It's not the fault of the person who deletes the cookie.
What you say there is absolutely correct, but it begs the question: How would it ever be the fault of the user in any possible case? I have a newsflash for the advertisers -- you do not have a God-given inalienable right to store data on my computer. It's mine, I paid for it, and I will selectively accept or freely remove any data that you attempt to place on it, for any reason or for no reason at all. The world does not owe anyone a reliable way to track the Web surfing of others.
This and DRM are two categories where marketers act like my personal property is theirs to do with as they please, and I'm sick of the way the average "consumer" puts up with this concept or anything resembling it.
Any Web site owner who doesn't like this can feel free to block me from their Web site; since it is theirs after all, I certainly do not dispute their right to do that (they would do so to find that I can live quite well without them). But please, let's dispose of this idea that some marketer not being able to track me is somehow my fault or my problem.
I say that if your business model relies on the ability to effectively spy on people, often without their knowledge or consent, then your business model is flawed and any difficulties you encounter are well-earned. I further say that the current situation exists only because of widespread ignorance; that is, if every single person who ever went online were a thoroughly educated uber-geek and fully aware of all tracking techniques used, then no one or practically no one would ever allow any of it and the marketers would have to come up with a more reasonable way to make money.
This is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
And, as usual, no one will be held accountable for it. If it looks like someone may, they will claim "National Security" and halt all proceedings. It would seem that "Slick Willy" has some competition.
The quality of moderation has been on the decline as of late. Like the guy above who pointed this out, he was modded "Offtopic." When an article is posted, commenting about the article is on-topic EVEN when it's not commentary that you personally like. Anyone should be able to figure this out. It is so obvious I can't believe it has to be explained to anyone with mod points.
Mods also need to figure out that anyone who vehemently disagrees is not "Flamebait" unless their primary purpose is to insult. But if they are using something resembling facts and logic, even if they're not G-rated nice, it's not flamebait.
For this reason I am almost harsh when meta-moderating, which I do anytime the opportunity comes up. I am tired of this shit; shitty moderation is how you ruin a site like this and because it doesn't happen all at once and in-your-face but happens gradually over time, people don't see it this way.
I fully expect to be modded Offtopic or Troll or Flamebait for "daring" to (again) call bullshit when I see it. My Karma is sitting at "Excellent" so do your worst and prove me right.
While you're thinking on the OS you could be thinking on the next YouTube or something. Why waste so much talent?
You say that as though the amount of thinking a person can do is a finite quantity, and that each time you think you decrease this quantity, so therefore the wise thing to do is conserve it as much as possible.
However, it's really more like a muscle -- the more you use it, the more able it becomes. Linux made me think very much when I first began using it, especially considering that this was 1997 so as you can imagine, the automatic graphical/menu-driven installers were not nearly as good as they are now. It took a decent amount of thinking to come to an understanding of why the system works the way that it does, but having done this I can now make related decisions instantly. I also learned a lot about how to find my own answers, which is also a skill that comes more easily now than it did before.
You're saying that as if it's a bad thing. Do you insist on an OS that makes you think a lot?
Depriving me of the ability to make security decisions on my own, on the premise that making those decisions requires thinking and well that's just too hard, is not my idea of the proper role of an operating system. The OS is not "making" me think, because all of the thinking done is inherent to the task performed; for example if I am setting up a network then I am thinking of how I want this done, what steps I will take to secure it, which computers will be used for what tasks, etc. The thinking is inherent in the task, just as sowing seed is implied by wanting to reap a harvest.
The thinking required cannot really be separated from the task; the best approximation is to have the designer of the system (Microsoft, in this case) try to determine in advance what you will and won't do and set defaults that attempt to please everybody. This is, of course, directed more by marketing's idea of what they think most people want rather than the developers' ideas of what is technically superior. That is (imho) the biggest difference between the Microsoft approach and that used by most Linux distributions.
To sum it up, no I do not believe that thinking is a bad thing, and thinking in particular is one of those things that I would much rather do myself than have someone try to do for me.
This is a predictable result of managing tons of users who all want to treat a complex machine that can perform millions of functions as though it were an appliance like a toaster or a microwave. The "I just want it to work but not if that means I have to learn anything" crowd are high-maintainence users when compared to someone who knows the utility of understanding the use of the tools you need to do your job.
Think about it this way. A car does only one thing, and yet you are required to obtain training and a license before you are allowed to use one. The idea that you can use a general-purpose device and not have to learn anything about how it works is an absurd pipe dream that has generated a lot of profit for the likes of Microsoft, but there is an expense to that idea and the expense is shouldered by support staff who act as a surrogate for the knowledge that the users did not want to learn. Much of IT really has changed from finding creative technical solutions to babysitting "permanent n00bs", you know the ones who can use a machine for five years straight and somehow manage to never learn anything new about it. Not everyone wants to be a tech? I'll buy that, but not knowing much about the tools you need to do your job and depending on someone else to pick up the slack doesn't sound very responsible, and never picking up more skill over the years, well, that takes work.
I used to be in the IT industry, and it is precisely this situation that made me decide to get into another line of work. As a hobby, I can really enjoy computing. As a profession, I became so sick of the willful helplessness (when all the tools and information are available and people don't learn anything simply because they don't care, but when there's a problem they sure do care then) and pure laziness I kept encountering that I ended up deciding that it wasn't for me, that there are less stressful ways to earn a living.
