Every geek also knows that story is a complete fabrication (you could at least wait until April 1st to repost it). You could probably get Fox to greenlight it though, considering they've purportedly just sunk to inking a deal to make a sequel to Independence Day (I just hope that one is an April Fool's joke too).
You're putting an awful lot of trust in one man not to abuse his power. Even if you think Obama will handle it responsibly (and I don't have nearly as much faith in him as you), don't you think there is at least the possibility that one of his successors may not be so moderate?
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I should point out that Germany before the 1930's was almost unquestionably the most academically and intellectually sophisticated country in the world. If you had went back to Germany in the 20's and told them that within 20 years, their country would elect one of the most intolerant demagogues and world history as dictator and begin systematically committing the genocide of a sizable portion of their population, they would have laughed at the thought. We always like to think that we're above devolving into brutality, oppression, and totalitarianism; but things can fall apart amazingly fast once you start heading down a certain road. I wouldn't just dismiss it so casually.
The goal of most filters isn't to be completely impossible to bypass, it's to make it enough of a pain in the ass to bypass that only a tiny minority will do it.
This whole "Internet OS" thing reminds me of the periodic resurgences of the dumb terminal/thin client idea that goes back to the mainframe days. It seems like every ten years or so, everyone is talking about thin clients in every office, with the OS and apps running on some offsite server somewhere (now with the added twist of multiple servers over the internet). Ostensibly this is seen as a good way to save IT money and overhead. But in every actual deployment I've seen, it only causes hassles, additional expense, and headaches.
Back in the 90's we tried this at my old university. We networked all our computers and put all our apps on a central server. Even though this was all done on a local network (much more reliable in those days than the internet), it was still a complete disaster. Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document. Now, with little network downtime, you would think this wouldn't be so much of a problem--but when you're talking about thousands of people who live and die by the written word, and who are often working on class deadlines, you can imagine that even 30 minutes of downtime was a nightmare. I was skeptical of this system from the get-go, but got overruled by some "visionaries" who had bought into the whole thin client argument with a religious fervor. Of course, long story short, we ended up scrapping the system after a year and going back to the old system (with a significant cost to the state and university for our folly).
It does take brains, but not necessarily his. I always suspected that pre-2006 Bush was little more than a pawn of Dick Cheney. It was only after the Republican Congressional defeat that he started to defy him (ousting Cheney's old buddy Rumsfeld, taking more moderate stances on Cheney's favorite issues, etc.).
Written by John Sayles, FX by James Cameron, a pre-A-Team George Peppard doing a comic role--should have been the greatest movie ever, but somehow wasn't.
You kids today think you have it so tough because all you can come up with in your "WE ALL GONNA DIE!" scenario is that you might have to abandon a few coastal cities and loose a few fucking islands?!?!? Let me tell you something, ladies--back in my day, we had REAL fears, like nuclear winter. We had roving packs of post-nuclear-holocaust marauders ready to cut our heads off just to steal a lousy tank of gasoline and some shotgun shells in OUR fucking doomsday scenarios! Has a little rising seawater ever caused your hair and teeth to fall out? Huh? Has a little coastal flooding ever caused packs of cannibals to roam the lands looking to rape your wife and have you for dinner? I don't think so! Ever had a supercomputer start an apocalyptic war with some slowly melting ice caps? Not likely!
Grow up and get some real irrational fears, you pansies.
Bah, the cars in the UK are too small to rack up a decent body count with. On the upside, the cops don't carry guns--so imagine the mayhem if you were well-armed and on a rampage.
No, I am pointing out that handing out the internet in undeveloped countries like candy, with no forethought to establishing structures to prevent and deal with abuse and misuse, is naive. Too many organizations are treating the internet as some sort of miracle cure-all that poor countries will just use benevolently to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They're ignoring the reality that, in a country where harsh poverty is a daily reality, the temptation to use the internet to scam can be MUCH more tempting than using it to take online college courses and to learn how to plant better crops.
Poverty and hard living in places like the Ukraine and Nigeria doesn't tend to encourage much empathy among scammers and phishers. People (like the OLPC guys) always talk about how bringing the internet to the third world is going to make lives better and all that. But they ignore the fact that a lot of those poor people are going to use this new-found freedom to scam those in the developed world, people who have a lot more resources than they do. Over time, this kind of activity can become normalized, enjoying quasi-legal and moral sanction (as was the case here).
