Free speech is a basic right. And that would include the written word as well. Internet usage is not a right however, but I think you do have a point there. There are some lines that should not be crossed, and they're doing just that.
Nah, that would not work. For one thing, Indians have had free rein over their Facebook, Google and twitter accounts since the very beginning. The citizenry will find it way too hard to make the shift from a global to a local platform.
Furthermore, we Indians are used to being relatively uncensored at every turn. The moment we "realize" that the government is actively monitoring every tweet and every post, people will start withdrawing from the services offered.
We have a deep mistrust of our government. It is one thing to force the uneducated into censorship. But those of us who use the internet have at least a basic education, and we don't like the government meddling in any of our affairs. especially if we can't see a justification in it.
What irks many of us, is the fact that the government spends too little of our tax money in the right places. For instance, the roads are potholed, the water services are unreliable. Energy production has crawled into a hole and died. There is hunger and starvation all over the country. The middle and upper classes are the ones who are most impacted by the Governmental organizations. The Police are unreliable.
When an accident occurs, we fear reporting it to the cops because we know that if we do, we're the first to be taken in for questioning and the cops overstep their authority at every turn. You see a guy dying on the street, and passers by will stop just to mull around and stare. Everyone will complain that someone should do something, but no one will consider calling the authorities or helping the poor chap to a hospital because the helper becomes the hunted in the eyes of the authorities.
A friend of mine was put in the slammer for moving the victim of an accident. He was let free four days later because the court decided he was innocent, but he left with bruises and came down with a bad case of diarrhea. The cops actually beat the guy up during their "questioning for facts"! He was just trying to help an injured guy who ended up dying on the way to the hospital.
We love our country, but we hate deeply, those in power who're trying to run it because they don't appear to care for the public.
An alternative website, monitored/restricted or not, will hold even less water in such a country. They might be able to forcefully lock social networks out of the country, but they can't get people to use a government-controlled one.
Apologies for the delayed reply.. India has a different definition regarding where its poverty line lies.
I tried to find the statistics I used in my reply above, but can't seem to find them. Any way, here's an article from The Times of India from May of 2011 that might throw some light on the facts.
Just a reminder.. The exchange rate is: $1 USD = Rs.51.71 INR. As per my calculations, the Urban Poverty Line lies at $7.16 per year while the Rural Poverty Line lies at $3.48 a year. Of course, this data is a bit out of date.. However, considering inflation levels and the massively slow ambling of the government, I think the point comes through quite clearly.
I hope this info satisfies your curiosity. God knows, I wish more people were as interested.:(
..once the prevalence of XP drops far enough, and people start replacing WinXP with Win7 stickers on their bumpers, Crackers will start building Virii and looking for holes in Win7, leaving XP alone.
People will continue to use XP for ages and ages. Especially those who've grown up with it and are too stuck in their ways to upgrade or switch to a different OS. Those who stay with XP, will not suffer too much.
What will really cause XP to fall off the market though, is Gaming, Tools and Applications, Hardware etc, that might no longer work on a machine running XP. For a long time, developers and Hardware Manufacturers will continue to build backward compatible stuff for the relatively small, but nevertheless fairly numerous clientele.
So sure, 2014 maybe where XP's red-line stands, but the race does not end just then.
I'm Indian you know.. Perhaps it does not occur to you, but there are people in this country who earn less in a year than you'd pay for a decent meal at a two star restraunt. There are millions of such people in fact. To say that the government agencies work hard to play this figure down, would be a gross understatement. But even though I live in a fairly prosperous patch of the country, living here since I was born, I have actually met such people.
In a country of over a billion people, with barely 0.4% of the population sucking up 90% of the money that floats around, it is a spectacular vision of neglect and sadness.
About 35% of the population of India lives below the poverty line. FYI, the poverty line translates to $6 US a year! Sure, for you it would feel like a kick in the stomach to receive a device such as this for christmas, but trust me, kids who get this device here would literally be willing to sell their kidneys for the opportunity to have one of them.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying I love the device, just that there are loads of people who will. And not only will they love and enjoy it, they will actually get it to do stuff the rest of us never even dreamed possible on such a low-spec toy.
So if someone asks me to buy the device for myself, I'd tell them to go eat shit. But I would nevertheless be glad to see it go out into the market for those who would otherwise go completely deviceless. I think there's some honour in that somewhere, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.:) Forgive me.
