Also they really screwed over Somethingawful.com when they held their Katrina Victims fundraiser. Lowtax had raised over $20,000 in donations and then froze the money refusing to even let them donate it to the Red Cross. Eventually he was able to get Pay Pal to refund the money to everyone who donated.
True. Most investors are the wealthier educated types. Although not computer savvy, they aren't just going to be throwing money away because an email told them so.
Chances are if they had hadn't spent all their money or porn and viagra with all that other spam, they wouldn't have any money to buy stocks anyways.
When the US economic power slows, and the EU (or whatever group) has more power, maybe then will the tables turn and it will be the US complaining about lack of power online. Until then, deal with it.
Considering the exponential ever increasing national debt of the US ($8 trillion dollars and counting!) and the exponential ever increasing economic power of China (which owns a good deal of that US National Debt) I'd say we have... Ohhh... About 5 to 10 years left of a US economic superpower.
Our housing market was actually propped up by China buying our debt, however that has slowed and we are about to see a major crash in that sector. Hope you invested wisely and brushed up on your Madrian!
Frankly, you don't know crap about the US aside from the nonsense that comes out of Hollywood or from OUR media sources who themselves are deeply opposed to the war and don't mind letting that bias inform their view (example: New York Times) or other news services who are also made up nearly 100% of people who oppose the war (example: BBC). But I'm sure you're CERTAIN that, despite their political leanings, these people are the soul of objective reporting. HINT: you're being manipulated again.
I hate to say this, but you sir are a tool.
I've lived in the states all my life and would have to say as an observation from a foreigner he is spot on.
The thing is that media and Hollywood pretty much are what drives America. They form the popular opinion.
The average American does not read NY Times much less read anything... It is said that the average American has not read a book since high school or college.
I'd say they aren't being manipulated as much as they just don't care and or being blind.
Many right and left wingers thing there is some sort of hidden agenda against them and they blindly follow their party which they latched on to either because it was their parents party or they revolted against their parents and sided with the opposite party.
You sir are simply being manipulated by your favorite party because you cannot see them for what they really have in mind for you. And it is not in your best interest... Personally I only favor the democrats in power right now because it would cause a stalemate in congress and prevent it from passing new laws which continually errode my freedoms.
Had we a democrat in the whitehouse I would simply support the republicans in the same hopes that government would cease to function, but it is kind of silly to think your vote counts for anything.
And the Grandparent is right about the relations to WWII and today. One of my favorite studies has been Germany during World War II and I've collected a good deal of propaganda films for their sake as art.
The blind overoptimism, stay the course, our great technology, and fearless infallible leaders and the subhuman enemy is always present in those films.
The whole "Why shouldn't my computer take three nanoseconds to turn on, read my mind, and then never ever have errors!!!?!?one1" thing is a very amateur approach to the problem, if you ask me. Sure, it would be nice, but I'm absolutely sure it's technically impossible.
Sometimes, you need people who know nothing of limitations of technology to design them. Of course you end up often re-inventing the wheel and wasting a lot of VC cash if done poorly... BUT!!!
If done correctly and with the correct amount of "No! It can't be done... Well... Maybe we could do it like this instead." from the Engineers you might end up with a first of its kind innovative product.
Otherwise... We'd still be using the same old stuff from the 1980s today.
I guess the guy is either mential or chooses to ignore the millions of people that make below $40,000 a year and cant afford a new stereo with ipod and ipod adapter or mp3 player plus rf transmitter...
I use my iPod in my old Honda 93 Honda Civic with a tape adapter.
Before I would fumble around with a CD walkman with the tape player adpater anyways. The thing only cost me $5.
I assume you are reffering to the problems that came about from the launch of HL2 (assuming as you do not elaborate at all).
Recently, I saw Red Orchestra at Target and bought it as an impulse buy because I really liked the Mod. However, to my dismay, I could never get it to run because it could not connect to Steam.
