Sounds like culture shock. Here we have an isolated religiously traditional culture suddenly exposed to new ideas and different lifestyles and we don't expect some kind of shock?
I don't think we're seeing negative elements suddenly overtake their society but the expression of human nature in a very dramatic way. The religious take on the "good life" simply folded for many of them and new avenues of expression opened up. This is the teething stage, soon they'll learn to live with information or, much less likely, crumble under the weight of it.
Culture shock has happened countless times through history. Technological advances, influx of immigrantion, sudden changes in government leadership, etc all contribute to the destabilization of the status quo. Its far too easy to bash television here, its just the medium and whats more important is how the new messages interacts with old messages.
AOL is not the internet
on
Glory Days at AOL
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· Score: 4, Interesting
>In the mean time, the Internet-boom happened.
Yet, dial-up at that time could be had for 5.95 or if there wasn't much competition in your neighborhood at the time 9.95 or so while AOL wanted double that. AOL does not equal the internet-boom. They're an ISP second and a content/service provider first.
From my experience, cheap local dial-ups helped get most of the non-techies on the net a lot more than AOL and its other proprietary cousins. These non-techies fired up a browser and were off - excitied by the prospect of this web thing and email, while AOL people safely hid in their controlled chat-rooms and paid per-minute charges.
Sure the non-AOLers had to actually spend five minutes talking to tech-support to setup their modems and email clients but at least they learned a little about how their computers and modems worked, as opposed to being stuck with some proprietary software that didnt really deliver the goods regarding easy easy use until much later versions.
Now, these non-techies are somewhat savvy tech consumers and surprisingly handy with a computer and have long since moved on to broadband, while the AOL people I remember are still there on a beater 486 and still getting ripped off.
Not exactly a scientific study, but lets not overestimate AOL's influence. Those mysterious "http" things on movie commercials, that Netscape thing people keep talking about, and not having an answer to the question "Whats your email address" were probably the biggest factors in getting people online, not a voice saying, "You've got mail!"
Re:you must have missed this story:
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention there's always VoIP. I've been a vonage subscriber for a month now and the sound quality is excellent. Voicemail is a little flakey, but I prefer answering machines anyway.
Even more interesting to consider is that the university could be teaching engineering and demolition which can be construed as the equivalent of bomb-making. Or even simple chemistry that results in an explosion. Afterall a virus is simply self-replicating/attaching code, anything can be put in its payload. Morally, its value-free, its up to the designer to decide if she wants a malicious virus or a non-malicious virus.
A virus is a simple piece of technology, in the end its going to be intent and payload that the court will/should focus on.
Actually this will matter significantly in the arena of cable vs DSL service. In DSL distance is everything and in my neighborhood the best you can hope for via DSL is a 384k link with a 128k guarantee from the DSL company while the cable company happily offers you a 1.44 mbs down connection in every location they serve.
Now consider areas where there aren't competing cable companies, people who live too far from the CO to even get service, etc and it will be a godsend to DSL providers. I doubt your 99.9% estimation is has much to do with the reality of the situation.
>I would think the University would be partly liable in a court of law, though I don't really know if it should be
Actually, I would think liability would have to stem from something. Usually negligence or recklessness, I don't think they would automatically be liable just because they created viruses. Unless the act or writing viruses or transporting them is illegal then the university would be pretty well protected if they had made proper and demonstratable/documented preperations not to let the viruses run free, e.g. firewalled off lab, etc.
Now if a student took a virus out with malicious intent I would think its fairly obvious the the only person who would be held liable in this situation would be the student.
>University is supplying the gun...it's shaky ground.
That would come under intent. If someone cleaned out the chemistry department to build a bomb I would think the question would be on how this happened not if chemistry departments worldwide should be shut-down for sake of security. I don't see why a computer virus would be any different.
Exactly, transparency in government in all things expect for those rare exceptions in which secrecy must be upheld. Making secrecy the de facto standard (Bush/Cheny and the energy industry's secret talks) is a horrible precedent. I'll take due process and spam over secrecy any day.
