TL;DR - Man was accused of downloading child porn after a neighbor used his AP to do so. He was cleared after some time, but not after being raided by SWAT; arrested; and having his name and reputation smeared all over the media.
2. ISP TOS: http://ww2.cox.com/aboutus/policies.cox Part 1 "[...] You may not use the Service to: [...] Resell or redistribute the Service to any third party via any means including but not limited to wireless technology." Break the TOS and I break the contract, which is terms for Cox to drop my service. Get another ISP? Well, maybe you have a surfeit of broadband choices in SF, but in my neck of the woods, there's only two -- and the other has the exact same TOS clause.
Every bit of this comes back to my main point. There are risks and rewards associated with running an open AP. I've detailed the risks. Are the rewards worth taking those risks? For you -- yes. For me -- no.
Heh. FUD? I'm not sure that means what you think it means. Describing why I do not run an open AP is not, in any way, an attempt to scare other people off from doing so. Clearly your priorities are different from mine. They hardly invalidate mine.
I stand by my reasons, since they are reasons that matter to me:
1. It absolutely is possible to be legally persecuted and prosecuted for actions that a guest does. That hasn't happened to you? Awesome! I NEVER want it to happen to me.
2. My ISP TOS absolutely do forbid sharing the connection. Your don't? Cool. I'm not going to risk losing my service for this.
3. Allowing somebody on my internal LAN absolutely opens up a plethora of security concerns. Your network is properly locked down? Very responsible of you! Mine isn't and I'm not willing to devote the time to do it.
I'm not entirely certain why the article lists "siphoning precious bandwidth" as the reason most people would lock down their Wi-Fi. It seems highly unlikely that that would come into play at all, most of the time, much less be the main reason.
No, there are three reasons why I don't have an open AP:
1. Legal liability for a guest's action is spotty. Technically speaking, I know that I am not liable if a guest performs an illegal act using my AP. What's the likelihood that a police officer or prosecutor would give me the benefit of the doubt while investigating the crime, though? The most likely course of action is that I spend some time in jail or under arrest until my innocence is proven.
2. My ISP TOS expressly forbids sharing the service. As long as they aren't doing deep packet sniffing (and they might be), it's possible I could set up the open AP such that everything is NAT'ed through a known server. The risk of doing so is getting my service cut off, though.
3. Allowing a rogue agent in my network drastically reduces the security of the network. I could create a locked down subnetwork just for the open AP, but that would be a notable amount of work.
So I have risks that involve jail time; termination of service; and/or loss of my personal data. What are the rewards? I feel good about helping my fellow man?
Each of the three major carriers are good is some ways and terrible in others. It all depends on what your priorities are.
Verizon has the best overall coverage US-wide. I've been to many areas that didn't have AT&T or T-Mobile coverage but have never found a place that didn't have Verizon coverage. That's about it.
AT&T has the fastest data speeds in most of the areas that it does cover (3G or LTE). Also, you can use data and voice at the same time on all of their smartphones right now. They are also less expensive than Verizon in most cases. Coverage is worse, though.
T-Mobile has ultra-low prices and the best customer service. Worst coverage and slow data speeds, though.
Oh, and there's Sprint. No idea if they will even be around this time next year.
I've been with all four. I'm with AT&T right now since I don't need Verizon's roaming coverage and would rather pay less and have faster speeds now.
This reasoning fails in at least three fundamental ways.
First, the Loch Ness Monster simply doesn't exist. No reputable scientist would claim that it does, or even that it could exist in the way that it is commonly portrayed.
Second, it's not even necessary for dinosaurs to still exist to support their argument. There are already well-known animals alive today that have been virtually unchanged since the dinosaur times. Alligators and crocodiles are the best examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
Third, as the existence of alligators shows, even if dinosaurs did still exist, that doesn't in any possible way "disprove" the Theory of Evolution. I'm not entirely certain what reasoning would have to apply so that their existence would matter at all.
Really, this mostly just goes to show that any "debate" on the topic is fruitless when one side thinks that an argument like this completely invalidates proven scientific fact. How can you argue against that?
Sure, until you get into filing anything more than the 1040EZ.
This isn't accurate. Web-based tax apps are now easily as full featured as their desktop variants. I've used TaxCut Online for some years, now, and have been able to do so relatively complex returns that way (investments, small business employer, etc).
My main criteria for choosing an elementary school for my kids is distance. That is, can they walk to it on their own? If yes, then I'm good.
I understand why other parents shop around for the "best" elementary schools, but I don't know that their reasoning is sound, in all (most?) cases. In the end, nearly all schools will be roughly the same. Yes, there are going to be some outliers in both directions, but those are the exceptions.
