The trouble is that they dont want to make it so the 'pirate' version is the one people want, because it has extra gameplay. So if they are going to have much more fun with the idea, it would have to go in the paid version...
I looked at the application in question and it appears to have been rejected for very good cause. Does it enrage you that you are not allowed to patent old things that many other people are already doing?
He's foaming at the mouth a little, but he's not entirely wrong.
The web has been changing rapidly, and mostly for the worse.
Javascript adds some minor convenience at a large cost in security and making parsing harder and so forth. There are cases where it's a good tool for the job, but they are rare. I constantly see it misused and abused. Slashdot, as an example, is almost completely unusable without disabling javascript. And yes, we had plenty interactivity long before the currently fashionable buzzwords were invented.
Of course that is possible, but far more likely what would happen is that the bank server wasnt serving out the malware directly, but had only been altered to inject references to code on other servers, dedicated to adware/malware themselves.
The typical, braindead browser would get infected anyway. A more sanely configured, noscript-enabled browser would silently avoid the malware.
Dont think anyone is pretending that is bulletproof but it's a good security layer and there is just no reason to skip it.
Well, HTML worked pretty well (and still does) for the purpose it was originally invented for: Presenting you text and images, without caring about the exact look of the presentation. It's just that few people are content with that.
This is the tragedy of the web. It worked pretty well, it still does, but it works less well because what it is actually IS is underappreciated, and people keep trying to make it something it is not. A means of distributing content based on semantics, leaving presentation decisions to the final display device, is pure genius. Yet every single major player in the html standards game has been focused on making something else entirely of it from day one.
"When another bomb goes off, you will all be asking why didn't the TSA do something about it."
The next time there is a bomb killing air travelers, I expect I will be asking why the TSA forced the victims to form up in a tight group outside the security cordon and thus gave the bomber such an easy way target.
"That all said, I find it mildly absurd that any security we don't like we just classify as security theater.. How on earth can we on one hand argue that Bush et al had ample warning and did nothing and then on the other bitch when they do something? "
Here's the thing. They had all the information they needed to stop it - the problem was not too little information, it was too much. They had far more information than they had the capacity to analyze.
So the response? Not to upgrade ability to analyze the information already collectable, no. Instead, let's collect a few thousand times MORE information. Let's throw a dragnet over anyone and everyone and store every email on the net forever, in case we need to search back through it later.
This is security theatre. We all get used to being less free, to being herded around more like cattle, on the assurance it will make us more safe. It will not. The same agencies that HAD the information to stop the crime, but not the analytical facilities to recognise the fact in time, now have EVEN MORE info to sift through. The vast majority of it completely irrelevant to stopping terrorists - but a wonderful treasure trove for anyone looking for something to use against their political enemies.
In the meantime the terrorists are even less likely to be detected, since we are throwing roughly the same analytic capabilities at a ridiculously expanded data set.
Exactly, signature antivirus only protects those who use it properly (most dont) AND luck out by not being among the first exposed to the new mutation of the day. Heuristic scans usually wind up with way too many false positives to be useful. These are just vain attempts to patch over an insecure core.
Securing the core would make everyone from marketing and a good portion of engineering extraordinarily unhappy by ruling out cool junk they would love to see and sell. You cant even sell that notion in linux land these days, and imagining it coming to windows is... well...
Only if Hollywood continues to pay handsomely for its development.
To understand the situation you really have to go back to the 80s. Antivirus scanners were just starting. Some of us were pointing out the problems with it. Some of us even made non-scanner AV systems that worked. Give me a DOS6 system and I can give you a very effective automatic defense system (though it would naturally take some time, given how many of the details I have forgotten between then and now.) Windows versions 3 and later broke the sort of system I (and others) developed, for no apparent reason. And ever since then, the antivirus vendors, MicroSoft, and the trade press have been pretty much unanimous that scanners were the only way to go. The customers pretty well refuse to buy anything else.
The trouble is scanners are and always were a security dead-end.
