No, user level programs can't generally do that. Since Vista user privileges don't give access to other app's data
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. Programs running under the same user's security context are all on equal footing and can inspect and interact with each other. Notepad could, for example, read the entire contents of Firefox's private memory. I can create a remote thread in the Firefox process to do whatever it pleased. Vista did not change this.
There is no easy way to steal credentials out of a browser or read email or anything like that.
This is also not true. Firefox clearly stores passwords using reversible encryption (how else could it send the plaintext passwords to websites?). Both the encrypted password and the decryption key is available to any program running under the user's context.
"Reading email" is a little vague, but if absolutely nothing else, a program could capture the text being displayed in the email application using any number of Win32 API / accessibility calls.
That is why viruses often try to trick the user into granting them admin level permissions via a UAC warning prompt
UAC does nothing to prevent a program from gaining adminstrative access (elevating). This has been reliably demonstrated many times by different people, and even Microsoft has said that UAC is not a security boundary. It was created (essentially) for one thing: to force software vendors to start writing programs that did not assume or require the user to have administrator rights. It had a positive side effect of making Microsoft look more focused on security.
As for drivers even a kernel level exploit usually won't be able to install them these days. Drivers need to be signed before Windows will allow them to be installed.
Windows 8 flat out refuses to install unsigned binaries as drivers
That's unfortunate for independent/small software development shops and open-source software projects. I remember when I had control over what ran on my computer; those were good days. If, however, malicious code has found its way into the kernel your machine is still fully compromised.
I think you're making some assumptions here about user capabilities and how encryption is used that are incorrect.
if credentials aren't encrypted
User credentials are never encrypted in such a way that the current user cannot access them. What would be the point? Secure storage exists to protect users from other users, and to some extent from nosy administrator (though you can't protect *anything* from a determined and nosy administrator). Bob needs to be able to read Bob's plaintext password or Bob cannot make use of it.
Browser exploit can probably scrape your pages or similar
No exploit needed. A program running alongside Firefox can simply *ask* Firefox to perform actions such as saving webpage contents to a file, etc. It could also use Win32 API function calls to save a copy of the Firefox window to an image.
Read your keystrokes, and thus get passwords without decryption
A user-mode program can easily capture (most) keystrokes a user enters in their session. An exception may be for those entered in a "secure" desktop or into an elevated process. For a standard program like a web browser, it's trivial to create a keyboard hook to capture everything. None of this involves encryption.
Read directly from memory, therefore also bypassing the need for decryption
A user generally has full access to their own memory space anyway. I can run a program that reads Firefox's private memory, and even if I couldn't do that then I could create a remote thread inside the Firefox process to read it for me. Again, nothing here involves encryption.
GPG/SSH/SSL/etc unencrypted
All of this is already available to the user. How could it be otherwise? If I'm going to send a server my private key, clearly it must be available unencrypted. If it requires a password to open my user's "keystore", then that password can be captured as mentioned above.
All of the above, plus for every user on a multi-user system
This is the only part you're completely correct about. Gaining system privileges allows a malicious program to escape the current user's access level and gain total access over the entire system. However, the XKCD comic is completely accurate that the vast majority of what people care about has nothing to do with administrator access of their computer.
You're right, GoG doesn't really quite fit in with the others. If I can simply download a game's installer and keep it handy, and can run the game without logging into some annoying client, then it's not so bad. I've bought stuff from Humble, for example, and that's fine with me.
As for the 2560x1440 monitors, you're also right about those existing, but if you take a look at Amazon and Newegg, you'll see that they're by far a second-class citizen. Newegg only has 15, only at the 27-inch size, and starting in mid $600 range. I understand paying more for quality, but this is more about overcoming the gravy boat that is HD TV panels (like someone else mentioned) than just paying for more pixels. It'd also be nice to see a smaller form factor (and higher DPI associated with that).
First, I prefer PC games and gaming. However, you say:
Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura
as if that's a good thing. I started with Steam a long time ago due to the Valve first-party titles and so I've kept active there, but I have intentionally avoided all of the others. The last thing I want is to have half a dozen different "platforms" that I have to use to manage and play my games. This is in fact an argument in favor of consoles -- all your games in one place. Playing hide and seek with your games -- needing to remember that Mass Effect 1 is on a DVD from Amazon, Mass Effect 2 is on Steam, and Mass Effect 3 is in Origin -- is stupid.
YOU control the software
That doesn't really fit in with your previous statement. Games on PCs have often been more locked down with draconian DRM than their console counterparts. Console games can be resold or traded. While both of these points are in flux right now, for the time being it still feels like it's the console games that you really have "more control" over.
play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC
Consoles haven't been holding back the PC nor made PC gaming "easier" to do on lesser hardware. What's done that is:
- Mobile gaming.
- Hardware outpacing (!) software for once. Intel's Core line of procs starting with Nehalem pretty much blew everything out of the water. Arriving around the same time was the (continuing) GPU revolution.
