Knowing at least one area in which windshield fliers are prevalent (college towns), chances are pretty high you'd be going ballistic over some poor college kid who just needed some cash and wasn't told what these fliers were for, not a malicious malware author/user hiding in an apartment somewhere while his freshly-hired lackeys unwittingly do his bidding.
So unfortunately, catching the guy distributing the fliers wouldn't do you any good, unless you're really THAT upset with the practice of windshield fliering in the first place.
The fake parking tickets, though, those are probably illegal in and of themselves, and the lackey distributing them would have to at least SEE what they are and thus be complicit in the activity, so they probably have some other manner of disguising themselves (official-looking police uniform, etc) so nobody questions them. Unless the REAL cops come by.
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012.
SCENE: The Pentagon, 2012
Science Advisor: "President Whoever-You'll-Be, IBM has completed our 20 petaflop computer. It is awaiting your command." President Whoever-You'll-Be: "Thank you, Advisor. We can use it to compute the long-term effects of nuclear waste disposal, weather fronts, and... just... just how much processing power is in this?" SA: *deep sigh* "Over 1.6 million processors and a total of 1.6TB of RAM, sir." PWYB: "My GOD, Advisor. Do you know what that much power could do? It... it could..." SA: *another deep sigh* "It could, in theory, calculate the entire state of Wisconson to rubble. Or process the irrelevance of humanity down to a variance of 10^-24. Or, and this is what we were hoping not to worry you about, refactor..." PWYB:(interrupting) "Refactor the planet into a singularity, yes, I know. This is a grave situation. We can only hope this much processing power doesn't fall into the hands of someone with fixed-polarity Reed-Muller expressions for incompletely specified Boolean equations and a vendetta." SA:(long pause) "Shall I turn it on, sir?" PWYB: "Yes, turn it on. And may God have mercy on our souls if we never need an fsck..."
Wow. Just... wow. That's impressive market research on their part. They are not sure how long people keep their cellphones. And they see no issue with requiring digital files to expire whenever the hardware does.
Well, I kept my last phone around for around four years or so! Of course, that was due to me not really having much need for new features on my phone at the time. Plus a lack of money to get a new one until relatively recently. Which also meant I lacked money to buy things like, say, $3.50 music tracks.
So look on the bright side, that's one hell of a market they're aiming for! People who either don't need a massive media player phone and thus probably wouldn't buy songs specifically for it even if they had one, or who can't afford to buy a new phone and also can't afford music tracks at a huge markup! Glad SOMEBODY'S tapping that market!:-)
Third, provide known-good channels for obtaining new software. See: Linux package managers and repositories. Tie it in to Microsoft Update. Make it possible for third parties to run their own repositories.
And right there is where the problem kicks in. In the commercial Windows software world, every company wants control of their own stuff. Ever wondered why a Windows start menu is, by most programs' default install settings, flooded with unhelpful top-level menu entries like "Symantec", "Adobe", and "Valve"? The companies would never want to relinquish control of their product enough to default them to "Utilities", "Graphics", and "Games"*.
My point is, with third-party repositories available for the Windows world, that would quickly become the rule, not the exception. In the Linux world, yes, due to the way things are licensed and distributed, every distro can maintain its own central repository easily and establish trust amongst its users. Anyone using a third-party repository under Linux is itching for trouble and better know what they're doing. But, that would never fly with Windows-centric companies. The user would be trained to say "Yes" to any repository update, the same as they're trained to say "Yes" to any UAC notice now. And, sadly, that would shoot down the entire "known-good channels" part of package managers.
So while that IS a good idea in theory, it'd never work in the current Windows atmosphere.
*: Treat these as abstract, rhetorical companies and products. I just pulled these out of thin air. For every one of these that DON'T install to a top-level company-name entry, I could probably find five more that DO if I actually looked around.
Hm. Must be something wrong with time and space. The universe's hologram controls are always the first thing to go wrong, as I learned on Star Trek. That and the mortality fail-safe. And... uh-oh.
If your car has a recall for a safety belt problem, and you don't get it fixed and get into an accident, is it suddenly the car manufacturer's fault? No.
