Would have to be done on the client side somehow to be of much value. If you do the decryption on someone elses server.. you are basically giving them a plain text copy.
Not that I particularly distrust gmail.. but if I'm going to be paranoid enough to encrypt my email, I think it's more realistic that my email provider might grab my secret message vice someone at my ISP or via man in the middle attack...
Actually compared to other "far off" technologies, solar is making surprising progress. I check on it every year or so, and while it's still not practical for my purposes yet.. there is definite real world "in stores now" improvement, as well as exciting stuff being done in labs.
I forget where, but I once saw a piece where they were showing what went into a photo shoot a christmas turkey. It was quite amusing.. involving varnish, blow torches, wood screws.. and all sorts of craziness.
I actually don't have much of a problem with this. When I buy food, I'm mostly buying it for the taste, and I don't think anyone buys food with the expectation of it looking like it does in the ads/on the box. If if the burger in the ad wasn't mostly plastic, you can be sure it would be assembled with a whole lot more care and thus look a lot better than as you said, the one assembled in under a minute by someone making minimum wage.
The cosmetic thing I get why people have a problem. People buy cosmetics entirely for how it will make them look. Providing a false representation of that seems pretty underhanded.
I do have a trunk... so I throw it in there. Beyond that I minimize the impact of it getting stolen by using full disk encryption.
Does your car not have any kind of lockable storage (actually what kind of car is this anywayno trunk?). If so, put it in there, otherwise you could always buy a jewellery safe and have a friend who is good with tools weld it to the floor, roof, or remove one of the seats and put the safe there. You could also keep your laptop and GPS and other gear in a hardened suitcase handcuffed to your wrist at all times
Most people don't care about whether their credit card information is properly protected.. which is probably why identity theft is such an epic problem. As said, most users were more concerned with the fact that the network was down.. and in fact the mass of angry gamers demanding Sony bring it up ASAP security concerns be damned was far, far louder than us over here concerned about personal information.
Even despite surprisingly high news coverage of the event, Sony has actually seen an increase in sales after the credit card thing.. as said originally.. most people just don't care.
what' it gonna take for kids today to stop buying sony?
Geeks.. I suspect this has been done. Everyone else, it's going to take something that actually hurts them.
Don't forget, Sony hasn't done anything that would really piss off the general population. Sony gets on our nerves because the areas they are evil in are highly visible to us, but to the average user, non-issues.
Lest we forget, most users have never heard of the OtherOS feature, didn't care about DRM being installed on their computer (probably amazed it could fit in there with all the other crap they probably had running), and their biggest concern when their credit card info and personal details got stolen was "when can I play games again!".
Even with the relatively high geek/gamer crossover, I suspect that even if every user who could define in a sentance what the OtherOS thing was about immediately boycotted Sony.. it wouldn't even register as a blip in the profit statements.
how the fairly basic logic of "they sold me the product with the marketed feature xyz which I valued and used, then disabled it after purchase, without compensation and with only forced permission" doesn't warrant relief?
You have to squeeze in another step:
"they had me agree to an EULA that basically allows them to do whatever the hell we want as a condition of using their product".
One one hand, yes, a lot of hard core drug users live shitty lives and have basically given up trying to improve them.. and instead just stay high as much as possible. One could write this off as being weak.
On the other hand, it's hard for me to judge when I grew up in a middle class home and although I've had the occasional periods where money was tight, have never really experienced the kind of hopeless poverty/uphill battle. It's easy to say "just get a job" to someone but it's far from that simple and the system is definitely stacked to keep the poor from getting out of poverty.
What really pisses me off however are the people who have all the opportunity and blow it. Good home, access to good education, great future.. screw that! And access to lots of people who will help them out to get clean.. screw that too! And then we are supposed to have sympathy for them because they are "troubled".
I was expecting them to be using some cool bittorrent specific fingerprinting technique or something.. but nope.. looks like it's a really primitive IP based database. My ISP gives me a dynamic IP and has a fairly sizable range.. I get all manner of randomness when I visit the site.
That's the interesting thing with this stuff. We only hear about the guys who get caught. We don't get to hear about the guys who run their operations successfully because success is pretty much defined by not getting caught.
One would need to create all kinds of new laws, regulations, and enforcement agencies.. none of which would be particularily cheap.
I still think it's the right thing to do. As I see it crime around drug dealing is the big problem with drugs, not the drugs themselves. There is crime around drug using as well, but the same can be said about alcohol.. and more importantly it's not going anywhere. At least if drugs were legalized, we'd get rid of _some_ of the drug crime...
Probably a better way would be "cannot be gamed without substantial risk of getting fired".
I really don’t get the need for this stuff, especially for programmers. I mean maybe in some jobs it makes sense, but as a programmer I know if I start slacking off it’s going to be pretty damn apparent when my stuff isn’t getting done or is of poor quality.