Also, I believe Trillian was the first IM to provide end to end encryption. Its been a long while since my sessions with other trillian users have been plain-text.
Its nice to see a big company embrace encryption like this. Sure, they could just be slightly paranoid about various AIM sniffers out ther, including their own. I guess that idea didn't go too far.
Actually, I'm not too surprised. In an electronic world full of plain-text mail, plain-text passwords, plain-text just about everything short of SSL pages, VPN, PGP mail, and ssh tunnels theres going to be a breaking point. Are users going to force vendors into providing encryption? With the popularity of wireless networks and free "network administration" tools with GUI front-ends no less, then perhaps encryption will be the new industry buzzword in the near future.
>While it has very good Word im-/export, it's not yet faultless (and won't be any time soon, because of inherent limitations of OpenOffice).
Is this true or is the problem that the.doc format is not fully documented? My understanding is that while MS holds to cards in regard to the.doc format no one, regardless of much effort they put in, can make a.doc reader/writer as well as MS.
Any clarification of the above would be apperciated.
> It's a high-quality farm implement, and I admire his work ethic, but it's still a farm implement.
I wouldn't even go that far. At first I was impressed that he got everything stuffed in there and working, but then again he's using NINE (or more) fans. That's just cheating; in a way.
This is a nick hack, but that's it, a hack. Its a dirty "shove it all in a box" job. I would think a project like the PC in a picture frame would be more deserving of world-wide geek attention.
>. For my $99 phone, a spare battery is $80. Some batteries are even more expensive than that.
That's standard cell phone pricing. They subsidize the cost of the phone with contacts, promotions with manufacturers, etc and also heavily mark-up accessories like batterys, cases, etc. Worse, you usually have to buy accessories retail so there's another mark-up.
Don't think this kind of pricing will magically go away. They're still going to mark-up to whatever the market can bear. Currently, what protections do we have the cells phone companies and laptop companies won't mark-up their fuel cell carts? None. There isn't some standard cartridge they're going to use, so it'll probably end up just like the inkjet market - cheap to get in, but not so cheap to continue. The ink may cost only a few pennies, but the pricing scheme will determine what we really pay.
There are third generation wireless devices out there and the battery power isn't bad at all. My Sidekick uses GPRS all day and I can almost get two days worth of use out of it.
Personally, I don't think they should design past 18 hours per charge. That's a whole waking day and people might as well get into the habit or recharging every night or have an extra battery handy if they want 3G tech.
I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet. I've been a SK owner since it was released in October and the device is truly a lemon. I'm on my third one right now and on my second SIM card. I'm not even up there with the real lemon owners. Others at the official forums http://www.hiptop.com/forums/ have gone through six to eight of these things.
The B&W was only $200 and was a gamble back in October, but I'm afraid Danger and T-Mobile have shown their true colors since. Very poor customer communications, promises of software still go unfulfilled - this device won't synch with any PIM and the telnet/ssh client simply hasn't happened. Development is closed to only a handful of people and will probably be a long while until a new app has passed the t-mobile/danger censors. They really don't want you to run anything that *might* even disrupt their setup. Sadly, still no basic calculator.
The new device sports a color screen and some more RAM. Big deal. QC could still be a problem and at $300 its competiting with much more complex devices like PocketPCs, high-end Palms, etc.
This seems more like a stop-gap measure to stop selling the lemon B&W unit to save their reputation and not scare away new customers. Hopefully, it'll work, I wish them no ill-will, but what about the rest of us stuck with this lemon? Eventually an upgrade price will be announced, but of course that means another 12 month contract. Fool me once...
One of the main strengths, if the only one other than bad publicity, behind a class-action is ability to get punitive damages not for the plaintiffs to run of buy Ferraris but to actully punish the company.
