"Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls"
Hey now. Espionage and sabotage are one thing, but that might be a DMCA violation!
Shh! That could be all the pretext the US needs for another war.
Seriously, when the US invaded Iraq one of the first things the provisional government did was introduce US style copyright laws.
The sponsor will not be given any special treatment with regards to comment score and moderation. The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor.
So essentially the sponsor's representative can be modded up or down in the same way as anyone else? I can't see that going down well in companies without a sense of humour.
We want to offer a sponsor the chance to have a serious conversation with our audience, but we are not going to be giving them a soap box to stand on. If they want to engage with our audience, they will need to understand that means taking the good with the bad.
Any takers so far? I imagine with the myriad of publicity options available today many companies are not going to want to get involved in a direct, uncensored discussion with a fairly informed audience like/.. I'd be inclined to admire any that do, especially if they can actually talk some sense, but I can't see many relishing a challenge like that.
The PC is not dead its just that common end users are driving up the shut-up-and-take-my-money model. the PC will end up being left to the geeks again which is probably the same small percentage of people (compared to the entire pc market space right now) it was back in the late 80s. the only reason common end users bought pcs was to get on the internet..
Exactly this.
Anyone else remember that PC boom in about 1999-2000 where tons of people went and bought ugly, bloated Cyrix MII rigs running Windows 98? It was a hideous time. Back then that was the entry level into computing, and the machines were junk from top to bottom. The only anti virus was from a PC-Pro cover disc circa 1996, there were no firewalls and no security updates. The end user didn't care, as long as it creaked into life long enough to connect to a dial up service. The user base that bought a Cyrix MII are now buying other things that better suit their needs.
What's worse, up until fairly recently they had *two* different chips named after the Pentium. The Pentium D and the Pentium Dual Core.
Who thought up these product ranges? Never mind naming them both Pentium, but giving them similar names? I've known lots of people confuse the two. I have no idea why we need all these product ranges. Celeron, Pentium and Xeon should be sufficient, with maybe something to differentiate the i7. But for god's sake, give them distinct and understandable names!
I hope I'm not the only one who was gravely disappointed with these "nuh-uh!"-style counterpoints. Rather than "and yet the film industry made record profits", let's drop some actual numbers. If our premise - that these guys have failed to make their case to support SOPA - is correct, then all of the world's facts should back us up.
Precisely this. Far too many arguments and debates simply turn into dogmatic slanging matches, where both sides make meaningless assertions without taking any time to construct a reasonable argument. If SOPA is as bad as people say there should be piles of ammunition to use against it.
Why aren't people challenging these figures about piracy and demanding to see the factual evidence? Why aren't people combing the industry produced literature on the subject and pointing out blatant corruptions of fact and any absurdities within them? Why aren't people producing counter proposals and statistics for the change they would like to see?
The way to win an argument is to make your opponent's position untenable by the use of factual information and well versed, coherent debate. Not to simply scream in their face louder than they scream in yours, which plays into their hands. Fight your battles on higher intellectual ground!
If you're posting publically about things that future employers might feel would make you unsuitable for a position in their company, then you deserve anything you get.
Do you? I can understand why employers might do it, but shit, how far do you take it? Do you keep absolutely everything that's even slightly left-field private in fear of what employers think of you? If you can't share your life, as provocative or dull as it may be, what's the fucking point?
I think the trend of employers not considering you for a position based on your god-damned facebook profile is a sad commentary on the overwhelming level of employer power, not any failing on part of the individual.
The reason that this is all possible is: bitcoin isn't a currency! It is the same as trading rocks with numbers painted on them to say how much they are worth.
To be fair, all our currencies work this way. The one, sole difference between a dollar and a rock painted with a number is that we believe the former is worth something. Currency is a mass hallucination of value.
While I understand that/. itself does not write the news, there seems to be some really poor submissions in the last year. Stuff which is way beneath the technical level and focus of the site or content only tenuously related to "tech". I don't necessarily mean political or social submissions, just the obviously vapid stuff.
Sites like Ars are leaving/. behind, and I don't feel like I learn as much here as I used to. Part of the appeal of tech news for me is to actually learn new things which I might not have read otherwise.
