I disagree. The steps are not so simple to take anymore, but they're still there.
1. Install your PDF viewer of choice, but disable the web browser integration so that it can never open a PDF without your knowledge.
2. Keep Flash installed, but use a plugin to disable it unless you want to turn it on. Same for Java and Silverlight. The only thing that's a bit silly about this is that it really shouldn't require a plugin.
3. All the usual - don't install things unless you know they're from trusted individuals. Don't download random crap from random places (anything pirated - pirating aside, there's a more-than-even chance that any such download you make is infected).
4. Run windows firewall ( or iptables). (I'd recommend also avoiding the firewalls that charge $60 -- they make a lot of noise about how much they help, but are no more or less effective. )
5. disable HTML and images in email, or at least set it to be only on demand.
You'll notice that all of the above rely on user discretion - they have to pick and choose the things they want to open on their computer. And they need to do it intelligently.
The steps above are not particularly simple, but that's my point. If you (not "you", but you know what I mean...) can't handle steps that aren't simple, you shouldn't be connecting your computer to everyone else in the world - you're putting them at risk with your irresponsible behavior. Someone who falls into this category should stick to their non-jailbroken iPad - which only lets them install safe software.
(For that reason, I think there *is* a great market for tightly locked down and controlled machines -- exactly the type of person who sees the computer as an appliance that they don't need to learn about)
You mentioned VMs - and that's not a bad answer either. Again, if it's beyond someone's capability to handle it, then they shouldn't be online. I really used to be more sympathetic, but I realized that as long as people don't, won't, or can't take responsibility, there's no way to stop them from making the problem worse.
I am also not implying that people who get infected are stupid; I'm sure this occurs across the intelligence spectrum. People are mostly oblivious and have other concerns. But that doesn't provide an excuse.
OS and AV companies, by selling what they sell, are perpetuating it by letting the user think he has nothing to worry about. . Frankly, I don't see an actual solution -- but I do know that absolving the user of his responsibility in the problem is not part of it.
Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware
You mean the people who had autorun enabled, allowing this to happen?
Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan.
Unless, of course, you disable flash by default and only enabled it for sites you can reasonably trust. While this isn't going to be 100% bulletproof, for most people it would stop this as a vector.
but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.
THen you're doing it wrong.
Since the computer is just an appliance to most people (and it is), I used to think that people weren't really wrong in not wanting to think about such common sense steps as would let them prevent harm to themselves and others. But... I'm coming to realize that it can't work that way. THe single biggest reason is that in most cases, the impacts of their ignorance reach far beyond themselves. Whether it be exposing personal information of family and friends, or running a payload that converts the machine to a spam factory, there is damage being done to others. Much like "your right to free speech ends at the tip of my nose", your right to use this powerful tool called a "computer" ends when it infringes on my data and/or time.
No, the real problem has a couple of parts. For years, OS manufacturers and/or AV creators have been selling users false security. MS says use AV. AV says use their product. Apple says they're so great you don't need AV. But none of these things actually protect you from your ignorance. Until computer users realize that even though their computer is an appliance, they must know how to use that appliance properly (as with any other appliance). Even a coffee maker can can burn you if you put your hand on the warming plate -- and most people educate themselves to this very early on. Unlike the coffeemaker, failure to learn basic practical security costs not only you, but those around you.
Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.
Great. Using ad/flash-blocking software is a crime now? Whatever happened to reasonable discussion?
Instead of just banning the users, could the mods not have simply pointed out that the site needed the ad revenue to survive, and also acted to remove the offensive ads?
Who are the customers of a site such as this; the users, or the advertisers?
Actually, that's rather amusingly worded. You can use it, they don't object. Just don't talk about it.
Do what Arstechnica discovered after they tried blocking adblock users from seeing articles; actually *ask* your users to whitelist your site in adblock (or other ad blockers) with a promise that if the adverts on the site cause issues with users machines that they will work to resolve them and/or remove those adverts from rotation.
I'd love to whitelist them, but a) when a problem occurs on my machine, it's too late for them to fix it and b) as I mentioned in a post above, they're not just showing me ads - they're also giving my information away to third parties every time I visit a page.
In addition to subjecting you to advertising - and the inherent security risks of third-party-hosted ads - they're also taking your information and giving it to large ad networks. That's obvious, you say -- but is it? I am willing to put up with non-obnoxious ads - that's a fair price in exchange for what I'm being given. But it's no longer a fair price when you are taking in trade not only my attention, but my cross-site browsing habits and handing both over to various third parties.
