Or maybe by someone who wants to save us from Apple's ridiculous and limiting EULA shrinkwrap nonsense.
>Should they win, those companies get a new product to sell in a market clamoring for Apple stuff.
That's true, but we also get a whole hell of a lot more consumer rights. Imagine being able to return software for a refund! Or running the software you paid for on anything you like. Or selling it. You know, the basic consumer rights we take for granted for everything except software.
Freedom to tinker and freedom to use is bigger than Apple. Much bigger.
I remember reading a Spirit graphic novel called Life on Another Planet many years ago, but I certainly dont remember lots of sexy ladies and hammy dialogue. Is anything in this movie actually a Spirit story or done in the style of Will Eisner? The Spirit stuff I remember is introspective and smart, not the flashy-trashy stuff Miller now specializes in. For a minute I thought this trailer was for a sequel to his Sin City movie.
>So can we just call ourselves U from now on and (States of America) is implied? Then we can call Australia, A. Europe, E. Africa....F? Antarctica... N?
Good idea, now African-American can just be abbreviated to F-U. Err, wait a second...
What exactly did you think the consequence of "less taxes" and "smaller government" as practiced by the right would lead to? Ads in tests and school vouchers while public school systems crumble is correct. A public school utopia is the incorrect answer.
For a right-leaning place, Slashdot has funny expectations.
Funny how our defense spending hasnt shrunk. What's that old saying about the Air Force holding a bake sale?
Its about priorities. Obviously schools are a very, very low priority in America. Such are the fruits of an anti-intellectual culture.
>Why don't they take a cheap car and put a sexy face on it?
Well, they do. Look at the Hyundai Tiberon. It looks like a sexy sportscar, but its a cheap-ish Hyundai. I think buyers in the econobox market want a submissive car.
Im sure a lot of people shopping for Hyundais and Kias are turned off by the Tiberon as being "too sporty." They probably think its just going to burn too much gas and go too fast, but the Civic or similiar looks like your friendly pal who will do his best to get you to where you need to be without breaking down or burning too much gas.
Not to mention its difficult to market to women and families with over-masculine designs.
>current President, and can't look back to anything before the year 2000 [meridianmagazine.com] for any blame whatsoever. The egregious irresponsibility of the sub-prime lending has a long and sordid history.
Good point, but at the same time this president was warned about these loans by his own financial advisers years ago and decided to do nothing. Perhaps he didnt start the fire but on his watch its his job to put it out. Imagine if a fireman walked by a burning building and said "Bill Clinton started this fire, let it burn." This administration defines incompetence and cronyism.
>There used to be (I don't know the numbers these days) more than 50% of servers on various unix
Malicious users dont spread viruses on servers, they root them via known vulnerabilities or weak password. No one is sitting at a production servers downloading poker programs and opening attachments from strangers. These are completely different strategies for compromising a box. There's no shortage of rooted boxes out there.
The point is still valid. OSX has been targeted by malware developers recently, starting with that fake video player that is still making the rounds. Most likely the malware developers are seeing OSX as an untapped market. Apple knows this is a threat and is doing the sensible thing. Expect more of this malware.
I dont believe thats true. Look at how medicare works. Medicare pays one fee for service. They dont negotiate, they dont do the billing back and forth, they dont check on pre-exsiting conditions, etc. The government has the power to dictate prices on socialized programs. Doctors and hospitals are forced to bill the flat amount. That right there cuts out all manner of insurance adjuster, doctor's staff, back and forth billing, etc.
Socializing this system will simplify it. There's no denying that.
Government is no more inefficient than private business. Except in this scenario you just cut out a whole lot of useless middlemen because the process itself is simplified.
Obviously you've never received care in a wealthy European nation. After spending some time overseas coming back to the US's healthcare system is like going back in time to the middle ages. "Oh, you wont cover that? You say its pre-existing? You wont pay for that test by doctor wants? Oh only $800 deductible? Oh, another bill from another readjustment? Oh, I lost my job and wont have insurance for two months and COBRA is 800 a month?"
>Government screws up everything it touches.
