Re:I don't care for these commercials
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New "Get a Mac" TV ads
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I haven't found a USB keyboard that provides a built-in USB hub that is also powered yet. Maybe they exist, but they certainly aren't the $9 ones. No matter what I plug into there other than the mouse, it tells me I need to plug this device into a powered USB port (even if it doesn't actually need power, like an iPod or my digital camera, both of which come with their own power). Its funny because on my PC, these devices work fine on unpowered ports. Same is true on the same hardware running Ubuntu. It's only OSX that thinks these external devices need to be powered.
So plug it into the empty port on your keyboard. Not powered.
Or, buy one of the macs that comes with ports on the front. If these exist, I honestly didn't know it.
Or, buy a hub. So the solution to a problem as simple as the placement of USB ports on a Mac is to purchase additional hardware to make up for the shortcomings in the initial design? Sounds simple, I'm sure every user knows what a USB hub is.
My 6 month old iMac provides only unpowered USB connections from its keyboard. Even devices that shouldn't require power (iPod, digital camera), OSX tells me they do. Interestingly enough, when running Linux (Ubuntu) on the same box, I can interface with these devices fine.
Re:I don't care for these commercials
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New "Get a Mac" TV ads
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not that almost any PCs come with PS2 keyboard/mouse any more, but since most vendors color code all their cables, its really just a matter of either not being color/tone blind (and also being able to match colors), or at least being able to tell the difference between the icon that looks like a keyboard, and the icon that looks like a mouse. Even if in spite of all of this, you manage to get them mixed up, most computers will still work fine. The rest of the cables only fit into one socket, so the only way to misconnect them is either to forget to, or requires a hammer.
Honestly I am not sure why all the keyboards and mice are USB now, the plug is no smaller, and you also give up at least one USB port to something that every non-server computer has. My Mac Mini at home only has 2 USB ports, and because I didn't want to drop $120 on a keyboard & mouse for a $450 computer, I have no free USB ports by default. Instead, I have an extra device sitting with my mini (USB hub) complete with associated wires.
And can we get a Mac with a USB port on the front of the box? I know that it's supposed to look like a simple design, but when I have to drag the expensive and fragile screen of the iMac I have at work around to get at the back of it so I can plug in the cable/thumb drive, so I can turn the screen around again so I can see it, so I can copy a file off of it, then turn it around and unplug it again, before turning it straight again so I can go back to work, it suddenly stops seeming like such a simple design. Whatever happened to form following function? Macs are all about being pretty, and somehow most people accept this as actually meaning "more user friendly."
Re:I don't care for these commercials
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New "Get a Mac" TV ads
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The stuff the OEM vendor bundles on the desktop is really not a problem with Windows, it's a problem with OEMs who don't actually have the best interests of their consumers in mind. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm also not a big fan of OSX. Between the two, Windows is able to be more productive, consistent (home & end keys - nuf sed), meaningful (how often do I really need to scroll to the top of my terminal window's history vs going to the front of my current line, why would Home & End be bound this way by default?) and waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard, software rendered drop shadows & transparencies, etc. Believe it or not, I value responsiveness, consistency, and day-to-day usability over polish. But then I'm not an average computer user, I'm a techie.
This is why I use XGL on Ubuntu on my iMac: responsive, pretty, hardware accelerated eye candy, and my CPU is totally quiet when I'm not specifically telling it to process something. I got used to seeing it idle at 10-15% CPU under OSX, and under Linux, it idles at 0-2%.
You're right, I guess Karma isn't what I really care about, what I care about is losing the privileges that I currently have. So I try to walk the line of moderating as fairly as I can without going to the point where some metamod will think I moderated unfairly, just because they disagreed with the perspective of the poster that I positively moderated.
You're right, group think isn't as bad here as elsewhere on the net, but it's not nearly as good as you'd find in some other communities. It's a fundamental flaw in allowing communities to police themselves, you can mitigate it to a certain extent, but you cannot eliminate it. For example, look at some of the people who try to defend a religious or non-evolutionary perspective. Or try to defend laws restricting minor (as in children) access to anything, no matter how psychologically, emotionally, or sometimes even physically damaging.
I try to pull the group thinking to be more centered, as much as I can within the limits the system imposes, and without risking losing or at least hurting my ability to do this.
At the moment, I'm 86% unfair meta-moderated, so I am feeling like I need to be a bit more cautious, I'm not sure at what threshold I'll lose mod rights. I firmly believe every one of my moderations has been fair, and am certain I could make a compelling case as such to any who would challenge me in a way where I could defend it.
