When Egypt shut down their network to deal with protesters, the west was quick to say that's the response of a dictatorship and that it was morally wrong. Likewise when other countries shut down their social media to deal with protests.
And yet, a few rioters in London and suddenly we're more than happy to do exactly the same thing. I saw a headline where Iran was asking the UN to intercede on behalf of the UK rioters. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-iran-un-mahmoud-ahmadinejad Isn't this hilarious how we were angry at how Iran cracked down on protesters during their election, but we are more than happy to do exactly the same thing for a few looters. Ahmadinejad must be laughing like a madman.
It's easy to talk a pile of trash when you aren't accountable for your blathering. Doing away with anonymity adds at least SOME accountability to your online life.
So let me get this straight... If we remove anonymity, we potentially put the life of people fighting for freedom in Egypt, Iran, even China at risk. And what do we gain? Aww, now no one will offend your delicate sensibilities with their trash talking?
Does NOT seem like a fair trade. Toughen up, buttercup, and realize that the anonymity that's making your life a TINY bit uncomfortable is essential for the lives of others.
Because I keep getting 'identified' as female. It's really annoying when I browse a site and obviously female oriented ads keep popping up. Google identifies me as female and that made no sense to me. 95% of my browsing is to IT/Tech/Computer sites, why would that identify as female? But now I realize they must be identifying me via my gmail account and other written text. The confusion likely stems from the fact I'm an exceptionally verbose male, predisposed towards descriptive language and precise grammar. That and I've always used emoticons as part of my attempt to overcome the lack of expression available in written text.
I would bet any amount my twitter also identifies as female. My wife is likely going to find this very amusing...
I think it's pretty obvious. There's a lot of PC gamers who grew up with games very much like indie RPGs. Whereas the average console gamer grew up with twitch games. Does it really surprise anyone which platform will be superior for that genre?
The phone hackers destroyed no property, deprived no owners of any of its use. I don't think there is any real harm here.
NO HARM?! In case you missed the details of the original case that started the whole firestorm... In 2002, Milly Dowler was kidnapped, then murdered later. When she went missing, News of the World hacked her phone. Seeing her voice mailbox was full, they deleted some messages (deleting potential evidence) so they could maybe get some new information. Meanwhile, the police saw that 'Milly' accessed her phone mailbox, so they downgraded her case, treating her as a low priority runaway. That meant that critical time tracking her was lost that could've got the police to her sooner and potentially saved her life.
What I don't understand is the wholesale posting of email addresses and passwords. What are they trying to accomplish?
I can answer that. The problem is the quantity of information. You crack a huge amount of email, but it takes some real 'boots on the ground' to go through it all and figure out what's signal and what's noise. And even if you do go through it all, you might not have the background knowledge to make sense of it.
So the idea then becomes to post the email and passwords and crowdsource it. Let everyone hold things up to the light and see what they can find. 90,000 emails is a lot for one person to go through, but trivial for 90,000 people to go through.
Something my grandfather knew and my great-grandfather... Many crimes are crimes of opportunity, usually linked to boredom. There have long been clear statistics that kids who play sports, play an instrument, or have dedication to a hobby are far less likely to be involved in crime. If someone is playing video games... They're not bored, and they're not out finding crimes of opportunity. Keep kids busy and they stay out of trouble.
What company doesn't "react badly" to people trying to get around their DRM?
I would expect most companies would react badly. However most companies would figure out a way to restore their DRM that didn't invalidate features promised at point of sale.
Cracked two WPA2. One was a weak password, as someone guessed. The other one? I just tried anything I knew about the neighbor, including his wife's name, his kids name, his car, etc. Password turned out to be his dog's name.
I have lived in my neighborhood for several years. Within my home detection range, I have access to nearly a dozen wireless hotspots. A few are open. A few use WEP. Two use WPA. A few use WPA2. In the course of my experimenting with wireless security and man in the middle attacks, I have gained access to all of them. The hardest one to crack forced me to set up a dedicated laptop for a week. Now, I'm just a computer guy with an interest in security. I tried just to see what could be done and to gain a better understanding. But the tools I used and the knowledge I have are available to virtually anyone. I'm far from some 'super-hacker'. My point is that if I were a pornographer, none of these would be secure enough to stop me. And yet the police are trying to spin this that somehow the homeowner who was wrongfully arrested was at fault for some security lack on his part. Ridiculous. It's obvious that the police didn't have enough information to justify the raid, and they are just covering that up. Can you imagine the police doing a major raid on your house, doing property damage, seizing your assets, etc. then being told "Hey, you have the same initials as the guy we're really after. We really didn't know enough to figure out if it was you or not, but we figured what the heck, we'd raid you anyway."
