There are plenty of people who are into light to severe masochism out there, easily in the thousands.
I don't think it's masochism. Sometimes I just want to watch a laughably bad movie. I don't know why, I just do. When I was a kid, I used to love those Saturday afternoon kung fu movies on our local independent station. I didn't just go to see Battlefield Earth, I actually paid good money to see it in a theater. Not even as a matinee. To this day, I'll often watch whatever crapbomb is on Syfy on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. If you think Uwe Boll is bad, try watching Atomic Twister sometime.
I dunno, it's just fun to sit there and watch a movie thinking, "Whoa, that's three miles past bad." It's also fun to talk about them with my friends. "Oh yeah? You thought that was bad? Let me tell you what I saw last Saturday!"
By the way, I don't know why you lumped Mortal Kombat with those types of movies. Did it win an Oscar? Hell no, but it was still actually kind of neat and exciting to watch. It actually had some redeeming qualities to it. The fight scene with Subzero was awesome. I thought Linden Ashby's (Johnny Cage) fight with Goro was cool, too. The start of it was hilarious. Anyway, there's a difference between mindless fun action and just plain bad. It was Mortal Kombat. What exactly were you expecting?
Goatse Security notified AT&T of the breach and the security hole was closed.
Then later in the article:
AT&T sent us a statement...: "The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T."
Personally, I think that AT&T is a sack of douchebags that doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and when choosing who to believe between AT&T and just about anyone else, I'm inclined to believe anyone else. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that someone did indeed notify AT&T, but now they're trying to cover their ass and make it sound like they somehow proactively found the hole themselves.
Okay, I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'm a bit embarrassed to actually ask any of my Indian colleagues this to their face and thought that the faceless strangers of Slashdot might be able to help.
Is this phrase, "please do the needful," some kind of Indian colloquialism? Back in the day, I suppose that a lot of Indians learned English from the British and passed it down through the generations, but I've never heard a British person use this phrase. My Indian colleagues use it a lot. I mean, like all the time when they're asking you for something. It's a phrase that I honestly don't think I've heard anyone of another ethnic background use. I'm not racist; I don't really care if they use the phrase because I understand what they are saying, although it did catch me off guard the first few times I heard it used in conversation.
I guess I'm just looking for some insight because I'm genuinely curious what its etymology is. Is it a direct translation of a common Indian-language phrase? Is it just one of those idioms that develop over time in a region? Is it something that was popularized by one or a small group of people at some point in the distant past?
You know, I don't have mod points right now, but if I did, I'd mod you up. I've never considered the possibility of a company like Google just outright buying a carrier. Now that it's been brought up, I think it's a damn good one. I wonder if that's really doable? If so, I'd much rather it be Google. I get the feeling that if it's Apple, we might end up even more screwed than we already are. Plus, although I consider the iPhone and iPad hardware to be superior, I consider Android and Chrome to be better platforms. In the long run, once mobile hardware becomes way more commoditized than it is right now, I suspect that Google will clean Apple's clock. Owning the ability to give out data plans with their devices and services would definitely give Google a leg up in the mobile platform war.
They wouldn't even have to buy all carriers. AT&T and Verizon, if I'm not mistaken, both have reach to over 97% of all Americans. Buying either one would suffice. Buying Verizon would get them the superior network (wireless and wired) with its 3G and FiOS coverage. Buying AT&T would have the advantage of putting them in a position to totally screw Apple. (I'd love to see Steve Jobs's face when he realized that his primary competitor is now in a position to butt f*ck him.)
But best of all, we'd finally have a carrier run by a company that has, at least in my opinion, consistently looked out for the consumer, a company that "gets it," the concept that win-win scenarios between consumers and companies is the best long-term strategy.
When I watch a news station, I expect to see news, not commentary. Now, I know that it's not going to be straight, hard-core news 24 hours a day, but still, you have to understand that when I do watch a news station, it's usually because I'm killing some down time and just flipping channels, or there's something going on that I want to know more about.
So if I have the choice between having a mainstream news station that may not do quite as good a job at reporting the news and that has bits of commentary (CNN) versus a "news" station that has craptons of commentary with a bit of really good news reporting mixed in (Fox), I'll pick the former almost every time. I don't have time to sift through the silliness to get to what I want to know.
But really, when I want news news, I usually just go somewhere like BBC or NPR on the Internet. In spite of claims to the contrary, I've personally found that Fox is anything but "fair and balanced" in their reporting. Let's be honest, sensationalism trumps any political leanings any of these stations have. Anyone who has been around as long as I have knows that it doesn't matter which side of the spectrum they fall on when it comes to getting the numbers.
I'm just not interested in it anymore and don't want to foot the bill, regardless of whether or not it benefits the public
Well, too damn bad. You don't get to have it both ways. Guess what. I've been paying for your butt for years. And your philosophy is that now that you've sucked off the teat of government for however many years you've been around, and whether you admit it or not, likely will for many years to come, you don't want to fulfill the implicit obligation that it entailed to pitch in to help provide those services for others?
Yeah, I don't subscribe to this philosophy. Have you ever bought something on credit? If so, once you got whatever it was you bought, did you explain to the credit company that you're just not interested in making payments any more? How did that work out for you? Because that's exactly how our government works. We pay to make sure that basic infrastructure services are available from you from the time you're born. We make sure you have electricity, running water, education, roads to travel on, clean air, more education, safety regulations to make sure your employer doesn't try to kill you with malice or gross negligence (because I assure you that they operate on the same philosophy you do). We protect your home from robbers, put out fires if you're dumb enough to smoke in bed, pay for your medical care if you're indigent, subsidize research to improve your quality of life, provide a means of redress if someone else causes you harm, defend you from terrorists (using one of the largest Socialist organizations in the world, incidentally), and do so many other things for you that it would be impossible to list them all here.