Enough bad karma and my comments drop off most people's threshold, I lose mod privileges, I lose metamod privileges, and I'm guessing I lose access to the various beta features that have been enabled for me. Basically I care about karma for the various reasons that karma exists (and not for the more popular reason of bragging rights). There are definitely moderations that I elect not to perform because even though I feel its a fair moderation, moderating in good faith can be punnished. Also, I believe you can lose moderation privileges even with relatively good karma, if your moderations exceed a certain percentage of unfair meta-moderation.
I recognize that meta moderation is an attempt to curb the bad moderators out there, and I recognize that for this reason its really necessary, but like all community based moderation systems, both meta moderation and regular moderation primarily function as a means to draw the most commonly held beliefs of the community to the surface, while burrying less common beliefs.
AV ran for 6 days straight on my server (Uther) one weekend where it was both a game holiday weekend for AV, and a real life holiday weekend (Thanksgiving I think?). The round started some time on Wednesday morning, went through the entire holiday weekend and into Monday & early Tuesday. I'm guessing some college kids missed their classes after Thanksgiving, and even probably some people called into work sick. At that point it was a grudge match. Alliance ultimately won when enough horde dropped out.
I regularly positively moderate people even when I don't agree with what they've said. I'm operating on the meaning of the moderation words themselves rather than whether or not I philosophically agree. Most mods, however, seem to see the moderation system as a way to promote personal agendas which is IMHO an abuse of the moderation system. So I think what you're saying is a good idea, because it might cause more people to be modded up even if their view differs from the community.
The unfortunate side effect of me using the moderation system as I believe it was intended to be used (rather than the way it's actually used by most of the mods) is that I get periodic unfair moderation metamoderations, which comes with a karma hit =(. This actually disencourages me from moderating, which is unfortunate since I try very hard to be an impartial mod and consider whether their post has validity, not whether I agree with it. I'm not willing to karma whore to make up for lost moderation karma, so in this sense the system favors the abusers.
At the same time we frequently see comments modded as flamebait when they're actually insightful, interesting, or informative but differ from the popular opinion.
I'm curious if this will not give rise to a new breed of network bootups. This breed would be initiated from a BIOS that only allows itself to be flashed with very visible and bright red user confirmation off a non-bootable physically attached disk (such as CD or floppy). This BIOS will only boot off the network, and what it boots would be anti-VM software which confirms the local boot process of your machine, then once determined to be clean, transfers control back to the local machine. The BIOS would have no built in support for booting directly from an attached disk.
Of course this is only useful in corporate installs, but what corporation wouldn't want that kind of security? Similar ideas could be implemented (albeit with less user security) for on-board flash which also has the same sort of restrictions on being updated. Basically the idea is that once you've gotten past the BIOS screen, the BIOS and its anti-VM store cannot be modified any longer, as a hardware design (eg, the POST process sets a read-only bit on these important parts once POST is done).
I guess my point is in the end, there will still be ways to detect this stuff, and it will require BIOS/EFI support for booting from a known-safe location that can test for rootkit VMs. It may not be as convenient as today's antivirus software, but nothing is undetectable. Heck, maybe there's a whole new business here. Front-loading "Security cards" (ROM) from antivirus vendors. You pay a monthly fee, and each month a new card is mailed to your house/business with the latest updates. You shut down, pop out the old one, pop in the new one, and start up, knowing you're protected.
Hehe, what if they bring an Ubuntu Live CD/DVD? What if they plug in a bootable USB/Firewire disk? What if they move the network cable to a laptop they control? What if they replace the master SATA/IDE disk and put the old one into slave mode?
At some point you have to realize the old security axiom: There is no security that can protect you if your attacker has physical access to the box. However, you can lock down the default software state to something that limits access w/o extraordinary efforts. Sometimes "sufficient" security is sufficient. You cannot protect against a determined attacker w/ physical access, but if you do a reasonable job of locking the box down for typical / normal access, you protect against the casual coworker looking to surf porn w/o it being tracable back to him. Just like locks on houses & cars: this keeps the honest people honest; the dishonest people are going to do whatever they want no matter what.
Also, I get the impression that for whatever reason, filtering at the NAT box won't work (maybe because they won't always control this NAT box, or the NAT box lacks the capability), which would be why he's looking at software solutions.
P.S. you can set Windows to only run certain executables; there's a tool for doing this. This would protect against an install of Firefox from a disk.
Although not an iTunes killer, I have found a player that is substantially better than iTunes. It's called amaroK. The reason IMO that it's not an iTunes killer has nothing to do with its feature set, but merely with its available target install base. Without access to the Windows platform, the possible audience is substantially smaller. I'd strongly recommend that anyone interested in it check it out though; THIS is a truly great music player. It is to iTunes what iTunes was to winamp/xmms.
