I fully acknowledge that services have to be end-of-lifed on occasion, but compare Google's typically "this is being shut down next month" notice with Microsoft's "that bit of software will stop getting security updates in a decade".
That is a completely unfair and unrealistic comparison for the following reason as the MS offerings have usually been bought. Google ostensibly offer you the user stuff you can use for free. If Google were more like MS then the products in question they discontinue would simply never exist in the first place.
And yet for a business it is *exactly* the sort of comparison that needs to be made. The only way I'd take Google services seriously for business use (free or not) is if they published an end-of-life schedule, much as MS do, whereby they commit to not end-of-lifing a product before the scheduled date. So far Google don't seem to have done this on any of their products, which to my mind makes them unsuitable for business use. You may say "but they won't shut down gmail", but at the end of the day Google themselves have never made any kind of commitment to keep it running as anything more than a rolling thing that they are well within their rights to shut down on a whim, and you'd be nuts to use it for business without that kind of assurance (however, a good number of businesses do appear to be nuts).
To be fair we were warned a new version was in the works in given the option to use it while it was still in beta. But your right to point out this is a a problem with all online offerings. All you can do is warn people an old system is changing but this will always piss some people off even if it is a change for the better. Sometimes you can run two systems side by side for a while and allow them choose but often this can cause more problems and also double the costs.
Which makes me ask: is it really worth using a "cloud service" for something that has traditionally been run in-house (such as email, etc.) - with an in-house system you don't have to deal with the vendor changing stuff under you; if you don't like the upgrade you just don't upgrade.
Old hardware? Was it built this century?
Not entirely recent hardware - my laptop, for example, was bought in 2007 and will not run the new Google Maps in any kind of usable way under Firefox (but google maps thinks it will and so defaults to the new interface). I'll admit that this isn't completely up to date hardware, but it runs absolutely everything else I ever use just fine, and I don't expect to have to buy a new computer just to look at a map that worked perfectly fine before they "upgraded" the interface.
I've no problem with them providing a new interface if it isn't forced upon systems where it just plain doesn't work, but that's not what they've done and from my perspective they have massively screwed up the existing functionality whilst providing nothing new that I'd be interested in.
"Cloud" services just seem to be a drive to greater inefficiency in my opinion - we're trying to do exactly the same stuff in a web browser that we were doing natively just fine many years ago, and in order to do this everyone is having to upgrade to hardware that is orders of magnitude more powerful than what they needed before *to do exactly the same thing*.
Generally though, most companies struggle to compete with the reliability of Google offerings.
I'm unconvinced about this, purely because when Google takes a project down, they usually seem to give very little notice. There's a really big difference between an in-house service that might go down for half a day *very occasionally* because of some hardware failure or something, and a Google service which goes down permanently with only a month's notice. From a business point of view I'd be much happier about relying on the former than the latter.
I fully acknowledge that services have to be end-of-lifed on occasion, but compare Google's typically "this is being shut down next month" notice with Microsoft's "that bit of software will stop getting security updates in a decade".
Also, they only seem to shut down side projects that I only hear about when they announce shutting them down. Call me when they shut down maps, gmail, search or android.
I'd say that shutting down isn't the only issue - services having wholesale changes made to them on Google's whim is also a problem (and this is a problem with all "cloud" service providers really). Take, for example, the recent Google Maps overhaul - there was no notice, suddenly the whole of Google Maps changed. Worse - on some of my hardware Google Maps thinks it can run the new version even though it's unusably slow: every time I go to google maps on that hardware I have to wait about 2 minutes for the page to finish rendering before I can (slowly) navigate through the menus to switch back to "classic mode", whcih it doesn't remember the next time I go to Google Maps. If I were relying on it for business use, that would be a complete disaster - we've gone from a good reliable service to a service that is often almost unusable overnight with no notice. It's also something that wouldn't happen with an in-house system - for inhouse stuff it would get tested to ensure it's ok first, and at the worst case if it isn't ok it would get rolled back until the problems could be resolved.
Also, I'm seeing quite a few businesses here in the UK make switches over to "cloud" services without *any* consideration for the data protection act - they are frequently storing personal data on offshore servers without the data owner's permission, which is illegal.
Will be interesting to see if it applies to their own. If an MP has a racist rant on their site, will the "extremist" filter flag it? Will Enoch Powell's speeches on YouTube get the axe? Guess: no.
I'm waiting for a newspaper to publish a leaked list of MPs who have said "yes I want the porn" to their ISPs...
"I do not wish to have the government choose for me which content is appropriate for my viewing. Unblock all of it. If I am worried about what my children will get into, I will monitor them myself or purchase configurable child blocking software. Thank you. Have a nice day."
My answer would be "please can you send me my mac code".
Like any other business, you, the consumer, eventually do pay for them - in higher (and newer, more devious) fees, lower savings/CD interest rates, and higher loan interest rates.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that you;re getting a free ride.
Well, that depends on the market... Vendors set prices based on what the market will bear, which is not necessarily directly related to the cost of providing the product. In a free market with lots of competition, prices will trend downwards until they track the cost of providing the product reasonably closely, so in that case if the cost to most of the vendors increases (e.g. through fraud) the price will indeed go up as the vendor passes those extra costs on to the customer. However, if there isn't much competition, what the market will bear (which is about the price the vendor will charge) won't track the cost of providing the product especially closely, so any increases to the costs will need to be absorbed by the vendor rather than being passed on to the customer.
