People have tried putting up paywalls in front of internet resources. It almost always ends badly. People like to btich about the ads, but at the end of the day it's the only way to survive. If you've got a better business model then let's see you put it into action, because there are a LOT of people trying to figure out alternative ways to make money or just cover costs who would love to see another option.
I've got a better "business model:" Die.
No, really! DIE! PLEASE! Fuck off and let the Internet go back to what it was in the '90s, before it got infested by all this commercial bullshit!
There will always be enough people running their own websites and posting their own content because they want to even if they don't make money from it, as well as forums (and, dare I say, newsgroups), that commercial content is not, has never been, and never will be, necessary!
5 hours is a long time to find, fix, test, and deploy a fix in your mind? Seriously?.
No, but it is a long time to fail over to the redundant systems, roll back whatever configuration change you did last, or that kind of thing.
I think we can safely say that you don't develop software for a living, or at least that if you do then you are completely incompetent.
Everything about this is wrong.
First of all, the issue is operations, not development. Even if development screwed up, it shouldn't matter because the deployment would be rolled back. (Actually, ideally the deployment wouldn't happen in the first place because QA would have found the issue first and told development to go back and fix their shit.)
Second, if you're in operations and you don't think 5 hours is a long time to get the service back up then you are completely incompetent!
At my previous job, I used C# under Visual Studio for web development (ASP.NET). As much as I loathe Microsoft's business practices, I have to admit C# is pretty nice to program in.
The software was running on AT&T systems, making AT&T the user. From the user's perspective, the software was malware. Therefore, the headline is accurate.
If it were running on the phones themselves, making the phone owner the user, then it would not have been malware.
While desktops are safe, mobile browsing is still problematic, I know on my Samsung Android phone I get ads on websites, enough to crowd out the information I'm looking for. So sooner or later, ad blockers will be like desktop browsers, mandatory.
I use mobile Firefox on my Android phone with the same ad-blocking extensions I have on my desktops.
Even ads that are "polite" are still hosted by third-party ad networks, which means they're still tracking, collecting, and monetizing your behavior. Since that is entirely unacceptable, all ads have to be blocked regardless of how unobtrusive they are.
In today's world it is up to each person to guard their own privacy.
Too bad doing so is literally impossible.
Plenty of free tools for e-mail and messaging encryption and anonymous web browsing. Stop using any social media services. If you are really paranoid only use public Internet cafes when going online. Stop using the Internet altogether.
Awesome. Now tell me how to stop third parties (e.g. friends, family, utility companies, credit reporting agencies, anybody operating surveillance cameras, the government) from sharing so much information about me that anything I might have posted on Facebook could have been extrapolated anyway. That's the problem!
More importantly, tell me how I can accomplish all that while still being able to exercise my 1st Amendment rights of free speech and free association (as opposed to dropping out of society to subsist in a cabin in the woods somewhere).
I mean, did you pay attention to my previous post at all? Did you read the article I cited, which illustrated how (for example) if social media had existed in the 1700s the British could have used it to quash the American Revolution before it began by identifying and taking out key individuals? How do we know Facebook, Google etc. aren't using the same tactics right now?
Your claim that the engine is "being stressed beyond its design" is wrong because the engine is identical to the ones sold in Europe, where the emissions laws are not ridiculously prejudiced against Diesels and what you call the "high power mode" is the only mode. In reality, the engine is simply over-engineered relative to the demands of the EPA-restricted mode.
I have a VW TDI that's "suped up" (albeit one older than 2009). Let me assure you that double the power is not only easily doable with bolt-on parts (ECU tuning, larger injectors, a bigger turbo and not much else) but that the result is hardly any less reliable than the factory configuration.
I'd like to see the political demographics of people who get emissions control bypass mechanisms are
Some of them are "ecomodder" types whose idea of "performance" might still be laudable efficiency, albeit prioritizing goals slightly differently than the EPA does.
For example, as delivered from the factory these 2009+ VW TDIs cannot safely use more than 5% biodiesel. However, with [illegal] modifications to the emissions system they could use 100% biodiesel, which can arguably provide "better" emissions than the EPA-mandated controls could. In particular, such a modification would reduce sulfur oxides to zero (since biodiesel contains no sulfur), reduce gross CO2 emissions (since removing the more onerous emissions controls would increase MPG) and -- most importantly -- reduce net carbon emissions to zero (since biodiesel is carbon neutral).