In most cases, the school will have a mix of good teachers, mediocre teachers, and outright bad teachers. It is my job as a parent to make sure that my kids learn what they need to learn regardless of what kind of teacher they have. That means nightly discussions on what they learned in school that day plus an overview of their homework. If the teacher is good, then my involvement doesn't need to go much beyond that. If the teacher is bad (like my daughter's 5th grade math teacher -- terrible!), then it's my responsibility to step up and fill in the gaps.
So yeah, if the school ended up being one of the terrible outliers, then the amount of time I would need to invest would likely drive me to find a different school... and yeah, a great outlier would mean less time for me, but who cares?
The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.
Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.
What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.
Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.
That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.
I had really high hopes for the various Linux-based mobile OSes last year and before... but I wonder if it's too little; too late at this point. By all accounts, WP7 is very very slick, yet it has negligible market share and even less mind share. What advantage will this new merged OS have?
Also, the software developer side of me has extremely high doubts that this will be doable in any reasonable time frame. Merging any kind of software is tricky; merging an OS is a herculean task. And for what?
I hear this theory quite a bit and I believe that Lucas himself has said this to be the case. I don't buy it. The entire Jedi mythology holds that it's the Jedi's mastery of the Force that gives him the ability to fight with a light saber. They made it very explicit with Yoda's fight with Dooku -- Yoda was hundreds of years old and practically disabled, but his immense mastery of the Force gave him incredible fighting abilities. If anything, Obi-Wan and Vader's age should have increased their skills, not decreased them.
I remember the first time I looked into FreeBSD. It was back in 1994 and I needed to run some Unix variant on my 386 and it came down to FreeBSD or Linux. At the time, FreeBSD seemed to be significantly farther along than Linux... but in a completely unusable way, to me. I was a rank newbie to Unix that had just learned how to exit 'vi' without powering down the computer. FreeBSD had almost no documentation and certainly none for somebody like me.
Linux, on the other hand, had the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The docs there were incredible! I hogged the computer lab's laser printer printing off the SAG and the NAG and, most importantly, Matt Welsh's 'Installation and Getting Started Guide'.
It was no contest. FreeBSD was an impenetrable mystery but 60 something floppies of Slackware later and I was hooked on Linux for life.
Nah, this is a fatal flaw only if you attempt to base Christianity on logic. Religions don't work that way. The key component is Faith, as in "my feeble human mind cannot hope to grasp God's grand design, so I have FAITH that it is true".
I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian but never thought that Adam was a real person. Genesis was always an allegory. I always assumed that it was only the Catholics that cared about "original sin" and the like.
Oh, you say that without "original sin" that quite a bit of Christianity falls apart? Yeah, that's going through the whole "logic" route again. I had faith.
I think you summarized the Android v iOS question pretty well. I'm in a similar boat -- a long time iOS user that's wanted to move to Android, but it's just not there yet. Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich will be?
I do have to take exception with one thing you said, though: "Apple...refused to produce and release any significant hardware improvements [in the 4S]". I hear refrains like this all over the place and just don't get it. The 4S has the same screen and case profile as the 4 but everything else is updated. The hardware improvements are massive! Sooo.... no new screen and no NFC and they haven't made any? Odd.
But yeah, Nexus Prime plus Ice Cream Sandwich looks like it might finally catch up to the iPhone + iOS. That leaves hope that a later model might actually supersede it.
BitCoins are currently used almost exclusively in financial transactions of an illicit nature. You want to buy drugs online and not be traced? Head to the dark webs with BitCoins at the ready! There are clear advantages to using BitCoins if what you are doing is illegal and so it makes perfect sense for them to take off in that market.
But eventually, one would want to use BitCoins to pay for legal services. My question is; how do you get to that point? Why would a legitimate business accept a currency that is used almost exclusively for illegal means? What is the strategy to convince mainstream businesses that BitCoins have a purpose in the main web, as well?
I think most people can agree that for most purposes, any alternative to Adobe Reader is going to be faster, smaller, and more secure. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that just because we're not using Reader that we're completely safe from PDF exploits. Witness the recent XPDF vulnerability that affects nearly every Linux-based PDF resource:
We're safe from a "security through obscurity" point of view (why bother writing an exploit for such a tiny market?) but this exploit is at least as bad as most of the Reader ones.
Words are just words, it's the meaning behind them that matters.
I agree, however I come to an entirely opposite conclusion as a result of that. Words, on their own, are utterly meaningless. They are simply light patterns when written down or sound vibrations when spoken aloud. These patterns and vibrations gain meaning only when we, as a society, deem them to have meaning.