- Shitty desktop monitors. Desktop resolutions nor pixel densities haven't improved in the last decade due to the "HD" scam that's been pulled on consumers. It used to be that every couple of years the graphics card would be driving 60-80% more pixels because the resolution was bigger (not to mention the increased color depth). Now for the last 8 years or so everyone has had a 1080 display with no improvement in sight.
In either case, console and PC gaming aren't mutually exclusive nor dependant. Both will continue as long as they are each successful in their own regards. Which is preferable can sometimes depend on the context (sitting on a couch with friends or playing online with friends, etc). Neither needs to fail for the other to succeed.
Bronies are people who like MLP so much that they identify it with their personal identity. That makes it an extreme position.
It's unlikely this will contribute much at this point (and depth in the thread), but I believe you are misunderstanding the "brony" label, and that this might be why so many people are disagreeing with you even though your base point about a life being disrupted by an obsession is valid.
By and large a brony is just "someone who watches My Little Pony and is not the targeted demographic". It's not just adults -- many teen boys accept the label. It's also not just males, many late-teen and older females also call themselves bronies. You don't see a lot of them going around telling coworkers and strangers and trying to "convert" them, but online or in discussion with friends they'll consider themselves part of that group. That is: "I'm a brony" means "I watch MLP".
The little animation Let's Go and Meet the Bronies from BronyDoc presents this as well (but in a much more colorful fashion).
So yes, while the real obsessive fanatics usually call themselves bronies, they only make up a small part of the brony group. Furries and the "crazy furries" are pretty much a perfect analog.
3. Pharma company goes on to spend $10M to show that the molecule will never work in people.
4. Pharma company spends about $100M on the molecule and it works out.
But in your hypothetical scenario you forgot the $2 billion they spent on advertising and marketing.
I'm not faulting you, but every time criticism of pharmaceuticals comes up everybody raves about high research costs while ignoring that these are not the main expenditure. Apologists also tend to forget about sheer mountain of money "Big Pharma" rakes in each year. There's a line somewhere between "making a profit" and "being a malevolent drain on society", and I think they've crossed well over it.
And this doesn't mention all the potential "negative future revenue" drugs that might have been squashed or hidden away, but that's another topic.
Absolutely not true. I've had many, many times that I've went to find an app for something and only found ad-supported ones with no paid version available. Contacting the developers about it usually results in "we're thinking about it" or "we prefer staying ad-supported only".
Developers need to realize that when you put out an ad-supported program, some of your users are not going to see those ads. It's part of the risk of using that (failed and parasitic, in my opinion) revenue model. Unfortunately everyone seems to think that every app in the store should be free and ignore the rest.
Blocking ads in advertising-funded apps is essentially the same as software piracy
Wow, when you go bullshit you go all the way. Does that mean when I disable cell/wifi network on my Android and run an ad-supported app (and therefore see no ads) I'm also being a "pirate"? At the absolute worst, blocking ads is a breaking of whatever bogus End User License Agreement the app thinks you've agreed to, while "software piracy" is simply copyright infringement. Anyone with half a brain (and not paid by the BSA) knows they aren't even close to similar.
He had a lot of people thinking about it, until he offered up dropping a Hellfire on Jane Fonda.
Funnily enough, he just (~3:53 PST) mentioned Jane Fonda as a good example of somebody who dissents and even supports the ideals of the enemy, yet doesn't deserve to be put on some secret drone strike list.
You can watch the filibuster live on C-SPAN's website. Big viewing numbers may show a little (if inconsequential) support for his effort.
IMHO, the next step is to block referrer information to third party sites. E.g. if example.com loads a script from gstatic.com, then the HTTP_REFERER header is not sent to gstatic.com. There's almost zero collateral damage (one captcha service doesn't work), and companies like Facebook and Google no longer get to know every site that most internet users visit.
I agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, but it might cause more grief that most would guess.
Over the last year or so I've played around with blocking the referer header from being sent at all, to any websites. 99% handle this just fine, but every now and then I'll come across sites that fail, and in various ways. Sometimes I get a useless error message from CloudFlare, and sometimes the page will simply render blank, like this one (in this case because TypeKit issues a 403 when requesting the CSS if the referer is missing).
I have no idea why some sites rely so heavily upon an HTTP header which is not required to be present at all. I'd love to see a browser start to do what you suggest and exclude the header in 3rd party requests because it would force sites to treat the header as it was intended (advisory only) and would also make it easier for those who want to block sending it entirely.
Wordfeud: Scrabble where you can play multiple people at once, and have up to 2 days per turn.
I like Word Ruggle on Android. It's like Boggle but playing with a bunch of other people at the same time, with each player's scores being ranked and displayed between the 2-3 minute rounds.