If I have a business that depends on XP... I'm out of luck. If I have a business that depends on FOSS and "Jeremy got a new job", I have the option of hiring someone for my company who will take the FOSS software and continue development.
This isn't just idle speculation. That's exactly what I'm doing for a living right now. I'm the guy who got hired when the original FOSS developer stopped. And now I have a job, my company gets to continue moving forward and my software updates are being sent back to the community for their benefit. Seems like a win-win to me.
There's a lovely chart out there that combines screen size, distance from screen and some other factors and shows that, at many common screen sizes (I have a 42" LCD) and viewing distances, Blu-ray is indistinguishable from DVD quality. As my wife and I happen to have our home theater in that range, I have seen absolutely no motivation to switch to a new format. (A friend brought over his Blu-ray player at one point, and once it was hooked up, we all agreed the difference was almost negligible.)
So why would King be shocked that a format that means nothing in a majority of households (I assume most of us are getting by with 46" screens or less) isn't taking over?
Exactly. Right now, officially, there was no Tiananmen Square massacre. But what if some TV drama, under the cover of 'alternate history' creates a TV drama that explores what would've happened if there was a Tiananmen Square massacre in '89? The Chinese government has worked so hard covering that up, they don't want some TV drama, under the guise of fiction, coming in and giving people the facts. So they need a law to nip that in the bud quickly.
Nothing to see here folks. This is just what happens when you want to firmly control the 'official' history. Obviously you can't have any kind of non-official history, even if it is fiction.
As a paying customer, I want your 'protection' to be invisible to me. As a paying customer, I don't want to be forced to put the CD in the drive, I don't want you installing drivers or messing with my boot sectors. I don't want you putting extra crap on my machine. I just want a smooth, fun, gaming experience.
Gary's mod sounds ideal. As a paying customer, I see/hear/experience nothing amiss. And yet their game is protected from theft.
If the choice is the customer experience vs. stopping pirates, the answer should always be the paying customer. No plan to stop piracy is worth inconvenience to the paying customer. And I'll put my money where my mouth is. As a consumer, despite enjoying Assassin's Creed, I did not purchase the sequels specifically because of the overbearing copy protection. But I would happily buy products from the people who make Gary's Mod.
Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe is wrong.
"The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"
I'm no astrophysicist, just a lowly programmer with a background in engineering physics, but I thought it was pretty much the standard (and understood by all) that carbon and anything heavier was produced by the stars? And I'm pretty sure I knew that by 12....
So no surprise he 'disproved' the big bang by making the assumption carbon must've been present. Hey kid, you're right, there was no 'Carbon Big Bang'. But that's not the big bang the rest of us are talking about.
Sometimes I randomly announce to empty rooms "I know you're listening...". It only has pros: if I'm wrong, nobody knows, but me; if I'm right, I just freaked someone out real bad.
I do the same thing! Except slightly differently, I'll sometimes stop in mid-thought, and think "GET OUT OF MY MIND!". Then I'll quickly look around to see who looks startled. If I'm wrong, no one knows, but if I'm right...
I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
Huh? My mind almost broke on that astounding bit of ignorance. What are you saying? Are you saying that once we invent vehicles that can travel faster than man on foot, we'll never run another 100 meter dash? Once we build a computer that can beat the top world's grandmasters, everyone will just stop playing chess?
The government pays the phone companies to build it. With your tax money.
You pay the phone companies exorbitant fees to use it.
Profit! For everyone, except you.
That's like complaining that you have to pay money to buy a car, and also pay for the gas to put in it. You are paying for 2 different things.
No, he's not. If you're comparing it to a car and gas, that would be the internet (car) and content (gas). The phone company doesn't pay for content. They don't create anything useful. They just control the means to access anything useful. So, as per the OP comment, it is like paying the phone company to build a car, then paying the phone company to actually use the car.