And now, after all of that, you don't want to foot the bill?
...the public doesn't actually do anything useful with all the information they're given
Maybe you don't do anything useful with the information. I do. Stop trying to project your own shortcomings on everyone else.
Hell, maybe if the tax dollars used for the Eisenhower interstate system had gone to private R&D I might have my flying car by now.
We tried it that way once. We ended up with things like systemic oppression, children working in factories, gross health and safety violations in the workplace, and... Aw, hell, never mind. You just keep dreaming that things would be better without a government. Better yet, travel to some places that, as the other poster pointed out, does not have a strong government. There are many places that you can live free of U.S. government tyranny. Let me know how that works out for you. I think I like it better our way.
People like you kill me. You're so delusional, thinking that you're so self-sufficient, that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, that government is just dragging your down, an obstacle to be overcome. You have no friggin' clue.
Without copyright law, what incentive would Microsoft have to continue to spend billions annually on software development and R&D?
Oh, and one more thing. Maybe I don't want Microsoft spending billions annually on software development and R&D. Personally, I don't like 15 or 20 companies being the gatekeepers of new technology because they're the only ones rich enough to throw that kind of money around. Instead of Microsoft spending a billion dollars to research 1000 things, why not have 100 companies spend 10 million each, each researching 10 things? Not only would you get a better diversity of research with lots of different ideas, but that also helps 100 companies make new and interesting things instead of just one. Maybe 100 CEOs can become multimillionaires off of their products instead of one guy becoming a multibillionaire.
Without copyright law, what incentive would Microsoft have to continue to spend billions annually on software development and R&D?
This question was specifically addressed in the talk. To dig deeper, maybe Microsoft doesn't need to spend billions annually on software development and R&D. It's very likely that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Cisco, etc. are all spending billions doing more or less the same research. The first one who gets it basically invalidates the billions that all the others have spent, at least for 20 years. If Microsoft could just openly rip off, say, Apple, then maybe some of those billions they're spending on reinventing Apple's wheel could be spent improving Apple's wheel instead. Better yet, maybe Joe Kernelhacker could take the wheels that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, etc. have created, tweak it a bit, and come up with something that the rest could in turn incorporate, or that he could even sell and help share the wealth.
Also, look at, for example, Adobe's new feature in Photoshop whereby you can remove stuff from pictures just by painting a boundary around it, and it fills in the background. Now, I'll agree that you shouldn't be able to just copy the code directly from Photoshop and use it in your own application wholesale. But as the laws are set up now, you can't even implement your own version of this feature, and that's absolutely horrible for innovation. Hell, just look what's going on with the H.264 battle. Not only are some people saying you can't use that codec--by far, the most popular and well-supported codec on the Internet--to make your own videos without paying up to MPEG LA, but some have issued veiled threats that the whole process is patented down so heavily that making any software that can stream video at all will get you sued into oblivion. And they're probably right.
The point of that tangent is that without software patents and copyright laws being extremely relaxed, maybe Microsoft can take some of that money they spend on lawyers (a very significant amount, by the way) and divert it to R&D because they no longer have to worry about being sued and paying millions to some schmuck who, it turns out, has a patent on wiping their butts. (Not to mention the millions in royalties they're having to pay to the other schmuck who has the patent on using toilet paper.)
Also, the fact that Adobe has the first product on the market that can do the out-of-sight out-of-mind trick is great advertising. Without software patents, will everyone replicate this feature in their products? Eventually, of course, yes. It's a cool feature. But it's obviously something that's not easy to replicate. It's not like Microsoft can just go to their development gurus and say, "Make this happen." If they incorporated it into Paint, it would probably take them months or even years to figure out a way to replicate the effect, during which time Adobe will be selling copies of Photoshop like gangbusters. This was what she was referring to with the slide on making it hard to replicate.
Have you ever used a piece of software that was blazing fast at something? Unless it was open source, did you really know exactly how it was fast? Was it because they came up with some clever way to use less resources? Did they come up with some clever algorithm that churns the numbers faster than everyone else? Did they just work really hard to remove all the bloat from their code, or write it to use resources on your machine at a lower level? There are literally millions of ways to make something work better. I just don't think that IBM will be ripping stuff off left and right from Oracle because it's not like they're going to instantly just know what to rip off.
They take their Windows disc and make copies for all their friends, and some company in a Southeast Asian country starts mass-producing it...
No, I'm not being facetious. This is not a passive-aggressive way of saying you're wrong, I simply do not know.
I've seen a lot of people talking about MPEG LA, including veiled threats against people who use Theora and WEBM, but I haven't heard much from MPEG LA itself. Where exactly is this "official stance" you speak of? I'd like to read it for myself.
It's my understanding that what MPEG LA does is gather patents that apply to encoding, license them out, and pay the owners of said patents. They also indemnify any manufacturers and/or users in case any of its patents are deemed to be invalid or infringing on other patents. Now, I 100% agree that we need to do away with these patents altogether. I also 100% agree that given that they exist, we should be use patent-free software so that the whole issue would be moot.
But given that they exist and that the issue isn't moot, has MPEG LA actually threatened to go after someone who violates one of these patents, or that creating any compressed video violates their patents? I've always viewed MPEG LA not so much as the enforcement arm of evil, but more like the record keepers of evil. Hell's accountants, so to speak.
A disappointment... Only if you let it.
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 2, Informative
But Lost presented itself as something different. It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it. Viewers were encouraged to try to understand the riddles of the island.
"It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it" != "There will be answers to everything mostly spoonfed to you." Being a sci-fi nut, I'm painfully aware of unintended plot holes and inconsistencies. Every show has them. Well, every show that networks let last longer than three episodes. But just because a few things aren't explained or even (gasp!) don't make sense over the course of six years doesn't make it a terrible show. It makes the writers human and (gasp!) sometimes a little overambitious.
