wildly inaccurate? Seems to me TEPCO and the japanese government have been the biggest offenders as later reality proves their lies: "don't need an exclusion zone, just stay indoors and you'll be fine"
The just staying indoors applied to different areas, it was even applied to Tokyo at one point when the prevailing winds shifted from blowing out to sea. And that was fine advice for Tokyo residents at the time. There was an evacuation zone applied immediately, which the government expanded as the situation at the plant evolved. Additionally the government advised those at larger distances than the evacuation zone to stay indoors, also fine for the time. The situation at the plant has not been one solid steady-state thing, it's changed over time and obviously advice given at one point may be incorrect at other times.
"no fuel has melted
Which was, at that point, true to the best of everyone's knowledge. Once it because obvious (mainly due to the types of isotopes being found in water used to cool the reactors being discovered) they stated otherwise.
"the rods in the spent fuel pool aren't uncovered"
See above, they've since said otherwise on this as well.
"containment hasn't been breached"
Again, they've said otherwise once they knew otherwise.
The only person lying here is you. You're deliberately taking statements given at one point in the crisis and trying to imply that they're lies because we now know different. But at that point they were made, TEPCO and the Japanese government didn't know any differently either, or in the case of the evacuation/precautions, they were appropriate for the situation at the time but would not be appropriate at different times.
There are certainly reasons to criticize how TEPCO and Japan's government has handled this crisis, but making shit up just makes you look like a loon.
When said corporation is said to be the target for a few weeks prior, I think it's more than scapegoating. It's a confirmation.
Anonymous was just DDoSing PSN, and stopped. While they've been involved in some "hacks", like the HBGary Federal mess, those were more social engineering attacks than sophisticated hacking. So it's unlikely that Anonymous is the culprit here, and even if they are, it means that Sony designed PSN so it's vulnerable to rather un-sophisticated social engineering attacks.
Although, given the epic screw up that is their public key crypto implementation on the PS3, maybe that wouldn't be too surprising.
In any case, since PSN is down not due to DDoS, but an actual hack into the network, it's definitely not "confirmation" that it's Anonymous.
Netflix is working even though PSN is down. When you start the Netflix app it prompts for a login about three times, but after that it works normally. I've used it a couple of times since the PSN troubles started. Just keep attempting to sign in and it'll eventually let you through.
I don't have a PS3 (or Netflix actually), but I saw someone in a different thread on this article say that while that was working for them earlier, it's stopped working and they haven't been able to access Netflix on their PS3 at all this evening. So this may be a YMMV thing. Hopefully not.
Because people were looking to pirate and/or cheat on PSN. By far the majority of PS3 owners were using PSN and NOT OtherOS, and would be much more put out if the cheaters were using OtherOS to disrupt their gameplay.
I agree not giving any kind of compensation was wrong, but forcing people to choose what was important to them was not necessarily unfair. The only rub is there is no way to downgrade or reenable the functionality, which really should be provided.
Except that OtherOS never, ever allowed people to cheat. That was only possible starting in December/January, some 9 months after OtherOS was removed. (And those who did break the PS3's security didn't use OtherOS to do so.) Also it wasn't choosing what was important to you, it was a choice between losing one type of major functionality or another type of major functionality. It's not just losing PSN, you basically lose the ability to play any future games as well because games require certain firmware levels to play and will install the required firmware if you don't have it. (See the article, this is what happened to the guy in Finland.) As someone else who replied to the grandparent noted, this is similar to a car manufacturer retroactively making it so you can only drive your car on even or odd days, but not both like you could when you bought it.
So perhaps you should read the thread yourself, you're at best misinformed (OtherOS = cheating is total bullshit), or at worst a shill.
The upgrade was not mandatory. The catch was, if you did not upgrade and remove the feature, you could no longer get on PlayStation Network. Apparently this was unfair.
Well the sheer fact that you had to give up functionality you paid for when you bought the PS3 no matter which option you chose is rather unfair. People do tend to react poorly to having their legitimately owned devices suddenly neutered in some way. And who can blame them? However, this goes beyond just not being able to access the PSN. It prevents you from playing any games online, which is a rather large selling point in many games nowadays. You also can't access any games you had paid for via PSN, something many had done (because despite what Sony wants you to believe many of those using OtherOS also used their PS3s for gaming extensively). You'll also be unable to play many future games AT ALL, because games require certain firmware versions to run, and they'll install the required version if you don't have it. (Which is what happened to the guy in the article, a game he bought installed a firmware update and he lost his OtherOS.)
So this isn't simply a "can't access PSN", it's a major loss of functionality of the console no matter what you do. You basically get to decide between having a PS3 to run Linux on or having a gaming console, whereas before you had both in one device.
I should note I don't own a PS3 so this hasn't impacted me personally, but what Sony did is unfair to consumers and it shouldn't be allowed. We wouldn't allow this type of behavior in any other device (can you even imagine a car company being allowed to remove functionality from a car after it was sold?) so why do we allow it on a console? And Sony is being sued over this in the US as well. They're being absolute dicks in that lawsuit too, including demanding to search the hard drives of the defendant's PS3s. (I am not making this up, check GrokLaw, PJ's done some articles about it.)
Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.
Congratulations, you've fallen for Sony's propaganda on this issue. I don't even own a PS3 and I know this is bullshit. What actually happened was Sony removed OtherOS from the PS3 slim. Hackers, Geohotz among them, started looking more seriously at the PS3 to try to find a way to enable OtherOS on the slim (note: playing copies of games and cheating online were not reasons they were trying to do this). Geohotz published some info that suggested he might manage to pull this off using OtherOS to access the hypervisor on a normal non-slim PS3. No actual working exploit to do anything with was released however. Sony saw this, used it as an excuse (or simply freaked out and overreacted) and removed OtherOS from ALL PS3s via a firmware update. Of course Sony insists they didn't actually remove it, users were given a choice: keep OtherOS or lose all access to PSN. (And also not be able to play any future games that required a higher firmware version than the last one that allowed OtherOS.) Not much of a choice as this result from the Finnish board has upheld, it was a removal of functionality no matter what the PS3 owner did.