Another example of this has nothing to do with advertising: Google analytics. In order to get useful information for them (tracking your usage of their site), providers are giving away YOUR habits to Google (or other tracking services). They're brokering your info in order to get a "free" service. Also not acceptable - my information does not belong to them in the first place.
If a site wants to serve ads themselves, then that's fine - because then I know exactly who I'm paying with my currency of attention. If they want to aggregate information *themselves*, then that's also since I know that I'm giving that information to *them*. But when they start handing both over to miscellaneous third parties*, that price is more than I am willing to pay.
On the other hand, the sites absolutely have the right to say "if you don't want to pay this price, go away.". Ars said that, and I went away -- which is unfortunate as I like Ars. But I don't like them enough to allow them to sell my browsing habits to multiple third party aggregators.
* even those sites with good privacy policies rarely point out that in addition to collecting your data, they're doing it through third parties -- which means that those third parties are collecting vastly more data than the site itself is.
ot to mention that I for one don't really want to pay for more eyewear than I need. 3D is great and all, but a huge chunk of gamers wear glasses
This is another case of "I can't use X, so there's no market for it". In case you hadn't noticed, gaming hasn't been just for geeks in quite a number of years... and while the stereotypical geek must wear glasses, in real life the majority of people don't. Not to mention that for a portion of that subset... it's not a hurdle, just an annoyance.
eems to me the PS3 has been in a constant spiral of removing features since the PS3 Launch, and I'm not just talking about the recent Other OS removal. So how long does anyone think Sony is going to let a novelty feature, i.e. 3D, fly before they pull the plug on who knows how many thousands of people who buy into this.
ot content with its iPhone scoop, Gizmodo has probably ruined the career of a young engineer
While I'm all for journalistic responsibility, let's not put blame where it doesn't belong. Gizmodo did not lose the phone. They did not find the phone. They did report thoroughly on both (as well as the hardware) once the phone was available to them. If a career has been ruined, it's the engineer who did it to himself. Given that apple bricked the phone almost immediately, he reported it himself as soon as he realized it was missing. (Could you imaging waking up in the morning to THAT particular realization... ) Hopefully in light of that they'll realize that mistakes happen, and no career is ruined at all...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that he's officially passed into hinging his entire worldview in relation to videogames as art on a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
A fallacy implies misuse of logic. He's not applying logic, he's applying his opinions and trying to disguise them as logic.
People who steal identities will carry on spoofing caller ID, because they already commit more serious crimes, while users of legitimate services will be inconvenienced. Still, at least the politicians are seen to do something about the problem.
I expect this will help with the third category. Legitimate (or quasi-legit) businesses that use caller ID to disguise themselves and trick you into answering the phone. Primarily telemarketers and collections agencies These groups will generally follow the new rule, because they are legal businesses that can be tracked down and punished.
Obviously those deliberately breaking the law won't stop doing so. But those taking advantage of a loophole in the law largely will stop.
As soon as a corporate entity see potential in it, you're going to get a copycat when the second corporate entity says "me too, but better!" And if a corporate entity doesn't see potential, the unfortunate truth is that there would be user base beyond enthusiasts.
It could be built without corporate help. But without major movers behind it, it's going to catch on just about as well as VRML did. And with major movers, you'll automatically get competition.
but there's problems with this- its impossible to know when you're calling a function or not by inspection, so you can have bugs that are difficult to find by code inspection- = does not always do what you expect it to. I prefer writing getters and setters to that.
Worse, it gives people the "feeling" that they're not doing anything except copying or compariing a value, leading to code like "for (Obj in ObjArray) { if Obj.X = 1 || Obj.X = 2 || (Obj.X > 10 && Obj.X 100)". People tend to assume that because it's so transparent, they're just accessing in data member. In reality, you have *no* idea of what that lookup is doing in the background - it could be refreshing from a remote server, or performing a complex calculation. At least with get/set* you are given some notion that there may be functionality attached, and you tend to be a little less careless.
The problem here is that writing a UI as code is simply not intuitive. It's not too bad if you can have that code generated and managed for you -- though that significantly increases the complexity of the tools you must use.
Nonetheless - what's missing from extjs, jqueryUI et al is a means to make it "drag and drop". This is 2010. I *really* shouldn't have to do any variation on ".add(new DropDownList())", in ANY language. There's no benefit to it, and it makes coding GUIs painfully slow - no matter how complete the library that's handling the actual behavior of the components behind the scene.
