what's the difference between a policeman watching you in person and a policeman watching you by camera?
A couple of years ago a city hall I used to work for had a small internal scandal that never made the press (although it probably should have). The police had installed surveillance cameras on a market place, which of course like many marketplaces here has lots of bars and bistros that during the summer deploy their terrasses so people can sit outside while enjoying their alcoholic drinks.
During the summer many women tend to wear miniskirts accompanied by revealing blouses. As it turns out, those cameras were extremely suitable for bored law enforcement officers, who'd rather be patrolling the local bistros on such a fine day, to have a very close peek as those cameras seem to have very good lenses for zooming. Well, one of the bored officers in question got caught by one of his superiours in the end, and there was lots of drama involved in city hall, with lots of backstabbing as you'd expect from politicians. In the end it resulted in the officer in question getting the sack.
A regular policeman doesn't walk up to women wearing revealing blouses and jam his nose right into cleavage. Something like that actually is a crime. A policeman with a surveillance camera doesn't have to jam his nose anywhere and can simply zoom in.
Professionally, I've come into contact with many cities having these systems, and often a city had their own set of privacy-horror-tales (although not always as bad as this one), followed by local politicians being dragged in the mud by newspapers, appropriate fingerpointing, and sometimes even not at all making the press but being one of jokes or gossips being spread around by the local IT staff or policeofficers.
You could argue here that police officers that operate/monitor these cameras should be monitored, but the sad truth of it is that the local city government already spent way too much on the camera system to have someone monitor the proper use. Sure, those cameras are being recorded, but who is going to watch those recordings unless anything actually happens? The effectiveness of these cameras has been proven to certain extent, but the invasions of privacy are also there and are most often covered up because local privacy watchdogs would scream at the top of their lungs.
In the end, the technology is handed to human beings. The technology, while perhaps invasive, is just part of the privacy problem. I personally don't mind being filmed while doing nothing "morally" or legally wrong. I would mind however if I'm actively being tracked while doing nothing wrong. I'm sure that the lady in the above story doesn't mind to be looked at, but I think she would mind of some officer zoomed in on her bosom.
This is traditionally followed by a wisecrack about how memory is cheap, followed by three enlightened posters pointing out the stupidity of that argument for multiple reasons.:-)
NEWSFLASH Credit card companies will block transactions given enough bad press. It is easy enough to get VISA clearing for anything "shady", but once you make headlines you'll be cut off before you can say "I'm making meeeelions".
Credit card companies have money, which pays for a whole lot of lawyers, judges, and Senators.
Yes, they do. But senators don't like it when their career gets tainted by such nice words as "supporting online copyright infringement" before they can make a real fortune.
Such a court battle would be far too expensive for the RIAA.
It wouldn't be too expensive for them, it would just waste money (and a large amount of it at that) for a very small gain. Bank card companies realize that the revenues they get from AllOfMP3 are negligable to the amount of money they'll spend on a lawsuit and they'll make a few negative headlines as well. In the grand scheme of the financial market, allofmp3 is the thing the credit card companies stepped in when they went for a walk, and they'll wipe it off before anyone else really notices the asociation.
Everyone can read about the penis enlargement treatment you ordered.
Quartermaster Clerk: One Swedish-made penis enlarger. Austin Powers: That's not mine. Quartermaster Clerk: One credit card receipt for Swedish-made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers. Austin Powers: I'm telling ya baby, that's not mine. Quartermaster Clerk: One warranty card for Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, filled out by Austin Powers. Austin Powers: I don't even know what this is! This sort of thing ain't my bag, baby. Quartermaster Clerk: One book, "Swedish-made Penis Enlargers And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby", by Austin Powers.
My friend, an attorney (basic office job, right?), needed some good way to handle scheduling, contacts, email, etc. Of course, he went with Exchange.
For small companies there are easy solutions to do scheduling and handling contacts. I worked in a small company that had a couple of applications integrated with LDAP and a webinterface for contacts and scheduling. Unfortunatly, these things don't deploy well on the large infrastructure of most companies. I'm not a big fan of exchange, but most of the times it's the right tool.
he looked very unprofessional when whatever he was using wasn't working
Don't deploy software that doesn't work? I mean, seriously... Before you start using something, make sure that it does what you want it to do.
All you need is some basic financial tracking (ooops... still no payroll), and something to print pretty estimates and invoices.
Most people tend to use accounting packages that are built for windows for this (for small companies, large ones typically have more expensive software with lots more features).
I hate this trend of people trying to convert entire offices to operating system X. Give people what they need to do their jobs, and the investment you do in software should repay itself in no time. Theoretical debates about free formats (yes, they are important) and open source (yes, that too is important imho) aside, people need to be able to do their jobs. If the free alternatives aren't good enough to get the job done, then pay the price for a license and get it over with.
Suppose for a moment that you need a fileserver. Considder the features you need on that fileserver. Are they available in samba? If so... Use samba, it'll cost the company nothing in licenses, and it'll get the job done. The most important questions a company should ask before deploying software is:
What features do we need? Will something rudimentary do, or does it need to do something very specific only package Y has?
Who will be using it? Are they capable of using this software effectively, and how much will training cost?
What do the licenses cost? Will the cheaper software end up costing me in lost productivity?
Once you've answered those questions, you'll be able to pick. Don't convert to another operating system because you can (or rather, you think you can), do it because there's a benefit other than just the licensing cost.
Converting most desktop PCs in a company to linux usually ends in tears, either for the admin or the users. They'll receive e-mails with attachments they can't open, or that don't look like they are supposed to. They won't know what software to use to do trivial tasks. The camera they used for taking pictures of some project's status won't show up like in windows, etc etc etc. Most of the problems are trivial ones, but they'll end up costing you a lot of time, that it's either going to frustrate the admin because he spends most of his time solving trivial problems, instead of working on the other important tasks he has, or the user who's getting frustrated that he can't do trivial tasks without having to bother the admin for everything.