That's important. It's not you that determines the meaning of a word and it's certainly not me; it's the collective "we" as a society as a whole that does.
So if "shit" and "poop" are both words for excrement, then why is one a swear and the other isn't? Because we, as a whole, decided that it was. It's as simple as that.
The obvious question is; "who cares?". Well, by definition, almost everybody! Since we've decided what swears are, that makes their use offensive. If you tell somebody to "fuck off", it's completely understood that you are saying something with the INTENT to be offensive. Now tell that same somebody to "slag off". It means roughly the same thing (I think) but is it offensive? Maybe somewhere, but not here in the US. The recipient of your insult doesn't have the social knowledge to know if you are trying to offend them or not.
It may well be that "we" will eventually decide that the current crop of swears aren't swears anymore. When that happens, they lose all of their offensiveness... but, honestly, we'll just come up with alternatives. We need to have some way to convey 'intent to offend' and swears are the way to do it.
How is this a news article? Oxford University Press says that when they are ready to publish their next revision in 10 years, they might consider doing it online only if there isn't a demand for the hard-copy version.
Calling it "wild speculation" just doesn't do that term justice.
I am not seeing the appeal of this service. It's not as flexible as PayPal and not as wide-spread as Visa/Mastercard debit cards.
In fact, this sounds a lot like a (more limited) version of an online checking account. I set one up for my daughter when a significant part of her allowance was being spent online (iTunes, Amazon, etc) anyway. Her allowance is auto-transferred to her account every week and she uses the supplied Visa debit card to make purchases. Since it's Visa, it's accepted everywhere. I can track all of the spending, too, since everything is online.
I could maybe see this being appealing if it truly did micropayments but as long as their definition of micro is "less than $20", it just doesn't make sense.
Yeah, the idea of Paperless isn't new. The movie industry has had this for years, for instance. It's just (relatively) new in the ticketing industry.
And I would disagree that it wasn't successful for the Miley tour; it was phenomenally successful. AC's comment about using one-time-use cards was definitely a workaround and it did happen... but percentage-wise, it was nothing compared to how much those tickets were normally scalped. Just because a system isn't 100% foolproof doesn't mean it doesn't have any value at all.
I love that you used Miley Cyrus as an example where the "Tom Waits" style ticketing couldn't work. In fact, Miley's entire tour was done in exactly that fashion! Her tour is the poster child of the so-called Paperless Ticketing.
Here's roughly how paperless works in a case like Miley's tour. A parent goes online and buys tickets for their daughter using a credit card. They are issued a receipt but no tickets. Instead, they are given instructions to bring their credit card to the show and present it for admission.
This caught some parents off-guard since they were expecting to just drop their kid off or maybe car-pool. Practically no parents actually go into the stadium for a Miley Cyrus concert.
Anyway, so on the day of the show, the parent and kid get to the gate and get their card swiped. If it checks out, then the kid goes on and there is a separate "loop" that brings the parent back out to wait for the show to end. If there are difficulties with the card (wrong card, card won't swipe, etc), then the parent is directed to customer support to get it resolved.
It worked very very well. Yes, it was somewhat inconvenient to have to physically be there to present your card, but there were very few complaints in the end. I think most people were just glad that they could get tickets at a reasonable price. Miley's previous tour was fraught with scalpers selling tickets in the thousands of dollars.
Stubhub is owned by eBay, not Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster owns TicketsNow.
So how do tickets "magically" appear on Stubhub, eBay, or TicketsNow before you can buy them retail? Well, there are several ways.
First, some of the tickets for sale on the reseller sites don't yet exist. The sellers are gambling that they will get the tickets before you need them. This practice may soon be illegal (and I think already is in New Jersey).
The most common way, though, is via "presales". See, tickets don't go on sale all at the same time. The promoter, concert venue, and artist (and more) all get a certain number of tickets that they can sell before the official onsale date. A common use for these are fanclub tickets. That is, if you are part of the U2 fan club, then you are given the option of buying a certain number of tickets at (usually) a reduced price and before anybody else can buy them. American Express often has some deals like this as well. The end result is that a lot of the very best tickets are sold well before the tickets look like they are on sale at all. Well, every ticket scalper is part of every fan club and do whatever it takes to be part of a "presale". They then take their tickets to your favorite resale spot and voila, the ticket magically appears there before you could have bought it direct.
Interesting, yes.. but I'm more interested in where that music for all of the demo videos came from. The credits list titles, composers, and the fact that they are Creative Commons but no links or URLs. So are they pieces composed just for the project? Or is there some place out there with lots of "atmospheric" instrumentals under Creative Commons that are suitable for videos?