I gather there are OSX builds available, but no Windows builds. If you're running Ubuntu or Debian, apt-get install amarok & amarok-engines, and you're good to go on an older stable build.
There are some very compelling features available in the latest development builds, which are unfortunately not easy to set up if you're a novice. I recently detailed for my brother the steps I took to get the latest development build running (actually, from their SVN repo); if anyone is interested, please let me know, and I'll toss them here.
Also if you just want to check it out but are currently running Windows or don't want to try to install it, I gather there's a live CD of this too.
Quitting MMO's is fairly easy, or at least it was for me. I just deleted WoW, and that was it.
I'm glad you qualified that with "at least it was for me," because the obvious analogy is, "Quitting gambling is fairly easy, I just don't go into the casino," or "Quitting coccaine is fairly easy, I just threw out my stash."
If quitting was easy, then you weren't addicted, by definition. There is a distinction between playing a lot and being addicted to a game; it's even possible to play more than an addict and simultaneously not have a problem.
Depending on how addicted, you might end up going so far as to buy a new copy of the game after you've deleted it (if you made sure that you had no access to your old account, such as deleting all your chars and changing the password to something you couldn't possibly remember later, or perhaps intentionally getting perma-banned).
Unsurprisingly a lot of people who purchase characters (from eBay or equivalent) for games such as Everquest or Warcraft are actually former players who are looking to get back into the scene without having to start from scratch.
One guy I used to know officially left Everquest on four separate occasions, and still plays today. The first time he just reactivated his old account. The second time he changed his password to something he couldn't remember (typed a bunch of garbage in notepad and pasted it into the password box twice), but used customer service to restore the "forgotten" password. The third time he deleted all his characters and trashed his password; he bought a new account w/ several of the same classes he used to play. The fourth time he purposely got himself banned in a very bad way (and I guess they associate these sort of bans with the billing info?). He bought another new account, and now pays a friend to pay for it for him.
He no longer tries to quit; he recognizes he has a problem, but he realizes he can't kick it himself, and has a hard time convincing anyone that it's harder than just deleting the game. In the mean time, he once stole in-game items from real life friends (actually the people he was living with since he has no job), and after a GM investigation, they found out the items were stuck in a world container (like a forge) and picked up a minute later by his account.
I lost touch with him after that latest incident; the friends he'd stolen from said he's kinda nomadic now, traveling around, mooching shelter and bandwidth; relegated to Everquest since his ancient computer cannot play newer games, and he can of course not afford a newer one.
There's no official recognition of his condition though, so he can't afford to get help for it. He'll tell you he has a problem, but knowing his own past, he doesn't know how he can try again to stop since doing so already ended up costing him some of his closest friends.
When people hear about new kinds of addictions, they think, "Well, I could conquor that, so everyone else must be able to also, and if they claim they can't, then they're a liar." And its this attitude that denies a small minority of people who have a real and uncontrollable problem access to the help they need to get through it.
In the drug market? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. There must be substantial evidence that a drug 1) meets its objective, and 2) doesn't do what it doesn't advertise in the prescribing information sheet (PI - aka patient information sheet).
This isn't the FDA attempting to protect a business model, it's the FDA ensuring the safety of citizens, and protecting them from snake oil salesmen who might actually be selling people not only false hope, but also products which do more harm than good (if they do any good at all).
Do you know that for a short while, before regulatory approval, it was popular to sell radioactive isotopes as cure-alls that were to be consumed orally? Also tape worm eggs were sold as a means for weight loss. These sort of products are the result of lack of regulatory oversight.
In the current regulatory process, you must prove that your product accomplishes what it advertises, and you must identify any common side effects, and all of this must be advertised in the PI, so that prescribing physicians and such-minded patients can make informed decisions (which is not to say that all of them do;-)).
Yes, it is true. It cost many millions of dollars to take a product from inception (whether it's a compound created in a laboratory, or a plant natives have been using forever) through all the preclinical and clinical trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval. Not only that, it often costs nearly the same, or sometimes even more, for products that get near the end of clinical trials, and present a side effect that all the preclinical trials failed to display (whether it's because the preclinical subjects were unable to tell the researchers about the side effect, such as something severe that only represents itself seldomly but with no visible signs, or because the non-human test subjects simply didn't experience the side effect).
There are litterally hundreds of people who work on a product at any given point in its many testing phases, and all of these people draw salaries. Testing for products can take 10 or more years, and all of this gives no guarantee the product will succeed at the end.