$50 per person doesn't sound like much, but take that times a hundred-thousand people and it will make an obvious mark on the books. Affecting the bottom line is pretty much the only way a consumer has a voice when dealing with a large and wealthy company. Even a little drop from the last quarter could be very nasty for a company; it will affect stock and other payouts, undermine investor confidence, etc.
>You would be surprised at just how much an affect of a beautiful environment can actually have on your life.
I fail to see the beauty of thousands killed annually by flooding and no real plans to power the world's largest country.
Sadly, many westerners like our above poster come off as so elitist they can easily be mistaken for racists. To them, it seems, the rest of the world is a potential tourist attraction and the natives better be "authentic" e.g. underfed, undereducated, sheoless, and surrounded by beauty. Well, enough beauty that'll fill up the card on your digital camera so you can view all this beauty on the plane ride home. Whatever happens to the natives is their problem, right?
The rest of the world is not a potential vacation, its an active and constantly changing place. Sure, the dam has criticisms just like anything else, but spare me your thesis on the beauty of the the environment and what seems to be bad news for your vacation plans.
>You would be surprised at just how much an affect of a beautiful environment can actually have on your life.
and overvaluing it to an absurd degree makes you sound a little crazy.
>eliminating the need to destroy embryos to get them.
Now they can rest where god intended them to rest, in the dumpster behind the clinic or finally tossed out en masse when storage costs outweigh potential profit at the fertility clinic. Heaven forbid this waste actually does some good for someone somewhere!
It's really going to hurt when European and Asian drugs based on stem research, patented of course, hit the markets here in the States with a huge mark-up.
How to upgrade to new version on linux?
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 1
In windows all I have to do is run the setup again, but if I get the tarball it just extracts itself and I have two versions of mozilla on the system. Is there a way to update my copy of moz 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1?
Bad starters for PKD. Try these.
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I would not start with the Valis trilogy (the three books mentioned above which are essentially the same story) if introducing someone ot PKD. Start with the good fiction and then work your way down to his more personal, experimental, and tougher to read books.
Try:
A Scanner Darkly: Still relevant (if not more so in today's surveillance culture) criticism of the war on drugs, exploration of drug culture, and paranoia/conspiracy. Great character work. *if you can only read one PKD story do this one or Man in the High Castle.
Bladerunner (that's the title they sell it under now, I know): Okay, you've seen the movie, but the book has very little to do with the movie except with setting, a little plot, and character names. Excellent PKD exploration on human vs non-human and moral ambiguity.
Ubik: excellent work of sci-fi. Touches heavily upon PKD's "kipple" theme.
The Man in the High Castle: one of the first, if not the first "elsewhere" story. Superb in many ways.
Eye in the Sky: Ubik-like mindbender.
Solar Lottery: No one ever recommends this because its so unlike PKD (first published novel I believe) but its a great short read and you can pick up on some future themes PKD explores later on.
>...something not "scifi-geek-hacker" for a change? It's a big world out there.
I just finished The Handmaid's Tale today and its such a great book. Think 1984 but instead of criticizing Stalinism its focuses more on a hypothetical western fundamentalist distopia.
Don't be fooled by reviews that make it sound like a feminist's book. This is great character writing, great world-building, and powerful political commentary. Do some web searches, this book deserves more attention than its already gotten since it was written in '85 I believe.
Them: Adventures with Extremists. This was the best thing I read all of last year. Writer/Reporter Jon Ronson makes a list of 10 or so people/groups labeled extremists and spends somes time with them in a neutral way as possible. Amazing eye-opening book on how people out there think and live and how it affects us all in the end.
Worth it just for the chapter on Ruby Ridge. It will bring you close to tears. Laugh at me now, but just read that chapter and then tell me how silly I sound.
Neither of these books are geeky/hacker but I think they intersect that demographic in interesting ways. Enjoy.
Sorry, but sometimes even the shadiest of lawyers can accidentally do some good. Look at what it takes just to get a lawsuit off the ground: first a lawyer or two, depositions, money, time, effort, etc.
