Drug dealers uses cell phones to communicate. Following your flawless logic we should incarcerate every executives of Sprint, AT&T, MetroPCS and all...
Only if the drug dealer called an AT&T rep and asked if his plan had roaming charges while he was moving drugs across the border.
I am still trying to figure out was the *disadvantage* is (in terms of climate and environment) to less pollution.
I know some fat blowhard will make less money, but excuse me if that doesn't concern me much.
Taxing fuel increases the price of shipping which raises the price of almost everything even for poor people who ride their bike to work. Given how bad the economy is it's understandable that this would be unpopular.
It's funny. I know very well that nubs work really bad as analog sticks, but when I saw that controller, my first thought was, "Why the hell do gamepads still need a Select and Start button?"
I don't know about select but start makes a good pause button.
Point to a "you need to fix your computer page?" is brilliant and obvious. Darn, why didn't I think of that!
--davecb
Bad idea.
Do you know how many fake "you have a virus click here to remove it" malware pages are out there?
How is your average user supposed to know the fbi's site is real.
The entire DoD network is one massive honeypot. All the real data is sent by carrier pigeon.
Damnit man! Why did you let them know?! Now I gotta figure out how to armor the pigeons so they're not shot out of the skies... How tiny do they make bullet proof vests? Maybe I could use a swallow instead. Does anyone here know the air speed velocity of... Never mind, I'll figure something out.
Will you figure something out in Africa or Europe?
How is Cloud different from other software, which can also be killed, unless of course, it is open source. But even with open source, it is more convenient if the company continues to maintain and support it.
If desktop software gets killed you still have your copy to use.
It is not like this issue is something covered on Fox and MSNBC and CNN.
Ever since 2008, elections aren't won by ignoring the internet, and Obama of all people knows it.
Not to say this is all idle campaign talk. I have high hope that whatever we end up with won't be the end-of-democracy-as-we-know-it bill we have now. It might not even be as bad as the DMCA, and the internet survived that one. But it'll still be bad legislation, because the very principle behind it is trying to solve the wrong problem the wrong way.
As flawed as the DMCA is, it still has some give and take. It has safe harbor clauses that actually helped sites like youtube to operate unhindered. SOPA is completely one sided.
I had mod points, and I was planning on use them all on this discussion, but as no one said what I wish to say, I'll spend them elsewhere. Here it goes.
You claim that the Raspberry Pi proves Doctorow wrong. Well, tablet computers prove him right. And smartphones, too. These are the two personal computer forms which dominate today's market, and will continue to dominate in the future. The market for laptops is shrinking while the market for tablets has increased 42%, according to some estimates Apple is becoming the world's dominant computer platform, with the dominant product being a closed, locked-down, walled garden of a personal computer.
And what about your home router? It's also a general purpose computer, which has been locked down hard to force you to not fiddle with it. The same applies to NAS and even some external HDs.
If that isn't enough, take a look at every chinese trinket toy which is sold on ebay. I'm referring to stuff such as MP3 players, media players, tablets, video game consoles and all of the sort. You can't fiddle with their software, you can't tweak their OS, you can only use them until it gets bricked. I personally have purchased a cheap, 20 dollar MP3 player with a neat color display which, at the time, put my cellphone to shame, and the damned thing could only be used to display song names and play tetris. And it was a full blown computer, which had a SD card reader.
My media player is also a general purpose computer, which has been castrated by my cable provider. My TV is also a general purpose computer, complete with HDMI input plugs, SD card reader and USB plug. It runs linux, too. But I can't do shit with it. It's from Sony, which also sells other personal computers, such as the Playstation line, playstation portable and playstation vita. And you can't do shit with them, either.
This is what Doctorow is warning about. And you said he has been proven wrong? How?
So no, Raspberry Pi does not prove him wrong. No matter how cool it is or how open it has been designed, it is a very specific product for a very specific market. There is a risk it will be put in the same category as a multitester, oscilloscopes and pulse generators: technical tools which only the technically literate are interested in using. That is, true general purpose computers are being relegated to something that only the fools at the local modern incantation of the homebrew computer club are even interested with, and this is very dangerous.
