Because it makes the prosecution look bad if they ever arrest someone and don't get a conviction.
I suppose that depends on who's looking.
To me, not letting this go makes them look bad in the strongest possible terms. There are few things I respect more than the ability to humble yourself and admit when you made a mistake, when you took something too far, when it's time to reverse course. That's because I've made mistakes in life and I know it takes courage to do this.
But then, I have principles. I have reason. You could say I have a soul. These people clearly don't.
Stop it with the insults... I am the LostCluster (See me on Twitter!) and my account got stolen. I need DB Admin help to get it back. I can be authenticated as me.
I maintain host security. I use good passwords. I don't share passwords with untrustworthy people (nor do I share this one with anybody). How, precisely, would someone steal my Slashdot account? Without me doing something irresponsible or stupid, I mean. Without compromising this entire site's database and doing damage to many more accounts than just mine, I mean.
And when I do something irresponsible or stupid, which does happen occasionally, I take the lesson. I don't whine and I don't beg to be bailed out of it. A side-effect of being an adult is that I don't end up trying to put DB admins into awkward and unwanted positions like playing a he-said/she-said game of guessing who the real one is.
I don't speak for Slashdot staff so consider this an educated guess. But the position you're trying to put them in is probably the reason they don't want to help you. You really blame them?
Did you read his twitter post? It was an obvious joke. No reasonable person could possibly interpret it as an actual threat. Most unreasonable people would even understand it was a joke.
Let's say you are a government (that is, party leaders, financiers of campaigns, and other power brokers within that government). You know that it is politically difficult or impossible to pass law severly curtailing the existing level of free speech. You also know what a chilling effect is. You want to expand your power and make people more afraid of government.
What do you do? You take laws that may have started out in a reasonable way. You then use them in an unreasonable way and make someone's life hellish when you know they don't really deserve it. What's the result? You set a precedent. Everyone else double-checks and carefully tiptoes around everything they want to say because they don't want to be next.
Objective accomplished.
I'll never understand this insatiable lust for more and more money and power, but then I am not an insecure fevered ego. Its machinations, however, are very easy to understand because they repeat over and over again throughout history (a subject that isn't properly taught anymore, at least not by the gov't sponsored schools, though you can remedy that for yourself with some reading.).
The problem, is that context can get lost, especially on twitter. What if someone else retweets it? And then their followers see it. Some of which have no idea of the context in which the original comment was made, and may have no idea who the person was who made the original comment.
You see, that's why the police are supposed to investigate crimes prior to charges being filed.
A few months ago I had a domestic flight in Australia, the first time I'd flown in years. Amusingly, I get swabbed for explosives by security. Afterwards, sitting around waiting for my flight I came very, very close to making a Facebook status a long the lines of "Just got swabbed for explosives at the airport, lucky I left my C4 at home". I'm glad I was smart enough not to.
It's too bad that the criminals we really have to worry about aren't stupid enough to even joke about such things. They're the ones who would never mention a thing to anyone under any pretext until it's too late.
How can a threat to bomb an airport be considered as a joke?
Because of something called "context". If I go to a comedy club, and the comedian on-stage tells a joke and then says as the punchline, "And I'm going to blow up the airport!" do you think he would be arrested? Do you think any fucken moron in the audience wouldn't see it as part of a joke. CONTEXT. I don't know the context of this guy's post on Twitter, but I think it might be safe to say that this particular case could have used a little more fucken intelligent analysis...
Yeah, I think yours is the kind of point that needs to be emphasized here. It seems there is no dispute that he was joking. The government is not trying to prove that he actually intended to bomb anything because they know he wasn't. That being the case, the arrest alone would have been more than enough to teach him a lesson he'll never forget.
I just don't share or understand this desire to drag someone through the mud and nail him to the cross as hard as you can when there was no actual intent to do harm. This is a bean counter, not a hardened criminal mastermind who actually made bombs or showed any indication that he was going to. The guy did something extremely stupid and has already been punished enough. He's not going to do it again, so what purpose does it serve to prolong the affair?
Just give him his appeal, let him go, wipe his record clean, maybe threaten him with the most severe punishment available if he ever does do it again, and be done with it. Let him go back to earning an honest living. Show him that the legal system does have a sense of proportion and justice, that way he's even less likely to ever become a hardened criminal.