TL;DR - if they could raise the prices without losing too much business, they would've done so already, irrespective of whether there were any additional costs to pass on to the customer.
A bank-managed payment system (i.e. debit/credit cards) will be the ultimate winner.
Actually, here in the UK, over the past few years I've noticed an increasing number of businesses have stopped taking card payments. I can only assume the banks have increased charges and small businesses have decided it just isn't worth their while.
I'm not surprised they can't get filters right, they can't get anything right. I joined TalkTalk in December last year as the price is attractive.
There's a reason for that...
(Seriously, I have customers who use cheap talk-talk accounts for business use and they don't see the point in paying for a decent internet connection...)
As weird as some porn tends to get, the mainstream stuff is very good educational material. My niece asked her mother, after hearing about what parts go where, "but don't the legs get in the way?" So at some point it is very educational to see a little porn and go "ah, well now it all makes sense."
The trouble is that people are so interfering that if anyone got wind of someone showing their child some porn, even carefully selected porn for legitimate educational value like you mention, they'd get a visit from social services faster than you could say "bonk".
Could you please provide a list of FTTC ISPs that aren't being forced to implement the filter. Thanks.
AFAIK the only ISPs that are implementing the filters are BT, Virgin, TalkTalk and Sky. So take your pick out of all of the others (of which there are a fairly large number).
The ISPs claim that it is impossible for their filters to be 100% accurate
Nobody's asking for it to be 100% accurate, but there's a huge difference between 100% and just 93% accurate. Considering this is automated restriction of speech, you'd better make damn sure you're atleast in the 99.99% range of accuracy.
Not gonna happen - you just can't make the filters that accurate. The point you seem to be missing is that the people implementing the filters (the ISPs) have been saying all along that it can't be done and they don't want to do it. But the government has ignored them and basically threatened to legislate unless the big ISPs implement filters. So the big ISPs know they have to implement filtering either way, and figure that if they do it "voluntarilly" (i.e. because of threats rather than because of legislation) then they are less likely to end up in court over all this.
So that's where we stand - the government doesn't understand technology so is just demanding the impossible, the ISPs know this is never going to work but have been left no choice.
In a way, I kinda wish the ISPs had just refused because if the government has to legislate there might be a bit more debate over the whole issue. More opinion here.
And that even when people do figure out how to crack the DRM that it will slow people down enough that impatience with the cracking process will cause them to give up an buy.
This is the utterly flawed thinking that the entertainment industry use. The consumer is not going to spend time cracking the DRM - if they want a DRM-free copy of the content (quite possibly for some pretty reasonable purpose) and the DRM can't be trivially stripped, the consumer will simply download an illegal copy which has already been stripped by someone else instead. And then they will start to wonder WTF they bothered to pay for a crippled copy in the first place if they were still going to have to download an illegal copy, so the next time they'll probably skip the whole "paying for it" stage.
That's the problem with DRM - in order to be useful it has to be 100% effective. As soon as one person strips it and makes that stripped copy available on the internet then DRM becomes not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive because its now pushing otherwise law abiding people towards downloading the stripped copy.
Actually, the licencing policies of ebooks are the primary reason why I still read paper books instead of ebooks: I actually quite like the ebook format, and all other things being equal I would probably switch to ebooks.
However, with paper books, you buy a book and read it. Then you hand it to your partner, who reads it. Maybe you lend it to some friends to read. It sits on your bookshelf for a while. Then you have kids and in 20 years' time they read it and possibly pass it on to their kids. Maybe you decide to sell it for a small amount of pocket change. Conversely, if I buy an ebook from Google Play, I can read it... that's it - its tied to my Play account, I can't move it into my partner's Play aggount for her to read, I can't lend it to any friends, even if Play is even still around in 20 years time I won't be able to hand it on to my kids, and I can't sell it. In theory, I *could* lend my partner my entire tablet (tied to my play account) so that she can read it, but even this is explicitly disallowed by the Play T&Cs, so strictly speaking I can't even legally do that.
To my mind, this so greatly devalues the product that I'm not interested in handing over money for it. And, frankly, I'm surprised that anyone wants to buy an ebook with these terms attached to it - all of the things I've mentioned that I want to be able to do with my books are *normal* and acceptable things that most people have been doing with books for generations and I'm surprised that people aren't totally shocked and dismayed when they find they can't do any of this anymore with ebooks they had "bought".
Sounds like a lot of feel-good pirate nonsense. The music industry started selling DRM-free music years ago. It continues to decline.
Does it? The last figures I saw (admittedly around a year ago) seemed to clearly show a decline in album sales and a steep increase in single track sales. Even without copyright infringement this wouldn't surprise me at all - for CDs, except for a few selected tracks that are (expensively) made available as singles for a short period after their release, if you like one or two tracks you have to buy the entire album. Now, you can buy just the tracks you like, so is there any surprise that album sales are being rapidly surplanted by singles sales?
Also, its worth remembering that the economy has been utterly screwed over the past few years, so not entirely surprising that people might be cutting back on the amount they spend on nonessentials.
I think it's time to all admit to yourselves that *some* people will pay for stuff and some people are going to try to avoid spending money on music and movies so they can by expensive clothes, iPhones, expensive laptops, and other physical stuff.
