For all those brainless sheep suggesting that Blocking Child Pornography is a good thing, please take a few seconds to think through the actual real world implications of what you're suggesting.
- In practice when they talk about filtering "the internet" they mean filtering HTTP (and HTTPS) access ONLY. - That means that OTHER distribution means (HTTP over VPN, TOR, encrypted files over P2P, URLS to FTP servers, private email servers, etc) will not be filtered.
Functionally it's just sweeping the problem under the carpet - if nobody can SEE child pornography (accidentally, I mean cause those who are REALLY into that will find ways to bypass the filter) then it must not exist, magically we believe we've solved the problem and children are not being sexually abused, right?
WRONG!
Imagine you and your famiy (wife-n-kids) are walking down a street and in passing an alley you see a homeless person being viciously stabbed to death. Rather than REPORTING this event to the police (or perhaps intervening in the situation yourself) you put your hands over your childrens eyes and ears, turn and walk away. Sure this is CONVENIENT FOR YOU, and you can pretend that the world is a safe place because your children neither saw nor heard violence - but SOMEBODY WAS MURDERED AND YOU IGNORED IT.
Filtering Child Pornography on the internet is EXACTLY the same behaviour.
Also keep in mind that just about EVERY piece of legislation proposing filtering of child pornography NEVER actually goes so far as to REQUIRE that attempted access of child pornography be reported to the police.
Seriously folks: they KNOW that someone just attempted breaking the law, they literally caught someone in the act, but they have NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER of reporting that to the police - but they somehow think they're doing something useful.
Filtering Child Pornography on the internet is all about GENERATING A WARM AND FUZZY FEELING and NOT about stamping out evil in the world (and, in doing so, instituting an infrastructure and policy of censorship). An INFINITELY better plan would be to NOT BLOCK anything, but merely reporting every access to child pornography to the proper authorities so that they can NAIL THE SICK BASTARDS!
For those who wonder why people think this is EXTREMELY POOR FORM: - Their ability to do this is based on them intercepting all your HTTP data, all the time, every day - insert massive invasion of privacy yadda yadda etc etc etc
Even if this "carbon bomb" does go off it will take decades, if not centuries, for the planet to warm to a point where it makes any significant effect on our lives.
The problem here are weasel-words like "significant effect".
Because we're already seeing: - coral deaths - drops in significant numbers at the low end of the food chain - ocean acidification impacting shellfish - sea level rise about to wipe out (any second now) low island nations (YES folks, entire NATIONs)
Sure you personally are not about to be directly impacted at your doorstep, sitting smugly in the mountains of Colorado (or your penthouse apartment in New York), but there's PLENTY of the biosphere (people included) being directly impacted today.
And the thing to keep in mind is that by the time YOU personally wake up and smell the coffee, we're ALL completely screwed, you CANNOT stop a trainwreck of this magnitude.
But HEY, just for the sake of retarded arguments - lets ASSUME that this "global warming" is not actually occurring.
From what we know of how we treat the environment, our current methods and technologies for energy production, distribution, and consumption are hugely wasteful , non-renewable, and incredibly toxic to the biosphere (erm, yes, that thing we currently have ONLY ONE of).
Peoples ONLY argument against "doing something now to stop the madness" is "but that will cost a lot of money".
REALLY? Are we as a species/civilization THAT INCREDIBLY STUPID that we'll happily put our personal short-term-greed ahead of our collective survival as a species?
Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor
If you continued to read the rest of my comments you'd see I was meaning these massive displays make sense because you're NOT USING THE COMPUTER, you're just using a PHREAKINHUGE DISPLAY (think touchscreen enabled TV WeatherMan, lecturer in a classroom flipping electronic charts, etc)
Full of apologising for crack-brained-isms of Windows8.
I for one cannot imagine using a touch-the-screen solution on the desktop or laptop.
On the other hand (er, so to speak) I am seriously looking forward to non-contact gesture technologies like Leap Motion.