For the US there is a valuable lesson here. This is why you should eliminate with extreme prejudice any and all "zero tolerance" rules in the school systems. After a generation or two grows up thinking that this is normal, you wind up with obsessive enforcement of laws like this.
Hmmm..... can browsers be programmed to reject single-pizel sized images?
No, but with Adblock Plus combined with one or more of the lists, and a good hosts file (look out for apk!), and maybe RequestPolicy, you can eliminate the need to do that. It also helps to use RefControl to defeat HTTP Referrer tracking and Redirect Remover to frustrate that method. Then you also avoid lots of garbage that goes beyond tracking images. For my own/etc/hosts file, I concatenated several popular ones (Google for them) and then uniq'ed the result. It's 1.5MB of bullshit-blocking goodness.
Why do I ruthlessly block all advertisements and make myself difficult to track? Because the moment they try to be sneaky is the moment I lose all respect for them and anything they hoped to accomplish. For me that moment was a long time ago, back when a 14.4 kbaud modem was FAST. This is not an industry that can regulate itself. When an advertiser is especially (more than usually) deceptive, the other advertisers don't speak out against them, complaining that this makes the industry look bad. That means they're giving their silent consent and are equally guilty. So I say fuck 'em. Fuck all of them. I can't support or respect what is not respectable no matter how justified and entitled they think they are.
If you're not using a Gecko-based browser you can always try something like Privoxy. It's related to the old (outdated) JunkBuster proxy if you remember that. The only disadvantage is that full filtering may cost you the ability to see partially-downloaded pages, making your browsing feel subjectively slower. I believe it can do basic ad blocking without this downside, however.
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
You know that among modern OSes, Windows is unusual in that it doesn't come with a compiler as a standard feature.
You don't have any actual point apart from "I don't want to pay for the tools I use to get money".
If there's one thing Microsoft is smart about, it's that they try to please developers. People developing software that runs on Windows is good for Microsoft. It gives others a reason to want to use Windows. How many people are unable to fully switch to Linux (but would like to) because some software they must use is Windows-only?
This decision by Microsoft means that, up until now, Microsoft has considered such effects to be valuable enough to justify giving away Visual Studio. Now they are asking for money in addition to this effect. Complaining and trying to convince Microsoft to change their minds is standard haggling.
Besides which, not everyone who programs on Windows is selling the software they produce. Some of them are developing FOSS. They would naturally be more reluctant to pay than someone who is actually engaged in a commercial use and considers it a cost of doing business.
The biggest advantage to Linux security is that it is far far easier to tell what is running, why it's running, and how it is configured, not to mention what ports are open and by whom.
Yes, in the hands of a newb user, both Linux and Windows can be insecure. That said, the training needed to lock down a Linux system is much more accessible and implementable. To properly lock down a Windows box you either need expensive third party tools or a Doctorate in "Making Microsoft do what I say despite what it wants".
This is one thing I love about Linux and *nix in general. If something goes wrong, it happened for a reason. It is not a random event. That means I can actually find out not just what failed, but *why* it failed. When I fix it, it stays fixed.
It's more like the deterministic behavior one would expect from a machine.
Actually, it's problematically too long of a wait period. If the broadcasters prefer you to watch the show on the air, then a delay of longer than the new-show interval works against that goal by keeping viewers who want to watch shows in the correct order from catching up after a missed episode until the hiatus.
It's almost as if their business plan is to punish viewers who fall behind for even a single episode...
It's also as though they want people in other countries to torrent their content. Trying to stagger your releases so that one region gets a movie or a show days/weeks/months before other regions do makes absolutely no sense in the face of a global Internet. How people will respond to that is predictable.
Now we have the proof. I feel vindicated, somehow.
Unfortunately, these are not people who listen to things like proof and reason.
They're just like political and religious fanatics. When the facts contradict their articles of faith, they simply scream louder. These are not people who would ever say something like "wow, piracy isn't a threat to us after all, you know sometimes it's good to find out you were wrong about something, whew, that's a burden off our backs!"
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit... that's so very important... that they can't just get a warrant for?