But if that one manufacturer has a long, chronic history of their safety belts breaking, bursting into flames, draining the fuel, smearing the washer fluid, letting the air out of the tires, and providing easy access for criminals to hotwire the engine, one has to start to believe there's a limit to customer responsibility and start to wonder just what's going on with QA in the seat belt department in the first place.
Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting analog is a requirement of DTV?
Put quickly: The resale of the analog broadcast spectrum.
Put not-quite-as-quickly-but-still-kinda-fast: As I understands it, analog broadcasts are a lot more inefficient than digital, so shutting them down frees up a lot of space to be resold or otherwise reused in other capacities. Whether this means more advertising or better wireless/cell phone reliability or whatever remains to be seen.
We need Desert Bus resurrected. Only this time, in full 3D, rendering the entire trip at once, requiring a ton of RAM and video power in addition to six hours of time for the trip from Tuscon to Vegas.
Plus a more photorealistic bug splattering on the windshield after five hours.
Tricky to say. One thing I've noticed about the past few of these is that these are all taken from before they started doing Disagree Mail. So they might have a massive backlog to go through and figure the corporate overlords who deemed this necessary will get sick of it before they run out, meaning they won't need to loop back like you described.
Yes, I'm operating under the belief that this was forced on Slashdot by their corporate overlords and isn't entirely their fault. So?
I work for a printer company. My brother gave me an idea for an easter egg to bury in the high-level stuff we make. Specifically, his exact quote was "If my MP3 player has a Shuffle mode, my printer should, too".
Collate: On | Off | Shuffle
Shame it's not coded up, and I wouldn't put it in anyway. But, subtle and possibly absurd. That's the way easter eggs should be.
What?!? Then who's going to fight the other rubber-suit monsters that just happen to be sitting around dormant until they coincidentally awaken when ol' Godzilla shows up[1]? Gotta take the good with the bad, I say.
Funny how I think they left the PC game industry because they were whining about piracy, and how going console-only would solve that so wonderfully and magically.
And now, it's bitch, bitch, bitch all over again! It's the players' fault! Screw you, customers! What've customers ever done for them, anyway?
Hm. A more curious question than it seems. At first, I was going to say that the people can use their own erasers on their own stuff. Except, really, can you really take back something you've said? I mean, once you've said it, it's been said, and you're not going to un-say it.
Maybe the piece would've been better without any erasers.
I think Lewis Black put it best on one of his Back In Black segments on The Daily Show. People tune in to Fox (News) to seethe in outrage over what they saw on Fox (broadcast) the night before. It's a self-perpetuating business!
ICQ used to allow that, as I recall. And, coincidentally, I think 10 users was the limit before it would fall to IRC-style multi-user chat.
Though it had its flaws, definitely. Like how it could mix IRC-style and talk-style users depending on preferences. And how IRC-style users sometimes got half-finished text lines from talk-style users repeatedly. And "phosphorescent green terminal" would've been nice — everyone was allowed to pick their own background and text colors AND change them at will. My eyes hurt greatly past that...
What would you rather have, an actual, physical, signed check by one of the legends of programming, one which you can frame if you want, or a string of text in some giant database reading to the effect of "dknuth sent $2.56", which would equate to about one line on a sheet of blank, white paper?
It's not so much holding the cards/keys, it's taking a picture where that's accidentally in the frame, and in fairly readable view. For an example, let's say you're selling something on eBay (insert obligatory Police Squad! joke here). It's not something that their stock pictures will cover, so you need to take a picture of it. Let's also assume that you don't have a photo studio handy, nor do you have an area of your house/apartment specially designed with a stage and neutral backdrop on which to take pictures, so you're taking the picture on your kitchen table, or an end table in the living room. All seem perfectly reasonable?
That's where your problem might come in. Without even thinking about it, you might have left some clutter on the table. All you needed is space to put your object. It's all that clutter you need to worry about; suddenly, your car keys could show up all over the internet via an honest mistake. Or maybe a credit card bill with your address. Your credit card seems less likely, I'll admit, given most people keep those in their wallets, not in the open on tables, but still, the point stands.