Even tried connecting directly to the internet without a router and turning off firewall and hacking the WinXP TCP/IP, but to no avail that game would not work.
I would have reformatted the machine, but it was my room mates. *coughs* My main computer is a PPC mac *coughs* and they were disproving of me playing games on it anyways.
Still... I thought it as money towards supporting an indie game dev, and eventually I'll have a Intel Mac so it will hopefully work.
But doesn't mean I will shy away from games that use Steam.
Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other?
Kind of, my cell phone company only allows me to send videos to other people on the same Wirless company easily (SprintPCS) but it could be due to my crappy phone being so old.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this? Or batteries more exspensive than having generators.
I'd still keep a few generators in backup, but woulnd't you need less of them with DC?
Oh and, Quebec is one of the very rare provinces/states/territories in North America that is running serious studies about having a proportional representation modeled election and parliament.
If we are ever to fix our problems in the States with politics, we'd have to move to this type of system. I basically does away with having a 2 party system and you end up with being able to have many parties. Israel uses it and basically a new political party was able to get more votes than the two existing ones.
Are we saying that purpose built computer Hardware/Software cannot be made unhackable? Or are the companies being paid to not create reliable software?
If you physical access to the machine, you can hack it. Doesn't matter if you spend millions on securing it.
This is why datacenters have locks and very good security systems.
If you can get to the console, the often times you can do all sorts of things that you can't do remotley. This is the key problem with the votiing machines since they are out in the public.
The best method for this would to be have a secure centralized datacenter that each of the voting consoles (which would be dumb terminals) would vpn using SSL high encryption and cast their votes (think Citrix or an X environment)
However, the central server still could be tampered with so it would have to have major oversite with the code, security personell, and anyone else would could change votes.
As it is... You can still cheat on paper ballots, but its harder to burn 100,000 votes than it is to do a change with an SQL query command.
Canadian Customs has "searched" my laptop twice. Once I sat at the border for about four hours while the tried to figure out how to use the finder. U.S. customs took my laptop (a MacBook Pro) out of the case and looked at it, but I think they decided they didn't want to spend the time with it.
As a previous poster somewhere in the above post suggested to use a dummy account... I'll take this one bit further...
When you cross the border, just use bootcamp ready to boot into a blank WinXP partition with the account set to a very limited user account that can only see files in its on C:\documents and settings\(profile) directory.
I'd throw in a few incoculus pictures and documents and maybe some favorites to make it look like you actually use it it...
Then let them do their search and let them be on their on their merry way.
Also keep a dummy account on OS X just in case you get a smart border guard who asks you to reboot in OS X.
I'd hate to say this, but sometimes assimilation is the only route to living in certain countries. It might be a bit paranoid, but without assimilation certain aspects of countries change beyond what the current residents would tolerate.
Secondly, some cultures tend to be imcompatible especially with they are highly against assimilation when moving to another location.
While other cultures are really hostile to any other cultures and will refuse to let you assimilate at all no matter what...
So sadly the best solution is "when in Rome, does as the Romans" or find another one more friendly.
If this class is about learning computers, I would teach them computers. If they screw up the operating system or break something, teach them how to fix it. Teach them how to re-image the drive or use the rollback feature.
If we hide knowledge we aren't teaching our kids anything.
If they do something bad then punish them, but don't treat them like criminals when they are here to learn.
That said... If I happened to be in a state of power and any of my underlings bought a product because they saw a nifty billboard or were taking out on a nice golf trip, I'd be rather irrate on misuse of company resources.
Not because it shows a misuse of company resources towards something that was chosen because of perks, but rather showing what kind of character that person is when making important decisions.
Of course usually its the person on top who is the one blinded by human desires which often destroys the company which defeats his goal of appeasing the stock holders.
Last I remember the Creative Nomad did not support fairplay or even Sony's DRM and the only planned is the Microsoft's Play for Sure (see more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_NOMAD ) but if you have an early Nomad, that isn't supported.