I have to assume that there are some "secret" plans involving Ubuntu One that make a lot of sense (if you know them) and can actually explain why Ubuntu One exists in the first place. I've read through all the public documentation and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what is even remotely unique or noteworthy about the service.
Right now, it's attempting to be a Dropbox clone. However, it's not yet there and is clearly still in beta -- even though they have the same pricing structure as the (very mature) Dropbox. Their goal for the file synchronization service is to be as full-featured as Dropbox? But not more? Seriously, if your goal is to be as good as Dropbox, then why not just use Dropbox?
It's not even that "Ubuntu One is OSS and Dropbox is proprietary". Both services have OSS parts and proprietary parts.
Maybe, then, they are trying to be more of an online backup service, ala Mozy? Well... no. I can't find any evidence that they encrypt your data so it would be a bust as online backup.
So I don't get it. Why would anybody use (much less pay for) it when there are much more robust services already out there AND there's no indication that it'll actually be better than those services in any way. There must be some secret plans that I just don't know about.
There might be some validity to this study if my daughter is any indication.
The study definitely nailed one point -- prior to the Internet, most people never wrote anything substantial outside of school. And even that was minimal and done with great reluctance. I remember one instance in particular while in High School (pre-Internet). We were tasked with writing a short story. It needed to be at least 500 words. I've never really needed an excuse to write so I whipped up a couple thousand word horror story and that was that. I was shocked, though, at the other submissions. Nearly every other classmate struggled to hit the 500 word mark and used every trick in the book to get there. Many couldn't even do that and complained about how hard it was to even commit 200 words to their story.
That was the case throughout my High School years. Nobody would write anything unless ordered to and, even then, would do the absolute bare minimum.
Fast forward (many years) to today. My daughter is a typical "tween". Her texts and IMs and email messages are all "UR sooooo cool!!! LOL" and the like. If you were to concentrate on just that, then you would be justified in complaining about the downfall of literacy. But you would be wrong. That's just one aspect of her writing.
See, she also writes books. Not just "stories" and certainly not because she was ordered to in class. She finished her first book when she was 10 years old. It was 500 pages. Not 500 words... 500 PAGES long. Her subsequent stories have been similar.
Now I'm not saying that the books are ready for public consumption but just the fact that she writes so much at her age is amazing. Part of it is that she is "gifted" in that area... but I'm convinced that part of it is just because she has been writing in other mediums for so long that it's become second nature to her.
Compuserve was my first real foray into an online community and all the good and bad that comes with it. I was 16 and in High School when the Computer Programming teacher (BASIC on Apple II+ computers) signed up for a school account on Compuserve. This was years before I had even heard of the Internet. Since nobody in the school had the first clue what to do with this "Information Superhighway" thing, and I was the only geek around, the teacher just gave me the login info and let me do whatever I wanted on it.
It didn't take me long to gravitate towards the various chat rooms. Those of you who grew up with the availability of the Internet and the like probably take it for granted that you can communicate with people all over the world (or nation, at least). Back when my only communication with the world at large was my pen pal, these simple chat rooms were mind-blowing!
There was one little hitch. See, my nickname back then was "Granny" (play on my last name) and so I naturally used it as my handle in the chat room. I forget which room I joined but I hadn't been in there but a few seconds when I started getting a lot of people saying "hi" and asking where I was located and the like. Then somebody asked how old I was and I mentioned that I was 16.
Well, right after I wrote that, I started getting a stream of Private Chat requests. We're talking a couple dozen requests in about 10 seconds. "Everybody is so friendly," I thought.
But their questions were odd and very personal. "What do you look like?" "What color are your eyes?" "What are you wearing?" Eh? What am I wearing? What kind of weird question is that to ask.
And then: "How big are your boobs?" "Do you have a boyfriend?" It went off the deep end after that.
They thought I was a 16 year old girl! I thought that was so funny and told them so. And just like that, all of the Private Chats closed and all I was left with were a scattering of "Well why would you call yourself Granny if you weren't a girl?" messages.
I signed on a few more times as Granny after that but found that I really couldn't go anywhere without a stream of sexual comments following me. I eventually had to change my nick just to be able to chat with people without them staring at my virtual chest.
That was an eye-opener. Let me tell you, though, when the Internet happened years later and I heard women complaining about being effectively harassed online by a bunch of horny nerds... well, I knew exactly what they were talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, let's step back into the real world:
1. Being held liable for guest's actions: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/24/unsecured-wifi-child-pornography-innocent_n_852996.html
TL;DR - Man was accused of downloading child porn after a neighbor used his AP to do so. He was cleared after some time, but not after being raided by SWAT; arrested; and having his name and reputation smeared all over the media.
