Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
But that's the thing, people often do. Modern mass marketing is exactly that. A saturated market is zero sum; when one marketing message wins another one must lose.
We as a society are going to need to come to terms with this as marketing becomes more efficient and manipulative. I'm not sure what the solution is but more speech is probably not it.
Personally, I'd try to make unnecessary repetition of messages illegal. That's spam and serves no positive purpose.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The ISP's have sat fat and lazy for too long just selling you a "faster pipe" as the last mile of cable got faster.
True. One thing that bugs me is the lack of support for multicast. This has the potential to significantly and cheaply improve network efficiency with almost no change in network hardware at all and yet, with a few honorable exceptions, ISP's have been too slack to consistently implement it.
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Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
... and stop complaining over what the marketing copy said.
No, if the marketing copy was dishonest he has every right to complain. A lot of marketing parasites like to pretend they're allowed to commit fraud. No actually, they're not.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Because my application is better at knowing how to adapt to a given amount of bandwidth than TCP/IP is.
No it isn't. You are implicitly assuming your application is running in isolation, unfortunately a common naive programmer mistake.
All running applications using the link together know better than TCP/IP how to allocate bandwidth but no one application does. Most of your complaints about TCP/IP are due to the intrinsic problem of getting different applications with no knowledge of each other to cooperate, not TCP/IP as such.
To put it another way: TCP/IP's algorithm for bandwidth sharing can never be optimal because it doesn't have the high level knowledge that the application does, but then, neither does each application.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Yes. To verify a system is uncompromised from a possibly compromised system is idiotic. If a person doesn't understand this then they are not a competent programmer.
I've said for years that most "anti-virus" companies are engaged in fraud and the CEO's of most "anti-virus" companies should've been in jail for it a long time ago. It shows how low the IT industry has sunk when even quite basic fraud like this is being allowed to continue. At the very least there should have been a class-action lawsuit.
The only way to truly verify a system is good is to do it from a known good system. For a standalone PC that means booting off known-good read-only media, usually a CDROM, and using that to verify the checksums of all the critical files on the hard disk. To handle updates the CDROM needs to have enough smarts to download signed checksums of updates off the net and storing them in encrypted form (so malware can't tamper with it) on read-write media, preferably a memory key only inserted into the system when booted off the read-only media.
Part of the reason this has not been done until now is that third parties could not easily read the proprietary undocumented NTFS file system, because BS OS licensing made it difficult and expensive to have a separate boot and because M$, incredibly, stopped shipping CDROM's of their OS. Now that NTFS has been reverse engineered it is possible to create a third-party Linux CDROM that can do all of the above. This is the only practical way to stop the Windows virus pandemic. Ironic that the best way to verify a windows system may be to use a linux system.
To anticipate a few questions:
Yes, Joe Sixpack is perfectly capable of inserting a CDROM, pressing the reset key and following the limited instructions (ie. get professional help if a virus is found or recover files off the known good distribution media).
Yes, this approach perfectly capable of protecting Joe Sixpack's personal files if the CDROM has enough smarts to back up personal files and check sum them every time it is run. Even if it doesn't do this it's still verifying the system is uncompromised.
Yes, it's perfectly capable of verifying every executable on the system, including those not initially distributed with the OS.
Yes, both whitelist and blacklist checksumming is possible at the same time. What a concept!
Good system/network administrators already automatically, regularly checksum verify all the systems they manage to verify their systems have not been corrupted, whether by a virus or a hardware error. It works. If they don't they are mediocre administrator at best.
M$ is perfectly capable of creating such a CDROM however those "professionals" have chosen not to and allow the virus/bot pandemic to continue. And they wonder why some people don't like them.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
I'm just sick of the entitlement mentality that is wedded to a near Stockholm Syndrome among a lot of younger people.
Copyright is misnamed - it is a privilege not a right - and it is not at all clear that giving an individual the ability to stop copying, potentially by billions, is a sensible thing to do.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
You're a bigot. Either that or a lying astroturfer. Let me fix that for you:
Closed-source software often times has very poor support options. Unanswered phone calls and "we'll fix it in the next release in a year's time" are not substitutes for email messages often returned with fixes in hours.