If you want, you can sit there and dwell on every single nitpicky little inconsistency, and yes, if you choose to do so, the show will likely suck for you. Or you could accept that there will probably be some things that you're going to have to imagine some rational explanations for yourself and even some (gasp!) continuity goofs and enjoy the show for the things that do make sense.
How does Kate end up at the funeral dead if she managed to fly off the island alive?
For the record, this was one of the things that was explicitly explained. It's been explained here. If you still don't understand, that's not the writers' fault; you must have missed it somehow.
The writers of Lost promised that they had a full story in mind when the series started, that they were not just making it up as they went along. That either wasn't true or they were some of the worst writers in history.
...Or they're just like almost every other writer that has ever existed. They knew how they wanted the story to start, they knew how they wanted the story to end, they had some major plot points in mind along the way, and they knew in detail some key elements of the story. The rest was just filling in the spaces, fleshing out the details. Sometimes in doing so, some minor details got escalated and merited their own development. Sometimes in doing so, some minor continuity errors were introduced.
Any writer who tells you that they know the "full story" six years in advance is exaggerating, and not necessarily in a bad way. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to be doing at work next week, but stuff comes up and plans change, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot based on interaction with others (e.g. the writers think of something new and interesting to pursue) or outside influences (e.g. a old writer leaves and a new writer is hired).
You're not missing much. This is a poor clone of the game. It LOOKS good but plays horrible (compared to the arcade original). The ghosts are stupid (run in circles instead of after you), the maze has tunnels that don't match up creating dead ends, and the ghosts stay blue forever. I didn't think it possible but it appears somebody programmed a worse game than Atari Pac-Man (which looks crap but is fun to play)
...And yet it's still very likely cooler than anything you've ever accomplished.
Seriously, I'm sure that the engineers at Google had about 2,741,288 more productive things they could have been doing than this, but they did it anyway because it was fun. It was probably some guy that that churned it out in his spare time. It sure is easy to cast stones at other people's endeavors from your comfortable armchair, isn't it? Tell you what, get off your butt and do something you think is neat in your spare time, let us pick it apart for being "meh" compared to professionally developed products, and then we'll see if you are so quick to criticize again.
Yes, you nailed the premise of this item exactly, directly relating the linked article to how seeing tired old cliches like posting, "Isn't this supposed to be a news site?" in every Idle post is so tedious.
Good job, man, I hope others catch your ironic agreement with the post!
...if they are unable to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, that's a bad thing. I don't understand why people think this is a good thing.
Because if they are able to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, then other people can gain access to your phone before it can be remotely wiped. 99.999% of those people do not have your best interest at heart. Probably 99.9% of them are thieves and criminals trying to screw you over. 0.099% of them are law enforcement officials overstepping the bounds of what is allowed by law. (But it would cost you tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees to prove it in court, and you'd risk the chance that you get an idiot judge who sets a bad precedent for everyone else.)
If we're lucky, 0.001% of them have anything to do with the president or counterfeiters, but really, I think that's being generous.
The problem isn't really with xkcd. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of idiots out there who think they're as funny as xkcd. If the Wikipedia administrators only had to deal with the once-in-a-blue-moon comic vandalism by Randall Munroe or Stephen Colbert, this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, when these idiots take it upon themselves to try to convince their buddies that they are as funny as the people who really are funny, it makes life awful difficult for people trying to maintain a useful site.
I'm GLAD they take themselves seriously. If we didn't have folks working on behalf of Wikipedia that did, looking up information on anything would be precisely as useful and informative as looking up information on malamanteau.
If Chevy was actively advertising how many illegal DVDs you can fit in the car...
Well, that's just it. I've looked pretty thoroughly at Limewire's web site, and I'm just not seeing any reference at all to illegal downloads. In fact, the site looks on the surface to be pretty vanilla corporate-type design. Maybe the judge has some kind of smoking gun I'm just not seeing, but as far as I know, Limewire has never advertised itself as a product you should use to download files illegally. (But granted, being a commercial implementation of something I can get for free without adware infestation, I've never looked too closely into it.)
...and DVD bootlegging in Impalas ran rampant maybe.
Well, another analogy I can think of is the sale and use of so-called "Saturday night special" handguns. In spite of their prevalent use in criminal activities, a lawsuit against them was dismissed in 2003, and they remain largely unregulated today.
Not saying that they should or shouldn't, I'm just saying that it seems to me that it's awful inconsistent to pass summary judgment--as in, they didn't even get a trial--when other companies that specialize in providing stuff that is foreseeably used quite often, if not mostly, in illegal activities gets a free pass. Hell, if I wanted to, I could even buy a set of lockpicks and go to town. (Or more to the point, go to your house.)
Since I really don't want to bother reading 59 pages just to get the answer to this question, does it address how Limewire "encouraged" people to download copyrighted material? Is it simply because it allows people to make whatever they have available, and that just happened to be what some people make available?
Does it explain how this is different from, say, an automobile? After all, cars can be used to transport just about anything. Illegal things like unlicensed guns, drugs, teenagers across state lines, stolen merchandise, illegal aliens, bodies of people you've just murdered, cases of laundered cash for organized crime bosses, etc. They can also be used to transport legal stuff, like my ass back and forth to work every day.
I guess what I'm really not getting is, if Joe Schmo gets caught using his 1979 Impala to haul illegal copies of Free Willy DVDs, will the RIAA/MPAA sue Chevrolet?
So? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize he was a TEENAGER, that makes it all right. I forgot that teenagers are invincible, and that as adults we should look back fondly on the stupid ass things we did that should have, by all rights, caused us to get killed and take others with us.