Bullshit. Certain people in power want you to believe competent government cant exist, but it does all over the world. Republicans love to sell you on this line because it helps their corporate masters make more money and provides an excuse for their corruption in office. Perhaps you should be voting in the guy who is willing to do things right as opposed to resigning yourself to shitty government run by shitty people.
Wont anyone think of the layers and layers of middlemen between a dollar and actual healthcare service? Well, politicans do. The healthcare system is such a racket that fixing it will lead to a lot of redundant jobs. A lot.
Lots of eggs need to be broken to make this omelette. Who is willing to step up and do this? No one.
You want viruses? Visit mininova and start downloading some cracked commercial software. Pick anything. You'll get infected. This is how people I know get infected. Its not a windows exploit, its not a firewall setting, its not activex, its not a lack of warnings, its not ignorance, its not the fabled zero-day exploits, its not bad security engineering, its malware predators taking advantage of greedy people who dont want to pay for commercial software.
Cant afford it? There's probably an OSS or freeware clone somewhere. No? Then buy it used or suck it up and pay. Its incredible how many people download photoshop when paint.net or thegimp are free. Or how many people whine about MS Office activation when Open Office and Abiword are free.
Huh? Ubuntu is an OS not an application. It installs its own boot loader called grub. It does this because the windows boot loader will not recognize a linux install. Perhaps your beef, if you truly have one, is with MS. They could make their boot loader play nice with other OS's. I believe you can load windows with grub just fine. The/mbr restore for windows is to wipe grub and go back to using the windows loader.
If you think any other non-MS OS is easier to "uninstall" then youre just wrong.
>e have a wifi network that we depend on (and cellphones we need, of course) and so the last thing we need is this plan having unitended consequences for wireless signals.
It wont affect wifi. Those are completely different frequencies.
If implemented right then you shouldnt have any problems. Cell phones are designed to deal with interference. I imagine the implementation will be a mix of jamming and installing materials that block RF.
>We're just worried that they might be rushing forward with an untested and possibly ill-advised solution that could have a deleterious effect on nearby wireless usage.
Jamming is as old as radio. Its a known issue. I cant help you with shoddy contractors, but its a solved problem for the most part.
Suggesting that someone gets doped up and sped up with stimulants is a pretty poor idea, especially when dealing with the over 40 crowd. Has there been any studies on the safety of this stuff for older people? Does it affect the heart in any way? Or the lungs? Who knows. This stuff is sold as "nutritional supplements." Nootropics are a young man's game, if they really do anything other than a boatload of side-effects.
Chemistry isnt the best way to attack all problems. It amazing what you can to improve yourself with nothing but your mind. Im not young either anymore, but not as old as the person asking. What I do is:
1. Make lists. No need for a super memory when everything is written down. This also keeps you from stressing out about forgetting things.
2. Focus my energies. Im not some time-rich undergrad or someone living in their mother's basement. I can only learn so many new things and do so much. I focus on only a couple instead of a potpourri of items. This also has the side-effect of keeping one from being a Jack of all trades, master of none."
3. Use relaxation techniques. A little deep breathing or even a simple form of meditation works wonders. Geeks are pressured to get all hopped up on caffeine and other stimulants. Heh, you dont know smarts and insight until youve gone dry on this stuff and used your brain naturally. Trust me. Not to mention, older people should worry about their hearts first and then their brains; stimulants can cause heart disease.
4. Eat better. You cant eat like youre 18 anymore.
5. Get some exercise. Doesnt matter what, a little goes a long way.
6. Embrace aging. You cant fight it, so work with it. There's nothing sadder than a 60 yo guy with a dye job and an over-priced convertible trying to win back his youth. Let it go. Find other things to do than technology. Other things become more important.
ot because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...
A counter argument to that is that its superior because the vendor provides all these admin tools for large deployment. It may be the case that FF is good for home but IE for business, especially when so many business sites really dont support FF and the legacy aspect of activex.
On top of it, a competent admin locks down the browser and doesnt give the user local admin rights. That setup makes IE pretty damn secure. Its tough to destroy a windows installation when you cant write outside of your own user profile and have no access to any system settings.