This is *exactly* the sort of progress we should be making. With a jobs gap that is getting increasingly wider (job creation has not matched population growth for a long time now) with no end in sight we should be adjusting to the idea that we don't just want, but need to work less. Our standard of living depends on it.
The number of jobs per head is already less than 1, and will only go down as we move beyond the industrial age (at least for now, who knows what the future holds?). Spreading those roles still available to more people by reducing hours (and maintaining pay) should be something we consider an absolute priority. Enormous challenges, certainly, but we cannot keep pretending to ourselves that any of our industrial age economic systems can make the gap as it stands now.
People will call them slackers or call them lazy or whatever other moralistic snap value judgments people think of, but I think anyone who manages to achieve a shorter working day, away from the office for the same money is doing something worthy of admiration, not derision. It is something to emulate.
This list is fairly poor, but I just wanted to draw negative attention to UltraDefrag and all third party defrag programs. A lot of people use third party solutions but very few actually know why they are using them, except for claims like "they are better!" The truth is that defragging a hard drive is a fairly simple process that is hard to get wrong, you literally just re-organise chunks together into blocks. Windows Defrag gets it right, and to be honest you cannot improve on just getting it right.
Traditionally, Windows defrag tools will defrag the data but won't reorganize it by doing things like putting system files at the start of a partition and everything else afterwards. On Windows 2000 and XP, the Windows tool was actually a basic version of Diskeeper which MS had licensed, that didn't have the functionality for organising the disk. Your data may not be fragmented, but you still end up with large seek times because the system files are all over the partition.
If you want my recommendation, Jkdefrag is a great third party tool.
I went to the site prepared to test it's mettle. I was ready to push it to the limit, probe the very depths of it's knowledge. I was prepared for a challenge, ready to be finally convinced that A.I has made some progress towards humanity. Perhaps I was even ready to look at myself anew, question what it is to be human, to have my own philosophical boundaries tested by an intelligence outside of our known reality.
I greeted the Cleverbot, and started with a simple question:
Q: What is 2 + 2?
A: More than 5.
Oh well, so much for that.
Original SMB levels and Lost levels will be included
is likely going to bite this guy in the ass, assuming he didn't get permission from Nintendo (which from a lack of mention on the site I doubt he has).
Even if he did get permission, it doesn't stop the company from tearing up that agreement. Bomber Games did an incredible remake of Streets of Rage, and had gone to the trouble of asking Sega, who gave them permission. Years later when the final version was released Sega demanded it was removed a couple of days after release.
I guarantee that if I'm at the bar watching a White Sox game, and somebody turns it off in favor of some video game, there's going to be hell to pay.
(replace "White Sox" with your favorite team that plays a real sport based on physical prowess)
What defines a "real sport"? Every sport is just an arbitrary set of rules designed to provide entertainment for competitors or spectators.
I like watching competitive Team Fortress 2. It's exciting, the commentary on sites like VanillaTF2 are informative and of a good standard, and some of the individual pieces of skill and teamwork are breathtaking. It certainly seems like a sport to me - arbitrary rules designed to provide entertainment for competitors and spectators. Perhaps not to your fancy, but it doesn't disqualify it from being a sport.
One reason would be that someone who is disruptive at age 13 might still be able to become a productive member of society if given a little guidance and education.
If the anarchist tendencies among us said "hey if they don't want to go to school, don't make 'em" we're going to end up with half filled schools, and an even greater dependency class than we already have in society - because of course, the fact that you have achieved less or worked less doesn't mean you should receive less, the government should rob from the rich to help you.
The social harm done could hardly be underestimated.
That's fine, but if you want to stop a dependency class then you need to cater for as many people as possible. Forcing kids into schools doesn't automatically give them a future, it doesn't make them learn and it doesn't make them interested. What is wrong with providing opportunities for those that did drop out of school or got poor grades?
The prevailing winds of authoritarian thought seem to be obsessed with dependency culture, but are aghast at the suggestion of doing anything about it, except possibly ending the dependency by cutting people loose completely, leaving them to die or fend for themselves. The social harm we're causing today is saying that no-one has a chance unless they fit a very narrow set of working skills and mental abilities. Don't have them? Tough shit, welfare dependency for you. We should really be looking at providing employment opportunities for those who don't fit into school, as well as those who do.
