Oh, it had to happen to someone important and/or with money.
More like it happened to someone who knew they didn't have to answer a single question from some inexperienced TSA "officials." When he told them he didn't have to tell them why he had the money the Agent allegedly replied, "Well I'll tell you what. . . . You might not be legally required to tell me that but you will be legally required to tell the police officer who will come talk to you. I'm just trying to ask some questions to figure out what all this is about so I can get you on your plane. But you want to play smart ass, and I'm not going to play your f---ing game." Here's the transcript from his following detention (note that this is the ACLU's hosted complaint):
Agent: Is there a reason you're not answering any questions Bierfeldt: I'm not refusing to answer any Agent: I want you to see it from my -- from what we're seeing, you come in with some money but you don't want to answer any questions about how much it is that's in your possession. Bierfeldt: I don't know. Agent: Is it a secret why you have the money or something? Bierfeldt: I don't know the exact amount â" you're asking where my employment is, I'm simply asking whether I'm legally required to answer Agent: Well may I ask, the question is, why do you have this money? That's the question, that's the major question. Bierfeldt: Yes sir, and I'm asking whether I'm legally required to answer that question. Agent: Answer that question first, why do you have this money? Bierfeldt: Am I legally required to answer that question? Agent: So you refuse to answer that question? Bierfeldt: No sir, I'm not refusing. Agent: Well you're not answering. Bierfeldt: I'm simply asking my rights under the law. Agent: I'm asking you a question and in return you're asking me a question. You're not answering it.
And then later:
Agent: Why do you have all this money? Bierfeldt: That's my, I asked you sir, am I required by law to answer the question. Agent: I'm just asking you why you have $4700? Bierfeldt: That's my question, I don't understand the law. Agent: You want to talk to DEA about it? They'll probably ask you more questions. Bierfeldt: If they can tell me if I'm required to answer by law the question, I'll answer the question. I'm just looking for a simple yes or no. Agent: It's just a simple question. I just want to know why you have $4700 on you, that's not a usual thing. . .. Second Agent: He's refusing to answer any questions, he don't want to answer so, we [sic] gonna have to take him down to the station. Agent: I mean yeah, that's suspicious. Second Agent: DEA, FBI, and all those Agent: Every one of them. Second Agent: So we can do that.
Sounds pretty much how I'd react if you caught me in a really bad mood.
True: this all could have been avoided if the staffer had told them who he was working for and where the money came from. False: the staffer was required by law to divulge this information. I'm sure these guys are used to civilians rolling over for them everyday but if you ask me they're too used to being able to take your shit to another room and hold you there because they are bored.
Clearly the title was trying to illustrate the PHP interpreter's ability to solve the pythagorean theorem [mit.edu].
I don't need PHP for that! Besides, the pythagorean theorem doesn't have X, just a, b, and c.
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
I see you prefer short, nondescript variable names for your algorithms. I pity the person who has to maintain that bit of code. What is a? What is b? What is c?
I ascribe to a more Knuth-y self descriptive code and prefer the Pythagorean theorem to look more like:
I like using this word to describe it and I agree with this piece for the most part. Although I would like to point out some differences with photography and video.
8-bit games are the cavemen drawings of what games will become. At the time of their inception they were probably revered above many other things by those who viewed them. Today they are crude and easily reproduced by a two year old. This will not be the case with games. And why not?
I can sit down with pen and paper and make a caveman drawing but I cannot sit down at my computer and make a Contra clone for an NES emulator? Why? Because the tools that represent pen and paper in this analogy are not open to me. They are closed and guarded by law and by obfuscation. I can look at a Picasso and begin to imitate the colors and angles and feel. I can play a Playstation One game but not imitate. I am not arguing that these methods should be open and available to all, I am just pointing out that this inhibits the everyone-can-do-what-they-want factor of most art mediums. It's difficult for me to acquire oils and pastels but it is near impossible for me to acquire a Neo Geo developer's license and kit.
In part this is due simply to complexity. Which brings me to my next point: games require a team.
Painting, drawing, photographing do not necessarily require a team. Films do but it is often to create a vision of a director or writer. I believe that games require much more teamwork and collaboration. Your texture folks have to be on board for the feel, your 3D engine has to be tuned to work with your feel, your dialogue has to match the feel, the coordination seems endless to me for modern games. This prevents the explosion of games and relegates us to a set number right now. I am not sure this will ever change.
In short, I feel that the difficulty in anyone picking up something to create a game inhibits the artistic expression. No one can arise by their own will in this field like you could in art or film. Furthermore, the idea of a lone genius revolutionizing or creating a movement is far more rare due to these inhibiting factors whereas that may more often happen in other arts.
I argue that games are art but they do hold different complexities and properties from other traditional arts. It may be a long time before they are recognized in the general public as such since the general public may always be removed from being able to create their own games with open tools.
Is it just me, or is this essentially a fundraising article?
As a regular submitter, I assure you that when I wrote the fourth sentence as nothing but a request for donations I had no idea anyone would bother to read that far into the summary.
Disclaimer: I do not work for the EFF but I do send them a twenty every now and then.
Donate to us, because we got a patent revoked.
I was hoping it would sound more like "Donate to us because we can get more patents revoked." And really, who else is working towards that? Once the USPTO grants a patent, it's done. They don't get as much from me as I give to public radio or open source software but I'll give them some change to fight that fight.