2. ISP TOS: http://ww2.cox.com/aboutus/policies.cox Part 1 "[...] You may not use the Service to: [...] Resell or redistribute the Service to any third party via any means including but not limited to wireless technology." Break the TOS and I break the contract, which is terms for Cox to drop my service. Get another ISP? Well, maybe you have a surfeit of broadband choices in SF, but in my neck of the woods, there's only two -- and the other has the exact same TOS clause.
Every bit of this comes back to my main point. There are risks and rewards associated with running an open AP. I've detailed the risks. Are the rewards worth taking those risks? For you -- yes. For me -- no.
Heh. FUD? I'm not sure that means what you think it means. Describing why I do not run an open AP is not, in any way, an attempt to scare other people off from doing so. Clearly your priorities are different from mine. They hardly invalidate mine.
I stand by my reasons, since they are reasons that matter to me:
1. It absolutely is possible to be legally persecuted and prosecuted for actions that a guest does. That hasn't happened to you? Awesome! I NEVER want it to happen to me.
2. My ISP TOS absolutely do forbid sharing the connection. Your don't? Cool. I'm not going to risk losing my service for this.
3. Allowing somebody on my internal LAN absolutely opens up a plethora of security concerns. Your network is properly locked down? Very responsible of you! Mine isn't and I'm not willing to devote the time to do it.
I'm not entirely certain why the article lists "siphoning precious bandwidth" as the reason most people would lock down their Wi-Fi. It seems highly unlikely that that would come into play at all, most of the time, much less be the main reason.
No, there are three reasons why I don't have an open AP:
1. Legal liability for a guest's action is spotty. Technically speaking, I know that I am not liable if a guest performs an illegal act using my AP. What's the likelihood that a police officer or prosecutor would give me the benefit of the doubt while investigating the crime, though? The most likely course of action is that I spend some time in jail or under arrest until my innocence is proven.
2. My ISP TOS expressly forbids sharing the service. As long as they aren't doing deep packet sniffing (and they might be), it's possible I could set up the open AP such that everything is NAT'ed through a known server. The risk of doing so is getting my service cut off, though.
3. Allowing a rogue agent in my network drastically reduces the security of the network. I could create a locked down subnetwork just for the open AP, but that would be a notable amount of work.
So I have risks that involve jail time; termination of service; and/or loss of my personal data. What are the rewards? I feel good about helping my fellow man?
Not worth it at all.
Each of the three major carriers are good is some ways and terrible in others. It all depends on what your priorities are.
Verizon has the best overall coverage US-wide. I've been to many areas that didn't have AT&T or T-Mobile coverage but have never found a place that didn't have Verizon coverage. That's about it.
AT&T has the fastest data speeds in most of the areas that it does cover (3G or LTE). Also, you can use data and voice at the same time on all of their smartphones right now. They are also less expensive than Verizon in most cases. Coverage is worse, though.
T-Mobile has ultra-low prices and the best customer service. Worst coverage and slow data speeds, though.
Oh, and there's Sprint. No idea if they will even be around this time next year.
I've been with all four. I'm with AT&T right now since I don't need Verizon's roaming coverage and would rather pay less and have faster speeds now.
This reasoning fails in at least three fundamental ways.
First, the Loch Ness Monster simply doesn't exist. No reputable scientist would claim that it does, or even that it could exist in the way that it is commonly portrayed.
Second, it's not even necessary for dinosaurs to still exist to support their argument. There are already well-known animals alive today that have been virtually unchanged since the dinosaur times. Alligators and crocodiles are the best examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
Third, as the existence of alligators shows, even if dinosaurs did still exist, that doesn't in any possible way "disprove" the Theory of Evolution. I'm not entirely certain what reasoning would have to apply so that their existence would matter at all.
Really, this mostly just goes to show that any "debate" on the topic is fruitless when one side thinks that an argument like this completely invalidates proven scientific fact. How can you argue against that?
The good tax programs are all web-based now.
Sure, until you get into filing anything more than the 1040EZ.
This isn't accurate. Web-based tax apps are now easily as full featured as their desktop variants. I've used TaxCut Online for some years, now, and have been able to do so relatively complex returns that way (investments, small business employer, etc).
My main criteria for choosing an elementary school for my kids is distance. That is, can they walk to it on their own? If yes, then I'm good.
