A rating system is not censorship. The books are still published, and still available.
No they aren't "still published." Ratings convince publishers to edit for content in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For example. there has not been a rated-R super-hero movie since 2009, and there are none currently in production either.
Not all subjects are fine at all ages. Reading some topics, or viewing some materials at too young an age really can harm a child psychologically, introduce them to concepts their mind isn't mature enough to handle yet and the results can be quite harmful.
No sensible judge concerned with the dignity of his office would issue such a ridiculous gag order for twitter users. It's barely one step above ordering people to stop gossiping in pubs.
The output device is better suited to arranging the various streams of data than the decoder. Just as your DVD player doesn't choose where you position your speakers if you can hear, it shouldn't choose how you display your subtitles if you're deaf. They're not inherently part of the video. See also the difference between HTML+CSS+included files and a pre-rendered BMP of everything.
+1 Right there. I watch a lot of foreign films and my display will do 2.35:1 native. Its such a PITA when the subs are in the letterboxing rather than in the picture.
The moral? Never attribute to malice something that can be explained by sheer incompetence.
They are not exclusive. In fact, it seems to be a common play nowadays-- a company is incompetent in some costly area , say customer service. But by being incompetent they actually make money, for example a bunch of people with minor billing problems call in to get them corrected but they experience dropped calls, long hold times, voice-mail hell, etc. So some percentage of them just give up and pay the bogus charges because its not worth their time to put up with the incompetent customer service. That's a big win for the company - they save on staffing costs and they get to overcharge a portion of their customers.
It certainly isn't hard to imagine comcast-NBC doing the same thing - so what if they lose connectivity to lesser well-known parts of the internet? They've practically got a monopoly and so as long as facebook and google still work, most people will just put up with it, if they even notice. After all, that's what you've been doing yourself.
I might be mixing Lyons up with some other big-name proponent of SCO, but didn't he also blame his failure to think critically on slashtards? Something about how all the vociferousness just made him want to double-down rather than actually apply any critical thinking?
An FOIA request will be denied for obvious reasons, its rather silly that AP even would consider pushing the issue.
That's bullshit. Just because they will probably lose doesn't mean they shouldn't try. Their point that the photos document an event of enormous historical significance is 100% on the mark. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors involved, but as far as a news reporting organization is concerned, historical significance trumps just about everything else. They wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't try every means at their disposal to acquire the photos for publication.
I just wish they were more willing to stand up for those ideals when it came to the terms for "embedded" reporters and a whole host of other pansy-ass news reporting they've committed over the last decade.
if the FOIA says they have to be released then they have to be released; the president does not have a choice. . . nobody is above the law.
Except that's not what the FOIA says. In fact, the FOIA has all kinds of exceptions that can be used to deny a FOIA request - all part of "the law."
personally i dont want to see the photos.
I don't want to see the photos either and I think a government decision to release them now would just be trophy waving of the lowest order. But I do fully support the AP's argument that they are of enormous historical significance. I'd be fine with them being declassified in ~10 years from now, preferably sooner if al qaeda's irrelevance continues to accelerate.
A friend once bought a laser printer in the US (60Hz) and took it to New Zealand (50Hz). The power supply handled the 120v to 240v issue, but the motor that fed the paper through the system couldn't handle the frequency difference so that when he printed, the image on the pages was compressed because the paper moved too slowly.
To riff on your post - there are firefox addons that significantly reduce, if not outright kill, these cookie-less tracking techniques. Given your knowledge of the problem, I think you are aware of the addons, but for anyone else reading along who wants to start to take control back themselves rather than rely on the political process to come up with a "compromise":
noscript - http://noscript.net/ Noscript is the heavy-hitter, with all of the settings turned up to the max, no javascript gets executed from any site and it won't even try to access those tracking sites like facebook and google analytics, much less pull in javascript code from them. But, running with that configuration can make the web a harsh and unlivable place due to all of the useful javascript that gets blocked too.
ghostery - http://www.ghostery.com/ Ghostery specifically blocks when one page pulls in javascript and other "bugs" from those tracking sites. It will even give you a quick list of the trackers on each page when it loads.