I'm a big fan of linux as a server OS. 90% of the machines in my rack are linux machines, with the windows machines running specific software only available to windows. But when it comes to desktops, give users what they know and you'll save yourself some real headaches.
private mails on google search engine
on
2007 in Security
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· Score: 4, Funny
private mails of gmail users published on the google search engine
TV audiences of the TiVo generation have shown that they're not content to just watch reruns for long periods of time.
TV audiences of the "Internet generation" prefer to have all episodes released in one big torrent at the same time. That way they can have a [insert series here]-marathon and be done with it, and watch the shows again in about half a year. They get to choose their own time to watch what they want, and they often choose to watch reruns when they want.
With decreasing new episode counts, the problem of ratings getting harder and harder to come by shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The problem with ratings is that your audience is fickle at best. After 2 seasons of a new show most writers need to create new plot devices to keep the audience intrested, but in doing so they're often alienating the show from its original setup, which is what got the viewers in the first place. Personally, I've grown weary of the whole Starbuck & Apollo (and whomever they chose to sleep with) thing in BSG. It just drags on and on and on, and it's becoming soap-opera of Farscape-"It might not be your baby, oh and your clone whom I was in love with died"-proportions. There's nothing wrong with having sexual tension between protagonists, but blowing it out of proportions like Farscape (and the way BSG is headed) is just soap-opera in space.
they should try a novel approach: go back to a 30+ episode season.
Right now they're on the typical X-mas break which a lot of shows are taking. This is network policy, not filming policy. I think it's 22 or 24 episodes per season for most shows. Consider having 44 episodes per season. Logistic-wise that's a lot of pressure, twice the amount of pressure in the same timespan. We're not just dealing with a couple of actors and cameramen, but an entire crew of set-builders, stuntmen, "live" special effects people, digital special effects, editing, re-editing, scriptwriting, etc etc.
If you're dealing with a genre like soap opera, you can cut the logistics problem in half: you don't need new sets every 3 episodes, just have the actors stay in the same set for three weeks wondering who's the father of some pregnant woman. Scriptwriting for most soap opera is sub-par anyway, and well... soap opera doesn't need a lot of special effects (and if they do, they're most likely ridiculously cheap). That's why you see 200 episodes of soap opera in a year. It's not because those actors work harder (I'm not saying they are or aren't), but because the crew behind the actors doesn't have to do quite as much as in a scifi show.
You're on slashdot, posting in an article, saying everyone intrested in the content of the article needs to get a life.
You're on slashdot, posting in an article, saying you've never heard of sarcasm in reply to a comment saying everyone intrested in the content of the article needs to get a life.:)
Second, many packages supplied by RH are patched so far that the original developers won't provide support on the mailing lists
And this is a good thing because?
Am I to take it that you are saying Debian based systems are immune to this? Not so much the RPM hell (duh, Debian doesn't use RPMs), but the random collection of machines all different from each other even though the developers have root access? How, pray tell, do you manage that? Block access to the apt repositories?
I think the GP is refering to the fact that most developers will download rpms from the developers of a piece of software rather than from RH. Often the packages are substantially different. Most developers don't make deb packages available other than through the apt repositories. Tools like yum however make this a non-issue with RH these days, but there's very few people who know about yum (I'm not kidding, as I'm confronted with this fact on a nearly daily basis).
The truth is that it's quite easy to create dpkg dependency hell if you randomly were to install non repository debian packages. And indeed, the only way to be 100% certain is to make sure that users don't have the root password or sudo privileges.
First, what does System Administration have to do with developing software?
Maintaining all those boxes the developers work on? Updating packages, installing software, making sure the machines actually work? As a sysadmin/developer I can assure you that it's more work than you imagine. Many developers don't know the first thing about how to install, configure and maintain a linux machine, let alone have any security concerns. To top it all off, you'll probably also be responsible for building the installation packages, maintaining the local servers, and the various other tasks that come with the job. Don't underestimate the amount of time a sysadmin can save a developer, and certainly don't assume that someone who is good at programming has a good knowledge of the system he's programming for.
Why, if Debian is the best development platform in existance, would that be the case?
I don't support the "best devel platform" statement to be honest, because in the end you're going to have to test your software on multiple distros anyway. Personally I find debian a lot easier to admin than RH (and yes, I've got RH admin experience under my belt too). In general I've had less problems with debian stable machines than with RH machines over the years, and when I worked for a consultancy firm I'd usually only recommend RH if the customer was planning on using commercial software.
Perhaps your dealings with RedHat based distributions have been less than plesant, but if you want commercial application support, it's either RH or SUSE.
The funny thing about it is, that most people running linux, don't use it for commercial software. Sure, there are quite a few running Oracle on it, but in all fairness, those numbers are dwarfed by the amount of LAMP, mailserver+spammassassin, or cheap fileserver installs.
Tools for dealing with RPMs have advanced quite a bit in the last 5 years, and FWIW, I have no problems getting a box from "minimal install" to functional server. Understanding of the tools goes a long way toward preventing problems.
I know my way around RPM pretty well, and yes the tool itself and those around RPM have evolved, but to be honest, I simply don't like them as much as I do with dpkg and apt. I've had stuff break on me more than once, where it shouldn't have broken with rpms. Of course, this may have been a few years ago, but people who've had nasty experiences like that tend to remember when an upgrade just goes wrong, while with apt I've never had that happen to me.
All in all, RH isn't a bad distribution, it's linux like any other distro. It's just not my tool of choice.
What the fuck? They have an entire section going trans-human with Borg technology... VOLUNTARILY any they still miss the implications?