... This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off....
It's all about you, isn't it?
Well, I don't mean to sound narcissistic but this is how I imagine it happened:
Microsoft Web Admin: It's Friday, I'm bored. Let's do something fun. Microsoft Web Developer: You want to go down to the gym and practice our aim at throwing chairs. Microsoft Web Admin: Nah, that's not as fun anymore. Plus all the Stallman effigies are in disrepair. Microsoft Web Developer: I know! Let's put up another page that makes all the Slashdot users shit themselves again! Microsoft Web Admin: Oh man, that was pretty funny when we submitted the itsbetterwithwindows story and made it sound like that was Asus' idea. Microsoft Web Developer: Hahaha, yeah, good times. Ok, I'll put something up claiming IE8 superiority. You get ready to post stuff some shill defenses. Microsoft Web Admin: Oh, god, they're going to have aneurysms, this never gets old! Microsoft Web Developer: What do you give for the over/under on number of posts? Microsoft Web Admin: 300 Microsoft Web Developer: I'll put $20 on the over. Microsoft Web Admin: You're on.
Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 -- right out of the box.
Those Grapes are Sour ANYWAY!
And nothing is worse than this one:
Web Standards
It's a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.
Did you hear that? Because my head just fucking exploded.
And what the hell does "Manageability" mean? Rate at which the browser is able to be handled or controled? What the hell?! And their little quip for this one:
Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That's just not nice.
You know what's not nice? Having to write in my freaking javascript if(IE){ do tons of fucked up shit } else { everybody else's predictable behavior }. You know what else isn't nice? The scourge of websites that will forever taint the web because you couldn't get your shit together for IE6 and then you let it fester for years.
I am so done with internet explorer in any form. This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off. Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves for making me jaded and opposed to any form of IE.
My hometown in Minnesota shrinks all the time. Whenever a class graduates, we get the hell out of Dodge. Through the 90s I recall a huge influx of Hmong and Somali peoples to Minnesota, including the smaller towns. Now, it should be noted that jobs like factory work and farm work existed for these people but I think it a shame houses in the United States are going to be demolished.
With the amount of civil war and civil unrest in the world, one would think that a displaced or repressed person from Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Darfur, Sudan or near any place of high population density would bother to learn English and move out to the United States with for stability, law enforcement, cheap housing and a shot at a job.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..."
I know that a lot of people disagree with me on this and a lot of people here in the states are downright afraid of/opposed to immigration but I still think it's a shame they bulldoze houses due to lack of occupants. Granted, the people moving in would have to be sustained by welfare for a time but they could create their own markets and industry. It hasn't gone without problems in Minnesota but I can assure you it's for the betterment for those individuals and the diversity of Minnesota in the long run.
Very little mention of the IRS in that article. They make it sound like Treasury Secretary (Timothy) Geithner got together with Douglas Shulman, the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner, and convinced him to ask Congress to repeal this. Together.
You know, I don't know where the initiative came from, it doesn't really matter. But I found it amusing that a lot of news outlets probably thought "IRS to Repeal Tax"? That cannot sell and sounds like a lie. Better rephrase that to "Obama Cabinet Moves to Repeals Tax."
Sun has instead moved on to develop the superior Paper CPU while critics argue about the hypothetical "Scissors CPU" that competitors may be secretly developing.
Perhaps Debian doesn't believe that Microsoft might do something like Rambus did.
Rambus was chastised for their actions (like the linked article states). And I propose Debian approach this the same way someone would approach the Rambus situation from the beginning had they an inkling of Rambus' true intent.
Were I a Debian leader, I would simply approach Microsoft with the Mono code and the ECMA code of conduct and demand it in writing that for this snapshot of the code you have a forever royalty free to interact with.NET. Should they fail to comply with this request in a timely manner, I would submit all communications with Microsoft to ECMA in a motion to dismiss the aforementioned "standards" and remove Mono--and unfortunately Tomboy--from the Debian default package. I'd beef up the Debian wiki with details on how to get these two packages to fix this bug and focus on the bug for a near future release after Squeeze.
At that point, sit back and let ECMA and the community at large hash it out with Microsoft. Better now than later when other things may depend on this package and Microsoft has you right where Rambus has every memory maker on the planet.
Will anyone please accept that maybe all of the money spent for Homeland Security has actually helped prevent post 9/11 homeland terrorism from occurring? Instead of shoving it all to the side as republican war profiteering?
You may very well be right. Nowhere in my post did I say that it didn't. What I said was that we have gotten along for 8 years just fine without a Real ID. However painful it is for me to say this, TSA & DHS are here to stay. If they or the NSA wiretapping or whatever encroachments on our rights and privacy condoned have prevented homeland terrorism then good for them. I don't like all of those things but I cannot say one way or the other that they haven't worked.
But that's not what this is about. This is about people trying to push it even further. Do you just write them a blank check in the name of security? Do you just offer up all your rights on the spot and roll over for them? Let me quote the article:
Supporters saw a slimmer measure as better than nothing. But critics said the changes gut the law, weakening tools to fight fraud and learn whether bad drivers, drug runners or counterfeiters have licenses in more than one state.
