Oh wait, the "headache" bullshit again? Give your kid your glasses, and let them wear them until they get a severe headache
What are you talking about?
ALSO had a severe headache when you started to wear glasses, you also also got one when you changed your glasses strenght.
No seriously, what the hell are you talking about? If you gota headache with new glasses find a new optometrist. The only time glasses should give you a headache are when you're using the wrong strength (too weak or too strong).
What Nintendo should be allowed to do is just to roughly sue every single BS organisation intil they either make a disclairr against glasses, or they stop spewing out FUD.
Maybe if you could tell us what FUD you're talkimg about? Because as far as I can tell you seem to be saying that headaches are... to be expected and are not a cause for concern? Seriously due, explain - because I am rather baffled as to your point.
They just don't learn. Who at Ubisoft was so stupid that they forgot the reaction last time they did this? And wouldn't that idiot's decision have to go through some other people? This is irresponsible from both a PR and a revenue point of view.
They're a business, first and foremost. You can bet that if they didn't find it profitable to do the first two times, they're not going to do it a third time.
Here's an alternative scenario though it is bound to be an unpopular one: What if, the last time they did it, it was not the end of the world. What if they actually saw massive reduction in piracy, and a minor uptick in sales over what they expected? Sure, they patched it later - but if all they wanted to do was prevent the initial wave of piracy, the subsequent patch could have been indicative of success rather than failure. They gain some good PR for disabling it, while also receiving benefits from having included it in the first place.
Another unpopular but realistic way to look at it: they've already lost the customers they're going to lose out of this. They've seen the damage and deemed it acceptable in exchange for the benefits they receive by including the DRM.
Good find; I did the same search but without the year, and got page after page discussing the results but no primary or secondary sourced links to it. The context does tend to support my original thought - he's not promising the Diebold as a company will deliver the election, in spite of the slant that numerous blogs gave it - he's only saying that he as a party member wants to make sure that Bush gets Ohio's votes (doubtless the old fashioned way - money for bribes, etc;)
The problem is that while your perspective is rational - *almost* every single article I found discussing that quote put it explicitly or implicitly put it into the context of announcing plans to fix the votes.
The opening paragraph of that article is very interesting:
IN mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc. , sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.
Contextually, that tell us that he did this in his capacity as a supporting member and fundraiser. I think this makes it more likely to mean that he intended to raise funds either from Ohio constituents, or simply to show financial support within the state of Ohio. The connection between this and voting machine fraud seems to have been a fabrication of later media reports and/or bloggers -- but again, without the full original letter to provide context, we really can't be sure.
But here's another way to consider it: do people really believe that a high-profile person planning to engage in election fraud would commit that intention to paper and mail it out in hard copy to a couple hundred people in the form of an invite?
Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.
Here's what's really annoying about that particular quote: I can't find the full text of it, least not in 15 minutes of noodling around on Google. There are tons of references to that quote, plenty of references to the responses to the quote, but nothing at all which could put that quote into context. I'm not saying it's a case of misinterpretation... but I am saying that we don't have the facts. What we have is a great soundbite.
Then we have this FTA:
Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen. It seems to me that the same can be said of any election using this equipment and architecture.
In spite of that, I agree with your statement. The old fashioned way seems to be the one that is most foolproof. While that process can obviously be hacked as well, it typically needs to be done on a machine by machine basis and is quite a bit more traceable.
Since when are unique visitors automatically assumed to be registered users? Don't get me wrong, I think Google is getting this one right... but this "unique visitors" info is getting misreported all over the place today.
We see it here all the time. It's a subtle manifestation of envy, for none of the detractors have taken the initiative to do it themselves. When you can't do something cool, the next best thing is to cut down those who can.
Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. Certainly these things could never have occurred to the designers without your aid! You can now rest assured that you've set them on the right path. They will surely drop everything now and start from scratch, in large part due to the astute observations of slashdotters such as yourself.
Alternatively you missed the part of TFS where they pointed out that this was a test platform.
I'll let you use your awesome observational and deductive skills to determine which is more likely.
For some use cases hyperlinks work. For some they don't. For some you can use either/or - choice is good, etc.
Why do people have such a hard time with this kind of service? If you don't like it... don't use it. Nobody holds a gun to your head. Since millions of people are using it, I can't understand the argument that it's useless - because clearly to a signficant number of people it is *not* useless.