The reality, not the fiction that you're spouting, is that you can get support for any software, closed or open. Except that with open source you have more competition and more options.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
If I call the RIAA and say that I want to purchase the right to put hit song X on my website for every visitor to my website to download for free and ask what it would cost to purchase this right
In a true free market that price might have some meaning. In the current oligopoly that price is meaningless and insulting. Those dinosaurs need to die.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
The fact that your fellow citizens will cheer as the feds waterboard the key out of you really puts that in perspective, though.
Not needed. M$ (and almost certainly the US government through a secret security letter) have full and almost unhindered access to every network connected windows, and possibly linux, box on earth.
To preempt one argument: No, they're not going to be easily detected - they'll use steganography for network traffic and only install the spying software (via M$ update) on "persons/countries of interest".
Encryption is pointless when they have the keys to your computer. They built it after all and the general population intuitively understands that.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Be warned people - there's a lot of lying astroturfers on stories like these. They've flooded movie theatres with their propaganda, and they're doing the same on popular online forums like slashdot. Usually mysteriously mod'ed up, probably by sock puppets.
They're trying to manipulate you with their content-free paid propaganda by fraudulently pretending to be a citizen "just like you" so you don't discount the completely bigoted, one-sided view they represent.
They usually have some token point of agreement (e.g. "I certainly understand that not every copy is a lost sale"), usually immediately negated (e.g. "but piracy does hurt real people") because if they didn't their propaganda would be completely unbelievable. They like to do the "ignore the messenger, look at the message" line because they pretend that the messenger isn't an important part of the message (if it wasn't important why do they feel the need to engage in fraud?). They've gotten more sophisticated recently but it's still the same nonsense endlessly repeated with no actual facts.
Lying scum the lot of them.
A lot of people on slashdot, particularly the young and the naive, don't realize just how much astroturf is going on these days on many different sites, both in the "stories" (which are often just content free marketing drivel - they spam the editors until one gets through) and in the comments (where frauds pretend to be ordinary people rather than the paid scum they are).
they're not sneaking into government buildings at night photographing secret documents with tiny cameras, or planting bugs, or etc.
That's so passé.
Covert agents recruit trusted locals to do any sneaky stuff
Like that network connected windows office PC or smartphone sitting on the desk there. The one with the cute animated LOLcat screensaver. With the built-in microphone and camera.
M$ (and almost certainly the US government with a secret "security letter") have complete access to every network connected Windows box, and possibly many Linux boxes, on earth. It's too easy.
Given the history and current paranoia of the US government you are foolish if you use US made "smart" products when competing with US interests. And no, network sniffing is not going to help you when the network traffic uses steganography, pretends to be a new virus if necessary and is only enabled selectively.
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Anonymous company communication should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require visible accountability.
Ok, settle down for a second and catch your breath. Good.
Why should he? Why on earth should marketers have a soapbox, millions of hours of soapbox, and nobody else? Most marketers are an invasive bunch of pricks that have basically destroyed broadcast television (the net value of TV programs to the viewer is zero because of advertising) and are trying to do the same to the web, video on demand and pretty much every other media. Modern mass marketing has become a costly arms race to get mind share where everybody loses except the marketing parasites.
showing you products that you probably aren't interested in.
Well, duh. The vast majority of people have no interest in your so-called "targeted" ad's either so your argument is BS. I don't think I've seen a useful "targeted" ad in years. Marketers can be willfully ignorant about their "targeting" when it suits them.
In essence, I think it's an unfair assertion that marketers are, as you say, "relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever."
Marketers will do anything legal that makes money. Whether it's worthwhile for the customer is almost irrelevant. That's a pretty good definition of amorality.
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Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
Since you've defended your position on "the right of crap developers to be crap because they're not paid" over several iterations, I don't expect you to see the light now. But I'm afraid you're dead wrong, and just showing yourself to lack good judgement.
You are the one that is dead wrong. In a free country people can do what they damn well please, including writing crap code and ignoring suggestions.
What they can't do is claim, implicitly or explicitly, that some pile of of useless bits is a functioning application for a particular target audience. When deliberately done that's fraud.