My GOD! Bad drivers are running free across state borders! Here's $50 million dollars of tax payer money. Get them! At all costs! What? You need me to carry a Real ID along with my other ID and birth certificate and registration? Ok, whatever you say!
I call for a halt to Real ID or Pass ID or whatever until we see a need for it.
Translation: We know that for the past 8 years this has been pushed to prevent homeland terrorism but you know there hasn't really been any major events without it since 9/11. Also, we've got a lot of other shit to worry about that actually does affect your life more than having to present papers whenever you cross any political boundary inside the United States. You know, like the economy and jobs. We're getting Real ID watered down as best we can and hopefully it'll just kind of deflate and go away but there's some asshole Republicans left like Lamar Smith in Texas and Sensenbrenner in Wisconsin that like to say things like:
We go right back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people.
You hear that? The lawmakers that take us to war were actually in danger of physical harm themselves! Imagine that! But their voice, urgency and argument are getting pretty pathetic now that it's been eight years and no such thing has reoccurred. The fear card isn't so strong these days. "You might lose your house and/or job" seems to worry people more than "the odds are 1:10,000,000 that a terrorist may kill you in an extremely contrived scenario!"
Remember any sort of compromise or rational thought is bad because Sensenbrenner says doing so instantly brings us back to pre-9/11 danger. Beware of this sort of mentality. Beware the men that play with your emotions and speak in absolutes for the world is shades of grey.
This is how market competition is supposed to work.
Evil or not, a Google without competition inevitably stagnates.
Yes but how did Microsoft manage to compete with Google's Search engine?
What I'm confused about is Bing's quickness. I mean, I've read so many articles and patents about Google doing such and such to make its searches so quick and responsive. Not saying that Bing is just as quick but I don't notice a difference. So what's up? Has Microsoft implement hundreds of thousands of Red Hat modified kernels on machines in huge server farms like Google? You know with special impossible to understand BigTable and networking technology? Has hardware gotten so much better between then and now that this can be done on Windows virtualized on a hundred beefy machines?
I know no one can answer my questions but it's one of two things: 1) Microsoft read what I read and implemented Google or (dare I propose this?) 2) Microsoft -- in a shocking move -- actually did something really neat and innovative. Bing is getting decent reviews but maybe the usage doesn't demand what Google has to perform.
Unless, of course, you're like Microsoft and think "compete" means "lie".
Whatever, Microsoft knows what the consumer wants. It's not speed or accuracy or any of that stuff that Google uses to measure "quality." It's so much more simpler than that. Microsoft has searchability.
What? You don't know what searchability is? Well, then you're like the guy in Microsoft's commercial where a user is using Bing and his friend comes up and asks him what "searchability" means and everyone laughs him out of the room. You don't want to look stupid, do you? Didn't think so.
You don't need numbers and statistics that can be twisted, you just need to know that Bing has the best searchability. Jerry Seinfeld will eat a churro to that. Searchability. It's just more searchable.
Sad thing is, that'd probably be an effective ad. And if you don't think so, look at Budweiser's latest campaign.
How the article paints it (and what sells newspapers):
Google Drone: *bursts through the office doors* Fuhrer Brin, Fuhrer Brin! I've news that Microsoft's Bing service is gaining on us! Sergey Brin: JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist what're we gonna do?! Oh god oh god, we are so fucked! *kicks over his desk and gets up to pace wildly about the room* Why is there no coke on this goddamn coffee table when I need it?! Google Drone: *empties a baggy of cocaine onto the polished marble table and starts cutting lines* We need action now, sir. Sergey Brin: *inhales a long line and rubs his hands all over his face* Ok, ok, I got it. Get every able bodied person on 24/7 shifts for the next month working to make our service better. Google Drone: Bu... but sir, what about the 20% of the time they get to work on their own projects... Sergey Brin: SCREW that, we have an emergency. Get me everyone in the auditorium now, we ain't leavin' until the Google main search page is shitting rainbows and making the users feel like unicorns!
What's really happening:
Google Drone: *walks calmly into Brin's hermetically sealed chamber* Here's the reports for competitors, sir. It looks like Bing may have established itself as a competitor with Yahoo! but it's too early to tell. Sergey Brin: *steeples his fingers and lets out a long calm calculated sigh* Great, another trivial nuisance to keep an eye on -- well I didn't get this far by ignoring things. Ok. Google Drone: I'll put them on the big board, sir. Sergey Brin: Good but be sure not to put them on the buyout dart board, they're not an option. Google Drone: Yessir, anything else, sir? Sergey Brin: Yes, round up the boys in the rec room that seem to have so much free time lately and see if they can brainstorm up an optional beta prototype we could throw on our page to win back the morons... *ahem* users that left us for Bing. You know some video widget or bell or whistle or some such crap. Those users'll be back anyway.
Just like Wikipedia discourages people to make edits of a person's own article for themselves, this should also be discouraged. Once you receive money for edits you've made, you're no longer an uninterested third party and have a biased voice. There's no way to enforce this so Wikipedia will have to just continue accepting/rejecting edits based inherently on the edit and what bias it itself may hold.
Actually what was lost was any hope left I had for humanity. More than 2,147,483,647 'tweets' have been 'tweeted.' God, I feel stupid just saying that. But what is that? Like half the population of earth?! And then they go so far as to call lack of mobile Twitter applications apocalyptic? Humanity has officially jumped the shark, people. Some other animal should have been given a shot at ruining the world.
