Maybe not Lulzsec, but Megaupload's Kim Dotcom was arrested in the conditions you described (helicopters and all) in the first half. As for the second half, look at what happens in Gitmo and other secret CIA prisons. Unless you're one of those people who think waterboarding is not torture.
Yes, one happend in Australia and the other in the States (Cuba technically). But Megaupload was done at the behest of the U.S. government and their industry cronies. Don't think that it couldn't happen here, in the land of the free and home of the brave.
No, you just can't commit a crime against a rich person in general. Now, poor people, you can bend them over backwards and fuck 'em however you like. At worst, you'll get a slap on the wrist. At best, you'll get a pat on the back for a job well done. Either way, you'll be filthy rich.
The U.S. was not a democracy. Democracies degenerate into mob rule and ultimately tyranny again. The founding fathers knew this when they penned the Constitution. The understood all too well that democracies always resulted in failure. The U.S. was a republic modeled after the Roman republic.
Unfortunately, once we directly elected our Senators, we went from a republic to a democracy. And that is why you see people like Santorum catoring to the lowest common denominator.
If your BS detector isn't working in this day and age when you can access any information at the drop of a hat (or a Google search), then you are either stupid, lazy, or both. Ergo, most people are either stupid, lazy, or both. And considering how hard-working most people actually are, I'd say there's really only one conclusion.
And if it actively tracks me while on my own time - thankyouverymuchbutfuckrightoffnow, 'kay?
So your advice is instead of some technological solution or a second machine be it tablet or laptop, to instead have the OP resign. I'm sure you'd be the first one to resign if your company's machine use policy suddenly turns draconian.
Stuff like that is easy to say. Come back when it's your turn to put your neck on the line.
Unless you're advocating for the OP to actively subvert the company's machine should such a situation happen. In which case, you'd be in for a rude awakening when you get that termination notice and subsequent breach of contract (et al ) lawsuit.
Don't like having to work under company policies? Work for yourself. That's what everybody who's not interested in the corporate culture does. You lose the job security and stability, but you get your freedom in return. If that's not for you either, then you better hope you're real lucky.
You're missing the fact that his company's setup even allows him to connect to the internal network with an unauthorized device at all.
And you're missing the fact that the IT people are currently "none the wiser".
Both speak of an incompetent IT department, or none at all. Any mid-sized or larger company's IT department would have first denied all unauthorized connections, and second be monitoring such breeches. There's a huge difference between a Mac and a Windows machine from an administrative standpoint, and a Mac would stick out like a sore thumb in a properly-monitored Windows environment.
And before anybody says it, any shop using Macs for an enterprise intranet solution is asking for it. There's a reason why every large non-software company has an Active Directory deployment for their employees' personal machines. Microsoft might make crappy home software, but their enterprise solutions are top notch.
You are right about the RIAA, but the MPAA is a much larger industry than you are giving it credit. J.K. Rowling only has so much money because the Harry Potter films are a cash cow for her, and they reinforce and encourage book reading.
The saving grace is, the MPAA isn't nearly as affected by the digitization of media, because part of what they sell is the movie theater experience. The DVD sales is icing on the cake for them. However, the RIAA doesn't control concerts. In fact, it's one of the parts of the much larger music industry that they don't control either directly or indirectly. Also, moving pictures with sound are much harder to digitize than just sound. So the MPAA isn't as threatened by file sharing as the RIAA is.
This difference is why the MPAA can take their sweet time in shutting down sites like Suprnova while the RIAA is running around suing their customers' pants off. It's easy to pass an MP3 around even using an ad-hoc network between two proximal devices. It takes considerably more resources to do the same with a feature-length motion picture. The MPAA still has time (while broadband adoption is low).
The print industry isn't going anywhere. Tablets and self-publishing are both threats, but they're not real threats to the industry, only to its growth. There's nothing like picking up a book and flipping through its pages. Until a machine can replicate that experience, books are going nowhere. And piracy is an afterthought, as books ultimately get priced sufficiently low that it's not too expensive for anyone to purchase recreationally.