In episode 23 they're going to inject a giant spaceshark with Borg nanoprobes. They will then use the ships antigraviton emitterarray to make the ship "jump" over the huge Borg Spaceshark. In episode 24, the genius holographic doctor and his trusty sidekick ensign Ricky (who will only live this one episode, and never before appeared on the screen) will then develop form of poisoned spaceplankton which ensign Ricky will need to deliver manually into the sharks feeding orifice (which surprisingly looks like a black hole, but let's not get into that).
That makes no sense what-so-ever.
The star trek universe doesn't make a lot of sense to be honest. Don't get me wrong, the show had its merits, but those have been run over by countless years of milking the big fat spacecow, repetetive storylines (eg timetravel, kid saves the ship (yet again), particle of the week), etc etc...
"The Captain is more forward thinking and wants to go out and do some exploring but half the crew will be against that and want to just protect the border," says Rossi.
Captain's Log, Stardate 2528 point 4. I have beamed half the crew into space during a mutiny. They had forgotten that this was a Star Fleet vessel and not a Democracy. I will... miss them.
Ensign Ricky please report to the airlock for... euhm... maintenance duty. Repeat, ensign Ricky, please report to the airlock for maintenance.
So how long are they suppose to be supporting the Win9x OSes?
Until there's a good technical reason not too? It's not your responsibility to give people incentives to upgrade.
It's not your responsibility as a programmer to support every possible OS either. I'm all for supporting as many operating systems as possible, but at a certain point you have to draw the line, either for technical or practical reasons. Valid technical reasons would be that certain features simply aren't available on a certain OS (eg Unicode), and practical reasons are that your target audience doesn't actually use that OS.
Technical reasons are usually the strongest, as for instance the lack of Unicode support would mean you'd have to start developing a rather large library to provide such functionality, or using some library that has those features and is compatible with your licensing scheme which usually results in major changes in your code. A lot of time is wasted on providing support for these features (if they are possible), meaning that your software inevitably will get delayed for a long time.
Practical reasons are that your target audience simply is too small to warrant the invested time to get something to work. Sure, you can always hack something in your spare time, but unfortunatly manpower and time is limited, even for people who like to hack on some code in their free time. What's next? Supporting DOS? Imagine the amount of work you'd have making a modern application work on Windows 3.11.
Typically FOSS (or whatever people want to abbreviate open source software to these days) supports a large array of platforms, more than most commercial software will. But even FOSS has its limits to how far back in time you can go without having to upgrade every single thing on your system just to get it to compile, or for that matter actually work. People who are still running Win9x should eventually come to realize that their operating system is getting fairly old by now, their vendor has dropped support, and that the latest and greatest software won't be running on their OS of choice anymore. C'est la vie.
And if viruses were a concern, they wouldn't be using any version Windows.
Viruses, worms, and all of that rot haven't been a real concern to most people. Botnets and spyware infested computers are the living proof of that.
But when there's not, with a little care while programming, software for Win XP will usually run on Windows 9x without modification, so why not support it?
In commercial environments money is a real concern. How much will developing a portable piece of software cost more than one that is less portable? How much will the extra customer support cost? How many problems will supporting those platforms in the long run give as you start increasing the number of features? In open source environments it usually boils down to "How much of a headache/timesink would it be, and is someone willing/available to do it?".
Following on from that analogy, though...if you have a problem with the house rules of a given establishment, go somewhere else.
Ah, flawed analogy time (my favourite part of slashdot comments):
Hey, I invented this thing called a gun, it's really harmful to other human beings, good thing I'm getting sued by the government for every murder someone else commits
10000 years ago, Ugh and Moort invented fire. Good thing they didn't have lawyers back then, as fire can be used to destroy other peoples property
The designers of the SMTP protocol are still working to pay the damages caused by spammers world wide
Did you ever play Ultima Online? The botting scenario got so bad with that game in the end that at times it was impossible to tell who was a live player at the keyboard and who wasn't.
Seriously, if a game is that easily bottable, isn't a sign that the game is flawed? Yes, it's in their TOS (or rather "the agreement nobody reads when they patched") that you're not allowed to cheat, but truth be told, the cheater is violating the TOS, not the guy who wrote the software. The DMCA has very little to do with this, especially the piece you quoted.
I think the major problem here is the attitude (perpetuated, as usual, by Richard Stallman)
I'm guessing you've developed this attitude of the FSF's yourself;
Did RMS ever insult you at a linux convention or something? (I hear he does that sometimes) There's several posts here from you ranting about the FSF, and they've got nothing to do with this entire mess. Sure, RMS is an extremist in his stand on closed source software, patents and what not, but getting him, the FSF and the "mindset" of that community involved is just trolling.
The nVidia binary Linux drivers are a good example of this
The whole nvidia issue had to do with the GPL, and not the DMCA. IMHO, nvidia can distribute their drivers however they see fit, I don't need their drivers for my servers.
Ditto with a Linux port of WoW. People are currently complaining that there isn't a native Linux port of the game. Fine...but if one *does* get developed, said complaining will then simply move on to it being closed source...and so on, and so on.
That's what people do, they complain... Sun is shining? Too hot. It's snowing? Too cold. It's cloudy? Looks like it might rain. The original NWN client and server were ported to linux, and lo and behold, no masses of open sauce fanboys gathering on their forums yelling "Free the source!". Everybody who plays WoW either does it on windows or uses some version Wine. Who really needs a native linux client?
You're a fanboy, and when people point it out to you, you start ranting about RMS and the FSF. Blizzard can make some really nice games, but they're not that great a company when it comes to their customers. Do a little googling, and ignore the 14 year olds. Being a fanboy is one thing, blindly putting people or companies on pedestals and worshipping them like gods is another.