Who else is doing this? Are local false advertising laws being enforced? Err, nope. Are the loudmouth complainers actively looking for lawyers to sue other spyware providers? Err, nope again. Is Washington cracking down on egregious breaks in privacy laws? Err, nope again. Have there been any real challenges to shrink-wrap and legalese EULA's? Not that I have seen.
Oeople who care (techies) won't do anything about it, the government turns a blind eye, and even bigger business that gets hurt by spyware (think how much of Dell/HP/MS/Your company support's time is wasted on spyware related problems) won't touch this problem because these entity's use legalese EULA's and shrinkwrap licences too and like things the way they are.
That just leaves the bottom feeders vs. the bottom feeders. Sure beats nothing.
I will completely agree this is not a big win, but if there were more resources thrown at this case things might have turned out for the better. So are you going to contribute 20% of your paycheck to fight spyware? Does anyone really care once they discover Ad Aware? Don't think so.
>The poor guy. I guess some people just have all the bad luck.
That's one of the neat things about being a lawyer. You can invest your own time and money into small lawsuits like this. Like I said, currently, its either him or nothing.
>Also, how is this different from any automated Linux update method?
Its not. Well, this wasn't automated, it had to be downloaded from the windowsupdate.com site, but I think we're just seeing something of a double standard here.
Okay/. has an anti-MS bias. So do a lot of people, but losing network connectivity is pretty serious, especially on the world's monopoly OS.
What really gets me is that whenever there's an MS problem the/. crowd complains about ignorant users who don't patch. Now the patchers are the problem?
MS's automated patching system isn't bad, it keeps Joe User updated and there simply will be x amount of problems over y amount of time, as you said just like with any other vendor.
Enjoy the schadenfreude guys, it'll just make real MS complaints sound all the less convincing. Optional supplemental reading: the boy who cried wolf.
Crying wolf is a big problem when criticizing MS to the uninitiated. I have the displeasure of taking a 3 hour class with a rabid anti-MS type and at this point no one takes him seriously because of his zeal, even though 2/3 of the stuff he says are actually excellent points.
Engaging in simple-minded schadenfreude simply makes people look less credible. Seems like a tough lesson to learn for the loud-mouth anti-MS types.
Or better yet why aren't vendors doing this on their APs? All these companies are targeting the home market, they should make things *gasp* easy.
Sure there are standards to consider, but considering what a mess WEP is its surprising to see that there's no big movement (or is there?) to repair it. Sure Cisco's method of filtering out weak IV packets is nice, but is anyone else going to pay to use their patents?
I'm expecting, or perhaps hoping, that by the time 802.11g hits critical mass there will be an easy and secure encryption method standard on most of the equipment, especially for home buyers.
The industry should learn from 802.11b. It was new-ish, a huge gamble, and the WEP protocol was known to be weak. Now that wifi is as common as it is, perhaps we'll be seeing 802.11b being phased out because of its slow speed and security problems and being replaced by a more mature 802.11g standard.
A lot of people, including yours truly, once thought that was a good idea, but lets face it: we're people first and consumers second (if not third, fourth, fifth, etc).
This is a classic push/pull debate. If I want coupons or deals then I'll go to the damn deal sites. I don't need Kraft telling me that if I print out this email I'll get eight cents off some cheese-related product in my inbox. Imagine getting that on your answering machine. Now imagine getting that on your machine 50+ times a day.
Advertisers and marketeres are going to be forced to realize that convering every surface and every information point with ads is counter-productive and will only piss off consumers and keep creating an even larger anti-advertising backlash. They want nothing more than to make us constant buying machines and it just ain't gonna happen.
On that note I'll plug my ad blocking project (simple hosts file method with installer) just to piss off the right people.
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Sounds like culture shock. Here we have an isolated religiously traditional culture suddenly exposed to new ideas and different lifestyles and we don't expect some kind of shock?