Reaching forward and touching an exact spot with your finger (eg an Icon, a screen-control widget) fundamentally DOES NOT MAKE SENSE for anything other than a tablet solution.
On the flipside, reaching out towards your screen for a broad-scale gesture (swipe to move an app the the other screen, maximise an app, finger-zoom or select an area, control 3D space {google earth, etc}, shuffling a bunch of images onscreen, etc) seem completely natural. Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor - and even then it really only makes sense because you're now using that display as an advanced information kiosk not as your personal computer (different interaction rates, different interaction precision for common usage).
Having said that, there's no sane reason why in the future we will not see our displays using BOTH interaction methods (ie fully capable of direct-touch as well as Gestures in 3D Space). But I'm also sure they (er, the main computer/OS) will include some kind of basic voice control as well.
"The crapware issue is so bad that Microsoft even has "Signature"-branded PCs whose biggest selling point is the lack of trialware. An upgrade that costs a crazy $99."
Yes folks, for a measly hundred bux we'll be slightly less offensive.
Crapware on PCs is kinda like The Shouty Man in advertisements. Sure they're so in-yer-face that we notice them, but our *only* reaction is "screw that!".
Seriously folks, for the price of a cheap-n-nasty USB stick you could make ALL this "crapware" infinitely less abusive-relationship by having your default browser homepage be a "here's all the stuff we *gave* you, clicky linky to install what you like".
(a) not in your face offensive
(b) easy to hit the "tell someone who cares" button
(c) doesn't by-default bloat your machine (especially good for business users)
(d) Free USB Stick (!!!)
Don't underestimate the cost of hanging all of that golden plated little pins under your costly chip. Not to mention the cost of the socket itself on the motherboard.
Actually the MAJOR benefit is SPEED.
BGA is a format commonly used in soldered-to-the-mobo CPUs, Wikipedia lists the primary benefit of this being better performance at high speeds (due to lower inductance on the leads, less noise in the circuits, you NEED low noise on high-frequency circuits due to SNR issues).
You also get benefits from better thermal conduction from the CPU into the MOBO (yes, your motherboard does help sink some heat).
Between the rapid rate of change in CPU sockets, and the timeframe of most upgrades the overwhelming majority of customers (remember folks, this includes business/corporate sales) will at least upgrade at least the motherboard if not the entire computer.
Sure this will be a PITA for 'enthusiasts', but seriously folks - by CPU count you are NOT "most of the market". Also, if The Big I came out with all their CPUs soldered to the motherboard BUT that allowed them a straight-up 50% performance increase without any real changes on the CPU all the enthusiasts would wet themselves.
Unfortunately in this risk-vs-reward scenario there's a get-out-of-jail free card which we've ALL seen played fast-n-loose recently.
If your industry is "to big to fail" the government will step in and throw money at the problem.
So it's actually a financially viable proposition to invest in crappy workmanship, shoddy systems, and brain dead fundamentally unstable computing systems until A CRISIS LOOMS then wait for The Government so save your sorry ass.
It's EXACTLY what the banking/finance industry recently did in the US.
They KNEW perfectly well that what they did, while technically not illegal, was A REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA which *might* (possibly) not blow up in their faces, while making them insanely rich.
If business are perfectly happy with suchlike RAMPANT STUPIDITY (er I mean UNCONTROLLED GREED) even before the Government had made their "too big to fail" bailout, how much more likely is such behaviour these days?
Remember folks: if your screwup is BIG enough, there are NO CONSEQUENCES... ANY risk, no matter HOW insane, is worth it - as long as the scale of the potential disaster is large enough.
In a country where Internet Access is metered by usage forcing me to watch advertisements amounts to theft.
ESPECIALLY considering that MOST advertisements are obscenely huge either actual VIDEO or else more often HUGE flash files.