So it's not so much of stupid/drunk/stupid drunk people thinking it's a good idea to take a picture of them holding credit cards and car keys, it's more of a mistake of leaving things in the scene when taking a picture. And yes, people on Flickr are bizarre, but that's besides the point.
The existing studio system might suck as gatekeepers (these were the people who gave Britney Spears a recording contract, after all).
And...
If indie music is to really overthrow the studio system, the field needs some form of gatekeepers. Mere word of mouth isn't enough (too many really talented artists will be ignored in favor of talentless hacks who just happen to have a lot of myspace friends).
In a way, you're either contradicting yourself or overlapping your arguments. In a way. Okay, maybe a bit of an out-of-the-way way, but what you just described with the "just happen to have a lot of MySpace friends" artist could easily be reinterpreted to describe how Paris Hilton got a recording contract ("like, all her cool rich friends and stuff! ^_^ lol etc" can almost trivially map to a talentless indie hack or camwhore with a lot of MySpace friends).
Now, you might say that this isn't relevant, that what you're looking for is some "official" authority to act as a theoretical gatekeeper and AVOID the situation you described. But the question comes, what kind of gatekeeper? As your example showed, the "people-based" gatekeeper (MySpace, et al) is just as fallible as the "studio exec" gatekeeper (whoever felt it was a good idea to sign Britney Spears). And there's no such thing as a purely objective gatekeeper when it comes to music; it IS art, after all, and everybody's got their own opinions. I mean, SOMEBODY likes Britney Spears enough to have kept her in the public eye this long, right?
Just my opinion on the matter. It doesn't matter what kind of gatekeeper's giving you an opinion; in the end, it's only the gatekeeper's opinion, and you still need to make your own decisions eventually.
Maybe the GP meant it in the sense of that Microsoft will now no doubt pull out the old "zomg open sores is SOCIALIST!!11!1!" chestnut, only this time with "SEE?!?/?1! IT IS AN U DIDNT BELEIVE US!!1!" to back it up.
Well, looks like Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a few years late in its estimates, strangely. I guess that makes up for SimCity 2000 being (apparently) more than a few years early with microwave power.
Indeed, why are some people just completely unable to comprehend that not *everyone* is a greedy bastard?
I think that's part of the point; if you're a greedy bastard, self-centeredness and an inability to see beyond your next paycheck kind of comes with the territory, and you wind up with blog posts like the one linked.
He called it the "AwesomeBar" and not the "StupidBar" or "AwfulBar" or similar! BLASPHEMER!!!1!1 STONE HIM! STOOOOONE HIM!!1!
In all honesty, I like it, too. Sure, there's other ways in FF3 to organize bookmarks, but since I lack the OCD required to tag every bookmark I have[*] — not to mention the packrattishness to bookmark every site I visit — the AwesomeBar is considerably handy to quickly dig up obscure history entries I didn't think much of a week ago or so.
There just seems to be a passionately vocal subset of people who wish it took physical form so they could poke it to death with pointy sticks and then burn it.
[*]: But I obviously DO have the OCD required to properly use an — where need be, so don't mind me.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing at least one area in which windshield fliers are prevalent (college towns), chances are pretty high you'd be going ballistic over some poor college kid who just needed some cash and wasn't told what these fliers were for, not a malicious malware author/user hiding in an apartment somewhere while his freshly-hired lackeys unwittingly do his bidding.
So unfortunately, catching the guy distributing the fliers wouldn't do you any good, unless you're really THAT upset with the practice of windshield fliering in the first place.
The fake parking tickets, though, those are probably illegal in and of themselves, and the lackey distributing them would have to at least SEE what they are and thus be complicit in the activity, so they probably have some other manner of disguising themselves (official-looking police uniform, etc) so nobody questions them. Unless the REAL cops come by.
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012.
SCENE: The Pentagon, 2012
Science Advisor: "President Whoever-You'll-Be, IBM has completed our 20 petaflop computer. It is awaiting your command."