Traditionally, the Conservative party has always been the more authoritarian party. In the current UK climate of corporatist authoritarianism, you can imagine this takes quite a lot of imagination. While they might oppose 42 day detention limits now, I have no doubt when in power they would change their mind.
Remember the Tories practiced internment during the height of the IRA bombings. Hardly a party of liberty.
As a British citizen, I know the only ways to enjoy liberty are to be 'below the radar' of the authorities, and rely on their absolute incompetence. The state machinery is totally unconcerned with the populace, seeing them a way to feed the corporatist machine and nothing more.
As an aside, I read once that Margaret Thatcher was amazed by how "incredibly stupid" Ronnie Reagen was, so I'm not convinced their relationship was that good.
The 'loss of revenue' argument is what the media corps. are fighting for above anything else. It's the crux of the issue, and the reason so much money is pumped into the current litigation campaign.
If the media corps. could prove in court that 'loss of revenue' is a viable reason to sue, imagine what kind of twisted nonsense would become of it. Fair use, home recording, second hand media and any form of distribution below retail price would be considered 'loss of revenue'.
Why do you think the RIAA gets upset when record stores sell old review copies of a CD? Because to them, a CD sold on Ebay for a quid is a 'loss of revenue'. Since I buy *all* my CDs second hand, this is a big issue for me. Absurd as the argument may sound, litigating for life breaking sums on account of a dozen crappy sounding MP3 files is equally silly.
Essentially, this is an attempt to pass a law against being a 'bad' consumer. Free trade is dead, the 21st century is all about revenue protection.
Slashdot Mirror
"Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls" Hey now. Espionage and sabotage are one thing, but that might be a DMCA violation!
Shh! That could be all the pretext the US needs for another war.
Seriously, when the US invaded Iraq one of the first things the provisional government did was introduce US style copyright laws.
That is not a bad thing.
Oh, I agree. I'm suggesting that not many sponsors will be willing to submit themselves on even terms to the vox populii.
The sponsor will not be given any special treatment with regards to comment score and moderation. The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor.
So essentially the sponsor's representative can be modded up or down in the same way as anyone else? I can't see that going down well in companies without a sense of humour.
We want to offer a sponsor the chance to have a serious conversation with our audience, but we are not going to be giving them a soap box to stand on. If they want to engage with our audience, they will need to understand that means taking the good with the bad.
Any takers so far? I imagine with the myriad of publicity options available today many companies are not going to want to get involved in a direct, uncensored discussion with a fairly informed audience like /.. I'd be inclined to admire any that do, especially if they can actually talk some sense, but I can't see many relishing a challenge like that.
The PC is not dead its just that common end users are driving up the shut-up-and-take-my-money model. the PC will end up being left to the geeks again which is probably the same small percentage of people (compared to the entire pc market space right now) it was back in the late 80s. the only reason common end users bought pcs was to get on the internet..
Exactly this.
Anyone else remember that PC boom in about 1999-2000 where tons of people went and bought ugly, bloated Cyrix MII rigs running Windows 98? It was a hideous time. Back then that was the entry level into computing, and the machines were junk from top to bottom. The only anti virus was from a PC-Pro cover disc circa 1996, there were no firewalls and no security updates. The end user didn't care, as long as it creaked into life long enough to connect to a dial up service. The user base that bought a Cyrix MII are now buying other things that better suit their needs.
What's worse, up until fairly recently they had *two* different chips named after the Pentium. The Pentium D and the Pentium Dual Core.
Who thought up these product ranges? Never mind naming them both Pentium, but giving them similar names? I've known lots of people confuse the two. I have no idea why we need all these product ranges. Celeron, Pentium and Xeon should be sufficient, with maybe something to differentiate the i7. But for god's sake, give them distinct and understandable names!