Don't be a putz. What the GP described wasn't an accident. He wasn't "going a bit too fast," it was willfully and criminally negligent. "Hey, let's go toss 50-pound weights off a skyscraper an laugh about how close they come to bashing someone's skull in. It will be awesome! Afterward, we can run down the street and shoot guns in random directions!" Ah, those zany teenage shenanigans.
Again, this wasn't awesome. The GP was a dumbass, period, end of story.
Well, except for the part that you very likely could have killed yourself and two other people, possibly more. You were extremely lucky, as 99 times out of 100, when you lose control of your car while swerving, EXTREMELY bad things happen. The fact that this once it didn't doesn't make this an awesome story, it makes it a bit of a sad one to hear that your stupidity was rewarded.
What you did shouldn't be glorified. These maneuvers are exciting to watch on television and in the movies when performed by professionals with years of training and under extremely controlled conditions (and, incidentally, medical personnel immediately ready in case of accidents, some of which have killed even those professionals). But frankly, it sounds to me like the guy who was pissed off wasn't the asshole. I would have been pissed off too, and would have rather taken the damn bus than ride with you again. Maybe after two or three people you know are killed in car wrecks, you'll look back on this story and "awesome" will no longer be the word you use to describe it.
Seriously. I feel like you're saying, "I played Russian Roulette with FIVE bullets loaded in the gun, and I won! It was awesome!" No, it wasn't awesome. You were a dumbass.
Nice the way you glossed over that whole bit about Google (and Corporate America in general) basically handing the American Gov't anything they ask for information-wise on a silver platter.
Yeah, keep wearing that tinfoil hat.
...avoided by me keeping my mail server here, OUTSIDE OF THE U.S.
HAHAHAHAHA!!! You really think that if the U.S. wanted access to your e-mails that it wouldn't get it? Dude, have you been, I dunno, in a coma or something for the past two decades? I certainly don't mean to imply this is a good thing because it bothers me, too, but dude, turn on the news some day and watch what happens to countries that openly defy the United States. It's not pretty. Unless, of course, you live somewhere like China, North Korea, or Iran. But if you live there, well, I think that the U.S. getting to your data is the least of your problems.
Whoboy, but that was good for a laugh.
I'll keep my emails here, in our organization's datacenter, behind our own firewall.
Then you will be, as I said before, merely a meat shield between the government of wherever you live and your precious e-mail servers should your government decide that for whatever reasons it wants to see what you're up to.
You know, the United States has this reputation right now for being some massive, evil Big Brotherish empire. I'll even concede that with some of the laws on the books, it could be. But let's be realistic for a second. Unless you're some kind of international arms dealer or something, you're less than a bug on the United States's windshield. I really don't get why people think that the U.S. government would spy on Seamus McGee half a world away, but that their own government is completely sin-free and would never dream of doing something like that. Do you really believe that if Hillary Clinton wrote a nice letter to your prime minister/president/head hancho, they wouldn't bend over backwards to help out? Again, if you live in China, North Korea, or Iran, you're probably right. Life must be really good there.
I don't know whereyou got your IT credentials from...
The school where they teach you that any Internet presence, even a front-facing relay server, can be and has been hacked. Maybe you've heard of it, it's also the place where people learn that dipshits like you who think you know everything are one sniffer and a router hop away from having all of your communications laid bare.
The idea of entrusting any significant amount of our Corporate information in the hands of an extra-territorial corporation is anathema to us
The idea of entrusting any significant amount of our corporate information in the hands of an arrogant prick who think he's smarter than an extra-territorial corporation that specializes in handling such corporate information is anathema to me. God knows there are many legitimate reasons to host mail services locally, but if you showed up in my office with that line of bullshit, I'd conclude that you are either dangerously arrogant, hopelessly stupid, or most likely, looking for job security at the expense of best practices of the company and toss your ass out on the street.
Fair enough, but really, I still think that an individual has much less chance of standing up to a government than a corporation does. The question is, would the corporation want to stand up to the government? In the case of Google, they've proven well enough to me that they are indeed willing to go to bat to build up the trust of its users. Obviously, you'll have to decide for your particular situation and based on your own knowledge and experience.
And really, my point isn't that Google is awesome, though I really do think they are. My main point is that there has to be a rational process by which the risk versus reward is evaluated. You can't just shirk away from involving third parties because there's an element of risk. Sometimes it's much riskier to do nothing or even to try to do it yourself.
Your mail may go through a third-party server...they are not responsible for storage/retention of your mails.
At the same time, there's nothing technologically speaking stopping them from storing all of our e-mails for whatever nefarious purpose they have in mind.
If Gmail were to suddenly crash and burn, most of the people using it would lose all their mails.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there. The odds of Gmail crashing and burning are orders of magnitude less than the odds of your own mail servers crashing and burning and losing all of your e-mail. That's kind of the point of having stuff "in the cloud" to begin with.
Second of all, what's to say that Symantec might not have some kind of bug in their software that, for example, randomly loses some small percentage of e-mails? Unless it was either a large number or a replicable issue, we'd probably be none the wiser, and if just the right e-mail got lost, it could have a major business impact. The point is, as I said before, any unlikely scenario you can dream up, I can dream up a counterexample that works in Gmail's favor.
like all webmail providers...there is the risk of other people hacking into your account.
So what do you use instead? If you use an ISP's POP account, your problem is no different. If you host your own mail server so that the mail is never stored on the Internet, then by definition that server has to have presence on the Internet, and again, the risk is still there. The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't. In other words, I'd trust Google to prevent people from hacking into my account more than I'd trust myself.
Oh and by the way, for corporate accounts, Google doesn't use those silly security questions to let you reset your password. If you lose it, you'll have to get one of the managers of your corporate Gmail accounts to reset it for you. The specific vector of attack you mentioned is a non-issue.