I don't think we're seeing negative elements suddenly overtake their society but the expression of human nature in a very dramatic way. The religious take on the "good life" simply folded for many of them and new avenues of expression opened up. This is the teething stage, soon they'll learn to live with information or, much less likely, crumble under the weight of it.
Culture shock has happened countless times through history. Technological advances, influx of immigrantion, sudden changes in government leadership, etc all contribute to the destabilization of the status quo. Its far too easy to bash television here, its just the medium and whats more important is how the new messages interacts with old messages.
>In the mean time, the Internet-boom happened.
Yet, dial-up at that time could be had for 5.95 or if there wasn't much competition in your neighborhood at the time 9.95 or so while AOL wanted double that. AOL does not equal the internet-boom. They're an ISP second and a content/service provider first.
From my experience, cheap local dial-ups helped get most of the non-techies on the net a lot more than AOL and its other proprietary cousins. These non-techies fired up a browser and were off - excitied by the prospect of this web thing and email, while AOL people safely hid in their controlled chat-rooms and paid per-minute charges.
Sure the non-AOLers had to actually spend five minutes talking to tech-support to setup their modems and email clients but at least they learned a little about how their computers and modems worked, as opposed to being stuck with some proprietary software that didnt really deliver the goods regarding easy easy use until much later versions.
Now, these non-techies are somewhat savvy tech consumers and surprisingly handy with a computer and have long since moved on to broadband, while the AOL people I remember are still there on a beater 486 and still getting ripped off.
Not exactly a scientific study, but lets not overestimate AOL's influence. Those mysterious "http" things on movie commercials, that Netscape thing people keep talking about, and not having an answer to the question "Whats your email address" were probably the biggest factors in getting people online, not a voice saying, "You've got mail!"
Not to mention there's always VoIP. I've been a vonage subscriber for a month now and the sound quality is excellent. Voicemail is a little flakey, but I prefer answering machines anyway.
Even more interesting to consider is that the university could be teaching engineering and demolition which can be construed as the equivalent of bomb-making. Or even simple chemistry that results in an explosion. Afterall a virus is simply self-replicating/attaching code, anything can be put in its payload. Morally, its value-free, its up to the designer to decide if she wants a malicious virus or a non-malicious virus.
A virus is a simple piece of technology, in the end its going to be intent and payload that the court will/should focus on.
Actually this will matter significantly in the arena of cable vs DSL service. In DSL distance is everything and in my neighborhood the best you can hope for via DSL is a 384k link with a 128k guarantee from the DSL company while the cable company happily offers you a 1.44 mbs down connection in every location they serve.
Now consider areas where there aren't competing cable companies, people who live too far from the CO to even get service, etc and it will be a godsend to DSL providers. I doubt your 99.9% estimation is has much to do with the reality of the situation.
>I would think the University would be partly liable in a court of law, though I don't really know if it should be
Actually, I would think liability would have to stem from something. Usually negligence or recklessness, I don't think they would automatically be liable just because they created viruses. Unless the act or writing viruses or transporting them is illegal then the university would be pretty well protected if they had made proper and demonstratable/documented preperations not to let the viruses run free, e.g. firewalled off lab, etc.
Now if a student took a virus out with malicious intent I would think its fairly obvious the the only person who would be held liable in this situation would be the student.
>University is supplying the gun...it's shaky ground.
That would come under intent. If someone cleaned out the chemistry department to build a bomb I would think the question would be on how this happened not if chemistry departments worldwide should be shut-down for sake of security. I don't see why a computer virus would be any different.
Exactly, transparency in government in all things expect for those rare exceptions in which secrecy must be upheld. Making secrecy the de facto standard (Bush/Cheny and the energy industry's secret talks) is a horrible precedent. I'll take due process and spam over secrecy any day.
Also, I believe Trillian was the first IM to provide end to end encryption. Its been a long while since my sessions with other trillian users have been plain-text.
Its nice to see a big company embrace encryption like this. Sure, they could just be slightly paranoid about various AIM sniffers out ther, including their own. I guess that idea didn't go too far.