My obviously well documented history of flat out REFUSING to return to a site which either FORCES me to view ads or where I cannot successfully filter the ads shows that I have NO INTENTION of actually defrauding anyone of anything.
Legally, sites do NOT have a leg to stand on.
If your advertisements were NOT huge data-hogs and visually offensive (NB the advertising industry at one point claimed that lack of click-through was due to people not noticing their ads, which quite frankly FAILS THE LAUGH TEST) then I wouldn't be blocking them (eg Google text ads).
People like to believe that Coal and other fossil fuels continue to be long-term viable energy sources because they honestly believe that "carbon capture works".
Surely there's NOBODY out there who doesn't know that bandaid solutions eventually fail, and when they do they fail MUCH WORSE than just getting off your fat arse and fixing the problem.
My prediction for the future is that at some point a large number of previously "successful" carbon-capture schemes will fail.
Fail in the sense of "containment failure" , suddenly releasing all that previously 'captured' cee-oh-too back into the atmosphere.
In the space of a year-or-three The Balance will shift and Venus will not be much of a mystery anymore.
Don't believe me? Well think on this - millions of years ago they had a warming planet due to excess CO2 emissions, someone thought up the great plan of capturing all that excess carbon into great 'deposits' and fossilising them. (Coal, Oil, etc) "nobody will ever bother these deposits, they'll be safe FOREVER".
Anything you can do to increase profits is acceptable, irrespective of how badly it damages the environment.
And I say THE Environment because THERE IS ONLY ONE, we all share it, and once it is so badly damaged that it no longer works well for ANY part of humanity, we're ALL screwed.
Seriously folks, either clean up your act here on PLANET EARTH or fund NASA (and friends) sufficiently so that we have "a backup plan" on some other planet.
Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.
Of course, this all depends on if the tests are actually reliable.
The thing I find most frustrating is the ABSOLUTE HYPOCRISY of these major finance industry institutions.
One second they LOUDLY AND PROUDLY talk up the benefits of THE FREE MARKET but the moment that FREE becomes FREE FALL they want ABSOLUTE GUARANTEES that there will be no actual consequences to their screwup.
It's called risk-vs-reward, sometimes you push the risk too far, and sometimes you get burned. Survival of the fittest. Darwinian Evolution.
Or did they not teach these overpaid psychopathic CEOs anything at school?
If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
The problem with this statement is the core meaning of "better".
Better corporate-whore megacorp fat-cat greedy bastards or better-for-society in a "we can all make buckets of money and be happy if we play nicely" kind of way?
Not that I think companies should not make a profit. Not that I think companies should not make LOTS of profit.
But when banks are crying about their massive costs one week (to justify fee increases) and then announcing RECORD PROFITS (in a never ending succession of record profit years) there's got to be something COMPLETELY WRONG.
When financial institutions can screw up SO BADLY that literally billions of dollars are needed to bail them out yet other industries or businesses just go bankrupt when they make bad decisions, there has to be something COMPLETELY WRONG.
Slashdot Mirror
For all those brainless sheep suggesting that Blocking Child Pornography is a good thing, please take a few seconds to think through the actual real world implications of what you're suggesting.
- In practice when they talk about filtering "the internet" they mean filtering HTTP (and HTTPS) access ONLY.
- That means that OTHER distribution means (HTTP over VPN, TOR, encrypted files over P2P, URLS to FTP servers, private email servers, etc) will not be filtered.
Functionally it's just sweeping the problem under the carpet - if nobody can SEE child pornography (accidentally, I mean cause those who are REALLY into that will find ways to bypass the filter) then it must not exist, magically we believe we've solved the problem and children are not being sexually abused, right?
WRONG!
Imagine you and your famiy (wife-n-kids) are walking down a street and in passing an alley you see a homeless person being viciously stabbed to death. Rather than REPORTING this event to the police (or perhaps intervening in the situation yourself) you put your hands over your childrens eyes and ears, turn and walk away. Sure this is CONVENIENT FOR YOU, and you can pretend that the world is a safe place because your children neither saw nor heard violence - but SOMEBODY WAS MURDERED AND YOU IGNORED IT.
