It's a shame what the Boy Scouts have become. When my father was a boy, doing well in the scouts was something to aspire to. There was a time when that Eagle Scout patch was a badge of honor. I enjoyed scouting quite a bit when I was younger (I'm 27 now) but by the time I had made it from Weblos to Boy Scouts, the right-wing crazies had already started taking control and as it got weirder I got out.
Over the 1990s the Boy Scouts turned into an organization intolerant of those who do not subscribe to organized religion and promotes homophobia. Now they've added corporate shilling to their list of achievements. It's a great shame to see an organization that once churned out young men ready to lead a progressive society turned into a recruiting ground for religion, intolerance, and corporate shills.
I think it would be far easier to patch WGA in order to make it FAIL authentication than it would be to make a counterfeit Windows version PASS authentication...
It's definitely going to be easier. All one will have to do is figure out where WGA stores the registration code, replace it with one that's known to fail WGA, and then cause the system to try and authenticate. Of course, the end user will then just be able to re-enter the good key, which on an OEM system is usually stuck to the front of the machine, so a really good trojan will send the original key to an army of zombie which automatically try to activate with it repeatedly, so that Microsoft flags the key as one released by pirates and refuses to ever activate it again.
"...behind not controlling American elections at the National Level?"
The US is a Federalist nation, built around the idea that the national government should have control over only what is absolutely necessary, and that the state should handle the rest. So the states each have the right to electoral votes in choosing the President, and representatives in Congress, but how the states choose their representatives and decide electoral votes before passing them on to Congress is up to the states.
"and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."
Yeah, I'm sure all those dedicated Debian users are going to have a huge impact on browser use numbers. If they all switch over to IceWeasel, IE 7 might pick up two, even three hundredths of a percent. That would definitely spell the end for Firefox.
I wonder in what situation he will be, he better be working on a backup skill.
Given the money he's making, he'll have no trouble putting himself through college to pick up a backup skill after the funding for pro gaming has dried up.
"Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them."
That's not really true-nukes make a great deterrent against attacks and developing them has great propagandist value. Beyond that, you base your statement on the premise that the weapons are useless because launching one nuke leads to nuclear warfare, in which no one wins. The problem is that not all nations have leaders who are even remotely sane, and Kim Jong Il is probably the craziest world leader to come along, well, ever. As crazy as he was, at least Hitler's agenda didn't completely revolve around himself. But if Kim Jong Il is feeling wacky and just wants to nuke a neighbor for kicks, it's going to happen.
It is to the F/OSS fanboys at Slashdot. When your favorite OS has a market share that can be best summed up as irrelevant, and your favorite web browser is only pushing 16%, articles like this one can still make you feel superior for knowing how to use sudo and apt-get or rpm to install software.
This is one buyout that doesn't surprise me at all. Google put a lot into Google video, and just as it opened up, YouTube's popularity exploded, stealing Google video's thunder. Personally I think Google is to blame for the failure of Google video-by requiring users to upload via software instead of the web, they added in one more step, which is one step too many for the masses of people out there who can barely manage to compose a movie with the tools that come in the OS.
So now Google's about to spend 1.7 billion to make up for a really dumb mistake. I can't say I agree, but I'm definitely not surprised.
For me Google always wins because Google just keeps making the searches return not just more information, but information that is more relevant. Combined with Google's advertisements, which have quickly become one of my favorite ways to shop, Google often has the answer to a lot of life's little questions and problems. Contrast that with other search engines: they just try stripping down to a barebones, Google-style layout, and then throw on lame features dreamed up by some team of idiots in marketing. Take Ask.com's cool new feature; the ability to view a tiny image of the page before I click through. This might be useful if the tiny image didn't make all of the text and images so tiny that they're illegible; in other words, it's mostly useless. Amazon tried giving the ability to remember past searches. I'll give them credit for this one, it really could come in handy when doing a lot of research via the web, especially if they would have written a nice Firefox plugin to enhance the capabilities. But because Google gives better search results, it doesn't matter. It's just easier to get better search results from Google and be careful when I take notes.
A word of advice to all of Google's competitors. Cut the crap. Just give better search results. And when you know you can't do better-I'm pointing at you, Microsoft and Amazon-just cut your losses and go focus on something that you do well.
So let me get this straight-three minority players in the online music market think that by combining physical stores, codecs people despise, and mp3 players nobody buys will produce a winning service? Start shorting those stocks now, folks.
Notably, he does not plan on distributing movies online, calling online distribution a 'rathole.'
