Its amazing isnt it. The main article just glossses over the massive computer crimes done by this canadian. The double standard for kiddie porn is mind-blowing and has built some real scary precedents. I'm just afraid the damage has been done and anything done under the guise of 'protecting children' is the root password to the most basic civil rights.
Sorry but security is hard. You sound like someone who is sick and tired of using su or swiching to root to do system tasks and decides that its best to deal with these 'annoyances' by just running at root.
Secondly, you are either trolling or have a selective memory. Ive run vista and it does not bring up pop-ups that often. They should be coming up just as often as OSX's. Modifying crap in your user directory shouldnt bring anything up. I'd check to see if your vista is running correctly.
What happens when you have 1000 laymen hack on an article and not one of them is an actual expert is you get a close approximation of fact diluted by bias and misunderstanding.
>Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?
To bitch about microsoft apparantly. Hello, I am running software on a platform it wasnt designed to run on using new and unstable drivers and I am surprised things are not working as well as on my xp sp2 system! Now I shall submit this grievance to slashdot!
>At the very least you should be using a car analogy.
Not to mention the obligatory MS bashing, OSS praise, and bad 'in soviet russia' joke. We would also accept a snarky comment about Duke Nukem Forever, Apple users, or heavy use of the acronym PHB.
>it is the doctor's job to know what drugs are available and prescribe them to me.
Your doctor does benefit from all the freebies these companies give out. Notice theyre never advertising cancer treatments or replacement prosthetics in these commercials. The idea is to tell people that theres a treatment for something that they normally wouldnt bother to go to the doctor for like heartburn, light depression, infrequent impotence, insomnia, etc. These people go to the doctor, the doctor probably prescribes whatever is popular, and they may get relief.
I dont see such a big problem with these things. If youre that motivated to go to the doctor then you probably have a problem. I think its very easy to just dismiss this as 'evil pharmecuticals' which isnt very fair. Conversely, if all medical advertising was made illegal tomorrow I doubt anything would change. People would still go to their doctors for these issues or more likely instead of learning about stuff from television they would search it on wikipedia or about.com and find out about new drugs and treatments. Theres somethign to be said about what wealthier societies consider medical problems. Infrequent heartburn, Im sure, doesnt get treated much in africa or the middle east.
Personally, healthcare is so expensive here in the US I dont know how people have the time and money to bother their doctors about stuff that might be trivial. I think we're looking at how advertising is changing to meet the demands of well-off aging baby boomers with geriatric problems. All these ads seem targeted mostly at them.
POwer outages? Hell, those are excuses to not do work. I cant imagine what kind of special wiring problem you must encounter that just affects the server room but not the plugs running your desktop and power-hungry monitor. Or are you saying that if you had a normal laptop you could polish up that word document while the rest of your coworkers are thinking 'why is that moron still working?' Seriously, there are some decent criticism of thin client implementations but this isnt just one of them.
Secondly, do you have permission to install software? I can give you a bad ass workstation and limit you to a limited user. The problem here isnt the thin client its policy. Most large environments have some kind of go-between/approval for software installs or all the users would muck up all the machines with bonzai buddy or whatever crap passes for the amusement only a spyware animated gorilla on your desktop can provide.
>They at least can continue work with documents and files stored on their local drive.
Who uses their local drive on a lan? You should be using a networked drive that gets backed up nightly. Especially with all those power outtages.
These stories might be plants, but this stuff is out there and it works fine. I think the big holdup is the IT mentality of 'one computer per person' Thin-clients go against the norm and is probably a very hard sell for management, who can only think of things as 'how is this like my home version of windows.'
I did visit one company that ran citrix on every desktop. I believe the desktops were either full blown versions of windows or windows ce. The citrix client ran on top of that and connected to a server on the lan. They all use the same apps anyway so it works out.
Where I work now we run citrix as a remote solution but I dont see any reason why we cant move all of our desktop users to it. Most wouldnt even notice a difference.
>The passivity of the watching experience is actually its best selling point
Exactly. Too many geeks and 'futurists' think everything will be like the current incarnation of the web and email because these things are currently popular. All these cries of 'interactivity' is just silly. People like relaxing, sitting down, and watching a story unfold. If they didnt we'd all be reading Choose Your Own Adventure books nowaways and movies would have a special remote to vote on what happens next. The technologists dont understand the art form, theyre not even close.
>The US is still stuck around 7-10mbit for the majority of us
No its not. Your average broadband connection floats around 600-700 kbps. There isnt enough last-mile bandwidth for these schemes and big telcos have very little incentive to roll out huge and expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially when regulators keep giving them sweetheart deals.
>Are you saying that business will be unable to cope with giving the customer what they want to pay for?