This would come at a cost of increased nitrogen oxides and potentially increased large particulates, which might sound bad until you realize that in VOC-sensitive areas increased NOx could be good and that recent studies suggest it's actually the small particulates (produced equally by diesel and gasoline engines) and not the large particulates (which diesel particulate filters are designed to trap) that are harmful. (Sorry, I can't find a link to the study supporting that last claim.)
American colonists famously bought Manhattan island from the natives for proverbial beads and trinkets. You may call that "voluntary," but it's still abusive.
To make my previous post more clear: the letter I linked to was the governor explaining why he vetoed the bill that would give private security officers the same powers as commissioned police. As of two days ago, his veto was overridden and that bill is now law.
This illustrates why the Free Software movement is so incredibly important. But it isn't just Free "Software" that we need; it's Free Protocols, standards and systems. It is intolerable to allow the Internet to be carved into centralized, single-company-controlled silos like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's various services because they abuse that control for their own ends, and will only expand the degree of that abuse in the future. It is inevitable that they will eventually use their privileged position to unduly control world events, if they aren't doing so already.
It is not enough to simply avoid using those things; they are already actively working to rape us of our privacy (through third parties) whether we participate or not. We have a moral imperative to both actively resist having anyone use them and to build decentralized, privacy-respecting replacements.
Of course, that's easy to say. With all the money and power vested in asserting totalitarian control over the world's information against us, how do we win?
Fuel cells are the only way to get thermodynamic efficiency that is remotely competitive with battery electric vehicles.
And "fuel cells" of the racing variety (i.e., another name for "plain old gas tanks" blow both those things out of the water in terms of overall utility. There is no point at all bothering with hydrogen fuel cells or batteries when we can just add carbon to our hydrogen and store it the same way as we've been storing petroleum for the last hundred years.
The fact that you think the technology in this article would bring about the hydrogen economy shows you misunderstood it completely.
This article is actually about solving the problem of the hydrogen economy (namely, that storing H2 by itself is needlessly difficult, dangerous and expensive) by attaching carbon to that hydrogen so that we can store it as easily as we store petroleum fuels today.
The phrase you're looking for is "carbon neutral."
Anyway, this is not a revolutionary concept. It's fundamentally no different than making ethanol or biodiesel, except that you're using a machine instead of a plant to do it.
Copyright is not property (it is a limited monopoly, an intangible concept), and can only be "infringed:" making a copy does not "steal" the copyright; the copyright holder still has it.
An individual copy is property, and can be stolen.
Let's say Alice owns a CD of music created by Bob. If Eave takes Alice's CD then Alice doesn't have it anymore -- Eave has stolen Alice's property. If instead Eave copies Alice's CD then Eave has (probably*) infringed upon Bob's copyright.
(*unless Eave had Bob's direct or indirect permission (e.g. Bob had chosen a permissive license), or the purpose of Eave's copying fell under Fair Use.)
Yes. All DRM is malware (but not all malware is DRM).
That definition really doesn't make sense, even if it sounds nice to a demographic that hates not being able to do whatever they want.
In other words, a demographic that respects the concept of property rights. Once I buy [a copy of] something, I own it [i.e., that copy]. Because it is my property, I have the right to use it as I wish!
Some examples:
If I buy a house, the seller can't tell me I'm not allowed to sell it to black people.
If I buy a car, the seller can't tell me I can only take it to the dealer for repair, and am not allowed to repair it myself with third-party parts.
If I buy a book, the author can't tell me I can't cross stuff out or write in the margin.
By that definition any software that charges for premium functionality is malware because the restriction on functionality is for the software makers benefit not the users.
That's different: you're talking about selling a thing with some functionality to the user for one price, or selling a thing with more functionality to the user for a higher price. And that's fine! What's not fine is selling a thing to the user and then telling him he's "not allowed" to use the functionality he already has. It's the after-the-fact restriction on his property rights that's the problem.
If you decide to sell the thing with more functionality to the user for the lower-functionality price and the user modifies it to enable that functionality, that is the user's right. It's his property, and you gave up the right to restrict the thing's use by selling it -- in fact, that's what "selling" means. If that bothers you, then you shouldn't have stupidly sold it for a price lower than you wanted in the first place!