But it's more than a single change that is ultimately involved here though, it's a long running pattern of behavior, a long-running calculus of benefit. It wouldnt benefit Microsoft to produce a more secure OS. It would cost them more money to develop that way, but people would not want to pay more for it. And they would not be able to make any money off of the antivirus market - not saying they make much now, but they are still in the game and angling to make something there. A securable system would give that possibility up for no business gain. It would not be popular with hardware manufacturers either. Malware increases the attrition rate on existing installs which increases the sales rate on new hardware.
Even the linux ecosystem isnt immune to the same forces, though it started with a more securable base and obviously hasnt been so badly compromised. But none of the companies that make money from linux have any incentive to minimise support needs. Most explicitly rely on support needs to fuel the profitable side of their business. This means they benefit not just from malware but from undecipherable error messages and all sorts of other poor practices.
Anyway, you are right about ad blocking, although it's better simply to noscript everything than worrying about what is an ad and what is some other third-party thing that doesnt need to be loaded.
A resident antivirus scanner is probably better than nothing, for the average computer user who would rather have his eyes poked out with a hot iron than try to understand how his computer works. But I see them smashed by malware every day, and it's no surprise. The fundamental paradigm just doesnt allow for security, and for reasons above I dont expect to see it change anytime soon.
I have a virus on my desktop right now, I have a pool going on how long before an antivirus update finally picks it up and it starts screaming. Want to bet?
My money is on over a month, I am having a very hard time getting any of my coworkers to take an under position.
It's worse than you realise - the Saudi national you describe as 'still just a witness' with the first word implying suspicion - that fella was never a suspect, nor is he a witness other than incidentally, he's a victim. The Islamophobia is palpable.
"...criminally stupid enough to wander towards an active military firefight walking with individuals carrying AK's and RPG's."
Dont recall there being any RPGs. Definitely plenty of AKs, because it would have been criminally stupid to be out driving around Baghdad without them. A civilian doesnt magically become something else simply because he is armed, and the US, with our second amendment, should be acutely aware of that.
They had AKs because everyone in that area carried AKs and it would have indeed been "criminally stupid" for them to travel in that area without bodyguards. They took no aggressive actions, and they didnt 'roll up into a firefight' they attempted to render assistance to the wounded AFTER the firefight had come to a conclusive ending.
The video is direct evidence of a war crime on its face. It's not Manning, but everyone else who had access and did NOT leak it, who should be charged for that. The cables reveal many other crimes and misbehaviour by the US government, are essentially all over-classified, and constitute information that the citizens have a right to see, and a NEED to see, in order to do our job in the republic.
The fact that we keep promoting criminals and throwing whistleblowers in the brig instead of the other way around is probably the biggest threat to the national security of this country today.
As I understand it, offline mode only works if you are online when you set it. So, can I set it to offline mode, then move the computer to a location with no internet, and play it indefinitely? I doubt it. And when I get a chance to play a game at the location with internet - it's because the internet connection died and I cant work until it comes back. Oops! Cant set offline mode, internet is down. Right?
You're absolutely right. I had a very similar experience and I certainly wont send these thieves my money again. The fact that their DRM scheme is marginally less painful than that of the competition may be true but it's damning with faint praise. Steam fanboys are so thick on slashdot these days I bet they swamp us with down mods pretty quickly though.
You can change the tense all you want, you are still making a broad, blanket judgement with an unbounded scope covering innumerable events and phenomena you have absolutely no direct knowledge of and telling me you KNOW, a priori, that they are ALL bull. You can dress that up and dance around with it all you want, it's still a statement of faith and cannot be anything else.
And the more of your post I try to reply to the more I see it is all just the same. Your questions make no sense, your premises are held by faith and will not be examined, so I fear the conversation dead ends. "Like all supernatural things the results are only murky when you do a crappy experiment, when you have a well designed experiment they always fail." Here we go, your faith in a nutshell. There is no need for you to actually do any research or even just survey research that other people have done to date, you know what you will find without reading a single boring page. Experiments with the right results are well done, those with results that might cast doubt on your faith were obviously poorly designed or executed, and all this is known before the experiments are even done!
Ironically if you eleminted the words 'all' and 'always' from your statement I would probably be unable to disagree with it. But without those words you dont have a faith anymore.
You said "Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms."