Yes. First off, the demand for iptv will evaborate because no one has ever see one. And theres tons of competition that its in demand like cable and satelite.
>'Nobody will be able to play these 'nextgen' video games because the processing power isn't there.'
Thats a lousy analogy. CPU manufacturers are constalty producing fast chips, see moore's law. Telecom companies are not constantly producing faster last-mile solutions.
>The market will be there to provide what we want as soon as we have a use for it. You can count on it.
I've been waiting for a 100mbps connection to my home for a decade. Lets not be too naive here. Businesses would love to get off the t1 system. etc.
Its a valid complaint. At the very least an authority should inform them before fining them. This is why I think a free federal AV solution should be available for all US citizens. You dont have to use it but if you dont and youre a bot, you get fined. Free updates, daily scans, etc. Probably for the price of an hours worth of war.
That guy youre paying to 'play for you' isnt actually playing, he's ninja looting. When you 'pay' for that level sixty and every group you get into has some guy who is quiet the whole time and then ninja loots the best item dont complain to blizzard. its not the game that sucks, its you.
>I'd love for my raw memories to live beyond myself.
I dont think that's possible. The patterns in the meat of your brain do not have some kind of universal or raw format. They would be a meaningless mess to another person in a best case scenario. Most likely they would be a painful epileptic seizure. Sorry but when the meat goes so does the memories. I'd start on my memoirs now if I was you.
Agreed theres nothing wrong with using 200kbps as a metric. Its pretty much saying 'anything but phone modems and ISDN' which is good enough as any definition. If they upped to a more crowd pleasing number than I would imagine many ISPs would claim 'top speeds of x' with x being some datarate thats possible but unattainable.
>With all due respect to Mr.Kahn, who I am told invented TCP/IP:
An engineer is not an economist. You shouldnt have to apologize when you see an expert use his weight in one field to push his opinions in another. He is at fault here.
>Imagine a cell phone cradle that supported a keyboard/mouse/monitor console.
Okay. It will need a video chipset to drive at least a 1024x768 display. At least 256megs of ram. Wifi. USB controller. Local storage of say 4 gigs minumum. A decent OS. Apps.
Now its 4x as big, 4x as expensive, and ugly.
A quick look at dell's site shows me a PC can be had for 500 dollars which comes with a 19inch LCD, 60gig drive, 512megs of ram.
Why would anyone get a super-phone? Hell, I have a treo and love it, but its not for everyone. Its very limiting and very expensive. Phones are seen as almost disposable portable devices. Losing one isnt the end of the world. Losing this is. There goes all the data, bookmarks, photos, etc.
The cheap dell sits safely in the living room with a great screen and enough power to last more than a couple years for the casual user.
Its not really supposed to be. The idea is to spread the word that its illegal/wrong to infringe on copyright. That way people can't use the "i didnt know" defense. Ignoring the arguments for backup purposes for a moment, the real fight here is to inform people about usage. In the old days of VCRs i bet there was no shortage of people who when asked would answer no the following question 'is it illegal to copy a movie you bought and give it to all yoru friends?' Owning the movie can be seem as having unlimited copy and distribution powers, especially if there is no profit involved. This clearly isnt fair use as traditionally defined. It may not be the VCR days, but there are new computer users everday and the studios and software developers are going to keep pounding in this message. It wont stop willful infringers but it will stop someone who might have assumed otherwise.
It also can provide sympathy when the studios crack down on pirates. Average people will think 'we all know this is illegal, why should they get away with this?' Especially if its profitable and the average person thinks the pirates are gaming the system purely for personal profit.
One of the biggest defenses for P2P is that casual users had no idea what they were doing may have been illegal. They thought the p2p company was providing all these videos or free (or subsidized by ads).
It happens and the large payout is the incentive. Thanks to this guy youre going to see 10x more nigerian scams.
The longtime treasurer of Alcona County was accused Wednesday in an embezzlement scheme in which he may have served as both perpetrator and victim, sending up to $1.25 million in county funds and his own life savings to con artists after falling for one of the notorious online Nigerian banking frauds.
>Apparently only the west is allowed anything nuclear or dangerous - everyone else has no right, apparently.
Wow, your smart-ass comment has changed everyone's mind. Starting next month the US will begin to give nuclear weapons to every nation on earth in the name of fairness. Thank you sir for opening my eyes. I'm sure this kind of thing can only end well!
No the problem is that you are advocating any rule breaking as being a good thing. This is historically untrue. On occasion this kind of thing is helpful, like with civil disobedience for a moral cause, but it certainly is not true generally. Generally, the actions of 'we know better' hotheads is almost always morally wrong and morality is not this simplistic and narrow 'badasses' vs 'sheep' dichotomy you describe.