The Internet didn't "take off" in 1983 for reasons that are completely unrelated to why this product failed. Most of it was because in 1983, computers were slow, modems were slow, and communication via the Internet wasn't nearly as practical as sneakernet. Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
The only reason why people used the Internet was to communicate a very large amount of information over long distances to a multitude of individuals--distances beyond what a day trip could reach, and enough information to enough people that a quick series of telephone calls couldn't otherwise convey. There were the occasional hobbyists, tinkerers, and computer and engineering geeks--actually, the ones using the Internet were mostly them. The anomalies were the regular people.
This particular service didn't take off probably because competing services like Compuserv and Prodigy were cheaper and better. This service didn't take off more likely because their business model sucked, their management sucked, their product sucked, or some combination thereof. Services like Compuserv were ultimately supplanted by the World Wide Web because the WWW allowed anybody and everybody to generate their own content. But prior to the rise of the WWW, these services were the norm. Even now, there are some unexpected hundreds of thousands of actual subscribers to AOL (as opposed to the people who subscribed, and just kept paying their bills despite no longer using the service), because a lot of people only need and only desire such services. Not that the WWW isn't superior, but back then, the WWW didn't stand a chance. The only reason why the WWW took off was because the speed of computers, as well as the speed of modems, became acceptable. After modems broke 9600 baud speed barrier, access to the Internet was good enough for using the WWW.
And to make it clear, since this was my original point, the WWW is not the Internet. It is only a small part of it, though it is currently the most visible part of the Internet. But it is not the Internet.
If NASA's technological advancements can't be placed in the public domain for all to use, then I say they should at least get a cut of whatever product their technology ends up in.
Balanced is what Fox News advertises themselves as. They're balanced in that they give both sides the same platform with which to speak upon, irrespective of the validity or even the accuracy of the arguments put forth by either side.
Balanced is not synonymous for fair. It is not synonymous for right. Balanced is only for sore losers, whiners, and people who think they're entitled to both an opinion and an audience but have neither.
Quite frankly, Sony's behavior has been atrocious over the last two decades. They have been douchebags. GP and other comments have listed plenty of examples of why they deserve such derision. Now, if you can provide examples of why they might not, bring it. If you can't, shut up and stop whining about how the world (or Slashdot in this case) isn't fair because your opinion counts less than everybody else's. Because quite frankly, if you can't provide those examples, your opinion on the matter sure as hell does count less than the opinions of people who can provide examples, irrespective of their ultimate opinion.
This is why you decentralize and compartmentalize. The life support doesn't talk to the food dispenser. The boosters responsible for orbital adjustments don't talk to the communications array. Likewise, the solar panel controls are separated, even from each other. Communication happens via a human. Validation that the communication was properly passed on can happen using a passive third system that only accepts input and does not send output.
Centralization and consolidation are cost-savings measures. They give up protections and redundancy in favor of efficiency. Sometimes, it's appropriate, and sometimes, it's not. In cases where lives are dependent on the proper functioning of the system, I'd say it's not.
You hit the nail on the head. Monsanto only wields power here because they have the rule of law on their side and deep pocketbooks to keep it so.
They'd be laughed out of China if they tried some of the boneheaded maneuvers they've tried here. That is, assuming they're not brought in front of a firing squad.
It has nothing to do with 9/11 and terrorism in general, than with the end of the Cold War and the lack of a common enemy.
But it's not like the government hasn't been snooping on you since forever. Look at J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI and their history of wiretapping politicans and later blackmailing them (see who brought down Nixon--Hoover's protege who was passed over for the next head of the FBI after Hoover's death). The only difference now is that 1) it can happen almost effortlessly because computers are much faster at processing information, and much better at storing information than humans and paper files respectively; and 2) you know about it immediately because information is available to everybody.