Absolutely - some people are going to spend money on entertainment, irrespective of how badly they are treated by the industry, and some people are going to avoid spending money on entertainment (either by illegally copying, or simply by not consuming the products at all), irrespective of how well they are treated. The people the industry needs to keep happy are the middle-ground - the people who want reasonably priced entertainment and don't want to get screwed over - make the products too expensive, or artificially break them with DRM and the business from these people will be lost.
I do think that DRM is possibly doing a good job of training people to copy content who otherwise wouldn't - if you keep buying content and keep finding that the only way to do re
The music and movie industries are in decline simply because they won't provide content their customers want in the form their customers want it. And of course that results in them going out of business. You don't want to sell what people want to buy, don't be surprised when people take their business elsewhere. It doesn't take an MBA to figure that one out.
The problem is that the entertainment industry seems to think they are selling inelastic products - i.e. they believe the demand is always the same and therefore any drop in sales can only be due to illegal copying. It never occurs to them that the other answer is that people simply don't want what they are selling...
No, blame the end user. That's what you get for licensing your virtual entertainment and not reading the terms.
Sorry, but when an shop says "Buy this movie", why exactly should people be expected to read a long T&Cs document that explains that you're not actually buying the movie, just a revokable licence to watch it? It is clearly misadvertising - that should be illegal, and punished.
If you want to sell a limited licence to watch a movie then fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to advertise it using the words "buy this movie".
Governments aren't supposed to be about making money - governments are about doing things that are good for the citizens but unviable for a company to do.
If the government thinks that letting SpaceX use the pad is a Good Thing for the public, then that's what they should be doing, irrespective of whether they are going to make money from it or not. If you're going to base all decisions on whether or not you can make money from them then you may as well just port a corporation in charge of a country (although this seems to be exactly what a lot of crazy Americans think would be ideal...)
It is an asset that can be rented. Since Space X is not going to be launching rockets everyday, then the pad should be scheduled and rented to whomever wants to launch rockets from it. I do not care if it is Kari Byron and LDRS.
Now here you're suddenly showing that it *isn't* all about making money - SpaceX have shown that they can launch rockets, so giving them access to the pad seems like a Good Thing. If it were just about making money then the government would be happy to rent it to someone who is just interested in paying to make sure SpaceX can't use it, but aren't interested in launching rockets themselves - that most definitely doesn't seem to be in the interests of the public, *who are the people the government are supposed to be serving*.
I've never needed any blind faith to be an atheist.
Russell's tea-pot says it all. If someone wants to claim they are agnostic about the existence of a tea-pot in orbit around Mars, then that's not being open minded. That's being irrational.
A teapot is a human-made artifact - unless we sent it to mars there's no reason to believe it got there. Conversely *we simply do not know* how the universe came into being, so pretty much all answers that don't conflict with the known science are up for grabs as possibilities. I'm reasonably happy to dismiss the idea of knowing specificalities about any creator, but the idea that there may have been some intelligence behind the creation of the universe seems no more irrational to me than the idea that it all just popped into existence of its own accord - blind faith is required to make a choice between these possibilities, since there is no evidence either way.
(It should also be mentioned that if you assume that we will eventually have the technology to simulate our corner of the universe then statistically the chances that we're not just part of a simulation may be quite low, and that would certainly constitute our universe "being created by some intelligence").
With God, it's more indecisive than irrational, as it's just a case of not being able to decide between a story indoctrinated by parents, and taking a position based on rationality.
You're talking about _religion_, which isn't what I'm talking about at all. Religion is indoctrinated by parents and society - I'm talking about the fact that we fundamentally can't know whether there is a god or not, irrespective of what BS is spouted by religions. Atheism too is a religion - the absolute belief that there is no god despite absolutely zero supporting evidence, and is indoctinated by parents and society.
(For the record, I'm agnostic - I believe that the existance or nonexistance of a god is unknowable (unless one chooses to show itself) and therefore, ultimately I shouldn't waste my time worrying about it).
That just means you're indecisive.
No, it just means I don't think there is any merit in making a decision at all, since that decision can never be based on anything beyond blind faith (which I do not posess).
There so very many things for which there is no evidence, that it becomes incredibly questionable for you to select just a few of them to believe in. If you believe in a god for which there is no proof, why not the Grey Men? the Invisible Pink Space Unicorn? Why not the flying spaghetti monster? Why not Russell's Teapot? Why not the dragon in my garage? Why not Harry Potter? Why not the Sasquatch? Why not Atlantis? I could go on for a very long time before I run out things that I could name that don't exist.
So how and why do you choose, with no supporting evidence, to believe in some things and not to believe in others?
My point was that the claim that "its obvious you shouldn't believe in a god because there is no evidence to support the existence of a god" has absolutely no more merit than "its obvious that you should believe in a god because there is no evidence to support the universe just popping into existence without the helping hand of a creator". Both viewpoints are equally valid from the evidence available, so either side arguing that the other is wrong is always going to be supported only by that side's faith in their own beliefs. I certainly think that the evolution-deniers can be refuted on scientific grounds, but at the end of the day we fundamentally don't know what started the creation of the universe - we have no idea if it was a random event or if some intelligence tweaked all the universal constants to be just right to create life a few billion years down the line and then kicked off the big bang. Nor is it likely that we will ever know this - its pretty fundamentally unknowable.