For me Gmail is a no-go for anything sensitive - actually even for personal mail - simply because it's storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy, especially privacy of non-nationals.
Do you also run your own ISP, with complete control over the communication chain once a packet hits the country in which you live? Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read. And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy. Who do you think is in a better position to protect your privacy if the police go busting down doors, a HUGE multinational company protecting its reputation and with significant pull in the international political community, or you, Joe Schmo, little more than a meat shield between that oppressive government and your precious e-mail server?
I'll say it yet again, because it bears repeating. Any evil thing you can dream up that Google may do with your e-mail, I can dream up something else that someone else in the chain can do with your e-mail. As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent, what's to stop government spies from simply breaking into you house whil
Don't Google also need to improve their reliability and guarantee data integrity? People have lost their email in the past due to Gmail disasters, with no backups to recover it from.
Yeah, this would be a pretty big news story. I'm not saying that I'm 100% sure that Google has never lost an e-mail, but I'm inclined to think that as someone who keeps pretty good tabs on the tech industry, that would have made my radar. And the simple truth is that I remember absolutely nothing about this.
Without some kind of citation or proof, I'm going to assume that this claim is totally bogus. But by all means, please do prove me wrong.
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I don't think it's masochism. Sometimes I just want to watch a laughably bad movie. I don't know why, I just do. When I was a kid, I used to love those Saturday afternoon kung fu movies on our local independent station. I didn't just go to see Battlefield Earth, I actually paid good money to see it in a theater. Not even as a matinee. To this day, I'll often watch whatever crapbomb is on Syfy on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. If you think Uwe Boll is bad, try watching Atomic Twister sometime.
I dunno, it's just fun to sit there and watch a movie thinking, "Whoa, that's three miles past bad." It's also fun to talk about them with my friends. "Oh yeah? You thought that was bad? Let me tell you what I saw last Saturday!"
By the way, I don't know why you lumped Mortal Kombat with those types of movies. Did it win an Oscar? Hell no, but it was still actually kind of neat and exciting to watch. It actually had some redeeming qualities to it. The fight scene with Subzero was awesome. I thought Linden Ashby's (Johnny Cage) fight with Goro was cool, too. The start of it was hilarious. Anyway, there's a difference between mindless fun action and just plain bad. It was Mortal Kombat. What exactly were you expecting?
...According to AT&T. Someone is lying. From TFA:
Then later in the article:
Personally, I think that AT&T is a sack of douchebags that doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground, and when choosing who to believe between AT&T and just about anyone else, I'm inclined to believe anyone else. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that someone did indeed notify AT&T, but now they're trying to cover their ass and make it sound like they somehow proactively found the hole themselves.
Okay, I know this is a bit off-topic, but I'm a bit embarrassed to actually ask any of my Indian colleagues this to their face and thought that the faceless strangers of Slashdot might be able to help.
Is this phrase, "please do the needful," some kind of Indian colloquialism? Back in the day, I suppose that a lot of Indians learned English from the British and passed it down through the generations, but I've never heard a British person use this phrase. My Indian colleagues use it a lot. I mean, like all the time when they're asking you for something. It's a phrase that I honestly don't think I've heard anyone of another ethnic background use. I'm not racist; I don't really care if they use the phrase because I understand what they are saying, although it did catch me off guard the first few times I heard it used in conversation.
I guess I'm just looking for some insight because I'm genuinely curious what its etymology is. Is it a direct translation of a common Indian-language phrase? Is it just one of those idioms that develop over time in a region? Is it something that was popularized by one or a small group of people at some point in the distant past?
You know, I don't have mod points right now, but if I did, I'd mod you up. I've never considered the possibility of a company like Google just outright buying a carrier. Now that it's been brought up, I think it's a damn good one. I wonder if that's really doable? If so, I'd much rather it be Google. I get the feeling that if it's Apple, we might end up even more screwed than we already are. Plus, although I consider the iPhone and iPad hardware to be superior, I consider Android and Chrome to be better platforms. In the long run, once mobile hardware becomes way more commoditized than it is right now, I suspect that Google will clean Apple's clock. Owning the ability to give out data plans with their devices and services would definitely give Google a leg up in the mobile platform war.
They wouldn't even have to buy all carriers. AT&T and Verizon, if I'm not mistaken, both have reach to over 97% of all Americans. Buying either one would suffice. Buying Verizon would get them the superior network (wireless and wired) with its 3G and FiOS coverage. Buying AT&T would have the advantage of putting them in a position to totally screw Apple. (I'd love to see Steve Jobs's face when he realized that his primary competitor is now in a position to butt f*ck him.)
But best of all, we'd finally have a carrier run by a company that has, at least in my opinion, consistently looked out for the consumer, a company that "gets it," the concept that win-win scenarios between consumers and companies is the best long-term strategy.
When I watch a news station, I expect to see news, not commentary. Now, I know that it's not going to be straight, hard-core news 24 hours a day, but still, you have to understand that when I do watch a news station, it's usually because I'm killing some down time and just flipping channels, or there's something going on that I want to know more about.
So if I have the choice between having a mainstream news station that may not do quite as good a job at reporting the news and that has bits of commentary (CNN) versus a "news" station that has craptons of commentary with a bit of really good news reporting mixed in (Fox), I'll pick the former almost every time. I don't have time to sift through the silliness to get to what I want to know.
But really, when I want news news, I usually just go somewhere like BBC or NPR on the Internet. In spite of claims to the contrary, I've personally found that Fox is anything but "fair and balanced" in their reporting. Let's be honest, sensationalism trumps any political leanings any of these stations have. Anyone who has been around as long as I have knows that it doesn't matter which side of the spectrum they fall on when it comes to getting the numbers.