Actually ethanol burns worse than gasoline and (if you make it our way) takes more energy to make than you get from burning it, but that's ok because of, well, I have to really reach for this one -- JOB CREATION!
What I don't like is how ethanol is damaging for older vehicles. I know I have nothing to back it up, but ever since 10% ethanol started showing up at the pumps I'd swear I've had more trouble with my older car (difficulty starting, power, etc). Reading articles such as this one about the upcoming Ethanol-15 redouble my concerns.
It's the corn lobby and government subsidies that's driving adding ethanol into our gasoline, nothing else. I'm all for alternative-fueled cars designed to run on E85 (or E100 for that matter), but leave the stuff out of the "gas" pump.
I'm trying to figure out what possible reason to have Flash embeddable inside an Office document someone might have. Maybe you could argue that it's worth being able to embed in a PowerPoint slide, but even that is reaching.
A forthcoming version of Flash Player will detect when it's being launched from Office and will present users with a dialog box with vague warnings of a potential threat.
I think a better solution is to disable Flash entirely* when run from an Office document and instead display a message that says:
It's also a blank page if you use AdBlock+ with EasyList. The rule ||googletagservices.com^$third-party breaks their requirement for Google Tag Services, and they weren't bright enough to handle this failure gracefully. Same with NoScript -- unless you've allowed googletagservices.com (and I've managed to browse the web fine for over a decade without it) then it's blank-screen for you.
So instead of paying to be legal, you tell us to pay to use a service (newsgroups/vpn/seedbox) that can still allow you to be flagged criminal? I though the main goal of piracy was not to pay at all.
That's the problem with the widespread use of loaded terms like "piracy". The original word starts getting a vast number of additional meanings (primarily pejoratives pasted on by news and media conglomerates) with the intent to label others who apply the term correctly as malicious. See "hacker" for another good example.
A "pirate" in the electronic sense is someone who violates copyright law. This is somewhat unfortunate, as I think there should be more distinction between those violating copyright for commercial gain versus those only doing so for personal use.
As to your point about not paying for content, I think this is a widespread mistaken belief. I believe the vast majority of noncommercial copyright violators would be eagerly willing to pay for digital media content that can be used under their own terms and on all of their electronic devices. I certainly know I would be.
Paying for Usenet access and/or a seedbox can run you $20/month or more (depends on provider, block accounts, indexer community support, etc). This is in addition to what most people already pay for cable/satellite TV access (say $80/mo). Add those together and you've got at least $100/mo that people are already willing to spend. If I could get high quality DRM-free TV episodes I would probably be willing to spend even more. Toss in perks such as MKVs that include closed-captioned subtitles and 0% chance of audio/video sync issues and you've got something better than most of what's out there now.
Most "pirates" are willing to pay for content. The problem is that it isn't available by any "legal" means.
I currently don't pay because for now no service can be as good as a bittorrent download
That might change when you get a handful of copyright violation notices from your ISP. Suddenly the alternatives will look a lot better.
They both belonged in jail. Too bad they were both too privileged, pretty white boys to serve even a day.
The absurdity of this sentence is astounding.
LaMacchia "got off" because he didn't break the law. Do you understand what that means? He did not violate the established law... so why does he belong in jail? But don't worry -- his innocence resulted in the creation of additional tighter, more draconian laws which have been slowly removing from copyright any semblance of its original meaning. Oh, and at the same time bankrupting and making felons of your average American families (you know, your neighbors).
Swartz was facing multiple felony convictions, impossible fines, and potentially life imprisonment -- so he killed himself. His life was quite literally destroyed because he copied some electronic files and a corrupt whore of a prosecutor shooting for political gain wanted to "make an example" of him.
So you should be happy. Your kind got much more that just a little jail time for two people innocent of any meaningful crime. Freedom reduced, penalties absurdly unfitting of the "crime", and a young man dead. What a great day for the "defenders of copyright"!
I liked the detailed information about the FTL jumps in Battlestar Galactica found in the show bible by RDM:
Faster Than Light (FTL)
The ability to travel faster than the speed of light is, of course, impossible so FTL is a bit of a misnomer even in Galactica's world. Technically speaking neither Galactica nor any other "FTL" capable ship actually goes faster than the speed of light. What happens during a "Jump" is that the fabric of space itself is folded and the ship travels from point A to point B directly.
Picture space as a piece of cloth lying on a table Place a coin on the left hand side In order to move it to the right side of the cloth, you could slide it across the cloth or pick it up and place it there, both of which involve traveling across the physical space and will take time However, if you pick up the right hand side of the cloth and fold it over so it touches the left hand side, the coin can be transferred from one point to another virtually instantaneously.
That is essentially what happens during a Jump. Galactica's FTL engine fold the fabric of space itself (through another dimension beyond the 3rd dimension) and the ship literally transfers itself between two distant points which are momentarily brought together.