Filtering Child Pornography on the internet is EXACTLY the same behaviour.
Also keep in mind that just about EVERY piece of legislation proposing filtering of child pornography NEVER actually goes so far as to REQUIRE that attempted access of child pornography be reported to the police.
Seriously folks: they KNOW that someone just attempted breaking the law, they literally caught someone in the act, but they have NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER of reporting that to the police - but they somehow think they're doing something useful.
Filtering Child Pornography on the internet is all about GENERATING A WARM AND FUZZY FEELING and NOT about stamping out evil in the world (and, in doing so, instituting an infrastructure and policy of censorship). An INFINITELY better plan would be to NOT BLOCK anything, but merely reporting every access to child pornography to the proper authorities so that they can NAIL THE SICK BASTARDS!
What they were really hoping for was a set of Crystal Skulls.
Obviously Cox are a bunch of DICKS.
It's your own fault for not realising it.
For those who wonder why people think this is EXTREMELY POOR FORM:
- Their ability to do this is based on them intercepting all your HTTP data, all the time, every day - insert massive invasion of privacy yadda yadda etc etc etc
Even if this "carbon bomb" does go off it will take decades, if not centuries, for the planet to warm to a point where it makes any significant effect on our lives.
The problem here are weasel-words like "significant effect".
Because we're already seeing:
- coral deaths
- drops in significant numbers at the low end of the food chain
- ocean acidification impacting shellfish
- sea level rise about to wipe out (any second now) low island nations (YES folks, entire NATIONs)
Sure you personally are not about to be directly impacted at your doorstep, sitting smugly in the mountains of Colorado (or your penthouse apartment in New York), but there's PLENTY of the biosphere (people included) being directly impacted today.
And the thing to keep in mind is that by the time YOU personally wake up and smell the coffee, we're ALL completely screwed, you CANNOT stop a trainwreck of this magnitude.
But HEY, just for the sake of retarded arguments - lets ASSUME that this "global warming" is not actually occurring.
From what we know of how we treat the environment, our current methods and technologies for energy production, distribution, and consumption are hugely wasteful , non-renewable, and incredibly toxic to the biosphere (erm, yes, that thing we currently have ONLY ONE of).
Peoples ONLY argument against "doing something now to stop the madness" is "but that will cost a lot of money".
REALLY? Are we as a species/civilization THAT INCREDIBLY STUPID that we'll happily put our personal short-term-greed ahead of our collective survival as a species?
Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor
If you continued to read the rest of my comments you'd see I was meaning these massive displays make sense because you're NOT USING THE COMPUTER, you're just using a PHREAKINHUGE DISPLAY (think touchscreen enabled TV WeatherMan, lecturer in a classroom flipping electronic charts, etc)
Full of apologising for crack-brained-isms of Windows8.
I for one cannot imagine using a touch-the-screen solution on the desktop or laptop.
On the other hand (er, so to speak) I am seriously looking forward to non-contact gesture technologies like Leap Motion.
Reaching forward and touching an exact spot with your finger (eg an Icon, a screen-control widget) fundamentally DOES NOT MAKE SENSE for anything other than a tablet solution.
On the flipside, reaching out towards your screen for a broad-scale gesture (swipe to move an app the the other screen, maximise an app, finger-zoom or select an area, control 3D space {google earth, etc}, shuffling a bunch of images onscreen, etc) seem completely natural. Touch-screen-ing an 82 inch display makes sense, but at desktop scales that's like sitting 3 inches from your monitor - and even then it really only makes sense because you're now using that display as an advanced information kiosk not as your personal computer (different interaction rates, different interaction precision for common usage).
Having said that, there's no sane reason why in the future we will not see our displays using BOTH interaction methods (ie fully capable of direct-touch as well as Gestures in 3D Space). But I'm also sure they (er, the main computer/OS) will include some kind of basic voice control as well.