Well, too damn bad. You don't get to have it both ways. Guess what. I've been paying for your butt for years. And your philosophy is that now that you've sucked off the teat of government for however many years you've been around, and whether you admit it or not, likely will for many years to come, you don't want to fulfill the implicit obligation that it entailed to pitch in to help provide those services for others?
Yeah, I don't subscribe to this philosophy. Have you ever bought something on credit? If so, once you got whatever it was you bought, did you explain to the credit company that you're just not interested in making payments any more? How did that work out for you? Because that's exactly how our government works. We pay to make sure that basic infrastructure services are available from you from the time you're born. We make sure you have electricity, running water, education, roads to travel on, clean air, more education, safety regulations to make sure your employer doesn't try to kill you with malice or gross negligence (because I assure you that they operate on the same philosophy you do). We protect your home from robbers, put out fires if you're dumb enough to smoke in bed, pay for your medical care if you're indigent, subsidize research to improve your quality of life, provide a means of redress if someone else causes you harm, defend you from terrorists (using one of the largest Socialist organizations in the world, incidentally), and do so many other things for you that it would be impossible to list them all here.
And now, after all of that, you don't want to foot the bill?
Maybe you don't do anything useful with the information. I do. Stop trying to project your own shortcomings on everyone else.
We tried it that way once. We ended up with things like systemic oppression, children working in factories, gross health and safety violations in the workplace, and... Aw, hell, never mind. You just keep dreaming that things would be better without a government. Better yet, travel to some places that, as the other poster pointed out, does not have a strong government. There are many places that you can live free of U.S. government tyranny. Let me know how that works out for you. I think I like it better our way.
People like you kill me. You're so delusional, thinking that you're so self-sufficient, that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, that government is just dragging your down, an obstacle to be overcome. You have no friggin' clue.
Oh, and one more thing. Maybe I don't want Microsoft spending billions annually on software development and R&D. Personally, I don't like 15 or 20 companies being the gatekeepers of new technology because they're the only ones rich enough to throw that kind of money around. Instead of Microsoft spending a billion dollars to research 1000 things, why not have 100 companies spend 10 million each, each researching 10 things? Not only would you get a better diversity of research with lots of different ideas, but that also helps 100 companies make new and interesting things instead of just one. Maybe 100 CEOs can become multimillionaires off of their products instead of one guy becoming a multibillionaire.
This question was specifically addressed in the talk. To dig deeper, maybe Microsoft doesn't need to spend billions annually on software development and R&D. It's very likely that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Cisco, etc. are all spending billions doing more or less the same research. The first one who gets it basically invalidates the billions that all the others have spent, at least for 20 years. If Microsoft could just openly rip off, say, Apple, then maybe some of those billions they're spending on reinventing Apple's wheel could be spent improving Apple's wheel instead. Better yet, maybe Joe Kernelhacker could take the wheels that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, etc. have created, tweak it a bit, and come up with something that the rest could in turn incorporate, or that he could even sell and help share the wealth.
Also, look at, for example, Adobe's new feature in Photoshop whereby you can remove stuff from pictures just by painting a boundary around it, and it fills in the background. Now, I'll agree that you shouldn't be able to just copy the code directly from Photoshop and use it in your own application wholesale. But as the laws are set up now, you can't even implement your own version of this feature, and that's absolutely horrible for innovation. Hell, just look what's going on with the H.264 battle. Not only are some people saying you can't use that codec--by far, the most popular and well-supported codec on the Internet--to make your own videos without paying up to MPEG LA, but some have issued veiled threats that the whole process is patented down so heavily that making any software that can stream video at all will get you sued into oblivion. And they're probably right.
The point of that tangent is that without software patents and copyright laws being extremely relaxed, maybe Microsoft can take some of that money they spend on lawyers (a very significant amount, by the way) and divert it to R&D because they no longer have to worry about being sued and paying millions to some schmuck who, it turns out, has a patent on wiping their butts. (Not to mention the millions in royalties they're having to pay to the other schmuck who has the patent on using toilet paper.)
Also, the fact that Adobe has the first product on the market that can do the out-of-sight out-of-mind trick is great advertising. Without software patents, will everyone replicate this feature in their products? Eventually, of course, yes. It's a cool feature. But it's obviously something that's not easy to replicate. It's not like Microsoft can just go to their development gurus and say, "Make this happen." If they incorporated it into Paint, it would probably take them months or even years to figure out a way to replicate the effect, during which time Adobe will be selling copies of Photoshop like gangbusters. This was what she was referring to with the slide on making it hard to replicate.
Have you ever used a piece of software that was blazing fast at something? Unless it was open source, did you really know exactly how it was fast? Was it because they came up with some clever way to use less resources? Did they come up with some clever algorithm that churns the numbers faster than everyone else? Did they just work really hard to remove all the bloat from their code, or write it to use resources on your machine at a lower level? There are literally millions of ways to make something work better. I just don't think that IBM will be ripping stuff off left and right from Oracle because it's not like they're going to instantly just know what to rip off.
Kids should never be exposed to the symbols $#*!. They should have &^@%ed those symbols out.
No, I'm not being facetious. This is not a passive-aggressive way of saying you're wrong, I simply do not know.
I've seen a lot of people talking about MPEG LA, including veiled threats against people who use Theora and WEBM, but I haven't heard much from MPEG LA itself. Where exactly is this "official stance" you speak of? I'd like to read it for myself.
It's my understanding that what MPEG LA does is gather patents that apply to encoding, license them out, and pay the owners of said patents. They also indemnify any manufacturers and/or users in case any of its patents are deemed to be invalid or infringing on other patents. Now, I 100% agree that we need to do away with these patents altogether. I also 100% agree that given that they exist, we should be use patent-free software so that the whole issue would be moot.
