That's crazy cool. It's exactly what regular people need to be able to create something with 3D printing. Even though we nerds don't always realize, the percentage of people who are willing to learn some 3D software and mess with it in order to get a few trinkets is tiny. But give people something simple, even if it's not as efficient or powerful, and they will get creative. That's why Minecraft beats Second Life.
What's this? a clickbait? a troll? really? You have something to say, just say it. Don't make me click a video. I can read faster than most people can talk, so write it out, or I just don't give a fuck. I might care after I know at least the gist of what you want to say, but "hey, this dude has something interesting to say" isn't getting me to listen. There's a billion people on the Internet who all think they have something important to say.
aggravating is putting it nicely, I'd equate them to cancer - once you're in their database, it's almost impossible to get rid of them.
I never had an account, but people I know apparently had. When it started to get annoying, I told them to stop, then I told them to fuck off, then I told them "stop or lawyer" - that apparently finally worked.
I know. In the lower parts of my original post I talked about the why.
there aren't really any tribes in the West anymore, none that function anyway.
tribal, not tribes. We don't have well-defined tribes anymore, but our social structures are still the same, just with more fluidity. The basic principle, however, still works: Those close to me are humans, those remote frome me are sub-humans.
You can see this almost every evening in the news, when they say "there was an aircraft crash in XYZ today, 97 people dead, 2 of them (insert your country here)". 95 people are a statistical number, 2 people matter. Why? Because they are "one of us" and not "one of them".
Your disgust will probably be taken as evidence of being crazy.
And my atheism will be grounds for execution, I know. But truth isn't a democratic principle and voting on the value of pi doesn't change it.
Military targets exclusively is the white end, intentionally bombing civilians is the other. But that's not binary. Every time you deploy a bomb, there is a risk of what is euphemistically called "collateral damage". The more you are willing to accept that, the more you move right on the spectrum. And in most wars, people move very, very far along this line, until it's basically "ok, there's civilians in the area, too bad for them". And some people move further.
It's not that easy. Good guy / bad guy only works on TV.
With all due respect to the victims and their families and friends - this isn't world news. In quite a few parts of the world, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, that's a small note somewhere on page 5 of the local newspaper.
Also, to put things into perspective: That is almost exactly the number of people who die in car accidents every hour in the USA. Not just in this hour, every hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
So it's not news-worthy for the body count and not for the fact that there was a bomb or two. It's news-worthy because it happened in front of cameras and you don't need much to turn it into a shocking headline. It has emotional impact, due to the rarity (on US soil) and the close-to-home factor, aka "omg! I could've been there!".
And, most importantly and most disgustingly, we are still thinking in tribal norms. Our own dead and wounded are more important than the foreign ones.
I stopped using watches maybe 15 years ago. I haven't owned a wristwatch since, and the only clocks in my house are the ones built in to something else (my phone has one, for example).
I don't miss it at all. In public, there are more than enough watches to catch my train or whatever, and for my private life, things are a lot more relaxed this way.
For that reason, I fail to see what the smart-watch hype is all about. I intentionally removed a distraction years ago, why should I add it back with more bells & whistles?
A lot of people are playing games. Just look at the iOS App Store. While many of these people play browser games and minesweeper, there's quite a lot of PC sales outside the hyped gamer charts.
Angry Birds wasn't the first "must have" casual game, and many of its predecessors were PC games.
Re:Windows8 can be tamed, but why should you have
on
Windows 8 Killing PC Sales
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Apple started this nonsense
Except that on OS X the hot corners are fully optional. I don't use them myself, for example. I know where to configure them if I ever want to, but like you I just don't see the point and so I don't, and everything works just fine without.
That's the difference. Giving a user options is fine. Forcing the user unto something that you think is great just sucks, because users are different from each other and definitely from the developers.
(1) Web (95% of needs) (2) Office (5% of needs, and even then, only at a very rudimentary level)
Uh, what?