The U.S. and U.S. history is not as rosy and romantic as your grade school text books would let you believe. Despite the virtues of the Constitution and its principles, it's fairly dark. People think that just because we're sitting at the top of the world now that the U.S. is the greatest nation on the planet in human history. The Constitution only allows for a potential for greatness, but this has yet to be, nor have we been there, though we were getting closer for a short period of time (on the scale of human civilization, even 200 years is a short period of time). And it remains to be seen if this potential can ever be realized.
The uneducated and the powerful who use them comprising the majority of the inhabitants of this planet are not interested in a free society or any such thing, but rather intellectual and physical security for the former and power and wealth for the latter. What's unfortunate is that the latter's goals provides for the former's needs. The equillibrium state of civilization is that of the few dictating to the many . A free society where the populace is its own ruler requires a significant amount of work to create and maintain.
This is possible when society is comprised of hard-working individuals who don't mind the extra work that creating and maintaining a free society requires. This is why the middle class peaked during the 20th century. However, current trends of laziness, entitlement, and apathy result in what you see now: the decline of the middle class, greater income disparity, and eroding liberties.
It's not that this is the bleakest time in U.S. history, but it is certainly a step back from yesteryears. It is alarming that the trend is pointed towards equillibrium. Whether it will continue, ultimately resulting in the slow death of what could and arguably should have been greatness, or it will reverse as a result of some unforseen cataclysmic event, remains to be seen.
What's certain is that we live in interesting times. We have the capability to rise up against our masters in a nonviolent, enlightened way. That is the revolution brought about by the information age. We are also on the cusp of driving ourselves into a new Dark Ages. It is a matter of what we as capable individuals living here and now choose to do.
The ignorance shown by the comments on this article, even here where arguably some of the brightest minds in the world congregate, does not make me confident the country will turn around in any manner. But I am comforted by the fact that knowledge and intelligence is not directly correlated to ability, no matter how many knowledgable and intelligent people would like to believe otherwise.
When I relax my eyes, they go down. By your argument, it would be better if the location of the common element was customizable. You can do that in Windows (and move it to either side, but I find that not too useful). But on a Mac, I don't believe you can move that bar to the bottom of the screen even if you wanted to.
First off, at that level, he needs to start bri *ahem* making campaign donations to everybody, not just to the President. Senators, congressmen, judges, even the ones running the party all need their cut. And he needs to be doing it over multiple election years.
A few thousand dollars doesn't cut it anymore these days--at least not at the Federal level. To play in that game, he needs a warchest of at least half a million.
Additionally, he needed a lobbying firm to do the dirty work on his behalf. If it was a lobbying firm who did the brib *ahem* gift-giving instead, he would be shielded from all this by plausible deniability and would have kept his job. He could've just fired the lobbying firm and re-hired them under a different company name *ahem* I mean find another one.
Not sure about that. Social networks gain revenue based on online advertising, which is about how many ads get shown to the users. Spending 10 minutes on Facebook would yield the same revenue as spending 1 minute on G+ if there's very little page changes in Facebook, but a lot of page changes in G+.
You can argue about ads on timers and the fact that spending more time means visiting more pages, but there's a reason why content is constantly being split into 10 pages instead of all being on one page. Layout and design are important when it comes to maximizing ad viewership. Newspapers do this too, by splitting their stories across several pages so that you actually will go through the newspaper and not stop at the front page.
That's not to say that G+ is designed to show more ads over a given session than Facebook, but time spent on a site is not an accurate measure of revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not Lulzsec, but Megaupload's Kim Dotcom was arrested in the conditions you described (helicopters and all) in the first half. As for the second half, look at what happens in Gitmo and other secret CIA prisons. Unless you're one of those people who think waterboarding is not torture.