Actually, I'm not too surprised. In an electronic world full of plain-text mail, plain-text passwords, plain-text just about everything short of SSL pages, VPN, PGP mail, and ssh tunnels theres going to be a breaking point. Are users going to force vendors into providing encryption? With the popularity of wireless networks and free "network administration" tools with GUI front-ends no less, then perhaps encryption will be the new industry buzzword in the near future.
>While it has very good Word im-/export, it's not yet faultless (and won't be any time soon, because of inherent limitations of OpenOffice).
.doc format is not fully documented? My understanding is that while MS holds to cards in regard to the .doc format no one, regardless of much effort they put in, can make a .doc reader/writer as well as MS.
Is this true or is the problem that the
Any clarification of the above would be apperciated.
> It's a high-quality farm implement, and I admire his work ethic, but it's still a farm implement.
I wouldn't even go that far. At first I was impressed that he got everything stuffed in there and working, but then again he's using NINE (or more) fans. That's just cheating; in a way.
This is a nick hack, but that's it, a hack. Its a dirty "shove it all in a box" job. I would think a project like the PC in a picture frame would be more deserving of world-wide geek attention.
>. For my $99 phone, a spare battery is $80. Some batteries are even more expensive than that.
That's standard cell phone pricing. They subsidize the cost of the phone with contacts, promotions with manufacturers, etc and also heavily mark-up accessories like batterys, cases, etc. Worse, you usually have to buy accessories retail so there's another mark-up.
Don't think this kind of pricing will magically go away. They're still going to mark-up to whatever the market can bear. Currently, what protections do we have the cells phone companies and laptop companies won't mark-up their fuel cell carts? None. There isn't some standard cartridge they're going to use, so it'll probably end up just like the inkjet market - cheap to get in, but not so cheap to continue. The ink may cost only a few pennies, but the pricing scheme will determine what we really pay.
There are third generation wireless devices out there and the battery power isn't bad at all. My Sidekick uses GPRS all day and I can almost get two days worth of use out of it.
Personally, I don't think they should design past 18 hours per charge. That's a whole waking day and people might as well get into the habit or recharging every night or have an extra battery handy if they want 3G tech.
I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet. I've been a SK owner since it was released in October and the device is truly a lemon. I'm on my third one right now and on my second SIM card. I'm not even up there with the real lemon owners. Others at the official forums http://www.hiptop.com/forums/ have gone through six to eight of these things.
The B&W was only $200 and was a gamble back in October, but I'm afraid Danger and T-Mobile have shown their true colors since. Very poor customer communications, promises of software still go unfulfilled - this device won't synch with any PIM and the telnet/ssh client simply hasn't happened. Development is closed to only a handful of people and will probably be a long while until a new app has passed the t-mobile/danger censors. They really don't want you to run anything that *might* even disrupt their setup. Sadly, still no basic calculator.
The new device sports a color screen and some more RAM. Big deal. QC could still be a problem and at $300 its competiting with much more complex devices like PocketPCs, high-end Palms, etc.
This seems more like a stop-gap measure to stop selling the lemon B&W unit to save their reputation and not scare away new customers. Hopefully, it'll work, I wish them no ill-will, but what about the rest of us stuck with this lemon? Eventually an upgrade price will be announced, but of course that means another 12 month contract. Fool me once...
One of the main strengths, if the only one other than bad publicity, behind a class-action is ability to get punitive damages not for the plaintiffs to run of buy Ferraris but to actully punish the company.
$50 per person doesn't sound like much, but take that times a hundred-thousand people and it will make an obvious mark on the books. Affecting the bottom line is pretty much the only way a consumer has a voice when dealing with a large and wealthy company. Even a little drop from the last quarter could be very nasty for a company; it will affect stock and other payouts, undermine investor confidence, etc.
>You would be surprised at just how much an affect of a beautiful environment can actually have on your life.