This artificial limitation already plagues the software development world, where compilers are seen as scary stuff which only technical people care to have. I've seen police reports where they claimed that the target of the raid was somehow a hacker and a pirate because he had linux on his computer, as a dual boot. People already accept these absurd views on computers. They perceive locked down computers as something which is desirable and here to stay, and the hardware vendors are already taking advantage of that ignorance and lack of insight.
The path to a computing world where all computers are tight-down walled gardens is already set, and if we don't acknowledge it and do something prevent this disaster to happen then it will happen. And it will happen in the near future.
I'm sorry I was busy installing 3rd party code on my phone with a apk package installer app that runs without having to root my phone, did you say something?
Security is a whole lot easier if the users are competent at it. And if they're not competent, why are they entrusted with secure information?
The problems with IT seem to derive from the same attitude that causes most corporate jobs to suck - treating the employee as some kind of mindless drone who needs to be babysat. Demand professionalism and competence from employees, treat them that way in return and everyone is happier and things work better.
"These are secure documents, I shouldn't put them on Dropbox" isn't any harder than "these are secure documents, I shouldn't put them in my briefcase and take them home" was twenty years ago.
Because it's 20 years later and people are still putting those documents in a brief case and taking them home.
Better than, I'm supposed to use this dingly dangly to do work, but the tools I'm allowed to use don't quite do what I need. If I could just use this app I could increase productivity, but IT has the system so locked down that to even think about using a different app is grounds for termination.
Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money. A wise IT dept allows users to add additional tools, but with the caveat that the only fix available is a system wipe and restore to original configuration. The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
As to the Gadget aspect, if the company didn't buy it, the company isn't responsible to fix it. If the company did, the company should have an extra stockpile, and any broken gadget is simply replaced with a baseline new one, again leaving it up to the employee to restore the apps and data they want. And it's the employee's job if their failure to maintain a backup causes critical data to be lost.
Okay, everybody tell me how wrong I am.
Your not wrong, but being right won't keep you employed when an executive looses something critical on their ipad that doesn't have a backup.
I used to work at a place that had pretty draconian blocking policies. They used Websense at full lockdown. Websense would not only block at the IP level, but it also actively blocked proxy sites and proxy lists too. And by "actively," I mean it updated every hour. It was VERY difficult to circumvent.
The point is, if your ISP really wants to block you (and if the government threatens them with jail time if they don't), they can. Even if 1% are clever enough to stay a step ahead of them, 99% will be blocked.
The government can't block all proxies too many business rely on them and I believe in the american corporation's ability to control out government enough that this will never happen.
If meddling with DNS doesn't work, network operators will simply be forced to block at the IP level, e.g. by withdrawing the BGP routes to the censored sites. Good luck circumventing this kind of blocking (still possible with proxies, and maybe distributed anonymous p2p proxies, but a nuisance anyway).
You can't block at the ip level all you have to do is move your site to a popular shared hosting company like Godaddy and the ip will automatically change at regular intervals. If you block the entire range of ip's your going to block enough non-offending sites that people will actually notice and care,
I haven't used it in years, particularly what with having a smartphone, but I still keep it because why not?
Yeah. It's difficult to throw away something that still works. I used to pride myself in my lack of sentimentality, and then I realized that I'd been carting around vintage computers from house to house, as I moved over the years. I eventually forced myself to junk all of them (including a first generation SPARCstation and a Compaq luggable), except for a single conceit: a DEC Multia. How the fuck do you throw a DEC Alpha in the trash? It's like destroying a Model T.
It's easy to rationalize keeping that old junk, when you see stories like this, but, really, all it does is scare away your date.
You never throw a DEC Alpha in the trash you can sell the parts for a small fortune if you know the right people.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the type of life they want for all of us.
YEah......the UK is just a bastion of republican ideals........
Drug dealers uses cell phones to communicate. Following your flawless logic we should incarcerate every executives of Sprint, AT&T, MetroPCS and all...
Only if the drug dealer called an AT&T rep and asked if his plan had roaming charges while he was moving drugs across the border.
I am still trying to figure out was the *disadvantage* is (in terms of climate and environment) to less pollution.
I know some fat blowhard will make less money, but excuse me if that doesn't concern me much.
Taxing fuel increases the price of shipping which raises the price of almost everything even for poor people who ride their bike to work. Given how bad the economy is it's understandable that this would be unpopular.