Supreme Leader: Hey there ladies, want to come back to my lair to see my "unicorn"? I can guarantee that you've never seen a more horny beast.
Ever since Japan discovered NyanCat the North Koreans had to find something (anything) to escalate the coolness arms-race.
Studies have been done; the people that pay the least always complain the most.
After all, isn't this the Reasoned Eater of slashdot?
"The crapware issue is so bad that Microsoft even has "Signature"-branded PCs whose biggest selling point is the lack of trialware. An upgrade that costs a crazy $99."
Yes folks, for a measly hundred bux we'll be slightly less offensive.
Crapware on PCs is kinda like The Shouty Man in advertisements. Sure they're so in-yer-face that we notice them, but our *only* reaction is "screw that!".
Seriously folks, for the price of a cheap-n-nasty USB stick you could make ALL this "crapware" infinitely less abusive-relationship by having your default browser homepage be a "here's all the stuff we *gave* you, clicky linky to install what you like".
(a) not in your face offensive
(b) easy to hit the "tell someone who cares" button
(c) doesn't by-default bloat your machine (especially good for business users)
(d) Free USB Stick (!!!)
All That AND not pissing off your customers.
Broadwell will be soldered to the motherboard in order to prevent it from destroying the careers of senior military officers.
Don't underestimate the cost of hanging all of that golden plated little pins under your costly chip. Not to mention the cost of the socket itself on the motherboard.
Actually the MAJOR benefit is SPEED.
BGA is a format commonly used in soldered-to-the-mobo CPUs, Wikipedia lists the primary benefit of this being better performance at high speeds (due to lower inductance on the leads, less noise in the circuits, you NEED low noise on high-frequency circuits due to SNR issues).
You also get benefits from better thermal conduction from the CPU into the MOBO (yes, your motherboard does help sink some heat).
Between the rapid rate of change in CPU sockets, and the timeframe of most upgrades the overwhelming majority of customers (remember folks, this includes business/corporate sales) will at least upgrade at least the motherboard if not the entire computer.
Sure this will be a PITA for 'enthusiasts', but seriously folks - by CPU count you are NOT "most of the market". Also, if The Big I came out with all their CPUs soldered to the motherboard BUT that allowed them a straight-up 50% performance increase without any real changes on the CPU all the enthusiasts would wet themselves.
Interviewer: "Can any headline which ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?"
Interviewee: "No?"
Interviewer: "That's what I said, no."
So, erm, yes, it can.
HEADLINE: "Can any headline which ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?"
Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Unfortunately in this risk-vs-reward scenario there's a get-out-of-jail free card which we've ALL seen played fast-n-loose recently.
If your industry is "to big to fail" the government will step in and throw money at the problem.
So it's actually a financially viable proposition to invest in crappy workmanship, shoddy systems, and brain dead fundamentally unstable computing systems until A CRISIS LOOMS then wait for The Government so save your sorry ass.
It's EXACTLY what the banking/finance industry recently did in the US.
They KNEW perfectly well that what they did, while technically not illegal, was A REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA which *might* (possibly) not blow up in their faces, while making them insanely rich.
If business are perfectly happy with suchlike RAMPANT STUPIDITY (er I mean UNCONTROLLED GREED) even before the Government had made their "too big to fail" bailout, how much more likely is such behaviour these days?
Remember folks: if your screwup is BIG enough, there are NO CONSEQUENCES... ANY risk, no matter HOW insane, is worth it - as long as the scale of the potential disaster is large enough.
In a country where Internet Access is metered by usage forcing me to watch advertisements amounts to theft.
ESPECIALLY considering that MOST advertisements are obscenely huge either actual VIDEO or else more often HUGE flash files.
My obviously well documented history of flat out REFUSING to return to a site which either FORCES me to view ads or where I cannot successfully filter the ads shows that I have NO INTENTION of actually defrauding anyone of anything.