I hope I'm not the only one who was gravely disappointed with these "nuh-uh!"-style counterpoints. Rather than "and yet the film industry made record profits", let's drop some actual numbers. If our premise - that these guys have failed to make their case to support SOPA - is correct, then all of the world's facts should back us up.
Precisely this. Far too many arguments and debates simply turn into dogmatic slanging matches, where both sides make meaningless assertions without taking any time to construct a reasonable argument. If SOPA is as bad as people say there should be piles of ammunition to use against it.
Why aren't people challenging these figures about piracy and demanding to see the factual evidence? Why aren't people combing the industry produced literature on the subject and pointing out blatant corruptions of fact and any absurdities within them? Why aren't people producing counter proposals and statistics for the change they would like to see?
The way to win an argument is to make your opponent's position untenable by the use of factual information and well versed, coherent debate. Not to simply scream in their face louder than they scream in yours, which plays into their hands. Fight your battles on higher intellectual ground!
Just carry a second (or third) charged battery and switch it when the battery is drained.
Hey, I own a Samsung SGH-i320, where the battery life is so bad it came with a charging station and a spare battery as standard!
Please point me to the market where i am guaranteed to profit.
Running a casino.
If you're posting publically about things that future employers might feel would make you unsuitable for a position in their company, then you deserve anything you get.
Do you? I can understand why employers might do it, but shit, how far do you take it? Do you keep absolutely everything that's even slightly left-field private in fear of what employers think of you? If you can't share your life, as provocative or dull as it may be, what's the fucking point?
I think the trend of employers not considering you for a position based on your god-damned facebook profile is a sad commentary on the overwhelming level of employer power, not any failing on part of the individual.
Your voice in our government
Sorry, I was mistaken into thinking (in an ideal world) the people were the government. My mistake. It's your government.
The reason that this is all possible is: bitcoin isn't a currency! It is the same as trading rocks with numbers painted on them to say how much they are worth.
To be fair, all our currencies work this way. The one, sole difference between a dollar and a rock painted with a number is that we believe the former is worth something. Currency is a mass hallucination of value.
For shame. It's probably the wittiest, sexiest, most thought provoking sci-fi novel of the last 40 years.
While I understand that /. itself does not write the news, there seems to be some really poor submissions in the last year. Stuff which is way beneath the technical level and focus of the site or content only tenuously related to "tech". I don't necessarily mean political or social submissions, just the obviously vapid stuff.
Sites like Ars are leaving /. behind, and I don't feel like I learn as much here as I used to. Part of the appeal of tech news for me is to actually learn new things which I might not have read otherwise.
Hunt down and destroy the ancestors of Ja-Ja Binks.
Don't forget BSDVille, where all the inhabitants died.
Politicians, lobbyists et. al might actually understand what post-scarcity means.
This is *exactly* the sort of progress we should be making. With a jobs gap that is getting increasingly wider (job creation has not matched population growth for a long time now) with no end in sight we should be adjusting to the idea that we don't just want, but need to work less. Our standard of living depends on it.
The number of jobs per head is already less than 1, and will only go down as we move beyond the industrial age (at least for now, who knows what the future holds?). Spreading those roles still available to more people by reducing hours (and maintaining pay) should be something we consider an absolute priority. Enormous challenges, certainly, but we cannot keep pretending to ourselves that any of our industrial age economic systems can make the gap as it stands now.
People will call them slackers or call them lazy or whatever other moralistic snap value judgments people think of, but I think anyone who manages to achieve a shorter working day, away from the office for the same money is doing something worthy of admiration, not derision. It is something to emulate.
This list is fairly poor, but I just wanted to draw negative attention to UltraDefrag and all third party defrag programs. A lot of people use third party solutions but very few actually know why they are using them, except for claims like "they are better!" The truth is that defragging a hard drive is a fairly simple process that is hard to get wrong, you literally just re-organise chunks together into blocks. Windows Defrag gets it right, and to be honest you cannot improve on just getting it right.
Traditionally, Windows defrag tools will defrag the data but won't reorganize it by doing things like putting system files at the start of a partition and everything else afterwards. On Windows 2000 and XP, the Windows tool was actually a basic version of Diskeeper which MS had licensed, that didn't have the functionality for organising the disk. Your data may not be fragmented, but you still end up with large seek times because the system files are all over the partition.