If DVD Jon was smart, he'd write software that would unlock FairPlay, allow the user to copy it to another device, and then lock it down again (through FairPlay or whatever else).
Pardon me, but what happens if the device you own doesn't support any DRM whatsoever?
If people want to buy DRM music that is their choice. No one is forcing you to buy iPods, iTunes, or CDs, if you don't like it, don't buy it.
But they are violating the terms of the spirit of copyright laws of the constitution. Like others have said... Copyrights are tempoary and DRM circumvents this aspect of the law.
That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake...
So let me get this straight... First the crocodile eats you and then is the crocodile eaten by the snake? Or does the crocodile spit you out first?
Murder, though, is unjustified killing. It breaks one of the Ten Commandments to pick a child at random and bash his head in. It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
What is the difference between killing a child at random and then killing a child just because he was born under the wrong people? (aka your enemy)
Secondly, why does an all powerful yet loving god, need his chosen people to go out and kill people?
If he was all powerful, wouldn't he just drop the proverbial holy smackdown from orbit or disaster?
Only children, simpletons, and power-hungry ideologues believe in socialism any more
Then why does Norway have the highest standard of living in the world?
Seriously, get your damn terminology straight.
Socialism does not equal communism!
Even then it isn't black and white. North Korea is Stalinist Communist (as opposed to Marxist Communist or post-Stalinist Kruscheve Communist with each its own type of dogma)
Heck... Hitler's government was National Socialist and that is as far as you can get from communist ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_Pal#Criticism
Also they really screwed over Somethingawful.com when they held their Katrina Victims fundraiser. Lowtax had raised over $20,000 in donations and then froze the money refusing to even let them donate it to the Red Cross. Eventually he was able to get Pay Pal to refund the money to everyone who donated.
True. Most investors are the wealthier educated types. Although not computer savvy, they aren't just going to be throwing money away because an email told them so.
Chances are if they had hadn't spent all their money or porn and viagra with all that other spam, they wouldn't have any money to buy stocks anyways.
When the US economic power slows, and the EU (or whatever group) has more power, maybe then will the tables turn and it will be the US complaining about lack of power online. Until then, deal with it.
Considering the exponential ever increasing national debt of the US ($8 trillion dollars and counting!) and the exponential ever increasing economic power of China (which owns a good deal of that US National Debt) I'd say we have... Ohhh... About 5 to 10 years left of a US economic superpower.
Our housing market was actually propped up by China buying our debt, however that has slowed and we are about to see a major crash in that sector. Hope you invested wisely and brushed up on your Madrian!
Not to mention, I don't feel like stopping in mid wank to read the source of a codec I need to watch a pr0n clip.
Why yes! I can see why they modded you informative. Perhaps a bit too informative...
Frankly, you don't know crap about the US aside from the nonsense that comes out of Hollywood or from OUR media sources who themselves are deeply opposed to the war and don't mind letting that bias inform their view (example: New York Times) or other news services who are also made up nearly 100% of people who oppose the war (example: BBC). But I'm sure you're CERTAIN that, despite their political leanings, these people are the soul of objective reporting. HINT: you're being manipulated again.
I hate to say this, but you sir are a tool.
I've lived in the states all my life and would have to say as an observation from a foreigner he is spot on.
The thing is that media and Hollywood pretty much are what drives America. They form the popular opinion.
The average American does not read NY Times much less read anything... It is said that the average American has not read a book since high school or college.
I'd say they aren't being manipulated as much as they just don't care and or being blind.
Many right and left wingers thing there is some sort of hidden agenda against them and they blindly follow their party which they latched on to either because it was their parents party or they revolted against their parents and sided with the opposite party.
You sir are simply being manipulated by your favorite party because you cannot see them for what they really have in mind for you. And it is not in your best interest... Personally I only favor the democrats in power right now because it would cause a stalemate in congress and prevent it from passing new laws which continually errode my freedoms.
Had we a democrat in the whitehouse I would simply support the republicans in the same hopes that government would cease to function, but it is kind of silly to think your vote counts for anything.