Yet you claim you were not talking about things that havent occurred yet. But logically, given your statement above, would it not be fair to say that any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred, let us say, tomorrow, would still be covered as something that can NEVER be reproduced and ALWAYS explained materially?
If so, then you are indeed making claims about things that have yet to happen, long before any evidence could be brought to bear. If not I must say your statement becomes unintelligible.
"Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate."
But the VAST VAST majority of such cases, you were simply unable to investigate. And always will be. This is certainly no reason to simply believe outlandish stories, I dont disagree with you there, but certainty of falsehood is an entirely different animal from uncommited nonbelief.
"A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural?"
I will quote INXS. "You cant go against nature, because if you do, going against nature is part of nature too." No, I think "supernatural" is a silly word really. It appears to refer to something in objective reality but it only makes sense if you apply it subjectively instead. Each seemingly arbitrary or random phenomena of nature, in the human mind, was once "supernatural" and then at some point we formed a workable mental model that allowed us to predict it and/or manipulate it with some success. And suddenly it became natural. So, no, I dont believe in any "supernatural" powers. I do believe there are plenty of facts about the universe we do not yet fully understand however. It wouldnt be surprising at all if there are things left for us to discover that would seem 'supernatural' until we understand them. Oh, and water dousing? Do a little meta research on it sometime. The results of prior research is a bit murky. It isnt an easily repeatable always works thing, no, that's true - but there is also clearly individual variation and certain practitioners, for whatever reason, seem to consistently score much better than random chance could explain. Why? I very much doubt it has anything to do with demons or angels (though it is possible the internal representations of such beings might be involved when an individual practitioner is at work) but the first step to finding out why, for someone like Randi, is just acknowledging the possibility he might be wrong.
We canâ(TM)t be any clearer â" itâ(TM)s not. Period.
This is a very old trick managers learn early. It's called "pee on his shoe and claim it's raining." It's a favourite among the ones who lack the intelligence to invent believable lies.
"can always be explained through materialist mechanisms"
You just revealed yourself to be a Materialist Fundamentalist yourself with that statement. You just took aim at a very broad, essentially unbounded category of purported phenomena, including things that have never been (and will never be) subject to a proper investigation, including things that havent even happened yet (and therefore by logical necessity have not been investigated) and you pronounce a priori that they can ALWAY be explained through materialist mechanisms. There is no possible way that statement could be based on knowledge, since it pertains to things there is no possible way for you to have knowledge of. It is a statement of faith, no less so than the catechism or the haShema or the shahada are statements of faith.
You're right. It's also about locations with no internet activity. My get-away cabin doesnt have a phone and it sure as hell wont get internet. It's used for a few nights a month. The only time I have to do serious gaming will be when I am there. You really think I am going to pay another $80/month, plus several hundred if not thousand in install fees, to get a connection out there just so someone I paid good money to can spy on me with it?
Forget that. The old gaming machine out there with old games and dosbox runs fine. I'd like to upgrade it but not at that cost. (Not talking about the cost of the xbox - assume that's free. Still not worth getting a high speed connection laid out to a location that has no need for it, where it will very rarely be used, and only to spy on me. That's just too high a price by itself.)
Yes, they called it a DOS for a reason. It was a more advanced form of Operating System than was typical for personal machines, you see, it had these great things called 'disks' and it needed an Operating System that knew how to use them...
Surrealism might be argued to pair with post-newtonian physics as realism does to classical mechanics. Surrealism is not just a school of art but of philosophy as well.
I disagree, I think that's exactly what he does. The dowsing example is a good one. There are many examples where water-dowsing appears to work, and there seems to be every chance that we will eventually find one or more good explanations for why that is. Nonetheless, Randi dismisses the possibility out of hand even when his own experiment points to it. (Clarke, not a fundamentalist of any stripe, attempts to point this out and is dismissed. Randi already knows this stuff is all bunk, he doesnt need to look at any results.)
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that they dont want to make it so the 'pirate' version is the one people want, because it has extra gameplay. So if they are going to have much more fun with the idea, it would have to go in the paid version...
I looked at the application in question and it appears to have been rejected for very good cause. Does it enrage you that you are not allowed to patent old things that many other people are already doing?
He's foaming at the mouth a little, but he's not entirely wrong.