I use noscript with most, but not quite all, javascript blocked in conjunction with ghostery to keep guys like facebook and doubleclick/google from tracking me. Of course I block all cookies and do other things too, those two are just the most pertinent to the discussion.
So even with an opt-out, sure you might not, say, see any ads on a website once you've logged in. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're still tracking you and collecting data silently in the background.
That problem has become the number one reason why I won't pay for any web services. I give them money but I can't trust them not to turn around and use the additional information that usually comes with payment (full name, street address and the state of being actively ogged into the website for starters) to stalk me even more than they do the non-paying users.
Ironically, anonymous cash would really help to restore trust here.
Crypto stuff relying on gigundous keys would be a no-brainer, but where else could it be economical?
Maybe RAID computations. Block-level data-deduplication is starting to catch on and that needs to hash every block written to disk. i bet that could benefit from a GPU but the userland overhead may be enough to kill the practicality, at least for anything but long streaming writes.
You can blame a home owner for not putting a good lock on their door but the person that breaks in should still go to jail. Blaming the victim is just lame.
Except that Sony is the one who started the misplaced blame game here.
What Sony did was roughly the same as blaming a home invasion on some kid who egged their house. At that point Sony forfeited the victim sympathy card.
And for Firefox users there is Better Privacy [mozilla.org].
Actually, Firefox 4 supports this as well, out of the box.
FWIW - and it's worth it to me - Better Privacy provides better control in that I can set duration for the cookie. Mine are deleted after 5 minutes of last access. That works for sites like youtube that store the volume setting in the flash cookie, but still gives pretty good protection against flash cookies that might be misused due to lasting until I exit firefox (something I only do once or twice a month).
So why doesn't Microsoft sue? Because it would be a public relations nightmare - just as it was for SCO.
Perhaps you aren't aware that MS funded SCO's lawsuit. SCO was just a proxy for MS. Nothing to stop MS from "selling" the patents in question to some patent troll and engaging in another proxy lawsuit.
There has not been a single documented case of you making poopie, anywhere, any time. Therefore I can conclude that you MUST be full of shit. Isn't logic wonderful?
I am not surprised that you are one to pop up with the logical fallacy that an absence of evidence is actually conclusive proof. You want to accuse people of being endangered by wikileaks? Then you need to back that shit up with more than self-serving speculation.
Yes, when people die in the aftermath of the removal of corruption it's not at all the fault of the people abusing their power in the first place. Good thing you aren't an American because you have far more in common with the ideals of the DPRK than with ours.
"But despite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."
This isn't a reputable newspaper that tries to make sure they don't cause people to get killed by releasing information
Actually it is exactly that. For almost a year now, everything Wikileaks has published has been vetted by professional newspaper editors like those at the NY Times, the Guardian in the UK, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France, etc. Some of newspapers have changed over time, but in all cases top tier newspapers have been doing the work to keep the leaks from getting people killed. That's the main reason the documents have been coming out in a trickle rather than one big data-dump.
Furthermore, there has not been a single documented case of anyone being killed because they were "outted" by wikileaks.
His proposal involves locking an account identifier to a specific merchant. VCNs don't do this
Clearly you weren't paying attention. Either that or you are silly enough to think that locking to the first merchant to post a charge is meaningfully different from locking it to an arbitrary merchant.
Orbiscom's technology is called InControl, and is a method for locking a given card into certain usage rules, such as geographical limitations, amount limitations, and time period limitations.
Whatever. I reversed the flash app for ShopSafe that generates the numbers and orbiscom's name was all over it just as their press releases claimed responsibility for MBNA/BoA, Citi, Discover and Amex's implementations. If they didn't "invent" it they certainly productized far beyond anyone else.
Such a system already exists. It was developed by an irish company called Orbiscom which was recently bought-out by Mastercard. It's got different names - disposable credit cards, one-time use credit cards, Controlled Payment Numbers, etc. Bank of America call's theirs ShopSafe, Citibank calls theirs Virtual Account Numbers. I believe PayPal and Discover have their programs too -- all based on Orbiscom's technology.
