Ford wants to exploit these fools even more. So they create their own line of gas stations, that sell the same fuel as everywhere else, but at five times the cost. Then they change the hole in the gas tank to a star shape, so that you can't fill the car up anywhere but at their gas stations.
The difference is, Ford doesn't have the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. To Apple, the "Ford" here is making it easier for the owner to choose-- less choice means it's easier to decide. What could be simpler than that? That's a good thing, as long as you're not a power user. But Apple has never been about power users, it's been about computing for dummies. Get used to it already. So you're not a dummy. So don't buy Apple products, get it?
This is not particularly a new phenomenon. Something like 30 years ago I recall discovering a place in the middle of Burbank in an industrial warehouse that billed itself as a "library" for phonograph records. I was able to go there, ask about a particularly obscure record, and obtain a cassette dup of it for about $5.
They wouldn't let anyone's hands on the actual source disk, they ONLY provided tape dups. They had a huge selection of stuff that would otherwise be really hard to find (this was way before eBay). It appeared that they did this service for the "entertainment" industry who needed ready access, so I suspect that the powers-that-be turned a blind-eye to it. Perhaps you were supposed to erase the tape after listening to it, though I don't think anything was said about it. I don't remember how I found out about it, possibly via a friend of mine who worked for Motown studios, or another friend who was an assistant film editor. I went once to get a tape of a very obscure disk I wanted to hear and never got around to going back again-- I lived in LA at the time, but the weren't very conveniently located or I might have spent more time there...
I've never read anything by P. K. Dick, and haven't seen a movie based on, "Do Androids..." (at least, as far as I know-- perhaps "Creation of the Humanoids?"). However, I coincidentally happened to name one of my abstract digital paintings "Nexus 6" because it looked somewhat like a network and was the sixth version of it.
They will need a bureaucracy to maintain the list of banned sites, and to insure all the various ISPs are informed of it. Then it only takes one to leak the list (or maybe two, if they try to track which list is leaked by inserting a tracking entry), and we can then all freely explore what problems it has and how ineffective it really is, and enjoy the Streisand effect on it all. And of course, they'll ultimately try to block WikiLeaks and that'll go over like a lead balloon, as it's a popular enough site that they won't be able to keep that under wraps in any event.
A couple of days ago NPR had an interview with some government security guy who was arguing for banning the Islamic terrorist's sites. As if that would do any good-- don't these guys have any idea how the internet works? Even if you can ban some specific DNS names or IP addresses, it'll get proxied all over hell and/or the very worst that would happen is they would translate the sites into something apparently benign but with coded content, so it won't really have much effect on their ability to communicate...
Seems to me, that if you translate your content into something that appears to support a wedge issue that the powers that be are overly fond of, say, anti-abortion or pro-life (or one of each), they can't block it with out a lot of stink about censorship and will find a bunch of rabid conservatives or liberals all ready to rise up and fight for the cause. And how hard would it be to produce a custom browser that can assemble the uncoded content from a couple of such sites, and perhaps using redundant sites and a ready ability to update the sitelist info? It may not be necessary to go anywhere near that far, but it shows that there is no way that content can be blocked on the internet-- just get over it already...
It essentially has a fixed histogram. I wonder what you'd get back from them if you sent them an image specifically designed to be hard to fit into that histogram...
You have to ask, just how many bloated egos can one organization sustain? There's probably enough there already subject to easy bruising. And those egos need some drones to actually do the work...
The newscorps are dinosaurs struggling to get out of the tar pits-- but the harder they struggle, the faster they get sucked down.
I don't read print newspapers at all and while I visit google news periodically, I rarely click through anyway-- the headlines are enough to tell me what I want to know for the most part. If they start blocking the click through, they'll lose the only chance they will have of subjecting my eyeballs to advertising. I do consume newsradio or newsvideo now and then, but most of it is so horribly biased I'd never pay to get it from one source...
To even consider lowering your resolution to make icons/fonts larger is moronic.
I wish this were true. Try running with large fonts for awhile and cranking up the font size in your browser. You'll find all sorts of things that don't work very well with them. In fact, to enter this reply I had to use alt-minus to resize down this page as otherwise half of the text was overwriting the other half. Most apps haven't been tested very well with large fonts. I do run like that rather than set the pixel resolution down, but it's quirky to say the least.
