I'm shocked that the MPAA spokesweasel didn't blame piracy. Shocked, I tell you.
And yes, I'll agree with the submitter's remarks - most movies nowadays are pure shite, little more than CGI thrown everywhere to try to cover a pathetic script. Oh, and don't forget the half-hour of commercials before the movie, too. And they always seem to start the commercials at the published start time. So you arrive half an hour late, trying to skip the commercials, and *this* movie was the one with only 15 minutes of crap in front of it.
The last time I bought Office (97, no need to upgrade until I converted to OpenOffice), I needed Word and Excel only. Buying those two items separately would cost a few hundred dollars more than buying the entire suite including PowerPointless, AccessDenied, and Outhouse. Assuming things haven't changed since then, there's definitely something wrong with that pricing model.
(I'm so witty! I also use the terms "Winblows" or "Windoze" and of course "AOHell." I shop at CompUSSR, OfficeDespot, and DrawlMart. They just built a Stupor DrawlMart in my hometown. I usually pay with my BastardCard credit card.)
But my point still stands - the pricing model is designed to punish you if you pick and choose, kind of like having to buy the entire CD just to get the one or two good songs.
As much as all us hate spam, child porno, junk mail, ads, laywers, etc, we must live them. It's something most people call "society".
HOW DARE YOU sully child pornographers by placing them in the same category as spammers and junk mailers???!?!?!?!11111
Seriously, though, I think you're making a big mistake here. Kiddie porn must never be acceptable in any society under any circumstances. Lumping that in with necessary (or unnecessary) evils that we tolerate is just plain wrong.
For example, nobody likes lawyers, until you find a company bending you over for something like unpaid wages, and then suddenly, you like lawyers a lot. Call them a "necessary evil." Spam and junk mail may not be illegal, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate them; these are "unnecessary evils." The real-world analogy of spam is that I'll stand on the street outside your house, with a megaphone, and yell, "WOULD YOU LIKE A BIGGER PENIS?" When you open the front door to tell me to stop, I'll think, "hey, great, there's someone home!" and then shout louder and more frequently. Should society tolerate that?
If you want your PHB to shell out money for a car so your techs can get around quicker, do you explain to him the inner workings of a combustion engine and the anatomical reasons for not being able to walk as fast as you could drive a car, or do you just tell him "we'll get there faster if we have one"?
You make a very valid point, but I don't agree that it is applicable. Buying techies a car and getting them on-site faster (as compared to walking) have a cause and effect relationship. Google's use of linux has nothing to do with their stock price; I'm guessing they could have used BSD or a commercial unix.
The saddest thing is that this would probably work a lot better with a PHB than any amount of technical reasons about viruses, worms, security, cost of licenses, etc.
-paul
big f-ing deal
on
IE7 Leaked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm trying to imagine why anyone in their right mind would want this. First off, it's IE, and therefore an excellent tool for spreading worms and viruses. Then consider that it is not a release version, and so will have many more bugs than a regular release of IE, many of them probably very exploitable.
I suppose you could say I'm trolling or trying to start a flamewar, but really, do you want MS's latest bit of bugware on your desktop? And who knows what some L337 HAX0R might have managed to graft into the code prior to making it available? Kind of like downloading warez - too risky for any but the most foolish...
... which is exactly the demographic that IE still has tightly locked up.
-paul
I remember the "food riots" of the 1970's
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Population Bomb, there's nostalgia for you. Something like half the population dying of famine, food riots among the remainder. I remember the food riots of the 1970's, don't you?
Parent poster has it right - doom and gloom sells, whether the apocalypse is environmental or religious in nature. How many crackpots have declared that the Rapture is coming on such-and-such a date? The author of this book is not much different, he's just worshipping a different god/ess.
Similar experience, except the doofus whispered a question to me, expecting me to actively assist him. Football players are so stupid, they think that one week after kicking your ass for being smart, you'll actually help them. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I've never really been one of those "turn the other cheek" people.
One particular question was the atomic mass of a particular ion, something involving a few carbon atoms. I gave him the answer, minus about 6. Another question, another ion, I think it was a dichromate, which IIRC has 7 oxygen atoms. You get the wrong answer if you think it only has 4.
In the end, I got 95%, and he scored in the high 50's. I doubt he ever figured out that I had given him deliberately bad answers.