Software released under many open source licenses could also be considered malware as the requirement that anyone who modifies the code has to release the changes isn't for their benefit it is for the benefit of others.
You are either ignorant or trolling. I will charitably assume the former, for now.
The open source license clauses you refer to only require changes to be released by anyone who modifies the code AND DISTRIBUTES the modified version. That's an important distinction! Why? Because basic property law already establishes the user's right to make modifications to that copy; accepting the license is not necessary to have that right.
Copying and redistributing, on the other hand, is restricted by copyright law, and the license gives the user the right to do that -- which he otherwise would not have -- in exchange for his promise to distribute source code that matches the binary he distributes.
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I've got a better "business model:" Die.
No, really! DIE! PLEASE! Fuck off and let the Internet go back to what it was in the '90s, before it got infested by all this commercial bullshit!
There will always be enough people running their own websites and posting their own content because they want to even if they don't make money from it, as well as forums (and, dare I say, newsgroups), that commercial content is not, has never been, and never will be, necessary!
No, but it is a long time to fail over to the redundant systems, roll back whatever configuration change you did last, or that kind of thing.
Everything about this is wrong.
First of all, the issue is operations, not development. Even if development screwed up, it shouldn't matter because the deployment would be rolled back. (Actually, ideally the deployment wouldn't happen in the first place because QA would have found the issue first and told development to go back and fix their shit.)
Second, if you're in operations and you don't think 5 hours is a long time to get the service back up then you are completely incompetent!
Console CPUs are using custom instruction sets? I assumed they were using a regular AMD APU architecture, just with custom numbers of execution units.
Why, what else could they use that money for? It's not as if they're going to use it for anything useful, like reducing income inequality!
At my previous job, I used C# under Visual Studio for web development (ASP.NET). As much as I loathe Microsoft's business practices, I have to admit C# is pretty nice to program in.
The software was running on AT&T systems, making AT&T the user. From the user's perspective, the software was malware. Therefore, the headline is accurate.
If it were running on the phones themselves, making the phone owner the user, then it would not have been malware.
That's a horrible rip-off. I pay half that much for two and a half times as much data with T-Mobile.
I use mobile Firefox on my Android phone with the same ad-blocking extensions I have on my desktops.
Even ads that are "polite" are still hosted by third-party ad networks, which means they're still tracking, collecting, and monetizing your behavior. Since that is entirely unacceptable, all ads have to be blocked regardless of how unobtrusive they are.
Too bad doing so is literally impossible.
Awesome. Now tell me how to stop third parties (e.g. friends, family, utility companies, credit reporting agencies, anybody operating surveillance cameras, the government) from sharing so much information about me that anything I might have posted on Facebook could have been extrapolated anyway. That's the problem!
More importantly, tell me how I can accomplish all that while still being able to exercise my 1st Amendment rights of free speech and free association (as opposed to dropping out of society to subsist in a cabin in the woods somewhere).
I mean, did you pay attention to my previous post at all? Did you read the article I cited, which illustrated how (for example) if social media had existed in the 1700s the British could have used it to quash the American Revolution before it began by identifying and taking out key individuals? How do we know Facebook, Google etc. aren't using the same tactics right now?
The "XX" you're looking for is "95." ODB-II (and thus emissions testing sans tailpipe sensor) became mandatory in 1996.
Your claim that the engine is "being stressed beyond its design" is wrong because the engine is identical to the ones sold in Europe, where the emissions laws are not ridiculously prejudiced against Diesels and what you call the "high power mode" is the only mode. In reality, the engine is simply over-engineered relative to the demands of the EPA-restricted mode.
I have a VW TDI that's "suped up" (albeit one older than 2009). Let me assure you that double the power is not only easily doable with bolt-on parts (ECU tuning, larger injectors, a bigger turbo and not much else) but that the result is hardly any less reliable than the factory configuration.
Some of them are "ecomodder" types whose idea of "performance" might still be laudable efficiency, albeit prioritizing goals slightly differently than the EPA does.
For example, as delivered from the factory these 2009+ VW TDIs cannot safely use more than 5% biodiesel. However, with [illegal] modifications to the emissions system they could use 100% biodiesel, which can arguably provide "better" emissions than the EPA-mandated controls could. In particular, such a modification would reduce sulfur oxides to zero (since biodiesel contains no sulfur), reduce gross CO2 emissions (since removing the more onerous emissions controls would increase MPG) and -- most importantly -- reduce net carbon emissions to zero (since biodiesel is carbon neutral).