If all of that work and expense could be done by one company, and any other company could snap it up w/o having to invest in that research, then who in their right mind would invest 10's or 100's of millions of dollars into producing a product when that basically means they're giving it to their competetors for free? Sometimes when the product is sufficiently narrow in scope, even with patents, on a successful drug, drug companies fail to recover their investment during the patent's lifetime.
There are many areas that the patent system is abused. It may even be abused to some extent in the pharmaceutical industry (there certainly are products that are less expensive than other products to research and produce, depending on the product's origin, intended use, and how smoothly it runs through trials), but it is absolutely necessary in order that companies like these (which are in the end for-profit companies with a legal obligation to their share holders; feel free to start your own not-for-profit pharmaceutical) can research and produce life saving drugs and treatments while remaining financially salient.
I think the long and short of this whole discussion is that there's no silver bullet here. If there was, then the opposing system would by and large fall into disuse. Depending on what sort of thing you're making, how it behaves, and what it interacts with, different scenarios will be easier / harder to program, and more / less efficient with system resources.
Maybe I'm not the demographic being described by the article, but I believe I have more close friends than I would w/o the Internet. I have my real life friends, some of whom have been my friends for more than half my life, and I have close friends I met online, and only know from online. Some of these people I've never met in real life, yet I'm comfortable enough to confide in them and look to them for advice.
I don't use MySpace, I don't participate in social networking sites, yet I've still managed to encounter other minds like mine; minds I can learn from, and minds I can teach. Having an online life doesn't preclude me from having an offline life, and indeed they supplement each other.
Finally, the Internet has greatly facilitated maintaining offline friendships that would have dissolved for geographic reasons. These friendships have moved online, and if not for the Internet, we might write a letter once a month or so. Instead I talk to these people daily. We also game together, so on a typical Friday night, a half dozen of my real life (offline) friends and I meet up and slay Onyxia or run Molten Core together when it would be logistically infeasible for us to meet in person.
Whose rights are eroded? Only children, and children, most of whom lack objective and rational consideration (which is not to say all adults have this), have significantly reduced rights as it is, and this is the way it should be; children should be subject to parental jurisdiction. I hope you don't mean to say that children should have all the same rights as adults, because if so, my kids better get out there and get a job! (that one was sarcasm)
A child not having a right to something that adults enjoy a right to is not necessarily an affront. In this case, for those children whose parents grant them access to the restricted material, their rights are eroded only by an extremely thin margin (almost all such kids would have had to had a parent at least take them to the store anyhow, and my kids' money comes from me to boot). For children whose parents don't want them having access to this kind of material, well, I guess they're SoL, as well they should be, since it is within the right (and duty, if the parent feels it is necessary) of the parent to restrict this material.
For adults, you're right, for children, you're wrong. The government has frequently filtered products available to children through a lens of adult supervision. Precent here is well established.
Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this point, the government is not saying, "Your children cannot have access to this material," (like it does with alcohol) rather it's saying, "An adult needs to decide it's ok for the kid."
That decision is mine and my wife's, period...
And now you and your wife (if you live in this jurisdiction) will have a tool to facilitate this more easily.
This watermarking would be easily defeated with a posterization filter. Just dither every color to the nearest multiple of 2 or 3, or whatever threshold is necessary. We shouldn't see much perceptible loss in quality, but the watermark would be eliminated.
Watermarking is actually generally about altering the data stream in a way that is invasive enough that removing it would unacceptably degrade quality. Thus all watermarking will be perceptible, or else it is too easily defeated. I think the rule of thumb is something like twice the quality loss that the watermark introduces is necessary to remove the watermark.
If you wish to use this overly broad definition of censorship, a definition which somehow, contrary to the meaning of the word, doesn't deny access, only requires adult supervision for kids, then yes, it meets your definition. And I believe it is appropriate. Whether the punnishments for noncompliance set forth in the law are appropriate, and whether the law itself is overly vague, I'm not really debating at the moment, only that such laws, if crafted carefully, are a good thing. And since noone can seem to cough up the actual text of the law, it's hard to know beyond the fud being spread by this article how vague the definitions are or how tough the punnishments are.
It is a tool for parents to help control what content their kids have access to. If you don't believe that developing minds are influenced by their environment, then I sincerely hope that child services takes an interest in how you raise your children should you currently or ever have any.
censoring n 1: counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy [syn: censorship, security review] 2: deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances [syn: censorship]
Any adult still has access to this material, and any child with adult supervision. If it were censorship, then either noone could get access to this material, or only people with government clearance could get access to the material.