And to all you morons saying "get some glasses"-- just you wait. When you get to be 40-50 your focus range degrades until you have to have glasses for close, for distance, etc.-- why do you think they have bifocals/trifocals/progressives? And the problem is, by the time you get your new super-progressive lenses, you're eyes have already started to shift their prescription, so that halfway before your insurance will allow you to get another pair, your prescription is out of whack. You'll start dragging your glasses out to the end of your nose in order to change the focus for closer work, and small print is really hell. Either you have to put it right up to your bloody nose without your glasses to be in focus, and then you're in so close you're blocking the light and/or you have to move your head (or the object) right to left in order to read it all, or you try to use your glasses and have to hold it 2 feet away in order to be in focus and then it's too small to make out at that distance.
Large fonts help a lot, though I wish more apps were thoroughly tested using them. I suspect many of those apps have been programmed by the morons posting about glasses here...
It's an absolute fact that not having a 4-year degree will keep you out of some programming jobs. But, it's quite likely that those jobs it will keep you out of, are ones you would want to be kept out of in any case.
But for the sake of argument let's pretend they manage to store all that data. Do you really think they'll be able to go through all that data to find anything meaningful? It's like trying to find one particular drop of water while getting sprayed by an infinitely-supplied firehose.
It's not necessary to store it all, collecting traffic selectively via various types of searches-- keywords, looking for encrypted traffic of a certain sort, etc.
Even if this is only done by sampling-- intermittently and periodically or narrowing the target to what's going through a particular node that has some feature of interest. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of ways that data collection can occur that might happen to pick up your communications-- such as if a terrorist target happens to have the same name as you, causing the equipment to single out your messages.
And before you say those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about, there isn't ANYONE who has nothing to hide-- if you disagree please send me your credit card information. Imagine an unscrupulous employee at the NSA who decides to start collecting credit card or insider trading information that they happen to encounter while sampling the data streams. Or suppose he sees an email that indicates you recently bought a wide screen TV and you'll be in Florida next weekend (assuming you don't already live in Florida). That information could be passed to someone that might use your financial information, destroy a stock that you own, or help a burglar to locate a target.
The web is about freely exchanged, individually generated content. Facebook, myspace, twitter, et. al., are about taking that free exchange and privatizing it. The problem is not that they're doing it, but that people don't realize they're doing it and actually patronize these restrictive services because of the pretty shiny things the services hold up in front of them.
But if you haven't noticed, such things do have a tendency to be faddish and users soon tire of them. The reason for this is that real open web services that can do similar things are not all that hard to devise and do not have the restrictions on functionality that proprietary systems must impose in order to maintain their business models. So ultimately they cannot compete in the free realm unless they can capture sufficient share and that in itself becomes a feature that is hard to compete against (much like eBay, where an auction site is not all that hard to develop, but requires sufficient user base out of the box to have any hope of competing with eBay). It strikes me though that social networking so far at least, doesn't provide sufficient lock-in based on number of users. Some may disagree about that with a site such as Facebook, but I suspect the right cute social interchange software that lacks Facebook's proprietary restrictions could produce a mass-exodus rather quickly I would think. It wouldn't take long for some new shiny toy to attract the fickle users to another new service-- and they're all free (of charge) after all, even if they're not free (as in freedom).
And for those of you who don't get the "restrictions" thing (as in "what restrictions?"), perhaps you wonder why Facebook hosts your images themselves rather than allowing you to host them elsewhere, and why you are limited in what HTML you can put on your facebook page? Facebook wants to do a couple of things, that it doesn't want you to do. Facebook wants to track the activity on your page, and won't allow you to track your own. If you had the ability to add an externally hosted image to your page or sufficient HTML, you could track the users who access your Facebook information, and in fact, potentially alter it based on who the user is. If you had the ability to control your Facebook pages to that extent, you could probably set up your own advertising space as well-- another thing that Facebook is "faced" with restricting in order to protect their raison d'etre.
Slashdot Mirror
They're really reaching for this one...
"What you need to hear," was a fad that died out by the 1960s once Edgar R. Murrow, H. L. Menken, and a few of their peers faded out.
Good night, and good luck.
Ford wants to exploit these fools even more. So they create their own line of gas stations, that sell the same fuel as everywhere else, but at five times the cost. Then they change the hole in the gas tank to a star shape, so that you can't fill the car up anywhere but at their gas stations.
The difference is, Ford doesn't have the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. To Apple, the "Ford" here is making it easier for the owner to choose-- less choice means it's easier to decide. What could be simpler than that? That's a good thing, as long as you're not a power user. But Apple has never been about power users, it's been about computing for dummies. Get used to it already. So you're not a dummy. So don't buy Apple products, get it?