I am really tired of being punished for being legit (and before anyone says, yes - I have contacted them on the issue - no, nothing came of it).
Yep, know how you feel. I've got the same issue with several games, and I ended up buying another DVD drive just because of the copy protection. Sure, DVD drives cost next to nothing these days, but it's annoying.
Yes, I know, nobody is forcing me to buy these games, and yes, I'm well aware of the fact that there are most likely cracked versions on the net, etc etc... But in all fairness, some copyprotection schemes are just going too far these days, for example Starforce and I'm sure the/. community can think of a few others.
If the copy-protection schemes in place make it a real pain for legal users, and in the first 2 weeks after release cracked versions still show up, then you probably are better off not using that particular copy-protection scheme but one that is nicer to users.
As for protecting the children, I think they'd be more interested in regulating MySpacesterKut et al. I mean, that's where all the pedophiles are gathering, which represents an ACTUAL threat to children, rather than the viewing of naughty videos, which represents... well, no real threat at all. I mean, WTF?
I'd have to disagree with you on this one. While pedophiles aren't going to congregate on youtube (for instance), I can imagine they do congregate on other places and scour youtube for saucy videos and pictures. Ordinary webbased boards contain enough links to youtubes jailbait dancing in its underwear in front of a webcam, and I highly doubt that those boards are full of teenage males (even though the local inhabitants may act like it).
However, I have to agree that legislation is a bad way of dealing with this problem in particular. Those youths needs to be educated about the dangers inherent to internet and prancing around on it in their underwear. The problem is that many parents are unaware of the "dangerous nature" of the Internet in this perspective (notice the quotes here, as the media has a tendency to overdramatize what internet can and cannot do).
I often hear many people here proclaiming that it is bad parenting to let children on the Internet unsupervised, but many parents don't even understand the basics of internet past sending an e-mail. I'm sure that you could sit right next to your child for a couple of hours a day as they play WoW, but by the first 30 minutes of staring at a screen you'll be just as bored as I would be watching someone else play a videogame and typing a lot. Add to that the fact that children usually are extremely good at gaining trust from their parents to act responsable. Many parents are also in the height of their careers, meaning that they usually bring home a lot of work and stress, and don't always have a fair share amount of time to spend with their children (which is a sad thing, but unfortunatly one of the undeniable truths of todays business environment).
More on topic, youtube isn't the primary problem for protecting kids, instant messengers with built in webcam support can easily be used by pedophiles. It's been on the news quite a few times that children are being lured over IM, and while some governments want to take initiatives to prevent such abuse by legislation and technological means, these initiatives will fail mostly because kids will easily swap from one IM client to another if for example they are required to authenticate with their identity card, or legislation deactivates the part of the instant messenger they'd like to use.
Hate speech and naughty content can occur equally as well via the media of text and pictures. Video doesn't necessarily add anything to either one. In fact, any smart, savvy Holocaust denier will tell you that text is a far more efficient and cost-effective method of defaming Jews.
To be honest, most hatespeech I have bumped into on the internet is by the means of websites posting articles accompanied by pictures. I'd be very surprised if a streaming video service would have more than a handful of videos. People who make hatespeech usually have a strong desire to remain anonymous, and videos make that harder to do.
Broadcast license fees open up a new revenue source for the government, which can be used to directly tax internet content (which so far is nearly unheard of).
Not as nearly unheard of as you might think. Where I live I've heard 3 proposals in the past 5 years for taxing the internet, either nation-wide or EU-wide, and this would make 4 (although very sneakily). I doubt that this proposal is anything less than a sneaky way to introduce an internet tax under the guise of "protecting the children" amongst other things.
jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
I live in a European country. All I can say about this is that electricity prices here have been jacking up steadily. What you're forgetting is that electricity is more of a necessity than gasoline for most people. People who don't own cars, still own a refridgerator. To be honest, I can give up my car more easily than my fridge and my electric furnace. I'll have to take public transportation to work, which is nearly as expensive (not kidding), just more inconvenient but I'll manage.
However, jack up the electricity price a little more. My retired grandmother now suddenly faces yet more drain on her very small income for the things she needs TO SURVIVE. You're punishing consumers who are wasting 24$/year with standby mode.
Now go to the average corporation, where most people leave their computer on 24/7, most companies run AC 12 hours a day, where large machinery makes the power consumption of entire apartment blocks look like a small dot on the chart waaaaaay below. Charge them more. In the end, they'll charge it back to their consumers, I know. Don't punish the people with relatively small incomes, who don't cause the biggest harm in the first place.
Except for, you know, the idea that we should be free to do whatever the hell we want, so long as we're not harming others. I know freedom (and liberalism) in general is out of favour these days, but still...
This has very little to do with freedom to be honest. It's their tld, they've setup the rules. Don't agree with them, buy a.com name.
So we should all suffer YOUR personal tastes?
No, you should suffer the Terms Of Service of the registrar, like the ones many tld's enforce. Don't like it? Write to the registrar, then write to the government, after failing to yield results just buy the damned.com.
And so long as Bob isn't harming a soul while fucking watermelons, what precisely is the problem?
No problem for me. Hell, if Bob wants to enjoy his watermelons that way, or if he is gay, as long as he's not bothering me, have fun and safe sex (or not). But if the Irish tld organization doesn't want to sell him a domainname, it's their right. It's their service, and they have a TOS up that warns you about this.
Equal rights and tolerance are just arguments you'd use when you're disciminating against specific groups of people (homosexuals, race, ethnic groups, etc), in this case no pornography is allowed at all. Not heterosexual, not homosexual, not interracial, not interspecies, just plain old NOTHING. While I don't agree with the fact that you can't open a porn site under.ie (after all, what the world really needs is more porn on the internet), it's their tld. Buy a.com name if you don't agree.