You are talking about home users and ignore games? The #1 reason people are not switching to OS X and Linux in droves, because most games still are windows-only, while you can get all major browsers for other operating systems, and office applications as well, heck even MS Office on OS X ?
That leads to a big question: with everything from Google Glass to cars' own dashboard screens offering visual 'distractions' like dynamic maps, can (and should) courts take a more active role in defining what people are allowed to do with technology behind the wheel? Or are statutes like California's hopelessly outdated?"
Flamebait? Troll? Clueless?
It is not the courts job to take an active role in defining things. Read up on this nifty little thing called seperation of powers. There is a thing called the legislature. It is their job.
Two, there is a huge difference between visual distractions in your field of vision and things that require you to take your eyes off the road and re-focus on something else. If you don't immediately understand that, then you've never driven a car at speed and frankly, you shouldn't be allowed to.
Three, are the statutes hopelessly outdated? Crazy pills? There's not much of a difference between reading on your smartphone and reading in a book while driving, just because one of them is new and fancy and electronic. I don't think the kid you run over will care if you were checking your Twitter account or your hand-written shopping list. You didn't have your eyes on the road and that's what matters.
It depends on the testing. I've run security tests. Most of the time, you do notify the people involved and plan with them, especially if you are testing live systems. You don't want to interrupt service, after all.
However, sometimes you want to test humans and procedures as well. In those cases, you might notify only management, not the technical people involved. You definitely notify someone, but not necessarily the people who will notice your attack first.
Friends of mine do social engineering pentesting. That's the best example, because notifying people just that such a thing is going on already changes the results. So they will usually carry a letter signed by the CEO and the security chief that states a) these guys are legit and b) call me to verify. And, btw., people who don't do b) upon seing the letter fail the test because anyone could carry a forgery. But, back to the point, in most cases, the CEO and security chief and maybe two people in legal who handled the contract are the only people within the target company that know about the testing.
Same, but to a lesser extend, with other security tests. If you want to test the firewall, you can tell the firewall guy. But if you want to test the firewall guy, you can't. You tell his manager or if the corp has a seperate security chain-of-command, the next-higher-up in the security report chain, so he can calm him down and congratulate him when he storms into the office saying "we're under attack". But if you want to find out if he'll notice at all, you obviously can't tell him beforehand.
Seriously, you are asking the wrong question on the wrong forum. Your legal department or your lawyer should handle this.
The issue is not technical. The question is which laws and contracts bind you and the other side, and which of these regulate their activities towards you.
For example, their security tests could be a part of their HIPAA or SOX implementation, and your contract states that you are included. Or there might be a seperate clause in the contract, SLA or other document.
Find out or better - let someone who is a professional in this field find out - where this is written down and what it does and doesn't allow. You might find out that you are already breaking your contract by blocking their probes. Or you might find out that they aren't allowed to probe and are thus in breach of several cybercrime laws. But you won't know until someone who knows the legalese has checked.
Disclaimer: I used to be the Senior Manager IT Compliance for a mid-sized corporation. I now run my own company.
Maybe in thirty to fifty years (*) we'll get there, but....
We thought we'd be there in 10 years. That was 1984. No, not the book, the year that Cyc was started.
So, it's already been almost 30 years since we first thought we'd be there. I'm sure we'll look at this problem again in another 30 years and think again that we'll be there really soon now.
The moment your computer becomes public (however limited that "public" is), it is a goner. It is like asking how to secure your computer after it was compromised.
That's bullshit and you are paranoid.
Multi-user systems were originally designed in a time where people simply didn't have their own computer. Seperating users from each other and from the system is pretty much what they were designed to do.
Now if we talk about windows, the game changes because it was originally (DOS times) designed as a single-user system, much like the old Mac OS. But in 2013 I would assume everyone is either running some Unix (i.e. Linux, OS X or some BSD) or some windows NT-relative. (with NT being basically the bastard child of OS/2 and VMS, I'd consider it a multi-user system even though I've not seen the source).