This would come at a cost of increased nitrogen oxides and potentially increased large particulates, which might sound bad until you realize that in VOC-sensitive areas increased NOx could be good and that recent studies suggest it's actually the small particulates (produced equally by diesel and gasoline engines) and not the large particulates (which diesel particulate filters are designed to trap) that are harmful. (Sorry, I can't find a link to the study supporting that last claim.)
American colonists famously bought Manhattan island from the natives for proverbial beads and trinkets. You may call that "voluntary," but it's still abusive.
To make my previous post more clear: the letter I linked to was the governor explaining why he vetoed the bill that would give private security officers the same powers as commissioned police. As of two days ago, his veto was overridden and that bill is now law.
In Missouri, they do now!
This illustrates why the Free Software movement is so incredibly important. But it isn't just Free "Software" that we need; it's Free Protocols, standards and systems. It is intolerable to allow the Internet to be carved into centralized, single-company-controlled silos like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's various services because they abuse that control for their own ends, and will only expand the degree of that abuse in the future. It is inevitable that they will eventually use their privileged position to unduly control world events, if they aren't doing so already.
It is not enough to simply avoid using those things; they are already actively working to rape us of our privacy (through third parties) whether we participate or not. We have a moral imperative to both actively resist having anyone use them and to build decentralized, privacy-respecting replacements.
Of course, that's easy to say. With all the money and power vested in asserting totalitarian control over the world's information against us, how do we win?
It makes me wonder if plugging in something like a Scangauge or VCDS changes the performance too.
And "fuel cells" of the racing variety (i.e., another name for "plain old gas tanks" blow both those things out of the water in terms of overall utility. There is no point at all bothering with hydrogen fuel cells or batteries when we can just add carbon to our hydrogen and store it the same way as we've been storing petroleum for the last hundred years.
The fact that you think the technology in this article would bring about the hydrogen economy shows you misunderstood it completely.
This article is actually about solving the problem of the hydrogen economy (namely, that storing H2 by itself is needlessly difficult, dangerous and expensive) by attaching carbon to that hydrogen so that we can store it as easily as we store petroleum fuels today.
The phrase you're looking for is "carbon neutral."
Anyway, this is not a revolutionary concept. It's fundamentally no different than making ethanol or biodiesel, except that you're using a machine instead of a plant to do it.
Copyright is not property (it is a limited monopoly, an intangible concept), and can only be "infringed:" making a copy does not "steal" the copyright; the copyright holder still has it.
An individual copy is property, and can be stolen.
Let's say Alice owns a CD of music created by Bob. If Eave takes Alice's CD then Alice doesn't have it anymore -- Eave has stolen Alice's property. If instead Eave copies Alice's CD then Eave has (probably*) infringed upon Bob's copyright.
(*unless Eave had Bob's direct or indirect permission (e.g. Bob had chosen a permissive license), or the purpose of Eave's copying fell under Fair Use.)
Oh, so you're the AC who keeps posting about that!
In other words, a demographic that respects the concept of property rights. Once I buy [a copy of] something, I own it [i.e., that copy]. Because it is my property, I have the right to use it as I wish!
Some examples:
That's different: you're talking about selling a thing with some functionality to the user for one price, or selling a thing with more functionality to the user for a higher price. And that's fine! What's not fine is selling a thing to the user and then telling him he's "not allowed" to use the functionality he already has. It's the after-the-fact restriction on his property rights that's the problem.
If you decide to sell the thing with more functionality to the user for the lower-functionality price and the user modifies it to enable that functionality, that is the user's right. It's his property, and you gave up the right to restrict the thing's use by selling it -- in fact, that's what "selling" means. If that bothers you, then you shouldn't have stupidly sold it for a price lower than you wanted in the first place!
You are either ignorant or trolling. I will charitably assume the former, for now.
The open source license clauses you refer to only require changes to be released by anyone who modifies the code AND DISTRIBUTES the modified version. That's an important distinction! Why? Because basic property law already establishes the user's right to make modifications to that copy; accepting the license is not necessary to have that right.
Copying and redistributing, on the other hand, is restricted by copyright law, and the license gives the user the right to do that -- which he otherwise would not have -- in exchange for his promise to distribute source code that matches the binary he distributes.