The only thing that can be said is that it doesn't fit your personal criteria of "useful" -- and that's far from a definitive statement for anyone but you. ("your/you" in the general sense - eg the speaker)
My point - my only point in my reply to AC - is that for the one scenario that AC argued against, his argument was not valid. Whether or not software should provide a feature is not the point. Whether or not the workaround for the lack is the best possible workaround solution is also not the point. Certainly I'm not prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to a particular software lack. (In fact, the use case I was thinking of - copy and paste worked fine, but selecting text and copying it in a tiny font on a tiny screen with big fingers is a pain in the ass.)
Why on earth would I ever need to do that? Telling them 3 keywords to search for on Google would probably be easier if I really needed to tell them verbally and for some reason couldn't just say "I'll e-mail/text you the link".
Requiring you to get the email address over the phone in some cases, which can be even more tedious than a URL.
What? I thought even the iPhone supported that by now. *ducks*
Not that copy paste is impossible - but that sometimes it's awkward and can be easier to type a few characters, on any phone.
Really though the IRC client should be intelligent enough to shorten the displayed text for the link. Anything after ? is probably redundant. If you need to see the rest of the link, hover over it. (And yes, there should be a way to "hover" on a link, even on a phone.)
Possibly - and yet software has shortcomings. Saying that the tool to workaround them is not useless because the workaround shouldn't be necessary is not a valid argument.
Another use case - and one I mostly use it for - I have something I'm looking at on my phone, and want to get it on my desktop. Since I rarely use email on my desktop, simply sending myself the link is a lot more work than typing "b + 5 chars", since I have "b" as a shortcut to bit.ly. Ideally all of my devices could talk to each other - shared clipboard and notification. Until that happens, though, workarounds like the one above keep it relatively painless.
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with (as long as I don' thave to maintain it), and it does work. On the other hand, based on the reports we get from that team, it makes it impossible for them to change anything without speccing it out a year ahead of time...
The same as "the right" - to convince you that they're in the right, and the other side is in the wrong; and to convince you that their preferred method of running things is the One True Way.
Note that I saw this in the aforementioned article, just - as I said - that I automatically find myself looking for it, on the basis of the articles I saw during the time I was reading the Atlantic.
Hurd, DNF, Wine 1.0, Gmail out of beta, Windows running stable, grannies using Linux, video chat on handheld computers, movies commonly coming out in 3D, video games you don't play with your hands, electric cars on dealership lots, a US president who isn't a white guy...
For bonus points, read the litany above to the tune of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
More seriously, though, I disagree. It's not that it's lame, it's that it's half-assed.
Sure, Hurd and DNF are done. Read TFA and the reviews, respectively.
Wine is here, but there's still a ton of shit it can't run. Windows is stable, but aside from becoming more usable it's no revolutionary change over how we interact with computers compared to 15 years ago.
Grannies run Linux, but for many more serious uses it's arguably not there for many other desktop uses.
3d movies... if you wear the special glasses and don't mind the 3d headache. Nor the price premium.
Hands free video games... great. We flail at our screens with all of our limbs now. That's an improvement? That's the best we can do with this technology?
Electric cars that are so expensive and so limited their only practical value is to prove that they can done, and to make some people feel better about their consumerism. That's not getting into the fact that we've simply shifted its carbon footprint to different places and times.
A non-white president who pushed to have the recession "officially over" two years ago, while continuing to publish the adjusted unemployment numbers introduced by the Bush regime to help hide how bad things really are. Let's not get into the multiple ongoing military actions that have actually increased instead of decreasing. New boss/old boss.
Video chat on handheld computers if you're on wifi, or if your carrier provides 4g, and if you don't mind getting raped on data charges, and if you have good network coverage, and if the other person has video, wants to use it, and has the same type of handheld OS that you do.
Yeah, we have all the things the future promised us. But none of it is done right. It's all limited, half-assed, restricted, and - in too many ways - not adding any real value because of those problems.
Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue.
In what way is using this technology to issue speeding tickets preventing terrorism, reducing fraud, improving the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents?
If the money really was earmarked to be used in that specific way, I think somebody has some 'splainin to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, the "headache" bullshit again?
Give your kid your glasses, and let them wear them until they get a severe headache
What are you talking about?
ALSO had a severe headache when you started to wear glasses, you also also got one when you changed your glasses strenght.
No seriously, what the hell are you talking about? If you gota headache with new glasses find a new optometrist. The only time glasses should give you a headache are when you're using the wrong strength (too weak or too strong).
What Nintendo should be allowed to do is just to roughly sue every single BS organisation intil they either make a disclairr against glasses, or they stop spewing out FUD.