It's funny. I know very well that nubs work really bad as analog sticks, but when I saw that controller, my first thought was, "Why the hell do gamepads still need a Select and Start button?"
I don't know about select but start makes a good pause button.
Is there a summary of the summary available?
It's a pain in the butt to get yourself removed from yahoo's email blacklist.
The end.
Sounds like someone's been compromised by the reverse vampires.
Stupid sun craving reverse vampires.
Point to a "you need to fix your computer page?" is brilliant and obvious. Darn, why didn't I think of that!
--davecb
Bad idea.
Do you know how many fake "you have a virus click here to remove it" malware pages are out there?
How is your average user supposed to know the fbi's site is real.
The entire DoD network is one massive honeypot. All the real data is sent by carrier pigeon.
Damnit man! Why did you let them know?! Now I gotta figure out how to armor the pigeons so they're not shot out of the skies... How tiny do they make bullet proof vests? Maybe I could use a swallow instead. Does anyone here know the air speed velocity of... Never mind, I'll figure something out.
Will you figure something out in Africa or Europe?
Start the meme! Open sourcing skymap is awesome! Thanks google!
Your meme is bad and you should feel bad.
How is Cloud different from other software, which can also be killed, unless of course, it is open source. But even with open source, it is more convenient if the company continues to maintain and support it.
If desktop software gets killed you still have your copy to use.
Of course they do. All (new) material is copyrighted. Even this post.
Yup and it belongs to Slashdot now. Read the fine print.
It is a portmanteu of IRaq and AfghanistAN.
That would be Iraqistan.
Ever since 2008, elections aren't won by ignoring the internet, and Obama of all people knows it.
Not to say this is all idle campaign talk. I have high hope that whatever we end up with won't be the end-of-democracy-as-we-know-it bill we have now. It might not even be as bad as the DMCA, and the internet survived that one. But it'll still be bad legislation, because the very principle behind it is trying to solve the wrong problem the wrong way.
As flawed as the DMCA is, it still has some give and take. It has safe harbor clauses that actually helped sites like youtube to operate unhindered. SOPA is completely one sided.
"better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" - Sir William Blackstone
"better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape" - Pol Pot
I'd rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase after them -Chief Wiggum
And why not bitch at Apple for locking down OS X and iPhone's too?
But... WE DO BITCH AT APPLE FOR LOCKING DOWN OS X AND IPHONE TOO.
I do this every day, and twice on weekends.
Posted from my Droid.
Finding the stairs is easy - it's climbing the stairs that defeats most of us!
They make climbable stairs now?
We have a cocaine fountain in the lobby? Why does no one tell me of these things?
Awww......man who told him?
Then the problem is with HR or training, not IT.
Everything we are likely to be blamed for is our problem.
It's not smart or fair for management to a blame us but it happens all the time,.
I had mod points, and I was planning on use them all on this discussion, but as no one said what I wish to say, I'll spend them elsewhere. Here it goes.
You claim that the Raspberry Pi proves Doctorow wrong. Well, tablet computers prove him right. And smartphones, too. These are the two personal computer forms which dominate today's market, and will continue to dominate in the future. The market for laptops is shrinking while the market for tablets has increased 42%, according to some estimates Apple is becoming the world's dominant computer platform, with the dominant product being a closed, locked-down, walled garden of a personal computer.
And what about your home router? It's also a general purpose computer, which has been locked down hard to force you to not fiddle with it. The same applies to NAS and even some external HDs.
If that isn't enough, take a look at every chinese trinket toy which is sold on ebay. I'm referring to stuff such as MP3 players, media players, tablets, video game consoles and all of the sort. You can't fiddle with their software, you can't tweak their OS, you can only use them until it gets bricked. I personally have purchased a cheap, 20 dollar MP3 player with a neat color display which, at the time, put my cellphone to shame, and the damned thing could only be used to display song names and play tetris. And it was a full blown computer, which had a SD card reader.
My media player is also a general purpose computer, which has been castrated by my cable provider. My TV is also a general purpose computer, complete with HDMI input plugs, SD card reader and USB plug. It runs linux, too. But I can't do shit with it. It's from Sony, which also sells other personal computers, such as the Playstation line, playstation portable and playstation vita. And you can't do shit with them, either.
This is what Doctorow is warning about. And you said he has been proven wrong? How?