It also logs the page you requested, when you requested it, and your browser. Everyday, they also rotate their logs and compress them for further statistical tracking at a future point!
My God!!! What is this world coming to? Where is the time a man could visit a site without having his IP, page and browser being logged, ans also rotated and compressed. Quick, call the EFF and the ACLU, I feel my rights are being violated. Sorry, doorbell, brb it's the FBI
How about a mathematical Captcha that cannot be solved with a calculator.
Yes, while we're at it, let's add a captcha about quantum physics. The idea of a captcha is to keep bots out, and get people in with little hassle. The moment you're going to make captchas more difficult than typing a few letters and numberrs, you're locking out potential "visitors" to your site (using visitors here loosely, because most of the time it's people who leave comments, or some form of input on your site). You don't want to scare away real users by asking them the sum of 2+2, let alone quantum physics.
I think we're facing a problem (just like with e-mail), where we're playing a cat-and-mouse game all the time. Spammers adapt to the anti-spam measures, either by adapting their software or in this case (although I find this very extreme) by using more manpower. Adapting the software means that eventually anti-spam will have countermeasures, perpetuating the cat-and-mouse game. The second one is more difficult to solve, and most viable readily available solutions make the thing you're protecting more difficult to use.
Captchas already annoy me... I've come to look at them as a necessary evil, but to be honest, they don't score high on my coolness-chart. Imagine how i'd feel about them if they became harder, by adding obscure cultural references (eg Who the hell is Dan Quayle? (Yes, I know, but as a European this isn't common knowledge))
Anyone who has worked elbow deep in an old computer case (the ones without rolled edges) will know what I'm talking about.
Ah yes, I've always said those cases were accidents waiting to happen. I try to avoid those things as much as I can, because you know that before you close it, you'll end up with a nice cut on a very irritating place like your fingers.
what's even worse is that these cases usually aren't very tough. I once accidently dropped something heavy on a friends PC, resulting in a huge dent in the case. I don't need to tell you how upset she was to find her 12.95 euro case dented, and ended up "undenting" it with a large hammer, which incidentally was the most fun thing I had done on her PC.
Don't buy those cases, unless you appreciate being cut. Spend 10 euro extra for a good case.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's anything like a browsers UserAgent field, I have a set of WWW::Mechanize perl scripts pretending to be firefox 2.0 on windows.
internet bandwidth usage has just gone up by 300% at the University of Washington... Scientists are baffled and blame global warming.
A couple of years ago a city hall I used to work for had a small internal scandal that never made the press (although it probably should have). The police had installed surveillance cameras on a market place, which of course like many marketplaces here has lots of bars and bistros that during the summer deploy their terrasses so people can sit outside while enjoying their alcoholic drinks.
During the summer many women tend to wear miniskirts accompanied by revealing blouses. As it turns out, those cameras were extremely suitable for bored law enforcement officers, who'd rather be patrolling the local bistros on such a fine day, to have a very close peek as those cameras seem to have very good lenses for zooming. Well, one of the bored officers in question got caught by one of his superiours in the end, and there was lots of drama involved in city hall, with lots of backstabbing as you'd expect from politicians. In the end it resulted in the officer in question getting the sack.
A regular policeman doesn't walk up to women wearing revealing blouses and jam his nose right into cleavage. Something like that actually is a crime. A policeman with a surveillance camera doesn't have to jam his nose anywhere and can simply zoom in.
Professionally, I've come into contact with many cities having these systems, and often a city had their own set of privacy-horror-tales (although not always as bad as this one), followed by local politicians being dragged in the mud by newspapers, appropriate fingerpointing, and sometimes even not at all making the press but being one of jokes or gossips being spread around by the local IT staff or policeofficers.
You could argue here that police officers that operate/monitor these cameras should be monitored, but the sad truth of it is that the local city government already spent way too much on the camera system to have someone monitor the proper use. Sure, those cameras are being recorded, but who is going to watch those recordings unless anything actually happens? The effectiveness of these cameras has been proven to certain extent, but the invasions of privacy are also there and are most often covered up because local privacy watchdogs would scream at the top of their lungs.
In the end, the technology is handed to human beings. The technology, while perhaps invasive, is just part of the privacy problem. I personally don't mind being filmed while doing nothing "morally" or legally wrong. I would mind however if I'm actively being tracked while doing nothing wrong. I'm sure that the lady in the above story doesn't mind to be looked at, but I think she would mind of some officer zoomed in on her bosom.
Let me improve your feeble script
Luke: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
George Lucas : I'm a bloody genius
"zomg teh force is strong in dis 1, i can tell from his milk-of-chloreines"
Random Star Wars fans, I AM George Lucas. Together we shall rule the universe as father and son.
Let me help you with this :
Dad?
Meh, karma to burn...
NEWSFLASH Credit card companies will block transactions given enough bad press. It is easy enough to get VISA clearing for anything "shady", but once you make headlines you'll be cut off before you can say "I'm making meeeelions".
Yes, they do. But senators don't like it when their career gets tainted by such nice words as "supporting online copyright infringement" before they can make a real fortune.
It wouldn't be too expensive for them, it would just waste money (and a large amount of it at that) for a very small gain. Bank card companies realize that the revenues they get from AllOfMP3 are negligable to the amount of money they'll spend on a lawsuit and they'll make a few negative headlines as well. In the grand scheme of the financial market, allofmp3 is the thing the credit card companies stepped in when they went for a walk, and they'll wipe it off before anyone else really notices the asociation.
Quartermaster Clerk: One Swedish-made penis enlarger.
Austin Powers: That's not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One credit card receipt for Swedish-made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I'm telling ya baby, that's not mine.
Quartermaster Clerk: One warranty card for Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, filled out by Austin Powers.