I hate it when people ignorant of managing large lans act like everything is super easy and their home software solves everything. Its like the guy at work who thinks we should dump all custom software and just go with "quickbooks, because it works for my personal stuff at home." Or "switch to macs because theyre kewl!"
Ehm, what exactly needs to be "centrally managed" about a friggin' Web-Browser?
Almost everything under internet options can be configure with group policy or at install time via IEAk7.
What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?
>that 120 terabytes costs 12,000 dollars in hard drives.
Or a few minutes of the iraq war.
Not to mention the proper compression can really shrink that down to size. I bet theyre just looking at the exchange data store of various servers and adding them up.
You can have windows, but you cant have windows and running as administrator 24/7, the same way you cant have linux and running as root 24/7. If this is the same trojan from that wired.com article then it doesnt work without admin rights. Autorun will attempt to run it, but when it tries to write to the machine registry and to c:\windows then its just going to fail.
>here are bright Comp Sci guys in the military and DOD.
They might have bright coders but if their sysadmins are letting them run as local admins then they have a pretty big problem.
Why are these PCs on the internet? I bet if they were firewalled off and actually used in class they would be a boon to education, not a liability. If the teacher needs a site for them to use it can be whitelisted. Its incredible how thoughtlessly PCs are deployed in schools. You need access and internet controls from day 1.
Are you kidding? Do you think slashdot is just a bunch of people who want to abolish copyright altogether? No copyright means the gpl is no longer enforceable. Essentially, all things would be public domain. No copyright hurts a lot of things.
The consensus Im seeing with geeks and non-geeks alike is a sensible copyright limit and sensible damage caps. We should absolutely be cheering these guys on for what they are doing. and unlike your extremist position, they have a chance of winning and changing minds.
>He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
The idea that any sensible person, let alone someone of Lessig's stature, would support something like that is beyond ridiculous. People dont mind paying fair prices and owning what they buy. The fight against the RIAA isnt to abolish copyright, its to protect consumers and to stop corporations from using the courts as a debt collection service.
>Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.
One of my pet peeves is statements like these. The failure of something is almost never attributed to lack of marketing and advertising. Its actually rare, especially when you are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations. What is common is making up excuses for failure. Google got many headlines and tech enabled people who would participate in this kind of thing knew all about it, but decided not to play. In reality this is what I think happened:
1. Google took a gamble with a SL clone. There's barely a market for SL, let alone a clone. 2. 3D worlds are clunky wastes of time. The business world has almost universally rejected them. 3. Many business PCs dont have 3D capabilities or have it done via software (intel) which makes it slow and unstable. 4. Google was hoping for a kid friendly SL. SL's popularity exists because its not kid friendly. 5. Google was hoping for a non-profitable SL. SL's popularity also exists because people make money off selling land and items.
This was a bad idea all around. It really deserved to fail. All the marketing in the world is just lipstick on a pig.
Why does any NASA headline always bring out the anti-science goons? How about trimming the defense budget first? You know the half TRILLION one? Or corporate handouts? Or foreign aid? Science should be last on the chopping block, not first.
Actually very different concepts, but perhaps a bit offtopic.
Your comment seems agreeable on the surface but you make a special exemption for humans. There's no reason we cant have machines with the same attributes of the mind. Its a technical and conceptual limitation.
>they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object.
Youre an object. The idea that humans are exceptional is not based in science. There's no shortage of humans or intelligent animals on this planet.
>it's still just a collection of little functions
Youre childhood memories, your grandmother, your parents, etc are nothing but a collection of little functions. The hardware and methods are a little different, but they consist of physical determinist molecules interacting with each other. No need to special exemptions. Once you fully accept that humans are just meat machines you'll see that AI is possible. Whether or not humanity can build it is the only question.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe by someone who wants to save us from Apple's ridiculous and limiting EULA shrinkwrap nonsense.
>Should they win, those companies get a new product to sell in a market clamoring for Apple stuff.
