There was a "dailywtf" the other week that covered the wrapped in word thing very well. Someone had taken a screenshot of their error, printed it, scanned it, then embedded it in a doc file....
That site does suffer from obvious fakes once in a while, but it's believable I suppose.
Thank god I don't have to deal with that sort of crap!
A lot of laptops still have them built in. My three year old home laptop does, and the six month old one I have here at work does also.
I guess this is due to them being used for travelling quite a lot. Though I can't remember the last hotel I went to that didn't have some sort of wireless or wired net available. And I spent four months in remote parts of Australia last year...
Oh sure, I probably am isolated from it. It's why my previous post was only semi-rhetorical.
It does seem to me that a lot of the circumstances you describe have a better solution, be that PDF, web based forms or whatever else.
The few things I use office-style document editors for are my resume and running up labels for homebrew beer, and then the results are printed to either paper, labels or PDF.
I would have modded you up, but you're already at 5.
Evidence based support of politicians. Evidence based policy. Evidence based... stuff in general.
If it turns out that the folks I voted for are scumbags, I'd like to know so they can be kicked out, taken to court, discredited, whatever. It's not "my team" and "their team", this is not about tribes or who's dad can beat up who else's dad, this is about the governance of of the USA.
If more people thought like this we wouldn't have the ridiculous spectacle of politicians throughout the western world getting away with all sorts of dodgy behaviour because "if you don't vote for me the other tribe will win!" and we might actually get a government we want.
"There's a whole profession dedicated to decoding things like this and summarizing them into easy to understand tidbits we call "NEWS ARTICLES"."
And if you read one of these news articles that happens to be about something you already know about, it turns out that instead of taking the time to understand and summarise them, most journalists just write any old crap that's usually not only wrong but demonstrative of their complete lack of effort to understand the source material.
I disagree with his stance there. If the employee claims the copyright/patent for something then they shouldn't be just handing it over to the company they work for.
If I invent something after hours and I consider it mine I don't take it to work the next day and write it into a product. Because that would be retarded and (IMHO) should count, as in every other instance with stuff I do at work, as the company's IP.
IT is a service provided to other parts of the company, they have certain responsiilities and the employees using their services also have responsibilities and restrictions. But when the IT department decides it owns everyone's desktop you end up in a bad place where procedure overrules actual use cases and stuff just takes forever to get done.
At work, my machines are my responsibility. If I don't have AV or a firewall I may get in trouble if I don't have a good reason. If I don't have IE I may find some things hard to access. Other than that it's free reign.
This current fiasco - no, the average consumer doesn't care much.
But previous ones like the rootkit (and general DRM on CDs) affect the average consumer a lot. It took a while to explain to my step-mother why I couldn't rip her CD for her, when I had hundreds of albums on my own. That it would be deliberately crippled so she couldn't listen to it on her mp3 player had never crossed her mind before.
I'd rather have the guy or gal that did drugs and slept around a bit, has ambivalent feelings about massive military spending and doesn't give a crap who marries who.
But the problem is that the media and the population will get whipped up into a fervour, they'll have moral panic like never before. Instead of people pretending to be puritans, we'll get people elected to power who are actually puritan. And that's likely even worse!
It's not a bad idea, that sort of clarity and transparency, and in a reasonable world it would be great because hypocrites and the corrupt would be outed and out of power. It's a shame we don't live in such a reasonable world really
Then you can only elect people who have never done *anything* the least bit risky in their lives.
All this does is hand the government even more into the hands of military and police establishment. Some of the people I'd want in power would be precisely the people who would fail these things. Activists, people who stood up and were counted at protests for freedom from over-government.
Sorry, but this is an absolutely terrible idea, unless you love the status quo and never, ever want it to change.
"it just isn't strong enough to elicit any of the health problems that people are worrying about, except possible lung damage"
Eh, isn't lung damage the only "health problem" with the stuff that's worth worrying about? All the supossed evils of THC itself have got little top no backing evidence AFAIR.
My network printer requires well over a hundred MB of downloads from HP to get going on windows, and insists on installing crapware.
On linux I just added it and everything was peachy. And people I know who have (perfectly good) older printers have had all sorts of trouble getting them working with Windows Vista or 7.
Yes, there are holes in Linux's device support. But there are just as many in everyone else's, more in my (anecdotal) experience.
If you really meant display but said run because you don't know the difference then you're the sort of user that needs educating about what this computer thing is and how the internets work.
If you really meant run, as in all the nasties you can embed in a word document, then you're another sort of user that needs educating, preferably with some sort of wooden bat.