As a result, Galactica is never "cruising" through the universe as does the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon. Galactica, and all FTL ships simply go from one point to another, and once they've arrived, they can only move at normal speeds below the speed of light.
Galactica is an older ship relatively speaking and so her technology is significantly behind that of many of the other ships in the ragtag fleet, hence the need for long checklists to be completed by many hands before any Jump.
The process is much simpler and quicker aboard Sharon's Raptor, for instance, but even the Raptor must make precise calculations and execute specific settings before initiating a Jump. (The specific checklist used by Galactica during the FTL sequence in the miniseries was gleaned from one of many checklists from the Apollo 15 lunar mission. Goto: http://www.hq.nasagov/office/pao/History/ap15fj/ and look under "Apollo 15 Documents" for many checklists of this kind.)
The speed of tight also governs communications and sensor information. The farther away a ship is from Galactica, the longer it will take the signal to travel If Galactica and one of her fighters are "only" as far away as the distance between the Earth and Mars (say, 700 million kilometers), there will be an 11 minute lag in a radio conversation. The same goes for optical observations in that by the time we spot a Cylon basestar-- at that same distance, it's had 11 minutes to move closer to Galactica.
The Cylons are bound by the same rules of physics and they cannot travel faster than the speed of light - they have to Jump as well.
The Red Line
Practically speaking the further one attempts to Jump, the more difficult the calculations and the more variables are introduces into the equations. For example, consider the difficulties inherent in Jumping to a relatively nearby star system "only" five light years away: any information Galactica can gather by looking through a telescope is, by definition, five years old. The star and all the planets surrounding it have been in motion for five years since the light we can see left that system This means that Galactica must calculate the motion of all the celestial bodies in that system based on information that is five years old. The further away the Jump point, the greater the problem - try to jump 100 light years, and you have a century's worth of calculations to do.
Because of the limitations inherent in colonial technology, their ability to calculate all the variables involved in a Jump are also limited. Their margin of error increases exponentially the further out they go and as a result, there is a theoretical "Red Line" beyond whic
Just found the actual comment she left via the Daily Mail:
This is the text of Perez's original review posted on Angie's List in August 2012.
Overall: F
Price: F
Quality: F
Responsiveness: F
Punctuality: F
Professionalism: F
Description Of Work: Dietz Development was to perform: painting, refinish floors, electrical, plumbing and handyman work. I was instead left with damage to my home and work that had to be reaccomplished for thousands more than originally estimated.
Member comments: My home was damaged' the "work" had to be re-accomplished; and Dietz tried to sue me for "monies due for his "work." I won in summary judgement (meaning that his case had no merit). Despite his claims, Dietz was/is not licensed to perform work in the state of VA. Further, he invoiced me for work not even performed and also sued me for work not even performed. Today (six months later) he just showed up at my door and '"wanted to talk to me." I said that I "didn't want to talk to him," closed the door , and called the police. (The police said his reason was that he had a "lien on my house"; however this "lien" was made null and void the day I won the case according to the court.) This is after filing my first ever police report when I found my jewelry missing and Dietz was the only one with a key. Bottom line do not put yourself through this nightmare of a contractor.
If that kind of review is worth $750,000 in damages then the Internet is boned. I thought the RIAA's damage calculations were bad -- There must be a trillion dollars worth of "harmful" reviews for places on Google Maps alone!
If posting to Yelp is a huge financial risk, the site will quickly die.
Sadly, it looks like they're going the other way.
Here's the Yelp page for Dietz Development. Look at the reviews and you can see that Yelp has been censoring them pretty heavily. All of them are from the last day or two and the review in question has been removed.
This was a great opportunity for Yelp to stand up for consumer rights and freedoms, but instead they've stuck their head in the sand. Even if they'd put a notice at the top of her review saying that "the statements here are not those of Yelp's, blah blah blah lawyer speak" that would have been fine. However, they've shown they have no backbone and won't stand behind their users.
What if Slashdot editors deleted comments anytime somebody looked at them wrong; what effect would that have on the quantity and quality of the discussion here? There's only been a tiny handful of times that a comment here has been censored -- hopefully it stays that way.
I've never used Yelp before because I wasn't real familiar with them. Now that I am I'll never use them in the future.
It's okay, the whole point of their fast release cycle is that you'll probably see that feature within the next 6 weeks rather than in 6 months from now. Idiots who don't understand the version system will whine about it, but that's a very tangible benefit of releasing more often.
And you know, if the rapid updates were just to fix bugs and improve performance, I doubt anyone would really care how fast versions came out. The problem is that with every release they feel the need to dick around with the user interface as well.
Look what's included in 17:
Some frakking stupid built-in "Social API" bullshit. Why the hell do I need Facebook and Twitter embedded in my browser? I intentionally block both of them on webpages, and now I have to deal with them being an integrated part of the software? I genuinely DO NOT understand this -- I thought the WHOLE POINT of the addon system was for adding things like this. Nowadays the Firefox addon ecosystem seems more focused on removing things from the browser. What. The. Hell.