Lying is only common when people try to interact with people. From what I've seen, people will almost never lie when they interact with devices or computer programs. Also, it is unlikely that an individual will lie when their anonymity is either assured, or enforced. When people interact about something they are personally invested in, the chances that they will lie go right through the roof!
as to the conclusion made in TFA, I'd say that the longer people have to make up lies, the more they will lie. It's not eMail that makes them lie, it's in the persons mind all the time. Also, in a face-to-face conversation, lying successfully becomes difficult for getting caught at it is a lot tougher. Your face and body language give things away that you'd have no trouble hiding in chat or mail.
I find it hard to believe someone actually used grant money to do this research! I could have come to the same conclusion without even thinking!
Or just push them through a shredder and then burn the results. Not only would that burn more paper, but if any bits do survive, the chances of a compatible un-burnt piece surviving are greatly reduced. The more documents burnt that way, the smaller the chance for any meaningful extraction of information.
It is common practice among digitally inclined firms to sue white-hats when they contact them about security vulnerabilities in their systems, rather than getting down and patching the holes and fixing the flaws.
It seems to me that it is no wonder that ethically inclined hackers would prefer to avoid approaching firms with their discoveries and instead just sit on them. Personally, I think ethics be gone and let the big lawyered up firms take their attitudes and suffer the consequences.
Contact the firm, set a deadline and then release the zero-day exploit anonymously on the specified date as promised.
Between "number of devices _sold_" and "number of devices _shipped_". I read somewhere a while ago about how Samsung was flooding the market with its devices but most of their devices weren't turning into actual sales. But even so.. Nevertheless, Just the fact that they were able to move almost 28 million handsets into the market is itself a grand statement to their capacity.
Sitting here in India, it's already 4:00 AM of the 22'nd of October 2011.
Sure I can go read the article and then calculate backward from the websites timezone (which runs on EST btw) but seriously, this is the internet! No one has a local audience anymore!
Did it not occur to anybody that we live in a world that's filled with time-zones!?:(
As I see it, one of the most critical failings of the whole G+ kaboodle, is the lack of a decent API.
Sure they have an API. But what good is it if you don't have an up and a down stream.
I read somewhere that about 80% of the regulars on social networking sites interact with each other via apps installed on their phones and other portable devices. As a matter of fact, even when on a desktop, a lot of people prefer to use apps to post and view updates. I've been on the move for most of the last four months, and I've racked up over 5500 tweets. If my twitter client (I use Gravity which is basically a Twitter client, but supports Facebook, Foursquare, StatusNet, SinaWeibo and Google Reader) had G+ too, I'd be redirecting more traffic in that direction. I'm pretty sure most of us who ping multiple social networks today would have no qualms about embracing G+.
I have not been following G+ updates for a while now, but I'm guessing their API is still unchanged since it was first released. Don't get me wrong though, I quite like G+. It's just that it is too inconvenient for me to go out of my way to be active on.
Since tax evasion is considered dishonesty, I don't see why is should be un-patentable. Patent all you like, but at the end of the day, if you use the method, it does not make it legal. Since it is illegal to do so, how do you track people or organizations who violate the patent and then enforce it? If you ask me, I think it is a bit like patenting a method to crack a safe. You can patent it all you like, but there are very few situations when you can actually use it legally. Not only do you get on the wrong side of the law if you use it, but if someone does use it, it can carry a second charge for the patent breech as well.
On the one hand, if you encourage people to patent their ideas, the IRS would be able to use that knowledge to look for similar patterns when they suspect that an entity is defrauding the government. If on the other hand, you refuse to issue patents for this, there's going to be a need for investigators to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
The amount of time that'll be freed up for humans to apply their abilities in other areas. Just because robots might do some of the work that we once used to do, does not in any way mean humans are going to be defunct. Even if humans stop working on menial and repetitive jobs, I'm certain we're not so un-innovative as to be unable to find things to do with ourselves.
I see huge potential opening up for work that mandates the need for what might be viewed or thought of as more human specialties.
I find it hard to believe that a lie is fabricated from any sort of moral standpoint whatsoever. When I make up a lie, I do it for reasons all my own. Morality is a distant second to whatever primary reason I might have.
For instance, I would not (if asked by a stranger on a bus) tell the truth about carrying a ton of money in my back pack. My primary motive has no moral inclination. It is driven by the perceived necessity for the safety of my belongings. Secondary would perhaps be perceived by some as a moral contradiction My parents might have said that it was evil to lie and that I would spend another agonizing eternity in hell. If such were the case, and if that were anything to do with morals, they're NOT MY morals, they're social morals.
Even if a magnet is somehow able to seize up my moral faculties, I would still be free to tell the Truth, or to tell a Lie based on intellectually reasoned stimulation. No amount of mental stimulation will be able to so that.