I mean at least I can derive cheap entertainment from cell phone texts but Twitter transcripts have little to no value in my eyes. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the backyard building a rocket ship to seek out another planet free of Twitter. Hopefully it'll just have more minor problems like being covered in methane or a flesh eating silicon based virus...
When I did my undergrad at the University of Minnesota in 2000, they let us know that they took our code that we submitted and stored it in a program with a database. Whenever a student submitted new code, it went through this program. Essentially, some really fancy Hamming Distance that I think might have been similar to FASTA or BLAST algorithms for genetics were employed to score assignments against all the other ones.
If it was common for students to write assignments -- say they had been given a design template -- then all of the scores would come back rather high. If the TA noticed an outlier, they would investigate. If two submissions came up sufficiently similar, they would investigate.
It was (of course) never explained in detail how it worked but I bet that today one could take this to many new levels with things like ANTLR that might allow the program to check the inherent structure in code to avoid something trivial like different comments or variable names skewing the results.
Was it me who was in the professor's situation, I would bite the bullet and code the very basic above application using a web form submission for TAs and Professors. Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students. Then I myself would put the opened source on there and run all my students assignments against it.
Problem solved, you can keep all your assignments static, you lazy bastards:)
I would like to see if you could pull off an interesting idea. See if you can get the Nepal government to allow the citizens to use whatever level of encryption they see fit. I believe my government does not allow an encryption level so high that they can never hope to crack it. It's strange, companies are allowed to implement DRM at whatever level they see fit yet I'm restricted, especially if it might be exported.
Why should digital rights be considered any different than non-digital rights?
Because I just went down the street to the Microcenter and purchased a DVD for $20 cash.
No way to track that (and no, no one's stalking me).
However, I just logged into Amazon.com and bought the same DVD on my credit card. My personal computer may hold this data now. My ISP may know this now. Amazon's servers most definitely have all my information. The government might even have logs of this traffic!
That is why this is a special case. And trust me, it does not end there... general dissent about the government may transpire between me and my friends in my home. But what if it happens through Gmail or Gchat?
In other words: Even if the police didn't really care about the pirated movies and the grade-hacking, it might have helped to make the warrant stick if they had made more of a passing reference to those issues in the motion for a warrant, at least according to the reasoning expressed by the judge.
I don't get it. Police use their resources at their discretion. I had a friend getting a massive speeding ticket once and in the middle of filling out the ticket, the cop's radio went apeshit. Someone had been shot nearby in DC so the cop just said, "This is your lucky day" and left. Why? Because he had better shit to do! Three times in one month my car was broken into and nothing was stolen but considerable damage was done to my vehicle. I asked cops if there was an option to dust for fingerprints... what do you think their answer was? I was at a party in college where a bunch of people were smoking five bowls of weed when cops knocked on the door. They were there to tell us to turn the music down. They smelled/saw weed. They told everyone to shut up or go home and that's what we did. Why didn't they book everyone in the room for possession? Probably because they had more important shit to do that night.
Point being, if you're complaining about your neighbor or roommate engaging in an illegal activity, stick to investigating what the source of the complaint is. His roommate wasn't upset about illegal file sharing, that was just to spite the guy. The cops requested a warrant correctly addressing the only problem anyone was having--the fact that Calixte may have been impersonating someone. Maybe changing grades bothered his roommate, I don't know.
Let me ask you this, if your neighbor had a problem with your pool parties getting too loud and he called the police and said "Oh yeah, and he also speeds when he drives in our neighborhood and I saw him with fireworks when they're illegal in our state and sometimes he has a bonfire without the notified officials being there and and and and and..." What would you do in a situation like that if you were the responding officer? Calm the guy down, verify if there is an issue, resolve the issue and tell the guy he needs proof if he wants to make it stick.
Now what if police implemented a template warrant for computers that had "illegal games, illegal music, illegal movies, etc" on it so that just in case they wanted icing on the cake for whatever they were going after you for, it was there? You know, just list common things. You need to know exactly what you're getting a warrant for otherwise it's an abuse just like the government wiretappings now.
Your editorial seems to consist more so of "if you really want to screw someone in a case like this, make sure you verify all this extra illegal stuff he's doing."... or have I missed something?
Your journalism teacher just gave you 50% off your paper for misspelling a proper noun.
Good sir, implying I ever took a journalism course or received direction on the subject is libel and slander! Furthermore I hereby demand you retract such a statement or I shall receive satisfaction!
Should you imply I am a journalist again, I may go so far as to insult you with the label of 'lawyer!'
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it had to happen to someone important and/or with money.
More like it happened to someone who knew they didn't have to answer a single question from some inexperienced TSA "officials." When he told them he didn't have to tell them why he had the money the Agent allegedly replied, "Well I'll tell you what. . . . You might not be legally required to tell me that but you will be legally required to tell the police officer who will come talk to you. I'm just trying to ask some questions to figure out what all this is about so I can get you on your plane. But you want to play smart ass, and I'm not going to play your f---ing game." Here's the transcript from his following detention (note that this is the ACLU's hosted complaint):
Agent: Is there a reason you're not answering any questions
Bierfeldt: I'm not refusing to answer any
Agent: I want you to see it from my -- from what we're seeing, you come in with some money but you don't want to answer any questions about how much it is that's in your possession.