I fail to see the beauty of thousands killed annually by flooding and no real plans to power the world's largest country.
Sadly, many westerners like our above poster come off as so elitist they can easily be mistaken for racists. To them, it seems, the rest of the world is a potential tourist attraction and the natives better be "authentic" e.g. underfed, undereducated, sheoless, and surrounded by beauty. Well, enough beauty that'll fill up the card on your digital camera so you can view all this beauty on the plane ride home. Whatever happens to the natives is their problem, right?
The rest of the world is not a potential vacation, its an active and constantly changing place. Sure, the dam has criticisms just like anything else, but spare me your thesis on the beauty of the the environment and what seems to be bad news for your vacation plans.
>You would be surprised at just how much an affect of a beautiful environment can actually have on your life.
and overvaluing it to an absurd degree makes you sound a little crazy.
>Nokia 5200 has a built in microwave
.3 seconds.
Still doesn't have anything on the taser phone.
Est time to find a bottle of mace at the bottom of purse: 3.2 seconds. Est time to point cell phone you're already talking on at attacker
Expect this Nokia in the next Bond movie. NSFW
"James, ring me anytime. I'll set it to vibrate for you."
>eliminating the need to destroy embryos to get them.
Now they can rest where god intended them to rest, in the dumpster behind the clinic or finally tossed out en masse when storage costs outweigh potential profit at the fertility clinic. Heaven forbid this waste actually does some good for someone somewhere!
It's really going to hurt when European and Asian drugs based on stem research, patented of course, hit the markets here in the States with a huge mark-up.
In windows all I have to do is run the setup again, but if I get the tarball it just extracts itself and I have two versions of mozilla on the system. Is there a way to update my copy of moz 1.3 on Mandrake 9.1?
I would not start with the Valis trilogy (the three books mentioned above which are essentially the same story) if introducing someone ot PKD. Start with the good fiction and then work your way down to his more personal, experimental, and tougher to read books.
Try:
A Scanner Darkly: Still relevant (if not more so in today's surveillance culture) criticism of the war on drugs, exploration of drug culture, and paranoia/conspiracy. Great character work. *if you can only read one PKD story do this one or Man in the High Castle.
Bladerunner (that's the title they sell it under now, I know): Okay, you've seen the movie, but the book has very little to do with the movie except with setting, a little plot, and character names. Excellent PKD exploration on human vs non-human and moral ambiguity.
Ubik: excellent work of sci-fi. Touches heavily upon PKD's "kipple" theme.
The Man in the High Castle: one of the first, if not the first "elsewhere" story. Superb in many ways.
Eye in the Sky: Ubik-like mindbender.
Solar Lottery: No one ever recommends this because its so unlike PKD (first published novel I believe) but its a great short read and you can pick up on some future themes PKD explores later on.
> ...something not "scifi-geek-hacker" for a change? It's a big world out there.
I just finished The Handmaid's Tale today and its such a great book. Think 1984 but instead of criticizing Stalinism its focuses more on a hypothetical western fundamentalist distopia.
Don't be fooled by reviews that make it sound like a feminist's book. This is great character writing, great world-building, and powerful political commentary. Do some web searches, this book deserves more attention than its already gotten since it was written in '85 I believe.
Them: Adventures with Extremists. This was the best thing I read all of last year. Writer/Reporter Jon Ronson makes a list of 10 or so people/groups labeled extremists and spends somes time with them in a neutral way as possible. Amazing eye-opening book on how people out there think and live and how it affects us all in the end.
Worth it just for the chapter on Ruby Ridge. It will bring you close to tears. Laugh at me now, but just read that chapter and then tell me how silly I sound.
Neither of these books are geeky/hacker but I think they intersect that demographic in interesting ways. Enjoy.
Short but decent read without getting too technical.
l ?page=1
http://www.nwfusion.com/research/2003/0331wpa.htm
Sorry, but sometimes even the shadiest of lawyers can accidentally do some good. Look at what it takes just to get a lawsuit off the ground: first a lawyer or two, depositions, money, time, effort, etc.