Now in the most paranoid of worlds, someone with physical access to your computer for a long enough time can certainly compromise it. If you have friends like that, you need new friends. (I have enough friends who could do it, but wouldn't, and that's the important part - if your friendship isn't based on trust, then why are you friends?)
This. One more info, if you have enabled fast user switching, then it's two mouse clicks to change to the guest account, but the guest can't switch back without entering your password, so enabling a friend to check his mail is basically a 5-second matter.
Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.
Which is why you don't just send them money. You set up a "consulting company" based in some tax haven and then retain their services for an unusually high fee. If you do it right, you can even gain tax benefits for it. Now your money is outside the US and thus the IRS scope and you can deposit it into your shell company.
All of this has been obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells not sold to some lobby group.
The reasons that nuclear is so disliked is not polution, it is danger. When a coal or gas plant blows up, tough luck for anyone inside. When a nuclear plant blows up, tough luck for everyone within many miles.
That, and the fact that we still don't know what to do with the radioactive waste.
It's not about living in the past, it is about not worrying what to keep and what to store. And the message you think most important today is likely to be completely worthless in five years, while you would love to still have that other message you thought unimportant back then.
I keep everything so I can decide today which old message I consider important. It is very rarely that I venture into the archive, but I have needed messages two years old at times.
I fail to see the problem. I have mails going back a decade or more all stored in maildir on an imap server. Done. I've changed clients several times, servers several times, no problem.
So what's the problem that makes an "ask slashdot" necessary?
That's crazy cool. It's exactly what regular people need to be able to create something with 3D printing. Even though we nerds don't always realize, the percentage of people who are willing to learn some 3D software and mess with it in order to get a few trinkets is tiny. But give people something simple, even if it's not as efficient or powerful, and they will get creative. That's why Minecraft beats Second Life.
You can tie up scammers on their home turf.
You also tie yourself up. Unless you have nothing else to do with your time, it's still a net loss for you.
Or is it just a waste of time?
That, at best.
Old saying: There's always a sucker in a game of poker. Look around the table. If you don't see him, it's you.
Never play criminals on their home turf. They are doing this for a living, you don't. Guess who's better at the game?
mod parent up.
What's this? a clickbait? a troll? really? You have something to say, just say it. Don't make me click a video. I can read faster than most people can talk, so write it out, or I just don't give a fuck. I might care after I know at least the gist of what you want to say, but "hey, this dude has something interesting to say" isn't getting me to listen. There's a billion people on the Internet who all think they have something important to say.
aggravating is putting it nicely, I'd equate them to cancer - once you're in their database, it's almost impossible to get rid of them.
I never had an account, but people I know apparently had. When it started to get annoying, I told them to stop, then I told them to fuck off, then I told them "stop or lawyer" - that apparently finally worked.
It seems the world disagrees with you.
I know. In the lower parts of my original post I talked about the why.
there aren't really any tribes in the West anymore, none that function anyway.
tribal, not tribes. We don't have well-defined tribes anymore, but our social structures are still the same, just with more fluidity. The basic principle, however, still works: Those close to me are humans, those remote frome me are sub-humans.
You can see this almost every evening in the news, when they say "there was an aircraft crash in XYZ today, 97 people dead, 2 of them (insert your country here)". 95 people are a statistical number, 2 people matter. Why? Because they are "one of us" and not "one of them".
Your disgust will probably be taken as evidence of being crazy.
And my atheism will be grounds for execution, I know. But truth isn't a democratic principle and voting on the value of pi doesn't change it.
The world is rarely this black and white.
Military targets exclusively is the white end, intentionally bombing civilians is the other. But that's not binary. Every time you deploy a bomb, there is a risk of what is euphemistically called "collateral damage". The more you are willing to accept that, the more you move right on the spectrum. And in most wars, people move very, very far along this line, until it's basically "ok, there's civilians in the area, too bad for them". And some people move further.