I understand why other parents shop around for the "best" elementary schools, but I don't know that their reasoning is sound, in all (most?) cases. In the end, nearly all schools will be roughly the same. Yes, there are going to be some outliers in both directions, but those are the exceptions.
In most cases, the school will have a mix of good teachers, mediocre teachers, and outright bad teachers. It is my job as a parent to make sure that my kids learn what they need to learn regardless of what kind of teacher they have. That means nightly discussions on what they learned in school that day plus an overview of their homework. If the teacher is good, then my involvement doesn't need to go much beyond that. If the teacher is bad (like my daughter's 5th grade math teacher -- terrible!), then it's my responsibility to step up and fill in the gaps.
So yeah, if the school ended up being one of the terrible outliers, then the amount of time I would need to invest would likely drive me to find a different school... and yeah, a great outlier would mean less time for me, but who cares?
The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.
Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.
What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.
Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.
That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.
I had really high hopes for the various Linux-based mobile OSes last year and before... but I wonder if it's too little; too late at this point. By all accounts, WP7 is very very slick, yet it has negligible market share and even less mind share. What advantage will this new merged OS have?
Also, the software developer side of me has extremely high doubts that this will be doable in any reasonable time frame. Merging any kind of software is tricky; merging an OS is a herculean task. And for what?
I hear this theory quite a bit and I believe that Lucas himself has said this to be the case. I don't buy it. The entire Jedi mythology holds that it's the Jedi's mastery of the Force that gives him the ability to fight with a light saber. They made it very explicit with Yoda's fight with Dooku -- Yoda was hundreds of years old and practically disabled, but his immense mastery of the Force gave him incredible fighting abilities. If anything, Obi-Wan and Vader's age should have increased their skills, not decreased them.
I remember the first time I looked into FreeBSD. It was back in 1994 and I needed to run some Unix variant on my 386 and it came down to FreeBSD or Linux. At the time, FreeBSD seemed to be significantly farther along than Linux... but in a completely unusable way, to me. I was a rank newbie to Unix that had just learned how to exit 'vi' without powering down the computer. FreeBSD had almost no documentation and certainly none for somebody like me.
Linux, on the other hand, had the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The docs there were incredible! I hogged the computer lab's laser printer printing off the SAG and the NAG and, most importantly, Matt Welsh's 'Installation and Getting Started Guide'.
It was no contest. FreeBSD was an impenetrable mystery but 60 something floppies of Slackware later and I was hooked on Linux for life.
Nah, this is a fatal flaw only if you attempt to base Christianity on logic. Religions don't work that way. The key component is Faith, as in "my feeble human mind cannot hope to grasp God's grand design, so I have FAITH that it is true".
I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian but never thought that Adam was a real person. Genesis was always an allegory. I always assumed that it was only the Catholics that cared about "original sin" and the like.
Oh, you say that without "original sin" that quite a bit of Christianity falls apart? Yeah, that's going through the whole "logic" route again. I had faith.
I think you summarized the Android v iOS question pretty well. I'm in a similar boat -- a long time iOS user that's wanted to move to Android, but it's just not there yet. Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich will be?
I do have to take exception with one thing you said, though: "Apple...refused to produce and release any significant hardware improvements [in the 4S]". I hear refrains like this all over the place and just don't get it. The 4S has the same screen and case profile as the 4 but everything else is updated. The hardware improvements are massive! Sooo.... no new screen and no NFC and they haven't made any? Odd.
But yeah, Nexus Prime plus Ice Cream Sandwich looks like it might finally catch up to the iPhone + iOS. That leaves hope that a later model might actually supersede it.
BitCoins are currently used almost exclusively in financial transactions of an illicit nature. You want to buy drugs online and not be traced? Head to the dark webs with BitCoins at the ready! There are clear advantages to using BitCoins if what you are doing is illegal and so it makes perfect sense for them to take off in that market.
But eventually, one would want to use BitCoins to pay for legal services. My question is; how do you get to that point? Why would a legitimate business accept a currency that is used almost exclusively for illegal means? What is the strategy to convince mainstream businesses that BitCoins have a purpose in the main web, as well?
I think most people can agree that for most purposes, any alternative to Adobe Reader is going to be faster, smaller, and more secure. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that just because we're not using Reader that we're completely safe from PDF exploits. Witness the recent XPDF vulnerability that affects nearly every Linux-based PDF resource:
http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2010/Oct/1024526.html
We're safe from a "security through obscurity" point of view (why bother writing an exploit for such a tiny market?) but this exploit is at least as bad as most of the Reader ones.
Words are just words, it's the meaning behind them that matters.