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I haven't found a USB keyboard that provides a built-in USB hub that is also powered yet. Maybe they exist, but they certainly aren't the $9 ones. No matter what I plug into there other than the mouse, it tells me I need to plug this device into a powered USB port (even if it doesn't actually need power, like an iPod or my digital camera, both of which come with their own power). Its funny because on my PC, these devices work fine on unpowered ports. Same is true on the same hardware running Ubuntu. It's only OSX that thinks these external devices need to be powered.
So plug it into the empty port on your keyboard.
Not powered.
Or, buy one of the macs that comes with ports on the front.
If these exist, I honestly didn't know it.
Or, buy a hub.
So the solution to a problem as simple as the placement of USB ports on a Mac is to purchase additional hardware to make up for the shortcomings in the initial design? Sounds simple, I'm sure every user knows what a USB hub is.
My 6 month old iMac provides only unpowered USB connections from its keyboard. Even devices that shouldn't require power (iPod, digital camera), OSX tells me they do. Interestingly enough, when running Linux (Ubuntu) on the same box, I can interface with these devices fine.
Not that almost any PCs come with PS2 keyboard/mouse any more, but since most vendors color code all their cables, its really just a matter of either not being color/tone blind (and also being able to match colors), or at least being able to tell the difference between the icon that looks like a keyboard, and the icon that looks like a mouse. Even if in spite of all of this, you manage to get them mixed up, most computers will still work fine. The rest of the cables only fit into one socket, so the only way to misconnect them is either to forget to, or requires a hammer.
Honestly I am not sure why all the keyboards and mice are USB now, the plug is no smaller, and you also give up at least one USB port to something that every non-server computer has. My Mac Mini at home only has 2 USB ports, and because I didn't want to drop $120 on a keyboard & mouse for a $450 computer, I have no free USB ports by default. Instead, I have an extra device sitting with my mini (USB hub) complete with associated wires.
And can we get a Mac with a USB port on the front of the box? I know that it's supposed to look like a simple design, but when I have to drag the expensive and fragile screen of the iMac I have at work around to get at the back of it so I can plug in the cable/thumb drive, so I can turn the screen around again so I can see it, so I can copy a file off of it, then turn it around and unplug it again, before turning it straight again so I can go back to work, it suddenly stops seeming like such a simple design. Whatever happened to form following function? Macs are all about being pretty, and somehow most people accept this as actually meaning "more user friendly."
The stuff the OEM vendor bundles on the desktop is really not a problem with Windows, it's a problem with OEMs who don't actually have the best interests of their consumers in mind. I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm also not a big fan of OSX. Between the two, Windows is able to be more productive, consistent (home & end keys - nuf sed), meaningful (how often do I really need to scroll to the top of my terminal window's history vs going to the front of my current line, why would Home & End be bound this way by default?) and waste less of my CPU on stupid and meaningless crap like Dashboard, software rendered drop shadows & transparencies, etc. Believe it or not, I value responsiveness, consistency, and day-to-day usability over polish. But then I'm not an average computer user, I'm a techie.
This is why I use XGL on Ubuntu on my iMac: responsive, pretty, hardware accelerated eye candy, and my CPU is totally quiet when I'm not specifically telling it to process something. I got used to seeing it idle at 10-15% CPU under OSX, and under Linux, it idles at 0-2%.
You're right, I guess Karma isn't what I really care about, what I care about is losing the privileges that I currently have. So I try to walk the line of moderating as fairly as I can without going to the point where some metamod will think I moderated unfairly, just because they disagreed with the perspective of the poster that I positively moderated.
You're right, group think isn't as bad here as elsewhere on the net, but it's not nearly as good as you'd find in some other communities. It's a fundamental flaw in allowing communities to police themselves, you can mitigate it to a certain extent, but you cannot eliminate it. For example, look at some of the people who try to defend a religious or non-evolutionary perspective. Or try to defend laws restricting minor (as in children) access to anything, no matter how psychologically, emotionally, or sometimes even physically damaging.
I try to pull the group thinking to be more centered, as much as I can within the limits the system imposes, and without risking losing or at least hurting my ability to do this.
At the moment, I'm 86% unfair meta-moderated, so I am feeling like I need to be a bit more cautious, I'm not sure at what threshold I'll lose mod rights. I firmly believe every one of my moderations has been fair, and am certain I could make a compelling case as such to any who would challenge me in a way where I could defend it.
Enough bad karma and my comments drop off most people's threshold, I lose mod privileges, I lose metamod privileges, and I'm guessing I lose access to the various beta features that have been enabled for me. Basically I care about karma for the various reasons that karma exists (and not for the more popular reason of bragging rights). There are definitely moderations that I elect not to perform because even though I feel its a fair moderation, moderating in good faith can be punnished. Also, I believe you can lose moderation privileges even with relatively good karma, if your moderations exceed a certain percentage of unfair meta-moderation.