Not to say metrics should be blindly used to gauge productivity, but any manager worth his weight in pepper packets is going to have a rough idea of how long stuff should be taking and is going to be aware of the quality of the work.
If I was in the situation (assuming for some reason I didn’t just quit and find a company that doesn’t treat me like an assembly line worker) I’d probably just have my work PC separate and do any goofing off on a separate (unmonitored) computer as others have suggested. Maybe flip up a document or something that would be reasonable to show no activity for a few minutes.
My upcoming sarcastic comments aside, I actually kinda agree. Most (not all but most) ask slashdot questions have been along the lines of "I can't use google or afford a consultant, please do my job for me". This might bring some interesting discussion... as long as the "sponsors" are labeled and the questions don't become obvious marketting.
I feel silly for getting concerned when that pulse stuff started showing up in the sidebar. Clearly things are heading in a good direction:)
For the first question I’d like to know how my organization can best leverage Oracle’s EJB technology to obtain the rapid and simplified development of distributed, transactional, secure and portable applications that we are looking for in our growing business.
It may have changed, but the bring issue I had with the cable thing was the cost to get the handful of channels I actually watched combined with the frequency I actually watched them was starting to get ridiculous.
I found that discovery channel became fairly repetitive. It may no longer be the case, but I found they would basically run the same lineup and same episodes all week. I get that there isn't enough content to have new episodes every day.. but at least give me some variety in the re-runs.
I also found the comedy channel got old. Too much of a good(ish) thing I guess.
The final straw was they raised rates (yet again), and I realized I hadn't had the TV on in like a month.. so I said to hell with it.
Now Aliant (my ISP) has some TV over internet type deal (along with fiber) going.. so I might give it another go.
The big problem I've found with these solutions is that because there is no feedback/status info.. they assume a certain state. If that state becomes out of whack for whatever reason.. all hell breaks loose. If you are a geek and understand what has happened, it's no problem. If you don't and a geek set it up for you are a solution and it's magic to you.. then you're out a TV until said geek can come over and get things working again.
The same problem applies to the internet as applies to cable. Good quality programming, while in some cases can be cheap if done by some dedicated people, tends to cost money. As such, you need a way to profit (which usually means advertising). Advertising tends to be more effective and hit more eyes as intelligence down.
The Internet lowers the bar for distribution and lets people get their stuff out there for a lot less, but I don't think we'll be seeing Connections quality programming again unless something very dramatic changes in the way the world functions.
While I too tend to prefer buying a series and watching it straight through (I don't care about the advertisements, more the lack of waiting a week between each chunk), I also fondly remember the "sit back and casually watch whatever is on" thing.
Discovery channel, comedy central, and TLC (back when it was about learning and not decorating houses..) were great for this style of consumption.
There are some honest to god sitcoms popping up. Still not worth getting my cable back yet, but it at least looks like the reality TV thing is starting to fade.
Primarily the mode of delivery. It made sense that the internet would piggyback on existing infrastructure (cable and telephone) but the tables have now turned, and it would make more sense to piggyback TV on a line specifically meant for Internet (fiber).
Complexity is an interesting one. Modern TVs are freaking complicated. My grandfathers set blew about 2 years ago so I helped get him a new one. Trying to find a larger screen TV that doesn’t require a geek to operate is pretty damn hard. There would seem to be a huge market for people that just want something you turn on, change volume, change channel, turn off. Even if you get a geek (like me) to set it up for you, you still end up with either multiple remotes (one for TV/one for digital box, one for DVD player) or a just as complicated “smart remote” that kinda works.
Some very basic functionality that should exist (but I haven’t seen) would be that the TV should detect a signal on an input and auto switch to it via some kind of hierarchy. Turn on the DVD player.. input should go to that.. turn it off.. back to digital box.. turn that off, back to analog cable. This seems basic and maybe it has been done, but when I looked I couldn’t find a TV that supported this.
And yet even most Slashdotters think it's perfectly fine to trust everything you have with Google - your search queries, your personal emails, your calls, your contacts, your social network, what you watch on YouTube, what you listen to, where you walk and go (Android) and everything else.
I know I do! At least up until that "and everything else".
I agree more people need to be aware of this and make a decision as to whether they are fine with it. Personally I assume everything you list can be observed by any number of people and have made a mostly informed decision that I really don't care. Anything I _don't_ want people snooping into stays on my encrypted drives in my local machines.. or if it does out on the net, is in an encrypted container.
Slashdot Mirror
Would have to be done on the client side somehow to be of much value. If you do the decryption on someone elses server.. you are basically giving them a plain text copy.
Not that I particularly distrust gmail.. but if I'm going to be paranoid enough to encrypt my email, I think it's more realistic that my email provider might grab my secret message vice someone at my ISP or via man in the middle attack...
It's improving.. little by little..
