Honestly. For standing up for what is right instead of doing what he's told. If there isn't a medal for that, there fucking should be.
He gambled with his access to this data and, in hindsight, I think it was a very imprudent thing to do that might result in espionage or treason charges. The documents he released would have to have had such a profound impact on the American people, the American press and the rest of the world that his imprisonment could only be seen as an Imperial action committed by a war hungry country. This, however, would require that politicians become involved and pardon him from any persecution instead of a military level court decision. And for that, I think we would have to be talking about more than a few accidental killings in a war zone. We would have to be talking about an unacknowledged war crime. The Garani video listed in the article might be a war crime but it sounds like the United States has admitted to it in the press, thereby removing the blunt effect it might have or the super valuable phrase "cover up".
Unfortunately for Manning, none of this went down to the degree he needed it to. I don't mean to sound apologetic or like lives are trivial things to be dispatched with at the push of a button but the American people seem to be okay with the fact that hell is visited upon two other nations by way of their tax dollar. If they want to, they can watch journalists being killed in Iraq. It's been available for several months with little impact. The justifications of these wars range from 9/11 to 'they got our oil' but it seems that anything Manning leaked has failed to leave the impact it needed to in order to ensure his freedom. That's my opinion from watching the media circus so far anyway--his only hope seems to be that the Garani video has much more of an impact. The 260,000 diplomatic cables are not going to have the impact he'll need them to. I can understand selected videos of unacknowledged journalist killings but why the cables? I don't think the politicians will appreciate that at all and it will do nothing for his case.
To me, what led those people to do media multitasking in the first place?
They did. They chose to do it. Information technology gave them a choice -- a freedom -- and they did not use it responsibly and through no one's fault but their own. You can give people powerful tools but it's ultimately up to them to use them responsibly. Right now here is what I'm hearing, "I'm stupid and distracted... it must be that latest technology's fault like TV and gaming and now the internet. I'm the victim and don't have to take responsibility for my actions." If I give you a nail gun and wood and tell you to build a house but instead you discover that shooting at cans with the nail gun and burning the wood in a bonfire is more entertaining than shelter... who's fault is that?
Something as empowering as the internet should not be faulted for this.
Does the Internet Make Humanity Smarter Or Dumber?
I tire of constantly pushing the idea that the internet is a double edged sword. It liberates you to pursue your desires whether they be learning, information, socializing, games or porn. In this liberating spirit, I claim it is possibly the greatest revolution yet in regards to information.
Now it's just your choice to use it as you desire. And anyone who says they will only ever use it for something like learning is flat out liar and, frankly, missing the point of the internet. I waste time on the internet and I am productive on the internet. Use the full spectrum of the internet and you'll get the most out of it as what it is: a tool. The choice is yours... time management for people has been an issue going all the way back through human history. Why must we stop now and act like 100% of our time must be spent on the internet playing Farmville?
For what it's worth Google claims that patent is totally unrelated and they're also trying to find someone they can pin this on so their multinational company doesn't take any of the heat. Remember, it's just one engineer behind this and once we find Scapegoaty McSeverancePackage this can all be put behind us and you can rest assured that Google is back to Do No Evil status. Ha.
First off if this is a technical discussion, we should probably be talking about layout engines -- not browsers. Secondly their HTML5 capabilities are well documented. You can come up with whatever perventage you want from those charts as some things (Video) might be deal breakers compared to others (MathML).
Make something innovative enough, Apple will co-opt it (cut-paste, tethering) and forget what they said previously about it and then delete your app from the store.
I found this article hilarious over a decade ago. Now it's kind of sad how Apple is treating innovative third party developers on the iDevices. Think outside the box, but not too far outside the box!
According to an article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.
I do not agree with this statement. There is a lot of doubt in my mind. As I listen to Zappa albums, I constantly find new things mixed into them. Often I tell a friend about a great Zappa song but they haven't the patience to listen through five minutes of weirdness just to get to a great guitar lick intricately backed. Anyhow, I would wager that Zappa's thirst for this kind of mixing would lead him to the industry standard: Pro Tools. I highly doubt a professional musician would stray from that but if Zappa dumped some cash into Ardour development and increased its support then maybe. But right now, audio recording on Linux isn't the greatest. Pro Tools is often augmented with dedicated hardware... I am unaware of how you would do this with Ardour. I also have had one hell of a time trying to get a dual core processor with plenty of ram to record in Linux and also play back what you're recording on top of several tracks without delay.
In my hobby projects, I have given up on audio recordings in Linux although I must say I was impressed with Ubuntu Studio when I was trying to layer guitar tracks a few years ago. It just seemed that the audio bus could not keep up when recording through my M-Audio USB input box... like a lot of things in Linux it could have been a configuration error but I spent a lot of time on that. Unfortunately, all musicians are not computer savvy and they certainly do not like messing around with getting software working in the studio.
Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books
So you can do a lot of things on Yahoo! like play chess, manage finances or e-mail. But what level of detail is going to be shared and for what possible reason?
Let's take the most basic possibility -- similar to XBox Live -- where it says eldavojohn is playing Futurama. You only ever get a few pieces of data: my name, I'm online and my activity. But it doesn't popup with "eldavojohn has died" or "eldavojohn has reached achievement X." The specifics are hidden resulting in this only facilitating friends noticing they're online and playing together. Might work with Yahoo! Chess but it I can't see it working for finances or e-mail. "Hey, eldavojohn's online, let's read up on some mutual funds together!" Or, "eldavojohn's e-mailing, I should e-mail with him!" Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This only sense this makes is if you're one of those "microbloggers" that likes to inform everyone what you're eating and when you're urinating because you have some weird infatuation with yourself.