I recognize that meta moderation is an attempt to curb the bad moderators out there, and I recognize that for this reason its really necessary, but like all community based moderation systems, both meta moderation and regular moderation primarily function as a means to draw the most commonly held beliefs of the community to the surface, while burrying less common beliefs.
AV ran for 6 days straight on my server (Uther) one weekend where it was both a game holiday weekend for AV, and a real life holiday weekend (Thanksgiving I think?). The round started some time on Wednesday morning, went through the entire holiday weekend and into Monday & early Tuesday. I'm guessing some college kids missed their classes after Thanksgiving, and even probably some people called into work sick. At that point it was a grudge match. Alliance ultimately won when enough horde dropped out.
I regularly positively moderate people even when I don't agree with what they've said. I'm operating on the meaning of the moderation words themselves rather than whether or not I philosophically agree. Most mods, however, seem to see the moderation system as a way to promote personal agendas which is IMHO an abuse of the moderation system. So I think what you're saying is a good idea, because it might cause more people to be modded up even if their view differs from the community.
The unfortunate side effect of me using the moderation system as I believe it was intended to be used (rather than the way it's actually used by most of the mods) is that I get periodic unfair moderation metamoderations, which comes with a karma hit =(. This actually disencourages me from moderating, which is unfortunate since I try very hard to be an impartial mod and consider whether their post has validity, not whether I agree with it. I'm not willing to karma whore to make up for lost moderation karma, so in this sense the system favors the abusers.
At the same time we frequently see comments modded as flamebait when they're actually insightful, interesting, or informative but differ from the popular opinion.
I'm curious if this will not give rise to a new breed of network bootups. This breed would be initiated from a BIOS that only allows itself to be flashed with very visible and bright red user confirmation off a non-bootable physically attached disk (such as CD or floppy). This BIOS will only boot off the network, and what it boots would be anti-VM software which confirms the local boot process of your machine, then once determined to be clean, transfers control back to the local machine. The BIOS would have no built in support for booting directly from an attached disk.
Of course this is only useful in corporate installs, but what corporation wouldn't want that kind of security? Similar ideas could be implemented (albeit with less user security) for on-board flash which also has the same sort of restrictions on being updated. Basically the idea is that once you've gotten past the BIOS screen, the BIOS and its anti-VM store cannot be modified any longer, as a hardware design (eg, the POST process sets a read-only bit on these important parts once POST is done).
I guess my point is in the end, there will still be ways to detect this stuff, and it will require BIOS/EFI support for booting from a known-safe location that can test for rootkit VMs. It may not be as convenient as today's antivirus software, but nothing is undetectable. Heck, maybe there's a whole new business here. Front-loading "Security cards" (ROM) from antivirus vendors. You pay a monthly fee, and each month a new card is mailed to your house/business with the latest updates. You shut down, pop out the old one, pop in the new one, and start up, knowing you're protected.
Hehe, what if they bring an Ubuntu Live CD/DVD? What if they plug in a bootable USB/Firewire disk? What if they move the network cable to a laptop they control? What if they replace the master SATA/IDE disk and put the old one into slave mode?
At some point you have to realize the old security axiom: There is no security that can protect you if your attacker has physical access to the box. However, you can lock down the default software state to something that limits access w/o extraordinary efforts. Sometimes "sufficient" security is sufficient. You cannot protect against a determined attacker w/ physical access, but if you do a reasonable job of locking the box down for typical / normal access, you protect against the casual coworker looking to surf porn w/o it being tracable back to him. Just like locks on houses & cars: this keeps the honest people honest; the dishonest people are going to do whatever they want no matter what.
Also, I get the impression that for whatever reason, filtering at the NAT box won't work (maybe because they won't always control this NAT box, or the NAT box lacks the capability), which would be why he's looking at software solutions.
P.S. you can set Windows to only run certain executables; there's a tool for doing this. This would protect against an install of Firefox from a disk.
Although not an iTunes killer, I have found a player that is substantially better than iTunes. It's called amaroK. The reason IMO that it's not an iTunes killer has nothing to do with its feature set, but merely with its available target install base. Without access to the Windows platform, the possible audience is substantially smaller. I'd strongly recommend that anyone interested in it check it out though; THIS is a truly great music player. It is to iTunes what iTunes was to winamp/xmms.
I gather there are OSX builds available, but no Windows builds. If you're running Ubuntu or Debian, apt-get install amarok & amarok-engines, and you're good to go on an older stable build.