This is the way of thinking of people who were using Eunuchs for too long.
UNIX shell = OS.
Seriously though, UIs are not OSs. The UNIX text-based command interpreters are not operating systems any more than this is, so I don't really see your point. UNIX is an OS. "M$ windoze", or as I prefer to call it, Microsoft Windows, is an OS. I really don't see how using one over the other will magically educate users about computer science vocabulary.
He probably wasn't saying that the unix shell is any more of an OS than a GUI. He was most likely saying that using a text-based shell will allow you to compare it to a GUI-based shell and realize that both of them are, in fact, just shells. Something along the lines of "hey, I can do X task in a KDE GUI and using a different method I can do the same task in a Bash shell, so I wonder what both of them are really doing on a lower level?"
Put another way, you can interpret the GP as "wow, I should assume he's stupid" but that is not your only option.
That header bar works great for me, but I find it annoying and doubly so because you cannot simply disable it in your user preferences (because, after all, our header bar is SO WONDERFUL who would ever want to disable it?). So, I installed the FireFox extension Remove It Permanently and used that to get rid of it, since NoScript isn't selective enough to be able to block it without also losing the ability to expand comments without opening a new page. At any rate, Remove It Permanently did the job well, and may be an option in your case if you also don't care to see it.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
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Is Vista a Trap?
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They understand it well enough to know that it's "not invented here".
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
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Is Vista a Trap?
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I go days without seeing a UAC box, but its nice to know my account has user level priveledges instead of admin.
So, it sounds like when they are done reimplementing UNIX, they might just have a fine operating system.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
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Is Vista a Trap?
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Before the idiot mods come out and mod you as "Troll" or "Flamebait", I want to point out that THIS IS OBVIOUSLY HUMOROUS.
If lobby groups can't get the government to do what they want, they either stop 'donate' money until they do, or give money to the other side on the condition they'll do what their told.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean "they're" by any chance?
What is it about their, there, and they're that you people have such a hard fucking time with, exactly? Or do you enjoy looking stupid and/or too lazy to proofread when you were trying to make a valid point? To those who whine about grammar nazis (because they also have a pathetic level of skill with their native language and it makes them feel inadequate when you point this out), I will break it down for you: how much your words mean to me is partly determined by how much they seem to mean to you. It does not take very much effort at all to proofread a 1-2 line post such as this one, yet the author could not be bothered to do so. Therefore, the author doesn't value his own post very much, so why should I?
I challenge anyone to come up with an argument against this that is something other than an excuse for why we should accept mediocrity. And for the whiney, annoying "who are you to judge" crowd, I say this - I am not telling anyone what to do; I am merely explaining why I will not take someone seriously who can't avoid the type of grammatical errors one would expect from a child.
And it is never the right time to mix politics with war (read my sig for a prime example).
If war is not political in nature, then I don't know what is.
Just because Fox News presents more than one side doesn't mean they are "ridiculous". I thought the idea was to get the story from multiple angles, hear all the sides, do your own research and THEN make up your own mind. I thought that blindly and thoughtlessly following what you hear was a bad thing? When did all this change?
Fox News always manages to present multiple "sides" that all come from a statist point of view. I have never seen Fox News, nor any other major media outlet, present anything resembling a minimal-government Libertarian point of view. Maybe you can come up with some minor counter-examples, but for the most part all I ever see out of all major media are arguments for why the size and power of the government should be expanded, with the only disagreement being whether it should expand its power by diminishing personal freedoms (Republicans) or economic freedoms (Democrats). Real "fair and balanced" news would give at least some time to why sacrificing freedom (which is a permanent decision) to obtain some temporary security is a very bad idea, one that we were warned about a long time ago by the likes of Benjamin Franklin et al. Pretending like the two competing methods for expanding state control are the only possible avenues to consider is irresponsible and intellectually dishonest at best.
Another typical Slashdot "editing" job. Was the university mentioned? Nope.
All these words were wasted to tell us about what happened, but a significant detail such as the name of the university was never mentioned, even though such a mention would help tremendously in putting pressure on the unnamed university to reverse their policy.
I can't believe people get paid to do basically nothing.
I tell you what else is typical of Slashdot. If I post a comment like this, I quickly get modded down as "off-topic" (never fucking mind that the article and summary we are reading is on-topic for the discussion - hey guess what mods, "I don't like that he said that" is not the same thing as "this is off-topic") but if an Anonymous Coward posts a comment like this, he/she gets modded up.
The summary was indeed rather shitty to omit that vital piece of information. The one and only solution to that is to write better summaries, not to abuse the moderation system to punish people who point this out.
I probably should have posted this anonymously, but I pity the mod who must mod me down for speaking my mind on-topic because they really truly can't find a good article to mod up, which is a much better use of those scarce mod points. In other words, I expect this one to sit at -1 in short order.
Stupidity, by its very nature, is already painful.
Considering how widespread stupidity has become, it is obviously not painful enough to provide a disincentive.
I also think there is a massive amount of institutional stupidity, the consequences for which are not being borne by the institutions responsible.