The most extreme possibility is far worse. What if you knew who I was playing chess with, what stocks I was buying and who I was e-mailing. If this is the case then Yahoo! could be poised to overtake Facebook as the number one source of evidence in divorce proceedings. I think anyone would agree that this extreme is highly undesirable.
So I don't get it. Yahoo! is trying to build a better service by switching this on? How are they planning to do this? The cynic in me is defaulting to some sort of money related advertising scheme whereby you say surely whatever you share with your friends can be shared with an advertiser. There is some money in that. Is that already baked into this privacy statement or will that be done behind your back or will that be a future "feature"?
It's probably because parents in many other countries are way more interested in driving their kids or excel in social activities or in sports than in intellectual pursuits (or not driving them to excel in anything at all).
It's weird, I read the article and came up with a completely different reason than the summary. And that reason is right in this text:
Just as Kavya Shivashankar has inspired the next wave of Indian spellers, Kavya found her bee mojo during the post-Spellbound boom. Before Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that featured Indian-American Nupur Lala's run to the 1999 Scripps title, many first-generation South Asian parents saw NSF as a way for their children to assimilate—the best way to understand a culture, after all, is to learn its language. They used the North South Foundation events as a sort of SAT prep, teaching their children to use phonetics, etymology, and word roots to suss out answers. "Our focus is not on competition," says Chitturi. "Winning becomes an outcome of you focusing on learning. You are competing against yourself, not these other people."
It seems like it's about assimilation and success to Indian-Americans as well as a great competition against yourself instead of another human -- minor league circuit or no minor league circuit. Then introduce a documentary outlining how one Indian kid succeeded by doing this and parents start picking up on it on a large scale.
If my parents and community had supported my academic interests as much as they supported my little league career, I'm sure I would have won a lot more spelling bees too.
But it's not like you had to be good at only one thing. My parents encouraged me to just be well rounded but it turned out I was terrible at sports and I loved playing trombone, reading and participating in math league. I'm sure the Indian kids get pushed to excel in sports as well but it is obvious that the cultural assimilation is very important to their parents because they most likely consider that as necessary on the path to success.
When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else.
Hint: Your worst nightmares do not have open jovial dialogues with you. And if they did communicate with you or offer you a score card or report, they would want you to feel as though you are completely safe -- totally unaware and unprepared for what you may face.
You've come a long way, Microsoft, but you have much much further to go. If you measure security by percentage increase in security then the evolution from Windows 95 to Windows 7 is nigh impassable. But that in no way means you're number one in the security scores. Run your marketing campaign with setting the "facts" straight but people like me know. With what little (journalistic) evidence you presented, there's no way I can build a conclusion that backs up your statement. And there's no way around that. It would better prepare you to look into the several thousand anecdotes found daily revealing the issues with Windows and Internet Explorer.
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
That's not true. If you post about this on Slashdot, you just cannot automatically opt for the settlement. You still have the option to fight this in a court of law if you feel that you are innocent and publicize that as much as you desire. Once you go public though, you cannot select that settlement option. Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
I submitted this same exact story referencing the same exact Slashdot article on the Hurt Locker this morning around 7am and it instantly went to being the lowest color any of my submissions have ever been at (jet black). So I was pretty sure I had done something wrong enough to attract the attention of an editor. When I submit stories I check for the story in firehose and by google searching Slashdot and this wasn't there. I didn't get the popup for duplicate URL submission either... I guess Jamie or someone just really wanted to claim the scoop on this story. What's even more bizarre is that the summary seems to be misdirected at Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver when it's actually a larger set of plaintiffs composing the US Copyright Group. That's who is listed as behind the ~15,000 lawsuits. Oh well...
And if you type 'Ballmer' the B morphs into a miniature Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and starts sweating profusely while throwing the other letters at you while shouting 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!"
Engels (as in Marx & Engels) is one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto and largely a lot of the Communist doctrine. To use a quote from him and his research to debate oil usage would be pure suicide on a political realm because your opponent would have an easy time pointing out that a socialist -- possibly one of the earliest socialists -- did research to point out the horrors that Capitalism wrought upon the environment. The resulting suggestion for Cap and Trade or retarding economic growth in the name of environmental consciousness would be taken up by the opposition as the evil socialism from the old enemy of Communist USSR and readily gobbled down by the older American people. Because it's fairly common for the American people to choose to see things in black and white where someone is either 100% wrong or 100% correct. Complete and utter bullshit but that's the logic the summary will invoke and it would be impossible to use this logic in any sort of debate. To further this comparison in the United States at least, you'd do better to just re-research Engels' work looking at Peak Wood instead of trying to quote or cite him.
He's calling him out. At best he'll trigger Jobs to outline his logic similar to the Flash issue. At worst his concerns fall on deaf ears. But for the rest of us, it might be a little pointer in the right direction.
Jobs wants to maintain complete control with the experience on iDevices and the second you try to make your application look more capable than just a regular application in the sense of altering look and feel, you're stepping on his turf and he will show up with the ban hammer. Jobs is not interested in a new container for viewing or looking like an operating system catching like wildfire and usurping Apple's bread and butter: being the best, fluid, sexy interface. That's how they make their money. That's one of the big components that justifies a massive price point on these products. That's a lot of Jobs' strategy and I think a lot of people know it including the shareholders.