Actually compared to other "far off" technologies, solar is making surprising progress. I check on it every year or so, and while it's still not practical for my purposes yet.. there is definite real world "in stores now" improvement, as well as exciting stuff being done in labs.
I forget where, but I once saw a piece where they were showing what went into a photo shoot a christmas turkey. It was quite amusing.. involving varnish, blow torches, wood screws.. and all sorts of craziness.
I actually don't have much of a problem with this. When I buy food, I'm mostly buying it for the taste, and I don't think anyone buys food with the expectation of it looking like it does in the ads/on the box. If if the burger in the ad wasn't mostly plastic, you can be sure it would be assembled with a whole lot more care and thus look a lot better than as you said, the one assembled in under a minute by someone making minimum wage.
The cosmetic thing I get why people have a problem. People buy cosmetics entirely for how it will make them look. Providing a false representation of that seems pretty underhanded.
I do have a trunk... so I throw it in there. Beyond that I minimize the impact of it getting stolen by using full disk encryption.
Does your car not have any kind of lockable storage (actually what kind of car is this anywayno trunk?). If so, put it in there, otherwise you could always buy a jewellery safe and have a friend who is good with tools weld it to the floor, roof, or remove one of the seats and put the safe there. You could also keep your laptop and GPS and other gear in a hardened suitcase handcuffed to your wrist at all times
I always spell it out... but then again I do the same with 4 letter words that don't look like they are supposed to be sounded out.
Most people don't care about whether their credit card information is properly protected.. which is probably why identity theft is such an epic problem. As said, most users were more concerned with the fact that the network was down.. and in fact the mass of angry gamers demanding Sony bring it up ASAP security concerns be damned was far, far louder than us over here concerned about personal information.
Even despite surprisingly high news coverage of the event, Sony has actually seen an increase in sales after the credit card thing .. as said originally.. most people just don't care.
what' it gonna take for kids today to stop buying sony?
Geeks.. I suspect this has been done. Everyone else, it's going to take something that actually hurts them.
Don't forget, Sony hasn't done anything that would really piss off the general population. Sony gets on our nerves because the areas they are evil in are highly visible to us, but to the average user, non-issues.
Lest we forget, most users have never heard of the OtherOS feature, didn't care about DRM being installed on their computer (probably amazed it could fit in there with all the other crap they probably had running), and their biggest concern when their credit card info and personal details got stolen was "when can I play games again!".
Even with the relatively high geek/gamer crossover, I suspect that even if every user who could define in a sentance what the OtherOS thing was about immediately boycotted Sony.. it wouldn't even register as a blip in the profit statements.
how the fairly basic logic of "they sold me the product with the marketed feature xyz which I valued and used, then disabled it after purchase, without compensation and with only forced permission" doesn't warrant relief?
You have to squeeze in another step:
"they had me agree to an EULA that basically allows them to do whatever the hell we want as a condition of using their product".
Probably because you effectively agree via the EULA to pretty much let them do whatever they want as a condition of using their product.
It's dirty and I think the law needs to step in and remove that kind of power from EULAs, but it's reality!
One one hand, yes, a lot of hard core drug users live shitty lives and have basically given up trying to improve them.. and instead just stay high as much as possible. One could write this off as being weak.
On the other hand, it's hard for me to judge when I grew up in a middle class home and although I've had the occasional periods where money was tight, have never really experienced the kind of hopeless poverty/uphill battle. It's easy to say "just get a job" to someone but it's far from that simple and the system is definitely stacked to keep the poor from getting out of poverty.
What really pisses me off however are the people who have all the opportunity and blow it. Good home, access to good education, great future.. screw that! And access to lots of people who will help them out to get clean.. screw that too! And then we are supposed to have sympathy for them because they are "troubled".
I was kind of disappointed about this.
I was expecting them to be using some cool bittorrent specific fingerprinting technique or something .. but nope.. looks like it's a really primitive IP based database. My ISP gives me a dynamic IP and has a fairly sizable range.. I get all manner of randomness when I visit the site.
Someone (or many someones) probably are.
That's the interesting thing with this stuff. We only hear about the guys who get caught. We don't get to hear about the guys who run their operations successfully because success is pretty much defined by not getting caught.
Pharmaceutical interests?
It wouldn't surprise me at all.. but I can't think of a reason for them to care.
I actually wonder about the economics of this.
One would need to create all kinds of new laws, regulations, and enforcement agencies.. none of which would be particularily cheap.
I still think it's the right thing to do. As I see it crime around drug dealing is the big problem with drugs, not the drugs themselves. There is crime around drug using as well, but the same can be said about alcohol .. and more importantly it's not going anywhere. At least if drugs were legalized, we'd get rid of _some_ of the drug crime...
Probably a better way would be "cannot be gamed without substantial risk of getting fired".