The web has been changing rapidly, and mostly for the worse.
Javascript adds some minor convenience at a large cost in security and making parsing harder and so forth. There are cases where it's a good tool for the job, but they are rare. I constantly see it misused and abused. Slashdot, as an example, is almost completely unusable without disabling javascript. And yes, we had plenty interactivity long before the currently fashionable buzzwords were invented.
Of course that is possible, but far more likely what would happen is that the bank server wasnt serving out the malware directly, but had only been altered to inject references to code on other servers, dedicated to adware/malware themselves.
The typical, braindead browser would get infected anyway. A more sanely configured, noscript-enabled browser would silently avoid the malware.
Dont think anyone is pretending that is bulletproof but it's a good security layer and there is just no reason to skip it.
This is the tragedy of the web. It worked pretty well, it still does, but it works less well because what it is actually IS is underappreciated, and people keep trying to make it something it is not. A means of distributing content based on semantics, leaving presentation decisions to the final display device, is pure genius. Yet every single major player in the html standards game has been focused on making something else entirely of it from day one.
Way to split hairs.
"When another bomb goes off, you will all be asking why didn't the TSA do something about it."
The next time there is a bomb killing air travelers, I expect I will be asking why the TSA forced the victims to form up in a tight group outside the security cordon and thus gave the bomber such an easy way target.
"That all said, I find it mildly absurd that any security we don't like we just classify as security theater.. How on earth can we on one hand argue that Bush et al had ample warning and did nothing and then on the other bitch when they do something? "
Here's the thing. They had all the information they needed to stop it - the problem was not too little information, it was too much. They had far more information than they had the capacity to analyze.
So the response? Not to upgrade ability to analyze the information already collectable, no. Instead, let's collect a few thousand times MORE information. Let's throw a dragnet over anyone and everyone and store every email on the net forever, in case we need to search back through it later.
This is security theatre. We all get used to being less free, to being herded around more like cattle, on the assurance it will make us more safe. It will not. The same agencies that HAD the information to stop the crime, but not the analytical facilities to recognise the fact in time, now have EVEN MORE info to sift through. The vast majority of it completely irrelevant to stopping terrorists - but a wonderful treasure trove for anyone looking for something to use against their political enemies.
In the meantime the terrorists are even less likely to be detected, since we are throwing roughly the same analytic capabilities at a ridiculously expanded data set.
The slower processor is probably a good thing, that i7 is too much for the battery.
Both devices have non-removable batteries, however, so both are complete failures by my standards. And the Macbook doesnt even have an ethernet jack!
That's a meta-fail.
This is Ubuntu we are talking about. Anything that can be screwed up, they will screw up. So yeah, no surprise to hear they have a EULA.
98 ran on top of DOS too, doh.
So did ME, although they saddled it with a really ugly cludge to keep you out of the primary shell.
XP was the first consumer oriented windows version that was NOT a DOS shell.
Exactly, signature antivirus only protects those who use it properly (most dont) AND luck out by not being among the first exposed to the new mutation of the day. Heuristic scans usually wind up with way too many false positives to be useful. These are just vain attempts to patch over an insecure core.
Securing the core would make everyone from marketing and a good portion of engineering extraordinarily unhappy by ruling out cool junk they would love to see and sell. You cant even sell that notion in linux land these days, and imagining it coming to windows is... well...
Only if Hollywood continues to pay handsomely for its development.
Mbam is one of the best on the field today.
The field is pretty crappy though.
To understand the situation you really have to go back to the 80s. Antivirus scanners were just starting. Some of us were pointing out the problems with it. Some of us even made non-scanner AV systems that worked. Give me a DOS6 system and I can give you a very effective automatic defense system (though it would naturally take some time, given how many of the details I have forgotten between then and now.) Windows versions 3 and later broke the sort of system I (and others) developed, for no apparent reason. And ever since then, the antivirus vendors, MicroSoft, and the trade press have been pretty much unanimous that scanners were the only way to go. The customers pretty well refuse to buy anything else.
The trouble is scanners are and always were a security dead-end.