It works pretty much exactly the way you described - you log into your account, generate a new CC# with a maximum limit and expiration date that you specify. Then the first merchant account that posts a charge to the number becomes the only merchant account that post any more charges to that number. So even if the number does get stolen, it isn't any good to the thieves. Other than those limitations, for all intents and purposes, it is just a regular credit card. Most merchants can't even tell the difference.
I've been using ShopSafe for well over a decade now and have never had a fraudulent charge. The only problems I've had have been when the merchant is sloppy and double-charges with the intent of cancelling the first charge - Parts-express.com is the only merchant that I know which does that for all of their transactions and fixing it was simple enough - I just double the max limit on the CC#.
Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Blame the SWAT-ification of the police. Tons of federal money for SWAT but nowhere near enough actual criminals that require that sort of response. So you've got a bunch of expensive people sitting around doing nothing; in order to justify their continued existence management deploys them on ever more trivial work just to be able to say they are being used and deserve to be funded next year.
Since when? Around here you don't need a license to own a firearm.
Plenty of states do require you to have a license to own a firearm but yes, technically it is up to the individual state's laws. Just like requiring a driver's license is also technically up to the individual state's laws.
While driving is a privilege, combining these does not make it a criminal activity.
Driving is not a privilege. It is a right, under the broad umbrella of the right to travel freely. If you want to compare it to something that is inarguably a right due to being explicitly enshrined in the Bill of Rights, look at guns. You need a license to own a gun. That license can be revoked as a criminal penalty. Driving is pretty much the same.
Slashdot Mirror
A rating system is not censorship. The books are still published, and still available.
No they aren't "still published." Ratings convince publishers to edit for content in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For example. there has not been a rated-R super-hero movie since 2009, and there are none currently in production either.
Not all subjects are fine at all ages. Reading some topics, or viewing some materials at too young an age really can harm a child psychologically, introduce them to concepts their mind isn't mature enough to handle yet and the results can be quite harmful.
That, btw, is nothing more than truthy folklore.
No sensible judge concerned with the dignity of his office would issue such a ridiculous gag order for twitter users. It's barely one step above ordering people to stop gossiping in pubs.
Don't be silly, that's what ASBOs are for.
OK, that's a gag, but this is real.
actually, the Disney capability of running trademarks and copyrights forever, and purchasing laws to enable this is standard slashdot fare.
Indeed, Disney's well known from taking from the public domain only to permanently copyright the result so as to never give back.
Trademarking "Seal Team Six" is just more of the same, but easier for the hoi polloi to identify as dirty pool.
Not to shill or anything, but any discussion of HDMI (or cables in general) wouldn't be complete without someone mentioning monoprice.com:
Here's their page of HDMI cable pricing where a 50ft hdmi cable is less than $35.
Percussive Maintenance.
The output device is better suited to arranging the various streams of data than the decoder. Just as your DVD player doesn't choose where you position your speakers if you can hear, it shouldn't choose how you display your subtitles if you're deaf. They're not inherently part of the video. See also the difference between HTML+CSS+included files and a pre-rendered BMP of everything.
+1 Right there. I watch a lot of foreign films and my display will do 2.35:1 native. Its such a PITA when the subs are in the letterboxing rather than in the picture.
The moral? Never attribute to malice something that can be explained by sheer incompetence.
They are not exclusive. In fact, it seems to be a common play nowadays-- a company is incompetent in some costly area , say customer service. But by being incompetent they actually make money, for example a bunch of people with minor billing problems call in to get them corrected but they experience dropped calls, long hold times, voice-mail hell, etc. So some percentage of them just give up and pay the bogus charges because its not worth their time to put up with the incompetent customer service. That's a big win for the company - they save on staffing costs and they get to overcharge a portion of their customers.
It certainly isn't hard to imagine comcast-NBC doing the same thing - so what if they lose connectivity to lesser well-known parts of the internet? They've practically got a monopoly and so as long as facebook and google still work, most people will just put up with it, if they even notice. After all, that's what you've been doing yourself.
I might be mixing Lyons up with some other big-name proponent of SCO, but didn't he also blame his failure to think critically on slashtards? Something about how all the vociferousness just made him want to double-down rather than actually apply any critical thinking?
An FOIA request will be denied for obvious reasons, its rather silly that AP even would consider pushing the issue.
