This post is just stupid. It's full of lies. How did this get onto the main page?
[sarcasam]Oh, I don't know. This does seem like a very balanced, unbiased article. I mean, just because the article submitted is the poster... well, that's no reason to believe it's self serving or anything like that.[/sarcasam]
I think I'm going to follow people's advice, and put Zonk on my banned list.
I'm willing to be he's the same one who rejected my article about Andreas Katsulas dying in order to post this. Way to go.
Why not post the university in the summary? like say "Lakehead, A Canadian University".
Yeah, you're right! Lakehead is in Orilla. How the hell can they have a study on electro-magnetic waves when they don't even have electricity there yet.
Next up... cameras: devil's magic or soul stealers?
Re:10 times better?
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Boll says the point is that his movies get better as his career progresses - Dungeon Siege is "ten times better" than BloodRayne, which is ten times better than House of the Dead, and so on.
So, does that make each release 1 grade higher in the Richter scale or something?
You can use a log based scale if you want. I doesn't matter. The definition of zero still holds:
This lawsuit must just be a mistake since the lady never used a computer. If that's the case, why is this even newsworthy? They probably just messed up. It happens. That's what independant judicial system is there for.
For two reasons:
1 - If this is a frivilous, baseless lawsuite in which the sued person is innocoent (extremely innocent, if one can use such a term), then how many other lawsuits, even those that have been extorted... urr... settled... were also made against innocent people?
2 - Sure, the law of averages saw that eventually one might file a completely wrong lawsuit like this. But then how many lawsuits are the RIAA filing in order to be able to hit this long-long-long shot? This isn't just an "oops, we mispelled her last name" type thing. This is way, way, way to the edge of the curve. And that means, also according to the law of averages, that there are TONS of other suits they've filed that are also "not quite accurate".
So, if it can be shown that the RIAA is filling a signifiant amount of lawsuits that range from innacurate to completely baseless, then what does that say about their abuse of the independent judicial system? It could leave them open for a massive countersuit on behalf of everyone who the RIAA has ever sued.
After all, if THEY can file suits in a court system that enters guilty pleas without the need for "beyond a shadow of a doubt", why can't we? As long as we can show that it's plausible that the RIAA has been extorting people, then we can sue them for, shall we say $500,000 per person?
Edit: Upon further inspection, that article seems to refer to a completely different market slide by Firefox.
Edit to the edit: Upon even further inspection, it seems that there were about six articles between that one and this one saying that Firefox has gained marketshare. Now I'm confused.
Edit to the edit of the edit: Yet another further inspection reveals that there is no consistant definition of "gain", "loss", "market" or "marketshare" amongst all the articles, making them appear to be completely unrelated, unreliable, and possible questionable, if not outright self serving. But this is Slashdot, so that can't be.
Final edit: Upon yet another even further again inspection, I've come to a conclusion. Fuck it.
PS To The Final Edit: I just reread my own posting, and realized that I did explicitly point out that this is Slashdot. I had almost forgot that! So, I'm editing the post to that fact.
All Your Base Are Belong To Firefox! After all, oonly old people use IE! In soviet russia, my new beowolf cluster of Web Browser overlords welcome me.
All the biologists and physicists I've spoken to say no. It's a fuel source, yes, but not a viable replacement for oil. It has a much lower fuel efficency, and it is still non-renewable. It might solve SOME of the pollution problems, but that's still a "might". It won't solve the growing energy need, and it won't solve the issue of non-renewability.
If you're looking forward towards a sustainable, rewnewable, efficient fuel source, they should be looking at wind, solar, nuclear, or hydrogen, to name a few.
To think that malicious employees waited until flash drives to steal data! Dear god, what about paper printouts, hard drives, e-mail, and (dare I say it?) floppy disks?!?
It isn't the theft of data that TFA is really concerend about.
The real threat comes from actual LOST data. With portable storage media getting bigger and bigger, more and more data can be put on it. Including massive amounts of spread sheets and even databases. (I worked for one company that insisted on keeping a sensitive database on USB keys, to be sneaker-netted around to whoever needed it).