I really don’t get the need for this stuff, especially for programmers. I mean maybe in some jobs it makes sense, but as a programmer I know if I start slacking off it’s going to be pretty damn apparent when my stuff isn’t getting done or is of poor quality.
Not to say metrics should be blindly used to gauge productivity, but any manager worth his weight in pepper packets is going to have a rough idea of how long stuff should be taking and is going to be aware of the quality of the work.
If I was in the situation (assuming for some reason I didn’t just quit and find a company that doesn’t treat me like an assembly line worker) I’d probably just have my work PC separate and do any goofing off on a separate (unmonitored) computer as others have suggested. Maybe flip up a document or something that would be reasonable to show no activity for a few minutes.
The hard ones require you to spend more time listening to people who use excessive buzzwords .. which isn't good for anyone ;p
My upcoming sarcastic comments aside, I actually kinda agree. Most (not all but most) ask slashdot questions have been along the lines of "I can't use google or afford a consultant, please do my job for me". This might bring some interesting discussion... as long as the "sponsors" are labeled and the questions don't become obvious marketting.
I feel silly for getting concerned when that pulse stuff started showing up in the sidebar. Clearly things are heading in a good direction :)
For the first question I’d like to know how my organization can best leverage Oracle’s EJB technology to obtain the rapid and simplified development of distributed, transactional, secure and portable applications that we are looking for in our growing business.
It may have changed, but the bring issue I had with the cable thing was the cost to get the handful of channels I actually watched combined with the frequency I actually watched them was starting to get ridiculous.
I found that discovery channel became fairly repetitive. It may no longer be the case, but I found they would basically run the same lineup and same episodes all week. I get that there isn't enough content to have new episodes every day.. but at least give me some variety in the re-runs.
I also found the comedy channel got old. Too much of a good(ish) thing I guess.
The final straw was they raised rates (yet again), and I realized I hadn't had the TV on in like a month.. so I said to hell with it.
Now Aliant (my ISP) has some TV over internet type deal (along with fiber) going.. so I might give it another go.
The big problem I've found with these solutions is that because there is no feedback/status info.. they assume a certain state. If that state becomes out of whack for whatever reason.. all hell breaks loose. If you are a geek and understand what has happened, it's no problem. If you don't and a geek set it up for you are a solution and it's magic to you.. then you're out a TV until said geek can come over and get things working again.
Also they are fairly expensive.
I don't know if the internet will really save us.
The same problem applies to the internet as applies to cable. Good quality programming, while in some cases can be cheap if done by some dedicated people, tends to cost money. As such, you need a way to profit (which usually means advertising). Advertising tends to be more effective and hit more eyes as intelligence down.
The Internet lowers the bar for distribution and lets people get their stuff out there for a lot less, but I don't think we'll be seeing Connections quality programming again unless something very dramatic changes in the way the world functions.
While I too tend to prefer buying a series and watching it straight through (I don't care about the advertisements, more the lack of waiting a week between each chunk), I also fondly remember the "sit back and casually watch whatever is on" thing.
Discovery channel, comedy central, and TLC (back when it was about learning and not decorating houses..) were great for this style of consumption.
It's actually starting to improve..
There are some honest to god sitcoms popping up. Still not worth getting my cable back yet, but it at least looks like the reality TV thing is starting to fade.
Primarily the mode of delivery. It made sense that the internet would piggyback on existing infrastructure (cable and telephone) but the tables have now turned, and it would make more sense to piggyback TV on a line specifically meant for Internet (fiber).
Complexity is an interesting one. Modern TVs are freaking complicated. My grandfathers set blew about 2 years ago so I helped get him a new one. Trying to find a larger screen TV that doesn’t require a geek to operate is pretty damn hard. There would seem to be a huge market for people that just want something you turn on, change volume, change channel, turn off. Even if you get a geek (like me) to set it up for you, you still end up with either multiple remotes (one for TV/one for digital box, one for DVD player) or a just as complicated “smart remote” that kinda works.
Some very basic functionality that should exist (but I haven’t seen) would be that the TV should detect a signal on an input and auto switch to it via some kind of hierarchy. Turn on the DVD player.. input should go to that.. turn it off.. back to digital box.. turn that off, back to analog cable. This seems basic and maybe it has been done, but when I looked I couldn’t find a TV that supported this.
And yet even most Slashdotters think it's perfectly fine to trust everything you have with Google - your search queries, your personal emails, your calls, your contacts, your social network, what you watch on YouTube, what you listen to, where you walk and go (Android) and everything else.
I know I do! At least up until that "and everything else".
I agree more people need to be aware of this and make a decision as to whether they are fine with it. Personally I assume everything you list can be observed by any number of people and have made a mostly informed decision that I really don't care. Anything I _don't_ want people snooping into stays on my encrypted drives in my local machines.. or if it does out on the net, is in an encrypted container.