Some younger developers are way over-enthusiastic about their creations, lacking the experience to judge where they fit in the scheme of things. These developers need to be bought gently back to reality with detailed and hopefully positive feedback so they can do better next time. The deliberate frauds, probably marketing, should be exposed for what they are and shunned.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
It would be cheaper to buy some sort of insurance.
Unless he has good reason to believe he is at higher risk than the general population, and the insurance company doesn't, insurance won't help.
Insurers are in business to make a profit ie. a loss for you. You should never insure anything that you can cover with your own cash flow for that reason.
The sole practical reason to have insurance is to use the larger cash reserves of the insurer to reduce the probability of variability in your own cash reserves. Depending on your personal circumstances this may indirectly reduce losses however insurers will likely price their insurance with that in mind, meaning that it may only be marginally worthwhile in any case.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Not even. They patented a method for scrolling up/down the same amount regardless of any zoom factor. Not all methods, and certainly not pgup/pgdn.
Which is obvious to somebody skilled in the art.
Is it naive to think that this isn't a purposeful ommission?
Why is it that every patent story on slashdot always obfuscates the fact that patents cover methods of implementation, and not all encompassing ideas?
Because even the patent office hasn't a clue what is the difference between methods and ideas. The entire patent edifice is based on little more than handwaving, though they try to obscure that fact with lots of terminology and assorted other BS.
They can't even objectively answer whether two ideas are the same or different. Nobody can, particularly in something as amorphous and ill-defined as software (e.g. they are forever confusing new words with new ideas), and the fact they fraudulently claim they can means everyone suffers.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Yes the charge rate is slower, but you need far fewer plugs - I've managed to get usb chargers for all my gadgets ( ds included ) and net result is I only need to manage one plug for the server. ( the number of usb cables is a different question, but they are much easier to manage ).
Watch out though; there's plenty of cheap, out-of-spec USB devices out there, both under-current supplies and over-current loads, that can fry whatever they're connected to. I've lost a laptop USB port and a USB hub this way and I've had mysterious laptop problems caused by USB devices pulling down the power.
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DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
Consider this - how often is a neophyte going to connect to a site with a self-signed certificate that actually has important information to keep encrypted but without any special instructions given ahead of time?
Often, when browsers are fixed and as more people become aware of the need for communications security. I for one would like to see many more websites with logins currently unencrypted using self-signed certificates.
Now how often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site (of a site which, by definition has important information, else it wouldn't be spoofed) with the use of a self-signed certificate?
Wrong question. The correction question is: How often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site with a self-signed certificate compared to a bare spoof site? As I said the problem is not self-signed sites but Firefox conflating increased communication security with external validation.
Talk about missing the point. Neophytes will NEVER know what to do with a pop-up of highly technical nature like this one.
You sound exactly like the egotistical programmers I've been talking about. The general population is perfectly capable of understanding the concept of general communication security ("improved communication security is being used between your computer and this web site's computer however the web site itself could potentially be a 'spoof' site as it has not been guaranteed non-fake by a third party") and validation ("'x' guarantees that this web site is not fake"). Like I said use mainstream English and if technical details are useful to specialists hide them behind a Technical Details button.
So better that the pop-up guide the neophyte into the default safe case while still providing information and choice to cognizant users.
No, better is what I've previously said and you've ignored.
That's exactly what firefox does now.
Which is wrong because it conflates communication security and validation, trains most users to ignore important messages and makes the use of self-signed certificates unnecessarily hard.
Unfortunately, attitudes like yours are a part of the reason why public key encryption isn't more widely used. The general public fully understands the general concepts of security. What they don't understand is jargon and why they should spend any time at all worrying about computer security, as distinct from personal security, when computers are perfectly capable of having high grade encryption and computer identity validation, as distinct from people/company identity validation, on all network links with no user interaction at all.
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Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
Until self-signed certificates are less safe than bare http any justification for putting up scary messages for self-signed only is nonsense.
The real problems that need to be fixed are:
The potential for confusion between externally signed and self-signed and the degree of trust thus evidenced. Firefox should use a different lock icon for encrypted transport and for identity validated instead of conflating the two. Some more extensive interface change might be appropriate (color change somewhere?)