I was in the program to earn a split engineering/computer science degree. However, two years in, I shifted to focus on the computer science and earned my degree in that. So despite not earning an engineering degree (I'm considering going back someday) I've been told the presentation of my work is very friendly to engineers. More than once, I've had engineers come to me and say "You must be an engineer" after they view my documentation, to which I respond and tell them my background.
But now I realize that someone could report me for doing 'engineering level work' without a license? I could be reported and investigated? Unreal...
My hope is that the psychiatrist or sociologist comes in, and measures the employees...
Boss: "Are they unhappy?" Psych: "Yes!" Boss: "Why?" Psych: "The problem mainly seems to be dissatisfaction with the government" Boss: "Ok, let the government know that all we need to do to prevent security breaches and minimize insider risk is to have an open, effective government. Problem solved!"
So, if I understand this right, if Microsoft honestly felt that H.264 is the best standard for the internet, they could simply release everything (including patents) for free, relinquish all control and legally open H.264. Then Google would happily support H.264 again.
So why don't they? If they are being open and honest, they have said they don't ever plan to 'clamp down' on their H.264 rights, so they are losing nothing. Of course, if they are completely lying, and fully plan to milk it for every dollar as soon as it becomes the standard, then I guess they would do exactly what they are doing now...
When the first movie came out on VHS video, my friends asked me why I didn't buy it. I said "This is an obvious stopgap. They are clearly going to release a better, more fully-featured version in the future. I'm going to wait for that version. Only once I'm sure that it's the 'totally complete, fully featured' last version they are going to put out, will I buy it."
I'm still waiting. I've given a lot of my money to a lot of different movies in the years in-between, but somehow Lucas manages to convince me with every release that there's another, better release coming soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay! Cheap knock-off stealth choppers for everyone!!
When Egypt shut down their network to deal with protesters, the west was quick to say that's the response of a dictatorship and that it was morally wrong. Likewise when other countries shut down their social media to deal with protests.
And yet, a few rioters in London and suddenly we're more than happy to do exactly the same thing. I saw a headline where Iran was asking the UN to intercede on behalf of the UK rioters. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-iran-un-mahmoud-ahmadinejad Isn't this hilarious how we were angry at how Iran cracked down on protesters during their election, but we are more than happy to do exactly the same thing for a few looters. Ahmadinejad must be laughing like a madman.
It's easy to talk a pile of trash when you aren't accountable for your blathering. Doing away with anonymity adds at least SOME accountability to your online life.
So let me get this straight... If we remove anonymity, we potentially put the life of people fighting for freedom in Egypt, Iran, even China at risk. And what do we gain? Aww, now no one will offend your delicate sensibilities with their trash talking?
Does NOT seem like a fair trade. Toughen up, buttercup, and realize that the anonymity that's making your life a TINY bit uncomfortable is essential for the lives of others.
Because I keep getting 'identified' as female. It's really annoying when I browse a site and obviously female oriented ads keep popping up. Google identifies me as female and that made no sense to me. 95% of my browsing is to IT/Tech/Computer sites, why would that identify as female? But now I realize they must be identifying me via my gmail account and other written text. The confusion likely stems from the fact I'm an exceptionally verbose male, predisposed towards descriptive language and precise grammar. That and I've always used emoticons as part of my attempt to overcome the lack of expression available in written text.
I would bet any amount my twitter also identifies as female. My wife is likely going to find this very amusing...
I think it's pretty obvious. There's a lot of PC gamers who grew up with games very much like indie RPGs. Whereas the average console gamer grew up with twitch games. Does it really surprise anyone which platform will be superior for that genre?
The phone hackers destroyed no property, deprived no owners of any of its use. I don't think there is any real harm here.
NO HARM?! In case you missed the details of the original case that started the whole firestorm...
In 2002, Milly Dowler was kidnapped, then murdered later. When she went missing, News of the World hacked her phone. Seeing her voice mailbox was full, they deleted some messages (deleting potential evidence) so they could maybe get some new information. Meanwhile, the police saw that 'Milly' accessed her phone mailbox, so they downgraded her case, treating her as a low priority runaway. That meant that critical time tracking her was lost that could've got the police to her sooner and potentially saved her life.