Bierfeldt: I don't know.
Agent: Is it a secret why you have the money or something?
Bierfeldt: I don't know the exact amount â" you're asking where my employment is, I'm simply asking whether I'm legally required to answer
Agent: Well may I ask, the question is, why do you have this money? That's the question, that's the major question.
Bierfeldt: Yes sir, and I'm asking whether I'm legally required to answer that question.
Agent: Answer that question first, why do you have this money?
Bierfeldt: Am I legally required to answer that question?
Agent: So you refuse to answer that question?
Bierfeldt: No sir, I'm not refusing.
Agent: Well you're not answering.
Bierfeldt: I'm simply asking my rights under the law.
Agent: I'm asking you a question and in return you're asking me a question. You're not answering it.
And then later:
Agent: Why do you have all this money? .
Bierfeldt: That's my, I asked you sir, am I required by law to answer the question.
Agent: I'm just asking you why you have $4700?
Bierfeldt: That's my question, I don't understand the law.
Agent: You want to talk to DEA about it? They'll probably ask you more questions.
Bierfeldt: If they can tell me if I'm required to answer by law the question, I'll answer the question. I'm just looking for a simple yes or no.
Agent: It's just a simple question. I just want to know why you have $4700 on you, that's not a usual thing. . .
Second Agent: He's refusing to answer any questions, he don't want to answer so, we [sic] gonna have to take him down to the station.
Agent: I mean yeah, that's suspicious.
Second Agent: DEA, FBI, and all those
Agent: Every one of them.
Second Agent: So we can do that.
Sounds pretty much how I'd react if you caught me in a really bad mood.
True: this all could have been avoided if the staffer had told them who he was working for and where the money came from. False: the staffer was required by law to divulge this information. I'm sure these guys are used to civilians rolling over for them everyday but if you ask me they're too used to being able to take your shit to another room and hold you there because they are bored.
Clearly the title was trying to illustrate the PHP interpreter's ability to solve the pythagorean theorem [mit.edu].
I don't need PHP for that! Besides, the pythagorean theorem doesn't have X, just a, b, and c.
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
I see you prefer short, nondescript variable names for your algorithms. I pity the person who has to maintain that bit of code. What is a? What is b? What is c?
I ascribe to a more Knuth-y self descriptive code and prefer the Pythagorean theorem to look more like:
sideAdjacentToRightAngle^2 + otherSideAdjacentToRightAngle^2 = sideOppositeRightAngle^2
Or maybe I'm just being a smartass? It's so hard to tell with developers these days ...
New PHP Interpreter Findx XSS, Injection Holes
New PHP Interpreter Finds XSS, Injection Holes
Fixed it for you.
Clearly the title was trying to illustrate the PHP interpreter's ability to solve the pythagorean theorem.
I like using this word to describe it and I agree with this piece for the most part. Although I would like to point out some differences with photography and video.
8-bit games are the cavemen drawings of what games will become. At the time of their inception they were probably revered above many other things by those who viewed them. Today they are crude and easily reproduced by a two year old. This will not be the case with games. And why not?
I can sit down with pen and paper and make a caveman drawing but I cannot sit down at my computer and make a Contra clone for an NES emulator? Why? Because the tools that represent pen and paper in this analogy are not open to me. They are closed and guarded by law and by obfuscation. I can look at a Picasso and begin to imitate the colors and angles and feel. I can play a Playstation One game but not imitate. I am not arguing that these methods should be open and available to all, I am just pointing out that this inhibits the everyone-can-do-what-they-want factor of most art mediums. It's difficult for me to acquire oils and pastels but it is near impossible for me to acquire a Neo Geo developer's license and kit.
In part this is due simply to complexity. Which brings me to my next point: games require a team.
Painting, drawing, photographing do not necessarily require a team. Films do but it is often to create a vision of a director or writer. I believe that games require much more teamwork and collaboration. Your texture folks have to be on board for the feel, your 3D engine has to be tuned to work with your feel, your dialogue has to match the feel, the coordination seems endless to me for modern games. This prevents the explosion of games and relegates us to a set number right now. I am not sure this will ever change.
In short, I feel that the difficulty in anyone picking up something to create a game inhibits the artistic expression. No one can arise by their own will in this field like you could in art or film. Furthermore, the idea of a lone genius revolutionizing or creating a movement is far more rare due to these inhibiting factors whereas that may more often happen in other arts.
I argue that games are art but they do hold different complexities and properties from other traditional arts. It may be a long time before they are recognized in the general public as such since the general public may always be removed from being able to create their own games with open tools.
Is it just me, or is this essentially a fundraising article?
As a regular submitter, I assure you that when I wrote the fourth sentence as nothing but a request for donations I had no idea anyone would bother to read that far into the summary.
Disclaimer: I do not work for the EFF but I do send them a twenty every now and then.
Donate to us, because we got a patent revoked.
I was hoping it would sound more like "Donate to us because we can get more patents revoked." And really, who else is working towards that? Once the USPTO grants a patent, it's done. They don't get as much from me as I give to public radio or open source software but I'll give them some change to fight that fight.