That's true, but we also get a whole hell of a lot more consumer rights. Imagine being able to return software for a refund! Or running the software you paid for on anything you like. Or selling it. You know, the basic consumer rights we take for granted for everything except software.
Freedom to tinker and freedom to use is bigger than Apple. Much bigger.
I remember reading a Spirit graphic novel called Life on Another Planet many years ago, but I certainly dont remember lots of sexy ladies and hammy dialogue. Is anything in this movie actually a Spirit story or done in the style of Will Eisner? The Spirit stuff I remember is introspective and smart, not the flashy-trashy stuff Miller now specializes in. For a minute I thought this trailer was for a sequel to his Sin City movie.
>So can we just call ourselves U from now on and (States of America) is implied? Then we can call Australia, A. Europe, E. Africa....F? Antarctica... N?
Good idea, now African-American can just be abbreviated to F-U. Err, wait a second...
What exactly did you think the consequence of "less taxes" and "smaller government" as practiced by the right would lead to? Ads in tests and school vouchers while public school systems crumble is correct. A public school utopia is the incorrect answer.
For a right-leaning place, Slashdot has funny expectations.
Funny how our defense spending hasnt shrunk. What's that old saying about the Air Force holding a bake sale?
Its about priorities. Obviously schools are a very, very low priority in America. Such are the fruits of an anti-intellectual culture.
>Why don't they take a cheap car and put a sexy face on it?
Well, they do. Look at the Hyundai Tiberon. It looks like a sexy sportscar, but its a cheap-ish Hyundai. I think buyers in the econobox market want a submissive car.
Im sure a lot of people shopping for Hyundais and Kias are turned off by the Tiberon as being "too sporty." They probably think its just going to burn too much gas and go too fast, but the Civic or similiar looks like your friendly pal who will do his best to get you to where you need to be without breaking down or burning too much gas.
Not to mention its difficult to market to women and families with over-masculine designs.
>current President, and can't look back to anything before the year 2000 [meridianmagazine.com] for any blame whatsoever. The egregious irresponsibility of the sub-prime lending has a long and sordid history.
Good point, but at the same time this president was warned about these loans by his own financial advisers years ago and decided to do nothing. Perhaps he didnt start the fire but on his watch its his job to put it out. Imagine if a fireman walked by a burning building and said "Bill Clinton started this fire, let it burn." This administration defines incompetence and cronyism.
>There used to be (I don't know the numbers these days) more than 50% of servers on various unix
Malicious users dont spread viruses on servers, they root them via known vulnerabilities or weak password. No one is sitting at a production servers downloading poker programs and opening attachments from strangers. These are completely different strategies for compromising a box. There's no shortage of rooted boxes out there.
The point is still valid. OSX has been targeted by malware developers recently, starting with that fake video player that is still making the rounds. Most likely the malware developers are seeing OSX as an untapped market. Apple knows this is a threat and is doing the sensible thing. Expect more of this malware.
I dont believe thats true. Look at how medicare works. Medicare pays one fee for service. They dont negotiate, they dont do the billing back and forth, they dont check on pre-exsiting conditions, etc. The government has the power to dictate prices on socialized programs. Doctors and hospitals are forced to bill the flat amount. That right there cuts out all manner of insurance adjuster, doctor's staff, back and forth billing, etc.
Socializing this system will simplify it. There's no denying that.
Government is no more inefficient than private business. Except in this scenario you just cut out a whole lot of useless middlemen because the process itself is simplified.
Obviously you've never received care in a wealthy European nation. After spending some time overseas coming back to the US's healthcare system is like going back in time to the middle ages. "Oh, you wont cover that? You say its pre-existing? You wont pay for that test by doctor wants? Oh only $800 deductible? Oh, another bill from another readjustment? Oh, I lost my job and wont have insurance for two months and COBRA is 800 a month?"
>Government screws up everything it touches.
Bullshit. Certain people in power want you to believe competent government cant exist, but it does all over the world. Republicans love to sell you on this line because it helps their corporate masters make more money and provides an excuse for their corruption in office. Perhaps you should be voting in the guy who is willing to do things right as opposed to resigning yourself to shitty government run by shitty people.