Just what we need: Bigger icons!. Let's display less information and take up valuable vertical screen space (which they whine about so much as excuses to get rid of the status and tab bars).
I think Mozilla would face much less resistance to their new update model if they would release fixes and performance updates automatically, but hold off making poorly thought-out UI changes except for on a 6-12 month cycle.
Or, better yet, drop the stupid UI changes all together.
What the hell Slashdot? You have to love a nerd news site that can't handle posting a tiny bit of code without frakking it all up. Screw Unicode support -- can we get some decent ASCII support sometime this decade?
Try again with some manual editing to make it fail a little less.
/*requirements*/ var requirements = "Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.";
My VLC can play the first link (labeled Snow Leopard), for a little while, but drops the stream.
The "checkback" links all seem to indicate they are either not streaming live to non-Apple devices, or they ran into a "problem" and will start it later.
Your main point is right, but THQ really ruined the SupCom series with Supreme Commander 2. A dumbed-down version of Starcraft was not at all what players and fans of the first game wanted.
Any time you start changing things to cater to the lowest denominator you ruin whatever you started with.
Slashdot Mirror
No, user level programs can't generally do that. Since Vista user privileges don't give access to other app's data
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. Programs running under the same user's security context are all on equal footing and can inspect and interact with each other. Notepad could, for example, read the entire contents of Firefox's private memory. I can create a remote thread in the Firefox process to do whatever it pleased. Vista did not change this.
There is no easy way to steal credentials out of a browser or read email or anything like that.
This is also not true. Firefox clearly stores passwords using reversible encryption (how else could it send the plaintext passwords to websites?). Both the encrypted password and the decryption key is available to any program running under the user's context.
"Reading email" is a little vague, but if absolutely nothing else, a program could capture the text being displayed in the email application using any number of Win32 API / accessibility calls.
That is why viruses often try to trick the user into granting them admin level permissions via a UAC warning prompt
UAC does nothing to prevent a program from gaining adminstrative access (elevating). This has been reliably demonstrated many times by different people, and even Microsoft has said that UAC is not a security boundary. It was created (essentially) for one thing: to force software vendors to start writing programs that did not assume or require the user to have administrator rights. It had a positive side effect of making Microsoft look more focused on security.
As for drivers even a kernel level exploit usually won't be able to install them these days. Drivers need to be signed before Windows will allow them to be installed.
I'm sorry, but this is also incorrect. Keep in mind there are multiple meanings of a "driver", but once you are executing code inside kernelspace, all bets are off. As Raymond Chen likes to say, It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway.
Windows 8 flat out refuses to install unsigned binaries as drivers
That's unfortunate for independent/small software development shops and open-source software projects. I remember when I had control over what ran on my computer; those were good days. If, however, malicious code has found its way into the kernel your machine is still fully compromised.
I think you're making some assumptions here about user capabilities and how encryption is used that are incorrect.
if credentials aren't encrypted
User credentials are never encrypted in such a way that the current user cannot access them. What would be the point? Secure storage exists to protect users from other users, and to some extent from nosy administrator (though you can't protect *anything* from a determined and nosy administrator). Bob needs to be able to read Bob's plaintext password or Bob cannot make use of it.
Browser exploit can probably scrape your pages or similar
No exploit needed. A program running alongside Firefox can simply *ask* Firefox to perform actions such as saving webpage contents to a file, etc. It could also use Win32 API function calls to save a copy of the Firefox window to an image.
Read your keystrokes, and thus get passwords without decryption
A user-mode program can easily capture (most) keystrokes a user enters in their session. An exception may be for those entered in a "secure" desktop or into an elevated process. For a standard program like a web browser, it's trivial to create a keyboard hook to capture everything. None of this involves encryption.
Read directly from memory, therefore also bypassing the need for decryption
A user generally has full access to their own memory space anyway. I can run a program that reads Firefox's private memory, and even if I couldn't do that then I could create a remote thread inside the Firefox process to read it for me. Again, nothing here involves encryption.
GPG/SSH/SSL/etc unencrypted
All of this is already available to the user. How could it be otherwise? If I'm going to send a server my private key, clearly it must be available unencrypted. If it requires a password to open my user's "keystore", then that password can be captured as mentioned above.
All of the above, plus for every user on a multi-user system
This is the only part you're completely correct about. Gaining system privileges allows a malicious program to escape the current user's access level and gain total access over the entire system. However, the XKCD comic is completely accurate that the vast majority of what people care about has nothing to do with administrator access of their computer.
You're right, GoG doesn't really quite fit in with the others. If I can simply download a game's installer and keep it handy, and can run the game without logging into some annoying client, then it's not so bad. I've bought stuff from Humble, for example, and that's fine with me.