It's all about you, isn't it?
Well, I don't mean to sound narcissistic but this is how I imagine it happened:
Microsoft Web Admin: It's Friday, I'm bored. Let's do something fun.
Microsoft Web Developer: You want to go down to the gym and practice our aim at throwing chairs.
Microsoft Web Admin: Nah, that's not as fun anymore. Plus all the Stallman effigies are in disrepair.
Microsoft Web Developer: I know! Let's put up another page that makes all the Slashdot users shit themselves again!
Microsoft Web Admin: Oh man, that was pretty funny when we submitted the itsbetterwithwindows story and made it sound like that was Asus' idea.
Microsoft Web Developer: Hahaha, yeah, good times. Ok, I'll put something up claiming IE8 superiority. You get ready to post stuff some shill defenses.
Microsoft Web Admin: Oh, god, they're going to have aneurysms, this never gets old!
Microsoft Web Developer: What do you give for the over/under on number of posts?
Microsoft Web Admin: 300
Microsoft Web Developer: I'll put $20 on the over.
Microsoft Web Admin: You're on.
Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 -- right out of the box.
Those Grapes are Sour ANYWAY!
And nothing is worse than this one:
Web Standards
It's a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.
Did you hear that? Because my head just fucking exploded.
And what the hell does "Manageability" mean? Rate at which the browser is able to be handled or controled? What the hell?! And their little quip for this one:
Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That's just not nice.
You know what's not nice? Having to write in my freaking javascript if(IE){ do tons of fucked up shit } else { everybody else's predictable behavior }. You know what else isn't nice? The scourge of websites that will forever taint the web because you couldn't get your shit together for IE6 and then you let it fester for years.
I am so done with internet explorer in any form. This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off. Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves for making me jaded and opposed to any form of IE.
With the amount of civil war and civil unrest in the world, one would think that a displaced or repressed person from Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Darfur, Sudan or near any place of high population density would bother to learn English and move out to the United States with for stability, law enforcement, cheap housing and a shot at a job.
"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free..."
I know that a lot of people disagree with me on this and a lot of people here in the states are downright afraid of/opposed to immigration but I still think it's a shame they bulldoze houses due to lack of occupants. Granted, the people moving in would have to be sustained by welfare for a time but they could create their own markets and industry. It hasn't gone without problems in Minnesota but I can assure you it's for the betterment for those individuals and the diversity of Minnesota in the long run.
'It's got everything you need to be a game changer,' said Neil Young
Young went on to say that the iPhone "keeps him searching for a game of gold" and went on to speak of the coming mobile console war:
There's fanboi lines bein' drawn
A-nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people spendin' their dimes
A-iPhone sales leavin' others far behind
The IRS wants to get RID of a tax?
Why am I deeply suspicious of this?
What's really going on here? What am I quietly going to get nailed on instead?
I read another article by Reuters about this that is entitled:
Obama backs repeal of tax on personal cellphones
Very little mention of the IRS in that article. They make it sound like Treasury Secretary (Timothy) Geithner got together with Douglas Shulman, the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner, and convinced him to ask Congress to repeal this. Together.
You know, I don't know where the initiative came from, it doesn't really matter. But I found it amusing that a lot of news outlets probably thought "IRS to Repeal Tax"? That cannot sell and sounds like a lie. Better rephrase that to "Obama Cabinet Moves to Repeals Tax."
Sun Kills Rock CPU, Says NYT Report
Sun has instead moved on to develop the superior Paper CPU while critics argue about the hypothetical "Scissors CPU" that competitors may be secretly developing.
Perhaps Debian doesn't believe that Microsoft might do something like Rambus did.
Rambus was chastised for their actions (like the linked article states). And I propose Debian approach this the same way someone would approach the Rambus situation from the beginning had they an inkling of Rambus' true intent.
.NET, MIcrosoft does hold at least one patent on the .NET infrastructure. So far, Microsoft has agred to offer these under a "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms of use" and they are currently royalty free. No one seems to be clear on how you get this into writing but it's allegedly the way things are.
.NET. Should they fail to comply with this request in a timely manner, I would submit all communications with Microsoft to ECMA in a motion to dismiss the aforementioned "standards" and remove Mono--and unfortunately Tomboy--from the Debian default package. I'd beef up the Debian wiki with details on how to get these two packages to fix this bug and focus on the bug for a near future release after Squeeze.
Even though Microsoft submitted the CLI and C# main components of
Were I a Debian leader, I would simply approach Microsoft with the Mono code and the ECMA code of conduct and demand it in writing that for this snapshot of the code you have a forever royalty free to interact with
At that point, sit back and let ECMA and the community at large hash it out with Microsoft. Better now than later when other things may depend on this package and Microsoft has you right where Rambus has every memory maker on the planet.
Will anyone please accept that maybe all of the money spent for Homeland Security has actually helped prevent post 9/11 homeland terrorism from occurring? Instead of shoving it all to the side as republican war profiteering?
You may very well be right. Nowhere in my post did I say that it didn't. What I said was that we have gotten along for 8 years just fine without a Real ID. However painful it is for me to say this, TSA & DHS are here to stay. If they or the NSA wiretapping or whatever encroachments on our rights and privacy condoned have prevented homeland terrorism then good for them. I don't like all of those things but I cannot say one way or the other that they haven't worked.