It's not that easy. Good guy / bad guy only works on TV.
My thoughts.
With all due respect to the victims and their families and friends - this isn't world news. In quite a few parts of the world, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, that's a small note somewhere on page 5 of the local newspaper.
Also, to put things into perspective: That is almost exactly the number of people who die in car accidents every hour in the USA. Not just in this hour, every hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
So it's not news-worthy for the body count and not for the fact that there was a bomb or two. It's news-worthy because it happened in front of cameras and you don't need much to turn it into a shocking headline. It has emotional impact, due to the rarity (on US soil) and the close-to-home factor, aka "omg! I could've been there!".
And, most importantly and most disgustingly, we are still thinking in tribal norms. Our own dead and wounded are more important than the foreign ones.
Similar attitude, different reason:
I stopped using watches maybe 15 years ago. I haven't owned a wristwatch since, and the only clocks in my house are the ones built in to something else (my phone has one, for example).
I don't miss it at all. In public, there are more than enough watches to catch my train or whatever, and for my private life, things are a lot more relaxed this way.
For that reason, I fail to see what the smart-watch hype is all about. I intentionally removed a distraction years ago, why should I add it back with more bells & whistles?
Don't confuse "gamer" with "plays games".
A lot of people are playing games. Just look at the iOS App Store. While many of these people play browser games and minesweeper, there's quite a lot of PC sales outside the hyped gamer charts.
Angry Birds wasn't the first "must have" casual game, and many of its predecessors were PC games.
Apple started this nonsense
Except that on OS X the hot corners are fully optional. I don't use them myself, for example. I know where to configure them if I ever want to, but like you I just don't see the point and so I don't, and everything works just fine without.
That's the difference. Giving a user options is fine. Forcing the user unto something that you think is great just sucks, because users are different from each other and definitely from the developers.
They want:
(1) Web (95% of needs)
(2) Office (5% of needs, and even then, only at a very rudimentary level)
Uh, what?
You are talking about home users and ignore games? The #1 reason people are not switching to OS X and Linux in droves, because most games still are windows-only, while you can get all major browsers for other operating systems, and office applications as well, heck even MS Office on OS X ?
That leads to a big question: with everything from Google Glass to cars' own dashboard screens offering visual 'distractions' like dynamic maps, can (and should) courts take a more active role in defining what people are allowed to do with technology behind the wheel? Or are statutes like California's hopelessly outdated?"
Flamebait?
Troll?
Clueless?
It is not the courts job to take an active role in defining things. Read up on this nifty little thing called seperation of powers. There is a thing called the legislature. It is their job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislature
Two, there is a huge difference between visual distractions in your field of vision and things that require you to take your eyes off the road and re-focus on something else. If you don't immediately understand that, then you've never driven a car at speed and frankly, you shouldn't be allowed to.
Three, are the statutes hopelessly outdated? Crazy pills? There's not much of a difference between reading on your smartphone and reading in a book while driving, just because one of them is new and fancy and electronic. I don't think the kid you run over will care if you were checking your Twitter account or your hand-written shopping list. You didn't have your eyes on the road and that's what matters.
It depends on the testing. I've run security tests. Most of the time, you do notify the people involved and plan with them, especially if you are testing live systems. You don't want to interrupt service, after all.
However, sometimes you want to test humans and procedures as well. In those cases, you might notify only management, not the technical people involved. You definitely notify someone, but not necessarily the people who will notice your attack first.
Friends of mine do social engineering pentesting. That's the best example, because notifying people just that such a thing is going on already changes the results. So they will usually carry a letter signed by the CEO and the security chief that states a) these guys are legit and b) call me to verify. And, btw., people who don't do b) upon seing the letter fail the test because anyone could carry a forgery. But, back to the point, in most cases, the CEO and security chief and maybe two people in legal who handled the contract are the only people within the target company that know about the testing.