As for the 2560x1440 monitors, you're also right about those existing, but if you take a look at Amazon and Newegg, you'll see that they're by far a second-class citizen. Newegg only has 15, only at the 27-inch size, and starting in mid $600 range. I understand paying more for quality, but this is more about overcoming the gravy boat that is HD TV panels (like someone else mentioned) than just paying for more pixels. It'd also be nice to see a smaller form factor (and higher DPI associated with that).
First, I prefer PC games and gaming. However, you say:
Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura
as if that's a good thing. I started with Steam a long time ago due to the Valve first-party titles and so I've kept active there, but I have intentionally avoided all of the others. The last thing I want is to have half a dozen different "platforms" that I have to use to manage and play my games. This is in fact an argument in favor of consoles -- all your games in one place. Playing hide and seek with your games -- needing to remember that Mass Effect 1 is on a DVD from Amazon, Mass Effect 2 is on Steam, and Mass Effect 3 is in Origin -- is stupid.
YOU control the software
That doesn't really fit in with your previous statement. Games on PCs have often been more locked down with draconian DRM than their console counterparts. Console games can be resold or traded. While both of these points are in flux right now, for the time being it still feels like it's the console games that you really have "more control" over.
play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC
Consoles haven't been holding back the PC nor made PC gaming "easier" to do on lesser hardware. What's done that is:
- Mobile gaming.
- Hardware outpacing (!) software for once. Intel's Core line of procs starting with Nehalem pretty much blew everything out of the water. Arriving around the same time was the (continuing) GPU revolution.
- Shitty desktop monitors. Desktop resolutions nor pixel densities haven't improved in the last decade due to the "HD" scam that's been pulled on consumers. It used to be that every couple of years the graphics card would be driving 60-80% more pixels because the resolution was bigger (not to mention the increased color depth). Now for the last 8 years or so everyone has had a 1080 display with no improvement in sight.
In either case, console and PC gaming aren't mutually exclusive nor dependant. Both will continue as long as they are each successful in their own regards. Which is preferable can sometimes depend on the context (sitting on a couch with friends or playing online with friends, etc). Neither needs to fail for the other to succeed.
Bronies are people who like MLP so much that they identify it with their personal identity. That makes it an extreme position.
It's unlikely this will contribute much at this point (and depth in the thread), but I believe you are misunderstanding the "brony" label, and that this might be why so many people are disagreeing with you even though your base point about a life being disrupted by an obsession is valid.
By and large a brony is just "someone who watches My Little Pony and is not the targeted demographic". It's not just adults -- many teen boys accept the label. It's also not just males, many late-teen and older females also call themselves bronies. You don't see a lot of them going around telling coworkers and strangers and trying to "convert" them, but online or in discussion with friends they'll consider themselves part of that group. That is: "I'm a brony" means "I watch MLP".
The little animation Let's Go and Meet the Bronies from BronyDoc presents this as well (but in a much more colorful fashion).
So yes, while the real obsessive fanatics usually call themselves bronies, they only make up a small part of the brony group. Furries and the "crazy furries" are pretty much a perfect analog.
3. Pharma company goes on to spend $10M to show that the molecule will never work in people.
4. Pharma company spends about $100M on the molecule and it works out.
But in your hypothetical scenario you forgot the $2 billion they spent on advertising and marketing.
I'm not faulting you, but every time criticism of pharmaceuticals comes up everybody raves about high research costs while ignoring that these are not the main expenditure. Apologists also tend to forget about sheer mountain of money "Big Pharma" rakes in each year. There's a line somewhere between "making a profit" and "being a malevolent drain on society", and I think they've crossed well over it.
And this doesn't mention all the potential "negative future revenue" drugs that might have been squashed or hidden away, but that's another topic.
Almost all apps have a pay-for ad-free version
Absolutely not true. I've had many, many times that I've went to find an app for something and only found ad-supported ones with no paid version available. Contacting the developers about it usually results in "we're thinking about it" or "we prefer staying ad-supported only".
Developers need to realize that when you put out an ad-supported program, some of your users are not going to see those ads. It's part of the risk of using that (failed and parasitic, in my opinion) revenue model. Unfortunately everyone seems to think that every app in the store should be free and ignore the rest.
Blocking ads in advertising-funded apps is essentially the same as software piracy
Wow, when you go bullshit you go all the way. Does that mean when I disable cell/wifi network on my Android and run an ad-supported app (and therefore see no ads) I'm also being a "pirate"? At the absolute worst, blocking ads is a breaking of whatever bogus End User License Agreement the app thinks you've agreed to, while "software piracy" is simply copyright infringement. Anyone with half a brain (and not paid by the BSA) knows they aren't even close to similar.
He had a lot of people thinking about it, until he offered up dropping a Hellfire on Jane Fonda.
Funnily enough, he just (~3:53 PST) mentioned Jane Fonda as a good example of somebody who dissents and even supports the ideals of the enemy, yet doesn't deserve to be put on some secret drone strike list.