But it's more than a single change that is ultimately involved here though, it's a long running pattern of behavior, a long-running calculus of benefit. It wouldnt benefit Microsoft to produce a more secure OS. It would cost them more money to develop that way, but people would not want to pay more for it. And they would not be able to make any money off of the antivirus market - not saying they make much now, but they are still in the game and angling to make something there. A securable system would give that possibility up for no business gain. It would not be popular with hardware manufacturers either. Malware increases the attrition rate on existing installs which increases the sales rate on new hardware.
Even the linux ecosystem isnt immune to the same forces, though it started with a more securable base and obviously hasnt been so badly compromised. But none of the companies that make money from linux have any incentive to minimise support needs. Most explicitly rely on support needs to fuel the profitable side of their business. This means they benefit not just from malware but from undecipherable error messages and all sorts of other poor practices.
Anyway, you are right about ad blocking, although it's better simply to noscript everything than worrying about what is an ad and what is some other third-party thing that doesnt need to be loaded.
A resident antivirus scanner is probably better than nothing, for the average computer user who would rather have his eyes poked out with a hot iron than try to understand how his computer works. But I see them smashed by malware every day, and it's no surprise. The fundamental paradigm just doesnt allow for security, and for reasons above I dont expect to see it change anytime soon.
I have a virus on my desktop right now, I have a pool going on how long before an antivirus update finally picks it up and it starts screaming. Want to bet?
My money is on over a month, I am having a very hard time getting any of my coworkers to take an under position.
It's worse than you realise - the Saudi national you describe as 'still just a witness' with the first word implying suspicion - that fella was never a suspect, nor is he a witness other than incidentally, he's a victim. The Islamophobia is palpable.
This is just utter nonsense.
"...criminally stupid enough to wander towards an active military firefight walking with individuals carrying AK's and RPG's."
Dont recall there being any RPGs. Definitely plenty of AKs, because it would have been criminally stupid to be out driving around Baghdad without them. A civilian doesnt magically become something else simply because he is armed, and the US, with our second amendment, should be acutely aware of that.
They had AKs because everyone in that area carried AKs and it would have indeed been "criminally stupid" for them to travel in that area without bodyguards. They took no aggressive actions, and they didnt 'roll up into a firefight' they attempted to render assistance to the wounded AFTER the firefight had come to a conclusive ending.
The video is direct evidence of a war crime on its face. It's not Manning, but everyone else who had access and did NOT leak it, who should be charged for that. The cables reveal many other crimes and misbehaviour by the US government, are essentially all over-classified, and constitute information that the citizens have a right to see, and a NEED to see, in order to do our job in the republic.
The fact that we keep promoting criminals and throwing whistleblowers in the brig instead of the other way around is probably the biggest threat to the national security of this country today.
As I understand it, offline mode only works if you are online when you set it. So, can I set it to offline mode, then move the computer to a location with no internet, and play it indefinitely? I doubt it. And when I get a chance to play a game at the location with internet - it's because the internet connection died and I cant work until it comes back. Oops! Cant set offline mode, internet is down. Right?
You're absolutely right. I had a very similar experience and I certainly wont send these thieves my money again. The fact that their DRM scheme is marginally less painful than that of the competition may be true but it's damning with faint praise. Steam fanboys are so thick on slashdot these days I bet they swamp us with down mods pretty quickly though.
You can change the tense all you want, you are still making a broad, blanket judgement with an unbounded scope covering innumerable events and phenomena you have absolutely no direct knowledge of and telling me you KNOW, a priori, that they are ALL bull. You can dress that up and dance around with it all you want, it's still a statement of faith and cannot be anything else.
And the more of your post I try to reply to the more I see it is all just the same. Your questions make no sense, your premises are held by faith and will not be examined, so I fear the conversation dead ends. "Like all supernatural things the results are only murky when you do a crappy experiment, when you have a well designed experiment they always fail." Here we go, your faith in a nutshell. There is no need for you to actually do any research or even just survey research that other people have done to date, you know what you will find without reading a single boring page. Experiments with the right results are well done, those with results that might cast doubt on your faith were obviously poorly designed or executed, and all this is known before the experiments are even done!
Ironically if you eleminted the words 'all' and 'always' from your statement I would probably be unable to disagree with it. But without those words you dont have a faith anymore.