Yes, one happend in Australia and the other in the States (Cuba technically). But Megaupload was done at the behest of the U.S. government and their industry cronies. Don't think that it couldn't happen here, in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Creating a cyborg horse sounds like a cool job.
There's still one thing you can't do on a printed book: retcon.
Imagine if Lucas took all of your Star Wars VHS's (including the ones you recorded off the TV) and made Han shoot first in all of them.
Give me a printed page any day.
Only when a rich man is involved.
No, you just can't commit a crime against a rich person in general. Now, poor people, you can bend them over backwards and fuck 'em however you like. At worst, you'll get a slap on the wrist. At best, you'll get a pat on the back for a job well done. Either way, you'll be filthy rich.
The U.S. was not a democracy. Democracies degenerate into mob rule and ultimately tyranny again. The founding fathers knew this when they penned the Constitution. The understood all too well that democracies always resulted in failure. The U.S. was a republic modeled after the Roman republic.
Unfortunately, once we directly elected our Senators, we went from a republic to a democracy. And that is why you see people like Santorum catoring to the lowest common denominator.
If your BS detector isn't working in this day and age when you can access any information at the drop of a hat (or a Google search), then you are either stupid, lazy, or both. Ergo, most people are either stupid, lazy, or both. And considering how hard-working most people actually are, I'd say there's really only one conclusion.
And if it actively tracks me while on my own time - thankyouverymuchbutfuckrightoffnow, 'kay?
So your advice is instead of some technological solution or a second machine be it tablet or laptop, to instead have the OP resign. I'm sure you'd be the first one to resign if your company's machine use policy suddenly turns draconian.
Stuff like that is easy to say. Come back when it's your turn to put your neck on the line.
Unless you're advocating for the OP to actively subvert the company's machine should such a situation happen. In which case, you'd be in for a rude awakening when you get that termination notice and subsequent breach of contract (et al ) lawsuit.
Don't like having to work under company policies? Work for yourself. That's what everybody who's not interested in the corporate culture does. You lose the job security and stability, but you get your freedom in return. If that's not for you either, then you better hope you're real lucky.
You're missing the fact that his company's setup even allows him to connect to the internal network with an unauthorized device at all.
And you're missing the fact that the IT people are currently "none the wiser".
Both speak of an incompetent IT department, or none at all. Any mid-sized or larger company's IT department would have first denied all unauthorized connections, and second be monitoring such breeches. There's a huge difference between a Mac and a Windows machine from an administrative standpoint, and a Mac would stick out like a sore thumb in a properly-monitored Windows environment.
And before anybody says it, any shop using Macs for an enterprise intranet solution is asking for it. There's a reason why every large non-software company has an Active Directory deployment for their employees' personal machines. Microsoft might make crappy home software, but their enterprise solutions are top notch.
You are right about the RIAA, but the MPAA is a much larger industry than you are giving it credit. J.K. Rowling only has so much money because the Harry Potter films are a cash cow for her, and they reinforce and encourage book reading.
The saving grace is, the MPAA isn't nearly as affected by the digitization of media, because part of what they sell is the movie theater experience. The DVD sales is icing on the cake for them. However, the RIAA doesn't control concerts. In fact, it's one of the parts of the much larger music industry that they don't control either directly or indirectly. Also, moving pictures with sound are much harder to digitize than just sound. So the MPAA isn't as threatened by file sharing as the RIAA is.
This difference is why the MPAA can take their sweet time in shutting down sites like Suprnova while the RIAA is running around suing their customers' pants off. It's easy to pass an MP3 around even using an ad-hoc network between two proximal devices. It takes considerably more resources to do the same with a feature-length motion picture. The MPAA still has time (while broadband adoption is low).
The print industry isn't going anywhere. Tablets and self-publishing are both threats, but they're not real threats to the industry, only to its growth. There's nothing like picking up a book and flipping through its pages. Until a machine can replicate that experience, books are going nowhere. And piracy is an afterthought, as books ultimately get priced sufficiently low that it's not too expensive for anyone to purchase recreationally.