Austin Powers: I don't even know what this is! This sort of thing ain't my bag, baby.
Quartermaster Clerk: One book, "Swedish-made Penis Enlargers And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby", by Austin Powers.
For small companies there are easy solutions to do scheduling and handling contacts. I worked in a small company that had a couple of applications integrated with LDAP and a webinterface for contacts and scheduling. Unfortunatly, these things don't deploy well on the large infrastructure of most companies. I'm not a big fan of exchange, but most of the times it's the right tool.
Don't deploy software that doesn't work? I mean, seriously... Before you start using something, make sure that it does what you want it to do.
Most people tend to use accounting packages that are built for windows for this (for small companies, large ones typically have more expensive software with lots more features).
I hate this trend of people trying to convert entire offices to operating system X. Give people what they need to do their jobs, and the investment you do in software should repay itself in no time. Theoretical debates about free formats (yes, they are important) and open source (yes, that too is important imho) aside, people need to be able to do their jobs. If the free alternatives aren't good enough to get the job done, then pay the price for a license and get it over with.
Suppose for a moment that you need a fileserver. Considder the features you need on that fileserver. Are they available in samba? If so... Use samba, it'll cost the company nothing in licenses, and it'll get the job done. The most important questions a company should ask before deploying software is:
Once you've answered those questions, you'll be able to pick. Don't convert to another operating system because you can (or rather, you think you can), do it because there's a benefit other than just the licensing cost.
Converting most desktop PCs in a company to linux usually ends in tears, either for the admin or the users. They'll receive e-mails with attachments they can't open, or that don't look like they are supposed to. They won't know what software to use to do trivial tasks. The camera they used for taking pictures of some project's status won't show up like in windows, etc etc etc. Most of the problems are trivial ones, but they'll end up costing you a lot of time, that it's either going to frustrate the admin because he spends most of his time solving trivial problems, instead of working on the other important tasks he has, or the user who's getting frustrated that he can't do trivial tasks without having to bother the admin for everything.
I'm a big fan of linux as a server OS. 90% of the machines in my rack are linux machines, with the windows machines running specific software only available to windows. But when it comes to desktops, give users what they know and you'll save yourself some real headaches.
Oh noes! Everyone can see my spam now!
TV audiences of the "Internet generation" prefer to have all episodes released in one big torrent at the same time. That way they can have a [insert series here]-marathon and be done with it, and watch the shows again in about half a year. They get to choose their own time to watch what they want, and they often choose to watch reruns when they want.
The problem with ratings is that your audience is fickle at best. After 2 seasons of a new show most writers need to create new plot devices to keep the audience intrested, but in doing so they're often alienating the show from its original setup, which is what got the viewers in the first place. Personally, I've grown weary of the whole Starbuck & Apollo (and whomever they chose to sleep with) thing in BSG. It just drags on and on and on, and it's becoming soap-opera of Farscape-"It might not be your baby, oh and your clone whom I was in love with died"-proportions. There's nothing wrong with having sexual tension between protagonists, but blowing it out of proportions like Farscape (and the way BSG is headed) is just soap-opera in space.
Right now they're on the typical X-mas break which a lot of shows are taking. This is network policy, not filming policy. I think it's 22 or 24 episodes per season for most shows. Consider having 44 episodes per season. Logistic-wise that's a lot of pressure, twice the amount of pressure in the same timespan. We're not just dealing with a couple of actors and cameramen, but an entire crew of set-builders, stuntmen, "live" special effects people, digital special effects, editing, re-editing, scriptwriting, etc etc.
If you're dealing with a genre like soap opera, you can cut the logistics problem in half: you don't need new sets every 3 episodes, just have the actors stay in the same set for three weeks wondering who's the father of some pregnant woman. Scriptwriting for most soap opera is sub-par anyway, and well... soap opera doesn't need a lot of special effects (and if they do, they're most likely ridiculously cheap). That's why you see 200 episodes of soap opera in a year. It's not because those actors work harder (I'm not saying they are or aren't), but because the crew behind the actors doesn't have to do quite as much as in a scifi show.
You're on slashdot, posting in an article, saying you've never heard of sarcasm in reply to a comment saying everyone intrested in the content of the article needs to get a life. :)
And this is a good thing because?
I think the GP is refering to the fact that most developers will download rpms from the developers of a piece of software rather than from RH. Often the packages are substantially different. Most developers don't make deb packages available other than through the apt repositories. Tools like yum however make this a non-issue with RH these days, but there's very few people who know about yum (I'm not kidding, as I'm confronted with this fact on a nearly daily basis).
The truth is that it's quite easy to create dpkg dependency hell if you randomly were to install non repository debian packages. And indeed, the only way to be 100% certain is to make sure that users don't have the root password or sudo privileges.
Maintaining all those boxes the developers work on? Updating packages, installing software, making sure the machines actually work? As a sysadmin/developer I can assure you that it's more work than you imagine. Many developers don't know the first thing about how to install, configure and maintain a linux machine, let alone have any security concerns. To top it all off, you'll probably also be responsible for building the installation packages, maintaining the local servers, and the various other tasks that come with the job. Don't underestimate the amount of time a sysadmin can save a developer, and certainly don't assume that someone who is good at programming has a good knowledge of the system he's programming for.
I don't support the "best devel platform" statement to be honest, because in the end you're going to have to test your software on multiple distros anyway. Personally I find debian a lot easier to admin than RH (and yes, I've got RH admin experience under my belt too). In general I've had less problems with debian stable machines than with RH machines over the years, and when I worked for a consultancy firm I'd usually only recommend RH if the customer was planning on using commercial software.
The funny thing about it is, that most people running linux, don't use it for commercial software. Sure, there are quite a few running Oracle on it, but in all fairness, those numbers are dwarfed by the amount of LAMP, mailserver+spammassassin, or cheap fileserver installs.
