"If it offends me, I want it banned for everyone." seems to be the mentality of so many.
This is so true it hurts. Somehow we've slipped into a society where people honestly believe that they have some natural or state-given right to not be offended. Just look at colleges and universities. The last bastions of intellectual thinking, lively debate, and radical ideas, right? Nope. There's no free speech on campuses anymore. You can't say whatever you like. If what you have to say is not politically correct, you get kicked out.
For a fun experiment, try this in the U.S.: ask a random person whether their government gives (or should give) them or their children the right to be protected from offensive material. I think you'd be shocked (perhaps offended, even?) how many people will answer in the affirmative. For extra fun, remind them that the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly gives every citizen the right to speak and communicate as offensively as they like. It's your job to shelter yourself from whatever you deem offense, not society's and certainly not the state.
I have a good friend who is normally quite liberal about most things, but has a pair of young daughters and thus strongly believes that every ISP should filter all Internet content by default. I've tried explaining to him what a bad idea this is from pretty much every angle, but he persists. And I wish he was the exception, but there are plenty of other people I've met or know who believe the same thing. It frustrates me because it's people like this that are turning my beloved country into a nanny state. The actions of the government lately have flushed the idea of capitalism down the toilet, I don't want to see the same thing happen to speech next.
Mr. Blunt is NOT ranting. He actually does put forth a good argument that authors should be paid for the audio rights for their books if an audio production is being sold by a third party.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that argument.
From where I sit, it just sounds like the Author's Guild is pissed that someone invented--or more offensively, sold--a technology that undermines one of their revenue streams. That's life, that's business, that's capitalism. Deal with it. The correct response isn't to bring your sob story to the public and politicians and hope that they pity you enough to prop up your outmoded business model for a few extra years. The correct response is to adjust your way of doing business such that both you and your customers benefit from this new technology.
I guess that's too much to ask for today's businesses?
And though I do enjoy The Consumerist, I wish they wouldn't post random complaints like this that are accompanied with no proof, links, or documentation. Everyone rallies around the OP and if you try to speak up and point out that there's only one side of the story being presented, you're drowned in a sea of "GTFO" and the like.
I work for a company with a very vocal customer base and it's hilarious the important details that people will leave out (or outright lies that they'll include) when publicly denigrating the company on forums. Sometimes it's because they don't agree with our policies, sometimes they're using it as leverage to get something for free, and sometimes they just want the attention. I suspect this XBox case is in line with the latter, whether or not we're hearing all the details.
Since The Consumerist was recently purchased by Consumer's Union, I hope to see these kinds of posts become fewer and fewer. There's nothing wrong with a legitimate beef against a corporation, but it's silly that you can just send along an unsubstantiated email and get it on the front page of a popular blog by the end of the day.
In particular, it might be useful to pick one of the OSS FS and see it dominate the industry. All it would take is several large companies to decide to change NOW, and the rest would follow.
If it were that easy, the following would all be household names:
LinuxDevices constantly showcases new and fascinating Linux-based hardware like this. Everything from phones to tablets to embedded systems. The problem is that few of these ever seem to make it to market and the ones that do are usually only available to companies who can buy them by the thousands. The remainder that are within the reach of the average hobbyist don't stack up price-wise to more pedestrian solutions that can do the job for cheaper (e.g., a netbook, WRT54GL, or NSLU2).
How can open source best exploit this latest EU decision?"
More to the point, how is Microsoft going to exploit it? I'm not an anti-MS zealot, but I can completely see them bundling some third-rate thing that still uses the IE rendering engine or something like Safari that's nowhere near usable on Win32.
That said, if IE is still the default option (or from the user's perspective appears to be), then this judgement really amounts to zilch no matter which side of the debate you're on.
1) VT Extensions have been available in AMD and Intel chips for around 3 years now. XenServer is an enterprise-grade solution, most people who are genuinely interested in deploying it in a production environment are going to have the resources to run it.
2) Did you actually run Citrix XenServer in your testing? I expect they've tested it pretty well given that running Windows on it is one of their bigger bullet-points. (Also, I admin a datacenter full of Windows machines... it's not very stable in the long run even when running natively.)
Again, it comes down to the "It just works," thing. If you have the hardware that can support it and are willing to tool around and maybe deal with problems, ok then. However if you don't want to do that, then VMWare is what you want.