You can watch the filibuster live on C-SPAN's website. Big viewing numbers may show a little (if inconsequential) support for his effort.
IMHO, the next step is to block referrer information to third party sites. E.g. if example.com loads a script from gstatic.com, then the HTTP_REFERER header is not sent to gstatic.com. There's almost zero collateral damage (one captcha service doesn't work), and companies like Facebook and Google no longer get to know every site that most internet users visit.
I agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, but it might cause more grief that most would guess.
Over the last year or so I've played around with blocking the referer header from being sent at all, to any websites. 99% handle this just fine, but every now and then I'll come across sites that fail, and in various ways. Sometimes I get a useless error message from CloudFlare, and sometimes the page will simply render blank, like this one (in this case because TypeKit issues a 403 when requesting the CSS if the referer is missing).
I have no idea why some sites rely so heavily upon an HTTP header which is not required to be present at all. I'd love to see a browser start to do what you suggest and exclude the header in 3rd party requests because it would force sites to treat the header as it was intended (advisory only) and would also make it easier for those who want to block sending it entirely.
Wordfeud: Scrabble where you can play multiple people at once, and have up to 2 days per turn.
I like Word Ruggle on Android. It's like Boggle but playing with a bunch of other people at the same time, with each player's scores being ranked and displayed between the 2-3 minute rounds.
Actually ethanol burns worse than gasoline and (if you make it our way) takes more energy to make than you get from burning it, but that's ok because of, well, I have to really reach for this one -- JOB CREATION!
What I don't like is how ethanol is damaging for older vehicles. I know I have nothing to back it up, but ever since 10% ethanol started showing up at the pumps I'd swear I've had more trouble with my older car (difficulty starting, power, etc). Reading articles such as this one about the upcoming Ethanol-15 redouble my concerns.
It's the corn lobby and government subsidies that's driving adding ethanol into our gasoline, nothing else. I'm all for alternative-fueled cars designed to run on E85 (or E100 for that matter), but leave the stuff out of the "gas" pump.
This is why your data should not be executable.
I'm trying to figure out what possible reason to have Flash embeddable inside an Office document someone might have. Maybe you could argue that it's worth being able to embed in a PowerPoint slide, but even that is reaching.
A forthcoming version of Flash Player will detect when it's being launched from Office and will present users with a dialog box with vague warnings of a potential threat.
I think a better solution is to disable Flash entirely* when run from an Office document and instead display a message that says:
"Flash has been disabled. To enable Flash content, contact your system administrator and he will come back there and hit you on the head with a tack hammer 'cause you are a retard ."
* of course with the obligatory registry-key-bypass for corporate users
It's also a blank page if you use AdBlock+ with EasyList. The rule ||googletagservices.com^$third-party breaks their requirement for Google Tag Services, and they weren't bright enough to handle this failure gracefully. Same with NoScript -- unless you've allowed googletagservices.com (and I've managed to browse the web fine for over a decade without it) then it's blank-screen for you.
Pretty sad.
So instead of paying to be legal, you tell us to pay to use a service (newsgroups/vpn/seedbox) that can still allow you to be flagged criminal? I though the main goal of piracy was not to pay at all.
That's the problem with the widespread use of loaded terms like "piracy". The original word starts getting a vast number of additional meanings (primarily pejoratives pasted on by news and media conglomerates) with the intent to label others who apply the term correctly as malicious. See "hacker" for another good example.
A "pirate" in the electronic sense is someone who violates copyright law. This is somewhat unfortunate, as I think there should be more distinction between those violating copyright for commercial gain versus those only doing so for personal use.
As to your point about not paying for content, I think this is a widespread mistaken belief. I believe the vast majority of noncommercial copyright violators would be eagerly willing to pay for digital media content that can be used under their own terms and on all of their electronic devices. I certainly know I would be.
Paying for Usenet access and/or a seedbox can run you $20/month or more (depends on provider, block accounts, indexer community support, etc). This is in addition to what most people already pay for cable/satellite TV access (say $80/mo). Add those together and you've got at least $100/mo that people are already willing to spend. If I could get high quality DRM-free TV episodes I would probably be willing to spend even more. Toss in perks such as MKVs that include closed-captioned subtitles and 0% chance of audio/video sync issues and you've got something better than most of what's out there now.
Most "pirates" are willing to pay for content. The problem is that it isn't available by any "legal" means.
I currently don't pay because for now no service can be as good as a bittorrent download
That might change when you get a handful of copyright violation notices from your ISP. Suddenly the alternatives will look a lot better.
They both belonged in jail. Too bad they were both too privileged, pretty white boys to serve even a day.
The absurdity of this sentence is astounding.