I know my way around RPM pretty well, and yes the tool itself and those around RPM have evolved, but to be honest, I simply don't like them as much as I do with dpkg and apt. I've had stuff break on me more than once, where it shouldn't have broken with rpms. Of course, this may have been a few years ago, but people who've had nasty experiences like that tend to remember when an upgrade just goes wrong, while with apt I've never had that happen to me.
All in all, RH isn't a bad distribution, it's linux like any other distro. It's just not my tool of choice.
In episode 23 they're going to inject a giant spaceshark with Borg nanoprobes. They will then use the ships antigraviton emitterarray to make the ship "jump" over the huge Borg Spaceshark. In episode 24, the genius holographic doctor and his trusty sidekick ensign Ricky (who will only live this one episode, and never before appeared on the screen) will then develop form of poisoned spaceplankton which ensign Ricky will need to deliver manually into the sharks feeding orifice (which surprisingly looks like a black hole, but let's not get into that).
The star trek universe doesn't make a lot of sense to be honest. Don't get me wrong, the show had its merits, but those have been run over by countless years of milking the big fat spacecow, repetetive storylines (eg timetravel, kid saves the ship (yet again), particle of the week), etc etc...
Ensign Ricky please report to the airlock for ... euhm... maintenance duty. Repeat, ensign Ricky, please report to the airlock for maintenance.
It's not your responsibility as a programmer to support every possible OS either. I'm all for supporting as many operating systems as possible, but at a certain point you have to draw the line, either for technical or practical reasons. Valid technical reasons would be that certain features simply aren't available on a certain OS (eg Unicode), and practical reasons are that your target audience doesn't actually use that OS.
Technical reasons are usually the strongest, as for instance the lack of Unicode support would mean you'd have to start developing a rather large library to provide such functionality, or using some library that has those features and is compatible with your licensing scheme which usually results in major changes in your code. A lot of time is wasted on providing support for these features (if they are possible), meaning that your software inevitably will get delayed for a long time.
Practical reasons are that your target audience simply is too small to warrant the invested time to get something to work. Sure, you can always hack something in your spare time, but unfortunatly manpower and time is limited, even for people who like to hack on some code in their free time. What's next? Supporting DOS? Imagine the amount of work you'd have making a modern application work on Windows 3.11.
Typically FOSS (or whatever people want to abbreviate open source software to these days) supports a large array of platforms, more than most commercial software will. But even FOSS has its limits to how far back in time you can go without having to upgrade every single thing on your system just to get it to compile, or for that matter actually work. People who are still running Win9x should eventually come to realize that their operating system is getting fairly old by now, their vendor has dropped support, and that the latest and greatest software won't be running on their OS of choice anymore. C'est la vie.
Viruses, worms, and all of that rot haven't been a real concern to most people. Botnets and spyware infested computers are the living proof of that.
In commercial environments money is a real concern. How much will developing a portable piece of software cost more than one that is less portable? How much will the extra customer support cost? How many problems will supporting those platforms in the long run give as you start increasing the number of features? In open source environments it usually boils down to "How much of a headache/timesink would it be, and is someone willing/available to do it?".
I think he's got enough on his hands as it is :)
Ah, flawed analogy time (my favourite part of slashdot comments):
Seriously, if a game is that easily bottable, isn't a sign that the game is flawed? Yes, it's in their TOS (or rather "the agreement nobody reads when they patched") that you're not allowed to cheat, but truth be told, the cheater is violating the TOS, not the guy who wrote the software. The DMCA has very little to do with this, especially the piece you quoted.
Did RMS ever insult you at a linux convention or something? (I hear he does that sometimes) There's several posts here from you ranting about the FSF, and they've got nothing to do with this entire mess. Sure, RMS is an extremist in his stand on closed source software, patents and what not, but getting him, the FSF and the "mindset" of that community involved is just trolling.
The whole nvidia issue had to do with the GPL, and not the DMCA. IMHO, nvidia can distribute their drivers however they see fit, I don't need their drivers for my servers.
That's what people do, they complain... Sun is shining? Too hot. It's snowing? Too cold. It's cloudy? Looks like it might rain. The original NWN client and server were ported to linux, and lo and behold, no masses of open sauce fanboys gathering on their forums yelling "Free the source!". Everybody who plays WoW either does it on windows or uses some version Wine. Who really needs a native linux client?
You're a fanboy, and when people point it out to you, you start ranting about RMS and the FSF. Blizzard can make some really nice games, but they're not that great a company when it comes to their customers. Do a little googling, and ignore the 14 year olds. Being a fanboy is one thing, blindly putting people or companies on pedestals and worshipping them like gods is another.
Yep, know how you feel. I've got the same issue with several games, and I ended up buying another DVD drive just because of the copy protection. Sure, DVD drives cost next to nothing these days, but it's annoying.
Yes, I know, nobody is forcing me to buy these games, and yes, I'm well aware of the fact that there are most likely cracked versions on the net, etc etc... But in all fairness, some copyprotection schemes are just going too far these days, for example Starforce and I'm sure the /. community can think of a few others.
If the copy-protection schemes in place make it a real pain for legal users, and in the first 2 weeks after release cracked versions still show up, then you probably are better off not using that particular copy-protection scheme but one that is nicer to users.
I'd have to disagree with you on this one. While pedophiles aren't going to congregate on youtube (for instance), I can imagine they do congregate on other places and scour youtube for saucy videos and pictures. Ordinary webbased boards contain enough links to youtubes jailbait dancing in its underwear in front of a webcam, and I highly doubt that those boards are full of teenage males (even though the local inhabitants may act like it).