As a graphic designer, suppressing the font list would help. Why is it even needed?
Or perhaps more interesting, can I somehow use a huge font list to mount a buffer overflow attack against such monitoring programs?
We're getting the best government that money can buy. And who said the US has no state religion? It's the ALMIGHTY DOLLAR, praise the hoard.
It's comforting to see that the RIAA corps are so flush that they can afford all that government payola!
This is not particularly a new phenomenon. Something like 30 years ago I recall discovering a place in the middle of Burbank in an industrial warehouse that billed itself as a "library" for phonograph records. I was able to go there, ask about a particularly obscure record, and obtain a cassette dup of it for about $5. They wouldn't let anyone's hands on the actual source disk, they ONLY provided tape dups. They had a huge selection of stuff that would otherwise be really hard to find (this was way before eBay). It appeared that they did this service for the "entertainment" industry who needed ready access, so I suspect that the powers-that-be turned a blind-eye to it. Perhaps you were supposed to erase the tape after listening to it, though I don't think anything was said about it. I don't remember how I found out about it, possibly via a friend of mine who worked for Motown studios, or another friend who was an assistant film editor. I went once to get a tape of a very obscure disk I wanted to hear and never got around to going back again-- I lived in LA at the time, but the weren't very conveniently located or I might have spent more time there...
What do you expect from the party of Barbara Streisand, than to institutionalize the "Streisand Effect"?
I can't wait for the pop-up ads that follow your eyes around.
I've never read anything by P. K. Dick, and haven't seen a movie based on, "Do Androids..." (at least, as far as I know-- perhaps "Creation of the Humanoids?"). However, I coincidentally happened to name one of my abstract digital paintings "Nexus 6" because it looked somewhat like a network and was the sixth version of it.
Do I need a lawyer now?
They will need a bureaucracy to maintain the list of banned sites, and to insure all the various ISPs are informed of it. Then it only takes one to leak the list (or maybe two, if they try to track which list is leaked by inserting a tracking entry), and we can then all freely explore what problems it has and how ineffective it really is, and enjoy the Streisand effect on it all. And of course, they'll ultimately try to block WikiLeaks and that'll go over like a lead balloon, as it's a popular enough site that they won't be able to keep that under wraps in any event.
A couple of days ago NPR had an interview with some government security guy who was arguing for banning the Islamic terrorist's sites. As if that would do any good-- don't these guys have any idea how the internet works? Even if you can ban some specific DNS names or IP addresses, it'll get proxied all over hell and/or the very worst that would happen is they would translate the sites into something apparently benign but with coded content, so it won't really have much effect on their ability to communicate...
Seems to me, that if you translate your content into something that appears to support a wedge issue that the powers that be are overly fond of, say, anti-abortion or pro-life (or one of each), they can't block it with out a lot of stink about censorship and will find a bunch of rabid conservatives or liberals all ready to rise up and fight for the cause. And how hard would it be to produce a custom browser that can assemble the uncoded content from a couple of such sites, and perhaps using redundant sites and a ready ability to update the sitelist info? It may not be necessary to go anywhere near that far, but it shows that there is no way that content can be blocked on the internet-- just get over it already...
It essentially has a fixed histogram. I wonder what you'd get back from them if you sent them an image specifically designed to be hard to fit into that histogram...
I suppose if you tweaked the gamma and contrast enough you could make anything work without inserting "random noise"...
What were you hoping to stack on top of a box that's about 5cm wide?
His iPod
Here's a few things I don't want anyone to know (or at least, anyone to be able to google at will):
My credit card numbers
My SSN
Passwords to my computer systems
My medical records
Shouldn't be doing them, indeed. If that's what this guy's understanding of privacy is, it does not speak well for his powers of comprehension.
You have to ask, just how many bloated egos can one organization sustain? There's probably enough there already subject to easy bruising. And those egos need some drones to actually do the work...
The newscorps are dinosaurs struggling to get out of the tar pits-- but the harder they struggle, the faster they get sucked down.
I don't read print newspapers at all and while I visit google news periodically, I rarely click through anyway-- the headlines are enough to tell me what I want to know for the most part. If they start blocking the click through, they'll lose the only chance they will have of subjecting my eyeballs to advertising. I do consume newsradio or newsvideo now and then, but most of it is so horribly biased I'd never pay to get it from one source...
And I could do without breathing in all that ozone...
To even consider lowering your resolution to make icons/fonts larger is moronic.