So the strategy to publicly ponder how far this will go... or where the precise line will be drawn for what an application can and can't do is 1) interesting and 2) a potential time saver for new application developers. You want to make a new look and feel? The message is loud and clear: either do it on the immature Android operating system or don't do it at all. And that advice stands until Jobs apologizes and approves applications like My Frame.
"We talk to students from a faith science basis, but we're not biased in the delivery of curriculum," Mrs Doneley said. "We say, 'This is where we're coming from' but allow students to make up their own minds."
I really wish they had gone into detail on what exactly a 'faith science basis' is. I'm not saying they're completely walled off from each other but attempting to give your children solid foundational logic should not be approached from an angle that contains any sort of faith.
If they are indeed teaching intelligent design in much the same way as Niels Bohr's atomic model or -- perhaps more apt -- motivation for slavery then I have little problem with this. But if they spend anymore than a few hours discussing how it was flawed then I would consider this a waste of time instead of 'critical thinking.' It's great to see all the sides of a historical issue but that's all intelligent design is to me and, much more importantly, the peer reviewed journals and scientific community at large.
If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem. If you want to teach it to my kids as an outstanding theory or hypothesis, I'm going to sit down and have a lengthy discussion with them. If you do you teach it in the United States, I'm going to be there arguing that you spend just as much time on Native American origin stories or even better the original Hindu creation story followed by Swami Vivekananda's logic of compatibility with Darwinism and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness's decision to largely reject it.
Intelligent Design is an attempt to absolve the scriptures of ever being wrong in their creation story and salvage what is possible when presented with fossil evidence and short-term evolution evidence in smaller celled organisms. Other religions have similar damage control, why do the Christians only get theirs mentioned in state schools?
They are arguing that this helps critical thinking and allows the child to make their own conclusions... but curiously this "critical thinking" that presents an opposing view is curiously the view that the localized religion adheres to. If you want to teach critical thinking, expose the child to more views than what the adults are already largely marketing to them in the home and at religious services.
This article bounces between acceptable and a BS facade to market Intelligent Design. Australia's a sovereign nation but I will speak up if this comes anywhere near my public schools.
Maybe the people who are in the real thing should sue him
Um, asking kindly is one thing, suing is another. I don't know what grounds you would sue on but let me tell you there would be no faster way to get people to stop making films about war than to make it known that vets will sue your profit away. The story is based on a writer's experience as an embedded journalist in a IED unit in Iraq. It's fictitious. It's art. It's not a real story.
In short, soldiers suing movie makers so that we can copy their licensed material illegally is a really bad idea. Your motives are interesting and sort of on track but don't logically follow your proposed actions.
I don't know who your customers are... is this a sort of IT mass production heavy printer thing you're producing? I'm guessing so if they're LAN printers but who knows? Anyways if you're shipping this thing to residences, give the tool to your parents or -- failing that -- someone age ~15 or ~65. Give them the documentation you have and do not say a word. See what they do with it and how intuitive it is to them and take notes while they're using it. Do they successfully test the printer or fail? If they fail, that's actually your failure. So know your audience and maybe rethink the tool. But assuming that your audience isn't afraid of a command line interface, go for it. I guess you could look into whether or not Powershell gives you any advantages (probably not). You're in a different world than I so that last suggestion may be off the mark.
It seems to me that if the source code is available freely, than the license terms are fulfilled, but what do I know, I'm not a lawyer...
No, no you are not. But this is really something that software developers who plan on reuse should know. From Section 6 of the GPLv2:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.
Is Apple redistributing the Program or a derivative thereof? What's more they're relicensing it with a noncompliant license. I think we got a legitimate problem here... If Apple wants to redistribute, they must provide a license to the consumer telling them how to obtain the source and notifying the consumer that they are free to copy, distribute or modify said Program (of course by the GPLv2 rules).
Facebook's problem is that its "lots of options" are spread over about 5 different sections of your profile in various sub-categories and with a wide variety of titles ranging from obvious to cryptic - choice is no good if you can't figure out what you're choosing from.
Alright well, I actually have a Facebook account and I've actually set the privacy settings. They promise to make it simpler (how, I'll never know) but the way it currently works is that you have a menu of six categories. They are:
Personal Information and Posts
Control who can see your photos and videos, and who can post to your wall
Contact Information
Control who can contact you on Facebook and see your contact information and email
Friends, Tags and Connections
Control whether your friends, tags and connections display on your profile
Search
Control who can see your search result on Facebook and in search engines
Applications and Websites
Control what information is available to Facebook-enhanced applications and websites
Block List
Control who can interact with you on Facebook
Now, if you click on any of them it breaks each of those down into sub categories. This is all explained fairly well, by the way. And on each of these sub categories they have drop downs to let you see who sees that sub category of items on your Facebook page:
Everyone
Friends of Friends
Only Friends
Customize
Pretty straight forward but that last one lets you get into lists and some more complicated stuff.
So please tell me what is confusing about that, how it could be better and how that's "spread out"?
Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.
First it's not enough privacy options. Now it's too many privacy options. Tomorrow when they get the unspoken mythical number correct, we'll bitch about the default settings. Then someone will come on Slashdot and say that his Linux servers were rooted and we'll say that it's because all the idiots of the world use out of the box settings and don't change the default passwords. Granted, your average facebooker shouldn't have to have the wherewithal to set up a Linux server but I think this Google/Facebook privacy complaining thing is getting a little old. Especially when both named parties are suddenly doing quite a bit to make users happy now that it's becoming important to consumers. To complain that they give us too many options now is just... just...
Sherry Bobbins: Would you like some pepper on your food, Bart? Bart Simpson: Sure... little more... little more... little more... too much, take it back.