That's bullshit. Just because they will probably lose doesn't mean they shouldn't try. Their point that the photos document an event of enormous historical significance is 100% on the mark. That doesn't mean there aren't other factors involved, but as far as a news reporting organization is concerned, historical significance trumps just about everything else. They wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't try every means at their disposal to acquire the photos for publication.
I just wish they were more willing to stand up for those ideals when it came to the terms for "embedded" reporters and a whole host of other pansy-ass news reporting they've committed over the last decade.
if the FOIA says they have to be released then they have to be released; the president does not have a choice. . . nobody is above the law.
Except that's not what the FOIA says. In fact, the FOIA has all kinds of exceptions that can be used to deny a FOIA request - all part of "the law."
personally i dont want to see the photos.
I don't want to see the photos either and I think a government decision to release them now would just be trophy waving of the lowest order. But I do fully support the AP's argument that they are of enormous historical significance. I'd be fine with them being declassified in ~10 years from now, preferably sooner if al qaeda's irrelevance continues to accelerate.
A friend once bought a laser printer in the US (60Hz) and took it to New Zealand (50Hz). The power supply handled the 120v to 240v issue, but the motor that fed the paper through the system couldn't handle the frequency difference so that when he printed, the image on the pages was compressed because the paper moved too slowly.
To riff on your post - there are firefox addons that significantly reduce, if not outright kill, these cookie-less tracking techniques. Given your knowledge of the problem, I think you are aware of the addons, but for anyone else reading along who wants to start to take control back themselves rather than rely on the political process to come up with a "compromise":
noscript - http://noscript.net/
Noscript is the heavy-hitter, with all of the settings turned up to the max, no javascript gets executed from any site and it won't even try to access those tracking sites like facebook and google analytics, much less pull in javascript code from them. But, running with that configuration can make the web a harsh and unlivable place due to all of the useful javascript that gets blocked too.
ghostery - http://www.ghostery.com/
Ghostery specifically blocks when one page pulls in javascript and other "bugs" from those tracking sites. It will even give you a quick list of the trackers on each page when it loads.
I use noscript with most, but not quite all, javascript blocked in conjunction with ghostery to keep guys like facebook and doubleclick/google from tracking me. Of course I block all cookies and do other things too, those two are just the most pertinent to the discussion.
So even with an opt-out, sure you might not, say, see any ads on a website once you've logged in. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're still tracking you and collecting data silently in the background.
That problem has become the number one reason why I won't pay for any web services. I give them money but I can't trust them not to turn around and use the additional information that usually comes with payment (full name, street address and the state of being actively ogged into the website for starters) to stalk me even more than they do the non-paying users.
Ironically, anonymous cash would really help to restore trust here.
Crypto stuff relying on gigundous keys would be a no-brainer, but where else could it be economical?
Maybe RAID computations. Block-level data-deduplication is starting to catch on and that needs to hash every block written to disk. i bet that could benefit from a GPU but the userland overhead may be enough to kill the practicality, at least for anything but long streaming writes.
So do you think such a kid with a history of vandalism and making threats to the home owner wouldn't be the first person they would look at?
The first person they would look at simply because he's standing right there with an egg in hand? Sure.
The first person they would blame publicly? No, not at all.
That is just common sense which just seems totally absent from Slashdot today.
Pot, kettle, bam.
You can blame a home owner for not putting a good lock on their door but the person that breaks in should still go to jail.
Blaming the victim is just lame.
Except that Sony is the one who started the misplaced blame game here.
What Sony did was roughly the same as blaming a home invasion on some kid who egged their house. At that point Sony forfeited the victim sympathy card.
And for Firefox users there is Better Privacy [mozilla.org].
Actually, Firefox 4 supports this as well, out of the box.
FWIW - and it's worth it to me - Better Privacy provides better control in that I can set duration for the cookie. Mine are deleted after 5 minutes of last access. That works for sites like youtube that store the volume setting in the flash cookie, but still gives pretty good protection against flash cookies that might be misused due to lasting until I exit firefox (something I only do once or twice a month).
So why doesn't Microsoft sue? Because it would be a public relations nightmare - just as it was for SCO.