LaMacchia "got off" because he didn't break the law. Do you understand what that means? He did not violate the established law... so why does he belong in jail? But don't worry -- his innocence resulted in the creation of additional tighter, more draconian laws which have been slowly removing from copyright any semblance of its original meaning. Oh, and at the same time bankrupting and making felons of your average American families (you know, your neighbors).
Swartz was facing multiple felony convictions, impossible fines, and potentially life imprisonment -- so he killed himself. His life was quite literally destroyed because he copied some electronic files and a corrupt whore of a prosecutor shooting for political gain wanted to "make an example" of him.
So you should be happy. Your kind got much more that just a little jail time for two people innocent of any meaningful crime. Freedom reduced, penalties absurdly unfitting of the "crime", and a young man dead. What a great day for the "defenders of copyright"!
Asshole.
Oops, OCR fail. The link is: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap15fj/ if you're interested.
I liked the detailed information about the FTL jumps in Battlestar Galactica found in the show bible by RDM:
And - it has regrettably to be said - in a culture full of batshit-insane drivers.
No joke. There are some pretty crazy Russian dashcam/streetcam compilations on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFw1dpGw9uQ (0:55).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkvX9SVAlk0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTb4CGhp_eo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XB-B3Bqsm4 (2:52, 8:30)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiBLfLcUmZs (11:02)
It seems to be a combination of driving too fast for conditions (and/or bald tires) and assuming everyone else will jump the hell out of your way.
Just found the actual comment she left via the Daily Mail:
If that kind of review is worth $750,000 in damages then the Internet is boned. I thought the RIAA's damage calculations were bad -- There must be a trillion dollars worth of "harmful" reviews for places on Google Maps alone!
If posting to Yelp is a huge financial risk, the site will quickly die.
Sadly, it looks like they're going the other way.
Here's the Yelp page for Dietz Development. Look at the reviews and you can see that Yelp has been censoring them pretty heavily. All of them are from the last day or two and the review in question has been removed.
This was a great opportunity for Yelp to stand up for consumer rights and freedoms, but instead they've stuck their head in the sand. Even if they'd put a notice at the top of her review saying that "the statements here are not those of Yelp's, blah blah blah lawyer speak" that would have been fine. However, they've shown they have no backbone and won't stand behind their users.
What if Slashdot editors deleted comments anytime somebody looked at them wrong; what effect would that have on the quantity and quality of the discussion here? There's only been a tiny handful of times that a comment here has been censored -- hopefully it stays that way.
I've never used Yelp before because I wasn't real familiar with them. Now that I am I'll never use them in the future.
Oh that's just beautiful, Slashdot.
#commentlisting li:not(.comment) {
list-style: none outside none;
margin: 0 0 11px 22px;
}
Remove the bullets and margin from list elements. What a great idea; makes it much easier to read.
It's okay, the whole point of their fast release cycle is that you'll probably see that feature within the next 6 weeks rather than in 6 months from now. Idiots who don't understand the version system will whine about it, but that's a very tangible benefit of releasing more often.
And you know, if the rapid updates were just to fix bugs and improve performance, I doubt anyone would really care how fast versions came out. The problem is that with every release they feel the need to dick around with the user interface as well.
Look what's included in 17:
I think Mozilla would face much less resistance to their new update model if they would release fixes and performance updates automatically, but hold off making poorly thought-out UI changes except for on a 6-12 month cycle.
Or, better yet, drop the stupid UI changes all together.
What the hell Slashdot? You have to love a nerd news site that can't handle posting a tiny bit of code without frakking it all up. Screw Unicode support -- can we get some decent ASCII support sometime this decade?
Try again with some manual editing to make it fail a little less.
var slURL = "http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/sl_mvp.m3u8";
var nonSlURL = 'http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/12poibnasfdvpiajbafvpihjbasfvpiubfsv10_checkback.jpg';
var windowsURL = 'http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/12poibnasfdvpiajbafvpihjbasfvpiubfsv10_checkback.jpg';
var iphoneURL = "http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/12poibnasfdvpiajbafvpihjbasfvpiubfsv10_iphone_ref.mov";
var ipadURL = "http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/12poibnasfdvpiajbafvpihjbasfvpiubfsv10_ipad_ref.mov";
var voiceOver = "http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/oct/1210pibasdfvoihbadsv/12poibnasfdvpiajbafvpihjbasfvpiubfsv10_iphone_ref.mov";
var requirements = "Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.";
var refreshPage = false;
If you go look at the source of this Javascript in an auto-refreshing IFRAME, you'll see
My VLC can play the first link (labeled Snow Leopard), for a little while, but drops the stream.
The "checkback" links all seem to indicate they are either not streaming live to non-Apple devices, or they ran into a "problem" and will start it later.
THQ ruined the Sup Com series by trying
Your main point is right, but THQ really ruined the SupCom series with Supreme Commander 2. A dumbed-down version of Starcraft was not at all what players and fans of the first game wanted.
Any time you start changing things to cater to the lowest denominator you ruin whatever you started with.