As for distributing the data across the network, it is very easy to solve that problem cryptographically. You encrypt your data, and the decryption key is distributed as part of the "friending" process. In theory, if your friends are out to get you and want your privacy to be undermined, they could distribute the key further, but this is not much different than the current situation, where they could just copy your data from a website and hand it out to people.
The difference there is that your relatively small key holds the potential for everything on your page. If someone copies and mails a few pics of me, big deal. But that key could be easily copied and sent covertly with the copier taking their sweet time to look at all my stuff -- and for how long before I catch on? And how long before key collecting viruses run rampant and phone home to a black market provider's server where all Diaspora data is cached? The killer there is that you'd never even know and two if you had to change your key then you need to refriend everyone to get the key out. I understand how asymmetric key encryption works in PGP but that requires that you have a single person you are sending the message to... do you need to build a PGP public/private key for each of your friends? Then I guess my next question is where does this decryption take place? Obviously it has to take place on your friend's box otherwise the people in the middle would have your key and your unencrypted data. So your friend logs on to check out your picture on Facebook... but he's on his netbook so he has to wait to get the encrypted data then decrypt the data on a possibly low CPU intensive device.
And then when people start posting unlicensed songs and movies to their pages you'll have the MPAA and RIAA trying to sue the crap out of everyone ever connected to it and then they'll start caching as a Diaspora node... and wait for legal action to get a potential file sharer's key by court order...
I don't know, my imagination just takes off sometimes but it's not like your proposed method is a silver bullet for Social Networking... there's gotta be a lot of storage donated from people getting absolutely nothing in return from using that storage. My gigs of pictures need to be hosted by dogooders who have no access to them when I'm offline and my friends want to see them. I just don't see that sort of mentality happening. People seed on bittorrent because they can use the files that they're seeding but they're not going to be able to use my encrypted files that people might want when I'm offline nor will I be able with a netbook to help them out with hosting their files.
If we had continued improving on P2P instead of giving in to centralized servers we wouldn't be there...
Alright, I know that a few projects like Diaspora are supposed to utilize this but I am still largely confused by this. Peer to peer implies that by owning my own personal data, it is on my home computer or laptop. Some people only have a laptop and some people like to power down their machines when they're away. So this seems to imply that you need to either have this disseminated to other peers in order for people to access it while you're offline. On top of that if you're disseminating photos or videos, this could get crazy for upload speed. So then your stuff is on another person's machine and who knows if they didn't just take and modified the Diaspora code to record all your stuff. Can you trust their node anymore than Facebook? Sure, it might be encrypted but it's hard to believe that it wouldn't be susceptible to a man in the middle attack or eventually crack the encryption by brute force. So you're kind of at that point back to the same problem as you are with entrusting Google or Facebook with your data. Otherwise you need to pay for a dedicated hosting server and they're not going to be cheap if you're miss popular with thousands of photos and that's not really P2P.
So how was P2P supposed to fix this problem? Especially for people with just a laptop or even like my parents who have a dial up connection out on a farm house with very tiny upload bandwidth. I'm just not getting a clear picture of how the average person would handle this.
One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we'll worry about it.
Let me counter that with one the more trie and oft-repeated maxims from businessmen in the 80s: Don't you worry about security, let me worry about blank.
Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it's now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects.
And yet Facebook thrives and not until last week did Google offer secure searching and they're a giant. Sounds to me like companies that don't worry about privacy are doing pretty well -- maybe even the industry leaders. Maybe they're on to something about it being unimportant to the consumer?
A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad.
Oh give me a break. Ninety percent of news stories are negative. Because it sells eyeballs. Really, do you expect a news article about the really great privacy that Slashdot offers Anonymous Cowards to appear? When privacy works, it's not news. Hell, when privacy is kept intact people don't even know. Your reasoning here is severely flawed.
Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions and other data to third parties.
Yep, marketing's a bitch, ain't it? But then again, we're getting Facebook for free and I don't think there's been any case of someone suffering serious harm from Facebook dumping a chat to marketing. Certainly unsettling but has there been any sort of actual case of abuse and harm to the user? I use Facebook and I don't care much. I'm putting my data on their servers and they had me agree to some BS impossible to read ToS so I just mitigate that by keeping anything sensitive off it. If Diaspora takes off -- hey, great -- but until I can communicate with all my friends and family on it who are half a continent away no thanks.
Google is caught recording not only MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots, but storing data from the networks as well.
"Caught?" That's funny. If you don't want to "catch" people "recording" your shit, stop broadcasting it and put some encryption on it and use a hidden SSID. You know, like the hundred or so Slashdot posts have pointed out.
But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'
"Prevailing?" So prevailing that you need to reference a half a year old quote that is about all we have of that attitude. That's the predominant force out there? Care to come up with more companies using that sentiment? Care to put that quote into context for me? Put the pressure on them and the companies will change. Fact is that nobody's putting any pressure on them so why should they stop doing something which allows them to better market to you with ads and make more money?
If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user. You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that.
[citation needed] Prosecutor is leading the witness. Seriously, you're putting words into their mouths. Evil, yes they are. Saying that they claim your data is now theirs by way of their actions is ridiculous. Then from there y
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly. For standing up for what is right instead of doing what he's told. If there isn't a medal for that, there fucking should be.