Some of your examples make absolutely no sense though - for example, given that J K Rowling has never tried to pass Harry Potter off as non-fiction, there seems little merit in people believing that it is non-fiction. The same cannot be said of various religious texts.
Also, things like a dragon in your garage are fundamentally knowable things - if you want to convince me that you've got a dragon in your garage then its a pretty simple job for you to just show it to me. If you refuse to show it then that can be taken as a reasonably good implication that you don't have a dragon. Conversely, the existence/nonexistence of a god is not knowable - if you want to convince me that a god exists there is *no way* for you to show me that god even if you wanted to, so the fact that you can't do this doesn't imply anything.
Science doesn't need to disprove anything since there is no reason to believe in a god in the first place. Even if there is a god, it doesn't mean that any of the junk in the bible, koran, bhagavad gita, or harry potter is true.
Sorry, but "what you believe is wrong and you should stop believing in it because I say so" is no better than the religious fanatics claiming that their religion is right and you should believe in it because they say so - there's no reason to believe that there was a creator but there's also no reason _not_ to believe that there wasn't a creator. Science can't provide evidence either way, so all anyone is ever going to do by proclaiming that their viewpoiint is right and that they don't need any evidence to back it up is cause a few more wars.
(For the record, I'm agnostic - I believe that the existance or nonexistance of a god is unknowable (unless one chooses to show itself) and therefore, ultimately I shouldn't waste my time worrying about it).
Barring that, as a customer I don't really NEED 1,000 entries. I might very well ask "what's new in this version?", though. Mark the 50 most significant ones and pull those for the changelog.
I don't think anyone is expecting to browse through 1000 entries, but if you are affected by a specific bug that you've reported, you might want to do a search on the changelog to see if that bug has been addressed. However, in this situation an open bug tracking system would be more useful so that the customer would get an automatic notification about their bug being fixed.
Change logs and proper release notes are very appreciated by administrators and end users.
Administrators yes, end users much less so. The fact that Microsoft used to downplay Linux's stability and security by publishing the "number of bugs fixed" figures for Windows and Linux along side each other (with Windows receiving far fewer fixes and therefore perceived as "better" because people somehow assumed that less fixes == less things to fix) pretty much demonstrates the end-user mindset: I'm pretty sure that a large chunk of end users expect software to be perfect and if you admit that yours isn't (by telling the users you fixed a problem) then you lose out to the competition who continue to make out that they are perfect.
So I guess the answer to the original question is: it depends who the audiance for the changelogs are - if they are clued up techies then changelogs are valuable, if the audiance are non-technical then the logs are going to be ignored at best, and at worst used by your competition to "prove" how bad your software is.
The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
Not even that - the problem is that the economy is built around the idea that everyone has to work, and most people have to have a full time job. Mechanisation has long been done on the premise that it improves our lives by reducing the amount of time we spend working and therefore increasing the amount of time to do leisure activities - but that's at odds with the economy. If we're ever going to achieve that goal of decreased work time and increased leisure time then there will at some point have to be a big paradigm shift in how the economy works. Some of that may be reducing working hours (i.e. instead of 1 person working 40 hours a week, why not 4 people working 10 hours a week?) But ultimately its difficult to see how to achieve that whilst everything is priced for the full time worker.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
Also I think the original premise is probably wrong anyway - I imagine there are prostitutes who enjoy what they do and aspired to do it. IMHO the problem with prostitution isn't the prostitution itself, it's the grey/black-market status of it which creates undesirable elements. Make it an above-board reputable job and a lot of that goes away.
How feasible would it be to split the internet right down the middle but share the same lines?
So on one half you could keep the wild wild west net and on the other all the cry babies and censor-happy types can have their walled wide web. Then just onion-up the wild wild west side.
This wouldn't work because you're forgetting the censor-happy people's mentality: they aren't trying to censor the internet so that they can't get to certain material, they are trying to censor it so that _you_ can't get to certain material because the _idea_ of you looking at certain stuff in private offends them. So this kind of split couldn't happen because the censor-happy people still don't want to allow you to get to the "wild wild west" net.
Wide-scale censoring is all about "I find what you do in private to be offensive so you should be locked up for offending me!" and almost never to do with "I find this content offensive so don't want to see it myself". Much the same way as various activities happening between consenting adults in private are illegal - this isn't about protecting anyone from anything other than offense caused by their own narrow-mindedness.
Note, I do think there is a place for local-scale censorship, such as preventing kids/teachers at school from accidentally stumbling across stuff they shouldn't. However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work and it is far better to spot kids doing this so someone can have a talk with them. That's not to say that I necessarilly think kids looking at porn is a bad thing (indeed, it's completely normal), but talking to them about it to put it into context is probably a good plan.
Some more googling suggests that the CBL tells you the honeypot IP after listing. If this is true, could you not look in your proxy logs to see what the URLs to the C&C servers look like and block them based on a pattern that matches the part after the domain name?
There wasn't an especially obvious fingerprint I could derive from the requests when I looked (i.e. each time I've seen this, the request has been considerably different)
Slashdot Mirror
I fully acknowledge that services have to be end-of-lifed on occasion, but compare Google's typically "this is being shut down next month" notice with Microsoft's "that bit of software will stop getting security updates in a decade".