Who else is doing this? Are local false advertising laws being enforced? Err, nope. Are the loudmouth complainers actively looking for lawyers to sue other spyware providers? Err, nope again. Is Washington cracking down on egregious breaks in privacy laws? Err, nope again. Have there been any real challenges to shrink-wrap and legalese EULA's? Not that I have seen.
Oeople who care (techies) won't do anything about it, the government turns a blind eye, and even bigger business that gets hurt by spyware (think how much of Dell/HP/MS/Your company support's time is wasted on spyware related problems) won't touch this problem because these entity's use legalese EULA's and shrinkwrap licences too and like things the way they are.
That just leaves the bottom feeders vs. the bottom feeders. Sure beats nothing.
I will completely agree this is not a big win, but if there were more resources thrown at this case things might have turned out for the better. So are you going to contribute 20% of your paycheck to fight spyware? Does anyone really care once they discover Ad Aware? Don't think so.
>The poor guy. I guess some people just have all the bad luck.
That's one of the neat things about being a lawyer. You can invest your own time and money into small lawsuits like this. Like I said, currently, its either him or nothing.
>Also, how is this different from any automated Linux update method?
/. has an anti-MS bias. So do a lot of people, but losing network connectivity is pretty serious, especially on the world's monopoly OS.
/. crowd complains about ignorant users who don't patch. Now the patchers are the problem?
Its not. Well, this wasn't automated, it had to be downloaded from the windowsupdate.com site, but I think we're just seeing something of a double standard here.
Okay
What really gets me is that whenever there's an MS problem the
MS's automated patching system isn't bad, it keeps Joe User updated and there simply will be x amount of problems over y amount of time, as you said just like with any other vendor.
Enjoy the schadenfreude guys, it'll just make real MS complaints sound all the less convincing. Optional supplemental reading: the boy who cried wolf.
Crying wolf is a big problem when criticizing MS to the uninitiated. I have the displeasure of taking a 3 hour class with a rabid anti-MS type and at this point no one takes him seriously because of his zeal, even though 2/3 of the stuff he says are actually excellent points.
Engaging in simple-minded schadenfreude simply makes people look less credible. Seems like a tough lesson to learn for the loud-mouth anti-MS types.
>Why can't the same thing be applied to wireless?
Or better yet why aren't vendors doing this on their APs? All these companies are targeting the home market, they should make things *gasp* easy.
Sure there are standards to consider, but considering what a mess WEP is its surprising to see that there's no big movement (or is there?) to repair it. Sure Cisco's method of filtering out weak IV packets is nice, but is anyone else going to pay to use their patents?
I'm expecting, or perhaps hoping, that by the time 802.11g hits critical mass there will be an easy and secure encryption method standard on most of the equipment, especially for home buyers.
The industry should learn from 802.11b. It was new-ish, a huge gamble, and the WEP protocol was known to be weak. Now that wifi is as common as it is, perhaps we'll be seeing 802.11b being phased out because of its slow speed and security problems and being replaced by a more mature 802.11g standard.
>They were marked (like ADV:) for easy filtering
A lot of people, including yours truly, once thought that was a good idea, but lets face it: we're people first and consumers second (if not third, fourth, fifth, etc).
This is a classic push/pull debate. If I want coupons or deals then I'll go to the damn deal sites. I don't need Kraft telling me that if I print out this email I'll get eight cents off some cheese-related product in my inbox. Imagine getting that on your answering machine. Now imagine getting that on your machine 50+ times a day.
Advertisers and marketeres are going to be forced to realize that convering every surface and every information point with ads is counter-productive and will only piss off consumers and keep creating an even larger anti-advertising backlash. They want nothing more than to make us constant buying machines and it just ain't gonna happen.
On that note I'll plug my ad blocking project (simple hosts file method with installer) just to piss off the right people.
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html