Why all the secrecy and all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit when you could have the full force (and legitimacy) of a court of law backing you up? What is the need for "new surveillance technologies" when you can present a court order to the ISP and capture everything to and from your suspect at the source?
The truth is, there's a lot of crime and not a lot of money for cops.
Imagine the law enforcement resources that would be freed up and made available for real crimes (i.e. those with a victim) if we never prosecuted anything that happens among consenting adults. I bet a lot more thieves, rapists, and murderers would be behind bars.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police.
The difference being that everyone pays for police protection but some get better service than others. If you can read Slashdot during the day or have a company-supplied phone, that's between you and your employer. If that really bothered me for some reason, I could choose not to do business with you.
Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
Maybe you didn't intend it this way but that sounds rather defeatist. None of that is a reason to give up and stop calling attention to abuses wherever they happen. None of that means we shouldn't expect better. If we never scrutinized these things, it would be far worse than it is right now.
Your train of thought crashed as soon as you failed to realize the difference between research and production. It is perfectly OK to research one platform while using another, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I have developed the Linux kernel in the past and that hasn't stopped me from turning into an Apple fag. My understanding of how operating systems work does not make me want to tinker them all, quite the opposite. I am perfectly fine when things just work, that is my goal as an engineer.
I was talking about users who *need* a managed experience or else they get into trouble. *Need*. I think people replying to me didn't get that part and perhaps I should have made it more clear.
Wanting one or finding it convenient is different. If you can do serious kernel development then you are more skilled than I am, and I definitely don't need a managed experience. Yours is a genuine preference. It is not a need. That isn't what I was talking about at all and doesn't fit anything I was saying. I just get tired sometimes of how low the standards are, how little people expect of themselves. If the masses benefit from something, that didn't happen because of them. I'd rather it did.
Incidentally I wouldn't call you an "Apple fag" or any other kind of "fag". The way you articulate yourself is better than that.
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
I'm really curious as to how you define the situation in Afghanistan as "peace."
It isn't obvious to you?
The way I saw it, he was talking about the reason why the situation in Afghanistan is so violent. If peace is the "problem" the violence is the "solution". That's the problem. In other words, the addictive part of war is that it is so good for the economy and the people who most influence the economy do not personally fight wars
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. If it does not have them, it will demand that they be found. If they cannot be found, they must be manufactured. Above all else it wants to perpetuate its existencen as a system, just as even the lowly virus tries to propagate itself. Indeed, the viruses that failed to propagate are unknown to us today, while the power structures that failed to propagate are unknown as well.
The truly shitty thing is that no one wins. It's a system that long ago assumed a life of its own, like a cancer. The masters and power-brokers who seem to have so much control are much greater slaves to it than those who can see what's wrong with it.
Yet with the editors running more and more fearmongering bullshit and stupid flamebait (it used to be at least decent flamebait with some substance) the audience too has shifted from a good mix of differing opinions to paranoid libertarians and fanboys pretending to be shills. When interesting links stop appearing completely I too will be gone.
You're aware of the problem and by articulating your view in a thoughtful way, you are participating in the solution. That's why I come here.
In a way, I disagree with the pessimism you show. Yet I am not in conflict with you. I just don't feel that way myself but I see how someone could. It's other than bickering because I don't need you to be wrong.
That's also why I come here. That's what will make me look elsewhere if it should relocate. Too many places are too polar and unreasonable.
Do editors here do any proofreading at all, whatsoever? Irrelevant statements, useless commentary, and almost no coherant point of the headline.
No wonder people are leaving this site in droves. Slashdot = the myspace of tech sites.
Oh I do agree with you and I've been here for years, long since before registering my account (I had another account prior to it, and prior to that I lurked).
I come here because I can directly contact individuals who can reason and think critically. I can also directly contact petty spiteful people who are easily revealed to be what they are. Both are good when handled correctly. I also come here because I can listen, read, and learn from people who have knowledge that I do not. I find that if I am at least slightly thoughtful and write well, I am modded up; if I am not, someone will speak up and tell me precisely where I failed. Both are good when handled correctly.
It is the users who make this site what it is. It is not the editors. They are not worthy to be called "editors" because they cannot even handle automated spell-checkers, let alone true proofreading. They would not last one day working for a tabloid -- they would be fired for incompetence and underwhelming performance. This site succeeds in spite of their stumbling, comic, pathetic attempt to master their native language.