But given that they exist and that the issue isn't moot, has MPEG LA actually threatened to go after someone who violates one of these patents, or that creating any compressed video violates their patents? I've always viewed MPEG LA not so much as the enforcement arm of evil, but more like the record keepers of evil. Hell's accountants, so to speak.
I care.
"It claimed to have an underlying logic behind it" != "There will be answers to everything mostly spoonfed to you." Being a sci-fi nut, I'm painfully aware of unintended plot holes and inconsistencies. Every show has them. Well, every show that networks let last longer than three episodes. But just because a few things aren't explained or even (gasp!) don't make sense over the course of six years doesn't make it a terrible show. It makes the writers human and (gasp!) sometimes a little overambitious.
If you want, you can sit there and dwell on every single nitpicky little inconsistency, and yes, if you choose to do so, the show will likely suck for you. Or you could accept that there will probably be some things that you're going to have to imagine some rational explanations for yourself and even some (gasp!) continuity goofs and enjoy the show for the things that do make sense.
For the record, this was one of the things that was explicitly explained. It's been explained here. If you still don't understand, that's not the writers' fault; you must have missed it somehow.
...Or they're just like almost every other writer that has ever existed. They knew how they wanted the story to start, they knew how they wanted the story to end, they had some major plot points in mind along the way, and they knew in detail some key elements of the story. The rest was just filling in the spaces, fleshing out the details. Sometimes in doing so, some minor details got escalated and merited their own development. Sometimes in doing so, some minor continuity errors were introduced.
Any writer who tells you that they know the "full story" six years in advance is exaggerating, and not necessarily in a bad way. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to be doing at work next week, but stuff comes up and plans change, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot based on interaction with others (e.g. the writers think of something new and interesting to pursue) or outside influences (e.g. a old writer leaves and a new writer is hired).
...And yet it's still very likely cooler than anything you've ever accomplished.
Seriously, I'm sure that the engineers at Google had about 2,741,288 more productive things they could have been doing than this, but they did it anyway because it was fun. It was probably some guy that that churned it out in his spare time. It sure is easy to cast stones at other people's endeavors from your comfortable armchair, isn't it? Tell you what, get off your butt and do something you think is neat in your spare time, let us pick it apart for being "meh" compared to professionally developed products, and then we'll see if you are so quick to criticize again.
Yes, you nailed the premise of this item exactly, directly relating the linked article to how seeing tired old cliches like posting, "Isn't this supposed to be a news site?" in every Idle post is so tedious.
Good job, man, I hope others catch your ironic agreement with the post!
Because if they are able to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, then other people can gain access to your phone before it can be remotely wiped. 99.999% of those people do not have your best interest at heart. Probably 99.9% of them are thieves and criminals trying to screw you over. 0.099% of them are law enforcement officials overstepping the bounds of what is allowed by law. (But it would cost you tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees to prove it in court, and you'd risk the chance that you get an idiot judge who sets a bad precedent for everyone else.)
If we're lucky, 0.001% of them have anything to do with the president or counterfeiters, but really, I think that's being generous.
...And this is why we can't ever have anything nice.
The problem isn't really with xkcd. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of idiots out there who think they're as funny as xkcd. If the Wikipedia administrators only had to deal with the once-in-a-blue-moon comic vandalism by Randall Munroe or Stephen Colbert, this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, when these idiots take it upon themselves to try to convince their buddies that they are as funny as the people who really are funny, it makes life awful difficult for people trying to maintain a useful site.
I'm GLAD they take themselves seriously. If we didn't have folks working on behalf of Wikipedia that did, looking up information on anything would be precisely as useful and informative as looking up information on malamanteau.
Well, that's just it. I've looked pretty thoroughly at Limewire's web site, and I'm just not seeing any reference at all to illegal downloads. In fact, the site looks on the surface to be pretty vanilla corporate-type design. Maybe the judge has some kind of smoking gun I'm just not seeing, but as far as I know, Limewire has never advertised itself as a product you should use to download files illegally. (But granted, being a commercial implementation of something I can get for free without adware infestation, I've never looked too closely into it.)
Well, another analogy I can think of is the sale and use of so-called "Saturday night special" handguns. In spite of their prevalent use in criminal activities, a lawsuit against them was dismissed in 2003, and they remain largely unregulated today.
Not saying that they should or shouldn't, I'm just saying that it seems to me that it's awful inconsistent to pass summary judgment--as in, they didn't even get a trial--when other companies that specialize in providing stuff that is foreseeably used quite often, if not mostly, in illegal activities gets a free pass. Hell, if I wanted to, I could even buy a set of lockpicks and go to town. (Or more to the point, go to your house.)
Since I really don't want to bother reading 59 pages just to get the answer to this question, does it address how Limewire "encouraged" people to download copyrighted material? Is it simply because it allows people to make whatever they have available, and that just happened to be what some people make available?
Does it explain how this is different from, say, an automobile? After all, cars can be used to transport just about anything. Illegal things like unlicensed guns, drugs, teenagers across state lines, stolen merchandise, illegal aliens, bodies of people you've just murdered, cases of laundered cash for organized crime bosses, etc. They can also be used to transport legal stuff, like my ass back and forth to work every day.
I guess what I'm really not getting is, if Joe Schmo gets caught using his 1979 Impala to haul illegal copies of Free Willy DVDs, will the RIAA/MPAA sue Chevrolet?
So? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize he was a TEENAGER, that makes it all right. I forgot that teenagers are invincible, and that as adults we should look back fondly on the stupid ass things we did that should have, by all rights, caused us to get killed and take others with us.
Don't be a putz. What the GP described wasn't an accident. He wasn't "going a bit too fast," it was willfully and criminally negligent. "Hey, let's go toss 50-pound weights off a skyscraper an laugh about how close they come to bashing someone's skull in. It will be awesome! Afterward, we can run down the street and shoot guns in random directions!" Ah, those zany teenage shenanigans.