In the end, the coach pressured the teacher to pass him anyway, so he wouldn't lose his academic eligibility. I take great comfort in seeing him now on a Megan's List website for my home state, and his address is listed as "Incarcerated."
Anyone who RTFA'ed that I linked would have realized that the article was satire. Satire directed exactly at the sort of thing that the original article is promoting: drinking this, not eating that, whatever, will make you live longer. And that was my point, is that every week, "they" have something new that you're supposed to eat, or not supposed to eat, and I'm tired of keeping up with which food will kill you this week, so I say sod it all, and I'll just eat a sensible diet. Except for my precious Mountain Dew. My precious
Every day, something new will either kill you or make you live forever. For example, check out this one:
A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found a link between the consumption of dog urine and the decreased likelihood of heart attacks, team leaders announced Tuesday in cracking, uneven voices.
"Our research indicates that by drinking six to eight glasses of fresh dog urine per day, individuals can reduce the risk of cardiac arrest by as much as 70 percent,"
How about a sensible diet, a variety of foods, don't O.D. on anything, and you'll be OK, says the geek who can pound a six-pack of Mountain Dew every day and still sleep like a baby.
Of course I'm sure that this device will never fall into the hands of the "bad guys." Thinking from the bad guy perspective, if I were sending people to hijack planes, and they were failing at this device, I'd get my hands on one of them, somehow, through a sympathetic government, bribery, outright theft, whatever.
Then whomever gets the "glory" of murdering innocent civilians has one additional step in the training camp: learning how to calmly lie into the microphone. We don't pack the explosives in his bag until he can pass 10 times out of 10.
I'd much prefer returning to pre-1972 rules where the airlines could decide if you could bring a loaded firearm onto the plane. Those airlines that allowed it would get my business, and the free market would take care of the problem.
Please crawl out from under the rock where you've been living.
At least here in the U.S., the arrest gets all the press. An acquittal NEVER gets nearly as much press. Case in point, recently nine women attending two fraternity parties near the University of Colorado were taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. It was front-page news for several days when two of the women apparently tested positive for GHB, a "date-rape" drug. One of the frats has actually had its local chapter closed down for the rest of the year, maybe permanently.
Fast-forward several weeks, and guess what, the "quickie" test for GHB has a non-zero occurence of false positives. The more expensive, accurate, and time-consuming lab test came back negative on all nine women. Was it front page news for over a week that "frats didn't drug women after all"? I'll let you guess at the answer.
I had a point somewhere in there. Oh yeah, I'd prefer not to be arrested just because I happened to come into casual contact with a criminal.
NTFS encryption is (IIRC) based off your login password. Which, as other posters have pointed out, can be cracked in a matter of minutes using a precomputed hash table, or in less than 1 day if you use something like l0phtcrack. If you think NTFS encryption will save your data from prying eyes, you are sorely mistaken.
Actually, I think the guy violated the DMCA by circumventing the copyright protection technology.
Because I think the DMCA is a ridiculously bad piece of law, I would like to see Mark prosecuted for violating it, so that people can see just how bad it is.
I just can't imagine what satisfaction one gets from buying a ring tone.
Same here. I thought you were supposed to be embarassed that your phone went off in a public place and disturbed everyone else. Hello? Vibrate feature? But no, every 12-yr-old hip-hopster gangsta-rapper wannabe just HAS to have his phone blast out the latest crap from M. C. Pee Pants whenever one of his "bitches" calls him.
Here's a tip: if I hear your phone sing (I use the term loosely) "pick up da phone, got some money comin' in" one more time, I'm going to introduce your phone to Mr. Sledgehammer. And then maybe your head, too. I figure I should get a medal for preventing all the crimes you were going to commit in the coming years.
The main problem with Web Dwarf is that I can't insert Macromedia Flash items onto a web page.
You say that like it's a problem.
I know, I know, I've got that "I know what's best" attitude that everybody loves to hate, but really, Flash is a craptastic piece of software, known mainly for bloating download times, making it impossible to bookmark a specific page, and generally being annoying. ("Punch the fucking idiotic monkey and win a piece of spyware!") Not to mention that it OWNZ0RZ screen-readers that blind or nearly-blind people use.
Seriously re-evaluate your requirements. Do you really *NEED* Flash?