Top that off with more and more USB keys floating around the office. Sure, right now, not every employee has one. Or, at best, every employee has just one. But it is becoming more and more prevellant to have "unowned" keys. In other words, a company buys a crapload, and people just grab whichever key is available at the moment to use.
Soon, people will treat USB keys like they treat floppy disks; there'll be a big pile of them, and employees will just grab one as they need it.
Because of this causal attitude towards USB keys, it'll become near impossible to track all the data. Employee X copies Spread Sheet A onto a key, takes it home to work on it, brings it back, and tosses the key back in the pile. You now have an unaccounted for instance of that data. Each time an employee does that, you have more and more instances of data that are unaccounted for.
There's no guarentee that the employee will blank out the key. There's no way of tracking which data is on which key. So an employee might check out a key that has data on it that isn't theirs. There might be hundred of files on the key. Who knows. They don't. They won't care, either. They'll just copy thier files over, work on them, copy them back.
So, each key has tons of data on it. If someone were to ask the CFO "Show me all copies of Sensitive Spread Sheet 5", they couldn't.
Now, one employee checks out a key. They treat it just as casually as they would a floppy disk. They lose it somewhere. (Falls out of their pocket, gets left on the bus, etc). Now, a floppy disk might have just a tiny amount of information on it. A few documents. A couple spreadsheets. A USB key could have an entire database! Someone picks it up, and suddenly has the bank information for all the company's employees...
That's the big issue there. Not that employees will sneak data away on USB keys (though that is a concern, too), but that employees will be too casual with large amounts of data and quite literally LOSE it.
it won't matter because their is no public outcry yet at this point. Most non-Slashdot computer users seem to look at it as part of life. Nor are any of the corporate interests flexing their muscles to get the government hopping.
Actually, it won't matter because even though we (tech savy, anti-malware consumers) are the vast majority of the marketplace, we are the vast minority of Crapware 180's "customers".
What power do we really have? A boycott won't work. None of us buy thier "products" anyways. The Malware makers income is all based on being paid by shady or downright illegal companies for advertisments. And all of those companies rely on uninfomred (read: stupid) people seeing those ads and responding to them. It may not be many people, but it's enough to make a profit. (After all, when you're either a) selling snake oil or b) stealing people's money/credit card numbers/identity/whatever, only a few suckers are needed to make a profit).
So we can't do any economical harm to them through the usual methods. We can't boycott products, or refuse to shop at the advertised merchants. And even if one or two of those merchants get nailed/go bankrupt/whatever, there will be 500 more right behind them, all waiting to get their share of the sucker pie.
Corporations aren't going to do anything about it, either. None of the "merchants" are their direct competators. Those corps are focusing on "ligitamate" consumers (ie: us). They don't see Crapware 180 as a competator. They may see it as a minor nusicence to their own networks. But keep in mind that there are SEVERAL corporations who's business model depends on the existence of black hat advertisers. (After all, with no spyware infested computers, there's no way to see spyware removal programs/services...).
So the government can try to step in and blow up Crapware 180, or any of their ilk, but it'll only go so far. Most of those companies have gone to great lengths to (just barely) stay within the letter of the law (or at least, snuggled safely in a nest of loopholes). Any action they can try to take would get tied up for years, if not decades, in the courts. Crapware 180 will make enough money to survive the legal actions. And, in the worst case, they can fold and secretly/illegaly shuffle their money away, only to pop up again as another company.
Personally, I still think that a user supported massive attack on the spyware companies will do any good. Something like the Make Love Not Spam screensaver from a year or so ago. Either DDoS the servers to hell (of the merchants or the adware provider, whichever), or some form of massive "click fraud" type attack against the merchants to make it too expensive to operate. (No profit = no companies).
The series ended with a cliffhanger (first season finale), which I've always thought is a pretty nasty thing to do to your audience, not that I'd expect anything better from Fox.