The idea that any institution takes on a life of its own, independent from the people of which it is composed, is an illusion that I wish we could put to rest. If institutions are stupid, it's because they are led by stupid people and staffed by people who are too sheeplike (a form of stupidity) to question their leadership from time to time. Stupid people are stupid people, and the only thing special about an institution is that when they band together under a common organization, the results of stupid decision-making are magnified; therefore, whether it is institutional or not is merely a question of scale and does not change the nature of what you are dealing with.
Additionally, in your example of the complacency of the Social Security administration, this is a natural consequence of assuming that young people are incapable of realizing that one day they will grow old and will become unable or unwilling to continue working, and that the time to start preparing for that eventuality is right now. Once you assume that people cannot handle this and that the optimal solution to this problem is to create a governmental bureaucracy to do it for them, you have already lost the battle against stupidity because you have prevented it from being painful (i.e. you have deprived people of the opportunity to learn why it should be, that there is a reason for this -- people can learn a great many things if you don't take the necessary incentives away from them). Once this premise is established, the fact that glaring problems will arise such as the failure to adequately protect that Social Security number is the most natural thing in the world; if your premise is faulty, the conclusions/consequences which follow will also be faulty.
Unfortunately, most people prefer to bury their head in the sand by assuming that the fundamental idea is just peachy and every flaw must be in the implementation, which then leads to endless debates about who should reform the system and by what means.
I guess that either depends on your definition of scam, stupidity, or both. Someone may be stupid for clicking on a link sent to them by what is, or appears to be, a trusted source, which happens to redirect to what appears to be an Error/Re-login page for their e-mail. Once that password has been compromised -- the weakest link in most cases -- the attacker can begin to take advantage of "Forgot your password" features on other sites.
Actually in most computers/networks that are even nominally secure, the machines themselves and their passwords are not the weakest link. The weakest link is almost always the user, which is why social engineering attacks often succeed where brute-force cracking of i.e. encryption would fail. However, unlike machines, the users are capable of changing themselves and adapting to these realities, and are also able to assume responsibility for their failure to recognize and act on the importance of good security practices.
I think rather than "stupidity," it would best be defined as violation of trust. Some people may set their trust thresholds too low, and you may say people are stupid for trusting anyone, but at some point everyone has to trust someone, and exploitation of that trust will always be a possibility.
I take a "trust-but-verify" approach on these matters. In other words, when the prudence of trusting a particular entity can be evaluated, which is almost always the case, and still a decision is made to extend trust without evaluating this, that is what I consider stupidity. And the method here is not some convoluted, esoteric process; it's very simple and anyone can grasp the concept -- all sources are suspect unless demonstrated to be otherwise. Say what you will, but the way the Internet has become has made this necessary and anyone who does not realize this has no business transmitting personal financial information through the network. So long as they do not cause harm to others, I support the right of anyone to voluntarily do anything that they are not qualified to do, and along with that I support the necessity that they bear the consequences of such poor decision-making (usually these are called "learning experiences").
While I certainly wish people would wise up and stop doing this, if someone does decide of their own free will to give their financial data to a scammer, this does not directly harm me in any way and therefore it really isn't my concern. What I do have a problem with is this unstated assumption that they are just hapless victims for whom we should extend sympathy and support, when the reality is that every step of the way they made choices that allowed for a scenario like ID theft to happen. If people would shed this victim mentality, it would have a far-reaching effect that would dramatically improve practically all aspects of modern life; the curbing of fradulent transactions would just be a nice little side-effect.
I have a different perspective on scams and phishing (which often lead to ID theft).
In a way, the perpetrators of these ripoffs are actually doing humanity a favor. They are making stupidity more painful.
About the only case during which ID theft can happen that you cannot easily attribute (at least partially) to a fault of the victim is when customer information is stolen from a legitimate business and then abused to steal identities. Practically all of the rest of it relies on the naive nature and/or the greed of the victim, and both of these should be recognized as weaknesses, the exploitation of which is an eventuality. Put another way, anyone who sincerely believes that online requests for account numbers, their social security number, etc. should be responded to without first verifying their legitimacy is a fool, is begging for something like this to happen, and should see any theft that does happen as an educational experience in why you don't trust random, unverified strangers with your most confidential personal information.
If someone walked up to you in the street and said "Hi, I'm a manager at your bank, we need your account number and all of your personal information," you'd likely tell them (however politely or however rudely) to fuck off. At the very least, you'd ask to see some credentials before you'd actually give out any personal information. Why is it that when the same thing occurs via e-mail, so many people people shut down their common sense and critical thinking skills (whatever degree of those that may be left) and happily say "oh wow, I sure am glad they contacted me for my full name, address, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, and account numbers before they locked my account!"? Would you really feel sorry for someone who did this? Or would you decide that the scammer in this case is providing one of the few remaining incentives to not be so careless and stupid with things that are important?
A simple observation can be made: all scams rely on either the stupidity (the willingness to give confidential information to anonymous people) or the greed (the expectation of receiving large sums of money for very little or no work), or both, of the victim. It would be impossible or nearly impossible to arrest and prosecute every last phisher and con artist in the world who wants to rip people off; indeed, even attempting to do so would require a police state. While it is still a good idea to go after the scammers, since it increases the risk of earning a living by ripping people off, this alone is never going to solve the problem. I propose that the problem could be solved not by going after relatively anonymous scammers who pop up all over the globe, but by hardening the targets. This is never going to happen so long as we coddle the less-bright (as evidenced by behavior) among us by telling them that they're innocent, helpless little people who fell victim to the big mean old scammers, but it could happen if we remind them that the event did not happen in isolation, that they exhibited contributory negligence, that in most cases no one gets your confidential information unless you personally give it to them, and that their lack of discernment helps to fund organized crime.