However, I have to agree that legislation is a bad way of dealing with this problem in particular. Those youths needs to be educated about the dangers inherent to internet and prancing around on it in their underwear. The problem is that many parents are unaware of the "dangerous nature" of the Internet in this perspective (notice the quotes here, as the media has a tendency to overdramatize what internet can and cannot do).
I often hear many people here proclaiming that it is bad parenting to let children on the Internet unsupervised, but many parents don't even understand the basics of internet past sending an e-mail. I'm sure that you could sit right next to your child for a couple of hours a day as they play WoW, but by the first 30 minutes of staring at a screen you'll be just as bored as I would be watching someone else play a videogame and typing a lot. Add to that the fact that children usually are extremely good at gaining trust from their parents to act responsable. Many parents are also in the height of their careers, meaning that they usually bring home a lot of work and stress, and don't always have a fair share amount of time to spend with their children (which is a sad thing, but unfortunatly one of the undeniable truths of todays business environment).
More on topic, youtube isn't the primary problem for protecting kids, instant messengers with built in webcam support can easily be used by pedophiles. It's been on the news quite a few times that children are being lured over IM, and while some governments want to take initiatives to prevent such abuse by legislation and technological means, these initiatives will fail mostly because kids will easily swap from one IM client to another if for example they are required to authenticate with their identity card, or legislation deactivates the part of the instant messenger they'd like to use.
To be honest, most hatespeech I have bumped into on the internet is by the means of websites posting articles accompanied by pictures. I'd be very surprised if a streaming video service would have more than a handful of videos. People who make hatespeech usually have a strong desire to remain anonymous, and videos make that harder to do.
Not as nearly unheard of as you might think. Where I live I've heard 3 proposals in the past 5 years for taxing the internet, either nation-wide or EU-wide, and this would make 4 (although very sneakily). I doubt that this proposal is anything less than a sneaky way to introduce an internet tax under the guise of "protecting the children" amongst other things.
I live in a European country. All I can say about this is that electricity prices here have been jacking up steadily. What you're forgetting is that electricity is more of a necessity than gasoline for most people. People who don't own cars, still own a refridgerator. To be honest, I can give up my car more easily than my fridge and my electric furnace. I'll have to take public transportation to work, which is nearly as expensive (not kidding), just more inconvenient but I'll manage.
However, jack up the electricity price a little more. My retired grandmother now suddenly faces yet more drain on her very small income for the things she needs TO SURVIVE. You're punishing consumers who are wasting 24$/year with standby mode.
Now go to the average corporation, where most people leave their computer on 24/7, most companies run AC 12 hours a day, where large machinery makes the power consumption of entire apartment blocks look like a small dot on the chart waaaaaay below. Charge them more. In the end, they'll charge it back to their consumers, I know. Don't punish the people with relatively small incomes, who don't cause the biggest harm in the first place.
This has very little to do with freedom to be honest. It's their tld, they've setup the rules. Don't agree with them, buy a .com name.
No, you should suffer the Terms Of Service of the registrar, like the ones many tld's enforce. Don't like it? Write to the registrar, then write to the government, after failing to yield results just buy the damned .com .
No problem for me. Hell, if Bob wants to enjoy his watermelons that way, or if he is gay, as long as he's not bothering me, have fun and safe sex (or not). But if the Irish tld organization doesn't want to sell him a domainname, it's their right. It's their service, and they have a TOS up that warns you about this.
Equal rights and tolerance are just arguments you'd use when you're disciminating against specific groups of people (homosexuals, race, ethnic groups, etc), in this case no pornography is allowed at all. Not heterosexual, not homosexual, not interracial, not interspecies, just plain old NOTHING. While I don't agree with the fact that you can't open a porn site under .ie (after all, what the world really needs is more porn on the internet), it's their tld. Buy a .com name if you don't agree.
Or as Scotty once said: "The harder they make the plumbing, the easier it is to clog up the drain"
My God!!! What is this world coming to? Where is the time a man could visit a site without having his IP, page and browser being logged, ans also rotated and compressed. Quick, call the EFF and the ACLU, I feel my rights are being violated. Sorry, doorbell, brb it's the FBI
Man, I wish I had modpoints right now :)
Yes, while we're at it, let's add a captcha about quantum physics. The idea of a captcha is to keep bots out, and get people in with little hassle. The moment you're going to make captchas more difficult than typing a few letters and numberrs, you're locking out potential "visitors" to your site (using visitors here loosely, because most of the time it's people who leave comments, or some form of input on your site). You don't want to scare away real users by asking them the sum of 2+2, let alone quantum physics.
I think we're facing a problem (just like with e-mail), where we're playing a cat-and-mouse game all the time. Spammers adapt to the anti-spam measures, either by adapting their software or in this case (although I find this very extreme) by using more manpower. Adapting the software means that eventually anti-spam will have countermeasures, perpetuating the cat-and-mouse game. The second one is more difficult to solve, and most viable readily available solutions make the thing you're protecting more difficult to use.
Captchas already annoy me... I've come to look at them as a necessary evil, but to be honest, they don't score high on my coolness-chart. Imagine how i'd feel about them if they became harder, by adding obscure cultural references (eg Who the hell is Dan Quayle? (Yes, I know, but as a European this isn't common knowledge))
Ah yes, I've always said those cases were accidents waiting to happen. I try to avoid those things as much as I can, because you know that before you close it, you'll end up with a nice cut on a very irritating place like your fingers.
what's even worse is that these cases usually aren't very tough. I once accidently dropped something heavy on a friends PC, resulting in a huge dent in the case. I don't need to tell you how upset she was to find her 12.95 euro case dented, and ended up "undenting" it with a large hammer, which incidentally was the most fun thing I had done on her PC.
Don't buy those cases, unless you appreciate being cut. Spend 10 euro extra for a good case.