The predictable happened at that point, hackers started looking at the PS3 seriously and in less than a year it was hacked so severely that the root key was obtained. (Helped along by Sony royally fucking up their public key crypto implementation on the console.) At that point, which was back in December/January, it became possible to start pirating games and cheating online. That point was a good 9 months AFTER OtherOS was removed entirely. (And OtherOS wasn't used to pull off breaking the PS3's security.) OtherOS never allowed cheating, or playing pirated games. But Sony wants gamers to think that's why they removed it, and they have good reasons to be fighting that battle. They're being sued in a class-action lawsuit over removal of OtherOS in the US. If they lose in that lawsuit it could cost them very dearly.
So stop drinking the Sony cool-aid and stop spreading their propaganda. The reality is far, far different than Sony wants you to believe it is.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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Did ANYONE criticizing this theory actually listen to the entire lecture??
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to not waste my time watching lectures by people that make quack-like claims. He's not doing himself any favors by this, as lots of intelligent people will write him off as a loon and not bother watching his lecture. If he really has the science to back up his claims, he'd be much better off making the claims sound realistic (and publishing his results in peer reviewed journals), instead of making loony sounded statements, so that he'd get taken seriously.
So maybe he's got a point, maybe he doesn't, but he sounds like a loon, so I'm not going to waste my time watching his lecture. And I doubt I'm alone in that.
That is just ridicilous. In Norwegian money, one month of spotify membership costs less than a beer bought at a pub*: and the amount of music you have available is excellent. If they really want the radio model with advertisements and a fixed playlist - listen to a goddamn radio station. Spotify is something completely different - you have full controll over what you are listening to.
Some people aren't going to pay no matter what, so the free Spotify service was an excellent way to convert those people from file sharing (absolutely zero profit for the music industry) to some profit, even if small. It's always better to make some money than no money, which Wal-mart has proved quite well by becoming insanely massive by offering lower markup to keep prices down for consumers.
The problem is the music industry (and many other content industries) refuse to accept that these people exist. You simply can't make those people pay, they're not willing to, they won't do it. You might get some money out of them by suing them, but the RIAA proved that's a money losing task already so it's very doubtful. But the thing is... those people just might decide to become paying customers later on if they're treated right. People's attitudes change over time, and as they get older, and have more stable income, many often decide it's better to pay and be legit than to continue to pirate. However, if you keep treating them like shit, and taking away innovative free services that will never happen. They'll continue to pirate just to spite you, or simply stop listening to any music from the big labels.
So it is ridiculous, but not because people won't pay. It's ridiculous that the music industry would prefer to drive those people back to illegal file sharing instead of taking some profit from them. And it's absolutely ludicrous that they're willing to risk making those people life-long pirates instead of taking a smaller amount of money now in the chances of getting more from them later on.
I'm pretty sure the courts reasoning is that, because google is now modifying their autocomplete (removing "piracy" related things) they are no longer just showing what other people searched for but are actually somewhat responsible for the results now.
So perhaps Google should refuse to remove anything from the autocomplete suggestions for users from Italy. Then they can just point the MPAA/RIAA equivalents to the court cases and say "look, we can't help you, the law says we're responsible if we do, so you'll need to talk to Italy's lawmakers". The level of pressure they'd bring to bear should do the trick if nothing else does, cause we all know that the content industries simply would not accept such a state of affairs.
It would be a commendable thing to do. But wouldn't the Italians just use Bing or something else? Living without the Google search engine shouldn't really be a huge inconvenience - although their other services (email, maps, documents, etc) would certainly be missed.
In the short term, yes, but it won't be long until MS gets sued for something similar in Italy and has to decide if it's worth doing business there any longer. And if Italy changes the laws because Google pulled out of the country, Google could then come back. Ultimately the law's going to have to change there or Italy's going to make it impossible for any Internet companies to do business there.
So according to the chart, if you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer. Hang around for 4 hours, and you get radiation poisoning. That's not a lot of time - it takes days of labor to do anything major. Probably takes 30 minutes just to walk around part of the plant looking for radiation leaks. This must be why it took so long to plug that water leak - no one could hang around the leak for more than brief intervals.
The difficulty stopping the leak was more trying to work with portions of the leak (maybe both sides) under water in addition to the radiation issues. I'm pretty sure one side was completely inaccessible due to the water, so they were having to dump stuff in and hope it would get to the leak and plug it. Which it finally did. They're not working under optimal conditions period, even without the radiation they'd be having problems fixing stuff. The plant's lucky to still be standing after what it went through.
And more importantly, don't place your backups at or below sea level; and especially not so when on the coast. And especially, especially not so when tsunamis are prevalent in your region. The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.
This sounds good the way you put it, but the reality of the situation is that they did plan for a tsunami. However the one they planned for was roughly half the height of the one that actually hit. When you're hit with a disaster (just considering the tsunami) twice as big as your disaster planning planned for it's obvious things won't go as planned. You just can't plan for everything, sometimes mother nature throws something at you far outside the realms of realistic disaster planning, and this was one of those times. Keep in mind that this wasn't really one disaster, it was two in a row. First an earthquake much larger than all expectations/planning, then a tsunami twice as large as expected/planned for. While the situation isn't optimal by any means the fact that they suffered an earthquake much larger than planned for, plus a tsunami twice as big as planned for makes it amazing the problems aren't more severe.