(On the flip side - for very simple UIs, code-based is faster. I'm largely talking about complex UIs)
A lot of this can be eliminated by create a good "GUI Markup Language" native to the browser such that the common 95% of typical GUI/CRUD behavior can be handled by the markup language, reducing the need for client- and server-side imperative code. (XUL tried this, but they didn't seem to understand the CRUD world.)
While this is true, it's also not able to succeed for some of the same reasons that javascript is such a mess: if it's native to the browser, you automatically need to have a standard, and 100% compliance to that standard. And that is something rarely achieved by any browser, never mind in a single release. This would give you the same version problems you're trying to get away from in the first place.
I think the idea is a good one - a cross-platform means of implementing a consistent GUI. But that's currently filled by Java, Flash, Silverlight, AIR, JavaFX and a host of others I"m probably not thinking of. You'd need something more than putting a markup language on top of it to make it standard enough to be useful.
I believe that the law states that you have to mention that you're wearing a recorder before starting ANY conversation.
It depends. Most US states have a one-party consent law. That is, if the person carrying the recorder knows he's carrying it, that's good enough.
There are 12 (last I checked) that have two-party consent laws, meaning that all parties being recorded have consent. For phone calls, some states also require an audible background beep at regular intervals.
A front facing camera is good for one specific task (which - to date - hasn't had a good working implementation). For all other usages of a camera (you know -- taking pictures) front-facing is useless. Ever try to use an LCD viewfinder that you couldn't see?
So ordinarily, this would set off an alert. "demos" is correct, because we're talking about plural of "demo", and certainly not possessive.
BUT... apostrophe also represents missing letters in a contraction. And "demo" is short for "demonstration". Looked at that way, it seems that "demo's" is right.
I'm still inclined to think it's the usual rule (demos) that applies, if only because we don't typically use demo as a shortened word -- that is, we don't say "demo' " using the " ' " to represent what's missing.
So is there someone out there who knows the answer to this one? Should we follow the usual rule, or is this really a contraction of "demo[nstration]s" thereby making "demo's" correct?
Yes, thanks. While I have seen some frustrating breakages in OSS before (I recall several different Ubuntu updates that broke Xorg, the bastards), this isn't one of them. The software is a year out of date. You're given six months warning. Continuing to run after that time (if it were possible) would mean that your long-outdated version is no longer receiving definition updates -- so you'd be left with a false sense of security that you're somehow protected when you weren't.
if they had just issued a routine update that broke servers that's one thing. But they've been announcing this for six months. If you were on clamav-announce list (the ONLY way they have to get in contact with users otherwise too busy to check their web site) you would have learned about this long before it was an issue.
Even a month ago, you probably could have used that freedom to set up your own server and use outdated definitions for years to come. Now it's down to the wire, and it sounds like you don't have that luxury... but is that their fault? They communicated well in advance. Why blame them because you weren't listening?
"ClamAV forced upgrade breaks email servers" should read "Failure to upgrade despite six months warning breaks email servers" or "Inattentive server admins cause massive downtime".
And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn't based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be F***ed. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That's why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Nice rant and straw man. They're not talking about throwing these kids in jail. Instead, targetting people at higher risk of following a criminal path, and giving them extra efforts to steer them from that path.
ISure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there's no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where's the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given?
Why would you naively assume that criminal behavior is no more likely among a population so identified than among the rest of the population? They're not just throwing allof the state's youth into the system to churn out who the "defectives" are. These are people who have a) already started down a criminal path or b) come from homes so screwed up that they had to be removed for their own safety. Statistically, both of these groups have a considerably reduced chance of a normal life. If there's a reliable means of figuring out which subset of those groups are more prone than others, and to take active steps to help them prevent it, why would you not do it? Why would you don the rose-colored glasses and pretend that they can just step out of Juvie and lead a fully normal life, when the odds are stacked against it?
Ok, I've got my flame-retardant suit on. Let's have it...
I do agree with you - we're allegedly a rational species that can (not does, "can") place ourselves above base instincts and drives. Unfortunately, it's not just biology
One could reasonably argue that manufacturing a child via syringe is literally a part of biology but it has nothing to do with instinct.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Install your PDF viewer of choice, but disable the web browser integration so that it can never open a PDF without your knowledge.
2. Keep Flash installed, but use a plugin to disable it unless you want to turn it on. Same for Java and Silverlight. The only thing that's a bit silly about this is that it really shouldn't require a plugin.