VMWare is nice, but it's hardware requirements aren't anything to write home about. The last time I tried ESX in a production environment, I needed to buy a new RAID card because none that we usually have in stock were compatible with it. Xen, last I knew, runs on pretty much everything although you do need VT instructions in your CPU if you want to run Windows.
IF terrorists can learn to fly a jumbo jet, which, mind you, is a very complex beast that requires a lot of training, simulator, and real-world flying time to be able to fly one
Actually, it doesn't take a whole lot of training to fly a jumbo jet into something. Especially if it's already in the air and enroute to wherever. To do what the terrorists did, all you have to know is where the yoke, pedals, and throttle are.
Now actually flying an entire trip from takeoff to landing without killing anyone (not even yourself), that takes a non-trivial amount of skill.
Okay, so the band is bypassing iTunes to release music. Yet strangely, Apple didn't think this app "competed" with any existing Apple-branded software.
At some level, citizens have to submit to authority figures. I'm not saying that we have to blindly follow all edicts, but if a cop pulls you over, you should pull over instead of fleeing.
I don't know which country you're from, but the country that I'm from (and where this incident took place) was founded by people who refused to submit to authority figures. Even had a whole war and everything over it.
Also, strawman alert: Nobody argues that you have the right to flee a cop who pulls you over.
If a student is texting during class, she should stop when asked.
I'd like to know why she was asked in the first place. Texting, last I knew, was a both a silent and solitary activity. It's not disruptive to the class. It might be disruptive to the girl's learning, but that'll be her problem to deal with when it's test time.
Further, a teacher is not an authority figure. Nor is a teacher a babysitter, day-care provider, surrogate parent, or any of the other things that the school system is forcing them to be. Their job should be to teach, nothing else.
Lying about it and causing a kerfluffle about it ought to be punishable.
No, perhaps she shouldn't have lied. But according to the article, she didn't cause the "kerfluffle," the teacher and cops did. None of this would have happened if the teacher would have just continued teaching instead of getting all hung up about one student not paying attention in class. The teacher was the one who caused the disruption by calling the cops and making a big scene over it. But of course, the simplest solution--expelling the student from the classroom--wouldn't have satisfied the teacher's power trip nearly as much.
The same would be true if she had been passing notes in class and caused a fuss about it.
Again with the bad analogies. Yes, passing notes is disruptive because it involves distracting other students in the class.
The self-professed libertarians here who argue that she should be able to do whatever she wants are missing the fact that this is in class. The education of the class would be impossible if anyone could do whatever they wanted.
I don't know if I'm a libertarian or not (sounds like you were out to deliberately offend them?), but again, nobody is arguing that anarchy should reign in classrooms. Students who are being actively disruptive (and not just annoying the teacher through inattention) should be removed from the classroom, end of story. Students who habitually fail to pay attention in class will learn the hard way that it doesn't work out for them in the long run anyway. Issuing criminal charges against them is not exactly the most efficient way to get the point across.
Don't like Twitter's downtime? roll your own and do better.
(But honestly, I still don't see what all the hype about Twitter is. It's just a mashup between instant messaging and RSS from what I can tell, not sure why there needs to be a "service" wrapped around it.)
From what little I know of facial recognition software, it takes measurements of facial features and uses those as the "key". They almost certainly won't accept something that doesn't that doesn't resemble a face. I'll bet it never occurred to the developers that ripping out all those fancy algorithms would actually make the system somewhat more secure.
The problem isn't that it was a commercially operated prison. The problem is that the payment structure was set up in such a way as to benefit the operator for an increased number of incarcerations. It shouldn't just be illegal, it should be unconstitutional for any contract or law to provide benefit to one party when another is found guilty of a crime.
I don't think most people realize what a huge money-making industry the prison system is. Not only is there a very strong commercial sector built around incarceration, but states and local governments receive loads of funding for every prisoner sent their way.
A few days ago I read this story of a kid (18 years old) who got sent to prison for a couple months. He and his friends were on a road trip and got pulled over. They weren't speeding or anything and the cop wouldn't tell them why he pulled them over. Near as they can surmise, he only pulled them over because they looked young and had out-of-state plates. After not finding anything wrong with the license or insurance, he orders them out of the car and starts searching their belongings. (Without a warrant, but are you going to challenge a cop when you're a thousand miles from home?)