And even moreso, I'd like to know why generators were not immediately made available within the first 12-hours by the military after an emergency had been declared. Had any of this been done, there would have never been an initial emergency declared, let alone an ever growing escalation.
Some generators were flown in soon afterward, but they were incompatible with the power systems at the plant. This is probably related to the fact that western and eastern Japan run on different frequencies. That goes back to the late 1800s, and is a bit too entrenched to easily fix. Maybe now they'll look at it and work to change it, but I doubt they can. Maybe they can at least arrange things so that nuclear plants cooling systems can be powered by either frequency in the future. Also, as someone else pointed out, the sites the generators needed to plug into were swamped from the tsunami. Since the tsunami was twice as large as planned for, this was outside the disaster planning as well.
The real problem is simply that the disaster was much larger than anyone planned for. That's at all levels, and it's probably because you simply can't plan for everything. 9.0 magnitude earthquakes are quite uncommon, this was the 5th largest earthquake in recorded history. The tsunami was also larger than planned for across all of Japan (not just the site of the Fukushima reactors). There were seawalls, of up to 39 feet tall, but the tsunami was so large it washed over them, and collapsed a good portion of them. It's not a failing to not plan for something that's not really foreseeable.
I can see a 50-state lawsuit coming out of this. Wonder how ATT feels about taking on 50 government all at the same time.
Highly unlikely, all the telcos (and cablecos) spend a ton of money on lobbying and campaign donations. Pretty much none of our elected officials are willing to mess with them, no matter what party. (The democrats do a bit better, but they're still unwilling to really make the telcos/cablecos accountable.) It would take massive, massive and widespread public outrage to get the state AGs to even consider going after AT&T. So perhaps our best hope is that they do get too greedy and try to rip us off en-masse, then maybe we'll get the required level of outrage for something to actually be done. But don't count on it.
ATT recently bought (well a few years ago) centennial wireless. Everything was great until the last few months (for me the last 3 weeks). I'm not sure what they are doing, but areas where I used to get 5 bars (that were not att areas but centennial wireless areas) I now get 2 or 3 bars. Calls are being dropped in areas where I used to have the best service. Everyone I know who used to use centennial wireless is having the same problems. No signal, droppped calls, etc.
Where I live, AT&T has the absolute worst reception of all the cell phone carriers. There are lots of areas were you can get 4-5 bars from every single competing carrier, but on AT&T you're lucky if you get 1 bar, and the odds are you'll get dropped calls as well. It makes no sense either, they have competition here, but they either don't care, or are too incompetent, to improve their reception. Personally I think it's the "don't care" option, they don't put much effort into their landline services here either, and their customer service is abysmal as well.
I fail to see how this is a problem - last I checked, the DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering and for interoperability, which is what this is about - not to mention first sale doctrine issues.
Namely that the DMCA is a US law and graf_chokolo is in Germany, so the DMCA doesn't cover him.
Google's attitude seems to be that copyright is merely a hassle, an obstacle to be routed around. Even if they are not found to be legally in violation of the GPL, they obviously Bionic with the deliberate intent of routing around it.
If you read the rationale section of Bionic README.TXT it doesn't seem that Google's trying to claim these new headers are re-licensed. They're simply providing an (automatic) way to create cleaned headers that won't cause compilation errors due to a variety of reasons that the original headers can/will cause them. While I'm not a copyright expert, this doesn't sound anything like what these guys are claiming Google's doing.
Also, I've never heard of anyone having to release their source code because they used header files from Linux. You kinda have to use them to compile, and there's plenty of non-GPL software that compiles and runs on Linux that hasn't been forced to release its source code.
I'm really upset about this. I love the NYT and it's my favorite general news source; but I simply can't justify paying that much. I guess us poor people who read a lot of news aren't in their target demographic.
Or just Google a bit to find a link to the article you want to read through a supported "search, blogs and social media" page that'll bypass the limit when you hit it. Shouldn't be a problem for current news, but will be an issue for historic articles. (Which I can understand charging for more than I can charging for everything.) This beats the hell out of what my local newspaper's done, they erected a paywall for everything. Even the most recent articles you can read a paragraph of and that's it, otherwise you have to have a print subscription to read them on their website. They're not the world's greatest newspaper, but I'm still hoping they crash and burn due to this. It was done in a really obnoxious manner. (Non-subscribers weren't even allowed to register to comment on the announcement that they were going to implement it. The message was loud and clear: "If you don't subscribe to the paper, we don't give a damn about you." Perhaps they should stop selling individual print copies as well, it would fit their current attitude.)
In addition to the link Doctor_Jest provided you, there's some things to keep in mind. It's highly unlikely that this could ever get to Chernobyl levels no matter what. The Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment shell, when the core melted down and the cooling water vaporised into steam there was nothing to contain the explosion, so it took out the surrounding structure easily and spread massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The Japanese reactors all have containment shells, so the core would have to manage to breach the containment shell before massive amounts of radioactive material could get into the environment. This is highly unlikely to happen. In fact, all signs are that at least a partial meltdown has already occurred, but the containment shells are still intact, exactly as designed. The explosions have been due to excess hydrogen released due to the heat of the reactors breaking down coolant water. These damaged the surrounding buildings, but not the containment shells.
And while a comparison to Three Mile Island is a better example, the damage caused by the Three Mile Island incident has been overblown/over-hyped for years. Almost none of the radiological contamination there made it out of the facility. And of what was released, it was nearly all in gaseous form. While there are some groups who dispute this, all the detailed studies have found no evidence of high levels of radiation in the environment after the incident, making those groups' claims unlikely to be true. And of course, as the link Doctor_Jest provided tells you, the cancer risk isn't as high as most people think even after serious radiation releases like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki or the Chernobyl release.