3. All the usual - don't install things unless you know they're from trusted individuals. Don't download random crap from random places (anything pirated - pirating aside, there's a more-than-even chance that any such download you make is infected).
4. Run windows firewall ( or iptables). (I'd recommend also avoiding the firewalls that charge $60 -- they make a lot of noise about how much they help, but are no more or less effective. )
5. disable HTML and images in email, or at least set it to be only on demand.
You'll notice that all of the above rely on user discretion - they have to pick and choose the things they want to open on their computer. And they need to do it intelligently.
The steps above are not particularly simple, but that's my point. If you (not "you", but you know what I mean...) can't handle steps that aren't simple, you shouldn't be connecting your computer to everyone else in the world - you're putting them at risk with your irresponsible behavior. Someone who falls into this category should stick to their non-jailbroken iPad - which only lets them install safe software.
(For that reason, I think there *is* a great market for tightly locked down and controlled machines -- exactly the type of person who sees the computer as an appliance that they don't need to learn about)
You mentioned VMs - and that's not a bad answer either. Again, if it's beyond someone's capability to handle it, then they shouldn't be online. I really used to be more sympathetic, but I realized that as long as people don't, won't, or can't take responsibility, there's no way to stop them from making the problem worse.
I am also not implying that people who get infected are stupid; I'm sure this occurs across the intelligence spectrum. People are mostly oblivious and have other concerns. But that doesn't provide an excuse.
OS and AV companies, by selling what they sell, are perpetuating it by letting the user think he has nothing to worry about. . Frankly, I don't see an actual solution -- but I do know that absolving the user of his responsibility in the problem is not part of it.
Don't say you have a tight setup when you run Windows, it's impossible.
Don't say you have a tight setup when that's your attitude. It's impossible.
Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware
You mean the people who had autorun enabled, allowing this to happen?
Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan.
Unless, of course, you disable flash by default and only enabled it for sites you can reasonably trust. While this isn't going to be 100% bulletproof, for most people it would stop this as a vector.
but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.
THen you're doing it wrong.
Since the computer is just an appliance to most people (and it is), I used to think that people weren't really wrong in not wanting to think about such common sense steps as would let them prevent harm to themselves and others. But... I'm coming to realize that it can't work that way. THe single biggest reason is that in most cases, the impacts of their ignorance reach far beyond themselves. Whether it be exposing personal information of family and friends, or running a payload that converts the machine to a spam factory, there is damage being done to others. Much like "your right to free speech ends at the tip of my nose", your right to use this powerful tool called a "computer" ends when it infringes on my data and/or time.
No, the real problem has a couple of parts. For years, OS manufacturers and/or AV creators have been selling users false security. MS says use AV. AV says use their product. Apple says they're so great you don't need AV. But none of these things actually protect you from your ignorance. Until computer users realize that even though their computer is an appliance, they must know how to use that appliance properly (as with any other appliance). Even a coffee maker can can burn you if you put your hand on the warming plate -- and most people educate themselves to this very early on. Unlike the coffeemaker, failure to learn basic practical security costs not only you, but those around you.
Apparently (FTA), this is in the site's T&Cs
Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.
Great. Using ad/flash-blocking software is a crime now? Whatever happened to reasonable discussion? Instead of just banning the users, could the mods not have simply pointed out that the site needed the ad revenue to survive, and also acted to remove the offensive ads? Who are the customers of a site such as this; the users, or the advertisers?
Actually, that's rather amusingly worded. You can use it, they don't object. Just don't talk about it.
Do what Arstechnica discovered after they tried blocking adblock users from seeing articles; actually *ask* your users to whitelist your site in adblock (or other ad blockers) with a promise that if the adverts on the site cause issues with users machines that they will work to resolve them and/or remove those adverts from rotation.
I'd love to whitelist them, but a) when a problem occurs on my machine, it's too late for them to fix it and b) as I mentioned in a post above, they're not just showing me ads - they're also giving my information away to third parties every time I visit a page.
Ads really are the smallest part of this issue.
In addition to subjecting you to advertising - and the inherent security risks of third-party-hosted ads - they're also taking your information and giving it to large ad networks. That's obvious, you say -- but is it? I am willing to put up with non-obnoxious ads - that's a fair price in exchange for what I'm being given. But it's no longer a fair price when you are taking in trade not only my attention, but my cross-site browsing habits and handing both over to various third parties.