If you want my recommendation, Jkdefrag is a great third party tool.
I went to the site prepared to test it's mettle. I was ready to push it to the limit, probe the very depths of it's knowledge. I was prepared for a challenge, ready to be finally convinced that A.I has made some progress towards humanity. Perhaps I was even ready to look at myself anew, question what it is to be human, to have my own philosophical boundaries tested by an intelligence outside of our known reality. I greeted the Cleverbot, and started with a simple question: Q: What is 2 + 2? A: More than 5. Oh well, so much for that.
Which means that
is likely going to bite this guy in the ass, assuming he didn't get permission from Nintendo (which from a lack of mention on the site I doubt he has).
Even if he did get permission, it doesn't stop the company from tearing up that agreement. Bomber Games did an incredible remake of Streets of Rage, and had gone to the trouble of asking Sega, who gave them permission. Years later when the final version was released Sega demanded it was removed a couple of days after release.
I guarantee that if I'm at the bar watching a White Sox game, and somebody turns it off in favor of some video game, there's going to be hell to pay.
(replace "White Sox" with your favorite team that plays a real sport based on physical prowess)
What defines a "real sport"? Every sport is just an arbitrary set of rules designed to provide entertainment for competitors or spectators.
I like watching competitive Team Fortress 2. It's exciting, the commentary on sites like VanillaTF2 are informative and of a good standard, and some of the individual pieces of skill and teamwork are breathtaking. It certainly seems like a sport to me - arbitrary rules designed to provide entertainment for competitors and spectators. Perhaps not to your fancy, but it doesn't disqualify it from being a sport.
One reason would be that someone who is disruptive at age 13 might still be able to become a productive member of society if given a little guidance and education.
If the anarchist tendencies among us said "hey if they don't want to go to school, don't make 'em" we're going to end up with half filled schools, and an even greater dependency class than we already have in society - because of course, the fact that you have achieved less or worked less doesn't mean you should receive less, the government should rob from the rich to help you.
The social harm done could hardly be underestimated.
That's fine, but if you want to stop a dependency class then you need to cater for as many people as possible. Forcing kids into schools doesn't automatically give them a future, it doesn't make them learn and it doesn't make them interested. What is wrong with providing opportunities for those that did drop out of school or got poor grades?
The prevailing winds of authoritarian thought seem to be obsessed with dependency culture, but are aghast at the suggestion of doing anything about it, except possibly ending the dependency by cutting people loose completely, leaving them to die or fend for themselves. The social harm we're causing today is saying that no-one has a chance unless they fit a very narrow set of working skills and mental abilities. Don't have them? Tough shit, welfare dependency for you. We should really be looking at providing employment opportunities for those who don't fit into school, as well as those who do.
This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.
Because meekly sitting there and begging the State to give clemency and change it's mind has been *really* successful so far, hasn't it?
Weird expressions of dissent are all we have left. Nothing else works.
Remember the Tories practiced internment during the height of the IRA bombings. Hardly a party of liberty.
As a British citizen, I know the only ways to enjoy liberty are to be 'below the radar' of the authorities, and rely on their absolute incompetence. The state machinery is totally unconcerned with the populace, seeing them a way to feed the corporatist machine and nothing more.
As an aside, I read once that Margaret Thatcher was amazed by how "incredibly stupid" Ronnie Reagen was, so I'm not convinced their relationship was that good.
If the media corps. could prove in court that 'loss of revenue' is a viable reason to sue, imagine what kind of twisted nonsense would become of it. Fair use, home recording, second hand media and any form of distribution below retail price would be considered 'loss of revenue'.
Why do you think the RIAA gets upset when record stores sell old review copies of a CD? Because to them, a CD sold on Ebay for a quid is a 'loss of revenue'. Since I buy *all* my CDs second hand, this is a big issue for me. Absurd as the argument may sound, litigating for life breaking sums on account of a dozen crappy sounding MP3 files is equally silly.
Essentially, this is an attempt to pass a law against being a 'bad' consumer. Free trade is dead, the 21st century is all about revenue protection.