"Consoles are a good example of having the need for a closed environment, openess enables extreme cheating"
Because *ALL* PC games are hell to play online because of cheating. It's now a well known fact that PC games can only be single player and offline because of this, right?
*facepalm*
"Nobody has advantage from having this console broken other than pirates and cheaters."
And people that have kids that scratch disks, and people that like to keep their library on hard drive and people that want to extend the media capabilities of the ps3 and people that want to use it as a linux machine and people that want to play homebrew games distributed by other people who opened up their consoles.
Any cheapass pc will run linux better than the ps3.
Not the point. I own my ps3, don't try to tell me what to do with it.
(I fully agree with cheaters being kicked off and perma-banned from the multiplayer network, by the way. I just disagree that it's in any way a good design to have security enforced on the client. This was learned waaaay back in the days of quakeworld and other pioneering multiplayer online games)
So, even before it goes to court, you've decided that Sony are legally right, and that you don't want to fight this bullshit. Your idea that it's fine to release info as long as you do it anonymously is retarded in the extreme.
The rest of us have an issue with Sony's behaviour, and even if we don't agree with everything geohot does or much of how he does it, we tend to agree that it's a court case that needs to go the right way to put a stop to the continuing erosion of our rights over our hardware.
Absolutely, there is, and if that happens to be the outcome then the next step should be stronger action to change the law.
I know, I know, in reality the next step will be "piss and moan about it on the internet", but at least at that point the law is ironclad and we know a) where we have to fight to get our rights back and b) that we really don't own these devices in the eyes of the law, and to treat them as rental machines in future (or stay away from them completely)
Slashdot Mirror
There was a "dailywtf" the other week that covered the wrapped in word thing very well. Someone had taken a screenshot of their error, printed it, scanned it, then embedded it in a doc file....
That site does suffer from obvious fakes once in a while, but it's believable I suppose.
Thank god I don't have to deal with that sort of crap!
A lot of laptops still have them built in. My three year old home laptop does, and the six month old one I have here at work does also.
I guess this is due to them being used for travelling quite a lot. Though I can't remember the last hotel I went to that didn't have some sort of wireless or wired net available. And I spent four months in remote parts of Australia last year...
Oh sure, I probably am isolated from it. It's why my previous post was only semi-rhetorical.
It does seem to me that a lot of the circumstances you describe have a better solution, be that PDF, web based forms or whatever else.
The few things I use office-style document editors for are my resume and running up labels for homebrew beer, and then the results are printed to either paper, labels or PDF.
It's good to see a custodial sentence AND significant fines.
Too often we hear about these guys getting off with a slap on the wrist and a fine equivalent to less than 10% of their ill gotten gains.
I would have modded you up, but you're already at 5.
Evidence based support of politicians. Evidence based policy. Evidence based... stuff in general.
If it turns out that the folks I voted for are scumbags, I'd like to know so they can be kicked out, taken to court, discredited, whatever. It's not "my team" and "their team", this is not about tribes or who's dad can beat up who else's dad, this is about the governance of of the USA.
If more people thought like this we wouldn't have the ridiculous spectacle of politicians throughout the western world getting away with all sorts of dodgy behaviour because "if you don't vote for me the other tribe will win!" and we might actually get a government we want.
I've seen that before and it *is* hilarious, and a testament to human stupidity.
OTOH, if you're that stupid or ill-equipped to deal with a computer, maybe you shouldn't be using one in a professional capacity to start with.
And just who is sending all these word documents around anyway?
I never get emailed documents, I get emailed links to web pages, and occasionally pdfs, but 'doc' ?
Can't think of the last tim I had to deal with it.
"There's a whole profession dedicated to decoding things like this and summarizing them into easy to understand tidbits we call "NEWS ARTICLES"."
And if you read one of these news articles that happens to be about something you already know about, it turns out that instead of taking the time to understand and summarise them, most journalists just write any old crap that's usually not only wrong but demonstrative of their complete lack of effort to understand the source material.
I disagree with his stance there. If the employee claims the copyright/patent for something then they shouldn't be just handing it over to the company they work for.
If I invent something after hours and I consider it mine I don't take it to work the next day and write it into a product. Because that would be retarded and (IMHO) should count, as in every other instance with stuff I do at work, as the company's IP.
It's not difficult...
In the USA p.erhaps. In the free world, anything that's not ripped off from the company or competing with them is fair game.
LOL@ IT department's sovereingty
IT is a service provided to other parts of the company, they have certain responsiilities and the employees using their services also have responsibilities and restrictions. But when the IT department decides it owns everyone's desktop you end up in a bad place where procedure overrules actual use cases and stuff just takes forever to get done.