It's a site change from externally signed to self-signed or bare, or from self-signed to bare that should be flagged. Firefox should remember signed site state and flag with popups when those transitions occur. Those popups should be integrated with the existing warning popups.
That seems like a pretty good policy to me.
It's not good policy to put up popups that have no meaning. Just like the boy that cried wolf and Vista UAC all you're doing is training the user to ignore popups when they do matter.
Programmers complain incessantly about users ignoring messages. Almost always it's the programmer's fault for not designing their user interface for their target audience. Why on earth should a user take any notice of messages that
are meaningless because they're written in software dialect English not mainstream English
are often more important to the programmer than to the user
do not give the user any avenue to respond. i.e. do not tell the user step-by-step what to do.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets.
Many countries have much stricter privacy rules than the USA. Access to electoral rolls and birth, death and marriage information is restricted and the only realistic way to get the information is via marketing signups or fraud. Reselling of personal information obtained for a specific purpose is also restricted.
The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer.
and your bank statements too. Doesn't stop any misuse that isn't detected as fraudulent.
Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.
No, for most of the world's population it's not out there and these privacy concerns are completely valid.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it can have negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
People should receive due process, no matter what they appear to be doing.
Problem is, we live in an imperfect world. The police aren't mind readers, they have to believe what they see and make reasonable decisions based on what they see and currently if they see a "shooter" on a rooftop the balance of probabilities is that they're dangerous and need to be controlled before an innocent gets hurt (including themselves if they're mentally ill). Like many real world situations there's no time for due process but making an incomplete decision on incomplete information in limited time is better than making no decision at all and possibly allowing an innocent getting hurt. If your game ever became popular then the balance of probabilities would change and maybe what the police would do would change too.
However, there's also the added problem that police are only human and some are in dangerous situations every day. That means if they personally want survive for any length of time statistically they have to assume the worst every day. Even though they will be wrong more often than not, they will be right when it matters to them, when they really are personally in danger.
A bit like the distinction between type I and type II errors in statistics. Not sure what can be done about it other than giving police non-lethal options and protecting them as much as possible so they don't feel the need to assume/do the worst all the time.
Are they mad? The work of thousands of scientists published on line for all to see. A reasonable generic copyright license. All downloadable.
What about the poor deserving lawyers? Where is the DRM? The commercial propaganda about "IP"? The hundred page license? The attempts by assorted hangers on to profit at other people's expense?
I think the lawyers should form a class action lawsuit for loss of income. It's just not right that somebody should be able to do something without numerous lawyers attached.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
But that's the thing, people often do. Modern mass marketing is exactly that. A saturated market is zero sum; when one marketing message wins another one must lose.
We as a society are going to need to come to terms with this as marketing becomes more efficient and manipulative. I'm not sure what the solution is but more speech is probably not it.
Personally, I'd try to make unnecessary repetition of messages illegal. That's spam and serves no positive purpose.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
the real powerhouse voices are still MOSTLY on the left-end of the spectrum.
Only from your personal point of view.
Most of the world regards the BBC etc. as centrist and US politics as generally right wing.
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Stop using tab characters in your code!
The ISP's have sat fat and lazy for too long just selling you a "faster pipe" as the last mile of cable got faster.
True. One thing that bugs me is the lack of support for multicast. This has the potential to significantly and cheaply improve network efficiency with almost no change in network hardware at all and yet, with a few honorable exceptions, ISP's have been too slack to consistently implement it.
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Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
No, if the marketing copy was dishonest he has every right to complain. A lot of marketing parasites like to pretend they're allowed to commit fraud. No actually, they're not.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Because my application is better at knowing how to adapt to a given amount of bandwidth than TCP/IP is.
No it isn't. You are implicitly assuming your application is running in isolation, unfortunately a common naive programmer mistake.
All running applications using the link together know better than TCP/IP how to allocate bandwidth but no one application does. Most of your complaints about TCP/IP are due to the intrinsic problem of getting different applications with no knowledge of each other to cooperate, not TCP/IP as such.
To put it another way: TCP/IP's algorithm for bandwidth sharing can never be optimal because it doesn't have the high level knowledge that the application does, but then, neither does each application.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Yes. To verify a system is uncompromised from a possibly compromised system is idiotic. If a person doesn't understand this then they are not a competent programmer.