But that's not what this is about. This is about people trying to push it even further. Do you just write them a blank check in the name of security? Do you just offer up all your rights on the spot and roll over for them? Let me quote the article:
Supporters saw a slimmer measure as better than nothing. But critics said the changes gut the law, weakening tools to fight fraud and learn whether bad drivers, drug runners or counterfeiters have licenses in more than one state.
My GOD! Bad drivers are running free across state borders! Here's $50 million dollars of tax payer money. Get them! At all costs! What? You need me to carry a Real ID along with my other ID and birth certificate and registration? Ok, whatever you say!
I call for a halt to Real ID or Pass ID or whatever until we see a need for it.
We go right back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Maybe governors should have been in the Capitol when we knew a plane was on its way to Washington wanting to kill a few thousand more people.
You hear that? The lawmakers that take us to war were actually in danger of physical harm themselves! Imagine that! But their voice, urgency and argument are getting pretty pathetic now that it's been eight years and no such thing has reoccurred. The fear card isn't so strong these days. "You might lose your house and/or job" seems to worry people more than "the odds are 1:10,000,000 that a terrorist may kill you in an extremely contrived scenario!"
Remember any sort of compromise or rational thought is bad because Sensenbrenner says doing so instantly brings us back to pre-9/11 danger. Beware of this sort of mentality. Beware the men that play with your emotions and speak in absolutes for the world is shades of grey.
This is how market competition is supposed to work.
Evil or not, a Google without competition inevitably stagnates.
Yes but how did Microsoft manage to compete with Google's Search engine?
What I'm confused about is Bing's quickness. I mean, I've read so many articles and patents about Google doing such and such to make its searches so quick and responsive. Not saying that Bing is just as quick but I don't notice a difference. So what's up? Has Microsoft implement hundreds of thousands of Red Hat modified kernels on machines in huge server farms like Google? You know with special impossible to understand BigTable and networking technology? Has hardware gotten so much better between then and now that this can be done on Windows virtualized on a hundred beefy machines?
I know no one can answer my questions but it's one of two things: 1) Microsoft read what I read and implemented Google or (dare I propose this?) 2) Microsoft -- in a shocking move -- actually did something really neat and innovative. Bing is getting decent reviews but maybe the usage doesn't demand what Google has to perform.
Unless, of course, you're like Microsoft and think "compete" means "lie".
Whatever, Microsoft knows what the consumer wants. It's not speed or accuracy or any of that stuff that Google uses to measure "quality." It's so much more simpler than that. Microsoft has searchability.
What? You don't know what searchability is? Well, then you're like the guy in Microsoft's commercial where a user is using Bing and his friend comes up and asks him what "searchability" means and everyone laughs him out of the room. You don't want to look stupid, do you? Didn't think so.
You don't need numbers and statistics that can be twisted, you just need to know that Bing has the best searchability. Jerry Seinfeld will eat a churro to that. Searchability. It's just more searchable.
Sad thing is, that'd probably be an effective ad. And if you don't think so, look at Budweiser's latest campaign.
Baa. Baaaaaa. Baa.
How the article paints it (and what sells newspapers):
... but sir, what about the 20% of the time they get to work on their own projects ...
... *ahem* users that left us for Bing. You know some video widget or bell or whistle or some such crap. Those users'll be back anyway.
Google Drone: *bursts through the office doors* Fuhrer Brin, Fuhrer Brin! I've news that Microsoft's Bing service is gaining on us!
Sergey Brin: JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist what're we gonna do?! Oh god oh god, we are so fucked! *kicks over his desk and gets up to pace wildly about the room* Why is there no coke on this goddamn coffee table when I need it?!
Google Drone: *empties a baggy of cocaine onto the polished marble table and starts cutting lines* We need action now, sir.
Sergey Brin: *inhales a long line and rubs his hands all over his face* Ok, ok, I got it. Get every able bodied person on 24/7 shifts for the next month working to make our service better.
Google Drone: Bu
Sergey Brin: SCREW that, we have an emergency. Get me everyone in the auditorium now, we ain't leavin' until the Google main search page is shitting rainbows and making the users feel like unicorns!
What's really happening:
Google Drone: *walks calmly into Brin's hermetically sealed chamber* Here's the reports for competitors, sir. It looks like Bing may have established itself as a competitor with Yahoo! but it's too early to tell.
Sergey Brin: *steeples his fingers and lets out a long calm calculated sigh* Great, another trivial nuisance to keep an eye on -- well I didn't get this far by ignoring things. Ok.
Google Drone: I'll put them on the big board, sir.
Sergey Brin: Good but be sure not to put them on the buyout dart board, they're not an option.
Google Drone: Yessir, anything else, sir?
Sergey Brin: Yes, round up the boys in the rec room that seem to have so much free time lately and see if they can brainstorm up an optional beta prototype we could throw on our page to win back the morons
Just like Wikipedia discourages people to make edits of a person's own article for themselves, this should also be discouraged. Once you receive money for edits you've made, you're no longer an uninterested third party and have a biased voice. There's no way to enforce this so Wikipedia will have to just continue accepting/rejecting edits based inherently on the edit and what bias it itself may hold.
... nothing of value was lost.