There are some very compelling features available in the latest development builds, which are unfortunately not easy to set up if you're a novice. I recently detailed for my brother the steps I took to get the latest development build running (actually, from their SVN repo); if anyone is interested, please let me know, and I'll toss them here.
Also if you just want to check it out but are currently running Windows or don't want to try to install it, I gather there's a live CD of this too.
I'm glad you qualified that with "at least it was for me," because the obvious analogy is, "Quitting gambling is fairly easy, I just don't go into the casino," or "Quitting coccaine is fairly easy, I just threw out my stash."
If quitting was easy, then you weren't addicted, by definition. There is a distinction between playing a lot and being addicted to a game; it's even possible to play more than an addict and simultaneously not have a problem.
Depending on how addicted, you might end up going so far as to buy a new copy of the game after you've deleted it (if you made sure that you had no access to your old account, such as deleting all your chars and changing the password to something you couldn't possibly remember later, or perhaps intentionally getting perma-banned).
Unsurprisingly a lot of people who purchase characters (from eBay or equivalent) for games such as Everquest or Warcraft are actually former players who are looking to get back into the scene without having to start from scratch.
One guy I used to know officially left Everquest on four separate occasions, and still plays today. The first time he just reactivated his old account. The second time he changed his password to something he couldn't remember (typed a bunch of garbage in notepad and pasted it into the password box twice), but used customer service to restore the "forgotten" password. The third time he deleted all his characters and trashed his password; he bought a new account w/ several of the same classes he used to play. The fourth time he purposely got himself banned in a very bad way (and I guess they associate these sort of bans with the billing info?). He bought another new account, and now pays a friend to pay for it for him.
He no longer tries to quit; he recognizes he has a problem, but he realizes he can't kick it himself, and has a hard time convincing anyone that it's harder than just deleting the game. In the mean time, he once stole in-game items from real life friends (actually the people he was living with since he has no job), and after a GM investigation, they found out the items were stuck in a world container (like a forge) and picked up a minute later by his account.
I lost touch with him after that latest incident; the friends he'd stolen from said he's kinda nomadic now, traveling around, mooching shelter and bandwidth; relegated to Everquest since his ancient computer cannot play newer games, and he can of course not afford a newer one.
There's no official recognition of his condition though, so he can't afford to get help for it. He'll tell you he has a problem, but knowing his own past, he doesn't know how he can try again to stop since doing so already ended up costing him some of his closest friends.
When people hear about new kinds of addictions, they think, "Well, I could conquor that, so everyone else must be able to also, and if they claim they can't, then they're a liar." And its this attitude that denies a small minority of people who have a real and uncontrollable problem access to the help they need to get through it.
In the drug market? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. There must be substantial evidence that a drug 1) meets its objective, and 2) doesn't do what it doesn't advertise in the prescribing information sheet (PI - aka patient information sheet).
;-)).
This isn't the FDA attempting to protect a business model, it's the FDA ensuring the safety of citizens, and protecting them from snake oil salesmen who might actually be selling people not only false hope, but also products which do more harm than good (if they do any good at all).
Do you know that for a short while, before regulatory approval, it was popular to sell radioactive isotopes as cure-alls that were to be consumed orally? Also tape worm eggs were sold as a means for weight loss. These sort of products are the result of lack of regulatory oversight.
In the current regulatory process, you must prove that your product accomplishes what it advertises, and you must identify any common side effects, and all of this must be advertised in the PI, so that prescribing physicians and such-minded patients can make informed decisions (which is not to say that all of them do
Yes.
Yes, it is true. It cost many millions of dollars to take a product from inception (whether it's a compound created in a laboratory, or a plant natives have been using forever) through all the preclinical and clinical trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval. Not only that, it often costs nearly the same, or sometimes even more, for products that get near the end of clinical trials, and present a side effect that all the preclinical trials failed to display (whether it's because the preclinical subjects were unable to tell the researchers about the side effect, such as something severe that only represents itself seldomly but with no visible signs, or because the non-human test subjects simply didn't experience the side effect).
There are litterally hundreds of people who work on a product at any given point in its many testing phases, and all of these people draw salaries. Testing for products can take 10 or more years, and all of this gives no guarantee the product will succeed at the end.
If all of that work and expense could be done by one company, and any other company could snap it up w/o having to invest in that research, then who in their right mind would invest 10's or 100's of millions of dollars into producing a product when that basically means they're giving it to their competetors for free? Sometimes when the product is sufficiently narrow in scope, even with patents, on a successful drug, drug companies fail to recover their investment during the patent's lifetime.