I've said for years that most "anti-virus" companies are engaged in fraud and the CEO's of most "anti-virus" companies should've been in jail for it a long time ago. It shows how low the IT industry has sunk when even quite basic fraud like this is being allowed to continue. At the very least there should have been a class-action lawsuit.
The only way to truly verify a system is good is to do it from a known good system. For a standalone PC that means booting off known-good read-only media, usually a CDROM, and using that to verify the checksums of all the critical files on the hard disk. To handle updates the CDROM needs to have enough smarts to download signed checksums of updates off the net and storing them in encrypted form (so malware can't tamper with it) on read-write media, preferably a memory key only inserted into the system when booted off the read-only media.
Part of the reason this has not been done until now is that third parties could not easily read the proprietary undocumented NTFS file system, because BS OS licensing made it difficult and expensive to have a separate boot and because M$, incredibly, stopped shipping CDROM's of their OS. Now that NTFS has been reverse engineered it is possible to create a third-party Linux CDROM that can do all of the above. This is the only practical way to stop the Windows virus pandemic. Ironic that the best way to verify a windows system may be to use a linux system.
To anticipate a few questions:
M$ is perfectly capable of creating such a CDROM however those "professionals" have chosen not to and allow the virus/bot pandemic to continue. And they wonder why some people don't like them.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
I'm just sick of the entitlement mentality that is wedded to a near Stockholm Syndrome among a lot of younger people.
Copyright is misnamed - it is a privilege not a right - and it is not at all clear that giving an individual the ability to stop copying, potentially by billions, is a sensible thing to do.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
You're a bigot. Either that or a lying astroturfer. Let me fix that for you:
Closed-source software often times has very poor support options. Unanswered phone calls and "we'll fix it in the next release in a year's time" are not substitutes for email messages often returned with fixes in hours.
The reality, not the fiction that you're spouting, is that you can get support for any software, closed or open. Except that with open source you have more competition and more options.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
If I call the RIAA and say that I want to purchase the right to put hit song X on my website for every visitor to my website to download for free and ask what it would cost to purchase this right
In a true free market that price might have some meaning. In the current oligopoly that price is meaningless and insulting. Those dinosaurs need to die.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
The fact that your fellow citizens will cheer as the feds waterboard the key out of you really puts that in perspective, though.
Not needed. M$ (and almost certainly the US government through a secret security letter) have full and almost unhindered access to every network connected windows, and possibly linux, box on earth.
To preempt one argument: No, they're not going to be easily detected - they'll use steganography for network traffic and only install the spying software (via M$ update) on "persons/countries of interest".
Encryption is pointless when they have the keys to your computer. They built it after all and the general population intuitively understands that.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Be warned people - there's a lot of lying astroturfers on stories like these. They've flooded movie theatres with their propaganda, and they're doing the same on popular online forums like slashdot. Usually mysteriously mod'ed up, probably by sock puppets.
They're trying to manipulate you with their content-free paid propaganda by fraudulently pretending to be a citizen "just like you" so you don't discount the completely bigoted, one-sided view they represent.
They usually have some token point of agreement (e.g. "I certainly understand that not every copy is a lost sale"), usually immediately negated (e.g. "but piracy does hurt real people") because if they didn't their propaganda would be completely unbelievable. They like to do the "ignore the messenger, look at the message" line because they pretend that the messenger isn't an important part of the message (if it wasn't important why do they feel the need to engage in fraud?). They've gotten more sophisticated recently but it's still the same nonsense endlessly repeated with no actual facts.
Lying scum the lot of them.
A lot of people on slashdot, particularly the young and the naive, don't realize just how much astroturf is going on these days on many different sites, both in the "stories" (which are often just content free marketing drivel - they spam the editors until one gets through) and in the comments (where frauds pretend to be ordinary people rather than the paid scum they are).
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
they're not sneaking into government buildings at night photographing secret documents with tiny cameras, or planting bugs, or etc.
That's so passé.
Covert agents recruit trusted locals to do any sneaky stuff
Like that network connected windows office PC or smartphone sitting on the desk there. The one with the cute animated LOLcat screensaver. With the built-in microphone and camera.