If the OP had the reading comprehension abilities of a fifth-grader, he would not have written that sentence. What TFA actually said:
That doesn't mean Lucasfilm is diving into online distribution, though. "Having had a lot of experience in this area, we're not rushing in," he said. "We're trying to find out exactly where the monetization is coming from. We're not interested in jumping down a rat hole until such time as it finally figures itself out.
So Lucas did not say that he won't be distributing online, just that he won't be doing it until there's a settled market in place.
I'd take a hiatus from everything in life to get those two elected. They may not have the answers, but neither do Congress or the President and his staff, and at least the comedians can spot the problems.
"Finally... someone who can price episodal content at a point where even *I* would want to give it a shot. Unless the episodes last a measly hour of gameplay or so, sound like a decent deal."
And at $35 it's a steal. More game companies need to realize that if they cut out the publisher AND the retailer, they can slash prices and still come out ahead!
Hopefully the inevitable dependence of Windows software on Vista will send a lot of pirates over to Mac OS X for x86, which has had its copyright protections nullified with ease at every new release. Hell, if Red Hat were smart they'd work some sort of DRM-lite into a new desktop version of Red Hat just to pick up some pirates.
"New Scientist points out that if such a launch ring were built, it would instantly become "one of the most important targets on the planet.""
If the ring is built, it will most likely be built by the United States. The same United States that right now, via a combination of nuclear weapons at underground launch sites around the world, mounted on jets in the form of cruise missiles, and moving around the oceans on submarines, has the power to quickly raze just about any area on the planet - enough nukes to wipe out human life entirely, if the desire arose. The same United States that already has launch sites for rockets and space shuttles that it has been using for the last five decades to put things in orbit. Given all that our nation already possesses that can do what the magnetic ring could, exactly why is the extra convenience it offers likely to make it an "important target?" Especially since it would be far easier to rebuild than something like the space shuttle and related facilities?
Oh right, it's because New Scientist is a crappy publication aimed at the monosyllabic masses, and the Slashdot editors should be ashamed of themselves for linking to it.
"But our own individual greed have all contributed to this problem. When was the last time anyone cared about looking for anything "made in the USA"? If we as individuals don't feel compelled to buy products from our own nation, on what grounds do we expect corporations to hire more expensive US labor?"
It's great that you realize that, but it doesn't matter. Good luck finding American leaders willing to espouse personal responsibility-it clearly isn't something this country is looking for. Americans much prefer leaving all the hard choices to someone else, and unless you're quoting nonsense from a book of fairy tales, telling Americans that they actually have to make an effort to deal with a problem is a sure-fire way to get tuned out.
Unless this company is in some Midwestern backwater where the cost of living is many times below the national average, trying to turn a profit doing IT support for $65 an hour is just nuts. I can't imagine how anyone could turn a profit at that rate, unless it involves paying employees peanuts and promising a chunk of the business that might turn into something valuable on the off-chance the company is bought out in some future IT boom.
Do yourself a favor and read some books about running a small business. Then start consulting on your own to clients with more money for at least $120 an hour.
"Because its downright silly to have 3 big trucks drive by to pick up 2 computers and a printer in the name of "envrionmental cleanliness"? If anything the big names should all pitch in and form a collaborative group."
Agreed. Before curbside recycling was common, there were places in my town where everyone took all the cans, bottles, and batteries for recycling. We still have something similar for oil, paint, and other nasty stuff. Why not do something similar for computers-just let everyone drop them off at the mall or something. It would have to be less expensive than all the pickup/mail-in nonsense we have now.
Maybe the computer makers could just pay the Salvation Army and Goodwill to handle it, since their pickup center staff spend most of their weekends just repeating the phrase "no, we don't take old computers" over and over on weekends. Talk about a win-win.
I wonder how much of this is developers trying to recoup the costs of developing more detailed content, and how much is just Sony letting developers charge more at release because PS3 units will be in very short supply. Given that there will only be a few million units available in the entire world at launch (some of which will incur no launch game sales as they'll just be resold at high markups), it seems to me that developers might have a hard time selling enough of any one game to break even.
So Alan Cox's battery explodes... does anyone else think that this whole exploding battery thing is all a Microsoft plot to kill off the Linux kernel team?
"...said the best way to improve computer literacy in India was to adopt open source software in schools..."
Well of course it is! Nothing will teach stupid users how to use a computer like software with a man page that hasn't been updated in five years, has no written documentation, and responses to bug requests along the lines of "learn C and fix the problem yourself, noob!"