No harm indeed...
What I don't understand is the wholesale posting of email addresses and passwords. What are they trying to accomplish?
I can answer that. The problem is the quantity of information. You crack a huge amount of email, but it takes some real 'boots on the ground' to go through it all and figure out what's signal and what's noise. And even if you do go through it all, you might not have the background knowledge to make sense of it.
So the idea then becomes to post the email and passwords and crowdsource it. Let everyone hold things up to the light and see what they can find. 90,000 emails is a lot for one person to go through, but trivial for 90,000 people to go through.
Something my grandfather knew and my great-grandfather... Many crimes are crimes of opportunity, usually linked to boredom. There have long been clear statistics that kids who play sports, play an instrument, or have dedication to a hobby are far less likely to be involved in crime. If someone is playing video games... They're not bored, and they're not out finding crimes of opportunity. Keep kids busy and they stay out of trouble.
if you cant PROVE you bought it, it's pirated by default.
Obviously! After all, this is America, where a man is guilty unless he can prove he's innocent.
And we're cutting back. What do they know that we don't? Hmm...
What do the Chinese know that we don't?
Math
Science
And in the US, we want creationism taught in biology classes and forbid schools from using the word 'gay'.
'Nuff said.
What company doesn't "react badly" to people trying to get around their DRM?
I would expect most companies would react badly. However most companies would figure out a way to restore their DRM that didn't invalidate features promised at point of sale.
Cracked two WPA2. One was a weak password, as someone guessed. The other one? I just tried anything I knew about the neighbor, including his wife's name, his kids name, his car, etc. Password turned out to be his dog's name.
I have lived in my neighborhood for several years. Within my home detection range, I have access to nearly a dozen wireless hotspots. A few are open. A few use WEP. Two use WPA. A few use WPA2. In the course of my experimenting with wireless security and man in the middle attacks, I have gained access to all of them. The hardest one to crack forced me to set up a dedicated laptop for a week. Now, I'm just a computer guy with an interest in security. I tried just to see what could be done and to gain a better understanding. But the tools I used and the knowledge I have are available to virtually anyone. I'm far from some 'super-hacker'. My point is that if I were a pornographer, none of these would be secure enough to stop me. And yet the police are trying to spin this that somehow the homeowner who was wrongfully arrested was at fault for some security lack on his part. Ridiculous. It's obvious that the police didn't have enough information to justify the raid, and they are just covering that up. Can you imagine the police doing a major raid on your house, doing property damage, seizing your assets, etc. then being told "Hey, you have the same initials as the guy we're really after. We really didn't know enough to figure out if it was you or not, but we figured what the heck, we'd raid you anyway."
If I have a business that depends on XP... I'm out of luck. If I have a business that depends on FOSS and "Jeremy got a new job", I have the option of hiring someone for my company who will take the FOSS software and continue development.
This isn't just idle speculation. That's exactly what I'm doing for a living right now. I'm the guy who got hired when the original FOSS developer stopped. And now I have a job, my company gets to continue moving forward and my software updates are being sent back to the community for their benefit. Seems like a win-win to me.
There's a lovely chart out there that combines screen size, distance from screen and some other factors and shows that, at many common screen sizes (I have a 42" LCD) and viewing distances, Blu-ray is indistinguishable from DVD quality. As my wife and I happen to have our home theater in that range, I have seen absolutely no motivation to switch to a new format. (A friend brought over his Blu-ray player at one point, and once it was hooked up, we all agreed the difference was almost negligible.)
So why would King be shocked that a format that means nothing in a majority of households (I assume most of us are getting by with 46" screens or less) isn't taking over?
Exactly. Right now, officially, there was no Tiananmen Square massacre. But what if some TV drama, under the cover of 'alternate history' creates a TV drama that explores what would've happened if there was a Tiananmen Square massacre in '89? The Chinese government has worked so hard covering that up, they don't want some TV drama, under the guise of fiction, coming in and giving people the facts. So they need a law to nip that in the bud quickly.