M$ (and almost certainly the US government with a secret "security letter") have complete access to every network connected Windows box, and possibly many Linux boxes, on earth. It's too easy.
Given the history and current paranoia of the US government you are foolish if you use US made "smart" products when competing with US interests. And no, network sniffing is not going to help you when the network traffic uses steganography, pretends to be a new virus if necessary and is only enabled selectively.
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Anonymous company communication should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require visible accountability.
Ok, settle down for a second and catch your breath. Good.
Why should he? Why on earth should marketers have a soapbox, millions of hours of soapbox, and nobody else? Most marketers are an invasive bunch of pricks that have basically destroyed broadcast television (the net value of TV programs to the viewer is zero because of advertising) and are trying to do the same to the web, video on demand and pretty much every other media. Modern mass marketing has become a costly arms race to get mind share where everybody loses except the marketing parasites.
showing you products that you probably aren't interested in.
Well, duh. The vast majority of people have no interest in your so-called "targeted" ad's either so your argument is BS. I don't think I've seen a useful "targeted" ad in years. Marketers can be willfully ignorant about their "targeting" when it suits them.
In essence, I think it's an unfair assertion that marketers are, as you say, "relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever."
Marketers will do anything legal that makes money. Whether it's worthwhile for the customer is almost irrelevant. That's a pretty good definition of amorality.
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Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
Since you've defended your position on "the right of crap developers to be crap because they're not paid" over several iterations, I don't expect you to see the light now. But I'm afraid you're dead wrong, and just showing yourself to lack good judgement.
You are the one that is dead wrong. In a free country people can do what they damn well please, including writing crap code and ignoring suggestions.
What they can't do is claim, implicitly or explicitly, that some pile of of useless bits is a functioning application for a particular target audience. When deliberately done that's fraud.
Some younger developers are way over-enthusiastic about their creations, lacking the experience to judge where they fit in the scheme of things. These developers need to be bought gently back to reality with detailed and hopefully positive feedback so they can do better next time. The deliberate frauds, probably marketing, should be exposed for what they are and shunned.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
It would be cheaper to buy some sort of insurance.
Unless he has good reason to believe he is at higher risk than the general population, and the insurance company doesn't, insurance won't help.
Insurers are in business to make a profit ie. a loss for you. You should never insure anything that you can cover with your own cash flow for that reason.
The sole practical reason to have insurance is to use the larger cash reserves of the insurer to reduce the probability of variability in your own cash reserves. Depending on your personal circumstances this may indirectly reduce losses however insurers will likely price their insurance with that in mind, meaning that it may only be marginally worthwhile in any case.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Not even. They patented a method for scrolling up/down the same amount regardless of any zoom factor. Not all methods, and certainly not pgup/pgdn.
Which is obvious to somebody skilled in the art.
Is it naive to think that this isn't a purposeful ommission?
Why is it that every patent story on slashdot always obfuscates the fact that patents cover methods of implementation, and not all encompassing ideas?
Because even the patent office hasn't a clue what is the difference between methods and ideas. The entire patent edifice is based on little more than handwaving, though they try to obscure that fact with lots of terminology and assorted other BS.
They can't even objectively answer whether two ideas are the same or different. Nobody can, particularly in something as amorphous and ill-defined as software (e.g. they are forever confusing new words with new ideas), and the fact they fraudulently claim they can means everyone suffers.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
he can add in a small laptop with a power adapter and a media reader (usb ports, card reader, optical drive, whatever he needs).
Make sure there's no DRM like WGA on the laptop.
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How many proprietary dependencies do your archival backups have?
Yes the charge rate is slower, but you need far fewer plugs - I've managed to get usb chargers for all my gadgets ( ds included ) and net result is I only need to manage one plug for the server. ( the number of usb cables is a different question, but they are much easier to manage ).
Watch out though; there's plenty of cheap, out-of-spec USB devices out there, both under-current supplies and over-current loads, that can fry whatever they're connected to. I've lost a laptop USB port and a USB hub this way and I've had mysterious laptop problems caused by USB devices pulling down the power.
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DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
Consider this - how often is a neophyte going to connect to a site with a self-signed certificate that actually has important information to keep encrypted but without any special instructions given ahead of time?