Just an idea, and it's something that I have never seen implemented on any sort of large scale, but what I do know is that what we are doing right now is not very effective. In any case, Aesop definitely had it right: a fool and his money are soon parted. You can't realistically remove the money from that equation, and you can't remove the desire to steal from every person on the planet, but you can certainly remove the fool from that equation.
But not in anyway an answer to what was asked. In fact, it's not even a guarantee of avoiding the problem either. It's about as useful as turning up at a car accident with a lecture on proper lane etiquette. It's just your opinion, possibly of no relevance to the circumstances, of zero help at the time, and will not stop car accidents happening.
If improper lane etiquette (such as changing lanes without bothering to check for the presence of another vehicle already in the lane) is what caused the accident, then it would not be an unreasonable assumption that the driver at-fault does not understand this subject. Lane etiqutte would fall under driver training, and increased driver training can indeed prevent accidents (they call them defensive-driver classes, and many insurance companies will give discounts for drivers who have completed these courses).
And offending was put into quotes because I am in the USA, and as such I have seen that word repeatedly used to describe silliness that any adult should be able to handle without crying about it. I put the word into quotes because I strongly disagree that anything someone says can ever hurt you unless you choose to give them that power, but the way the word is typically used suggests a victim mentality that your emotions are at the mercy of what other people think. It is precisely that view that I was arguing against, and as such I placed the words in quotes because that is its common usage, even if I consider that usage to be invalid. The parent post was readily available for all to see, so if I were attempting to intend that to be a direct quote, this would obviously fail. Methinks you just didn't like what I said and are clutching at straws yourself to try and portray it in a negative fashion (this is made more obvious by your failure to address my main point about not allowing the incompetence of users to harm others; instead you you want to nit-pick semantics). But considering that the previous poster was complaining about being a sanctimonious asshole, which is something that could not directly harm anything but could hurt someone's feelings if they choose to give random strangers the power to do that, then yes "offensive" was correctly used.
Any other useless concerns? Did I also fail to use a punctuation mark, or did I use a relative pronoun in the subjective case when it should have been the objective case? Or are you ready to quit worrying about stupid shit and just admit that you are unable to disagree with what someone said without automatically assuming that they must be dishonest in some way?
Isn't there a way to develop a virus that can spread through these compromised computers, but instead of doing the damage, it fixes the leaks? These compromised computers have some sort of back-door left open right?
If eradicating the botnet problem is what you want to do, a far better solution would be if someone were to write a virus/trojan/worm/whatever that used all the latest Windows exploits for the sole purpose of infecting a machine, hanging around long enough to spread to other machines, and then just fucking formatted every last writable disk drive to which it had access. Preferably this would be a cryptographically secure wipe and not a regular format, so that the data could not be recovered. This would be the biggest favor anyone could do for the Internet.
While Windows has a lot of stupid design decisions (such as ever automatically executing untrusted binaries), it is still more than possible to secure a Windows box sufficiently that it will not be the host of a bot. Just as I would hire a mechanic to work on my car because I do not have the skills, a user who does not know how to do this could hire a local IT guy to do this if they did not know how. Therefore, having established that it is within the realm of possibility to secure a Windows machine, even if one does not personally have the necessary system administration skills, the only reason why this isn't happening is apathy.
Many users will put up with popup advertisements, strange system behavior, and a bogged-down system. Indeed, too many have come to accept this as normal. What no user will put up with is the unrecoverable loss of all data (especially when you consider that the type of user who ignores basic security is also likely to be the type who never makes backups). If this happened, then overnight Joe Sixpack would suddenly start caring about security and would either be motivated enough to do what it takes to safeguard his system, or would be taken offline by means of freshly-wiped hard drives and would therefore stop becoming a platform for malware that could harm any other users.
I certainly would not suggest that someone actually attempt to do this if it is illegal to do so in their jurisdiction, but it would certainly make me smile if someone, somewhere did something like this. I am all for freedom, including the freedom to fuck yourself up by your own ignorance if that is what you wish to do, but when the incompetence of one person can make many others suffer it becomes an injustice that should not be tolerated.
Try to be more constructive you sanctimonious asshole (parent AC).
What the GP poster said is in fact a valid way to avoid becoming part of the problem. The time to worry about being too sanctimonious or too much of an asshole is when the stakes are low, as in minor annoyances. In this case, you are talking about botnets which are a major source of all spam, plenty of identity theft, DDoS attacks that cost real money, and a source of income for organized crime. Your petty concern about not "offending" someone is quite silly in light of these facts. Put another way, fucking get over yourself and quit comforting people who can't prevent their own incompetence from adversely affecting others.
Not that I, or anyone I know likes DRM, but this is a perfect example of what the rabid haters of DRM conveniently choose to ignore. That in many cases, without DRM we would not have access to the content that we do, or have the choices we enjoy today.