So the cop finds drugs in the backpack of one of the friends. The driver had no knowledge of the drugs and barely knew the guy carrying them. Cop arrests all of them. The other passengers were all eventually let go. The druggie turned in his dealer in exchange for probation. The driver, however, got prison. Because having drugs in your car is illegal whether or not you know about them, he got convicted and sent to prison for (I think) around 3 months. This kid was a straight-A college student with ZERO criminal record. The court-appointed lawyer told him that the only way to avoid a prison sentence was to plead guilty, which he did, and still got the prison sentence.
I've been following this for the last couple of weeks and here's all you need to take away from it without actually RTFA:
1. The article describes how to write a trojan. Not a virus. A virus exploits security vulnerabilities in software to spread itself. A trojan exploits security vulnerabilities in humans to spread itself. Measures can always be implemented to defend against the former. No software written will ever ever prevent the latter.
2. The article is basically one giant inflammatory troll relying entirely on a deep and confused misunderstanding of point #1 to justify its conclusion that Linux is insecure. The whole point of the article was to generate a huge backlash and drive traffic to the blog, much like the modus operandi of the Linux Haters Blog or whatever it was called.
DRM in the US is not a transaction between two private parties. Instead, it is the *government* offering to step in and put legal force behind one party's interference with another's right to use their own property.
Then it is an issue for the courts to deal with, not legislators. (NEVER give congress something important to do, they'll fuck it up every time.)
The nuts-and-bolts of the agreement are somewhat pedantic, providing for Red Hat to validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies
Having a bit of trouble parsing this. Does this mean "validate" as in Red Hat is going to test Windows on its virtualization products or "validate" as in the VM will be responsible for ensuring that the copy of Windows is legitimate?
why is there this preconception that linking to content that you know full well is illegal, is acceptable?
Why do you have this preconception that information can, in and of itself, be considered "illegal"? I honestly can't think of a more fascist tenet or idea than that.
I would argue that the TNT is the first consumer graphics accelerator worth a crap, but the Virge did have its uses.
I guess it depends on what you define as "worth a crap," but it was the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset and GLQuake that *really* launched the PC as a serious gaming platform (and the six-month upgrade cycle that goes with it). Back in the 90MHz Pentium days, rendering a 30fps 3D scene at 640x480 with consumer-level hardware was no small accomplishment.
If we're going so far down this "cats are intelligent creatures and are living beings that should be cared for" line, then what about the rats?
Fancy rats are extremely intelligent (far more so than cats) and affectionate (anything's more affectionate than a cat), and make great pets.
I probably should have emphasized in my post that I am not pro-cat and anti-rat as some replies have suggested. In fact, I'm firmly against the needless killing, torture, or mutilation any kind of animal. (As anyone who would call themselves a human should be.)
In reference to the submitter's situation, I'd ideally like to see a pest control expert come in and capture the rats humanely (release them where? I dunno, I'm not the expert) and patch up all the areas that let the rats in in the first place. If I were the owner of the place, that's exactly what I'd try to do, anyway. It sounds like neither the owner nor the employees at the dealership really care anything at all about the day-to-day maintenance or cleanliness of the building.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, next time, please reply to the article instead of the first post if you don't want to be modded off-topic. Thanks.
This is so true it hurts. Somehow we've slipped into a society where people honestly believe that they have some natural or state-given right to not be offended. Just look at colleges and universities. The last bastions of intellectual thinking, lively debate, and radical ideas, right? Nope. There's no free speech on campuses anymore. You can't say whatever you like. If what you have to say is not politically correct, you get kicked out.
For a fun experiment, try this in the U.S.: ask a random person whether their government gives (or should give) them or their children the right to be protected from offensive material. I think you'd be shocked (perhaps offended, even?) how many people will answer in the affirmative. For extra fun, remind them that the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly gives every citizen the right to speak and communicate as offensively as they like. It's your job to shelter yourself from whatever you deem offense, not society's and certainly not the state.
I have a good friend who is normally quite liberal about most things, but has a pair of young daughters and thus strongly believes that every ISP should filter all Internet content by default. I've tried explaining to him what a bad idea this is from pretty much every angle, but he persists. And I wish he was the exception, but there are plenty of other people I've met or know who believe the same thing. It frustrates me because it's people like this that are turning my beloved country into a nanny state. The actions of the government lately have flushed the idea of capitalism down the toilet, I don't want to see the same thing happen to speech next.
</rant>
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that argument.
From where I sit, it just sounds like the Author's Guild is pissed that someone invented--or more offensively, sold--a technology that undermines one of their revenue streams. That's life, that's business, that's capitalism. Deal with it. The correct response isn't to bring your sob story to the public and politicians and hope that they pity you enough to prop up your outmoded business model for a few extra years. The correct response is to adjust your way of doing business such that both you and your customers benefit from this new technology.