And the Grandparent is right about the relations to WWII and today. One of my favorite studies has been Germany during World War II and I've collected a good deal of propaganda films for their sake as art.
The blind overoptimism, stay the course, our great technology, and fearless infallible leaders and the subhuman enemy is always present in those films.
The whole "Why shouldn't my computer take three nanoseconds to turn on, read my mind, and then never ever have errors!!!?!?one1" thing is a very amateur approach to the problem, if you ask me. Sure, it would be nice, but I'm absolutely sure it's technically impossible.
Sometimes, you need people who know nothing of limitations of technology to design them. Of course you end up often re-inventing the wheel and wasting a lot of VC cash if done poorly... BUT!!!
If done correctly and with the correct amount of "No! It can't be done... Well... Maybe we could do it like this instead." from the Engineers you might end up with a first of its kind innovative product.
Otherwise... We'd still be using the same old stuff from the 1980s today.
I'm not denying that there will be severe human impact to it, but it's likely to harmful more than deadly.
So we are talking about the difference of 6 billion dead versus a few hundred million?
Sure nuclear warfare won't wipe out the human race either, but I'd rather not have to survive it.
I guess the guy is either mential or chooses to ignore the millions of people that make below $40,000 a year and cant afford a new stereo with ipod and ipod adapter or mp3 player plus rf transmitter...
I use my iPod in my old Honda 93 Honda Civic with a tape adapter.
Before I would fumble around with a CD walkman with the tape player adpater anyways. The thing only cost me $5.
I assume you are reffering to the problems that came about from the launch of HL2 (assuming as you do not elaborate at all).
Recently, I saw Red Orchestra at Target and bought it as an impulse buy because I really liked the Mod. However, to my dismay, I could never get it to run because it could not connect to Steam.
Even tried connecting directly to the internet without a router and turning off firewall and hacking the WinXP TCP/IP, but to no avail that game would not work.
I would have reformatted the machine, but it was my room mates. *coughs* My main computer is a PPC mac *coughs* and they were disproving of me playing games on it anyways.
Still... I thought it as money towards supporting an indie game dev, and eventually I'll have a Intel Mac so it will hopefully work.
But doesn't mean I will shy away from games that use Steam.
Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other?
Kind of, my cell phone company only allows me to send videos to other people on the same Wirless company easily (SprintPCS) but it could be due to my crappy phone being so old.
Wouldn't having datacenters switch over to DC power and then just using a massive battery backup system help with this? Or batteries more exspensive than having generators.
I'd still keep a few generators in backup, but woulnd't you need less of them with DC?
Oh and, Quebec is one of the very rare provinces/states/territories in North America that is running serious studies about having a proportional representation modeled election and parliament.
n tation
And for those who don't know what Proportional Representation is. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_represe
If we are ever to fix our problems in the States with politics, we'd have to move to this type of system. I basically does away with having a 2 party system and you end up with being able to have many parties. Israel uses it and basically a new political party was able to get more votes than the two existing ones.
Are we saying that purpose built computer Hardware/Software cannot be made unhackable? Or are the companies being paid to not create reliable software?
If you physical access to the machine, you can hack it. Doesn't matter if you spend millions on securing it.
This is why datacenters have locks and very good security systems.
If you can get to the console, the often times you can do all sorts of things that you can't do remotley. This is the key problem with the votiing machines since they are out in the public.
The best method for this would to be have a secure centralized datacenter that each of the voting consoles (which would be dumb terminals) would vpn using SSL high encryption and cast their votes (think Citrix or an X environment)
However, the central server still could be tampered with so it would have to have major oversite with the code, security personell, and anyone else would could change votes.
As it is... You can still cheat on paper ballots, but its harder to burn 100,000 votes than it is to do a change with an SQL query command.
Canadian Customs has "searched" my laptop twice. Once I sat at the border for about four hours while the tried to figure out how to use the finder. U.S. customs took my laptop (a MacBook Pro) out of the case and looked at it, but I think they decided they didn't want to spend the time with it.