He gambled with his access to this data and, in hindsight, I think it was a very imprudent thing to do that might result in espionage or treason charges. The documents he released would have to have had such a profound impact on the American people, the American press and the rest of the world that his imprisonment could only be seen as an Imperial action committed by a war hungry country. This, however, would require that politicians become involved and pardon him from any persecution instead of a military level court decision. And for that, I think we would have to be talking about more than a few accidental killings in a war zone. We would have to be talking about an unacknowledged war crime. The Garani video listed in the article might be a war crime but it sounds like the United States has admitted to it in the press, thereby removing the blunt effect it might have or the super valuable phrase "cover up".
Unfortunately for Manning, none of this went down to the degree he needed it to. I don't mean to sound apologetic or like lives are trivial things to be dispatched with at the push of a button but the American people seem to be okay with the fact that hell is visited upon two other nations by way of their tax dollar. If they want to, they can watch journalists being killed in Iraq. It's been available for several months with little impact. The justifications of these wars range from 9/11 to 'they got our oil' but it seems that anything Manning leaked has failed to leave the impact it needed to in order to ensure his freedom. That's my opinion from watching the media circus so far anyway--his only hope seems to be that the Garani video has much more of an impact. The 260,000 diplomatic cables are not going to have the impact he'll need them to. I can understand selected videos of unacknowledged journalist killings but why the cables? I don't think the politicians will appreciate that at all and it will do nothing for his case.
To me, what led those people to do media multitasking in the first place?
They did. They chose to do it. Information technology gave them a choice -- a freedom -- and they did not use it responsibly and through no one's fault but their own. You can give people powerful tools but it's ultimately up to them to use them responsibly. Right now here is what I'm hearing, "I'm stupid and distracted ... it must be that latest technology's fault like TV and gaming and now the internet. I'm the victim and don't have to take responsibility for my actions." If I give you a nail gun and wood and tell you to build a house but instead you discover that shooting at cans with the nail gun and burning the wood in a bonfire is more entertaining than shelter ... who's fault is that?
Something as empowering as the internet should not be faulted for this.
Does the Internet Make Humanity Smarter Or Dumber?
I tire of constantly pushing the idea that the internet is a double edged sword. It liberates you to pursue your desires whether they be learning, information, socializing, games or porn. In this liberating spirit, I claim it is possibly the greatest revolution yet in regards to information.
... time management for people has been an issue going all the way back through human history. Why must we stop now and act like 100% of our time must be spent on the internet playing Farmville?
Now it's just your choice to use it as you desire. And anyone who says they will only ever use it for something like learning is flat out liar and, frankly, missing the point of the internet. I waste time on the internet and I am productive on the internet. Use the full spectrum of the internet and you'll get the most out of it as what it is: a tool. The choice is yours
For what it's worth Google claims that patent is totally unrelated and they're also trying to find someone they can pin this on so their multinational company doesn't take any of the heat. Remember, it's just one engineer behind this and once we find Scapegoaty McSeverancePackage this can all be put behind us and you can rest assured that Google is back to Do No Evil status. Ha.
First off if this is a technical discussion, we should probably be talking about layout engines -- not browsers. Secondly their HTML5 capabilities are well documented. You can come up with whatever perventage you want from those charts as some things (Video) might be deal breakers compared to others (MathML).
Make something innovative enough, Apple will co-opt it (cut-paste, tethering) and forget what they said previously about it and then delete your app from the store.
I found this article hilarious over a decade ago. Now it's kind of sad how Apple is treating innovative third party developers on the iDevices. Think outside the box, but not too far outside the box!
According to an article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.
I do not agree with this statement. There is a lot of doubt in my mind. As I listen to Zappa albums, I constantly find new things mixed into them. Often I tell a friend about a great Zappa song but they haven't the patience to listen through five minutes of weirdness just to get to a great guitar lick intricately backed. Anyhow, I would wager that Zappa's thirst for this kind of mixing would lead him to the industry standard: Pro Tools. I highly doubt a professional musician would stray from that but if Zappa dumped some cash into Ardour development and increased its support then maybe. But right now, audio recording on Linux isn't the greatest. Pro Tools is often augmented with dedicated hardware ... I am unaware of how you would do this with Ardour. I also have had one hell of a time trying to get a dual core processor with plenty of ram to record in Linux and also play back what you're recording on top of several tracks without delay.
... like a lot of things in Linux it could have been a configuration error but I spent a lot of time on that. Unfortunately, all musicians are not computer savvy and they certainly do not like messing around with getting software working in the studio.
In my hobby projects, I have given up on audio recordings in Linux although I must say I was impressed with Ubuntu Studio when I was trying to layer guitar tracks a few years ago. It just seemed that the audio bus could not keep up when recording through my M-Audio USB input box
Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books
So you can do a lot of things on Yahoo! like play chess, manage finances or e-mail. But what level of detail is going to be shared and for what possible reason?
Let's take the most basic possibility -- similar to XBox Live -- where it says eldavojohn is playing Futurama. You only ever get a few pieces of data: my name, I'm online and my activity. But it doesn't popup with "eldavojohn has died" or "eldavojohn has reached achievement X." The specifics are hidden resulting in this only facilitating friends noticing they're online and playing together. Might work with Yahoo! Chess but it I can't see it working for finances or e-mail. "Hey, eldavojohn's online, let's read up on some mutual funds together!" Or, "eldavojohn's e-mailing, I should e-mail with him!" Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This only sense this makes is if you're one of those "microbloggers" that likes to inform everyone what you're eating and when you're urinating because you have some weird infatuation with yourself.
The most extreme possibility is far worse. What if you knew who I was playing chess with, what stocks I was buying and who I was e-mailing. If this is the case then Yahoo! could be poised to overtake Facebook as the number one source of evidence in divorce proceedings. I think anyone would agree that this extreme is highly undesirable.