That is a completely unfair and unrealistic comparison for the following reason as the MS offerings have usually been bought. Google ostensibly offer you the user stuff you can use for free. If Google were more like MS then the products in question they discontinue would simply never exist in the first place.
And yet for a business it is *exactly* the sort of comparison that needs to be made. The only way I'd take Google services seriously for business use (free or not) is if they published an end-of-life schedule, much as MS do, whereby they commit to not end-of-lifing a product before the scheduled date. So far Google don't seem to have done this on any of their products, which to my mind makes them unsuitable for business use. You may say "but they won't shut down gmail", but at the end of the day Google themselves have never made any kind of commitment to keep it running as anything more than a rolling thing that they are well within their rights to shut down on a whim, and you'd be nuts to use it for business without that kind of assurance (however, a good number of businesses do appear to be nuts).
To be fair we were warned a new version was in the works in given the option to use it while it was still in beta. But your right to point out this is a a problem with all online offerings. All you can do is warn people an old system is changing but this will always piss some people off even if it is a change for the better. Sometimes you can run two systems side by side for a while and allow them choose but often this can cause more problems and also double the costs.
Which makes me ask: is it really worth using a "cloud service" for something that has traditionally been run in-house (such as email, etc.) - with an in-house system you don't have to deal with the vendor changing stuff under you; if you don't like the upgrade you just don't upgrade.
Old hardware? Was it built this century?
Not entirely recent hardware - my laptop, for example, was bought in 2007 and will not run the new Google Maps in any kind of usable way under Firefox (but google maps thinks it will and so defaults to the new interface). I'll admit that this isn't completely up to date hardware, but it runs absolutely everything else I ever use just fine, and I don't expect to have to buy a new computer just to look at a map that worked perfectly fine before they "upgraded" the interface.
I've no problem with them providing a new interface if it isn't forced upon systems where it just plain doesn't work, but that's not what they've done and from my perspective they have massively screwed up the existing functionality whilst providing nothing new that I'd be interested in.
"Cloud" services just seem to be a drive to greater inefficiency in my opinion - we're trying to do exactly the same stuff in a web browser that we were doing natively just fine many years ago, and in order to do this everyone is having to upgrade to hardware that is orders of magnitude more powerful than what they needed before *to do exactly the same thing*.
Generally though, most companies struggle to compete with the reliability of Google offerings.
I'm unconvinced about this, purely because when Google takes a project down, they usually seem to give very little notice. There's a really big difference between an in-house service that might go down for half a day *very occasionally* because of some hardware failure or something, and a Google service which goes down permanently with only a month's notice. From a business point of view I'd be much happier about relying on the former than the latter.
I fully acknowledge that services have to be end-of-lifed on occasion, but compare Google's typically "this is being shut down next month" notice with Microsoft's "that bit of software will stop getting security updates in a decade".
Also, they only seem to shut down side projects that I only hear about when they announce shutting them down. Call me when they shut down maps, gmail, search or android.
I'd say that shutting down isn't the only issue - services having wholesale changes made to them on Google's whim is also a problem (and this is a problem with all "cloud" service providers really). Take, for example, the recent Google Maps overhaul - there was no notice, suddenly the whole of Google Maps changed. Worse - on some of my hardware Google Maps thinks it can run the new version even though it's unusably slow: every time I go to google maps on that hardware I have to wait about 2 minutes for the page to finish rendering before I can (slowly) navigate through the menus to switch back to "classic mode", whcih it doesn't remember the next time I go to Google Maps. If I were relying on it for business use, that would be a complete disaster - we've gone from a good reliable service to a service that is often almost unusable overnight with no notice. It's also something that wouldn't happen with an in-house system - for inhouse stuff it would get tested to ensure it's ok first, and at the worst case if it isn't ok it would get rolled back until the problems could be resolved.
Also, I'm seeing quite a few businesses here in the UK make switches over to "cloud" services without *any* consideration for the data protection act - they are frequently storing personal data on offshore servers without the data owner's permission, which is illegal.
Will be interesting to see if it applies to their own. If an MP has a racist rant on their site, will the "extremist" filter flag it? Will Enoch Powell's speeches on YouTube get the axe? Guess: no.
I'm waiting for a newspaper to publish a leaked list of MPs who have said "yes I want the porn" to their ISPs...
"I do not wish to have the government choose for me which content is appropriate for my viewing. Unblock all of it. If I am worried about what my children will get into, I will monitor them myself or purchase configurable child blocking software. Thank you. Have a nice day."
My answer would be "please can you send me my mac code".
Banks pay for credit card breaches, not consumers
Like any other business, you, the consumer, eventually do pay for them - in higher (and newer, more devious) fees, lower savings/CD interest rates, and higher loan interest rates.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that you;re getting a free ride.
Well, that depends on the market... Vendors set prices based on what the market will bear, which is not necessarily directly related to the cost of providing the product. In a free market with lots of competition, prices will trend downwards until they track the cost of providing the product reasonably closely, so in that case if the cost to most of the vendors increases (e.g. through fraud) the price will indeed go up as the vendor passes those extra costs on to the customer. However, if there isn't much competition, what the market will bear (which is about the price the vendor will charge) won't track the cost of providing the product especially closely, so any increases to the costs will need to be absorbed by the vendor rather than being passed on to the customer.