You deal with this by giving the "content producers" two choices: 1) Release non-DRM content in a customer-friendly way, suffer a minor amount of unauthorized copying, but still make lots of $$$ 2) Release no content at all -- take every music recording and every video and lock them up in a safe somewhere and throw away the key, since this is the only chance (outside of skilled safecrackers) that no one will ever obtain an unauthorized copy, and make absolutely no $$$.
For some reason we have collectively decided to allow a third option, which is where we act like their "content" is our crack habit and since we forgot how to make our own entertainment, we just can't live without it. Therefore, we think it's perfectly acceptable to give third parties any degree of control over our information systems in exchange for a few movies and some songs. Makes about as much sense as trading liberty for security but people are still willing to do both due to stupidity.
The "content producers" seem to have forgotten that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them. We can survive without them; they could not survive one day without us to buy what they produce. I would much rather remind them of this fact and quit trying so hard to forget that ourselves. This isn't really about music or video or whether you download it or buy a copy at the brick-and-mortar store; this is about rights and the erosion thereof, particularly your right to control your own systems. The *AA's involved have repeatedly shown that they have no problem playing hardball -- we are going to lose our rights if we are unwilling to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say there is absolutely correct, but it begs the question: How would it ever be the fault of the user in any possible case? I have a newsflash for the advertisers -- you do not have a God-given inalienable right to store data on my computer. It's mine, I paid for it, and I will selectively accept or freely remove any data that you attempt to place on it, for any reason or for no reason at all. The world does not owe anyone a reliable way to track the Web surfing of others.
This and DRM are two categories where marketers act like my personal property is theirs to do with as they please, and I'm sick of the way the average "consumer" puts up with this concept or anything resembling it.
Any Web site owner who doesn't like this can feel free to block me from their Web site; since it is theirs after all, I certainly do not dispute their right to do that (they would do so to find that I can live quite well without them). But please, let's dispose of this idea that some marketer not being able to track me is somehow my fault or my problem.
I say that if your business model relies on the ability to effectively spy on people, often without their knowledge or consent, then your business model is flawed and any difficulties you encounter are well-earned. I further say that the current situation exists only because of widespread ignorance; that is, if every single person who ever went online were a thoroughly educated uber-geek and fully aware of all tracking techniques used, then no one or practically no one would ever allow any of it and the marketers would have to come up with a more reasonable way to make money.
And, as usual, no one will be held accountable for it. If it looks like someone may, they will claim "National Security" and halt all proceedings. It would seem that "Slick Willy" has some competition.
Because I'm posting yet another god damned "in Soviet Russia" joke. In Soviet Russia, humor-impaired jokes mod YOU!
What kind of moron picks a site like Slashdot full of Linux users and posts a Windows and Mac-only game? April fool's indeed.
The quality of moderation has been on the decline as of late. Like the guy above who pointed this out, he was modded "Offtopic." When an article is posted,
commenting about the article is on-topic EVEN when it's not commentary that you personally like. Anyone should be able to figure this out. It is so obvious I can't believe it has to be explained to anyone with mod points.
Mods also need to figure out that anyone who vehemently disagrees is not "Flamebait" unless their primary purpose is to insult. But if they are using something resembling facts and logic, even if they're not G-rated nice, it's not flamebait.
For this reason I am almost harsh when meta-moderating, which I do anytime the opportunity comes up. I am tired of this shit; shitty moderation is how you ruin a site like this and because it doesn't happen all at once and in-your-face but happens gradually over time, people don't see it this way.
I fully expect to be modded Offtopic or Troll or Flamebait for "daring" to (again) call bullshit when I see it. My Karma is sitting at "Excellent" so do your worst and prove me right.
Yeah, what kind of idiot would ever think that this is primarily a US site? Methinks you're way too sensitive about this.
You say that as though the amount of thinking a person can do is a finite quantity, and that each time you think you decrease this quantity, so therefore the wise thing to do is conserve it as much as possible.
However, it's really more like a muscle -- the more you use it, the more able it becomes. Linux made me think very much when I first began using it, especially considering that this was 1997 so as you can imagine, the automatic graphical/menu-driven installers were not nearly as good as they are now. It took a decent amount of thinking to come to an understanding of why the system works the way that it does, but having done this I can now make related decisions instantly. I also learned a lot about how to find my own answers, which is also a skill that comes more easily now than it did before.
Depriving me of the ability to make security decisions on my own, on the premise that making those decisions requires thinking and well that's just too hard, is not my idea of the proper role of an operating system. The OS is not "making" me think, because all of the thinking done is inherent to the task performed; for example if I am setting up a network then I am thinking of how I want this done, what steps I will take to secure it, which computers will be used for what tasks, etc. The thinking is inherent in the task, just as sowing seed is implied by wanting to reap a harvest.
The thinking required cannot really be separated from the task; the best approximation is to have the designer of the system (Microsoft, in this case) try to determine in advance what you will and won't do and set defaults that attempt to please everybody. This is, of course, directed more by marketing's idea of what they think most people want rather than the developers' ideas of what is technically superior. That is (imho) the biggest difference between the Microsoft approach and that used by most Linux distributions.
To sum it up, no I do not believe that thinking is a bad thing, and thinking in particular is one of those things that I would much rather do myself than have someone try to do for me.