There are many areas that the patent system is abused. It may even be abused to some extent in the pharmaceutical industry (there certainly are products that are less expensive than other products to research and produce, depending on the product's origin, intended use, and how smoothly it runs through trials), but it is absolutely necessary in order that companies like these (which are in the end for-profit companies with a legal obligation to their share holders; feel free to start your own not-for-profit pharmaceutical) can research and produce life saving drugs and treatments while remaining financially salient.
Unless you're heavily IO bound.
I think the long and short of this whole discussion is that there's no silver bullet here. If there was, then the opposing system would by and large fall into disuse. Depending on what sort of thing you're making, how it behaves, and what it interacts with, different scenarios will be easier / harder to program, and more / less efficient with system resources.
It was supposed to be Stubborn Ape. They translated Stubborn badly and got "donkey" (which are well respected for their stubborn qualities).
Seems this may be a new section on Slashdot called Backlash:
http://backslash.slashdot.org/
Maybe I'm not the demographic being described by the article, but I believe I have more close friends than I would w/o the Internet. I have my real life friends, some of whom have been my friends for more than half my life, and I have close friends I met online, and only know from online. Some of these people I've never met in real life, yet I'm comfortable enough to confide in them and look to them for advice.
I don't use MySpace, I don't participate in social networking sites, yet I've still managed to encounter other minds like mine; minds I can learn from, and minds I can teach. Having an online life doesn't preclude me from having an offline life, and indeed they supplement each other.
Finally, the Internet has greatly facilitated maintaining offline friendships that would have dissolved for geographic reasons. These friendships have moved online, and if not for the Internet, we might write a letter once a month or so. Instead I talk to these people daily. We also game together, so on a typical Friday night, a half dozen of my real life (offline) friends and I meet up and slay Onyxia or run Molten Core together when it would be logistically infeasible for us to meet in person.
That's the point of that line.
Mmmhmm.
Whose rights are eroded? Only children, and children, most of whom lack objective and rational consideration (which is not to say all adults have this), have significantly reduced rights as it is, and this is the way it should be; children should be subject to parental jurisdiction. I hope you don't mean to say that children should have all the same rights as adults, because if so, my kids better get out there and get a job! (that one was sarcasm)
A child not having a right to something that adults enjoy a right to is not necessarily an affront. In this case, for those children whose parents grant them access to the restricted material, their rights are eroded only by an extremely thin margin (almost all such kids would have had to had a parent at least take them to the store anyhow, and my kids' money comes from me to boot). For children whose parents don't want them having access to this kind of material, well, I guess they're SoL, as well they should be, since it is within the right (and duty, if the parent feels it is necessary) of the parent to restrict this material.
For adults, you're right, for children, you're wrong. The government has frequently filtered products available to children through a lens of adult supervision. Precent here is well established.
... ad hominem argument, moron.
Once again, and I feel I've been very clear on this point, the government is not saying, "Your children cannot have access to this material," (like it does with alcohol) rather it's saying, "An adult needs to decide it's ok for the kid."
That decision is mine and my wife's, period...
And now you and your wife (if you live in this jurisdiction) will have a tool to facilitate this more easily.
Nice
Oh the irony is delicious.
This watermarking would be easily defeated with a posterization filter. Just dither every color to the nearest multiple of 2 or 3, or whatever threshold is necessary. We shouldn't see much perceptible loss in quality, but the watermark would be eliminated.
Watermarking is actually generally about altering the data stream in a way that is invasive enough that removing it would unacceptably degrade quality. Thus all watermarking will be perceptible, or else it is too easily defeated. I think the rule of thumb is something like twice the quality loss that the watermark introduces is necessary to remove the watermark.
Then we're debating semantics.
If you wish to use this overly broad definition of censorship, a definition which somehow, contrary to the meaning of the word, doesn't deny access, only requires adult supervision for kids, then yes, it meets your definition. And I believe it is appropriate. Whether the punnishments for noncompliance set forth in the law are appropriate, and whether the law itself is overly vague, I'm not really debating at the moment, only that such laws, if crafted carefully, are a good thing. And since noone can seem to cough up the actual text of the law, it's hard to know beyond the fud being spread by this article how vague the definitions are or how tough the punnishments are.
It is a tool for parents to help control what content their kids have access to. If you don't believe that developing minds are influenced by their environment, then I sincerely hope that child services takes an interest in how you raise your children should you currently or ever have any.
It's not censorship.
censoring
n 1: counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy [syn: censorship, security review] 2: deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances [syn: censorship]
Any adult still has access to this material, and any child with adult supervision. If it were censorship, then either noone could get access to this material, or only people with government clearance could get access to the material.