So no, Raspberry Pi does not prove him wrong. No matter how cool it is or how open it has been designed, it is a very specific product for a very specific market. There is a risk it will be put in the same category as a multitester, oscilloscopes and pulse generators: technical tools which only the technically literate are interested in using. That is, true general purpose computers are being relegated to something that only the fools at the local modern incantation of the homebrew computer club are even interested with, and this is very dangerous.
This artificial limitation already plagues the software development world, where compilers are seen as scary stuff which only technical people care to have. I've seen police reports where they claimed that the target of the raid was somehow a hacker and a pirate because he had linux on his computer, as a dual boot. People already accept these absurd views on computers. They perceive locked down computers as something which is desirable and here to stay, and the hardware vendors are already taking advantage of that ignorance and lack of insight.
The path to a computing world where all computers are tight-down walled gardens is already set, and if we don't acknowledge it and do something prevent this disaster to happen then it will happen. And it will happen in the near future.
I'm sorry I was busy installing 3rd party code on my phone with a apk package installer app that runs without having to root my phone, did you say something?
What happens when you have such muscle aches that you can't turn a key?
(Yes, this has happened to me after a day of carrying moving boxes.)
If you can bypass it, it ceases to be useful as a anti-theft device. If it turns on with just a key it can be hot wired like a normal car.
Security is a whole lot easier if the users are competent at it. And if they're not competent, why are they entrusted with secure information?
The problems with IT seem to derive from the same attitude that causes most corporate jobs to suck - treating the employee as some kind of mindless drone who needs to be babysat. Demand professionalism and competence from employees, treat them that way in return and everyone is happier and things work better.
"These are secure documents, I shouldn't put them on Dropbox" isn't any harder than "these are secure documents, I shouldn't put them in my briefcase and take them home" was twenty years ago.
Because it's 20 years later and people are still putting those documents in a brief case and taking them home.
Better than, I'm supposed to use this dingly dangly to do work, but the tools I'm allowed to use don't quite do what I need. If I could just use this app I could increase productivity, but IT has the system so locked down that to even think about using a different app is grounds for termination. Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money. A wise IT dept allows users to add additional tools, but with the caveat that the only fix available is a system wipe and restore to original configuration. The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up. As to the Gadget aspect, if the company didn't buy it, the company isn't responsible to fix it. If the company did, the company should have an extra stockpile, and any broken gadget is simply replaced with a baseline new one, again leaving it up to the employee to restore the apps and data they want. And it's the employee's job if their failure to maintain a backup causes critical data to be lost. Okay, everybody tell me how wrong I am.
Your not wrong, but being right won't keep you employed when an executive looses something critical on their ipad that doesn't have a backup.
still possible with proxies
I used to work at a place that had pretty draconian blocking policies. They used Websense at full lockdown. Websense would not only block at the IP level, but it also actively blocked proxy sites and proxy lists too. And by "actively," I mean it updated every hour. It was VERY difficult to circumvent.
The point is, if your ISP really wants to block you (and if the government threatens them with jail time if they don't), they can. Even if 1% are clever enough to stay a step ahead of them, 99% will be blocked.
The government can't block all proxies too many business rely on them and I believe in the american corporation's ability to control out government enough that this will never happen.
If meddling with DNS doesn't work, network operators will simply be forced to block at the IP level, e.g. by withdrawing the BGP routes to the censored sites. Good luck circumventing this kind of blocking (still possible with proxies, and maybe distributed anonymous p2p proxies, but a nuisance anyway).
You can't block at the ip level all you have to do is move your site to a popular shared hosting company like Godaddy and the ip will automatically change at regular intervals. If you block the entire range of ip's your going to block enough non-offending sites that people will actually notice and care,
Yeah. It's difficult to throw away something that still works. I used to pride myself in my lack of sentimentality, and then I realized that I'd been carting around vintage computers from house to house, as I moved over the years. I eventually forced myself to junk all of them (including a first generation SPARCstation and a Compaq luggable), except for a single conceit: a DEC Multia. How the fuck do you throw a DEC Alpha in the trash? It's like destroying a Model T.
It's easy to rationalize keeping that old junk, when you see stories like this, but, really, all it does is scare away your date.
You never throw a DEC Alpha in the trash you can sell the parts for a small fortune if you know the right people.