Wont anyone think of the layers and layers of middlemen between a dollar and actual healthcare service? Well, politicans do. The healthcare system is such a racket that fixing it will lead to a lot of redundant jobs. A lot.
Lots of eggs need to be broken to make this omelette. Who is willing to step up and do this? No one.
>t, because I haven't actually seen a warez bug cross my desk in years.
Psst. Download the torrent for Quicktime Full Version at mininova. Install it. Welcome to trojan land.
You want viruses? Visit mininova and start downloading some cracked commercial software. Pick anything. You'll get infected. This is how people I know get infected. Its not a windows exploit, its not a firewall setting, its not activex, its not a lack of warnings, its not ignorance, its not the fabled zero-day exploits, its not bad security engineering, its malware predators taking advantage of greedy people who dont want to pay for commercial software.
Cant afford it? There's probably an OSS or freeware clone somewhere. No? Then buy it used or suck it up and pay. Its incredible how many people download photoshop when paint.net or thegimp are free. Or how many people whine about MS Office activation when Open Office and Abiword are free.
Huh? Ubuntu is an OS not an application. It installs its own boot loader called grub. It does this because the windows boot loader will not recognize a linux install. Perhaps your beef, if you truly have one, is with MS. They could make their boot loader play nice with other OS's. I believe you can load windows with grub just fine. The /mbr restore for windows is to wipe grub and go back to using the windows loader.
If you think any other non-MS OS is easier to "uninstall" then youre just wrong.
>e have a wifi network that we depend on (and cellphones we need, of course) and so the last thing we need is this plan having unitended consequences for wireless signals.
It wont affect wifi. Those are completely different frequencies.
If implemented right then you shouldnt have any problems. Cell phones are designed to deal with interference. I imagine the implementation will be a mix of jamming and installing materials that block RF.
>We're just worried that they might be rushing forward with an untested and possibly ill-advised solution that could have a deleterious effect on nearby wireless usage.
Jamming is as old as radio. Its a known issue. I cant help you with shoddy contractors, but its a solved problem for the most part.
Suggesting that someone gets doped up and sped up with stimulants is a pretty poor idea, especially when dealing with the over 40 crowd. Has there been any studies on the safety of this stuff for older people? Does it affect the heart in any way? Or the lungs? Who knows. This stuff is sold as "nutritional supplements." Nootropics are a young man's game, if they really do anything other than a boatload of side-effects.
Chemistry isnt the best way to attack all problems. It amazing what you can to improve yourself with nothing but your mind. Im not young either anymore, but not as old as the person asking. What I do is:
1. Make lists. No need for a super memory when everything is written down. This also keeps you from stressing out about forgetting things.
2. Focus my energies. Im not some time-rich undergrad or someone living in their mother's basement. I can only learn so many new things and do so much. I focus on only a couple instead of a potpourri of items. This also has the side-effect of keeping one from being a Jack of all trades, master of none."
3. Use relaxation techniques. A little deep breathing or even a simple form of meditation works wonders. Geeks are pressured to get all hopped up on caffeine and other stimulants. Heh, you dont know smarts and insight until youve gone dry on this stuff and used your brain naturally. Trust me. Not to mention, older people should worry about their hearts first and then their brains; stimulants can cause heart disease.
4. Eat better. You cant eat like youre 18 anymore.
5. Get some exercise. Doesnt matter what, a little goes a long way.
6. Embrace aging. You cant fight it, so work with it. There's nothing sadder than a 60 yo guy with a dye job and an over-priced convertible trying to win back his youth. Let it go. Find other things to do than technology. Other things become more important.
ot because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...
A counter argument to that is that its superior because the vendor provides all these admin tools for large deployment. It may be the case that FF is good for home but IE for business, especially when so many business sites really dont support FF and the legacy aspect of activex.
On top of it, a competent admin locks down the browser and doesnt give the user local admin rights. That setup makes IE pretty damn secure. Its tough to destroy a windows installation when you cant write outside of your own user profile and have no access to any system settings.