I could personally do a much, MUCH better job than a dozen of them. I could do that with no serious effort. In this job market, I am hardly alone in that sense. I wonder if they appreciate the cushy job they can so thoroughly fail to do day after day with no serious consequence? I mean their idea of a "job consequence" is using their infinite mod points to down-mod posts that criticize them too heavily. It's a coin toss whether or not this one gets their attention, for they may be asleep at the wheel.
If they think I speak falsely, I hereby invite them to post with their own accounts and confront me, like men. I will have a multitude of previous examples to justify my position. They aren't going to say a damned thing against me because they know this is easy to find.
I haven't tested it, but I've read reports that while you do not get the warning if you post AC to a discussion in which you have posted, it will still remove said moderations.
If so I believe that's a new thing.
Also, regarding your sig... His disciples were definitely thick. They were not ordinary. They showed extraordinary courage. I mean... Peter was executed by crucifixion. His lament? He did not feel worthy to die by the same method as his Master. So according to legend, he was crucified... upside-down. Ordinary people would have been like the "old Peter" who denied Him thrice.
If you are going to demand a citation, your rebuttal better damn well include one! I'm not saying I dissagree, but your arrogance is definitely showing.
Eh I don't know. He countered an assertion with another assertion. While he could have invested a trivial amount of effort to do much better, nonetheless they remain on equal ground.
This is speculation, but perhaps that was the point?
Why is it that there is no malware for IOS? There are millions of these devices out there, so there certainly is an incentive for malware writers.
I believe that it has something to do with the fact that only Apple approved and checked software can be installed thereon. This closed system may not appeal to many here on/., but it is certainly as close as we have gotten to a malware proof computing experience we are likely to get anytime soon. Mac users will be able to enjoy this form of security with OS X 10.8 this summer.
Many people need to play in the approved sandbox or else they'll stumble and hurt themselves. Others know what they're doing and understand the security implications of actions they take so they don't need Big Daddy Apple watching over them (and would in fact find that restrictive/suffocating).
If you're willing to learn and attain your own understanding you will find that much more information than you would ever need is freely available. Then you achieve independence and freedom. You can then do what you like with equipment that's truly yours. If all of that is "too hard" and you prefer to use a machine for years without ever really grasping the principles behind it, then you are likely to be controlled by somebody: either a relatively benevolent vendor or a malware author. The former wants the money you choose to give to it; the latter will take everything it can.
There isn't a One True Way. The only real mistake is to wrongly assume you are in a given category when you are not. For Joe Sixpack users who do not enjoy discovering and learning new things, the Apple method has a lot of advantages. If its widespread use makes it harder for criminals to make a profit, that benefits the rest of us as well.
You know, sometimes it doesn't work out just quite that positively. Sometimes it results in getting beaten to shit anyway. I think you're being a bit naive.
I left this unsaid because it seemed rather obvious... but alright. The fallback is to get some muscle and some martial arts training yourself with the hope you will not have to use it. Bullies are not fighting for something sacred to them. They are not willing to lay down their lives for it. They aren't even willing to go to very much trouble. There were people in high school who probably could have beaten me in a fistfight, but they knew I would not simply roll over and give up, and they knew they were going to get hurt, and they knew that even if they won, they would not look like it. They were going to be in it for the long haul if they attacked me and I would continue to fight until incapacitated. This is not what a bully wants at all.
Being true to the nature of a bully, they passed me up for easier game. It is like an aura they can sense and tends to repel them. However, one did not, and I was forced to knock him out. I didn't want to do that but he left me no choice in the matter. It was enough to establish that I am not the doormat they were looking for.
The mistake people make is trying to make nice and be "friends" with the bully in the hopes he won't turn on you while never addressing their own fears and their own weaknesses. It is a form of laziness in the face of a worthy challenge. It's what attracts bullies, just as injured game attracts wolves. The failure to understand that is why this problem won't go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it makes the prosecution look bad if they ever arrest someone and don't get a conviction.
I suppose that depends on who's looking.