Legally, sites do NOT have a leg to stand on.
If your advertisements were NOT huge data-hogs and visually offensive (NB the advertising industry at one point claimed that lack of click-through was due to people not noticing their ads, which quite frankly FAILS THE LAUGH TEST) then I wouldn't be blocking them (eg Google text ads).
Graecum est, non legitur.
And THAT's why it cannot be read.
People like to believe that Coal and other fossil fuels continue to be long-term viable energy sources because they honestly believe that "carbon capture works".
Surely there's NOBODY out there who doesn't know that bandaid solutions eventually fail, and when they do they fail MUCH WORSE than just getting off your fat arse and fixing the problem.
My prediction for the future is that at some point a large number of previously "successful" carbon-capture schemes will fail.
Fail in the sense of "containment failure" , suddenly releasing all that previously 'captured' cee-oh-too back into the atmosphere.
In the space of a year-or-three The Balance will shift and Venus will not be much of a mystery anymore.
Don't believe me? Well think on this - millions of years ago they had a warming planet due to excess CO2 emissions, someone thought up the great plan of capturing all that excess carbon into great 'deposits' and fossilising them. (Coal, Oil, etc) "nobody will ever bother these deposits, they'll be safe FOREVER".
In face, the entire article is misleading.
The World is IN LOVE WITH MONEY.
Anything you can do to increase profits is acceptable, irrespective of how badly it damages the environment.
And I say THE Environment because THERE IS ONLY ONE, we all share it, and once it is so badly damaged that it no longer works well for ANY part of humanity, we're ALL screwed.
Seriously folks, either clean up your act here on PLANET EARTH or fund NASA (and friends) sufficiently so that we have "a backup plan" on some other planet.
Yours Faithfully,
The Selfish Gene.
Worse, you accidentally kill a friend or relative.
A truly dedicated terrorist HAS no friends, nor relatives.... anymore!
Why people always seems to think that the bad guys must be stupid?
Everybody is stupid.
The problem is that some people are stupid enough to assume that their enemy is more stupid than themselves.
Only OUTLAWS will have CELLPHONES.
And the others are all MUMMIES!
Damn straight we want to change it. If companies are getting so big that they become "too big to fail" and governments would rather throw money at them then watch them collapse, then some other mechanism must be found to mitigate the destructive behaviour of higher-ups. I wouldn't care, if not for the fact that their screw ups can wreak massive amounts of havoc against innocent people.
Of course, this all depends on if the tests are actually reliable.
The thing I find most frustrating is the ABSOLUTE HYPOCRISY of these major finance industry institutions.
One second they LOUDLY AND PROUDLY talk up the benefits of THE FREE MARKET but the moment that FREE becomes FREE FALL they want ABSOLUTE GUARANTEES that there will be no actual consequences to their screwup.
It's called risk-vs-reward, sometimes you push the risk too far, and sometimes you get burned.
Survival of the fittest.
Darwinian Evolution.
Or did they not teach these overpaid psychopathic CEOs anything at school?
If it makes them better bankers, then more power to them.
The problem with this statement is the core meaning of "better".
Better corporate-whore megacorp fat-cat greedy bastards or better-for-society in a "we can all make buckets of money and be happy if we play nicely" kind of way?
Not that I think companies should not make a profit.
Not that I think companies should not make LOTS of profit.
But when banks are crying about their massive costs one week (to justify fee increases) and then announcing RECORD PROFITS (in a never ending succession of record profit years) there's got to be something COMPLETELY WRONG.
When financial institutions can screw up SO BADLY that literally billions of dollars are needed to bail them out yet other industries or businesses just go bankrupt when they make bad decisions, there has to be something COMPLETELY WRONG.
And before you claim "we COULD NOT AFFORD to let them suffer the consequences", Iceland told their banks to go get stuffed when they asked for a government bailout and as a direct result are happily enjoying economic growth.