TL;DR - if they could raise the prices without losing too much business, they would've done so already, irrespective of whether there were any additional costs to pass on to the customer.
A bank-managed payment system (i.e. debit/credit cards) will be the ultimate winner.
Actually, here in the UK, over the past few years I've noticed an increasing number of businesses have stopped taking card payments. I can only assume the banks have increased charges and small businesses have decided it just isn't worth their while.
I'm not surprised they can't get filters right, they can't get anything right. I joined TalkTalk in December last year as the price is attractive.
There's a reason for that...
(Seriously, I have customers who use cheap talk-talk accounts for business use and they don't see the point in paying for a decent internet connection...)
As weird as some porn tends to get, the mainstream stuff is very good educational material. My niece asked her mother, after hearing about what parts go where, "but don't the legs get in the way?" So at some point it is very educational to see a little porn and go "ah, well now it all makes sense."
The trouble is that people are so interfering that if anyone got wind of someone showing their child some porn, even carefully selected porn for legitimate educational value like you mention, they'd get a visit from social services faster than you could say "bonk".
Who determines what political sites are extreme?
Isn't it any site that criticises the currently elected government?
Could you please provide a list of FTTC ISPs that aren't being forced to implement the filter. Thanks.
AFAIK the only ISPs that are implementing the filters are BT, Virgin, TalkTalk and Sky. So take your pick out of all of the others (of which there are a fairly large number).
The ISPs claim that it is impossible for their filters to be 100% accurate
Nobody's asking for it to be 100% accurate, but there's a huge difference between 100% and just 93% accurate.
Considering this is automated restriction of speech, you'd better make damn sure you're atleast in the 99.99% range of accuracy.
Not gonna happen - you just can't make the filters that accurate. The point you seem to be missing is that the people implementing the filters (the ISPs) have been saying all along that it can't be done and they don't want to do it. But the government has ignored them and basically threatened to legislate unless the big ISPs implement filters. So the big ISPs know they have to implement filtering either way, and figure that if they do it "voluntarilly" (i.e. because of threats rather than because of legislation) then they are less likely to end up in court over all this.
So that's where we stand - the government doesn't understand technology so is just demanding the impossible, the ISPs know this is never going to work but have been left no choice.
In a way, I kinda wish the ISPs had just refused because if the government has to legislate there might be a bit more debate over the whole issue. More opinion here.
And that even when people do figure out how to crack the DRM that it will slow people down enough that impatience with the cracking process will cause them to give up an buy.
This is the utterly flawed thinking that the entertainment industry use. The consumer is not going to spend time cracking the DRM - if they want a DRM-free copy of the content (quite possibly for some pretty reasonable purpose) and the DRM can't be trivially stripped, the consumer will simply download an illegal copy which has already been stripped by someone else instead. And then they will start to wonder WTF they bothered to pay for a crippled copy in the first place if they were still going to have to download an illegal copy, so the next time they'll probably skip the whole "paying for it" stage.
That's the problem with DRM - in order to be useful it has to be 100% effective. As soon as one person strips it and makes that stripped copy available on the internet then DRM becomes not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive because its now pushing otherwise law abiding people towards downloading the stripped copy.
Source: "Slashdot: In a new Rasmussen poll, 75% of American adults would rather read a book in traditional print format than in an ebook format. Only 15% prefer the ebook format (the other 10% are undecided)." http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/21/1143210/poll-shows-that-75-prefer-printed-books-to-ebooks
Actually, the licencing policies of ebooks are the primary reason why I still read paper books instead of ebooks: I actually quite like the ebook format, and all other things being equal I would probably switch to ebooks.
However, with paper books, you buy a book and read it. Then you hand it to your partner, who reads it. Maybe you lend it to some friends to read. It sits on your bookshelf for a while. Then you have kids and in 20 years' time they read it and possibly pass it on to their kids. Maybe you decide to sell it for a small amount of pocket change. Conversely, if I buy an ebook from Google Play, I can read it... that's it - its tied to my Play account, I can't move it into my partner's Play aggount for her to read, I can't lend it to any friends, even if Play is even still around in 20 years time I won't be able to hand it on to my kids, and I can't sell it. In theory, I *could* lend my partner my entire tablet (tied to my play account) so that she can read it, but even this is explicitly disallowed by the Play T&Cs, so strictly speaking I can't even legally do that.
To my mind, this so greatly devalues the product that I'm not interested in handing over money for it. And, frankly, I'm surprised that anyone wants to buy an ebook with these terms attached to it - all of the things I've mentioned that I want to be able to do with my books are *normal* and acceptable things that most people have been doing with books for generations and I'm surprised that people aren't totally shocked and dismayed when they find they can't do any of this anymore with ebooks they had "bought".
Sounds like a lot of feel-good pirate nonsense. The music industry started selling DRM-free music years ago. It continues to decline.
Does it? The last figures I saw (admittedly around a year ago) seemed to clearly show a decline in album sales and a steep increase in single track sales. Even without copyright infringement this wouldn't surprise me at all - for CDs, except for a few selected tracks that are (expensively) made available as singles for a short period after their release, if you like one or two tracks you have to buy the entire album. Now, you can buy just the tracks you like, so is there any surprise that album sales are being rapidly surplanted by singles sales?
Also, its worth remembering that the economy has been utterly screwed over the past few years, so not entirely surprising that people might be cutting back on the amount they spend on nonessentials.