I admit however, that there is a possibility that one could be immersed into a state of "willingness to respond with the truth rather than the false", however, it would be more due to a mental state and a clever questioner than anything else. Ask the wrong questions and *blam!* your truth serum will fall apart. As long as the mind forgets that it is unsafe, irresponsible, unsuitable or whatever else, to tell a lie, it will not bother making up one. As soon as it realizes the situation, it will invariably fight off the influence and pull its inhibitions right back to where there are supposed to be.
That noted, I find it impossible to imagine how someone could be influenced to tell a lie every time s/he opens his/her mouth. I just don't see that happening.
I've seen custom scratch mods that would rock this one into insignificance. This guy's done a fair job certainly.. Pretty neat and clean work. Honestly though, even I could do a better job. I'm not a modding guru, but I know what I'm talking about.
If stuff like this is what slashdot has started accepting, I'm sorry but we're gonna lose the few intelligent readers that're still left.
There's a good chance this was approved by mistake. I find it hard to believe that this was done on purpose.
Ah, there's a very good reason for keeping timezones. I'm amazed I even thought of it!:)
You see, If I live in India, which happens to be GMT+5.5 If I wanted to call someone up in the UK, I'd suddenly have a problem on my hands. On the one hand, I have no interest in calculating backward from the position of the sun in my sky. On the other, I'd be hard pressed to do the same based on the star patterns in my night sky if I wanted to call during my night. I might end up calling up while he's asleep, or while he's warming up his wife.
It all becomes much easier for me if I were to deduct 5.5 hours from my clock and figure out the current status of my clients sleep cycle based on my calculations and overlaying the result over my own sleep cycle.
Of course, having a standardized clock for the whole planet would have its conveniences, but the inconveniences far outweigh those. Once we've encapsulated the entire planet under a nice thick blanket of steel and start living in artificial days and nights to match our clocks, the tables will turn. But until then, we're going to be eating out of the hands of God, or something very much like him/her.
Slashdot Mirror
Free speech is a basic right. And that would include the written word as well. Internet usage is not a right however, but I think you do have a point there. There are some lines that should not be crossed, and they're doing just that.
Nah, that would not work. For one thing, Indians have had free rein over their Facebook, Google and twitter accounts since the very beginning. The citizenry will find it way too hard to make the shift from a global to a local platform.
Furthermore, we Indians are used to being relatively uncensored at every turn. The moment we "realize" that the government is actively monitoring every tweet and every post, people will start withdrawing from the services offered.
We have a deep mistrust of our government. It is one thing to force the uneducated into censorship. But those of us who use the internet have at least a basic education, and we don't like the government meddling in any of our affairs. especially if we can't see a justification in it.
What irks many of us, is the fact that the government spends too little of our tax money in the right places. For instance, the roads are potholed, the water services are unreliable. Energy production has crawled into a hole and died. There is hunger and starvation all over the country. The middle and upper classes are the ones who are most impacted by the Governmental organizations. The Police are unreliable.
When an accident occurs, we fear reporting it to the cops because we know that if we do, we're the first to be taken in for questioning and the cops overstep their authority at every turn. You see a guy dying on the street, and passers by will stop just to mull around and stare. Everyone will complain that someone should do something, but no one will consider calling the authorities or helping the poor chap to a hospital because the helper becomes the hunted in the eyes of the authorities.
A friend of mine was put in the slammer for moving the victim of an accident. He was let free four days later because the court decided he was innocent, but he left with bruises and came down with a bad case of diarrhea. The cops actually beat the guy up during their "questioning for facts"! He was just trying to help an injured guy who ended up dying on the way to the hospital.
We love our country, but we hate deeply, those in power who're trying to run it because they don't appear to care for the public.
An alternative website, monitored/restricted or not, will hold even less water in such a country. They might be able to forcefully lock social networks out of the country, but they can't get people to use a government-controlled one.
Error reading from drive C:
(A)bort, (I)gnore, (R)etry, (F)ail?
My bad.. I miscalculated unforgivably. They don't match the article I linked to.
The values recalculated to $135 urban and $104 rural.
I feel foolish now. I'll go sulk under the first stone I turn over. :(
Apologies for the delayed reply.. India has a different definition regarding where its poverty line lies.
I tried to find the statistics I used in my reply above, but can't seem to find them. Any way, here's an article from The Times of India from May of 2011 that might throw some light on the facts.
Just a reminder.. The exchange rate is: $1 USD = Rs.51.71 INR.
As per my calculations, the Urban Poverty Line lies at $7.16 per year while the Rural Poverty Line lies at $3.48 a year.
Of course, this data is a bit out of date.. However, considering inflation levels and the massively slow ambling of the government, I think the point comes through quite clearly.