I wish this were true. Try running with large fonts for awhile and cranking up the font size in your browser. You'll find all sorts of things that don't work very well with them. In fact, to enter this reply I had to use alt-minus to resize down this page as otherwise half of the text was overwriting the other half. Most apps haven't been tested very well with large fonts. I do run like that rather than set the pixel resolution down, but it's quirky to say the least.
And to all you morons saying "get some glasses"-- just you wait. When you get to be 40-50 your focus range degrades until you have to have glasses for close, for distance, etc.-- why do you think they have bifocals/trifocals/progressives? And the problem is, by the time you get your new super-progressive lenses, you're eyes have already started to shift their prescription, so that halfway before your insurance will allow you to get another pair, your prescription is out of whack. You'll start dragging your glasses out to the end of your nose in order to change the focus for closer work, and small print is really hell. Either you have to put it right up to your bloody nose without your glasses to be in focus, and then you're in so close you're blocking the light and/or you have to move your head (or the object) right to left in order to read it all, or you try to use your glasses and have to hold it 2 feet away in order to be in focus and then it's too small to make out at that distance.
Large fonts help a lot, though I wish more apps were thoroughly tested using them. I suspect many of those apps have been programmed by the morons posting about glasses here...
It's an absolute fact that not having a 4-year degree will keep you out of some programming jobs. But, it's quite likely that those jobs it will keep you out of, are ones you would want to be kept out of in any case.
But for the sake of argument let's pretend they manage to store all that data. Do you really think they'll be able to go through all that data to find anything meaningful? It's like trying to find one particular drop of water while getting sprayed by an infinitely-supplied firehose.
It's not necessary to store it all, collecting traffic selectively via various types of searches-- keywords, looking for encrypted traffic of a certain sort, etc. Even if this is only done by sampling-- intermittently and periodically or narrowing the target to what's going through a particular node that has some feature of interest. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of ways that data collection can occur that might happen to pick up your communications-- such as if a terrorist target happens to have the same name as you, causing the equipment to single out your messages.
And before you say those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about, there isn't ANYONE who has nothing to hide-- if you disagree please send me your credit card information. Imagine an unscrupulous employee at the NSA who decides to start collecting credit card or insider trading information that they happen to encounter while sampling the data streams. Or suppose he sees an email that indicates you recently bought a wide screen TV and you'll be in Florida next weekend (assuming you don't already live in Florida). That information could be passed to someone that might use your financial information, destroy a stock that you own, or help a burglar to locate a target.
Just what we need, a license for even MORE sloppy coding techniques...
Just tell me where I put the postit note or soda bottle to fake it out so it thinks I'm there all the time...
In my experience people who refer to themselves as Indies aren't very good.
Maybe you should get out more...
The web is about freely exchanged, individually generated content. Facebook, myspace, twitter, et. al., are about taking that free exchange and privatizing it. The problem is not that they're doing it, but that people don't realize they're doing it and actually patronize these restrictive services because of the pretty shiny things the services hold up in front of them.
But if you haven't noticed, such things do have a tendency to be faddish and users soon tire of them. The reason for this is that real open web services that can do similar things are not all that hard to devise and do not have the restrictions on functionality that proprietary systems must impose in order to maintain their business models. So ultimately they cannot compete in the free realm unless they can capture sufficient share and that in itself becomes a feature that is hard to compete against (much like eBay, where an auction site is not all that hard to develop, but requires sufficient user base out of the box to have any hope of competing with eBay). It strikes me though that social networking so far at least, doesn't provide sufficient lock-in based on number of users. Some may disagree about that with a site such as Facebook, but I suspect the right cute social interchange software that lacks Facebook's proprietary restrictions could produce a mass-exodus rather quickly I would think. It wouldn't take long for some new shiny toy to attract the fickle users to another new service-- and they're all free (of charge) after all, even if they're not free (as in freedom).
And for those of you who don't get the "restrictions" thing (as in "what restrictions?"), perhaps you wonder why Facebook hosts your images themselves rather than allowing you to host them elsewhere, and why you are limited in what HTML you can put on your facebook page? Facebook wants to do a couple of things, that it doesn't want you to do. Facebook wants to track the activity on your page, and won't allow you to track your own. If you had the ability to add an externally hosted image to your page or sufficient HTML, you could track the users who access your Facebook information, and in fact, potentially alter it based on who the user is. If you had the ability to control your Facebook pages to that extent, you could probably set up your own advertising space as well-- another thing that Facebook is "faced" with restricting in order to protect their raison d'etre.