I hate it when people ignorant of managing large lans act like everything is super easy and their home software solves everything. Its like the guy at work who thinks we should dump all custom software and just go with "quickbooks, because it works for my personal stuff at home." Or "switch to macs because theyre kewl!"
Ehm, what exactly needs to be "centrally managed" about a friggin' Web-Browser?
Almost everything under internet options can be configure with group policy or at install time via IEAk7.
What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?
A signed MSI at the very least.
>that 120 terabytes costs 12,000 dollars in hard drives.
Or a few minutes of the iraq war.
Not to mention the proper compression can really shrink that down to size. I bet theyre just looking at the exchange data store of various servers and adding them up.
You can have windows, but you cant have windows and running as administrator 24/7, the same way you cant have linux and running as root 24/7. If this is the same trojan from that wired.com article then it doesnt work without admin rights. Autorun will attempt to run it, but when it tries to write to the machine registry and to c:\windows then its just going to fail.
>here are bright Comp Sci guys in the military and DOD.
They might have bright coders but if their sysadmins are letting them run as local admins then they have a pretty big problem.
Why are these PCs on the internet? I bet if they were firewalled off and actually used in class they would be a boon to education, not a liability. If the teacher needs a site for them to use it can be whitelisted. Its incredible how thoughtlessly PCs are deployed in schools. You need access and internet controls from day 1.
>around the 11/9 attacks
Oh yes, the old 11/9 attacks. Who would have forgotten the rabid robot uprising on November 9th. Never forget! I still have a scar from a laser burn!
I dont care if youre british or what, its called "9/11." Thanks.
Are you kidding? Do you think slashdot is just a bunch of people who want to abolish copyright altogether? No copyright means the gpl is no longer enforceable. Essentially, all things would be public domain. No copyright hurts a lot of things.
The consensus Im seeing with geeks and non-geeks alike is a sensible copyright limit and sensible damage caps. We should absolutely be cheering these guys on for what they are doing. and unlike your extremist position, they have a chance of winning and changing minds.
>He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
The idea that any sensible person, let alone someone of Lessig's stature, would support something like that is beyond ridiculous. People dont mind paying fair prices and owning what they buy. The fight against the RIAA isnt to abolish copyright, its to protect consumers and to stop corporations from using the courts as a debt collection service.
>Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.
One of my pet peeves is statements like these. The failure of something is almost never attributed to lack of marketing and advertising. Its actually rare, especially when you are talking about multi-billion dollar corporations. What is common is making up excuses for failure. Google got many headlines and tech enabled people who would participate in this kind of thing knew all about it, but decided not to play. In reality this is what I think happened:
1. Google took a gamble with a SL clone. There's barely a market for SL, let alone a clone.
2. 3D worlds are clunky wastes of time. The business world has almost universally rejected them.
3. Many business PCs dont have 3D capabilities or have it done via software (intel) which makes it slow and unstable.
4. Google was hoping for a kid friendly SL. SL's popularity exists because its not kid friendly.
5. Google was hoping for a non-profitable SL. SL's popularity also exists because people make money off selling land and items.
This was a bad idea all around. It really deserved to fail. All the marketing in the world is just lipstick on a pig.
Why does any NASA headline always bring out the anti-science goons? How about trimming the defense budget first? You know the half TRILLION one? Or corporate handouts? Or foreign aid? Science should be last on the chopping block, not first.
>Same concept.
Actually very different concepts, but perhaps a bit offtopic.
Your comment seems agreeable on the surface but you make a special exemption for humans. There's no reason we cant have machines with the same attributes of the mind. Its a technical and conceptual limitation.
>they are simply high refined representations/emulations of an object.
Youre an object. The idea that humans are exceptional is not based in science. There's no shortage of humans or intelligent animals on this planet.
>it's still just a collection of little functions
Youre childhood memories, your grandmother, your parents, etc are nothing but a collection of little functions. The hardware and methods are a little different, but they consist of physical determinist molecules interacting with each other. No need to special exemptions. Once you fully accept that humans are just meat machines you'll see that AI is possible. Whether or not humanity can build it is the only question.