So don't let this scare you, modern reactors are designed to contain even a core meltdown, which is what the Three Mile Island reactor did (the containment shell was not breached), and what is happening so far with the Japanese reactors. Keep in mind that one of the affected Japanese reactors was built in 1970, and reactor design has become safer since then. But even so, the containment shell is doing its job.
I would say that part of the reason is that the tools needed to fix a PC are typically portable and/or highly available.
But this applies to other areas, the tools for working on cars (except really major repairs) are highly available and portable. Granted good ones cost a lot, but you can do minor things on your car (replacing spark plugs, changing oil, etc.) with stuff you buy at Wal-Mart. The difference is that you're paying a mechanic for their knowledge of how to use those tools. Why don't people realize it's the same thing for computers? Sure many of the tools are available for free, and are extremely portable, but knowing how to use them is the difficult part. It's quite easy for a novice to completely hose their computer using the same tools a skilled PC repair-person would use to fix it.
Having a teacher tutor involves them spending a predetermined (usually) amount of time with a student and that typically resonates in a person's mind as an act that requires pay.
So why do people not have the resonance when it takes 2 hours or more to repair their PC? And why do so many of them, despite obviously not knowing how to repair it themselves (or they wouldn't have asked you), seem to think it should have taken you only 10% of that time?
No, the problem is a lot of people, for some strange reason, think because they can successfully turn their PC on and browse the web that they're qualified to judge how easy and how quickly people can fix their PCs. They won't do the same thing to mechanics simply because they can turn their car on and drive it around. They won't do the same thing to a tutor even though they can read and write. But when it comes to PCs, many, many people are total jerks to those they want (often darn near demand) fix them. And as any IT worker can tell you, this attitude transfers to the office as well. Everyone's encountered numerous employees who think you're taking too long to fix their PC, even though they have no clue what you're actually doing.
But yes, a good solution is to say no. I only fix PCs for people who have treated me fairly in the past now. Everyone else I either politely put off (say I'm too busy, or I don't know what's wrong), or I just politely tell them I don't do PC repair. But I still boggle at the attitudes so many people cop when it comes to PC repair. It just makes no damn sense.
If the user is that frustrated with technology, we just tell them to get a Mac. Problem solved and we end up both happy.
Yeah, right, because if they're too cheap to pay for someone to repair their PC in the first place they'll be more than happy to buy all new hardware so they can run a totally new OS.
This never works in reality, the type of people willing to switch are willing to learn in the first place, and are less likely to be the type of person the article is addressed to (who pirates software and blindly clicks OK on all warnings). Nor would a Mac save these people, because they'd just happily give the malware rights elevation when prompted, without bothering to stop and think about what the hell is going on when that prompt pops up. It's not so much that they're idiots, it's that they're lazy and refuse to even try to learn what to avoid.
I further find it deeply disturbing that some citizens have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the right to carry concealed firearms, yet seemingly no one has been fighting to preserve the right of citizens to protect themselves by carrying concealed recording devices. That SHOULD be a right. Instead we've had these so-called wiretapping laws in place for decades that prohibit it.
Wiretapping laws, almost without exception, are meant to cover recording phone conversations, NOT public interactions. They were put on the books long before recorders small enough to hide on your person were commonplace enough for regular citizens to have them. What's happening here (and in many other cases) are police that don't want to be recorded are using laws for reasons they were never intended, and realistically don't support, to harass people who had the "nerve" to record the police when interacting with them.
Basically, there are no laws against concealed recording in public. There are laws about recording phone conversations without at least one party knowing (both parties in some states), but NOT about recording face-to-face conversations. They're called "wire" tapping laws for a reason, they were meant to cover conversations that went over actual wires -- the phone system.
Cops like to do this to scare people from recording them. Many of the instances I've read about, this ends up being thrown out. They want to cover their ass, rather than serve and protect. This type of "scope creep" should be strongly discouraged.
Exactly right, they don't want to be recorded, and it's generally because they behave badly (why else would they object to that recording?) You can almost always tell when this is the case because, as in this one, their car video cameras were mysteriously not working that day/night. When the police 1. charge someone with ridiculous wiretap charges for recording and/or videotaping them (because the video also captures audio) and 2. conveniently don't have their normal video proof of all interactions, then it's almost certainly about abuse, not about legit police work.
That would require being an active citizen. It's much easier to just post on Slashdot talking about how elected officials are all corrupt and evil members of the Illuminati.
Given that I'm not from anywhere even close to New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure the DA in this case isn't going to give a damn what I think or say. This more than likely goes for most of the people on Slashdot discussing this case. If it happens in my area I'll make sure the DA knows, but that isn't going to stop me discussing the injustice when it happens somewhere else.
The TOS "advertising providers" have to comply with are very very strict. I doubt Google will agree to things like these:
[...] upon request, the Advertising Provider agrees to provide Facebook the names of and contact information for any employees and/or contractors and to specify those employees and/or contractors involved in designing, targeting, serving advertising related products/services, or otherwise providing any services covered by this Agreement.
That's rather draconian, I'm not sure why any ad company would agree to those terms. It's a bit unreasonable for Facebook to demand the names and contact info of everyone involved in "designing, targeting, serving advertising related products/services". Does this mean that the companies who have agreed will have to fork over the contact info for every ad buyer that provides pre-designed ads? (In other words, nearly all ad buyers.) Sure sounds like it.
Frankly this sounds like an attempt by Facebook to get the names of employees to headhunt for an eventual Facebook-owned Ad network, as well as making sure they have plenty of contacts at the companies who buy ads as well. This is seriously abusive, even by Facebook's normal behavior. I suspect any ad companies who have agreed to this already are going to seriously regret it in the future.
Now as to me personally, I don't give a damn what they do here, I'm going to continue to adblock on Facebook because all the ads Facebook themselves run are obnoxious and annoying.