This is a predictable result of managing tons of users who all want to treat a complex machine that can perform millions of functions as though it were an appliance like a toaster or a microwave. The "I just want it to work but not if that means I have to learn anything" crowd are high-maintainence users when compared to someone who knows the utility of understanding the use of the tools you need to do your job.
Think about it this way. A car does only one thing, and yet you are required to obtain training and a license before you are allowed to use one. The idea that you can use a general-purpose device and not have to learn anything about how it works is an absurd pipe dream that has generated a lot of profit for the likes of Microsoft, but there is an expense to that idea and the expense is shouldered by support staff who act as a surrogate for the knowledge that the users did not want to learn. Much of IT really has changed from finding creative technical solutions to babysitting "permanent n00bs", you know the ones who can use a machine for five years straight and somehow manage to never learn anything new about it. Not everyone wants to be a tech? I'll buy that, but not knowing much about the tools you need to do your job and depending on someone else to pick up the slack doesn't sound very responsible, and never picking up more skill over the years, well, that takes work.
I used to be in the IT industry, and it is precisely this situation that made me decide to get into another line of work. As a hobby, I can really enjoy computing. As a profession, I became so sick of the willful helplessness (when all the tools and information are available and people don't learn anything simply because they don't care, but when there's a problem they sure do care then) and pure laziness I kept encountering that I ended up deciding that it wasn't for me, that there are less stressful ways to earn a living.
He probably wasn't saying that the unix shell is any more of an OS than a GUI. He was most likely saying that using a text-based shell will allow you to compare it to a GUI-based shell and realize that both of them are, in fact, just shells. Something along the lines of "hey, I can do X task in a KDE GUI and using a different method I can do the same task in a Bash shell, so I wonder what both of them are really doing on a lower level?"
Put another way, you can interpret the GP as "wow, I should assume he's stupid" but that is not your only option.
That header bar works great for me, but I find it annoying and doubly so because you cannot simply disable it in your user preferences (because, after all, our header bar is SO WONDERFUL who would ever want to disable it?). So, I installed the FireFox extension Remove It Permanently and used that to get rid of it, since NoScript isn't selective enough to be able to block it without also losing the ability to expand comments without opening a new page. At any rate, Remove It Permanently did the job well, and may be an option in your case if you also don't care to see it.
They understand it well enough to know that it's "not invented here".
So, it sounds like when they are done reimplementing UNIX, they might just have a fine operating system.
Before the idiot mods come out and mod you as "Troll" or "Flamebait", I want to point out that THIS IS OBVIOUSLY HUMOROUS.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you mean "they're" by any chance?
What is it about their, there, and they're that you people have such a hard fucking time with, exactly? Or do you enjoy looking stupid and/or too lazy to proofread when you were trying to make a valid point? To those who whine about grammar nazis (because they also have a pathetic level of skill with their native language and it makes them feel inadequate when you point this out), I will break it down for you: how much your words mean to me is partly determined by how much they seem to mean to you. It does not take very much effort at all to proofread a 1-2 line post such as this one, yet the author could not be bothered to do so. Therefore, the author doesn't value his own post very much, so why should I?
I challenge anyone to come up with an argument against this that is something other than an excuse for why we should accept mediocrity. And for the whiney, annoying "who are you to judge" crowd, I say this - I am not telling anyone what to do; I am merely explaining why I will not take someone seriously who can't avoid the type of grammatical errors one would expect from a child.
If war is not political in nature, then I don't know what is.
Fox News always manages to present multiple "sides" that all come from a statist point of view. I have never seen Fox News, nor any other major media outlet, present anything resembling a minimal-government Libertarian point of view. Maybe you can come up with some minor counter-examples, but for the most part all I ever see out of all major media are arguments for why the size and power of the government should be expanded, with the only disagreement being whether it should expand its power by diminishing personal freedoms (Republicans) or economic freedoms (Democrats). Real "fair and balanced" news would give at least some time to why sacrificing freedom (which is a permanent decision) to obtain some temporary security is a very bad idea, one that we were warned about a long time ago by the likes of Benjamin Franklin et al. Pretending like the two competing methods for expanding state control are the only possible avenues to consider is irresponsible and intellectually dishonest at best.
Well aren't you just a charitable *cough*karma-whoring*cough* kind of motherfucker!
Signed, Some Other AC.
I tell you what else is typical of Slashdot. If I post a comment like this, I quickly get modded down as "off-topic" (never fucking mind that the article and summary we are reading is on-topic for the discussion - hey guess what mods, "I don't like that he said that" is not the same thing as "this is off-topic") but if an Anonymous Coward posts a comment like this, he/she gets modded up.
The summary was indeed rather shitty to omit that vital piece of information. The one and only solution to that is to write better summaries, not to abuse the moderation system to punish people who point this out.
I probably should have posted this anonymously, but I pity the mod who must mod me down for speaking my mind on-topic because they really truly can't find a good article to mod up, which is a much better use of those scarce mod points. In other words, I expect this one to sit at -1 in short order.
Considering how widespread stupidity has become, it is obviously not painful enough to provide a disincentive.
