whoops, our bad" and just fix it. That would work too.