President Whoever-You'll-Be: "Thank you, Advisor. We can use it to compute the long-term effects of nuclear waste disposal, weather fronts, and... just... just how much processing power is in this?"
SA: *deep sigh* "Over 1.6 million processors and a total of 1.6TB of RAM, sir."
PWYB: "My GOD, Advisor. Do you know what that much power could do? It... it could..."
SA: *another deep sigh* "It could, in theory, calculate the entire state of Wisconson to rubble. Or process the irrelevance of humanity down to a variance of 10^-24. Or, and this is what we were hoping not to worry you about, refactor..."
PWYB: (interrupting) "Refactor the planet into a singularity, yes, I know. This is a grave situation. We can only hope this much processing power doesn't fall into the hands of someone with fixed-polarity Reed-Muller expressions for incompletely specified Boolean equations and a vendetta."
SA: (long pause) "Shall I turn it on, sir?"
PWYB: "Yes, turn it on. And may God have mercy on our souls if we never need an fsck..."
Wow. Just... wow. That's impressive market research on their part. They are not sure how long people keep their cellphones. And they see no issue with requiring digital files to expire whenever the hardware does.
Well, I kept my last phone around for around four years or so! Of course, that was due to me not really having much need for new features on my phone at the time. Plus a lack of money to get a new one until relatively recently. Which also meant I lacked money to buy things like, say, $3.50 music tracks.
So look on the bright side, that's one hell of a market they're aiming for! People who either don't need a massive media player phone and thus probably wouldn't buy songs specifically for it even if they had one, or who can't afford to buy a new phone and also can't afford music tracks at a huge markup! Glad SOMEBODY'S tapping that market! :-)
Third, provide known-good channels for obtaining new software. See: Linux package managers and repositories. Tie it in to Microsoft Update. Make it possible for third parties to run their own repositories.
And right there is where the problem kicks in. In the commercial Windows software world, every company wants control of their own stuff. Ever wondered why a Windows start menu is, by most programs' default install settings, flooded with unhelpful top-level menu entries like "Symantec", "Adobe", and "Valve"? The companies would never want to relinquish control of their product enough to default them to "Utilities", "Graphics", and "Games"*.
So, apply that to software repositories. They'd never let some general repository keep control of their software. "To install Adobe SomethingMangler© 54.x, add the following repository to your Windows Update list." "To let Symantec FooHerder Deluxe© be automatically updated, add the following repository to your Windows Update list." "In order for CompanyName's YourImportantVirusScanner 2009© to run, this repository must be added to your Windows Update list."
And in reality, that would be too hard for the user to remember and too user-unfriendly to boot. So it would be more like "Do you want to add Symantec Auto-Update to your repository list? [Yes/No]" "Do you want to add Adobe InstaUpdate© to your repository list? [Yes/No]" "Do you want to add CILK YES TO TIHS REPSOTIRY UPDATE YOUR VIRUSEES 2009!!!!! to your repository list? [Yes/No]"
My point is, with third-party repositories available for the Windows world, that would quickly become the rule, not the exception. In the Linux world, yes, due to the way things are licensed and distributed, every distro can maintain its own central repository easily and establish trust amongst its users. Anyone using a third-party repository under Linux is itching for trouble and better know what they're doing. But, that would never fly with Windows-centric companies. The user would be trained to say "Yes" to any repository update, the same as they're trained to say "Yes" to any UAC notice now. And, sadly, that would shoot down the entire "known-good channels" part of package managers.
So while that IS a good idea in theory, it'd never work in the current Windows atmosphere.
*: Treat these as abstract, rhetorical companies and products. I just pulled these out of thin air. For every one of these that DON'T install to a top-level company-name entry, I could probably find five more that DO if I actually looked around.
Arch!
*pause*
ARCH!
*pause*
Computer, ARCH!
Hm. Must be something wrong with time and space. The universe's hologram controls are always the first thing to go wrong, as I learned on Star Trek. That and the mortality fail-safe. And... uh-oh.
If your car has a recall for a safety belt problem, and you don't get it fixed and get into an accident, is it suddenly the car manufacturer's fault? No.