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame what the Boy Scouts have become. When my father was a boy, doing well in the scouts was something to aspire to. There was a time when that Eagle Scout patch was a badge of honor. I enjoyed scouting quite a bit when I was younger (I'm 27 now) but by the time I had made it from Weblos to Boy Scouts, the right-wing crazies had already started taking control and as it got weirder I got out.
Over the 1990s the Boy Scouts turned into an organization intolerant of those who do not subscribe to organized religion and promotes homophobia. Now they've added corporate shilling to their list of achievements. It's a great shame to see an organization that once churned out young men ready to lead a progressive society turned into a recruiting ground for religion, intolerance, and corporate shills.
Wi-Fi could be awesome...if it turns out that what Apple is really releasing is a VOIP device and not a cellular phone.
It's definitely going to be easier. All one will have to do is figure out where WGA stores the registration code, replace it with one that's known to fail WGA, and then cause the system to try and authenticate. Of course, the end user will then just be able to re-enter the good key, which on an OEM system is usually stuck to the front of the machine, so a really good trojan will send the original key to an army of zombie which automatically try to activate with it repeatedly, so that Microsoft flags the key as one released by pirates and refuses to ever activate it again.
That's the whole point! Instead of icky, downsampled, compressed images and sound we'll finally have high-quality stuff.
One-third of them will have to reformat and reinstall to get everything on ext3. The other two SuSE users won't have to change anything.
bada-BING!
Rapid results for election commentary on cable news. And a lot of money into the coffers of Diebold.
"...behind not controlling American elections at the National Level?"
The US is a Federalist nation, built around the idea that the national government should have control over only what is absolutely necessary, and that the state should handle the rest. So the states each have the right to electoral votes in choosing the President, and representatives in Congress, but how the states choose their representatives and decide electoral votes before passing them on to Congress is up to the states.
"and opens the path for Microsoft and Internet Explorer 7 to regain marketshare."
Yeah, I'm sure all those dedicated Debian users are going to have a huge impact on browser use numbers. If they all switch over to IceWeasel, IE 7 might pick up two, even three hundredths of a percent. That would definitely spell the end for Firefox.
Given the money he's making, he'll have no trouble putting himself through college to pick up a backup skill after the funding for pro gaming has dried up.
"Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them."
That's not really true-nukes make a great deterrent against attacks and developing them has great propagandist value. Beyond that, you base your statement on the premise that the weapons are useless because launching one nuke leads to nuclear warfare, in which no one wins. The problem is that not all nations have leaders who are even remotely sane, and Kim Jong Il is probably the craziest world leader to come along, well, ever. As crazy as he was, at least Hitler's agenda didn't completely revolve around himself. But if Kim Jong Il is feeling wacky and just wants to nuke a neighbor for kicks, it's going to happen.
"This is news?"
It is to the F/OSS fanboys at Slashdot. When your favorite OS has a market share that can be best summed up as irrelevant, and your favorite web browser is only pushing 16%, articles like this one can still make you feel superior for knowing how to use sudo and apt-get or rpm to install software.
This is one buyout that doesn't surprise me at all. Google put a lot into Google video, and just as it opened up, YouTube's popularity exploded, stealing Google video's thunder. Personally I think Google is to blame for the failure of Google video-by requiring users to upload via software instead of the web, they added in one more step, which is one step too many for the masses of people out there who can barely manage to compose a movie with the tools that come in the OS.
So now Google's about to spend 1.7 billion to make up for a really dumb mistake. I can't say I agree, but I'm definitely not surprised.
For me Google always wins because Google just keeps making the searches return not just more information, but information that is more relevant. Combined with Google's advertisements, which have quickly become one of my favorite ways to shop, Google often has the answer to a lot of life's little questions and problems. Contrast that with other search engines: they just try stripping down to a barebones, Google-style layout, and then throw on lame features dreamed up by some team of idiots in marketing. Take Ask.com's cool new feature; the ability to view a tiny image of the page before I click through. This might be useful if the tiny image didn't make all of the text and images so tiny that they're illegible; in other words, it's mostly useless. Amazon tried giving the ability to remember past searches. I'll give them credit for this one, it really could come in handy when doing a lot of research via the web, especially if they would have written a nice Firefox plugin to enhance the capabilities. But because Google gives better search results, it doesn't matter. It's just easier to get better search results from Google and be careful when I take notes.
A word of advice to all of Google's competitors. Cut the crap. Just give better search results. And when you know you can't do better-I'm pointing at you, Microsoft and Amazon-just cut your losses and go focus on something that you do well.