To me, not letting this go makes them look bad in the strongest possible terms. There are few things I respect more than the ability to humble yourself and admit when you made a mistake, when you took something too far, when it's time to reverse course. That's because I've made mistakes in life and I know it takes courage to do this.
But then, I have principles. I have reason. You could say I have a soul. These people clearly don't.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Nobody expects the repetitive meme!
Stop it with the insults... I am the LostCluster (See me on Twitter!) and my account got stolen. I need DB Admin help to get it back. I can be authenticated as me.
I maintain host security. I use good passwords. I don't share passwords with untrustworthy people (nor do I share this one with anybody). How, precisely, would someone steal my Slashdot account? Without me doing something irresponsible or stupid, I mean. Without compromising this entire site's database and doing damage to many more accounts than just mine, I mean.
And when I do something irresponsible or stupid, which does happen occasionally, I take the lesson. I don't whine and I don't beg to be bailed out of it. A side-effect of being an adult is that I don't end up trying to put DB admins into awkward and unwanted positions like playing a he-said/she-said game of guessing who the real one is.
I don't speak for Slashdot staff so consider this an educated guess. But the position you're trying to put them in is probably the reason they don't want to help you. You really blame them?
Did you read his twitter post? It was an obvious joke. No reasonable person could possibly interpret it as an actual threat. Most unreasonable people would even understand it was a joke.
Let's say you are a government (that is, party leaders, financiers of campaigns, and other power brokers within that government). You know that it is politically difficult or impossible to pass law severly curtailing the existing level of free speech. You also know what a chilling effect is. You want to expand your power and make people more afraid of government.
What do you do? You take laws that may have started out in a reasonable way. You then use them in an unreasonable way and make someone's life hellish when you know they don't really deserve it. What's the result? You set a precedent. Everyone else double-checks and carefully tiptoes around everything they want to say because they don't want to be next.
Objective accomplished.
I'll never understand this insatiable lust for more and more money and power, but then I am not an insecure fevered ego. Its machinations, however, are very easy to understand because they repeat over and over again throughout history (a subject that isn't properly taught anymore, at least not by the gov't sponsored schools, though you can remedy that for yourself with some reading.).
The problem, is that context can get lost, especially on twitter. What if someone else retweets it? And then their followers see it. Some of which have no idea of the context in which the original comment was made, and may have no idea who the person was who made the original comment.
You see, that's why the police are supposed to investigate crimes prior to charges being filed.
so he did not loose his job because of the conviction...
Did the conviction tighten his job?
A few months ago I had a domestic flight in Australia, the first time I'd flown in years. Amusingly, I get swabbed for explosives by security. Afterwards, sitting around waiting for my flight I came very, very close to making a Facebook status a long the lines of "Just got swabbed for explosives at the airport, lucky I left my C4 at home". I'm glad I was smart enough not to.
It's too bad that the criminals we really have to worry about aren't stupid enough to even joke about such things. They're the ones who would never mention a thing to anyone under any pretext until it's too late.
How can a threat to bomb an airport be considered as a joke? Because of something called "context". If I go to a comedy club, and the comedian on-stage tells a joke and then says as the punchline, "And I'm going to blow up the airport!" do you think he would be arrested? Do you think any fucken moron in the audience wouldn't see it as part of a joke. CONTEXT. I don't know the context of this guy's post on Twitter, but I think it might be safe to say that this particular case could have used a little more fucken intelligent analysis...
Yeah, I think yours is the kind of point that needs to be emphasized here. It seems there is no dispute that he was joking. The government is not trying to prove that he actually intended to bomb anything because they know he wasn't. That being the case, the arrest alone would have been more than enough to teach him a lesson he'll never forget.
I just don't share or understand this desire to drag someone through the mud and nail him to the cross as hard as you can when there was no actual intent to do harm. This is a bean counter, not a hardened criminal mastermind who actually made bombs or showed any indication that he was going to. The guy did something extremely stupid and has already been punished enough. He's not going to do it again, so what purpose does it serve to prolong the affair?
Just give him his appeal, let him go, wipe his record clean, maybe threaten him with the most severe punishment available if he ever does do it again, and be done with it. Let him go back to earning an honest living. Show him that the legal system does have a sense of proportion and justice, that way he's even less likely to ever become a hardened criminal.