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Its amazing isnt it. The main article just glossses over the massive computer crimes done by this canadian. The double standard for kiddie porn is mind-blowing and has built some real scary precedents. I'm just afraid the damage has been done and anything done under the guise of 'protecting children' is the root password to the most basic civil rights.
Sorry but security is hard. You sound like someone who is sick and tired of using su or swiching to root to do system tasks and decides that its best to deal with these 'annoyances' by just running at root.
Secondly, you are either trolling or have a selective memory. Ive run vista and it does not bring up pop-ups that often. They should be coming up just as often as OSX's. Modifying crap in your user directory shouldnt bring anything up. I'd check to see if your vista is running correctly.
What a perfectly cromulent essay!
What happens when you have 1000 laymen hack on an article and not one of them is an actual expert is you get a close approximation of fact diluted by bias and misunderstanding.
Spoken like a true Moon landing believer!
>Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?
To bitch about microsoft apparantly. Hello, I am running software on a platform it wasnt designed to run on using new and unstable drivers and I am surprised things are not working as well as on my xp sp2 system! Now I shall submit this grievance to slashdot!
>At the very least you should be using a car analogy.
Not to mention the obligatory MS bashing, OSS praise, and bad 'in soviet russia' joke. We would also accept a snarky comment about Duke Nukem Forever, Apple users, or heavy use of the acronym PHB.
Welcome to slashdot, you will most likely be moded down as an uninformative troll for even suggesting right-click > properties.
>it is the doctor's job to know what drugs are available and prescribe them to me.
Your doctor does benefit from all the freebies these companies give out. Notice theyre never advertising cancer treatments or replacement prosthetics in these commercials. The idea is to tell people that theres a treatment for something that they normally wouldnt bother to go to the doctor for like heartburn, light depression, infrequent impotence, insomnia, etc. These people go to the doctor, the doctor probably prescribes whatever is popular, and they may get relief.
I dont see such a big problem with these things. If youre that motivated to go to the doctor then you probably have a problem. I think its very easy to just dismiss this as 'evil pharmecuticals' which isnt very fair. Conversely, if all medical advertising was made illegal tomorrow I doubt anything would change. People would still go to their doctors for these issues or more likely instead of learning about stuff from television they would search it on wikipedia or about.com and find out about new drugs and treatments. Theres somethign to be said about what wealthier societies consider medical problems. Infrequent heartburn, Im sure, doesnt get treated much in africa or the middle east.
Personally, healthcare is so expensive here in the US I dont know how people have the time and money to bother their doctors about stuff that might be trivial. I think we're looking at how advertising is changing to meet the demands of well-off aging baby boomers with geriatric problems. All these ads seem targeted mostly at them.
>Once I started eating properly and getting back in shape, my heartburn disappeared.
Wait, hes not an actor but he knows a doctor. He knows the cure to heartburn. This is an ad for Ballys and Whole Foods right?
What enthusiasm? This isnt an article its a fucking ad.
POwer outages? Hell, those are excuses to not do work. I cant imagine what kind of special wiring problem you must encounter that just affects the server room but not the plugs running your desktop and power-hungry monitor. Or are you saying that if you had a normal laptop you could polish up that word document while the rest of your coworkers are thinking 'why is that moron still working?' Seriously, there are some decent criticism of thin client implementations but this isnt just one of them.
Secondly, do you have permission to install software? I can give you a bad ass workstation and limit you to a limited user. The problem here isnt the thin client its policy. Most large environments have some kind of go-between/approval for software installs or all the users would muck up all the machines with bonzai buddy or whatever crap passes for the amusement only a spyware animated gorilla on your desktop can provide.
>They at least can continue work with documents and files stored on their local drive.
Who uses their local drive on a lan? You should be using a networked drive that gets backed up nightly. Especially with all those power outtages.
These stories might be plants, but this stuff is out there and it works fine. I think the big holdup is the IT mentality of 'one computer per person' Thin-clients go against the norm and is probably a very hard sell for management, who can only think of things as 'how is this like my home version of windows.'
I did visit one company that ran citrix on every desktop. I believe the desktops were either full blown versions of windows or windows ce. The citrix client ran on top of that and connected to a server on the lan. They all use the same apps anyway so it works out.
Where I work now we run citrix as a remote solution but I dont see any reason why we cant move all of our desktop users to it. Most wouldnt even notice a difference.
>The passivity of the watching experience is actually its best selling point
Exactly. Too many geeks and 'futurists' think everything will be like the current incarnation of the web and email because these things are currently popular. All these cries of 'interactivity' is just silly. People like relaxing, sitting down, and watching a story unfold. If they didnt we'd all be reading Choose Your Own Adventure books nowaways and movies would have a special remote to vote on what happens next. The technologists dont understand the art form, theyre not even close.