Same, but to a lesser extend, with other security tests. If you want to test the firewall, you can tell the firewall guy. But if you want to test the firewall guy, you can't. You tell his manager or if the corp has a seperate security chain-of-command, the next-higher-up in the security report chain, so he can calm him down and congratulate him when he storms into the office saying "we're under attack". But if you want to find out if he'll notice at all, you obviously can't tell him beforehand.
Yes, but - it should be part of the agreement/contract and it should not come as a surprise.
Seriously, you are asking the wrong question on the wrong forum. Your legal department or your lawyer should handle this.
The issue is not technical. The question is which laws and contracts bind you and the other side, and which of these regulate their activities towards you.
For example, their security tests could be a part of their HIPAA or SOX implementation, and your contract states that you are included. Or there might be a seperate clause in the contract, SLA or other document.
Find out or better - let someone who is a professional in this field find out - where this is written down and what it does and doesn't allow. You might find out that you are already breaking your contract by blocking their probes. Or you might find out that they aren't allowed to probe and are thus in breach of several cybercrime laws. But you won't know until someone who knows the legalese has checked.
Disclaimer:
I used to be the Senior Manager IT Compliance for a mid-sized corporation. I now run my own company.
Maybe in thirty to fifty years (*) we'll get there, but....
We thought we'd be there in 10 years. That was 1984. No, not the book, the year that Cyc was started.
So, it's already been almost 30 years since we first thought we'd be there. I'm sure we'll look at this problem again in another 30 years and think again that we'll be there really soon now.
The moment your computer becomes public (however limited that "public" is), it is a goner. It is like asking how to secure your computer after it was compromised.
That's bullshit and you are paranoid.
Multi-user systems were originally designed in a time where people simply didn't have their own computer. Seperating users from each other and from the system is pretty much what they were designed to do.
Now if we talk about windows, the game changes because it was originally (DOS times) designed as a single-user system, much like the old Mac OS. But in 2013 I would assume everyone is either running some Unix (i.e. Linux, OS X or some BSD) or some windows NT-relative. (with NT being basically the bastard child of OS/2 and VMS, I'd consider it a multi-user system even though I've not seen the source).
Now in the most paranoid of worlds, someone with physical access to your computer for a long enough time can certainly compromise it. If you have friends like that, you need new friends. (I have enough friends who could do it, but wouldn't, and that's the important part - if your friendship isn't based on trust, then why are you friends?)
This. One more info, if you have enabled fast user switching, then it's two mouse clicks to change to the guest account, but the guest can't switch back without entering your password, so enabling a friend to check his mail is basically a 5-second matter.
Problem is, you'll need to get money into your account somehow. To do so will take a wire transfer that the IRS will be notified about. Going the other direction would also take a wire transfer, that the IRS will be notified about.
Which is why you don't just send them money. You set up a "consulting company" based in some tax haven and then retain their services for an unusually high fee. If you do it right, you can even gain tax benefits for it. Now your money is outside the US and thus the IRS scope and you can deposit it into your shell company.
All of this has been obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells not sold to some lobby group.
The reasons that nuclear is so disliked is not polution, it is danger. When a coal or gas plant blows up, tough luck for anyone inside. When a nuclear plant blows up, tough luck for everyone within many miles.
That, and the fact that we still don't know what to do with the radioactive waste.
They won't attack. So chill and stop acting crazy.
Because a show of arrogance is how you win the hearts of a population that has been told for decades that you are arrogant bastards?
It's not about living in the past, it is about not worrying what to keep and what to store. And the message you think most important today is likely to be completely worthless in five years, while you would love to still have that other message you thought unimportant back then.
I keep everything so I can decide today which old message I consider important. It is very rarely that I venture into the archive, but I have needed messages two years old at times.
I fail to see the problem. I have mails going back a decade or more all stored in maildir on an imap server. Done. I've changed clients several times, servers several times, no problem.
So what's the problem that makes an "ask slashdot" necessary?