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wildly inaccurate? Seems to me TEPCO and the japanese government have been the biggest offenders as later reality proves their lies: "don't need an exclusion zone, just stay indoors and you'll be fine"
The just staying indoors applied to different areas, it was even applied to Tokyo at one point when the prevailing winds shifted from blowing out to sea. And that was fine advice for Tokyo residents at the time. There was an evacuation zone applied immediately, which the government expanded as the situation at the plant evolved. Additionally the government advised those at larger distances than the evacuation zone to stay indoors, also fine for the time. The situation at the plant has not been one solid steady-state thing, it's changed over time and obviously advice given at one point may be incorrect at other times.
"no fuel has melted
Which was, at that point, true to the best of everyone's knowledge. Once it because obvious (mainly due to the types of isotopes being found in water used to cool the reactors being discovered) they stated otherwise.
"the rods in the spent fuel pool aren't uncovered"
See above, they've since said otherwise on this as well.
"containment hasn't been breached"
Again, they've said otherwise once they knew otherwise.
The only person lying here is you. You're deliberately taking statements given at one point in the crisis and trying to imply that they're lies because we now know different. But at that point they were made, TEPCO and the Japanese government didn't know any differently either, or in the case of the evacuation/precautions, they were appropriate for the situation at the time but would not be appropriate at different times.
There are certainly reasons to criticize how TEPCO and Japan's government has handled this crisis, but making shit up just makes you look like a loon.
When said corporation is said to be the target for a few weeks prior, I think it's more than scapegoating. It's a confirmation.
Anonymous was just DDoSing PSN, and stopped. While they've been involved in some "hacks", like the HBGary Federal mess, those were more social engineering attacks than sophisticated hacking. So it's unlikely that Anonymous is the culprit here, and even if they are, it means that Sony designed PSN so it's vulnerable to rather un-sophisticated social engineering attacks.
Although, given the epic screw up that is their public key crypto implementation on the PS3, maybe that wouldn't be too surprising.
In any case, since PSN is down not due to DDoS, but an actual hack into the network, it's definitely not "confirmation" that it's Anonymous.
Netflix is working even though PSN is down. When you start the Netflix app it prompts for a login about three times, but after that it works normally. I've used it a couple of times since the PSN troubles started. Just keep attempting to sign in and it'll eventually let you through.
I don't have a PS3 (or Netflix actually), but I saw someone in a different thread on this article say that while that was working for them earlier, it's stopped working and they haven't been able to access Netflix on their PS3 at all this evening. So this may be a YMMV thing. Hopefully not.
Why should it? Have you read any of this thread?
Because people were looking to pirate and/or cheat on PSN. By far the majority of PS3 owners were using PSN and NOT OtherOS, and would be much more put out if the cheaters were using OtherOS to disrupt their gameplay.
I agree not giving any kind of compensation was wrong, but forcing people to choose what was important to them was not necessarily unfair. The only rub is there is no way to downgrade or reenable the functionality, which really should be provided.
Except that OtherOS never, ever allowed people to cheat. That was only possible starting in December/January, some 9 months after OtherOS was removed. (And those who did break the PS3's security didn't use OtherOS to do so.) Also it wasn't choosing what was important to you, it was a choice between losing one type of major functionality or another type of major functionality. It's not just losing PSN, you basically lose the ability to play any future games as well because games require certain firmware levels to play and will install the required firmware if you don't have it. (See the article, this is what happened to the guy in Finland.) As someone else who replied to the grandparent noted, this is similar to a car manufacturer retroactively making it so you can only drive your car on even or odd days, but not both like you could when you bought it.
So perhaps you should read the thread yourself, you're at best misinformed (OtherOS = cheating is total bullshit), or at worst a shill.
The upgrade was not mandatory. The catch was, if you did not upgrade and remove the feature, you could no longer get on PlayStation Network. Apparently this was unfair.
Well the sheer fact that you had to give up functionality you paid for when you bought the PS3 no matter which option you chose is rather unfair. People do tend to react poorly to having their legitimately owned devices suddenly neutered in some way. And who can blame them? However, this goes beyond just not being able to access the PSN. It prevents you from playing any games online, which is a rather large selling point in many games nowadays. You also can't access any games you had paid for via PSN, something many had done (because despite what Sony wants you to believe many of those using OtherOS also used their PS3s for gaming extensively). You'll also be unable to play many future games AT ALL, because games require certain firmware versions to run, and they'll install the required version if you don't have it. (Which is what happened to the guy in the article, a game he bought installed a firmware update and he lost his OtherOS.)
So this isn't simply a "can't access PSN", it's a major loss of functionality of the console no matter what you do. You basically get to decide between having a PS3 to run Linux on or having a gaming console, whereas before you had both in one device.
I should note I don't own a PS3 so this hasn't impacted me personally, but what Sony did is unfair to consumers and it shouldn't be allowed. We wouldn't allow this type of behavior in any other device (can you even imagine a car company being allowed to remove functionality from a car after it was sold?) so why do we allow it on a console? And Sony is being sued over this in the US as well. They're being absolute dicks in that lawsuit too, including demanding to search the hard drives of the defendant's PS3s. (I am not making this up, check GrokLaw, PJ's done some articles about it.)
Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.
Congratulations, you've fallen for Sony's propaganda on this issue. I don't even own a PS3 and I know this is bullshit. What actually happened was Sony removed OtherOS from the PS3 slim. Hackers, Geohotz among them, started looking more seriously at the PS3 to try to find a way to enable OtherOS on the slim (note: playing copies of games and cheating online were not reasons they were trying to do this). Geohotz published some info that suggested he might manage to pull this off using OtherOS to access the hypervisor on a normal non-slim PS3. No actual working exploit to do anything with was released however. Sony saw this, used it as an excuse (or simply freaked out and overreacted) and removed OtherOS from ALL PS3s via a firmware update. Of course Sony insists they didn't actually remove it, users were given a choice: keep OtherOS or lose all access to PSN. (And also not be able to play any future games that required a higher firmware version than the last one that allowed OtherOS.) Not much of a choice as this result from the Finnish board has upheld, it was a removal of functionality no matter what the PS3 owner did.