The idea that any institution takes on a life of its own, independent from the people of which it is composed, is an illusion that I wish we could put to rest. If institutions are stupid, it's because they are led by stupid people and staffed by people who are too sheeplike (a form of stupidity) to question their leadership from time to time. Stupid people are stupid people, and the only thing special about an institution is that when they band together under a common organization, the results of stupid decision-making are magnified; therefore, whether it is institutional or not is merely a question of scale and does not change the nature of what you are dealing with.
Additionally, in your example of the complacency of the Social Security administration, this is a natural consequence of assuming that young people are incapable of realizing that one day they will grow old and will become unable or unwilling to continue working, and that the time to start preparing for that eventuality is right now. Once you assume that people cannot handle this and that the optimal solution to this problem is to create a governmental bureaucracy to do it for them, you have already lost the battle against stupidity because you have prevented it from being painful (i.e. you have deprived people of the opportunity to learn why it should be, that there is a reason for this -- people can learn a great many things if you don't take the necessary incentives away from them). Once this premise is established, the fact that glaring problems will arise such as the failure to adequately protect that Social Security number is the most natural thing in the world; if your premise is faulty, the conclusions/consequences which follow will also be faulty.
Unfortunately, most people prefer to bury their head in the sand by assuming that the fundamental idea is just peachy and every flaw must be in the implementation, which then leads to endless debates about who should reform the system and by what means.
Actually in most computers/networks that are even nominally secure, the machines themselves and their passwords are not the weakest link. The weakest link is almost always the user, which is why social engineering attacks often succeed where brute-force cracking of i.e. encryption would fail. However, unlike machines, the users are capable of changing themselves and adapting to these realities, and are also able to assume responsibility for their failure to recognize and act on the importance of good security practices.
I take a "trust-but-verify" approach on these matters. In other words, when the prudence of trusting a particular entity can be evaluated, which is almost always the case, and still a decision is made to extend trust without evaluating this, that is what I consider stupidity. And the method here is not some convoluted, esoteric process; it's very simple and anyone can grasp the concept -- all sources are suspect unless demonstrated to be otherwise. Say what you will, but the way the Internet has become has made this necessary and anyone who does not realize this has no business transmitting personal financial information through the network. So long as they do not cause harm to others, I support the right of anyone to voluntarily do anything that they are not qualified to do, and along with that I support the necessity that they bear the consequences of such poor decision-making (usually these are called "learning experiences").
While I certainly wish people would wise up and stop doing this, if someone does decide of their own free will to give their financial data to a scammer, this does not directly harm me in any way and therefore it really isn't my concern. What I do have a problem with is this unstated assumption that they are just hapless victims for whom we should extend sympathy and support, when the reality is that every step of the way they made choices that allowed for a scenario like ID theft to happen. If people would shed this victim mentality, it would have a far-reaching effect that would dramatically improve practically all aspects of modern life; the curbing of fradulent transactions would just be a nice little side-effect.
I have a different perspective on scams and phishing (which often lead to ID theft).
In a way, the perpetrators of these ripoffs are actually doing humanity a favor. They are making stupidity more painful.
About the only case during which ID theft can happen that you cannot easily attribute (at least partially) to a fault of the victim is when customer information is stolen from a legitimate business and then abused to steal identities. Practically all of the rest of it relies on the naive nature and/or the greed of the victim, and both of these should be recognized as weaknesses, the exploitation of which is an eventuality. Put another way, anyone who sincerely believes that online requests for account numbers, their social security number, etc. should be responded to without first verifying their legitimacy is a fool, is begging for something like this to happen, and should see any theft that does happen as an educational experience in why you don't trust random, unverified strangers with your most confidential personal information.
If someone walked up to you in the street and said "Hi, I'm a manager at your bank, we need your account number and all of your personal information," you'd likely tell them (however politely or however rudely) to fuck off. At the very least, you'd ask to see some credentials before you'd actually give out any personal information. Why is it that when the same thing occurs via e-mail, so many people people shut down their common sense and critical thinking skills (whatever degree of those that may be left) and happily say "oh wow, I sure am glad they contacted me for my full name, address, date of birth, social security number, mother's maiden name, and account numbers before they locked my account!"? Would you really feel sorry for someone who did this? Or would you decide that the scammer in this case is providing one of the few remaining incentives to not be so careless and stupid with things that are important?
A simple observation can be made: all scams rely on either the stupidity (the willingness to give confidential information to anonymous people) or the greed (the expectation of receiving large sums of money for very little or no work), or both, of the victim. It would be impossible or nearly impossible to arrest and prosecute every last phisher and con artist in the world who wants to rip people off; indeed, even attempting to do so would require a police state. While it is still a good idea to go after the scammers, since it increases the risk of earning a living by ripping people off, this alone is never going to solve the problem. I propose that the problem could be solved not by going after relatively anonymous scammers who pop up all over the globe, but by hardening the targets. This is never going to happen so long as we coddle the less-bright (as evidenced by behavior) among us by telling them that they're innocent, helpless little people who fell victim to the big mean old scammers, but it could happen if we remind them that the event did not happen in isolation, that they exhibited contributory negligence, that in most cases no one gets your confidential information unless you personally give it to them, and that their lack of discernment helps to fund organized crime.