I'm torn - on the one hand, this patent rivals "Method For Exercising A Cat Or Other Animal With A Chase Instinct Using A Laser Pointer" in sheer chutzpah. On the other hand, never having to hear "yo, where you at?" ever again sounds like a great thing.
/me HATES boost mobile for their gangsta commercials
That sounds like a nifty toy to use with Skype, but Ebay owns Skype now. Ebay will turn anything and everything over to law enforcement in response to a simple fax, not even a warrant, and they even publicly brag about this policy. Will they extend this policy to record all voip calls to/from a certain number if they get a fax from your local police department? Sure, Skype uses crypto, but are the keys stored somewhere? Will Ebay put in a back door or two (or a thousand) for law enforcement?
Remember, kiddies, the cops don't just watch and wiretap people who are suspected of breaking the law. There is a long and shameful trail of the occasional bad cop who uses the department's resources to find his ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or takes a bribe to find someone for someone else. Just because the cops are "interested" in you doesn't mean you've committed a crime.
For example, I read Embedded Systems Programmimg, Circuit Cellar, EETimes, and EDN. Someone else might point out Software Development magazine, but I find it's less applicable to my particular specialty. Really, it will depend on what sort of work you do within this very large field we call Computer Science.
Yes, Windows has supported clustering since NT4 (Wolfpack), and per the GP, it SUCKED BOLLOCKS. I had to deal with that shite every damn day for almost 3 years (1997-2000). We used active-active failover, and the joke around the company was that MS were halfway there: the "fail" worked just fine.
Did I read the record execs comments correctly? They want to artificially inflate the price of some songs? Gee, I wonder if their bravado has anything to do with the fact that they made a hella lot more money on price-fixing CD's than they had to pay in penalties when they were finally busted.
Or maybe they need the money; for all I know, the price of snorting coke off a stripper's breasts has gone up dramatically in the last year or so.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I'll agree with the submitter's remarks - most movies nowadays are pure shite, little more than CGI thrown everywhere to try to cover a pathetic script. Oh, and don't forget the half-hour of commercials before the movie, too. And they always seem to start the commercials at the published start time. So you arrive half an hour late, trying to skip the commercials, and *this* movie was the one with only 15 minutes of crap in front of it.
I wait for the DVD nowadays. Cheaper, too.
-paul
(I'm so witty! I also use the terms "Winblows" or "Windoze" and of course "AOHell." I shop at CompUSSR, OfficeDespot, and DrawlMart. They just built a Stupor DrawlMart in my hometown. I usually pay with my BastardCard credit card.)
But my point still stands - the pricing model is designed to punish you if you pick and choose, kind of like having to buy the entire CD just to get the one or two good songs.
-paul
HOW DARE YOU sully child pornographers by placing them in the same category as spammers and junk mailers???!?!?!?!11111
Seriously, though, I think you're making a big mistake here. Kiddie porn must never be acceptable in any society under any circumstances. Lumping that in with necessary (or unnecessary) evils that we tolerate is just plain wrong.
For example, nobody likes lawyers, until you find a company bending you over for something like unpaid wages, and then suddenly, you like lawyers a lot. Call them a "necessary evil." Spam and junk mail may not be illegal, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate them; these are "unnecessary evils." The real-world analogy of spam is that I'll stand on the street outside your house, with a megaphone, and yell, "WOULD YOU LIKE A BIGGER PENIS?" When you open the front door to tell me to stop, I'll think, "hey, great, there's someone home!" and then shout louder and more frequently. Should society tolerate that?
-paul
You make a very valid point, but I don't agree that it is applicable. Buying techies a car and getting them on-site faster (as compared to walking) have a cause and effect relationship. Google's use of linux has nothing to do with their stock price; I'm guessing they could have used BSD or a commercial unix.
-paul
-paul
I suppose you could say I'm trolling or trying to start a flamewar, but really, do you want MS's latest bit of bugware on your desktop? And who knows what some L337 HAX0R might have managed to graft into the code prior to making it available? Kind of like downloading warez - too risky for any but the most foolish ...
-paul
Parent poster has it right - doom and gloom sells, whether the apocalypse is environmental or religious in nature. How many crackpots have declared that the Rapture is coming on such-and-such a date? The author of this book is not much different, he's just worshipping a different god/ess.