The predictable happened at that point, hackers started looking at the PS3 seriously and in less than a year it was hacked so severely that the root key was obtained. (Helped along by Sony royally fucking up their public key crypto implementation on the console.) At that point, which was back in December/January, it became possible to start pirating games and cheating online. That point was a good 9 months AFTER OtherOS was removed entirely. (And OtherOS wasn't used to pull off breaking the PS3's security.) OtherOS never allowed cheating, or playing pirated games. But Sony wants gamers to think that's why they removed it, and they have good reasons to be fighting that battle. They're being sued in a class-action lawsuit over removal of OtherOS in the US. If they lose in that lawsuit it could cost them very dearly.
So stop drinking the Sony cool-aid and stop spreading their propaganda. The reality is far, far different than Sony wants you to believe it is.
Did ANYONE criticizing this theory actually listen to the entire lecture??
Well I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to not waste my time watching lectures by people that make quack-like claims. He's not doing himself any favors by this, as lots of intelligent people will write him off as a loon and not bother watching his lecture. If he really has the science to back up his claims, he'd be much better off making the claims sound realistic (and publishing his results in peer reviewed journals), instead of making loony sounded statements, so that he'd get taken seriously.
So maybe he's got a point, maybe he doesn't, but he sounds like a loon, so I'm not going to waste my time watching his lecture. And I doubt I'm alone in that.
That is just ridicilous. In Norwegian money, one month of spotify membership costs less than a beer bought at a pub*: and the amount of music you have available is excellent. If they really want the radio model with advertisements and a fixed playlist - listen to a goddamn radio station. Spotify is something completely different - you have full controll over what you are listening to.
Some people aren't going to pay no matter what, so the free Spotify service was an excellent way to convert those people from file sharing (absolutely zero profit for the music industry) to some profit, even if small. It's always better to make some money than no money, which Wal-mart has proved quite well by becoming insanely massive by offering lower markup to keep prices down for consumers.
The problem is the music industry (and many other content industries) refuse to accept that these people exist. You simply can't make those people pay, they're not willing to, they won't do it. You might get some money out of them by suing them, but the RIAA proved that's a money losing task already so it's very doubtful. But the thing is... those people just might decide to become paying customers later on if they're treated right. People's attitudes change over time, and as they get older, and have more stable income, many often decide it's better to pay and be legit than to continue to pirate. However, if you keep treating them like shit, and taking away innovative free services that will never happen. They'll continue to pirate just to spite you, or simply stop listening to any music from the big labels.
So it is ridiculous, but not because people won't pay. It's ridiculous that the music industry would prefer to drive those people back to illegal file sharing instead of taking some profit from them. And it's absolutely ludicrous that they're willing to risk making those people life-long pirates instead of taking a smaller amount of money now in the chances of getting more from them later on.
I'm pretty sure the courts reasoning is that, because google is now modifying their autocomplete (removing "piracy" related things) they are no longer just showing what other people searched for but are actually somewhat responsible for the results now.
So perhaps Google should refuse to remove anything from the autocomplete suggestions for users from Italy. Then they can just point the MPAA/RIAA equivalents to the court cases and say "look, we can't help you, the law says we're responsible if we do, so you'll need to talk to Italy's lawmakers". The level of pressure they'd bring to bear should do the trick if nothing else does, cause we all know that the content industries simply would not accept such a state of affairs.
It would be a commendable thing to do. But wouldn't the Italians just use Bing or something else? Living without the Google search engine shouldn't really be a huge inconvenience - although their other services (email, maps, documents, etc) would certainly be missed.
In the short term, yes, but it won't be long until MS gets sued for something similar in Italy and has to decide if it's worth doing business there any longer. And if Italy changes the laws because Google pulled out of the country, Google could then come back. Ultimately the law's going to have to change there or Italy's going to make it impossible for any Internet companies to do business there.
So according to the chart, if you hang around an area with 100 mS per hour for an hour, you'll receive a dose likely to cause cancer. Hang around for 4 hours, and you get radiation poisoning. That's not a lot of time - it takes days of labor to do anything major. Probably takes 30 minutes just to walk around part of the plant looking for radiation leaks. This must be why it took so long to plug that water leak - no one could hang around the leak for more than brief intervals.
The difficulty stopping the leak was more trying to work with portions of the leak (maybe both sides) under water in addition to the radiation issues. I'm pretty sure one side was completely inaccessible due to the water, so they were having to dump stuff in and hope it would get to the leak and plug it. Which it finally did. They're not working under optimal conditions period, even without the radiation they'd be having problems fixing stuff. The plant's lucky to still be standing after what it went through.
And more importantly, don't place your backups at or below sea level; and especially not so when on the coast. And especially, especially not so when tsunamis are prevalent in your region. The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.
This sounds good the way you put it, but the reality of the situation is that they did plan for a tsunami. However the one they planned for was roughly half the height of the one that actually hit. When you're hit with a disaster (just considering the tsunami) twice as big as your disaster planning planned for it's obvious things won't go as planned. You just can't plan for everything, sometimes mother nature throws something at you far outside the realms of realistic disaster planning, and this was one of those times. Keep in mind that this wasn't really one disaster, it was two in a row. First an earthquake much larger than all expectations/planning, then a tsunami twice as large as expected/planned for. While the situation isn't optimal by any means the fact that they suffered an earthquake much larger than planned for, plus a tsunami twice as big as planned for makes it amazing the problems aren't more severe.