So I don't get it. Yahoo! is trying to build a better service by switching this on? How are they planning to do this? The cynic in me is defaulting to some sort of money related advertising scheme whereby you say surely whatever you share with your friends can be shared with an advertiser. There is some money in that. Is that already baked into this privacy statement or will that be done behind your back or will that be a future "feature"?
It's probably because parents in many other countries are way more interested in driving their kids or excel in social activities or in sports than in intellectual pursuits (or not driving them to excel in anything at all).
It's weird, I read the article and came up with a completely different reason than the summary. And that reason is right in this text:
Just as Kavya Shivashankar has inspired the next wave of Indian spellers, Kavya found her bee mojo during the post-Spellbound boom. Before Spellbound, the 2002 documentary that featured Indian-American Nupur Lala's run to the 1999 Scripps title, many first-generation South Asian parents saw NSF as a way for their children to assimilate—the best way to understand a culture, after all, is to learn its language. They used the North South Foundation events as a sort of SAT prep, teaching their children to use phonetics, etymology, and word roots to suss out answers. "Our focus is not on competition," says Chitturi. "Winning becomes an outcome of you focusing on learning. You are competing against yourself, not these other people."
It seems like it's about assimilation and success to Indian-Americans as well as a great competition against yourself instead of another human -- minor league circuit or no minor league circuit. Then introduce a documentary outlining how one Indian kid succeeded by doing this and parents start picking up on it on a large scale.
If my parents and community had supported my academic interests as much as they supported my little league career, I'm sure I would have won a lot more spelling bees too.
But it's not like you had to be good at only one thing. My parents encouraged me to just be well rounded but it turned out I was terrible at sports and I loved playing trombone, reading and participating in math league. I'm sure the Indian kids get pushed to excel in sports as well but it is obvious that the cultural assimilation is very important to their parents because they most likely consider that as necessary on the path to success.
When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else.
Hint: Your worst nightmares do not have open jovial dialogues with you. And if they did communicate with you or offer you a score card or report, they would want you to feel as though you are completely safe -- totally unaware and unprepared for what you may face.
You've come a long way, Microsoft, but you have much much further to go. If you measure security by percentage increase in security then the evolution from Windows 95 to Windows 7 is nigh impassable. But that in no way means you're number one in the security scores. Run your marketing campaign with setting the "facts" straight but people like me know. With what little (journalistic) evidence you presented, there's no way I can build a conclusion that backs up your statement. And there's no way around that. It would better prepare you to look into the several thousand anecdotes found daily revealing the issues with Windows and Internet Explorer.
So don't go post this on slashdot or you'll owe this lawfirm $15,000!
That's not true. If you post about this on Slashdot, you just cannot automatically opt for the settlement. You still have the option to fight this in a court of law if you feel that you are innocent and publicize that as much as you desire. Once you go public though, you cannot select that settlement option. Also I think the plaintiff would aim a court decision more between $150,000 or $1.5 million though from what we've seen with prior cases that go to court where the individual is found guilty.
I submitted this same exact story referencing the same exact Slashdot article on the Hurt Locker this morning around 7am and it instantly went to being the lowest color any of my submissions have ever been at (jet black). So I was pretty sure I had done something wrong enough to attract the attention of an editor. When I submit stories I check for the story in firehose and by google searching Slashdot and this wasn't there. I didn't get the popup for duplicate URL submission either ... I guess Jamie or someone just really wanted to claim the scoop on this story. What's even more bizarre is that the summary seems to be misdirected at Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver when it's actually a larger set of plaintiffs composing the US Copyright Group. That's who is listed as behind the ~15,000 lawsuits. Oh well ...
And if you type 'Ballmer' the B morphs into a miniature Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and starts sweating profusely while throwing the other letters at you while shouting 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!"
Engels (as in Marx & Engels) is one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto and largely a lot of the Communist doctrine. To use a quote from him and his research to debate oil usage would be pure suicide on a political realm because your opponent would have an easy time pointing out that a socialist -- possibly one of the earliest socialists -- did research to point out the horrors that Capitalism wrought upon the environment. The resulting suggestion for Cap and Trade or retarding economic growth in the name of environmental consciousness would be taken up by the opposition as the evil socialism from the old enemy of Communist USSR and readily gobbled down by the older American people. Because it's fairly common for the American people to choose to see things in black and white where someone is either 100% wrong or 100% correct. Complete and utter bullshit but that's the logic the summary will invoke and it would be impossible to use this logic in any sort of debate. To further this comparison in the United States at least, you'd do better to just re-research Engels' work looking at Peak Wood instead of trying to quote or cite him.
He's calling him out. At best he'll trigger Jobs to outline his logic similar to the Flash issue. At worst his concerns fall on deaf ears. But for the rest of us, it might be a little pointer in the right direction.
... or where the precise line will be drawn for what an application can and can't do is 1) interesting and 2) a potential time saver for new application developers. You want to make a new look and feel? The message is loud and clear: either do it on the immature Android operating system or don't do it at all. And that advice stands until Jobs apologizes and approves applications like My Frame.
Jobs wants to maintain complete control with the experience on iDevices and the second you try to make your application look more capable than just a regular application in the sense of altering look and feel, you're stepping on his turf and he will show up with the ban hammer. Jobs is not interested in a new container for viewing or looking like an operating system catching like wildfire and usurping Apple's bread and butter: being the best, fluid, sexy interface. That's how they make their money. That's one of the big components that justifies a massive price point on these products. That's a lot of Jobs' strategy and I think a lot of people know it including the shareholders.