I hope this info satisfies your curiosity. God knows, I wish more people were as interested. :(
..once the prevalence of XP drops far enough, and people start replacing WinXP with Win7 stickers on their bumpers, Crackers will start building Virii and looking for holes in Win7, leaving XP alone.
People will continue to use XP for ages and ages. Especially those who've grown up with it and are too stuck in their ways to upgrade or switch to a different OS. Those who stay with XP, will not suffer too much.
What will really cause XP to fall off the market though, is Gaming, Tools and Applications, Hardware etc, that might no longer work on a machine running XP. For a long time, developers and Hardware Manufacturers will continue to build backward compatible stuff for the relatively small, but nevertheless fairly numerous clientele.
So sure, 2014 maybe where XP's red-line stands, but the race does not end just then.
I'm Indian you know.. Perhaps it does not occur to you, but there are people in this country who earn less in a year than you'd pay for a decent meal at a two star restraunt. There are millions of such people in fact. To say that the government agencies work hard to play this figure down, would be a gross understatement. But even though I live in a fairly prosperous patch of the country, living here since I was born, I have actually met such people.
In a country of over a billion people, with barely 0.4% of the population sucking up 90% of the money that floats around, it is a spectacular vision of neglect and sadness.
About 35% of the population of India lives below the poverty line. FYI, the poverty line translates to $6 US a year!
Sure, for you it would feel like a kick in the stomach to receive a device such as this for christmas, but trust me, kids who get this device here would literally be willing to sell their kidneys for the opportunity to have one of them.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying I love the device, just that there are loads of people who will. And not only will they love and enjoy it, they will actually get it to do stuff the rest of us never even dreamed possible on such a low-spec toy.
So if someone asks me to buy the device for myself, I'd tell them to go eat shit. But I would nevertheless be glad to see it go out into the market for those who would otherwise go completely deviceless. I think there's some honour in that somewhere, but I'm having trouble putting it into words. :) Forgive me.
I thought we (humans) all had roughly (if not exactly) the same amount of data.. This title reeks of intent to mislead! :)
Lying is only common when people try to interact with people. From what I've seen, people will almost never lie when they interact with devices or computer programs. Also, it is unlikely that an individual will lie when their anonymity is either assured, or enforced. When people interact about something they are personally invested in, the chances that they will lie go right through the roof!
as to the conclusion made in TFA, I'd say that the longer people have to make up lies, the more they will lie. It's not eMail that makes them lie, it's in the persons mind all the time. Also, in a face-to-face conversation, lying successfully becomes difficult for getting caught at it is a lot tougher. Your face and body language give things away that you'd have no trouble hiding in chat or mail.
I find it hard to believe someone actually used grant money to do this research! I could have come to the same conclusion without even thinking!
Or just push them through a shredder and then burn the results. Not only would that burn more paper, but if any bits do survive, the chances of a compatible un-burnt piece surviving are greatly reduced. The more documents burnt that way, the smaller the chance for any meaningful extraction of information.
It is common practice among digitally inclined firms to sue white-hats when they contact them about security vulnerabilities in their systems, rather than getting down and patching the holes and fixing the flaws.
It seems to me that it is no wonder that ethically inclined hackers would prefer to avoid approaching firms with their discoveries and instead just sit on them. Personally, I think ethics be gone and let the big lawyered up firms take their attitudes and suffer the consequences.
Contact the firm, set a deadline and then release the zero-day exploit anonymously on the specified date as promised.
Between "number of devices _sold_" and "number of devices _shipped_". I read somewhere a while ago about how Samsung was flooding the market with its devices but most of their devices weren't turning into actual sales. But even so.. Nevertheless, Just the fact that they were able to move almost 28 million handsets into the market is itself a grand statement to their capacity.
Ouroboros :-D
Big Pharma yes, but perhaps the more likely reason being, policy makers trying to garner favour with their mindless vote-banks.
What do you call those who live in Taiwan? GNAT? :-)
Ah ha, So the morning of the 22nd eh?
Sitting here in India, it's already 4:00 AM of the 22'nd of October 2011.
Sure I can go read the article and then calculate backward from the websites timezone (which runs on EST btw) but seriously, this is the internet! No one has a local audience anymore!
:(
Did it not occur to anybody that we live in a world that's filled with time-zones!?
Skip the paywall.. try this link or copy-paste this link when you hit the paywall. It ought to get you through.
As I see it, one of the most critical failings of the whole G+ kaboodle, is the lack of a decent API.
Sure they have an API. But what good is it if you don't have an up and a down stream.