Perhaps you aren't aware that MS funded SCO's lawsuit. SCO was just a proxy for MS. Nothing to stop MS from "selling" the patents in question to some patent troll and engaging in another proxy lawsuit.
There has not been a single documented case of you making poopie, anywhere, any time. Therefore I can conclude that you MUST be full of shit. Isn't logic wonderful?
I am not surprised that you are one to pop up with the logical fallacy that an absence of evidence is actually conclusive proof. You want to accuse people of being endangered by wikileaks? Then you need to back that shit up with more than self-serving speculation.
Also: http://www.anorak.co.uk/267106/politicians/wikileaks-killed-1300-people-and-counting.html
Yes, when people die in the aftermath of the removal of corruption it's not at all the fault of the people abusing their power in the first place. Good thing you aren't an American because you have far more in common with the ideals of the DPRK than with ours.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/taliban+hunt+wikileaks+outed+afghan+informers/3727667.html
Seems like you are plenty willing to take terrorists at their word, until it no longer serves your purposes. It was an empty threat then and it still is today.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/officials-may-be-overstating-the.html
"But despite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."
This isn't a reputable newspaper that tries to make sure they don't cause people to get killed by releasing information
Actually it is exactly that. For almost a year now, everything Wikileaks has published has been vetted by professional newspaper editors like those at the NY Times, the Guardian in the UK, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France, etc. Some of newspapers have changed over time, but in all cases top tier newspapers have been doing the work to keep the leaks from getting people killed. That's the main reason the documents have been coming out in a trickle rather than one big data-dump.
Furthermore, there has not been a single documented case of anyone being killed because they were "outted" by wikileaks.
His proposal involves locking an account identifier to a specific merchant. VCNs don't do this
Clearly you weren't paying attention. Either that or you are silly enough to think that locking to the first merchant to post a charge is meaningfully different from locking it to an arbitrary merchant.
Orbiscom's technology is called InControl, and is a method for locking a given card into certain usage rules, such as geographical limitations, amount limitations, and time period limitations.
Whatever. I reversed the flash app for ShopSafe that generates the numbers and orbiscom's name was all over it just as their press releases claimed responsibility for MBNA/BoA, Citi, Discover and Amex's implementations. If they didn't "invent" it they certainly productized far beyond anyone else.
Such a system already exists. It was developed by an irish company called Orbiscom which was recently bought-out by Mastercard.
It's got different names - disposable credit cards, one-time use credit cards, Controlled Payment Numbers, etc. Bank of America call's theirs ShopSafe, Citibank calls theirs Virtual Account Numbers. I believe PayPal and Discover have their programs too -- all based on Orbiscom's technology.
It works pretty much exactly the way you described - you log into your account, generate a new CC# with a maximum limit and expiration date that you specify. Then the first merchant account that posts a charge to the number becomes the only merchant account that post any more charges to that number. So even if the number does get stolen, it isn't any good to the thieves. Other than those limitations, for all intents and purposes, it is just a regular credit card. Most merchants can't even tell the difference.
I've been using ShopSafe for well over a decade now and have never had a fraudulent charge. The only problems I've had have been when the merchant is sloppy and double-charges with the intent of cancelling the first charge - Parts-express.com is the only merchant that I know which does that for all of their transactions and fixing it was simple enough - I just double the max limit on the CC#.
Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Blame the SWAT-ification of the police. Tons of federal money for SWAT but nowhere near enough actual criminals that require that sort of response. So you've got a bunch of expensive people sitting around doing nothing; in order to justify their continued existence management deploys them on ever more trivial work just to be able to say they are being used and deserve to be funded next year.
Since when? Around here you don't need a license to own a firearm.
Plenty of states do require you to have a license to own a firearm but yes, technically it is up to the individual state's laws. Just like requiring a driver's license is also technically up to the individual state's laws.
While driving is a privilege, combining these does not make it a criminal activity.
Driving is not a privilege. It is a right, under the broad umbrella of the right to travel freely.
If you want to compare it to something that is inarguably a right due to being explicitly enshrined in the Bill of Rights, look at guns.
You need a license to own a gun.
That license can be revoked as a criminal penalty.
Driving is pretty much the same.