So the strategy to publicly ponder how far this will go
"We talk to students from a faith science basis, but we're not biased in the delivery of curriculum," Mrs Doneley said. "We say, 'This is where we're coming from' but allow students to make up their own minds."
I really wish they had gone into detail on what exactly a 'faith science basis' is. I'm not saying they're completely walled off from each other but attempting to give your children solid foundational logic should not be approached from an angle that contains any sort of faith.
... but curiously this "critical thinking" that presents an opposing view is curiously the view that the localized religion adheres to. If you want to teach critical thinking, expose the child to more views than what the adults are already largely marketing to them in the home and at religious services.
If they are indeed teaching intelligent design in much the same way as Niels Bohr's atomic model or -- perhaps more apt -- motivation for slavery then I have little problem with this. But if they spend anymore than a few hours discussing how it was flawed then I would consider this a waste of time instead of 'critical thinking.' It's great to see all the sides of a historical issue but that's all intelligent design is to me and, much more importantly, the peer reviewed journals and scientific community at large.
If you want to teach it as a disproved theory, I got no problem. If you want to teach it to my kids as an outstanding theory or hypothesis, I'm going to sit down and have a lengthy discussion with them. If you do you teach it in the United States, I'm going to be there arguing that you spend just as much time on Native American origin stories or even better the original Hindu creation story followed by Swami Vivekananda's logic of compatibility with Darwinism and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness's decision to largely reject it.
Intelligent Design is an attempt to absolve the scriptures of ever being wrong in their creation story and salvage what is possible when presented with fossil evidence and short-term evolution evidence in smaller celled organisms. Other religions have similar damage control, why do the Christians only get theirs mentioned in state schools?
They are arguing that this helps critical thinking and allows the child to make their own conclusions
This article bounces between acceptable and a BS facade to market Intelligent Design. Australia's a sovereign nation but I will speak up if this comes anywhere near my public schools.
Maybe the people who are in the real thing should sue him
Um, asking kindly is one thing, suing is another. I don't know what grounds you would sue on but let me tell you there would be no faster way to get people to stop making films about war than to make it known that vets will sue your profit away. The story is based on a writer's experience as an embedded journalist in a IED unit in Iraq. It's fictitious. It's art. It's not a real story.
In short, soldiers suing movie makers so that we can copy their licensed material illegally is a really bad idea. Your motives are interesting and sort of on track but don't logically follow your proposed actions.
I don't know who your customers are ... is this a sort of IT mass production heavy printer thing you're producing? I'm guessing so if they're LAN printers but who knows? Anyways if you're shipping this thing to residences, give the tool to your parents or -- failing that -- someone age ~15 or ~65. Give them the documentation you have and do not say a word. See what they do with it and how intuitive it is to them and take notes while they're using it. Do they successfully test the printer or fail? If they fail, that's actually your failure. So know your audience and maybe rethink the tool. But assuming that your audience isn't afraid of a command line interface, go for it. I guess you could look into whether or not Powershell gives you any advantages (probably not). You're in a different world than I so that last suggestion may be off the mark.
It seems to me that if the source code is available freely, than the license terms are fulfilled, but what do I know, I'm not a lawyer...
No, no you are not. But this is really something that software developers who plan on reuse should know. From Section 6 of the GPLv2:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
Is Apple redistributing the Program or a derivative thereof? What's more they're relicensing it with a noncompliant license. I think we got a legitimate problem here ... If Apple wants to redistribute, they must provide a license to the consumer telling them how to obtain the source and notifying the consumer that they are free to copy, distribute or modify said Program (of course by the GPLv2 rules).
I will now be the first human being to have Linux installed ...
*puts Linux ISO on USB flash drive and drops his pants*
Facebook's problem is that its "lots of options" are spread over about 5 different sections of your profile in various sub-categories and with a wide variety of titles ranging from obvious to cryptic - choice is no good if you can't figure out what you're choosing from.
Alright well, I actually have a Facebook account and I've actually set the privacy settings. They promise to make it simpler (how, I'll never know) but the way it currently works is that you have a menu of six categories. They are:
Control who can see your photos and videos, and who can post to your wall
Control who can contact you on Facebook and see your contact information and email
Control whether your friends, tags and connections display on your profile
Control who can see your search result on Facebook and in search engines
Control what information is available to Facebook-enhanced applications and websites
Control who can interact with you on Facebook
Now, if you click on any of them it breaks each of those down into sub categories. This is all explained fairly well, by the way. And on each of these sub categories they have drop downs to let you see who sees that sub category of items on your Facebook page:
Pretty straight forward but that last one lets you get into lists and some more complicated stuff.
So please tell me what is confusing about that, how it could be better and how that's "spread out"?
Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.
First it's not enough privacy options. Now it's too many privacy options. Tomorrow when they get the unspoken mythical number correct, we'll bitch about the default settings. Then someone will come on Slashdot and say that his Linux servers were rooted and we'll say that it's because all the idiots of the world use out of the box settings and don't change the default passwords. Granted, your average facebooker shouldn't have to have the wherewithal to set up a Linux server but I think this Google/Facebook privacy complaining thing is getting a little old. Especially when both named parties are suddenly doing quite a bit to make users happy now that it's becoming important to consumers. To complain that they give us too many options now is just ... just ...
... little more ... little more ... little more ... too much, take it back.
Sherry Bobbins: Would you like some pepper on your food, Bart?