I think it's time to all admit to yourselves that *some* people will pay for stuff and some people are going to try to avoid spending money on music and movies so they can by expensive clothes, iPhones, expensive laptops, and other physical stuff.
Absolutely - some people are going to spend money on entertainment, irrespective of how badly they are treated by the industry, and some people are going to avoid spending money on entertainment (either by illegally copying, or simply by not consuming the products at all), irrespective of how well they are treated. The people the industry needs to keep happy are the middle-ground - the people who want reasonably priced entertainment and don't want to get screwed over - make the products too expensive, or artificially break them with DRM and the business from these people will be lost.
I do think that DRM is possibly doing a good job of training people to copy content who otherwise wouldn't - if you keep buying content and keep finding that the only way to do re
The music and movie industries are in decline simply because they won't provide content their customers want in the form their customers want it. And of course that results in them going out of business. You don't want to sell what people want to buy, don't be surprised when people take their business elsewhere. It doesn't take an MBA to figure that one out.
The problem is that the entertainment industry seems to think they are selling inelastic products - i.e. they believe the demand is always the same and therefore any drop in sales can only be due to illegal copying. It never occurs to them that the other answer is that people simply don't want what they are selling...
No, blame the end user. That's what you get for licensing your virtual entertainment and not reading the terms.
Sorry, but when an shop says "Buy this movie", why exactly should people be expected to read a long T&Cs document that explains that you're not actually buying the movie, just a revokable licence to watch it? It is clearly misadvertising - that should be illegal, and punished.
If you want to sell a limited licence to watch a movie then fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to advertise it using the words "buy this movie".
This is why the government cannot make money.
Governments aren't supposed to be about making money - governments are about doing things that are good for the citizens but unviable for a company to do.
If the government thinks that letting SpaceX use the pad is a Good Thing for the public, then that's what they should be doing, irrespective of whether they are going to make money from it or not. If you're going to base all decisions on whether or not you can make money from them then you may as well just port a corporation in charge of a country (although this seems to be exactly what a lot of crazy Americans think would be ideal...)
It is an asset that can be rented. Since Space X is not going to be launching rockets everyday, then the pad should be scheduled and rented to whomever wants to launch rockets from it. I do not care if it is Kari Byron and LDRS.
Now here you're suddenly showing that it *isn't* all about making money - SpaceX have shown that they can launch rockets, so giving them access to the pad seems like a Good Thing. If it were just about making money then the government would be happy to rent it to someone who is just interested in paying to make sure SpaceX can't use it, but aren't interested in launching rockets themselves - that most definitely doesn't seem to be in the interests of the public, *who are the people the government are supposed to be serving*.
I've never needed any blind faith to be an atheist.
Russell's tea-pot says it all. If someone wants to claim they are agnostic about the existence of a tea-pot in orbit around Mars, then that's not being open minded. That's being irrational.
A teapot is a human-made artifact - unless we sent it to mars there's no reason to believe it got there. Conversely *we simply do not know* how the universe came into being, so pretty much all answers that don't conflict with the known science are up for grabs as possibilities. I'm reasonably happy to dismiss the idea of knowing specificalities about any creator, but the idea that there may have been some intelligence behind the creation of the universe seems no more irrational to me than the idea that it all just popped into existence of its own accord - blind faith is required to make a choice between these possibilities, since there is no evidence either way.
(It should also be mentioned that if you assume that we will eventually have the technology to simulate our corner of the universe then statistically the chances that we're not just part of a simulation may be quite low, and that would certainly constitute our universe "being created by some intelligence").
With God, it's more indecisive than irrational, as it's just a case of not being able to decide between a story indoctrinated by parents, and taking a position based on rationality.
You're talking about _religion_, which isn't what I'm talking about at all. Religion is indoctrinated by parents and society - I'm talking about the fact that we fundamentally can't know whether there is a god or not, irrespective of what BS is spouted by religions. Atheism too is a religion - the absolute belief that there is no god despite absolutely zero supporting evidence, and is indoctinated by parents and society.
(For the record, I'm agnostic - I believe that the existance or nonexistance of a god is unknowable (unless one chooses to show itself) and therefore, ultimately I shouldn't waste my time worrying about it).
That just means you're indecisive.
No, it just means I don't think there is any merit in making a decision at all, since that decision can never be based on anything beyond blind faith (which I do not posess).
You don't seem to be following the argument.
There so very many things for which there is no evidence, that it becomes incredibly questionable for you to select just a few of them to believe in. If you believe in a god for which there is no proof, why not the Grey Men? the Invisible Pink Space Unicorn? Why not the flying spaghetti monster? Why not Russell's Teapot? Why not the dragon in my garage? Why not Harry Potter? Why not the Sasquatch? Why not Atlantis? I could go on for a very long time before I run out things that I could name that don't exist.
So how and why do you choose, with no supporting evidence, to believe in some things and not to believe in others?
My point was that the claim that "its obvious you shouldn't believe in a god because there is no evidence to support the existence of a god" has absolutely no more merit than "its obvious that you should believe in a god because there is no evidence to support the universe just popping into existence without the helping hand of a creator". Both viewpoints are equally valid from the evidence available, so either side arguing that the other is wrong is always going to be supported only by that side's faith in their own beliefs. I certainly think that the evolution-deniers can be refuted on scientific grounds, but at the end of the day we fundamentally don't know what started the creation of the universe - we have no idea if it was a random event or if some intelligence tweaked all the universal constants to be just right to create life a few billion years down the line and then kicked off the big bang. Nor is it likely that we will ever know this - its pretty fundamentally unknowable.