Actually what was lost was any hope left I had for humanity. More than 2,147,483,647 'tweets' have been 'tweeted.' God, I feel stupid just saying that. But what is that? Like half the population of earth?! And then they go so far as to call lack of mobile Twitter applications apocalyptic? Humanity has officially jumped the shark, people. Some other animal should have been given a shot at ruining the world.
...
I mean at least I can derive cheap entertainment from cell phone texts but Twitter transcripts have little to no value in my eyes. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the backyard building a rocket ship to seek out another planet free of Twitter. Hopefully it'll just have more minor problems like being covered in methane or a flesh eating silicon based virus
When I did my undergrad at the University of Minnesota in 2000, they let us know that they took our code that we submitted and stored it in a program with a database. Whenever a student submitted new code, it went through this program. Essentially, some really fancy Hamming Distance that I think might have been similar to FASTA or BLAST algorithms for genetics were employed to score assignments against all the other ones.
:)
If it was common for students to write assignments -- say they had been given a design template -- then all of the scores would come back rather high. If the TA noticed an outlier, they would investigate. If two submissions came up sufficiently similar, they would investigate.
It was (of course) never explained in detail how it worked but I bet that today one could take this to many new levels with things like ANTLR that might allow the program to check the inherent structure in code to avoid something trivial like different comments or variable names skewing the results.
Was it me who was in the professor's situation, I would bite the bullet and code the very basic above application using a web form submission for TAs and Professors. Then I would ask for help from other members of the department and make it a customizable growing project to protect the academic integrity of my school and students. Then I myself would put the opened source on there and run all my students assignments against it.
Problem solved, you can keep all your assignments static, you lazy bastards
I would like to see if you could pull off an interesting idea. See if you can get the Nepal government to allow the citizens to use whatever level of encryption they see fit. I believe my government does not allow an encryption level so high that they can never hope to crack it. It's strange, companies are allowed to implement DRM at whatever level they see fit yet I'm restricted, especially if it might be exported.
Take a look at this and see if you can get your country grouped into level 1 at the bottom of the page. Unrestricted levels of encryption would be a nice liberty to enjoy.
Why should digital rights be considered any different than non-digital rights?
Because I just went down the street to the Microcenter and purchased a DVD for $20 cash.
... general dissent about the government may transpire between me and my friends in my home. But what if it happens through Gmail or Gchat?
No way to track that (and no, no one's stalking me).
However, I just logged into Amazon.com and bought the same DVD on my credit card. My personal computer may hold this data now. My ISP may know this now. Amazon's servers most definitely have all my information. The government might even have logs of this traffic!
That is why this is a special case. And trust me, it does not end there
In other words: Even if the police didn't really care about the pirated movies and the grade-hacking, it might have helped to make the warrant stick if they had made more of a passing reference to those issues in the motion for a warrant, at least according to the reasoning expressed by the judge.
I don't get it. Police use their resources at their discretion. I had a friend getting a massive speeding ticket once and in the middle of filling out the ticket, the cop's radio went apeshit. Someone had been shot nearby in DC so the cop just said, "This is your lucky day" and left. Why? Because he had better shit to do! Three times in one month my car was broken into and nothing was stolen but considerable damage was done to my vehicle. I asked cops if there was an option to dust for fingerprints ... what do you think their answer was? I was at a party in college where a bunch of people were smoking five bowls of weed when cops knocked on the door. They were there to tell us to turn the music down. They smelled/saw weed. They told everyone to shut up or go home and that's what we did. Why didn't they book everyone in the room for possession? Probably because they had more important shit to do that night.
..." What would you do in a situation like that if you were the responding officer? Calm the guy down, verify if there is an issue, resolve the issue and tell the guy he needs proof if he wants to make it stick.
... or have I missed something?
Point being, if you're complaining about your neighbor or roommate engaging in an illegal activity, stick to investigating what the source of the complaint is. His roommate wasn't upset about illegal file sharing, that was just to spite the guy. The cops requested a warrant correctly addressing the only problem anyone was having--the fact that Calixte may have been impersonating someone. Maybe changing grades bothered his roommate, I don't know.
Let me ask you this, if your neighbor had a problem with your pool parties getting too loud and he called the police and said "Oh yeah, and he also speeds when he drives in our neighborhood and I saw him with fireworks when they're illegal in our state and sometimes he has a bonfire without the notified officials being there and and and and and
Now what if police implemented a template warrant for computers that had "illegal games, illegal music, illegal movies, etc" on it so that just in case they wanted icing on the cake for whatever they were going after you for, it was there? You know, just list common things. You need to know exactly what you're getting a warrant for otherwise it's an abuse just like the government wiretappings now.
Your editorial seems to consist more so of "if you really want to screw someone in a case like this, make sure you verify all this extra illegal stuff he's doing."
Mine screen is 1080.
Ja!? So ist mine!
Vell be happy! Mien schreen hazen ze dead pixels! Not so wunderbar nau, ja?
Your journalism teacher just gave you 50% off your paper for misspelling a proper noun.
Good sir, implying I ever took a journalism course or received direction on the subject is libel and slander! Furthermore I hereby demand you retract such a statement or I shall receive satisfaction!
Should you imply I am a journalist again, I may go so far as to insult you with the label of 'lawyer!'