You said "Supernaturalists have faith in something that can never be reliably reproduced and can always be explained through materialist mechanisms."
Yet you claim you were not talking about things that havent occurred yet. But logically, given your statement above, would it not be fair to say that any purportedly supernatural occurence in which Spiritualists would place faith that occurred, let us say, tomorrow, would still be covered as something that can NEVER be reproduced and ALWAYS explained materially?
If so, then you are indeed making claims about things that have yet to happen, long before any evidence could be brought to bear. If not I must say your statement becomes unintelligible.
"Either we were able to properly investigate and it turned out to be materialist, or we weren't able to properly investigate."
But the VAST VAST majority of such cases, you were simply unable to investigate. And always will be. This is certainly no reason to simply believe outlandish stories, I dont disagree with you there, but certainty of falsehood is an entirely different animal from uncommited nonbelief.
"A question to you, do you believe in the supernatural?"
I will quote INXS. "You cant go against nature, because if you do, going against nature is part of nature too." No, I think "supernatural" is a silly word really. It appears to refer to something in objective reality but it only makes sense if you apply it subjectively instead. Each seemingly arbitrary or random phenomena of nature, in the human mind, was once "supernatural" and then at some point we formed a workable mental model that allowed us to predict it and/or manipulate it with some success. And suddenly it became natural. So, no, I dont believe in any "supernatural" powers. I do believe there are plenty of facts about the universe we do not yet fully understand however. It wouldnt be surprising at all if there are things left for us to discover that would seem 'supernatural' until we understand them. Oh, and water dousing? Do a little meta research on it sometime. The results of prior research is a bit murky. It isnt an easily repeatable always works thing, no, that's true - but there is also clearly individual variation and certain practitioners, for whatever reason, seem to consistently score much better than random chance could explain. Why? I very much doubt it has anything to do with demons or angels (though it is possible the internal representations of such beings might be involved when an individual practitioner is at work) but the first step to finding out why, for someone like Randi, is just acknowledging the possibility he might be wrong.
This is a very old trick managers learn early. It's called "pee on his shoe and claim it's raining." It's a favourite among the ones who lack the intelligence to invent believable lies.
"can always be explained through materialist mechanisms"
You just revealed yourself to be a Materialist Fundamentalist yourself with that statement. You just took aim at a very broad, essentially unbounded category of purported phenomena, including things that have never been (and will never be) subject to a proper investigation, including things that havent even happened yet (and therefore by logical necessity have not been investigated) and you pronounce a priori that they can ALWAY be explained through materialist mechanisms. There is no possible way that statement could be based on knowledge, since it pertains to things there is no possible way for you to have knowledge of. It is a statement of faith, no less so than the catechism or the haShema or the shahada are statements of faith.
You're right. It's also about locations with no internet activity. My get-away cabin doesnt have a phone and it sure as hell wont get internet. It's used for a few nights a month. The only time I have to do serious gaming will be when I am there. You really think I am going to pay another $80/month, plus several hundred if not thousand in install fees, to get a connection out there just so someone I paid good money to can spy on me with it?
Forget that. The old gaming machine out there with old games and dosbox runs fine. I'd like to upgrade it but not at that cost. (Not talking about the cost of the xbox - assume that's free. Still not worth getting a high speed connection laid out to a location that has no need for it, where it will very rarely be used, and only to spy on me. That's just too high a price by itself.)
Yes, they called it a DOS for a reason. It was a more advanced form of Operating System than was typical for personal machines, you see, it had these great things called 'disks' and it needed an Operating System that knew how to use them...
Surrealism might be argued to pair with post-newtonian physics as realism does to classical mechanics. Surrealism is not just a school of art but of philosophy as well.
I disagree, I think that's exactly what he does. The dowsing example is a good one. There are many examples where water-dowsing appears to work, and there seems to be every chance that we will eventually find one or more good explanations for why that is. Nonetheless, Randi dismisses the possibility out of hand even when his own experiment points to it. (Clarke, not a fundamentalist of any stripe, attempts to point this out and is dismissed. Randi already knows this stuff is all bunk, he doesnt need to look at any results.)