At work, my machines are my responsibility. If I don't have AV or a firewall I may get in trouble if I don't have a good reason. If I don't have IE I may find some things hard to access. Other than that it's free reign.
This current fiasco - no, the average consumer doesn't care much.
But previous ones like the rootkit (and general DRM on CDs) affect the average consumer a lot. It took a while to explain to my step-mother why I couldn't rip her CD for her, when I had hundreds of albums on my own. That it would be deliberately crippled so she couldn't listen to it on her mp3 player had never crossed her mind before.
So some of these things really do affect people.
What's wrong with IGA?
Nestle is on my list...
I'd rather have the guy or gal that did drugs and slept around a bit, has ambivalent feelings about massive military spending and doesn't give a crap who marries who.
But the problem is that the media and the population will get whipped up into a fervour, they'll have moral panic like never before. Instead of people pretending to be puritans, we'll get people elected to power who are actually puritan. And that's likely even worse!
It's not a bad idea, that sort of clarity and transparency, and in a reasonable world it would be great because hypocrites and the corrupt would be outed and out of power. It's a shame we don't live in such a reasonable world really
Stops you buying it for domestic passengers in the same terminal, IMHO.
Not a security measure at all, but a tax/revenue measure.
Then you can only elect people who have never done *anything* the least bit risky in their lives.
All this does is hand the government even more into the hands of military and police establishment. Some of the people I'd want in power would be precisely the people who would fail these things. Activists, people who stood up and were counted at protests for freedom from over-government.
Sorry, but this is an absolutely terrible idea, unless you love the status quo and never, ever want it to change.
"it just isn't strong enough to elicit any of the health problems that people are worrying about, except possible lung damage"
Eh, isn't lung damage the only "health problem" with the stuff that's worth worrying about? All the supossed evils of THC itself have got little top no backing evidence AFAIR.
I set that up a while ago, I like it.
However it's easy to defeat the unlock portion by cloning someone's bluetooth device ID.
Works both ways.
My network printer requires well over a hundred MB of downloads from HP to get going on windows, and insists on installing crapware.
On linux I just added it and everything was peachy. And people I know who have (perfectly good) older printers have had all sorts of trouble getting them working with Windows Vista or 7.
Yes, there are holes in Linux's device support. But there are just as many in everyone else's, more in my (anecdotal) experience.
Debian doesn't like my SD reader. Windows 7 won't use the camera built in to the laptop.
Neither is a show stopper, but I have probably spent equal time on each one.
Now my eee 901, that seems to use lowest-common denominator hardware that even MacOS doesn't dislike too much!
"Doesn't run Word docs properly"
If you really meant display but said run because you don't know the difference then you're the sort of user that needs educating about what this computer thing is and how the internets work.
If you really meant run, as in all the nasties you can embed in a word document, then you're another sort of user that needs educating, preferably with some sort of wooden bat.
When was that?
'cos the rest of us got interested back when the ps3 was released and used it for media streaming.
"Consoles are a good example of having the need for a closed environment, openess enables extreme cheating"
Because *ALL* PC games are hell to play online because of cheating. It's now a well known fact that PC games can only be single player and offline because of this, right?
*facepalm*
"Nobody has advantage from having this console broken other than pirates and cheaters."
And people that have kids that scratch disks, and people that like to keep their library on hard drive and people that want to extend the media capabilities of the ps3 and people that want to use it as a linux machine and people that want to play homebrew games distributed by other people who opened up their consoles.
Any cheapass pc will run linux better than the ps3.
Not the point. I own my ps3, don't try to tell me what to do with it.
(I fully agree with cheaters being kicked off and perma-banned from the multiplayer network, by the way. I just disagree that it's in any way a good design to have security enforced on the client. This was learned waaaay back in the days of quakeworld and other pioneering multiplayer online games)
So, even before it goes to court, you've decided that Sony are legally right, and that you don't want to fight this bullshit. Your idea that it's fine to release info as long as you do it anonymously is retarded in the extreme.
The rest of us have an issue with Sony's behaviour, and even if we don't agree with everything geohot does or much of how he does it, we tend to agree that it's a court case that needs to go the right way to put a stop to the continuing erosion of our rights over our hardware.
Absolutely, there is, and if that happens to be the outcome then the next step should be stronger action to change the law.
I know, I know, in reality the next step will be "piss and moan about it on the internet", but at least at that point the law is ironclad and we know
a) where we have to fight to get our rights back and
b) that we really don't own these devices in the eyes of the law, and to treat them as rental machines in future (or stay away from them completely)