For the US there is a valuable lesson here. This is why you should eliminate with extreme prejudice any and all "zero tolerance" rules in the school systems. After a generation or two grows up thinking that this is normal, you wind up with obsessive enforcement of laws like this.
Hmmm..... can browsers be programmed to reject single-pizel sized images?
No, but with Adblock Plus combined with one or more of the lists, and a good hosts file (look out for apk!), and maybe RequestPolicy, you can eliminate the need to do that. It also helps to use RefControl to defeat HTTP Referrer tracking and Redirect Remover to frustrate that method. Then you also avoid lots of garbage that goes beyond tracking images. For my own /etc/hosts file, I concatenated several popular ones (Google for them) and then uniq'ed the result. It's 1.5MB of bullshit-blocking goodness.
Why do I ruthlessly block all advertisements and make myself difficult to track? Because the moment they try to be sneaky is the moment I lose all respect for them and anything they hoped to accomplish. For me that moment was a long time ago, back when a 14.4 kbaud modem was FAST. This is not an industry that can regulate itself. When an advertiser is especially (more than usually) deceptive, the other advertisers don't speak out against them, complaining that this makes the industry look bad. That means they're giving their silent consent and are equally guilty. So I say fuck 'em. Fuck all of them. I can't support or respect what is not respectable no matter how justified and entitled they think they are.
If you're not using a Gecko-based browser you can always try something like Privoxy. It's related to the old (outdated) JunkBuster proxy if you remember that. The only disadvantage is that full filtering may cost you the ability to see partially-downloaded pages, making your browsing feel subjectively slower. I believe it can do basic ad blocking without this downside, however.
valuable enough to justify giving away Visual Studio.
This was intended to be "... giving away Visual Studio Express".
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
You know that among modern OSes, Windows is unusual in that it doesn't come with a compiler as a standard feature.
You don't have any actual point apart from "I don't want to pay for the tools I use to get money".
If there's one thing Microsoft is smart about, it's that they try to please developers. People developing software that runs on Windows is good for Microsoft. It gives others a reason to want to use Windows. How many people are unable to fully switch to Linux (but would like to) because some software they must use is Windows-only?
This decision by Microsoft means that, up until now, Microsoft has considered such effects to be valuable enough to justify giving away Visual Studio. Now they are asking for money in addition to this effect. Complaining and trying to convince Microsoft to change their minds is standard haggling.
Besides which, not everyone who programs on Windows is selling the software they produce. Some of them are developing FOSS. They would naturally be more reluctant to pay than someone who is actually engaged in a commercial use and considers it a cost of doing business.
What part of this is so absurd to you?
The biggest advantage to Linux security is that it is far far easier to tell what is running, why it's running, and how it is configured, not to mention what ports are open and by whom.
Yes, in the hands of a newb user, both Linux and Windows can be insecure. That said, the training needed to lock down a Linux system is much more accessible and implementable. To properly lock down a Windows box you either need expensive third party tools or a Doctorate in "Making Microsoft do what I say despite what it wants".
This is one thing I love about Linux and *nix in general. If something goes wrong, it happened for a reason. It is not a random event. That means I can actually find out not just what failed, but *why* it failed. When I fix it, it stays fixed.
It's more like the deterministic behavior one would expect from a machine.
Actually, it's problematically too long of a wait period. If the broadcasters prefer you to watch the show on the air, then a delay of longer than the new-show interval works against that goal by keeping viewers who want to watch shows in the correct order from catching up after a missed episode until the hiatus.
It's almost as if their business plan is to punish viewers who fall behind for even a single episode...
It's also as though they want people in other countries to torrent their content. Trying to stagger your releases so that one region gets a movie or a show days/weeks/months before other regions do makes absolutely no sense in the face of a global Internet. How people will respond to that is predictable.
That just can't be so hard to understand.
Now we have the proof. I feel vindicated, somehow.
Unfortunately, these are not people who listen to things like proof and reason.
They're just like political and religious fanatics. When the facts contradict their articles of faith, they simply scream louder. These are not people who would ever say something like "wow, piracy isn't a threat to us after all, you know sometimes it's good to find out you were wrong about something, whew, that's a burden off our backs!"
Speaking of big questions, I have a small one.