I'm beginning to think that everything will one day stream Netflix. It would be nice if Netflix would concentrate less on getting their service on my refrigerator and more on expanding their selection of movies and shows available for streaming. It doesn't seem to have improved all that much since the service started.
I'm sure that trying to tracking a person's sexual inclinations by their typing habits will prove to be every bit as useful as the science of Phrenology.
The personal phone I carry is none of my IT department's business, and I like it that way--thank you very much. I don't want to EVER get into a situation where my workplace has a legal case for subpoenaing my personal phone.
Seriously, it's hard to believe I used to recommend them as a hosting service--back before their advertising campaigns started looking like Hooter's commercials. Now they could have the best value on the market and I'd still be ashamed to recommend them to any real client (and by "real" I mean "Anyone who isn't an old frat brother").
Since Apple makes the hardware, they don't HAVE to extort other companies to only ship with their software. Steve Jobs is just doing what Bill Gates *should* have been allowed to do from the beginning. MS got a raw deal in the 90's. If Dell or any hardware manufacturer had wanted, they could have went to someone else for an OS (IBM's OS/2 Warp was as good, if not better, than anything up through Win 98, and after that there was Linux/BeOs/etc.). They weren't being "extorted." MS was not only perfectly within their right to ship with their own default browser (something *every* OS does today), but they would have been perfectly within their right to ban competing browsers from their OS as well, like Apple does today with the iPhone and iPad.
When I make a piece of hardware or software, I am under absolutely no obligation to make it play well with my competition (quite the contrary). I answer to my shareholders only. And if Netscape, or Opera, or whoever has a problem with that; then let them go build their own goddamn OS or phone.
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Every geek also knows that story is a complete fabrication (you could at least wait until April 1st to repost it). You could probably get Fox to greenlight it though, considering they've purportedly just sunk to inking a deal to make a sequel to Independence Day (I just hope that one is an April Fool's joke too).
You're putting an awful lot of trust in one man not to abuse his power. Even if you think Obama will handle it responsibly (and I don't have nearly as much faith in him as you), don't you think there is at least the possibility that one of his successors may not be so moderate?
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I should point out that Germany before the 1930's was almost unquestionably the most academically and intellectually sophisticated country in the world. If you had went back to Germany in the 20's and told them that within 20 years, their country would elect one of the most intolerant demagogues and world history as dictator and begin systematically committing the genocide of a sizable portion of their population, they would have laughed at the thought. We always like to think that we're above devolving into brutality, oppression, and totalitarianism; but things can fall apart amazingly fast once you start heading down a certain road. I wouldn't just dismiss it so casually.
Why do I have a funny feeling that The Pirate Bay will suddenly be labeled a terrorist organization?
The goal of most filters isn't to be completely impossible to bypass, it's to make it enough of a pain in the ass to bypass that only a tiny minority will do it.
You mean Samsonite luggage ISN'T indestructible?!?!?
This whole "Internet OS" thing reminds me of the periodic resurgences of the dumb terminal/thin client idea that goes back to the mainframe days. It seems like every ten years or so, everyone is talking about thin clients in every office, with the OS and apps running on some offsite server somewhere (now with the added twist of multiple servers over the internet). Ostensibly this is seen as a good way to save IT money and overhead. But in every actual deployment I've seen, it only causes hassles, additional expense, and headaches.
Back in the 90's we tried this at my old university. We networked all our computers and put all our apps on a central server. Even though this was all done on a local network (much more reliable in those days than the internet), it was still a complete disaster. Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document. Now, with little network downtime, you would think this wouldn't be so much of a problem--but when you're talking about thousands of people who live and die by the written word, and who are often working on class deadlines, you can imagine that even 30 minutes of downtime was a nightmare. I was skeptical of this system from the get-go, but got overruled by some "visionaries" who had bought into the whole thin client argument with a religious fervor. Of course, long story short, we ended up scrapping the system after a year and going back to the old system (with a significant cost to the state and university for our folly).
It does take brains, but not necessarily his. I always suspected that pre-2006 Bush was little more than a pawn of Dick Cheney. It was only after the Republican Congressional defeat that he started to defy him (ousting Cheney's old buddy Rumsfeld, taking more moderate stances on Cheney's favorite issues, etc.).