>The US is still stuck around 7-10mbit for the majority of us
No its not. Your average broadband connection floats around 600-700 kbps. There isnt enough last-mile bandwidth for these schemes and big telcos have very little incentive to roll out huge and expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially when regulators keep giving them sweetheart deals.
>Are you saying that business will be unable to cope with giving the customer what they want to pay for?
Yes. First off, the demand for iptv will evaborate because no one has ever see one. And theres tons of competition that its in demand like cable and satelite.
>'Nobody will be able to play these 'nextgen' video games because the processing power isn't there.'
Thats a lousy analogy. CPU manufacturers are constalty producing fast chips, see moore's law. Telecom companies are not constantly producing faster last-mile solutions.
>The market will be there to provide what we want as soon as we have a use for it. You can count on it.
I've been waiting for a
100mbps connection to my home for a decade. Lets not be too naive here. Businesses would love to get off the t1 system. etc.
Its a valid complaint. At the very least an authority should inform them before fining them. This is why I think a free federal AV solution should be available for all US citizens. You dont have to use it but if you dont and youre a bot, you get fined. Free updates, daily scans, etc. Probably for the price of an hours worth of war.
That guy youre paying to 'play for you' isnt actually playing, he's ninja looting. When you 'pay' for that level sixty and every group you get into has some guy who is quiet the whole time and then ninja loots the best item dont complain to blizzard. its not the game that sucks, its you.
>I'd love for my raw memories to live beyond myself.
I dont think that's possible. The patterns in the meat of your brain do not have some kind of universal or raw format. They would be a meaningless mess to another person in a best case scenario. Most likely they would be a painful epileptic seizure. Sorry but when the meat goes so does the memories. I'd start on my memoirs now if I was you.
Agreed theres nothing wrong with using 200kbps as a metric. Its pretty much saying 'anything but phone modems and ISDN' which is good enough as any definition. If they upped to a more crowd pleasing number than I would imagine many ISPs would claim 'top speeds of x' with x being some datarate thats possible but unattainable.
>With all due respect to Mr.Kahn, who I am told invented TCP/IP:
An engineer is not an economist. You shouldnt have to apologize when you see an expert use his weight in one field to push his opinions in another. He is at fault here.
Because a P4 at 8ghz benches close to an athlon at 2.
>Imagine a cell phone cradle that supported a keyboard/mouse/monitor console.
Okay. It will need a video chipset to drive at least a 1024x768 display. At least 256megs of ram. Wifi. USB controller. Local storage of say 4 gigs minumum. A decent OS. Apps.
Now its 4x as big, 4x as expensive, and ugly.
A quick look at dell's site shows me a PC can be had for 500 dollars which comes with a 19inch LCD, 60gig drive, 512megs of ram.
Why would anyone get a super-phone? Hell, I have a treo and love it, but its not for everyone. Its very limiting and very expensive. Phones are seen as almost disposable portable devices. Losing one isnt the end of the world. Losing this is. There goes all the data, bookmarks, photos, etc.
The cheap dell sits safely in the living room with a great screen and enough power to last more than a couple years for the casual user.
>That's not a deterrent.
Its not really supposed to be. The idea is to spread the word that its illegal/wrong to infringe on copyright. That way people can't use the "i didnt know" defense. Ignoring the arguments for backup purposes for a moment, the real fight here is to inform people about usage. In the old days of VCRs i bet there was no shortage of people who when asked would answer no the following question 'is it illegal to copy a movie you bought and give it to all yoru friends?' Owning the movie can be seem as having unlimited copy and distribution powers, especially if there is no profit involved. This clearly isnt fair use as traditionally defined. It may not be the VCR days, but there are new computer users everday and the studios and software developers are going to keep pounding in this message. It wont stop willful infringers but it will stop someone who might have assumed otherwise.
It also can provide sympathy when the studios crack down on pirates. Average people will think 'we all know this is illegal, why should they get away with this?' Especially if its profitable and the average person thinks the pirates are gaming the system purely for personal profit.
One of the biggest defenses for P2P is that casual users had no idea what they were doing may have been illegal. They thought the p2p company was providing all these videos or free (or subsidized by ads).
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2
>Apparently only the west is allowed anything nuclear or dangerous - everyone else has no right, apparently.
Wow, your smart-ass comment has changed everyone's mind. Starting next month the US will begin to give nuclear weapons to every nation on earth in the name of fairness. Thank you sir for opening my eyes. I'm sure this kind of thing can only end well!
No the problem is that you are advocating any rule breaking as being a good thing. This is historically untrue. On occasion this kind of thing is helpful, like with civil disobedience for a moral cause, but it certainly is not true generally. Generally, the actions of 'we know better' hotheads is almost always morally wrong and morality is not this simplistic and narrow 'badasses' vs 'sheep' dichotomy you describe.