And even moreso, I'd like to know why generators were not immediately made available within the first 12-hours by the military after an emergency had been declared. Had any of this been done, there would have never been an initial emergency declared, let alone an ever growing escalation.
Some generators were flown in soon afterward, but they were incompatible with the power systems at the plant. This is probably related to the fact that western and eastern Japan run on different frequencies. That goes back to the late 1800s, and is a bit too entrenched to easily fix. Maybe now they'll look at it and work to change it, but I doubt they can. Maybe they can at least arrange things so that nuclear plants cooling systems can be powered by either frequency in the future. Also, as someone else pointed out, the sites the generators needed to plug into were swamped from the tsunami. Since the tsunami was twice as large as planned for, this was outside the disaster planning as well.
The real problem is simply that the disaster was much larger than anyone planned for. That's at all levels, and it's probably because you simply can't plan for everything. 9.0 magnitude earthquakes are quite uncommon, this was the 5th largest earthquake in recorded history. The tsunami was also larger than planned for across all of Japan (not just the site of the Fukushima reactors). There were seawalls, of up to 39 feet tall, but the tsunami was so large it washed over them, and collapsed a good portion of them. It's not a failing to not plan for something that's not really foreseeable.
I can see a 50-state lawsuit coming out of this. Wonder how ATT feels about taking on 50 government all at the same time.
Highly unlikely, all the telcos (and cablecos) spend a ton of money on lobbying and campaign donations. Pretty much none of our elected officials are willing to mess with them, no matter what party. (The democrats do a bit better, but they're still unwilling to really make the telcos/cablecos accountable.) It would take massive, massive and widespread public outrage to get the state AGs to even consider going after AT&T. So perhaps our best hope is that they do get too greedy and try to rip us off en-masse, then maybe we'll get the required level of outrage for something to actually be done. But don't count on it.
ATT recently bought (well a few years ago) centennial wireless. Everything was great until the last few months (for me the last 3 weeks). I'm not sure what they are doing, but areas where I used to get 5 bars (that were not att areas but centennial wireless areas) I now get 2 or 3 bars. Calls are being dropped in areas where I used to have the best service. Everyone I know who used to use centennial wireless is having the same problems. No signal, droppped calls, etc.
Where I live, AT&T has the absolute worst reception of all the cell phone carriers. There are lots of areas were you can get 4-5 bars from every single competing carrier, but on AT&T you're lucky if you get 1 bar, and the odds are you'll get dropped calls as well. It makes no sense either, they have competition here, but they either don't care, or are too incompetent, to improve their reception. Personally I think it's the "don't care" option, they don't put much effort into their landline services here either, and their customer service is abysmal as well.
I fail to see how this is a problem - last I checked, the DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering and for interoperability, which is what this is about - not to mention first sale doctrine issues.
Namely that the DMCA is a US law and graf_chokolo is in Germany, so the DMCA doesn't cover him.
Google's attitude seems to be that copyright is merely a hassle, an obstacle to be routed around. Even if they are not found to be legally in violation of the GPL, they obviously Bionic with the deliberate intent of routing around it.
If you read the rationale section of Bionic README.TXT it doesn't seem that Google's trying to claim these new headers are re-licensed. They're simply providing an (automatic) way to create cleaned headers that won't cause compilation errors due to a variety of reasons that the original headers can/will cause them. While I'm not a copyright expert, this doesn't sound anything like what these guys are claiming Google's doing.
Also, I've never heard of anyone having to release their source code because they used header files from Linux. You kinda have to use them to compile, and there's plenty of non-GPL software that compiles and runs on Linux that hasn't been forced to release its source code.
I'm really upset about this. I love the NYT and it's my favorite general news source; but I simply can't justify paying that much. I guess us poor people who read a lot of news aren't in their target demographic.
Or just Google a bit to find a link to the article you want to read through a supported "search, blogs and social media" page that'll bypass the limit when you hit it. Shouldn't be a problem for current news, but will be an issue for historic articles. (Which I can understand charging for more than I can charging for everything.) This beats the hell out of what my local newspaper's done, they erected a paywall for everything. Even the most recent articles you can read a paragraph of and that's it, otherwise you have to have a print subscription to read them on their website. They're not the world's greatest newspaper, but I'm still hoping they crash and burn due to this. It was done in a really obnoxious manner. (Non-subscribers weren't even allowed to register to comment on the announcement that they were going to implement it. The message was loud and clear: "If you don't subscribe to the paper, we don't give a damn about you." Perhaps they should stop selling individual print copies as well, it would fit their current attitude.)
In addition to the link Doctor_Jest provided you, there's some things to keep in mind. It's highly unlikely that this could ever get to Chernobyl levels no matter what. The Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment shell, when the core melted down and the cooling water vaporised into steam there was nothing to contain the explosion, so it took out the surrounding structure easily and spread massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The Japanese reactors all have containment shells, so the core would have to manage to breach the containment shell before massive amounts of radioactive material could get into the environment. This is highly unlikely to happen. In fact, all signs are that at least a partial meltdown has already occurred, but the containment shells are still intact, exactly as designed. The explosions have been due to excess hydrogen released due to the heat of the reactors breaking down coolant water. These damaged the surrounding buildings, but not the containment shells.
And while a comparison to Three Mile Island is a better example, the damage caused by the Three Mile Island incident has been overblown/over-hyped for years. Almost none of the radiological contamination there made it out of the facility. And of what was released, it was nearly all in gaseous form. While there are some groups who dispute this, all the detailed studies have found no evidence of high levels of radiation in the environment after the incident, making those groups' claims unlikely to be true. And of course, as the link Doctor_Jest provided tells you, the cancer risk isn't as high as most people think even after serious radiation releases like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki or the Chernobyl release.