Some of your examples make absolutely no sense though - for example, given that J K Rowling has never tried to pass Harry Potter off as non-fiction, there seems little merit in people believing that it is non-fiction. The same cannot be said of various religious texts.
Also, things like a dragon in your garage are fundamentally knowable things - if you want to convince me that you've got a dragon in your garage then its a pretty simple job for you to just show it to me. If you refuse to show it then that can be taken as a reasonably good implication that you don't have a dragon. Conversely, the existence/nonexistence of a god is not knowable - if you want to convince me that a god exists there is *no way* for you to show me that god even if you wanted to, so the fact that you can't do this doesn't imply anything.
Science doesn't need to disprove anything since there is no reason to believe in a god in the first place. Even if there is a god, it doesn't mean that any of the junk in the bible, koran, bhagavad gita, or harry potter is true.
Sorry, but "what you believe is wrong and you should stop believing in it because I say so" is no better than the religious fanatics claiming that their religion is right and you should believe in it because they say so - there's no reason to believe that there was a creator but there's also no reason _not_ to believe that there wasn't a creator. Science can't provide evidence either way, so all anyone is ever going to do by proclaiming that their viewpoiint is right and that they don't need any evidence to back it up is cause a few more wars.
(For the record, I'm agnostic - I believe that the existance or nonexistance of a god is unknowable (unless one chooses to show itself) and therefore, ultimately I shouldn't waste my time worrying about it).
Barring that, as a customer I don't really NEED 1,000 entries. I might very well ask "what's new in this version?", though. Mark the 50 most significant ones and pull those for the changelog.
I don't think anyone is expecting to browse through 1000 entries, but if you are affected by a specific bug that you've reported, you might want to do a search on the changelog to see if that bug has been addressed. However, in this situation an open bug tracking system would be more useful so that the customer would get an automatic notification about their bug being fixed.
Change logs and proper release notes are very appreciated by administrators and end users.
Administrators yes, end users much less so. The fact that Microsoft used to downplay Linux's stability and security by publishing the "number of bugs fixed" figures for Windows and Linux along side each other (with Windows receiving far fewer fixes and therefore perceived as "better" because people somehow assumed that less fixes == less things to fix) pretty much demonstrates the end-user mindset: I'm pretty sure that a large chunk of end users expect software to be perfect and if you admit that yours isn't (by telling the users you fixed a problem) then you lose out to the competition who continue to make out that they are perfect.
So I guess the answer to the original question is: it depends who the audiance for the changelogs are - if they are clued up techies then changelogs are valuable, if the audiance are non-technical then the logs are going to be ignored at best, and at worst used by your competition to "prove" how bad your software is.
The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
Not even that - the problem is that the economy is built around the idea that everyone has to work, and most people have to have a full time job. Mechanisation has long been done on the premise that it improves our lives by reducing the amount of time we spend working and therefore increasing the amount of time to do leisure activities - but that's at odds with the economy. If we're ever going to achieve that goal of decreased work time and increased leisure time then there will at some point have to be a big paradigm shift in how the economy works. Some of that may be reducing working hours (i.e. instead of 1 person working 40 hours a week, why not 4 people working 10 hours a week?) But ultimately its difficult to see how to achieve that whilst everything is priced for the full time worker.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
Also I think the original premise is probably wrong anyway - I imagine there are prostitutes who enjoy what they do and aspired to do it. IMHO the problem with prostitution isn't the prostitution itself, it's the grey/black-market status of it which creates undesirable elements. Make it an above-board reputable job and a lot of that goes away.
How feasible would it be to split the internet right down the middle but share the same lines?
So on one half you could keep the wild wild west net and on the other all the cry babies and censor-happy types can have their walled wide web.
Then just onion-up the wild wild west side.
This wouldn't work because you're forgetting the censor-happy people's mentality: they aren't trying to censor the internet so that they can't get to certain material, they are trying to censor it so that _you_ can't get to certain material because the _idea_ of you looking at certain stuff in private offends them. So this kind of split couldn't happen because the censor-happy people still don't want to allow you to get to the "wild wild west" net.
Wide-scale censoring is all about "I find what you do in private to be offensive so you should be locked up for offending me!" and almost never to do with "I find this content offensive so don't want to see it myself". Much the same way as various activities happening between consenting adults in private are illegal - this isn't about protecting anyone from anything other than offense caused by their own narrow-mindedness.
Note, I do think there is a place for local-scale censorship, such as preventing kids/teachers at school from accidentally stumbling across stuff they shouldn't. However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work and it is far better to spot kids doing this so someone can have a talk with them. That's not to say that I necessarilly think kids looking at porn is a bad thing (indeed, it's completely normal), but talking to them about it to put it into context is probably a good plan.
Some more googling suggests that the CBL tells you the honeypot IP after listing. If this is true, could you not look in your proxy logs to see what the URLs to the C&C servers look like and block them based on a pattern that matches the part after the domain name?
There wasn't an especially obvious fingerprint I could derive from the requests when I looked (i.e. each time I've seen this, the request has been considerably different)