I guess that's too much to ask for today's businesses?
And though I do enjoy The Consumerist, I wish they wouldn't post random complaints like this that are accompanied with no proof, links, or documentation. Everyone rallies around the OP and if you try to speak up and point out that there's only one side of the story being presented, you're drowned in a sea of "GTFO" and the like.
I work for a company with a very vocal customer base and it's hilarious the important details that people will leave out (or outright lies that they'll include) when publicly denigrating the company on forums. Sometimes it's because they don't agree with our policies, sometimes they're using it as leverage to get something for free, and sometimes they just want the attention. I suspect this XBox case is in line with the latter, whether or not we're hearing all the details.
Since The Consumerist was recently purchased by Consumer's Union, I hope to see these kinds of posts become fewer and fewer. There's nothing wrong with a legitimate beef against a corporation, but it's silly that you can just send along an unsubstantiated email and get it on the front page of a popular blog by the end of the day.
If it were that easy, the following would all be household names:
LinuxDevices constantly showcases new and fascinating Linux-based hardware like this. Everything from phones to tablets to embedded systems. The problem is that few of these ever seem to make it to market and the ones that do are usually only available to companies who can buy them by the thousands. The remainder that are within the reach of the average hobbyist don't stack up price-wise to more pedestrian solutions that can do the job for cheaper (e.g., a netbook, WRT54GL, or NSLU2).
More to the point, how is Microsoft going to exploit it? I'm not an anti-MS zealot, but I can completely see them bundling some third-rate thing that still uses the IE rendering engine or something like Safari that's nowhere near usable on Win32.
That said, if IE is still the default option (or from the user's perspective appears to be), then this judgement really amounts to zilch no matter which side of the debate you're on.
...was that of a few University of Washington researchers being escorted into the back of an unmarked van.
1) VT Extensions have been available in AMD and Intel chips for around 3 years now. XenServer is an enterprise-grade solution, most people who are genuinely interested in deploying it in a production environment are going to have the resources to run it.
2) Did you actually run Citrix XenServer in your testing? I expect they've tested it pretty well given that running Windows on it is one of their bigger bullet-points. (Also, I admin a datacenter full of Windows machines... it's not very stable in the long run even when running natively.)
VMWare is nice, but it's hardware requirements aren't anything to write home about. The last time I tried ESX in a production environment, I needed to buy a new RAID card because none that we usually have in stock were compatible with it. Xen, last I knew, runs on pretty much everything although you do need VT instructions in your CPU if you want to run Windows.
Actually, it doesn't take a whole lot of training to fly a jumbo jet into something. Especially if it's already in the air and enroute to wherever. To do what the terrorists did, all you have to know is where the yoke, pedals, and throttle are.
Now actually flying an entire trip from takeoff to landing without killing anyone (not even yourself), that takes a non-trivial amount of skill.
Okay, so the band is bypassing iTunes to release music. Yet strangely, Apple didn't think this app "competed" with any existing Apple-branded software.
Only enforce rules when it suits you, eh?
I don't know which country you're from, but the country that I'm from (and where this incident took place) was founded by people who refused to submit to authority figures. Even had a whole war and everything over it.
Also, strawman alert: Nobody argues that you have the right to flee a cop who pulls you over.
I'd like to know why she was asked in the first place. Texting, last I knew, was a both a silent and solitary activity. It's not disruptive to the class. It might be disruptive to the girl's learning, but that'll be her problem to deal with when it's test time.
Further, a teacher is not an authority figure. Nor is a teacher a babysitter, day-care provider, surrogate parent, or any of the other things that the school system is forcing them to be. Their job should be to teach, nothing else.
No, perhaps she shouldn't have lied. But according to the article, she didn't cause the "kerfluffle," the teacher and cops did. None of this would have happened if the teacher would have just continued teaching instead of getting all hung up about one student not paying attention in class. The teacher was the one who caused the disruption by calling the cops and making a big scene over it. But of course, the simplest solution--expelling the student from the classroom--wouldn't have satisfied the teacher's power trip nearly as much.
Again with the bad analogies. Yes, passing notes is disruptive because it involves distracting other students in the class.