Just an idea, and it's something that I have never seen implemented on any sort of large scale, but what I do know is that what we are doing right now is not very effective. In any case, Aesop definitely had it right: a fool and his money are soon parted. You can't realistically remove the money from that equation, and you can't remove the desire to steal from every person on the planet, but you can certainly remove the fool from that equation.
If improper lane etiquette (such as changing lanes without bothering to check for the presence of another vehicle already in the lane) is what caused the accident, then it would not be an unreasonable assumption that the driver at-fault does not understand this subject. Lane etiqutte would fall under driver training, and increased driver training can indeed prevent accidents (they call them defensive-driver classes, and many insurance companies will give discounts for drivers who have completed these courses).
And offending was put into quotes because I am in the USA, and as such I have seen that word repeatedly used to describe silliness that any adult should be able to handle without crying about it. I put the word into quotes because I strongly disagree that anything someone says can ever hurt you unless you choose to give them that power, but the way the word is typically used suggests a victim mentality that your emotions are at the mercy of what other people think. It is precisely that view that I was arguing against, and as such I placed the words in quotes because that is its common usage, even if I consider that usage to be invalid. The parent post was readily available for all to see, so if I were attempting to intend that to be a direct quote, this would obviously fail. Methinks you just didn't like what I said and are clutching at straws yourself to try and portray it in a negative fashion (this is made more obvious by your failure to address my main point about not allowing the incompetence of users to harm others; instead you you want to nit-pick semantics). But considering that the previous poster was complaining about being a sanctimonious asshole, which is something that could not directly harm anything but could hurt someone's feelings if they choose to give random strangers the power to do that, then yes "offensive" was correctly used.
Any other useless concerns? Did I also fail to use a punctuation mark, or did I use a relative pronoun in the subjective case when it should have been the objective case? Or are you ready to quit worrying about stupid shit and just admit that you are unable to disagree with what someone said without automatically assuming that they must be dishonest in some way?
If eradicating the botnet problem is what you want to do, a far better solution would be if someone were to write a virus/trojan/worm/whatever that used all the latest Windows exploits for the sole purpose of infecting a machine, hanging around long enough to spread to other machines, and then just fucking formatted every last writable disk drive to which it had access. Preferably this would be a cryptographically secure wipe and not a regular format, so that the data could not be recovered. This would be the biggest favor anyone could do for the Internet.
While Windows has a lot of stupid design decisions (such as ever automatically executing untrusted binaries), it is still more than possible to secure a Windows box sufficiently that it will not be the host of a bot. Just as I would hire a mechanic to work on my car because I do not have the skills, a user who does not know how to do this could hire a local IT guy to do this if they did not know how. Therefore, having established that it is within the realm of possibility to secure a Windows machine, even if one does not personally have the necessary system administration skills, the only reason why this isn't happening is apathy.
Many users will put up with popup advertisements, strange system behavior, and a bogged-down system. Indeed, too many have come to accept this as normal. What no user will put up with is the unrecoverable loss of all data (especially when you consider that the type of user who ignores basic security is also likely to be the type who never makes backups). If this happened, then overnight Joe Sixpack would suddenly start caring about security and would either be motivated enough to do what it takes to safeguard his system, or would be taken offline by means of freshly-wiped hard drives and would therefore stop becoming a platform for malware that could harm any other users.
I certainly would not suggest that someone actually attempt to do this if it is illegal to do so in their jurisdiction, but it would certainly make me smile if someone, somewhere did something like this. I am all for freedom, including the freedom to fuck yourself up by your own ignorance if that is what you wish to do, but when the incompetence of one person can make many others suffer it becomes an injustice that should not be tolerated.
What the GP poster said is in fact a valid way to avoid becoming part of the problem. The time to worry about being too sanctimonious or too much of an asshole is when the stakes are low, as in minor annoyances. In this case, you are talking about botnets which are a major source of all spam, plenty of identity theft, DDoS attacks that cost real money, and a source of income for organized crime. Your petty concern about not "offending" someone is quite silly in light of these facts. Put another way, fucking get over yourself and quit comforting people who can't prevent their own incompetence from adversely affecting others.
That's easy, tell them that there are drugs involved. Then they'll bring the whole fuckin' army.
You deal with this by giving the "content producers" two choices: 1) Release non-DRM content in a customer-friendly way, suffer a minor amount of unauthorized copying, but still make lots of $$$ 2) Release no content at all -- take every music recording and every video and lock them up in a safe somewhere and throw away the key, since this is the only chance (outside of skilled safecrackers) that no one will ever obtain an unauthorized copy, and make absolutely no $$$.
For some reason we have collectively decided to allow a third option, which is where we act like their "content" is our crack habit and since we forgot how to make our own entertainment, we just can't live without it. Therefore, we think it's perfectly acceptable to give third parties any degree of control over our information systems in exchange for a few movies and some songs. Makes about as much sense as trading liberty for security but people are still willing to do both due to stupidity.
The "content producers" seem to have forgotten that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them. We can survive without them; they could not survive one day without us to buy what they produce. I would much rather remind them of this fact and quit trying so hard to forget that ourselves. This isn't really about music or video or whether you download it or buy a copy at the brick-and-mortar store; this is about rights and the erosion thereof, particularly your right to control your own systems. The *AA's involved have repeatedly shown that they have no problem playing hardball -- we are going to lose our rights if we are unwilling to do the same.