Let's start with the fact that corporations don't have the freedom of speech. They're not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Oh boy... Terminology, folks, terminology.
The Internet didn't "take off" in 1983 for reasons that are completely unrelated to why this product failed. Most of it was because in 1983, computers were slow, modems were slow, and communication via the Internet wasn't nearly as practical as sneakernet. Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
The only reason why people used the Internet was to communicate a very large amount of information over long distances to a multitude of individuals--distances beyond what a day trip could reach, and enough information to enough people that a quick series of telephone calls couldn't otherwise convey. There were the occasional hobbyists, tinkerers, and computer and engineering geeks--actually, the ones using the Internet were mostly them. The anomalies were the regular people.
This particular service didn't take off probably because competing services like Compuserv and Prodigy were cheaper and better. This service didn't take off more likely because their business model sucked, their management sucked, their product sucked, or some combination thereof. Services like Compuserv were ultimately supplanted by the World Wide Web because the WWW allowed anybody and everybody to generate their own content. But prior to the rise of the WWW, these services were the norm. Even now, there are some unexpected hundreds of thousands of actual subscribers to AOL (as opposed to the people who subscribed, and just kept paying their bills despite no longer using the service), because a lot of people only need and only desire such services. Not that the WWW isn't superior, but back then, the WWW didn't stand a chance. The only reason why the WWW took off was because the speed of computers, as well as the speed of modems, became acceptable. After modems broke 9600 baud speed barrier, access to the Internet was good enough for using the WWW.
And to make it clear, since this was my original point, the WWW is not the Internet. It is only a small part of it, though it is currently the most visible part of the Internet. But it is not the Internet.
For a little while, I thought it was just one of the editors trying to sound the word out.
If NASA's technological advancements can't be placed in the public domain for all to use, then I say they should at least get a cut of whatever product their technology ends up in.
Kind of like how MIB is funded.
Balanced is what Fox News advertises themselves as. They're balanced in that they give both sides the same platform with which to speak upon, irrespective of the validity or even the accuracy of the arguments put forth by either side.
Balanced is not synonymous for fair. It is not synonymous for right. Balanced is only for sore losers, whiners, and people who think they're entitled to both an opinion and an audience but have neither.
Quite frankly, Sony's behavior has been atrocious over the last two decades. They have been douchebags. GP and other comments have listed plenty of examples of why they deserve such derision. Now, if you can provide examples of why they might not, bring it. If you can't, shut up and stop whining about how the world (or Slashdot in this case) isn't fair because your opinion counts less than everybody else's. Because quite frankly, if you can't provide those examples, your opinion on the matter sure as hell does count less than the opinions of people who can provide examples, irrespective of their ultimate opinion.
Bet your iPhone would have trouble surivivng a class M flare too.
This is why you decentralize and compartmentalize. The life support doesn't talk to the food dispenser. The boosters responsible for orbital adjustments don't talk to the communications array. Likewise, the solar panel controls are separated, even from each other. Communication happens via a human. Validation that the communication was properly passed on can happen using a passive third system that only accepts input and does not send output.
Centralization and consolidation are cost-savings measures. They give up protections and redundancy in favor of efficiency. Sometimes, it's appropriate, and sometimes, it's not. In cases where lives are dependent on the proper functioning of the system, I'd say it's not.
You hit the nail on the head. Monsanto only wields power here because they have the rule of law on their side and deep pocketbooks to keep it so.
They'd be laughed out of China if they tried some of the boneheaded maneuvers they've tried here. That is, assuming they're not brought in front of a firing squad.
It has nothing to do with 9/11 and terrorism in general, than with the end of the Cold War and the lack of a common enemy.