Again, this wasn't awesome. The GP was a dumbass, period, end of story.
Well, except for the part that you very likely could have killed yourself and two other people, possibly more. You were extremely lucky, as 99 times out of 100, when you lose control of your car while swerving, EXTREMELY bad things happen. The fact that this once it didn't doesn't make this an awesome story, it makes it a bit of a sad one to hear that your stupidity was rewarded.
What you did shouldn't be glorified. These maneuvers are exciting to watch on television and in the movies when performed by professionals with years of training and under extremely controlled conditions (and, incidentally, medical personnel immediately ready in case of accidents, some of which have killed even those professionals). But frankly, it sounds to me like the guy who was pissed off wasn't the asshole. I would have been pissed off too, and would have rather taken the damn bus than ride with you again. Maybe after two or three people you know are killed in car wrecks, you'll look back on this story and "awesome" will no longer be the word you use to describe it.
Seriously. I feel like you're saying, "I played Russian Roulette with FIVE bullets loaded in the gun, and I won! It was awesome!" No, it wasn't awesome. You were a dumbass.
Yeah, keep wearing that tinfoil hat.
HAHAHAHAHA!!! You really think that if the U.S. wanted access to your e-mails that it wouldn't get it? Dude, have you been, I dunno, in a coma or something for the past two decades? I certainly don't mean to imply this is a good thing because it bothers me, too, but dude, turn on the news some day and watch what happens to countries that openly defy the United States. It's not pretty. Unless, of course, you live somewhere like China, North Korea, or Iran. But if you live there, well, I think that the U.S. getting to your data is the least of your problems.
Whoboy, but that was good for a laugh.
Then you will be, as I said before, merely a meat shield between the government of wherever you live and your precious e-mail servers should your government decide that for whatever reasons it wants to see what you're up to.
You know, the United States has this reputation right now for being some massive, evil Big Brotherish empire. I'll even concede that with some of the laws on the books, it could be. But let's be realistic for a second. Unless you're some kind of international arms dealer or something, you're less than a bug on the United States's windshield. I really don't get why people think that the U.S. government would spy on Seamus McGee half a world away, but that their own government is completely sin-free and would never dream of doing something like that. Do you really believe that if Hillary Clinton wrote a nice letter to your prime minister/president/head hancho, they wouldn't bend over backwards to help out? Again, if you live in China, North Korea, or Iran, you're probably right. Life must be really good there.
The school where they teach you that any Internet presence, even a front-facing relay server, can be and has been hacked. Maybe you've heard of it, it's also the place where people learn that dipshits like you who think you know everything are one sniffer and a router hop away from having all of your communications laid bare.
The idea of entrusting any significant amount of our corporate information in the hands of an arrogant prick who think he's smarter than an extra-territorial corporation that specializes in handling such corporate information is anathema to me. God knows there are many legitimate reasons to host mail services locally, but if you showed up in my office with that line of bullshit, I'd conclude that you are either dangerously arrogant, hopelessly stupid, or most likely, looking for job security at the expense of best practices of the company and toss your ass out on the street.
But hey, good luck with that.
Fair enough, but really, I still think that an individual has much less chance of standing up to a government than a corporation does. The question is, would the corporation want to stand up to the government? In the case of Google, they've proven well enough to me that they are indeed willing to go to bat to build up the trust of its users. Obviously, you'll have to decide for your particular situation and based on your own knowledge and experience.
And really, my point isn't that Google is awesome, though I really do think they are. My main point is that there has to be a rational process by which the risk versus reward is evaluated. You can't just shirk away from involving third parties because there's an element of risk. Sometimes it's much riskier to do nothing or even to try to do it yourself.
At the same time, there's nothing technologically speaking stopping them from storing all of our e-mails for whatever nefarious purpose they have in mind.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there. The odds of Gmail crashing and burning are orders of magnitude less than the odds of your own mail servers crashing and burning and losing all of your e-mail. That's kind of the point of having stuff "in the cloud" to begin with.
Second of all, what's to say that Symantec might not have some kind of bug in their software that, for example, randomly loses some small percentage of e-mails? Unless it was either a large number or a replicable issue, we'd probably be none the wiser, and if just the right e-mail got lost, it could have a major business impact. The point is, as I said before, any unlikely scenario you can dream up, I can dream up a counterexample that works in Gmail's favor.
So what do you use instead? If you use an ISP's POP account, your problem is no different. If you host your own mail server so that the mail is never stored on the Internet, then by definition that server has to have presence on the Internet, and again, the risk is still there. The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't. In other words, I'd trust Google to prevent people from hacking into my account more than I'd trust myself.
Oh and by the way, for corporate accounts, Google doesn't use those silly security questions to let you reset your password. If you lose it, you'll have to get one of the managers of your corporate Gmail accounts to reset it for you. The specific vector of attack you mentioned is a non-issue.
Do you also run your own ISP, with complete control over the communication chain once a packet hits the country in which you live? Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read. And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy. Who do you think is in a better position to protect your privacy if the police go busting down doors, a HUGE multinational company protecting its reputation and with significant pull in the international political community, or you, Joe Schmo, little more than a meat shield between that oppressive government and your precious e-mail server?
I'll say it yet again, because it bears repeating. Any evil thing you can dream up that Google may do with your e-mail, I can dream up something else that someone else in the chain can do with your e-mail. As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent, what's to stop government spies from simply breaking into you house whil
Yeah, this would be a pretty big news story. I'm not saying that I'm 100% sure that Google has never lost an e-mail, but I'm inclined to think that as someone who keeps pretty good tabs on the tech industry, that would have made my radar. And the simple truth is that I remember absolutely nothing about this.
Without some kind of citation or proof, I'm going to assume that this claim is totally bogus. But by all means, please do prove me wrong.