I don't know if I'm a libertarian or not (sounds like you were out to deliberately offend them?), but again, nobody is arguing that anarchy should reign in classrooms. Students who are being actively disruptive (and not just annoying the teacher through inattention) should be removed from the classroom, end of story. Students who habitually fail to pay attention in class will learn the hard way that it doesn't work out for them in the long run anyway. Issuing criminal charges against them is not exactly the most efficient way to get the point across.
Don't like Twitter's downtime? roll your own and do better.
(But honestly, I still don't see what all the hype about Twitter is. It's just a mashup between instant messaging and RSS from what I can tell, not sure why there needs to be a "service" wrapped around it.)
"Pipe down, we have a business to run here." --Corrections industry
From what little I know of facial recognition software, it takes measurements of facial features and uses those as the "key". They almost certainly won't accept something that doesn't that doesn't resemble a face. I'll bet it never occurred to the developers that ripping out all those fancy algorithms would actually make the system somewhat more secure.
I don't think most people realize what a huge money-making industry the prison system is. Not only is there a very strong commercial sector built around incarceration, but states and local governments receive loads of funding for every prisoner sent their way.
A few days ago I read this story of a kid (18 years old) who got sent to prison for a couple months. He and his friends were on a road trip and got pulled over. They weren't speeding or anything and the cop wouldn't tell them why he pulled them over. Near as they can surmise, he only pulled them over because they looked young and had out-of-state plates. After not finding anything wrong with the license or insurance, he orders them out of the car and starts searching their belongings. (Without a warrant, but are you going to challenge a cop when you're a thousand miles from home?)
So the cop finds drugs in the backpack of one of the friends. The driver had no knowledge of the drugs and barely knew the guy carrying them. Cop arrests all of them. The other passengers were all eventually let go. The druggie turned in his dealer in exchange for probation. The driver, however, got prison. Because having drugs in your car is illegal whether or not you know about them, he got convicted and sent to prison for (I think) around 3 months. This kid was a straight-A college student with ZERO criminal record. The court-appointed lawyer told him that the only way to avoid a prison sentence was to plead guilty, which he did, and still got the prison sentence.
How's that for a justice system?
Edit: I meant to say, "I've been following this for the last week".
Dang kids and their newfangled Preview button...
I've been following this for the last couple of weeks and here's all you need to take away from it without actually RTFA:
1. The article describes how to write a trojan. Not a virus. A virus exploits security vulnerabilities in software to spread itself. A trojan exploits security vulnerabilities in humans to spread itself. Measures can always be implemented to defend against the former. No software written will ever ever prevent the latter.
2. The article is basically one giant inflammatory troll relying entirely on a deep and confused misunderstanding of point #1 to justify its conclusion that Linux is insecure. The whole point of the article was to generate a huge backlash and drive traffic to the blog, much like the modus operandi of the Linux Haters Blog or whatever it was called.
In summary: don't feed the trolls, kids.
Then it is an issue for the courts to deal with, not legislators. (NEVER give congress something important to do, they'll fuck it up every time.)
Okay. So I'm supposed to believe that one "smallish hosting provider" and three email messages are proof that half the Internet went down today?
WTF.
Have the submitter and kdawson both forgotten what an Internet is?
Having a bit of trouble parsing this. Does this mean "validate" as in Red Hat is going to test Windows on its virtualization products or "validate" as in the VM will be responsible for ensuring that the copy of Windows is legitimate?
I guess it depends on what you define as "worth a crap," but it was the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset and GLQuake that *really* launched the PC as a serious gaming platform (and the six-month upgrade cycle that goes with it). Back in the 90MHz Pentium days, rendering a 30fps 3D scene at 640x480 with consumer-level hardware was no small accomplishment.
If you're going to resort to a car analogy, at least choose the one that applies.
Almost every car you can buy comes with two to three engine options depending on how fast the car can go versus how fuel efficient it is.
But almost every new PC comes with a single OS option: Vista. And it has only one speed.
I probably should have emphasized in my post that I am not pro-cat and anti-rat as some replies have suggested. In fact, I'm firmly against the needless killing, torture, or mutilation any kind of animal. (As anyone who would call themselves a human should be.)
In reference to the submitter's situation, I'd ideally like to see a pest control expert come in and capture the rats humanely (release them where? I dunno, I'm not the expert) and patch up all the areas that let the rats in in the first place. If I were the owner of the place, that's exactly what I'd try to do, anyway. It sounds like neither the owner nor the employees at the dealership really care anything at all about the day-to-day maintenance or cleanliness of the building.