Bart Simpson: Sure
As for distributing the data across the network, it is very easy to solve that problem cryptographically. You encrypt your data, and the decryption key is distributed as part of the "friending" process. In theory, if your friends are out to get you and want your privacy to be undermined, they could distribute the key further, but this is not much different than the current situation, where they could just copy your data from a website and hand it out to people.
The difference there is that your relatively small key holds the potential for everything on your page. If someone copies and mails a few pics of me, big deal. But that key could be easily copied and sent covertly with the copier taking their sweet time to look at all my stuff -- and for how long before I catch on? And how long before key collecting viruses run rampant and phone home to a black market provider's server where all Diaspora data is cached? The killer there is that you'd never even know and two if you had to change your key then you need to refriend everyone to get the key out. I understand how asymmetric key encryption works in PGP but that requires that you have a single person you are sending the message to ... do you need to build a PGP public/private key for each of your friends? Then I guess my next question is where does this decryption take place? Obviously it has to take place on your friend's box otherwise the people in the middle would have your key and your unencrypted data. So your friend logs on to check out your picture on Facebook ... but he's on his netbook so he has to wait to get the encrypted data then decrypt the data on a possibly low CPU intensive device.
... and wait for legal action to get a potential file sharer's key by court order ...
... there's gotta be a lot of storage donated from people getting absolutely nothing in return from using that storage. My gigs of pictures need to be hosted by dogooders who have no access to them when I'm offline and my friends want to see them. I just don't see that sort of mentality happening. People seed on bittorrent because they can use the files that they're seeding but they're not going to be able to use my encrypted files that people might want when I'm offline nor will I be able with a netbook to help them out with hosting their files.
And then when people start posting unlicensed songs and movies to their pages you'll have the MPAA and RIAA trying to sue the crap out of everyone ever connected to it and then they'll start caching as a Diaspora node
I don't know, my imagination just takes off sometimes but it's not like your proposed method is a silver bullet for Social Networking
If we had continued improving on P2P instead of giving in to centralized servers we wouldn't be there...
Alright, I know that a few projects like Diaspora are supposed to utilize this but I am still largely confused by this. Peer to peer implies that by owning my own personal data, it is on my home computer or laptop. Some people only have a laptop and some people like to power down their machines when they're away. So this seems to imply that you need to either have this disseminated to other peers in order for people to access it while you're offline. On top of that if you're disseminating photos or videos, this could get crazy for upload speed. So then your stuff is on another person's machine and who knows if they didn't just take and modified the Diaspora code to record all your stuff. Can you trust their node anymore than Facebook? Sure, it might be encrypted but it's hard to believe that it wouldn't be susceptible to a man in the middle attack or eventually crack the encryption by brute force. So you're kind of at that point back to the same problem as you are with entrusting Google or Facebook with your data. Otherwise you need to pay for a dedicated hosting server and they're not going to be cheap if you're miss popular with thousands of photos and that's not really P2P.
So how was P2P supposed to fix this problem? Especially for people with just a laptop or even like my parents who have a dial up connection out on a farm house with very tiny upload bandwidth. I'm just not getting a clear picture of how the average person would handle this.
One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We're not focusing on security because our customers aren't asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we'll worry about it.
Let me counter that with one the more trie and oft-repeated maxims from businessmen in the 80s: Don't you worry about security, let me worry about blank.
Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it's now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects.
And yet Facebook thrives and not until last week did Google offer secure searching and they're a giant. Sounds to me like companies that don't worry about privacy are doing pretty well -- maybe even the industry leaders. Maybe they're on to something about it being unimportant to the consumer?
A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad.
Oh give me a break. Ninety percent of news stories are negative. Because it sells eyeballs. Really, do you expect a news article about the really great privacy that Slashdot offers Anonymous Cowards to appear? When privacy works, it's not news. Hell, when privacy is kept intact people don't even know. Your reasoning here is severely flawed.
Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions and other data to third parties.
Yep, marketing's a bitch, ain't it? But then again, we're getting Facebook for free and I don't think there's been any case of someone suffering serious harm from Facebook dumping a chat to marketing. Certainly unsettling but has there been any sort of actual case of abuse and harm to the user? I use Facebook and I don't care much. I'm putting my data on their servers and they had me agree to some BS impossible to read ToS so I just mitigate that by keeping anything sensitive off it. If Diaspora takes off -- hey, great -- but until I can communicate with all my friends and family on it who are half a continent away no thanks.
Google is caught recording not only MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots, but storing data from the networks as well.
"Caught?" That's funny. If you don't want to "catch" people "recording" your shit, stop broadcasting it and put some encryption on it and use a hidden SSID. You know, like the hundred or so Slashdot posts have pointed out.
But the prevailing attitude among corporate executives in these cases seems to be summed up by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who famously said this not too long ago: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'
"Prevailing?" So prevailing that you need to reference a half a year old quote that is about all we have of that attitude. That's the predominant force out there? Care to come up with more companies using that sentiment? Care to put that quote into context for me? Put the pressure on them and the companies will change. Fact is that nobody's putting any pressure on them so why should they stop doing something which allows them to better market to you with ads and make more money?
If you look beyond the patent absurdity of Schmidt's statement for a minute, you'll find another old maxim hiding underneath: Blame the user. You want privacy? Don't use our search engine/photo software/email application/maps. That's our data now, thank you very much. Oh, you don't want your private chats exposed to the world? Sorry, you never told us that.
[citation needed] Prosecutor is leading the witness. Seriously, you're putting words into their mouths. Evil, yes they are. Saying that they claim your data is now theirs by way of their actions is ridiculous. Then from there y