But if that one manufacturer has a long, chronic history of their safety belts breaking, bursting into flames, draining the fuel, smearing the washer fluid, letting the air out of the tires, and providing easy access for criminals to hotwire the engine, one has to start to believe there's a limit to customer responsibility and start to wonder just what's going on with QA in the seat belt department in the first place.
Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting analog is a requirement of DTV?
Put quickly: The resale of the analog broadcast spectrum.
Put not-quite-as-quickly-but-still-kinda-fast: As I understands it, analog broadcasts are a lot more inefficient than digital, so shutting them down frees up a lot of space to be resold or otherwise reused in other capacities. Whether this means more advertising or better wireless/cell phone reliability or whatever remains to be seen.
We need Desert Bus resurrected. Only this time, in full 3D, rendering the entire trip at once, requiring a ton of RAM and video power in addition to six hours of time for the trip from Tuscon to Vegas.
Plus a more photorealistic bug splattering on the windshield after five hours.
Tricky to say. One thing I've noticed about the past few of these is that these are all taken from before they started doing Disagree Mail. So they might have a massive backlog to go through and figure the corporate overlords who deemed this necessary will get sick of it before they run out, meaning they won't need to loop back like you described.
Yes, I'm operating under the belief that this was forced on Slashdot by their corporate overlords and isn't entirely their fault. So?
I work for a printer company. My brother gave me an idea for an easter egg to bury in the high-level stuff we make. Specifically, his exact quote was "If my MP3 player has a Shuffle mode, my printer should, too".
Collate: On | Off | Shuffle
Shame it's not coded up, and I wouldn't put it in anyway. But, subtle and possibly absurd. That's the way easter eggs should be.
How would slashdotters feel if somebody started selling a Linux branded cabernet with a picture of Tux on it without permission?
Oh, no, no, no, WINE is something else entirely. It doesn't require Linux; it even runs on the BSDs and Solaris, if I'm not mistaken. Easy mistake. :-)
*** Captain Spam runs and hides
Nobody wants Godzilla showing up in 50 years.
It's just too terrifying a possibility.
What?!? Then who's going to fight the other rubber-suit monsters that just happen to be sitting around dormant until they coincidentally awaken when ol' Godzilla shows up[1]? Gotta take the good with the bad, I say.
[1]: Besides Gamera.
Funny how I think they left the PC game industry because they were whining about piracy, and how going console-only would solve that so wonderfully and magically.
And now, it's bitch, bitch, bitch all over again! It's the players' fault! Screw you, customers! What've customers ever done for them, anyway?
[...] NVIDIA has released what they are calling the most powerful graphics card in history.
...until three months from now when the "GeForce".(++$ver_num) is released. Just like three months ago. And before that, and before that, and...
Hm. A more curious question than it seems. At first, I was going to say that the people can use their own erasers on their own stuff. Except, really, can you really take back something you've said? I mean, once you've said it, it's been said, and you're not going to un-say it.
Maybe the piece would've been better without any erasers.
I think Lewis Black put it best on one of his Back In Black segments on The Daily Show. People tune in to Fox (News) to seethe in outrage over what they saw on Fox (broadcast) the night before. It's a self-perpetuating business!
ICQ used to allow that, as I recall. And, coincidentally, I think 10 users was the limit before it would fall to IRC-style multi-user chat.
Though it had its flaws, definitely. Like how it could mix IRC-style and talk-style users depending on preferences. And how IRC-style users sometimes got half-finished text lines from talk-style users repeatedly. And "phosphorescent green terminal" would've been nice — everyone was allowed to pick their own background and text colors AND change them at will. My eyes hurt greatly past that...
What would you rather have, an actual, physical, signed check by one of the legends of programming, one which you can frame if you want, or a string of text in some giant database reading to the effect of "dknuth sent $2.56", which would equate to about one line on a sheet of blank, white paper?