I always thought there should be a law that prevents any show from having a cliffhanger unless they have already been guarenteed a next season.
As you mention, Fox is notoriously bad for this. Right off the top of my head, I can think of VR5, Brimstone and American Gothic. All great SF(ish) shows that had cliffhangers and were cancelled. Cruel beyond belief.
First time they used an oral thermometer, the second time a rectal one.
Nonono, you got it all wrong. They took the tempurature from the Canadian part of Pluto.
So from RTFA I got that they basically intimidated him. No legal charges, just a damocles sword hanging over his head for a while without any details as to why that was exactly.
An informative read, at least.
Now, I want to read a FA about the truth behind the lokitorrent "legal defense" fund...
Most systems will drop you to an operator after assuming that you have a pulse-dial phone if you just ignore all of their prompts. You may have to wait for them to repeat your menu choices a couple of times before this happens.
Except that the article is about VOICE based systems, not keypad systems. If you have a rotary phone, you can still use the voice feature. Doing nothing makes the system assume you've hung up, and it will hang up on you.
You claim that your homebrew crash-test dummy, Buster 2.0, is unbustable. If you were to build a Buster 2.0 clone, what do you think it would take to completely bust him (ie: break him so much that nothing short of building a new Buster 2.0 would do).
Would you be willing to do an episode to test that?
You claim that your homebrew crash-test dummy, Buster 2.0, is unbustable. If you were to build a Buster 2.0 clone, what do you think it would take to completely bust him (ie: break him so much that nothing short of building a new Buster 2.0 would do).
Would you be willing to do an episode to test that?
For schools especially, all internet access must be monitored, and schools in Leeds (Which ain't a small city) use an individual-user-login based service. This means a proxy server, and most kids wouldn't know what a proxy server was if it came up and slapped them in the face.
Much the same in Canada, but that doesn't mean it won't work. As an example, I go to Seneca College. In order to use any of their PCs, you have to log into them with your college username/password. OR, if you bring in your own computer (ie: a laptop with wifi), and try to get any outside access, then you must still log in. The system automatically redirects any outside requests to a login screen. Once you authenticate, then it will let you outside. So there is still some level of security. (And, as we all know, if someone is truly determined to Do Bad Things, they'll find a way).
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, why are they even worried about RFID tags? The REAL mark of the beast is in bar codes.
Personally, I'd rather have fuck@you.com
Oh, the tons of email I'd get from "please give us your email address to read this article/download this software/view this porn" providers I'd get...
[sarcasam]Oh, I don't know. This does seem like a very balanced, unbiased article. I mean, just because the article submitted is the poster... well, that's no reason to believe it's self serving or anything like that.[/sarcasam]
I think I'm going to follow people's advice, and put Zonk on my banned list.
I'm willing to be he's the same one who rejected my article about Andreas Katsulas dying in order to post this. Way to go.
Yeah! They should know better. I mean, games aren't drugs.
They're porn!
Yeah, you're right! Lakehead is in Orilla. How the hell can they have a study on electro-magnetic waves when they don't even have electricity there yet.
Next up... cameras: devil's magic or soul stealers?
So, does that make each release 1 grade higher in the Richter scale or something?
You can use a log based scale if you want. I doesn't matter. The definition of zero still holds:
0 * 10 = 0
For two reasons:
1 - If this is a frivilous, baseless lawsuite in which the sued person is innocoent (extremely innocent, if one can use such a term), then how many other lawsuits, even those that have been extorted... urr... settled... were also made against innocent people?
2 - Sure, the law of averages saw that eventually one might file a completely wrong lawsuit like this. But then how many lawsuits are the RIAA filing in order to be able to hit this long-long-long shot? This isn't just an "oops, we mispelled her last name" type thing. This is way, way, way to the edge of the curve. And that means, also according to the law of averages, that there are TONS of other suits they've filed that are also "not quite accurate".