But it's not like the government hasn't been snooping on you since forever. Look at J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI and their history of wiretapping politicans and later blackmailing them (see who brought down Nixon--Hoover's protege who was passed over for the next head of the FBI after Hoover's death). The only difference now is that 1) it can happen almost effortlessly because computers are much faster at processing information, and much better at storing information than humans and paper files respectively; and 2) you know about it immediately because information is available to everybody.
The U.S. and U.S. history is not as rosy and romantic as your grade school text books would let you believe. Despite the virtues of the Constitution and its principles, it's fairly dark. People think that just because we're sitting at the top of the world now that the U.S. is the greatest nation on the planet in human history. The Constitution only allows for a potential for greatness, but this has yet to be, nor have we been there, though we were getting closer for a short period of time (on the scale of human civilization, even 200 years is a short period of time). And it remains to be seen if this potential can ever be realized.
The uneducated and the powerful who use them comprising the majority of the inhabitants of this planet are not interested in a free society or any such thing, but rather intellectual and physical security for the former and power and wealth for the latter. What's unfortunate is that the latter's goals provides for the former's needs. The equillibrium state of civilization is that of the few dictating to the many . A free society where the populace is its own ruler requires a significant amount of work to create and maintain.
This is possible when society is comprised of hard-working individuals who don't mind the extra work that creating and maintaining a free society requires. This is why the middle class peaked during the 20th century. However, current trends of laziness, entitlement, and apathy result in what you see now: the decline of the middle class, greater income disparity, and eroding liberties.
It's not that this is the bleakest time in U.S. history, but it is certainly a step back from yesteryears. It is alarming that the trend is pointed towards equillibrium. Whether it will continue, ultimately resulting in the slow death of what could and arguably should have been greatness, or it will reverse as a result of some unforseen cataclysmic event, remains to be seen.
What's certain is that we live in interesting times. We have the capability to rise up against our masters in a nonviolent, enlightened way. That is the revolution brought about by the information age. We are also on the cusp of driving ourselves into a new Dark Ages. It is a matter of what we as capable individuals living here and now choose to do.
The ignorance shown by the comments on this article, even here where arguably some of the brightest minds in the world congregate, does not make me confident the country will turn around in any manner. But I am comforted by the fact that knowledge and intelligence is not directly correlated to ability, no matter how many knowledgable and intelligent people would like to believe otherwise.
When I relax my eyes, they go down. By your argument, it would be better if the location of the common element was customizable. You can do that in Windows (and move it to either side, but I find that not too useful). But on a Mac, I don't believe you can move that bar to the bottom of the screen even if you wanted to.
Proper grammar? You must be new here.
He wasn't doing it right.
First off, at that level, he needs to start bri *ahem* making campaign donations to everybody, not just to the President. Senators, congressmen, judges, even the ones running the party all need their cut. And he needs to be doing it over multiple election years.
A few thousand dollars doesn't cut it anymore these days--at least not at the Federal level. To play in that game, he needs a warchest of at least half a million.
Additionally, he needed a lobbying firm to do the dirty work on his behalf. If it was a lobbying firm who did the brib *ahem* gift-giving instead, he would be shielded from all this by plausible deniability and would have kept his job. He could've just fired the lobbying firm and re-hired them under a different company name *ahem* I mean find another one.
You met Chris Rock on the subway?
Not sure about that. Social networks gain revenue based on online advertising, which is about how many ads get shown to the users. Spending 10 minutes on Facebook would yield the same revenue as spending 1 minute on G+ if there's very little page changes in Facebook, but a lot of page changes in G+.
You can argue about ads on timers and the fact that spending more time means visiting more pages, but there's a reason why content is constantly being split into 10 pages instead of all being on one page. Layout and design are important when it comes to maximizing ad viewership. Newspapers do this too, by splitting their stories across several pages so that you actually will go through the newspaper and not stop at the front page.
That's not to say that G+ is designed to show more ads over a given session than Facebook, but time spent on a site is not an accurate measure of revenue.
Teenage girls have a higher rate of chargebacks? Who knew?