Maybe if you could tell us what FUD you're talkimg about? Because as far as I can tell you seem to be saying that headaches are... to be expected and are not a cause for concern? Seriously due, explain - because I am rather baffled as to your point.
They just don't learn. Who at Ubisoft was so stupid that they forgot the reaction last time they did this? And wouldn't that idiot's decision have to go through some other people? This is irresponsible from both a PR and a revenue point of view.
They're a business, first and foremost. You can bet that if they didn't find it profitable to do the first two times, they're not going to do it a third time.
Here's an alternative scenario though it is bound to be an unpopular one: What if, the last time they did it, it was not the end of the world. What if they actually saw massive reduction in piracy, and a minor uptick in sales over what they expected? Sure, they patched it later - but if all they wanted to do was prevent the initial wave of piracy, the subsequent patch could have been indicative of success rather than failure. They gain some good PR for disabling it, while also receiving benefits from having included it in the first place.
Another unpopular but realistic way to look at it: they've already lost the customers they're going to lose out of this. They've seen the damage and deemed it acceptable in exchange for the benefits they receive by including the DRM.
On the other hand you had a 50-50 shot to start with and had the advantage of knowing that one was fake.
Good find; I did the same search but without the year, and got page after page discussing the results but no primary or secondary sourced links to it. The context does tend to support my original thought - he's not promising the Diebold as a company will deliver the election, in spite of the slant that numerous blogs gave it - he's only saying that he as a party member wants to make sure that Bush gets Ohio's votes (doubtless the old fashioned way - money for bribes, etc ;)
The problem is that while your perspective is rational - *almost* every single article I found discussing that quote put it explicitly or implicitly put it into the context of announcing plans to fix the votes.
The opening paragraph of that article is very interesting:
IN mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc. , sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.
Contextually, that tell us that he did this in his capacity as a supporting member and fundraiser. I think this makes it more likely to mean that he intended to raise funds either from Ohio constituents, or simply to show financial support within the state of Ohio. The connection between this and voting machine fraud seems to have been a fabrication of later media reports and/or bloggers -- but again, without the full original letter to provide context, we really can't be sure.
But here's another way to consider it: do people really believe that a high-profile person planning to engage in election fraud would commit that intention to paper and mail it out in hard copy to a couple hundred people in the form of an invite?
Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.
Here's what's really annoying about that particular quote: I can't find the full text of it, least not in 15 minutes of noodling around on Google. There are tons of references to that quote, plenty of references to the responses to the quote, but nothing at all which could put that quote into context. I'm not saying it's a case of misinterpretation... but I am saying that we don't have the facts. What we have is a great soundbite.
Then we have this FTA:
Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen. It seems to me that the same can be said of any election using this equipment and architecture.
In spite of that, I agree with your statement. The old fashioned way seems to be the one that is most foolproof. While that process can obviously be hacked as well, it typically needs to be done on a machine by machine basis and is quite a bit more traceable.
It didn't. The debt increased year over year, in spite of the budget surplus.
Since when are unique visitors automatically assumed to be registered users? Don't get me wrong, I think Google is getting this one right... but this "unique visitors" info is getting misreported all over the place today.
I'm not sure, but I think it involved Vaseline, peanut brittle, and a keg.
It could just mean that we have an opportunity to speculate wildly on basis of limited information.
We see it here all the time. It's a subtle manifestation of envy, for none of the detractors have taken the initiative to do it themselves. When you can't do something cool, the next best thing is to cut down those who can.
Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. Certainly these things could never have occurred to the designers without your aid! You can now rest assured that you've set them on the right path. They will surely drop everything now and start from scratch, in large part due to the astute observations of slashdotters such as yourself.
Alternatively you missed the part of TFS where they pointed out that this was a test platform.
I'll let you use your awesome observational and deductive skills to determine which is more likely.
For some use cases hyperlinks work. For some they don't. For some you can use either/or - choice is good, etc.
Why do people have such a hard time with this kind of service? If you don't like it... don't use it. Nobody holds a gun to your head. Since millions of people are using it, I can't understand the argument that it's useless - because clearly to a signficant number of people it is *not* useless.
The only thing that can be said is that it doesn't fit your personal criteria of "useful" -- and that's far from a definitive statement for anyone but you. ("your/you" in the general sense - eg the speaker)
Wait, what?