I agree, however I come to an entirely opposite conclusion as a result of that. Words, on their own, are utterly meaningless. They are simply light patterns when written down or sound vibrations when spoken aloud. These patterns and vibrations gain meaning only when we, as a society, deem them to have meaning.
That's important. It's not you that determines the meaning of a word and it's certainly not me; it's the collective "we" as a society as a whole that does.
So if "shit" and "poop" are both words for excrement, then why is one a swear and the other isn't? Because we, as a whole, decided that it was. It's as simple as that.
The obvious question is; "who cares?". Well, by definition, almost everybody! Since we've decided what swears are, that makes their use offensive. If you tell somebody to "fuck off", it's completely understood that you are saying something with the INTENT to be offensive. Now tell that same somebody to "slag off". It means roughly the same thing (I think) but is it offensive? Maybe somewhere, but not here in the US. The recipient of your insult doesn't have the social knowledge to know if you are trying to offend them or not.
It may well be that "we" will eventually decide that the current crop of swears aren't swears anymore. When that happens, they lose all of their offensiveness... but, honestly, we'll just come up with alternatives. We need to have some way to convey 'intent to offend' and swears are the way to do it.
How is this a news article? Oxford University Press says that when they are ready to publish their next revision in 10 years, they might consider doing it online only if there isn't a demand for the hard-copy version.
Calling it "wild speculation" just doesn't do that term justice.
I am not seeing the appeal of this service. It's not as flexible as PayPal and not as wide-spread as Visa/Mastercard debit cards.
In fact, this sounds a lot like a (more limited) version of an online checking account. I set one up for my daughter when a significant part of her allowance was being spent online (iTunes, Amazon, etc) anyway. Her allowance is auto-transferred to her account every week and she uses the supplied Visa debit card to make purchases. Since it's Visa, it's accepted everywhere. I can track all of the spending, too, since everything is online.
I could maybe see this being appealing if it truly did micropayments but as long as their definition of micro is "less than $20", it just doesn't make sense.
Yeah, the idea of Paperless isn't new. The movie industry has had this for years, for instance. It's just (relatively) new in the ticketing industry.
And I would disagree that it wasn't successful for the Miley tour; it was phenomenally successful. AC's comment about using one-time-use cards was definitely a workaround and it did happen... but percentage-wise, it was nothing compared to how much those tickets were normally scalped. Just because a system isn't 100% foolproof doesn't mean it doesn't have any value at all.
I love that you used Miley Cyrus as an example where the "Tom Waits" style ticketing couldn't work. In fact, Miley's entire tour was done in exactly that fashion! Her tour is the poster child of the so-called Paperless Ticketing.
Here's roughly how paperless works in a case like Miley's tour. A parent goes online and buys tickets for their daughter using a credit card. They are issued a receipt but no tickets. Instead, they are given instructions to bring their credit card to the show and present it for admission.
This caught some parents off-guard since they were expecting to just drop their kid off or maybe car-pool. Practically no parents actually go into the stadium for a Miley Cyrus concert.
Anyway, so on the day of the show, the parent and kid get to the gate and get their card swiped. If it checks out, then the kid goes on and there is a separate "loop" that brings the parent back out to wait for the show to end. If there are difficulties with the card (wrong card, card won't swipe, etc), then the parent is directed to customer support to get it resolved.
It worked very very well. Yes, it was somewhat inconvenient to have to physically be there to present your card, but there were very few complaints in the end. I think most people were just glad that they could get tickets at a reasonable price. Miley's previous tour was fraught with scalpers selling tickets in the thousands of dollars.
Stubhub is owned by eBay, not Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster owns TicketsNow.
So how do tickets "magically" appear on Stubhub, eBay, or TicketsNow before you can buy them retail? Well, there are several ways.
First, some of the tickets for sale on the reseller sites don't yet exist. The sellers are gambling that they will get the tickets before you need them. This practice may soon be illegal (and I think already is in New Jersey).
The most common way, though, is via "presales". See, tickets don't go on sale all at the same time. The promoter, concert venue, and artist (and more) all get a certain number of tickets that they can sell before the official onsale date. A common use for these are fanclub tickets. That is, if you are part of the U2 fan club, then you are given the option of buying a certain number of tickets at (usually) a reduced price and before anybody else can buy them. American Express often has some deals like this as well. The end result is that a lot of the very best tickets are sold well before the tickets look like they are on sale at all. Well, every ticket scalper is part of every fan club and do whatever it takes to be part of a "presale". They then take their tickets to your favorite resale spot and voila, the ticket magically appears there before you could have bought it direct.