As a previous poster somewhere in the above post suggested to use a dummy account... I'll take this one bit further...
When you cross the border, just use bootcamp ready to boot into a blank WinXP partition with the account set to a very limited user account that can only see files in its on C:\documents and settings\(profile) directory.
I'd throw in a few incoculus pictures and documents and maybe some favorites to make it look like you actually use it it...
Then let them do their search and let them be on their on their merry way.
Also keep a dummy account on OS X just in case you get a smart border guard who asks you to reboot in OS X.
I'd hate to say this, but sometimes assimilation is the only route to living in certain countries. It might be a bit paranoid, but without assimilation certain aspects of countries change beyond what the current residents would tolerate.
Secondly, some cultures tend to be imcompatible especially with they are highly against assimilation when moving to another location.
While other cultures are really hostile to any other cultures and will refuse to let you assimilate at all no matter what...
So sadly the best solution is "when in Rome, does as the Romans" or find another one more friendly.
1. The process causes quite a loss in audio quality
2. You loose your file tags
3. Is quite time consuming when you have a hundred albums to do.
The drawback is that if IE ever gets usable it will be more difficult to make people switch to Firefox, they will just stick with IE because it works.
On the bright side, if they happen to be Linux or OS X user, IE won't work at all.
Well said...
If this class is about learning computers, I would teach them computers. If they screw up the operating system or break something, teach them how to fix it. Teach them how to re-image the drive or use the rollback feature.
If we hide knowledge we aren't teaching our kids anything.
If they do something bad then punish them, but don't treat them like criminals when they are here to learn.
That said... If I happened to be in a state of power and any of my underlings bought a product because they saw a nifty billboard or were taking out on a nice golf trip, I'd be rather irrate on misuse of company resources.
Not because it shows a misuse of company resources towards something that was chosen because of perks, but rather showing what kind of character that person is when making important decisions.
Of course usually its the person on top who is the one blinded by human desires which often destroys the company which defeats his goal of appeasing the stock holders.
Last I remember the Creative Nomad did not support fairplay or even Sony's DRM and the only planned is the Microsoft's Play for Sure (see more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_NOMAD ) but if you have an early Nomad, that isn't supported.
If DVD Jon was smart, he'd write software that would unlock FairPlay, allow the user to copy it to another device, and then lock it down again (through FairPlay or whatever else).
Pardon me, but what happens if the device you own doesn't support any DRM whatsoever?
If people want to buy DRM music that is their choice. No one is forcing you to buy iPods, iTunes, or CDs, if you don't like it, don't buy it.
But they are violating the terms of the spirit of copyright laws of the constitution. Like others have said... Copyrights are tempoary and DRM circumvents this aspect of the law.
That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an inscription warning that anyone who violated the sanctity of the grave would be eaten by a crocodile and a snake...
So let me get this straight... First the crocodile eats you and then is the crocodile eaten by the snake? Or does the crocodile spit you out first?
Murder, though, is unjustified killing. It breaks one of the Ten Commandments to pick a child at random and bash his head in. It does not break one of the Ten Commandments to kill your enemy in battle.
What is the difference between killing a child at random and then killing a child just because he was born under the wrong people? (aka your enemy)
Secondly, why does an all powerful yet loving god, need his chosen people to go out and kill people?
If he was all powerful, wouldn't he just drop the proverbial holy smackdown from orbit or disaster?
Not to mention the loving part...
Only children, simpletons, and power-hungry ideologues believe in socialism any more
Then why does Norway have the highest standard of living in the world?
Seriously, get your damn terminology straight.
Socialism does not equal communism!
Even then it isn't black and white. North Korea is Stalinist Communist (as opposed to Marxist Communist or post-Stalinist Kruscheve Communist with each its own type of dogma)
Heck... Hitler's government was National Socialist and that is as far as you can get from communist ideology.