Often, when browsers are fixed and as more people become aware of the need for communications security. I for one would like to see many more websites with logins currently unencrypted using self-signed certificates.
Now how often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site (of a site which, by definition has important information, else it wouldn't be spoofed) with the use of a self-signed certificate?
Wrong question. The correction question is: How often is a neophyte going to connect to a spoof site with a self-signed certificate compared to a bare spoof site? As I said the problem is not self-signed sites but Firefox conflating increased communication security with external validation.
Talk about missing the point. Neophytes will NEVER know what to do with a pop-up of highly technical nature like this one.
You sound exactly like the egotistical programmers I've been talking about. The general population is perfectly capable of understanding the concept of general communication security ("improved communication security is being used between your computer and this web site's computer however the web site itself could potentially be a 'spoof' site as it has not been guaranteed non-fake by a third party") and validation ("'x' guarantees that this web site is not fake"). Like I said use mainstream English and if technical details are useful to specialists hide them behind a Technical Details button.
So better that the pop-up guide the neophyte into the default safe case while still providing information and choice to cognizant users.
No, better is what I've previously said and you've ignored.
That's exactly what firefox does now.
Which is wrong because it conflates communication security and validation, trains most users to ignore important messages and makes the use of self-signed certificates unnecessarily hard.
Unfortunately, attitudes like yours are a part of the reason why public key encryption isn't more widely used. The general public fully understands the general concepts of security. What they don't understand is jargon and why they should spend any time at all worrying about computer security, as distinct from personal security, when computers are perfectly capable of having high grade encryption and computer identity validation, as distinct from people/company identity validation, on all network links with no user interaction at all.
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Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
Kudos for him for speaking up rather than trying to abuse the situation.
How do you know he didn't make a copy before speaking up? Get the cash and the kudos...
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Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
Until self-signed certificates are less safe than bare http any justification for putting up scary messages for self-signed only is nonsense.
The real problems that need to be fixed are:
That seems like a pretty good policy to me.
It's not good policy to put up popups that have no meaning. Just like the boy that cried wolf and Vista UAC all you're doing is training the user to ignore popups when they do matter.
Programmers complain incessantly about users ignoring messages. Almost always it's the programmer's fault for not designing their user interface for their target audience. Why on earth should a user take any notice of messages that
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets.
Many countries have much stricter privacy rules than the USA. Access to electoral rolls and birth, death and marriage information is restricted and the only realistic way to get the information is via marketing signups or fraud. Reselling of personal information obtained for a specific purpose is also restricted.
The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer.
and your bank statements too. Doesn't stop any misuse that isn't detected as fraudulent.
Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.
No, for most of the world's population it's not out there and these privacy concerns are completely valid.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it can have negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
People should receive due process, no matter what they appear to be doing.
Problem is, we live in an imperfect world. The police aren't mind readers, they have to believe what they see and make reasonable decisions based on what they see and currently if they see a "shooter" on a rooftop the balance of probabilities is that they're dangerous and need to be controlled before an innocent gets hurt (including themselves if they're mentally ill). Like many real world situations there's no time for due process but making an incomplete decision on incomplete information in limited time is better than making no decision at all and possibly allowing an innocent getting hurt. If your game ever became popular then the balance of probabilities would change and maybe what the police would do would change too.
However, there's also the added problem that police are only human and some are in dangerous situations every day. That means if they personally want survive for any length of time statistically they have to assume the worst every day. Even though they will be wrong more often than not, they will be right when it matters to them, when they really are personally in danger.
A bit like the distinction between type I and type II errors in statistics. Not sure what can be done about it other than giving police non-lethal options and protecting them as much as possible so they don't feel the need to assume/do the worst all the time.
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Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA
Copyright license
Are they mad? The work of thousands of scientists published on line for all to see. A reasonable generic copyright license. All downloadable.
What about the poor deserving lawyers? Where is the DRM? The commercial propaganda about "IP"? The hundred page license? The attempts by assorted hangers on to profit at other people's expense?
I think the lawyers should form a class action lawsuit for loss of income. It's just not right that somebody should be able to do something without numerous lawyers attached.