I read somewhere that about 80% of the regulars on social networking sites interact with each other via apps installed on their phones and other portable devices. As a matter of fact, even when on a desktop, a lot of people prefer to use apps to post and view updates. I've been on the move for most of the last four months, and I've racked up over 5500 tweets. If my twitter client (I use Gravity which is basically a Twitter client, but supports Facebook, Foursquare, StatusNet, SinaWeibo and Google Reader) had G+ too, I'd be redirecting more traffic in that direction. I'm pretty sure most of us who ping multiple social networks today would have no qualms about embracing G+.
I have not been following G+ updates for a while now, but I'm guessing their API is still unchanged since it was first released. Don't get me wrong though, I quite like G+. It's just that it is too inconvenient for me to go out of my way to be active on.
They must have settled out of court. :P
Since tax evasion is considered dishonesty, I don't see why is should be un-patentable. Patent all you like, but at the end of the day, if you use the method, it does not make it legal. Since it is illegal to do so, how do you track people or organizations who violate the patent and then enforce it?
If you ask me, I think it is a bit like patenting a method to crack a safe. You can patent it all you like, but there are very few situations when you can actually use it legally. Not only do you get on the wrong side of the law if you use it, but if someone does use it, it can carry a second charge for the patent breech as well.
On the one hand, if you encourage people to patent their ideas, the IRS would be able to use that knowledge to look for similar patterns when they suspect that an entity is defrauding the government. If on the other hand, you refuse to issue patents for this, there's going to be a need for investigators to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
The amount of time that'll be freed up for humans to apply their abilities in other areas. Just because robots might do some of the work that we once used to do, does not in any way mean humans are going to be defunct. Even if humans stop working on menial and repetitive jobs, I'm certain we're not so un-innovative as to be unable to find things to do with ourselves.
I see huge potential opening up for work that mandates the need for what might be viewed or thought of as more human specialties.
I find it hard to believe that a lie is fabricated from any sort of moral standpoint whatsoever. When I make up a lie, I do it for reasons all my own. Morality is a distant second to whatever primary reason I might have.
For instance, I would not (if asked by a stranger on a bus) tell the truth about carrying a ton of money in my back pack. My primary motive has no moral inclination. It is driven by the perceived necessity for the safety of my belongings. Secondary would perhaps be perceived by some as a moral contradiction My parents might have said that it was evil to lie and that I would spend another agonizing eternity in hell. If such were the case, and if that were anything to do with morals, they're NOT MY morals, they're social morals.
Even if a magnet is somehow able to seize up my moral faculties, I would still be free to tell the Truth, or to tell a Lie based on intellectually reasoned stimulation. No amount of mental stimulation will be able to so that.
I admit however, that there is a possibility that one could be immersed into a state of "willingness to respond with the truth rather than the false", however, it would be more due to a mental state and a clever questioner than anything else. Ask the wrong questions and *blam!* your truth serum will fall apart. As long as the mind forgets that it is unsafe, irresponsible, unsuitable or whatever else, to tell a lie, it will not bother making up one. As soon as it realizes the situation, it will invariably fight off the influence and pull its inhibitions right back to where there are supposed to be.
That noted, I find it impossible to imagine how someone could be influenced to tell a lie every time s/he opens his/her mouth. I just don't see that happening.
I've seen custom scratch mods that would rock this one into insignificance. This guy's done a fair job certainly.. Pretty neat and clean work. Honestly though, even I could do a better job. I'm not a modding guru, but I know what I'm talking about.
If stuff like this is what slashdot has started accepting, I'm sorry but we're gonna lose the few intelligent readers that're still left.
There's a good chance this was approved by mistake. I find it hard to believe that this was done on purpose.
Well, technically, they're not all that new. But yes, we're now obliged to recognize our gut dwelling overloards. :)
Ah, there's a very good reason for keeping timezones. I'm amazed I even thought of it! :)
You see, If I live in India, which happens to be GMT+5.5 If I wanted to call someone up in the UK, I'd suddenly have a problem on my hands. On the one hand, I have no interest in calculating backward from the position of the sun in my sky. On the other, I'd be hard pressed to do the same based on the star patterns in my night sky if I wanted to call during my night. I might end up calling up while he's asleep, or while he's warming up his wife.
It all becomes much easier for me if I were to deduct 5.5 hours from my clock and figure out the current status of my clients sleep cycle based on my calculations and overlaying the result over my own sleep cycle.
Of course, having a standardized clock for the whole planet would have its conveniences, but the inconveniences far outweigh those. Once we've encapsulated the entire planet under a nice thick blanket of steel and start living in artificial days and nights to match our clocks, the tables will turn. But until then, we're going to be eating out of the hands of God, or something very much like him/her.