... that's so very important ... that they can't just get a warrant for?
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit
Why all the secrecy and all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit when you could have the full force (and legitimacy) of a court of law backing you up? What is the need for "new surveillance technologies" when you can present a court order to the ISP and capture everything to and from your suspect at the source?
This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.
The truth is, there's a lot of crime and not a lot of money for cops.
Imagine the law enforcement resources that would be freed up and made available for real crimes (i.e. those with a victim) if we never prosecuted anything that happens among consenting adults. I bet a lot more thieves, rapists, and murderers would be behind bars.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police.
The difference being that everyone pays for police protection but some get better service than others. If you can read Slashdot during the day or have a company-supplied phone, that's between you and your employer. If that really bothered me for some reason, I could choose not to do business with you.
Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
Maybe you didn't intend it this way but that sounds rather defeatist. None of that is a reason to give up and stop calling attention to abuses wherever they happen. None of that means we shouldn't expect better. If we never scrutinized these things, it would be far worse than it is right now.
Your train of thought crashed as soon as you failed to realize the difference between research and production. It is perfectly OK to research one platform while using another, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I have developed the Linux kernel in the past and that hasn't stopped me from turning into an Apple fag. My understanding of how operating systems work does not make me want to tinker them all, quite the opposite. I am perfectly fine when things just work, that is my goal as an engineer.
I was talking about users who *need* a managed experience or else they get into trouble. *Need*. I think people replying to me didn't get that part and perhaps I should have made it more clear.
Wanting one or finding it convenient is different. If you can do serious kernel development then you are more skilled than I am, and I definitely don't need a managed experience. Yours is a genuine preference. It is not a need. That isn't what I was talking about at all and doesn't fit anything I was saying. I just get tired sometimes of how low the standards are, how little people expect of themselves. If the masses benefit from something, that didn't happen because of them. I'd rather it did.
Incidentally I wouldn't call you an "Apple fag" or any other kind of "fag". The way you articulate yourself is better than that.
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
I'm really curious as to how you define the situation in Afghanistan as "peace."
It isn't obvious to you?
The way I saw it, he was talking about the reason why the situation in Afghanistan is so violent. If peace is the "problem" the violence is the "solution". That's the problem. In other words, the addictive part of war is that it is so good for the economy and the people who most influence the economy do not personally fight wars
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. If it does not have them, it will demand that they be found. If they cannot be found, they must be manufactured. Above all else it wants to perpetuate its existencen as a system, just as even the lowly virus tries to propagate itself. Indeed, the viruses that failed to propagate are unknown to us today, while the power structures that failed to propagate are unknown as well.
The truly shitty thing is that no one wins. It's a system that long ago assumed a life of its own, like a cancer. The masters and power-brokers who seem to have so much control are much greater slaves to it than those who can see what's wrong with it.
Yet with the editors running more and more fearmongering bullshit and stupid flamebait (it used to be at least decent flamebait with some substance) the audience too has shifted from a good mix of differing opinions to paranoid libertarians and fanboys pretending to be shills. When interesting links stop appearing completely I too will be gone.
You're aware of the problem and by articulating your view in a thoughtful way, you are participating in the solution. That's why I come here.
In a way, I disagree with the pessimism you show. Yet I am not in conflict with you. I just don't feel that way myself but I see how someone could. It's other than bickering because I don't need you to be wrong.
That's also why I come here. That's what will make me look elsewhere if it should relocate. Too many places are too polar and unreasonable.
Do editors here do any proofreading at all, whatsoever? Irrelevant statements, useless commentary, and almost no coherant point of the headline.
No wonder people are leaving this site in droves. Slashdot = the myspace of tech sites.
Oh I do agree with you and I've been here for years, long since before registering my account (I had another account prior to it, and prior to that I lurked).
I come here because I can directly contact individuals who can reason and think critically. I can also directly contact petty spiteful people who are easily revealed to be what they are. Both are good when handled correctly. I also come here because I can listen, read, and learn from people who have knowledge that I do not. I find that if I am at least slightly thoughtful and write well, I am modded up; if I am not, someone will speak up and tell me precisely where I failed. Both are good when handled correctly.