Interesting, yes.. but I'm more interested in where that music for all of the demo videos came from. The credits list titles, composers, and the fact that they are Creative Commons but no links or URLs. So are they pieces composed just for the project? Or is there some place out there with lots of "atmospheric" instrumentals under Creative Commons that are suitable for videos?
I have to assume that there are some "secret" plans involving Ubuntu One that make a lot of sense (if you know them) and can actually explain why Ubuntu One exists in the first place. I've read through all the public documentation and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what is even remotely unique or noteworthy about the service.
Right now, it's attempting to be a Dropbox clone. However, it's not yet there and is clearly still in beta -- even though they have the same pricing structure as the (very mature) Dropbox. Their goal for the file synchronization service is to be as full-featured as Dropbox? But not more? Seriously, if your goal is to be as good as Dropbox, then why not just use Dropbox?
It's not even that "Ubuntu One is OSS and Dropbox is proprietary". Both services have OSS parts and proprietary parts.
Maybe, then, they are trying to be more of an online backup service, ala Mozy? Well... no. I can't find any evidence that they encrypt your data so it would be a bust as online backup.
So I don't get it. Why would anybody use (much less pay for) it when there are much more robust services already out there AND there's no indication that it'll actually be better than those services in any way. There must be some secret plans that I just don't know about.
Anybody feel like letting me know what I missed?
There might be some validity to this study if my daughter is any indication.
The study definitely nailed one point -- prior to the Internet, most people never wrote anything substantial outside of school. And even that was minimal and done with great reluctance. I remember one instance in particular while in High School (pre-Internet). We were tasked with writing a short story. It needed to be at least 500 words. I've never really needed an excuse to write so I whipped up a couple thousand word horror story and that was that. I was shocked, though, at the other submissions. Nearly every other classmate struggled to hit the 500 word mark and used every trick in the book to get there. Many couldn't even do that and complained about how hard it was to even commit 200 words to their story.
That was the case throughout my High School years. Nobody would write anything unless ordered to and, even then, would do the absolute bare minimum.
Fast forward (many years) to today. My daughter is a typical "tween". Her texts and IMs and email messages are all "UR sooooo cool!!! LOL" and the like. If you were to concentrate on just that, then you would be justified in complaining about the downfall of literacy. But you would be wrong. That's just one aspect of her writing.
See, she also writes books. Not just "stories" and certainly not because she was ordered to in class. She finished her first book when she was 10 years old. It was 500 pages. Not 500 words... 500 PAGES long. Her subsequent stories have been similar.
Now I'm not saying that the books are ready for public consumption but just the fact that she writes so much at her age is amazing. Part of it is that she is "gifted" in that area... but I'm convinced that part of it is just because she has been writing in other mediums for so long that it's become second nature to her.
Compuserve was my first real foray into an online community and all the good and bad that comes with it. I was 16 and in High School when the Computer Programming teacher (BASIC on Apple II+ computers) signed up for a school account on Compuserve. This was years before I had even heard of the Internet. Since nobody in the school had the first clue what to do with this "Information Superhighway" thing, and I was the only geek around, the teacher just gave me the login info and let me do whatever I wanted on it.
It didn't take me long to gravitate towards the various chat rooms. Those of you who grew up with the availability of the Internet and the like probably take it for granted that you can communicate with people all over the world (or nation, at least). Back when my only communication with the world at large was my pen pal, these simple chat rooms were mind-blowing!
There was one little hitch. See, my nickname back then was "Granny" (play on my last name) and so I naturally used it as my handle in the chat room. I forget which room I joined but I hadn't been in there but a few seconds when I started getting a lot of people saying "hi" and asking where I was located and the like. Then somebody asked how old I was and I mentioned that I was 16.
Well, right after I wrote that, I started getting a stream of Private Chat requests. We're talking a couple dozen requests in about 10 seconds. "Everybody is so friendly," I thought.
But their questions were odd and very personal. "What do you look like?" "What color are your eyes?" "What are you wearing?" Eh? What am I wearing? What kind of weird question is that to ask.
And then: "How big are your boobs?" "Do you have a boyfriend?" It went off the deep end after that.
They thought I was a 16 year old girl! I thought that was so funny and told them so. And just like that, all of the Private Chats closed and all I was left with were a scattering of "Well why would you call yourself Granny if you weren't a girl?" messages.
I signed on a few more times as Granny after that but found that I really couldn't go anywhere without a stream of sexual comments following me. I eventually had to change my nick just to be able to chat with people without them staring at my virtual chest.
That was an eye-opener. Let me tell you, though, when the Internet happened years later and I heard women complaining about being effectively harassed online by a bunch of horny nerds... well, I knew exactly what they were talking about.
Heh.