Another example of this has nothing to do with advertising: Google analytics. In order to get useful information for them (tracking your usage of their site), providers are giving away YOUR habits to Google (or other tracking services). They're brokering your info in order to get a "free" service. Also not acceptable - my information does not belong to them in the first place.
If a site wants to serve ads themselves, then that's fine - because then I know exactly who I'm paying with my currency of attention. If they want to aggregate information *themselves*, then that's also since I know that I'm giving that information to *them*. But when they start handing both over to miscellaneous third parties*, that price is more than I am willing to pay.
On the other hand, the sites absolutely have the right to say "if you don't want to pay this price, go away.". Ars said that, and I went away -- which is unfortunate as I like Ars. But I don't like them enough to allow them to sell my browsing habits to multiple third party aggregators.
* even those sites with good privacy policies rarely point out that in addition to collecting your data, they're doing it through third parties -- which means that those third parties are collecting vastly more data than the site itself is.
ot to mention that I for one don't really want to pay for more eyewear than I need. 3D is great and all, but a huge chunk of gamers wear glasses
This is another case of "I can't use X, so there's no market for it". In case you hadn't noticed, gaming hasn't been just for geeks in quite a number of years... and while the stereotypical geek must wear glasses, in real life the majority of people don't. Not to mention that for a portion of that subset... it's not a hurdle, just an annoyance.
eems to me the PS3 has been in a constant spiral of removing features since the PS3 Launch, and I'm not just talking about the recent Other OS removal. So how long does anyone think Sony is going to let a novelty feature, i.e. 3D, fly before they pull the plug on who knows how many thousands of people who buy into this.
Right.
Even today, just saying the word "Rico" will get people to at least think "Suave
Not me. I think... "[Ric]ooolllaa..." Damn you, our advertising corporate overlords. Damn you.
3D will never really take off until they can figure out a way to implement it comfortably without requiring the ridiculous glasses.
This fad will pass soon, hopefully, and we'll stop thinking about how cool the technology is and be back to thinking about making playable games.
I disagree. It's just part of the evolution towards neurally connected computing. Realizing that each eye is a distinct input is an important step.
ot content with its iPhone scoop, Gizmodo has probably ruined the career of a young engineer
While I'm all for journalistic responsibility, let's not put blame where it doesn't belong. Gizmodo did not lose the phone. They did not find the phone. They did report thoroughly on both (as well as the hardware) once the phone was available to them. If a career has been ruined, it's the engineer who did it to himself. Given that apple bricked the phone almost immediately, he reported it himself as soon as he realized it was missing. (Could you imaging waking up in the morning to THAT particular realization... ) Hopefully in light of that they'll realize that mistakes happen, and no career is ruined at all...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that he's officially passed into hinging his entire worldview in relation to videogames as art on a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
A fallacy implies misuse of logic. He's not applying logic, he's applying his opinions and trying to disguise them as logic.
People who steal identities will carry on spoofing caller ID, because they already commit more serious crimes, while users of legitimate services will be inconvenienced. Still, at least the politicians are seen to do something about the problem.
I expect this will help with the third category. Legitimate (or quasi-legit) businesses that use caller ID to disguise themselves and trick you into answering the phone. Primarily telemarketers and collections agencies These groups will generally follow the new rule, because they are legal businesses that can be tracked down and punished.
Obviously those deliberately breaking the law won't stop doing so. But those taking advantage of a loophole in the law largely will stop.
It could be built without corporate help. But without major movers behind it, it's going to catch on just about as well as VRML did. And with major movers, you'll automatically get competition.
Ah, that makes more sense. Though still I have to say pretty limited in use, until the software/processing power/bandwidth catches up.
but there's problems with this- its impossible to know when you're calling a function or not by inspection, so you can have bugs that are difficult to find by code inspection- = does not always do what you expect it to. I prefer writing getters and setters to that.
Worse, it gives people the "feeling" that they're not doing anything except copying or compariing a value, leading to code like "for (Obj in ObjArray) { if Obj.X = 1 || Obj.X = 2 || (Obj.X > 10 && Obj.X 100)". People tend to assume that because it's so transparent, they're just accessing in data member. In reality, you have *no* idea of what that lookup is doing in the background - it could be refreshing from a remote server, or performing a complex calculation. At least with get/set* you are given some notion that there may be functionality attached, and you tend to be a little less careless.
The problem here is that writing a UI as code is simply not intuitive. It's not too bad if you can have that code generated and managed for you -- though that significantly increases the complexity of the tools you must use.