It is the users who make this site what it is. It is not the editors. They are not worthy to be called "editors" because they cannot even handle automated spell-checkers, let alone true proofreading. They would not last one day working for a tabloid -- they would be fired for incompetence and underwhelming performance. This site succeeds in spite of their stumbling, comic, pathetic attempt to master their native language.
I could personally do a much, MUCH better job than a dozen of them. I could do that with no serious effort. In this job market, I am hardly alone in that sense. I wonder if they appreciate the cushy job they can so thoroughly fail to do day after day with no serious consequence? I mean their idea of a "job consequence" is using their infinite mod points to down-mod posts that criticize them too heavily. It's a coin toss whether or not this one gets their attention, for they may be asleep at the wheel.
If they think I speak falsely, I hereby invite them to post with their own accounts and confront me, like men. I will have a multitude of previous examples to justify my position. They aren't going to say a damned thing against me because they know this is easy to find.
unmod
That works better when you don't post AC.
I haven't tested it, but I've read reports that while you do not get the warning if you post AC to a discussion in which you have posted, it will still remove said moderations.
If so I believe that's a new thing.
... upside-down. Ordinary people would have been like the "old Peter" who denied Him thrice.
Also, regarding your sig... His disciples were definitely thick. They were not ordinary. They showed extraordinary courage. I mean... Peter was executed by crucifixion. His lament? He did not feel worthy to die by the same method as his Master. So according to legend, he was crucified
If you are going to demand a citation, your rebuttal better damn well include one! I'm not saying I dissagree, but your arrogance is definitely showing.
Eh I don't know. He countered an assertion with another assertion. While he could have invested a trivial amount of effort to do much better, nonetheless they remain on equal ground.
This is speculation, but perhaps that was the point?
unmod
That works better when you don't post AC.
Why is it that there is no malware for IOS? There are millions of these devices out there, so there certainly is an incentive for malware writers.
I believe that it has something to do with the fact that only Apple approved and checked software can be installed thereon. This closed system may not appeal to many here on /., but it is certainly as close as we have gotten to a malware proof computing experience we are likely to get anytime soon. Mac users will be able to enjoy this form of security with OS X 10.8 this summer.
Many people need to play in the approved sandbox or else they'll stumble and hurt themselves. Others know what they're doing and understand the security implications of actions they take so they don't need Big Daddy Apple watching over them (and would in fact find that restrictive/suffocating).
If you're willing to learn and attain your own understanding you will find that much more information than you would ever need is freely available. Then you achieve independence and freedom. You can then do what you like with equipment that's truly yours. If all of that is "too hard" and you prefer to use a machine for years without ever really grasping the principles behind it, then you are likely to be controlled by somebody: either a relatively benevolent vendor or a malware author. The former wants the money you choose to give to it; the latter will take everything it can.
There isn't a One True Way. The only real mistake is to wrongly assume you are in a given category when you are not. For Joe Sixpack users who do not enjoy discovering and learning new things, the Apple method has a lot of advantages. If its widespread use makes it harder for criminals to make a profit, that benefits the rest of us as well.
You know, sometimes it doesn't work out just quite that positively. Sometimes it results in getting beaten to shit anyway. I think you're being a bit naive.
I left this unsaid because it seemed rather obvious... but alright. The fallback is to get some muscle and some martial arts training yourself with the hope you will not have to use it. Bullies are not fighting for something sacred to them. They are not willing to lay down their lives for it. They aren't even willing to go to very much trouble. There were people in high school who probably could have beaten me in a fistfight, but they knew I would not simply roll over and give up, and they knew they were going to get hurt, and they knew that even if they won, they would not look like it. They were going to be in it for the long haul if they attacked me and I would continue to fight until incapacitated. This is not what a bully wants at all.
Being true to the nature of a bully, they passed me up for easier game. It is like an aura they can sense and tends to repel them. However, one did not, and I was forced to knock him out. I didn't want to do that but he left me no choice in the matter. It was enough to establish that I am not the doormat they were looking for.
The mistake people make is trying to make nice and be "friends" with the bully in the hopes he won't turn on you while never addressing their own fears and their own weaknesses. It is a form of laziness in the face of a worthy challenge. It's what attracts bullies, just as injured game attracts wolves. The failure to understand that is why this problem won't go away.