So don't let this scare you, modern reactors are designed to contain even a core meltdown, which is what the Three Mile Island reactor did (the containment shell was not breached), and what is happening so far with the Japanese reactors. Keep in mind that one of the affected Japanese reactors was built in 1970, and reactor design has become safer since then. But even so, the containment shell is doing its job.
I would say that part of the reason is that the tools needed to fix a PC are typically portable and/or highly available.
But this applies to other areas, the tools for working on cars (except really major repairs) are highly available and portable. Granted good ones cost a lot, but you can do minor things on your car (replacing spark plugs, changing oil, etc.) with stuff you buy at Wal-Mart. The difference is that you're paying a mechanic for their knowledge of how to use those tools. Why don't people realize it's the same thing for computers? Sure many of the tools are available for free, and are extremely portable, but knowing how to use them is the difficult part. It's quite easy for a novice to completely hose their computer using the same tools a skilled PC repair-person would use to fix it.
Having a teacher tutor involves them spending a predetermined (usually) amount of time with a student and that typically resonates in a person's mind as an act that requires pay.
So why do people not have the resonance when it takes 2 hours or more to repair their PC? And why do so many of them, despite obviously not knowing how to repair it themselves (or they wouldn't have asked you), seem to think it should have taken you only 10% of that time?
No, the problem is a lot of people, for some strange reason, think because they can successfully turn their PC on and browse the web that they're qualified to judge how easy and how quickly people can fix their PCs. They won't do the same thing to mechanics simply because they can turn their car on and drive it around. They won't do the same thing to a tutor even though they can read and write. But when it comes to PCs, many, many people are total jerks to those they want (often darn near demand) fix them. And as any IT worker can tell you, this attitude transfers to the office as well. Everyone's encountered numerous employees who think you're taking too long to fix their PC, even though they have no clue what you're actually doing.
But yes, a good solution is to say no. I only fix PCs for people who have treated me fairly in the past now. Everyone else I either politely put off (say I'm too busy, or I don't know what's wrong), or I just politely tell them I don't do PC repair. But I still boggle at the attitudes so many people cop when it comes to PC repair. It just makes no damn sense.
If the user is that frustrated with technology, we just tell them to get a Mac. Problem solved and we end up both happy.
Yeah, right, because if they're too cheap to pay for someone to repair their PC in the first place they'll be more than happy to buy all new hardware so they can run a totally new OS.
This never works in reality, the type of people willing to switch are willing to learn in the first place, and are less likely to be the type of person the article is addressed to (who pirates software and blindly clicks OK on all warnings). Nor would a Mac save these people, because they'd just happily give the malware rights elevation when prompted, without bothering to stop and think about what the hell is going on when that prompt pops up. It's not so much that they're idiots, it's that they're lazy and refuse to even try to learn what to avoid.
I further find it deeply disturbing that some citizens have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the right to carry concealed firearms, yet seemingly no one has been fighting to preserve the right of citizens to protect themselves by carrying concealed recording devices. That SHOULD be a right. Instead we've had these so-called wiretapping laws in place for decades that prohibit it.
Wiretapping laws, almost without exception, are meant to cover recording phone conversations, NOT public interactions. They were put on the books long before recorders small enough to hide on your person were commonplace enough for regular citizens to have them. What's happening here (and in many other cases) are police that don't want to be recorded are using laws for reasons they were never intended, and realistically don't support, to harass people who had the "nerve" to record the police when interacting with them.
Basically, there are no laws against concealed recording in public. There are laws about recording phone conversations without at least one party knowing (both parties in some states), but NOT about recording face-to-face conversations. They're called "wire" tapping laws for a reason, they were meant to cover conversations that went over actual wires -- the phone system.
Cops like to do this to scare people from recording them. Many of the instances I've read about, this ends up being thrown out. They want to cover their ass, rather than serve and protect. This type of "scope creep" should be strongly discouraged.
Exactly right, they don't want to be recorded, and it's generally because they behave badly (why else would they object to that recording?) You can almost always tell when this is the case because, as in this one, their car video cameras were mysteriously not working that day/night. When the police 1. charge someone with ridiculous wiretap charges for recording and/or videotaping them (because the video also captures audio) and 2. conveniently don't have their normal video proof of all interactions, then it's almost certainly about abuse, not about legit police work.
That would require being an active citizen. It's much easier to just post on Slashdot talking about how elected officials are all corrupt and evil members of the Illuminati.
Given that I'm not from anywhere even close to New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure the DA in this case isn't going to give a damn what I think or say. This more than likely goes for most of the people on Slashdot discussing this case. If it happens in my area I'll make sure the DA knows, but that isn't going to stop me discussing the injustice when it happens somewhere else.
The TOS "advertising providers" have to comply with are very very strict. I doubt Google will agree to things like these:
That's rather draconian, I'm not sure why any ad company would agree to those terms. It's a bit unreasonable for Facebook to demand the names and contact info of everyone involved in "designing, targeting, serving advertising related products/services". Does this mean that the companies who have agreed will have to fork over the contact info for every ad buyer that provides pre-designed ads? (In other words, nearly all ad buyers.) Sure sounds like it.
Frankly this sounds like an attempt by Facebook to get the names of employees to headhunt for an eventual Facebook-owned Ad network, as well as making sure they have plenty of contacts at the companies who buy ads as well. This is seriously abusive, even by Facebook's normal behavior. I suspect any ad companies who have agreed to this already are going to seriously regret it in the future.
Now as to me personally, I don't give a damn what they do here, I'm going to continue to adblock on Facebook because all the ads Facebook themselves run are obnoxious and annoying.
when getting money now matters more than the survival of the humanity in the long term.
A.k.a. Business 101?