So, if it can be shown that the RIAA is filling a signifiant amount of lawsuits that range from innacurate to completely baseless, then what does that say about their abuse of the independent judicial system? It could leave them open for a massive countersuit on behalf of everyone who the RIAA has ever sued.
After all, if THEY can file suits in a court system that enters guilty pleas without the need for "beyond a shadow of a doubt", why can't we? As long as we can show that it's plausible that the RIAA has been extorting people, then we can sue them for, shall we say $500,000 per person?
Edit: Upon further inspection, that article seems to refer to a completely different market slide by Firefox.
Edit to the edit: Upon even further inspection, it seems that there were about six articles between that one and this one saying that Firefox has gained marketshare. Now I'm confused.
Edit to the edit of the edit: Yet another further inspection reveals that there is no consistant definition of "gain", "loss", "market" or "marketshare" amongst all the articles, making them appear to be completely unrelated, unreliable, and possible questionable, if not outright self serving. But this is Slashdot, so that can't be.
Final edit: Upon yet another even further again inspection, I've come to a conclusion. Fuck it.
PS To The Final Edit: I just reread my own posting, and realized that I did explicitly point out that this is Slashdot. I had almost forgot that! So, I'm editing the post to that fact.
All Your Base Are Belong To Firefox! After all, oonly old people use IE! In soviet russia, my new beowolf cluster of Web Browser overlords welcome me.
I hope so. Then all the shares I buy now will be worth a gazillion dollars.
Really? All of them? Care to provide a list of these sources?
Hang on, let me just go ahead and try to remember every conversation I've ever had. {rolls eyes}
Off the top of my head, I'd have to say David Stephenson and Julie Czerneda (physicist and biologist, respectivly)
Isn't this something better solved with a quick Wikipedia search and a quick Google query?
All the biologists and physicists I've spoken to say no. It's a fuel source, yes, but not a viable replacement for oil. It has a much lower fuel efficency, and it is still non-renewable. It might solve SOME of the pollution problems, but that's still a "might". It won't solve the growing energy need, and it won't solve the issue of non-renewability.
If you're looking forward towards a sustainable, rewnewable, efficient fuel source, they should be looking at wind, solar, nuclear, or hydrogen, to name a few.
It isn't the theft of data that TFA is really concerend about.
The real threat comes from actual LOST data. With portable storage media getting bigger and bigger, more and more data can be put on it. Including massive amounts of spread sheets and even databases. (I worked for one company that insisted on keeping a sensitive database on USB keys, to be sneaker-netted around to whoever needed it).
Top that off with more and more USB keys floating around the office. Sure, right now, not every employee has one. Or, at best, every employee has just one. But it is becoming more and more prevellant to have "unowned" keys. In other words, a company buys a crapload, and people just grab whichever key is available at the moment to use.
Soon, people will treat USB keys like they treat floppy disks; there'll be a big pile of them, and employees will just grab one as they need it.
Because of this causal attitude towards USB keys, it'll become near impossible to track all the data. Employee X copies Spread Sheet A onto a key, takes it home to work on it, brings it back, and tosses the key back in the pile. You now have an unaccounted for instance of that data. Each time an employee does that, you have more and more instances of data that are unaccounted for.
There's no guarentee that the employee will blank out the key. There's no way of tracking which data is on which key. So an employee might check out a key that has data on it that isn't theirs. There might be hundred of files on the key. Who knows. They don't. They won't care, either. They'll just copy thier files over, work on them, copy them back.
So, each key has tons of data on it. If someone were to ask the CFO "Show me all copies of Sensitive Spread Sheet 5", they couldn't.
Now, one employee checks out a key. They treat it just as casually as they would a floppy disk. They lose it somewhere. (Falls out of their pocket, gets left on the bus, etc). Now, a floppy disk might have just a tiny amount of information on it. A few documents. A couple spreadsheets. A USB key could have an entire database! Someone picks it up, and suddenly has the bank information for all the company's employees...