In their defense, the last Tiger Woods game was pretty sweet, before they went back to focusing on the golf.
Written by John Sayles, FX by James Cameron, a pre-A-Team George Peppard doing a comic role--should have been the greatest movie ever, but somehow wasn't.
I saw Xanadu in the theater. I find it hard to believe anything could be worse than that.
You ever sucked d**k for a cheeseburger?
You kids today think you have it so tough because all you can come up with in your "WE ALL GONNA DIE!" scenario is that you might have to abandon a few coastal cities and loose a few fucking islands?!?!? Let me tell you something, ladies--back in my day, we had REAL fears, like nuclear winter. We had roving packs of post-nuclear-holocaust marauders ready to cut our heads off just to steal a lousy tank of gasoline and some shotgun shells in OUR fucking doomsday scenarios! Has a little rising seawater ever caused your hair and teeth to fall out? Huh? Has a little coastal flooding ever caused packs of cannibals to roam the lands looking to rape your wife and have you for dinner? I don't think so! Ever had a supercomputer start an apocalyptic war with some slowly melting ice caps? Not likely!
Grow up and get some real irrational fears, you pansies.
Why settle for a Danny Boyle wannabe, when you could get Danny Boyle himself?
Bah, the cars in the UK are too small to rack up a decent body count with. On the upside, the cops don't carry guns--so imagine the mayhem if you were well-armed and on a rampage.
No, I am pointing out that handing out the internet in undeveloped countries like candy, with no forethought to establishing structures to prevent and deal with abuse and misuse, is naive. Too many organizations are treating the internet as some sort of miracle cure-all that poor countries will just use benevolently to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They're ignoring the reality that, in a country where harsh poverty is a daily reality, the temptation to use the internet to scam can be MUCH more tempting than using it to take online college courses and to learn how to plant better crops.
Poverty and hard living in places like the Ukraine and Nigeria doesn't tend to encourage much empathy among scammers and phishers. People (like the OLPC guys) always talk about how bringing the internet to the third world is going to make lives better and all that. But they ignore the fact that a lot of those poor people are going to use this new-found freedom to scam those in the developed world, people who have a lot more resources than they do. Over time, this kind of activity can become normalized, enjoying quasi-legal and moral sanction (as was the case here).
I'm beginning to think that everything will one day stream Netflix. It would be nice if Netflix would concentrate less on getting their service on my refrigerator and more on expanding their selection of movies and shows available for streaming. It doesn't seem to have improved all that much since the service started.
No, you're thinking of soccer. Cricket is soccer's retard cousin. People that claim to like her are just trying to get into soccer's pants.
I'm sure that trying to tracking a person's sexual inclinations by their typing habits will prove to be every bit as useful as the science of Phrenology.
I guess the billions upon billions of cricket fans waiting across the world with baited breath for this match will just have to be disappointed.
The personal phone I carry is none of my IT department's business, and I like it that way--thank you very much. I don't want to EVER get into a situation where my workplace has a legal case for subpoenaing my personal phone.
Seriously, it's hard to believe I used to recommend them as a hosting service--back before their advertising campaigns started looking like Hooter's commercials. Now they could have the best value on the market and I'd still be ashamed to recommend them to any real client (and by "real" I mean "Anyone who isn't an old frat brother").
Since Apple makes the hardware, they don't HAVE to extort other companies to only ship with their software. Steve Jobs is just doing what Bill Gates *should* have been allowed to do from the beginning. MS got a raw deal in the 90's. If Dell or any hardware manufacturer had wanted, they could have went to someone else for an OS (IBM's OS/2 Warp was as good, if not better, than anything up through Win 98, and after that there was Linux/BeOs/etc.). They weren't being "extorted." MS was not only perfectly within their right to ship with their own default browser (something *every* OS does today), but they would have been perfectly within their right to ban competing browsers from their OS as well, like Apple does today with the iPhone and iPad.
When I make a piece of hardware or software, I am under absolutely no obligation to make it play well with my competition (quite the contrary). I answer to my shareholders only. And if Netscape, or Opera, or whoever has a problem with that; then let them go build their own goddamn OS or phone.
David Haye announced today that he's changing his name to "Mike Tyson." What a comeback!