It's not so much holding the cards/keys, it's taking a picture where that's accidentally in the frame, and in fairly readable view. For an example, let's say you're selling something on eBay (insert obligatory Police Squad! joke here). It's not something that their stock pictures will cover, so you need to take a picture of it. Let's also assume that you don't have a photo studio handy, nor do you have an area of your house/apartment specially designed with a stage and neutral backdrop on which to take pictures, so you're taking the picture on your kitchen table, or an end table in the living room. All seem perfectly reasonable?
That's where your problem might come in. Without even thinking about it, you might have left some clutter on the table. All you needed is space to put your object. It's all that clutter you need to worry about; suddenly, your car keys could show up all over the internet via an honest mistake. Or maybe a credit card bill with your address. Your credit card seems less likely, I'll admit, given most people keep those in their wallets, not in the open on tables, but still, the point stands.
So it's not so much of stupid/drunk/stupid drunk people thinking it's a good idea to take a picture of them holding credit cards and car keys, it's more of a mistake of leaving things in the scene when taking a picture. And yes, people on Flickr are bizarre, but that's besides the point.
The existing studio system might suck as gatekeepers (these were the people who gave Britney Spears a recording contract, after all).
And...
If indie music is to really overthrow the studio system, the field needs some form of gatekeepers. Mere word of mouth isn't enough (too many really talented artists will be ignored in favor of talentless hacks who just happen to have a lot of myspace friends).
In a way, you're either contradicting yourself or overlapping your arguments. In a way. Okay, maybe a bit of an out-of-the-way way, but what you just described with the "just happen to have a lot of MySpace friends" artist could easily be reinterpreted to describe how Paris Hilton got a recording contract ("like, all her cool rich friends and stuff! ^_^ lol etc" can almost trivially map to a talentless indie hack or camwhore with a lot of MySpace friends).
Now, you might say that this isn't relevant, that what you're looking for is some "official" authority to act as a theoretical gatekeeper and AVOID the situation you described. But the question comes, what kind of gatekeeper? As your example showed, the "people-based" gatekeeper (MySpace, et al) is just as fallible as the "studio exec" gatekeeper (whoever felt it was a good idea to sign Britney Spears). And there's no such thing as a purely objective gatekeeper when it comes to music; it IS art, after all, and everybody's got their own opinions. I mean, SOMEBODY likes Britney Spears enough to have kept her in the public eye this long, right?
Just my opinion on the matter. It doesn't matter what kind of gatekeeper's giving you an opinion; in the end, it's only the gatekeeper's opinion, and you still need to make your own decisions eventually.
Maybe the GP meant it in the sense of that Microsoft will now no doubt pull out the old "zomg open sores is SOCIALIST!!11!1!" chestnut, only this time with "SEE?!?/?1! IT IS AN U DIDNT BELEIVE US!!1!" to back it up.
Well, looks like Transport Tycoon Deluxe is a few years late in its estimates, strangely. I guess that makes up for SimCity 2000 being (apparently) more than a few years early with microwave power.
Indeed, why are some people just completely unable to comprehend that not *everyone* is a greedy bastard?
I think that's part of the point; if you're a greedy bastard, self-centeredness and an inability to see beyond your next paycheck kind of comes with the territory, and you wind up with blog posts like the one linked.
Kentucky has jurisdiction over the global internet. Who knew? Always the guys you least expect, huh?
I guess now I'm glad I moved out here for a job. We can build our own tech sector by just ruling that everybody's computers have to be over here.
some of us happen to like the new Awesomebar.
He called it the "AwesomeBar" and not the "StupidBar" or "AwfulBar" or similar! BLASPHEMER!!!1!1 STONE HIM! STOOOOONE HIM!!1!
In all honesty, I like it, too. Sure, there's other ways in FF3 to organize bookmarks, but since I lack the OCD required to tag every bookmark I have[*] — not to mention the packrattishness to bookmark every site I visit — the AwesomeBar is considerably handy to quickly dig up obscure history entries I didn't think much of a week ago or so.
There just seems to be a passionately vocal subset of people who wish it took physical form so they could poke it to death with pointy sticks and then burn it.
[*]: But I obviously DO have the OCD required to properly use an — where need be, so don't mind me.