That's the big issue there. Not that employees will sneak data away on USB keys (though that is a concern, too), but that employees will be too casual with large amounts of data and quite literally LOSE it.
Actually, it won't matter because even though we (tech savy, anti-malware consumers) are the vast majority of the marketplace, we are the vast minority of Crapware 180's "customers".
What power do we really have? A boycott won't work. None of us buy thier "products" anyways. The Malware makers income is all based on being paid by shady or downright illegal companies for advertisments. And all of those companies rely on uninfomred (read: stupid) people seeing those ads and responding to them. It may not be many people, but it's enough to make a profit. (After all, when you're either a) selling snake oil or b) stealing people's money/credit card numbers/identity/whatever, only a few suckers are needed to make a profit).
So we can't do any economical harm to them through the usual methods. We can't boycott products, or refuse to shop at the advertised merchants. And even if one or two of those merchants get nailed/go bankrupt/whatever, there will be 500 more right behind them, all waiting to get their share of the sucker pie.
Corporations aren't going to do anything about it, either. None of the "merchants" are their direct competators. Those corps are focusing on "ligitamate" consumers (ie: us). They don't see Crapware 180 as a competator. They may see it as a minor nusicence to their own networks. But keep in mind that there are SEVERAL corporations who's business model depends on the existence of black hat advertisers. (After all, with no spyware infested computers, there's no way to see spyware removal programs/services...).
So the government can try to step in and blow up Crapware 180, or any of their ilk, but it'll only go so far. Most of those companies have gone to great lengths to (just barely) stay within the letter of the law (or at least, snuggled safely in a nest of loopholes). Any action they can try to take would get tied up for years, if not decades, in the courts. Crapware 180 will make enough money to survive the legal actions. And, in the worst case, they can fold and secretly/illegaly shuffle their money away, only to pop up again as another company.
Personally, I still think that a user supported massive attack on the spyware companies will do any good. Something like the Make Love Not Spam screensaver from a year or so ago. Either DDoS the servers to hell (of the merchants or the adware provider, whichever), or some form of massive "click fraud" type attack against the merchants to make it too expensive to operate. (No profit = no companies).
I always thought there should be a law that prevents any show from having a cliffhanger unless they have already been guarenteed a next season.
As you mention, Fox is notoriously bad for this. Right off the top of my head, I can think of VR5, Brimstone and American Gothic. All great SF(ish) shows that had cliffhangers and were cancelled. Cruel beyond belief.
Simple. He'll just sell a whole crapload of viagra, college diplomas and sex memberships.
First time they used an oral thermometer, the second time a rectal one. Nonono, you got it all wrong. They took the tempurature from the Canadian part of Pluto.
An informative read, at least.
Now, I want to read a FA about the truth behind the lokitorrent "legal defense" fund...
Except that the article is about VOICE based systems, not keypad systems. If you have a rotary phone, you can still use the voice feature. Doing nothing makes the system assume you've hung up, and it will hang up on you.
Just goes to show that it is easier to make duplicate stories than coloured soap bubbles.
You claim that your homebrew crash-test dummy, Buster 2.0, is unbustable. If you were to build a Buster 2.0 clone, what do you think it would take to completely bust him (ie: break him so much that nothing short of building a new Buster 2.0 would do). Would you be willing to do an episode to test that?
Would you be willing to do an episode to test that?
"We loved it. It was better than Cats. We're going to give it favorable attention again and again."
We should all just take a breath, count to ten, and move on.
(Ask a yes/no question, get a yes/no answer)
Much the same in Canada, but that doesn't mean it won't work. As an example, I go to Seneca College. In order to use any of their PCs, you have to log into them with your college username/password. OR, if you bring in your own computer (ie: a laptop with wifi), and try to get any outside access, then you must still log in. The system automatically redirects any outside requests to a login screen. Once you authenticate, then it will let you outside. So there is still some level of security. (And, as we all know, if someone is truly determined to Do Bad Things, they'll find a way).