So let me get this straight-three minority players in the online music market think that by combining physical stores, codecs people despise, and mp3 players nobody buys will produce a winning service? Start shorting those stocks now, folks.
If the OP had the reading comprehension abilities of a fifth-grader, he would not have written that sentence. What TFA actually said:
So Lucas did not say that he won't be distributing online, just that he won't be doing it until there's a settled market in place.
I'd take a hiatus from everything in life to get those two elected. They may not have the answers, but neither do Congress or the President and his staff, and at least the comedians can spot the problems.
"Finally... someone who can price episodal content at a point where even *I* would want to give it a shot. Unless the episodes last a measly hour of gameplay or so, sound like a decent deal."
And at $35 it's a steal. More game companies need to realize that if they cut out the publisher AND the retailer, they can slash prices and still come out ahead!
Hopefully the inevitable dependence of Windows software on Vista will send a lot of pirates over to Mac OS X for x86, which has had its copyright protections nullified with ease at every new release. Hell, if Red Hat were smart they'd work some sort of DRM-lite into a new desktop version of Red Hat just to pick up some pirates.
"New Scientist points out that if such a launch ring were built, it would instantly become "one of the most important targets on the planet.""
If the ring is built, it will most likely be built by the United States. The same United States that right now, via a combination of nuclear weapons at underground launch sites around the world, mounted on jets in the form of cruise missiles, and moving around the oceans on submarines, has the power to quickly raze just about any area on the planet - enough nukes to wipe out human life entirely, if the desire arose. The same United States that already has launch sites for rockets and space shuttles that it has been using for the last five decades to put things in orbit. Given all that our nation already possesses that can do what the magnetic ring could, exactly why is the extra convenience it offers likely to make it an "important target?" Especially since it would be far easier to rebuild than something like the space shuttle and related facilities?
Oh right, it's because New Scientist is a crappy publication aimed at the monosyllabic masses, and the Slashdot editors should be ashamed of themselves for linking to it.
"But our own individual greed have all contributed to this problem. When was the last time anyone cared about looking for anything "made in the USA"? If we as individuals don't feel compelled to buy products from our own nation, on what grounds do we expect corporations to hire more expensive US labor?"
It's great that you realize that, but it doesn't matter. Good luck finding American leaders willing to espouse personal responsibility-it clearly isn't something this country is looking for. Americans much prefer leaving all the hard choices to someone else, and unless you're quoting nonsense from a book of fairy tales, telling Americans that they actually have to make an effort to deal with a problem is a sure-fire way to get tuned out.
Unless this company is in some Midwestern backwater where the cost of living is many times below the national average, trying to turn a profit doing IT support for $65 an hour is just nuts. I can't imagine how anyone could turn a profit at that rate, unless it involves paying employees peanuts and promising a chunk of the business that might turn into something valuable on the off-chance the company is bought out in some future IT boom.
Do yourself a favor and read some books about running a small business. Then start consulting on your own to clients with more money for at least $120 an hour.
"Because its downright silly to have 3 big trucks drive by to pick up 2 computers and a printer in the name of "envrionmental cleanliness"?
If anything the big names should all pitch in and form a collaborative group."
Agreed. Before curbside recycling was common, there were places in my town where everyone took all the cans, bottles, and batteries for recycling. We still have something similar for oil, paint, and other nasty stuff. Why not do something similar for computers-just let everyone drop them off at the mall or something. It would have to be less expensive than all the pickup/mail-in nonsense we have now.
Maybe the computer makers could just pay the Salvation Army and Goodwill to handle it, since their pickup center staff spend most of their weekends just repeating the phrase "no, we don't take old computers" over and over on weekends. Talk about a win-win.
I wonder how much of this is developers trying to recoup the costs of developing more detailed content, and how much is just Sony letting developers charge more at release because PS3 units will be in very short supply. Given that there will only be a few million units available in the entire world at launch (some of which will incur no launch game sales as they'll just be resold at high markups), it seems to me that developers might have a hard time selling enough of any one game to break even.
So Alan Cox's battery explodes... does anyone else think that this whole exploding battery thing is all a Microsoft plot to kill off the Linux kernel team?
"...said the best way to improve computer literacy in India was to adopt open source software in schools..."
Well of course it is! Nothing will teach stupid users how to use a computer like software with a man page that hasn't been updated in five years, has no written documentation, and responses to bug requests along the lines of "learn C and fix the problem yourself, noob!"