-paul
I believe that a quick google search will lead you to software that you need.
-paul
One particular question was the atomic mass of a particular ion, something involving a few carbon atoms. I gave him the answer, minus about 6. Another question, another ion, I think it was a dichromate, which IIRC has 7 oxygen atoms. You get the wrong answer if you think it only has 4.
In the end, I got 95%, and he scored in the high 50's. I doubt he ever figured out that I had given him deliberately bad answers.
In the end, the coach pressured the teacher to pass him anyway, so he wouldn't lose his academic eligibility. I take great comfort in seeing him now on a Megan's List website for my home state, and his address is listed as "Incarcerated."
-paul
-paul
-paul
How about a sensible diet, a variety of foods, don't O.D. on anything, and you'll be OK, says the geek who can pound a six-pack of Mountain Dew every day and still sleep like a baby.
-paul
Then whomever gets the "glory" of murdering innocent civilians has one additional step in the training camp: learning how to calmly lie into the microphone. We don't pack the explosives in his bag until he can pass 10 times out of 10.
I'd much prefer returning to pre-1972 rules where the airlines could decide if you could bring a loaded firearm onto the plane. Those airlines that allowed it would get my business, and the free market would take care of the problem.
-paul
At least here in the U.S., the arrest gets all the press. An acquittal NEVER gets nearly as much press. Case in point, recently nine women attending two fraternity parties near the University of Colorado were taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. It was front-page news for several days when two of the women apparently tested positive for GHB, a "date-rape" drug. One of the frats has actually had its local chapter closed down for the rest of the year, maybe permanently.
Fast-forward several weeks, and guess what, the "quickie" test for GHB has a non-zero occurence of false positives. The more expensive, accurate, and time-consuming lab test came back negative on all nine women. Was it front page news for over a week that "frats didn't drug women after all"? I'll let you guess at the answer.
I had a point somewhere in there. Oh yeah, I'd prefer not to be arrested just because I happened to come into casual contact with a criminal.
-paul
Gen. Turgidson [shouting] : "We must not allow a quantum computer gap!"
I'm just waiting for the good doctor to try to restrain his right arm. Damn that was a funny (and thought-provoking) movie. Purity of essence ...
-paul
-paul
Because I think the DMCA is a ridiculously bad piece of law, I would like to see Mark prosecuted for violating it, so that people can see just how bad it is.
-paul
Same here. I thought you were supposed to be embarassed that your phone went off in a public place and disturbed everyone else. Hello? Vibrate feature? But no, every 12-yr-old hip-hopster gangsta-rapper wannabe just HAS to have his phone blast out the latest crap from M. C. Pee Pants whenever one of his "bitches" calls him.
Here's a tip: if I hear your phone sing (I use the term loosely) "pick up da phone, got some money comin' in" one more time, I'm going to introduce your phone to Mr. Sledgehammer. And then maybe your head, too. I figure I should get a medal for preventing all the crimes you were going to commit in the coming years.
-paul
You say that like it's a problem.
I know, I know, I've got that "I know what's best" attitude that everybody loves to hate, but really, Flash is a craptastic piece of software, known mainly for bloating download times, making it impossible to bookmark a specific page, and generally being annoying. ("Punch the fucking idiotic monkey and win a piece of spyware!") Not to mention that it OWNZ0RZ screen-readers that blind or nearly-blind people use.
Seriously re-evaluate your requirements. Do you really *NEED* Flash?
-paul
-paul
But most peoples' time on the throne sounds a lot better than any song Britney ever "sang."
-paul
Remember, kiddies, the cops don't just watch and wiretap people who are suspected of breaking the law. There is a long and shameful trail of the occasional bad cop who uses the department's resources to find his ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, or takes a bribe to find someone for someone else. Just because the cops are "interested" in you doesn't mean you've committed a crime.
-paul
-paul
Yes, Windows has supported clustering since NT4 (Wolfpack), and per the GP, it SUCKED BOLLOCKS. I had to deal with that shite every damn day for almost 3 years (1997-2000). We used active-active failover, and the joke around the company was that MS were halfway there: the "fail" worked just fine.
-paul
Or maybe they need the money; for all I know, the price of snorting coke off a stripper's breasts has gone up dramatically in the last year or so.
-paul