Nothing to see here folks. This is just what happens when you want to firmly control the 'official' history. Obviously you can't have any kind of non-official history, even if it is fiction.
As a paying customer, I want your 'protection' to be invisible to me. As a paying customer, I don't want to be forced to put the CD in the drive, I don't want you installing drivers or messing with my boot sectors. I don't want you putting extra crap on my machine. I just want a smooth, fun, gaming experience.
Gary's mod sounds ideal. As a paying customer, I see/hear/experience nothing amiss. And yet their game is protected from theft.
If the choice is the customer experience vs. stopping pirates, the answer should always be the paying customer. No plan to stop piracy is worth inconvenience to the paying customer. And I'll put my money where my mouth is. As a consumer, despite enjoying Assassin's Creed, I did not purchase the sequels specifically because of the overbearing copy protection. But I would happily buy products from the people who make Gary's Mod.
Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe is wrong.
"The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"
I'm no astrophysicist, just a lowly programmer with a background in engineering physics, but I thought it was pretty much the standard (and understood by all) that carbon and anything heavier was produced by the stars? And I'm pretty sure I knew that by 12....
So no surprise he 'disproved' the big bang by making the assumption carbon must've been present. Hey kid, you're right, there was no 'Carbon Big Bang'. But that's not the big bang the rest of us are talking about.
Sometimes I randomly announce to empty rooms "I know you're listening...". It only has pros: if I'm wrong, nobody knows, but me; if I'm right, I just freaked someone out real bad.
I do the same thing! Except slightly differently, I'll sometimes stop in mid-thought, and think "GET OUT OF MY MIND!". Then I'll quickly look around to see who looks startled. If I'm wrong, no one knows, but if I'm right...
I'm not sure what Ken Jennings and Alex Trebek are getting out of it besides announcing their pending obsolescence.
Huh? My mind almost broke on that astounding bit of ignorance. What are you saying? Are you saying that once we invent vehicles that can travel faster than man on foot, we'll never run another 100 meter dash? Once we build a computer that can beat the top world's grandmasters, everyone will just stop playing chess?
What exactly is going to become obsolete here?
That's like complaining that you have to pay money to buy a car, and also pay for the gas to put in it. You are paying for 2 different things.
No, he's not. If you're comparing it to a car and gas, that would be the internet (car) and content (gas). The phone company doesn't pay for content. They don't create anything useful. They just control the means to access anything useful. So, as per the OP comment, it is like paying the phone company to build a car, then paying the phone company to actually use the car.
I was in the program to earn a split engineering/computer science degree. However, two years in, I shifted to focus on the computer science and earned my degree in that. So despite not earning an engineering degree (I'm considering going back someday) I've been told the presentation of my work is very friendly to engineers. More than once, I've had engineers come to me and say "You must be an engineer" after they view my documentation, to which I respond and tell them my background.
But now I realize that someone could report me for doing 'engineering level work' without a license? I could be reported and investigated? Unreal...
My hope is that the psychiatrist or sociologist comes in, and measures the employees...
Boss: "Are they unhappy?"
Psych: "Yes!"
Boss: "Why?"
Psych: "The problem mainly seems to be dissatisfaction with the government"
Boss: "Ok, let the government know that all we need to do to prevent security breaches and minimize insider risk is to have an open, effective government. Problem solved!"
So, if I understand this right, if Microsoft honestly felt that H.264 is the best standard for the internet, they could simply release everything (including patents) for free, relinquish all control and legally open H.264. Then Google would happily support H.264 again.
So why don't they? If they are being open and honest, they have said they don't ever plan to 'clamp down' on their H.264 rights, so they are losing nothing. Of course, if they are completely lying, and fully plan to milk it for every dollar as soon as it becomes the standard, then I guess they would do exactly what they are doing now...
When the first movie came out on VHS video, my friends asked me why I didn't buy it. I said "This is an obvious stopgap. They are clearly going to release a better, more fully-featured version in the future. I'm going to wait for that version. Only once I'm sure that it's the 'totally complete, fully featured' last version they are going to put out, will I buy it."
I'm still waiting. I've given a lot of my money to a lot of different movies in the years in-between, but somehow Lucas manages to convince me with every release that there's another, better release coming soon.
So now I'm waiting for the 3D version...