My point - my only point in my reply to AC - is that for the one scenario that AC argued against, his argument was not valid. Whether or not software should provide a feature is not the point. Whether or not the workaround for the lack is the best possible workaround solution is also not the point. Certainly I'm not prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to a particular software lack. (In fact, the use case I was thinking of - copy and paste worked fine, but selecting text and copying it in a tiny font on a tiny screen with big fingers is a pain in the ass.)
So what you're saying is - because software has shortcomings - any workaround to those shortcomings is invalid?
I see a problem here, don't you?
Why on earth would I ever need to do that? Telling them 3 keywords to search for on Google would probably be easier if I really needed to tell them verbally and for some reason couldn't just say "I'll e-mail/text you the link".
Requiring you to get the email address over the phone in some cases, which can be even more tedious than a URL.
What? I thought even the iPhone supported that by now. *ducks*
Not that copy paste is impossible - but that sometimes it's awkward and can be easier to type a few characters, on any phone.
Really though the IRC client should be intelligent enough to shorten the displayed text for the link. Anything after ? is probably redundant. If you need to see the rest of the link, hover over it. (And yes, there should be a way to "hover" on a link, even on a phone.)
Possibly - and yet software has shortcomings. Saying that the tool to workaround them is not useless because the workaround shouldn't be necessary is not a valid argument.
Another use case - and one I mostly use it for - I have something I'm looking at on my phone, and want to get it on my desktop. Since I rarely use email on my desktop, simply sending myself the link is a lot more work than typing "b + 5 chars", since I have "b" as a shortcut to bit.ly. Ideally all of my devices could talk to each other - shared clipboard and notification. Until that happens, though, workarounds like the one above keep it relatively painless.
It's only a radical concept if you believed anything less to begin with. To your point, though, quite a large percentage of the population did...
Ever try to read someone a full-length URL over the phone?
What about typing out a full length URL when you don't have the option of copy-paste?
Or trying to copy/paste a multi-line URL in an IRC client while on your phone w/ a screen that's 2" wide?
Please don't make the all-to-common mistake of thinking a technology or idea has no point simply because it doesn't fit your own usage patterns.
Our real-time systems are COBOL as well...
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with (as long as I don' thave to maintain it), and it does work. On the other hand, based on the reports we get from that team, it makes it impossible for them to change anything without speccing it out a year ahead of time...
The same as "the right" - to convince you that they're in the right, and the other side is in the wrong; and to convince you that their preferred method of running things is the One True Way.
Note that I saw this in the aforementioned article, just - as I said - that I automatically find myself looking for it, on the basis of the articles I saw during the time I was reading the Atlantic.
Thats the only question I care about, can I work on my projects?
Why would you want to?
It's called using the right tool for the job.
Hurd, DNF, Wine 1.0, Gmail out of beta, Windows running stable, grannies using Linux, video chat on handheld computers, movies commonly coming out in 3D, video games you don't play with your hands, electric cars on dealership lots, a US president who isn't a white guy...
For bonus points, read the litany above to the tune of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
More seriously, though, I disagree. It's not that it's lame, it's that it's half-assed.
Sure, Hurd and DNF are done. Read TFA and the reviews, respectively.
Wine is here, but there's still a ton of shit it can't run. Windows is stable, but aside from becoming more usable it's no revolutionary change over how we interact with computers compared to 15 years ago.
Grannies run Linux, but for many more serious uses it's arguably not there for many other desktop uses.
3d movies ... if you wear the special glasses and don't mind the 3d headache. Nor the price premium.
Hands free video games... great. We flail at our screens with all of our limbs now. That's an improvement? That's the best we can do with this technology?
Electric cars that are so expensive and so limited their only practical value is to prove that they can done, and to make some people feel better about their consumerism. That's not getting into the fact that we've simply shifted its carbon footprint to different places and times.
A non-white president who pushed to have the recession "officially over" two years ago, while continuing to publish the adjusted unemployment numbers introduced by the Bush regime to help hide how bad things really are. Let's not get into the multiple ongoing military actions that have actually increased instead of decreasing. New boss/old boss.
Video chat on handheld computers if you're on wifi, or if your carrier provides 4g, and if you don't mind getting raped on data charges, and if you have good network coverage, and if the other person has video, wants to use it, and has the same type of handheld OS that you do.
Yeah, we have all the things the future promised us. But none of it is done right. It's all limited, half-assed, restricted, and - in too many ways - not adding any real value because of those problems.
Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue.
In what way is using this technology to issue speeding tickets preventing terrorism, reducing fraud, improving the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents?
If the money really was earmarked to be used in that specific way, I think somebody has some 'splainin to do.