Nonetheless - what's missing from extjs, jqueryUI et al is a means to make it "drag and drop". This is 2010. I *really* shouldn't have to do any variation on ".add(new DropDownList())", in ANY language. There's no benefit to it, and it makes coding GUIs painfully slow - no matter how complete the library that's handling the actual behavior of the components behind the scene.
(On the flip side - for very simple UIs, code-based is faster. I'm largely talking about complex UIs)
A lot of this can be eliminated by create a good "GUI Markup Language" native to the browser such that the common 95% of typical GUI/CRUD behavior can be handled by the markup language, reducing the need for client- and server-side imperative code. (XUL tried this, but they didn't seem to understand the CRUD world.)
While this is true, it's also not able to succeed for some of the same reasons that javascript is such a mess: if it's native to the browser, you automatically need to have a standard, and 100% compliance to that standard. And that is something rarely achieved by any browser, never mind in a single release. This would give you the same version problems you're trying to get away from in the first place.
I think the idea is a good one - a cross-platform means of implementing a consistent GUI. But that's currently filled by Java, Flash, Silverlight, AIR, JavaFX and a host of others I"m probably not thinking of. You'd need something more than putting a markup language on top of it to make it standard enough to be useful.
I believe that the law states that you have to mention that you're wearing a recorder before starting ANY conversation.
It depends. Most US states have a one-party consent law. That is, if the person carrying the recorder knows he's carrying it, that's good enough.
There are 12 (last I checked) that have two-party consent laws, meaning that all parties being recorded have consent. For phone calls, some states also require an audible background beep at regular intervals.
A front facing camera is good for one specific task (which - to date - hasn't had a good working implementation). For all other usages of a camera (you know -- taking pictures) front-facing is useless. Ever try to use an LCD viewfinder that you couldn't see?
Free Demo's
So ordinarily, this would set off an alert. "demos" is correct, because we're talking about plural of "demo", and certainly not possessive.
BUT... apostrophe also represents missing letters in a contraction. And "demo" is short for "demonstration". Looked at that way, it seems that "demo's" is right.
I'm still inclined to think it's the usual rule (demos) that applies, if only because we don't typically use demo as a shortened word -- that is, we don't say "demo' " using the " ' " to represent what's missing.
So is there someone out there who knows the answer to this one? Should we follow the usual rule, or is this really a contraction of "demo[nstration]s" thereby making "demo's" correct?
Heck! Is this the "freedom" you want?
Yes, thanks. While I have seen some frustrating breakages in OSS before (I recall several different Ubuntu updates that broke Xorg, the bastards), this isn't one of them. The software is a year out of date. You're given six months warning. Continuing to run after that time (if it were possible) would mean that your long-outdated version is no longer receiving definition updates -- so you'd be left with a false sense of security that you're somehow protected when you weren't.
if they had just issued a routine update that broke servers that's one thing. But they've been announcing this for six months. If you were on clamav-announce list (the ONLY way they have to get in contact with users otherwise too busy to check their web site) you would have learned about this long before it was an issue.
Even a month ago, you probably could have used that freedom to set up your own server and use outdated definitions for years to come. Now it's down to the wire, and it sounds like you don't have that luxury... but is that their fault? They communicated well in advance. Why blame them because you weren't listening?
"ClamAV forced upgrade breaks email servers" should read "Failure to upgrade despite six months warning breaks email servers" or "Inattentive server admins cause massive downtime".
And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn't based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be F***ed. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That's why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Nice rant and straw man. They're not talking about throwing these kids in jail. Instead, targetting people at higher risk of following a criminal path, and giving them extra efforts to steer them from that path.
ISure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there's no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where's the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given?
Why would you naively assume that criminal behavior is no more likely among a population so identified than among the rest of the population? They're not just throwing allof the state's youth into the system to churn out who the "defectives" are. These are people who have a) already started down a criminal path or b) come from homes so screwed up that they had to be removed for their own safety. Statistically, both of these groups have a considerably reduced chance of a normal life. If there's a reliable means of figuring out which subset of those groups are more prone than others, and to take active steps to help them prevent it, why would you not do it? Why would you don the rose-colored glasses and pretend that they can just step out of Juvie and lead a fully normal life, when the odds are stacked against it?
Ok, I've got my flame-retardant suit on. Let's have it...
I do agree with you - we're allegedly a rational species that can (not does, "can") place ourselves above base instincts and drives. Unfortunately, it's not just biology
One could reasonably argue that manufacturing a child via syringe is literally a part of biology but it has nothing to do with instinct.