stalin would have never allowed cellphones for they would have seeded a revolt against him, letting people talk to each other is a big no-no if you want to keep an oppressive system going...
True of cellphones in the 80s/90s and maybe even today. But think ahead a bit, where they have the resources to track everyones movements from their cellphones, diagram associations, and monitor/scan/parse all conversations in real-time.
Who is going to use their cellphone to plan a revolt if big brother is listening on the line. Not "might be listening" if they suspect you and got a warrant to wiretap you or maybe handwaved some National Security at the carrier... but actually listening. A virtual guarantee that every text is scanned and logged (and blocked / delayed if suspect), every voice calls logged and the transcripts scanned in real-time...
Try selling at it $5.99 and see what happens to the app's piracy rate...
I expect the absolute piracy to stay the same. I expect total legitimate sales to fall through the floor. Thus piracy rate will skyrocket *
Note that "Piracy Rate" (defined here as the ratio of piracy to legit sales will increase dramatically as an artifact of the legitimate sales crashing, not as a result of any increase in actual piracy.
I seriously doubt there is anyone paying for $1 apps that would jailbreak their phone to pirate a $5 one. Maybe if the app pricing overall jacked up to $5 we would see an actual expansion in the number of pirates result, but not over one app.
1) Obama personally gave instructions to improve transparency 2) Obama administration fails at transparency 3) I'm not convinced Obama is the reason transparency is the problem.
4) Bush / Cheney administration also failed at transparency. 5) Bush / Cheney were personally part of that failure, having personally publicly and repeatedly defended the lack of transparency. 6) I see Bush / Cheney as part of the problem causing lack of transparency.
After promising us the most transparent Administration ever, he's actually (hard as it is to believe) racked up a worse record on FOIA requests than the Bush43 administration,
Yes and No.
"Obamaâ(TM)s directive, memorialized in written instructions from the Justice Department, appears to have been widely ignored."
Yes, the foia situation is getting worse. But the real question is why?
Clearly he's not reviewing all the FOIA requests personally... so who is reviewing them and why are the seemingly clear instructions to be more transparent being ignored?
Is Obama secretly telling them to be less transparent, while very publicly signing instructions to be more transparent?
Is there an entrenched bureaucracy that is essentially acting with impunity?
I give his administration a failing grade on this too, but I'd like to give Obama himself the benefit of the doubt on this one. I don't think he's the problem. Whereas in the Bush years, both Cheney and Bush were part of the problem.
Intelligence makes operations and missions safer. Safer missions means less dead soldiers. Therefore, spy sats result in less dead soldiers.
Not doing the mission at all is even safer; saves more lives, and doesn't require buying a spy satellite.
Not that I'm saying intelligence gathering is a bad thing. We definitely need good intelligence, but its a double edged sword. It does lead to operations being justified that we wouldn't/couldn't do otherwise, and I'm not convinced that most of what gets done really is all that necessary for national defense.
your talking about "mod down as a disagree" and/or "mod up as agree"
I concede there are people on slashdot who do mod that way, most of us don't though, hell I assume most of us don't even have mod points most of the time.
To be honest, I think the majority of people who make that abuse do so because slashdot lacks a way to simply flag posts as 'agree' and 'disagree' and 'factually wrong'. In other words its not so much a desire to corrupt and abuse the moderation system, but merely a clumsy work around for a feature they want.
I'm sure some small group is actively gaming and abusing the system, but every community has that sub-group, and its not representative of the whole.
Fair enough. But since iOS doesn't have task managment, being able to leave the app running and switch to the other, means that you can very easily inadvertantly leave the app logged in...for an indefinite period of time, which may be convenient but is really bad security.
And I don't want to necessarily use an app "in between" I want to use an app ON TOP of the banking window. I want to text my brother about stocks while I'm looking at my portfolio not switch back and forth continually. I want to run some calculations while the numbers I'm working from are displayed on hte page... not cut/switch/paste/switch/cut/switch/paste/calculate/cut/switch/paste...
And funny enough, I've been able to run more than one app at a time since June of last year....
Two windows on a screen at the same time? Or just the ability to switch between two apps?
I want the former, the latter is a PITA. I want to be able to SEE the page I'm getting the numbers from at the same time I enter them into the calculator.... not cut/switch apps/paste/switch apps/cut/switch apps/paste/switch apps...
Funny, my banking app doesn't require me to re-login.....
Mine does. And if it doesn't, how do you exit it so someone can't pick up your device, select your banking app, and already be logged in? Do you ahve to remember to logout manually with every use? That's just as bad, if not worse.
I want the banking up to stay logged in as long as its visible. But I want to have a calculator visible too, and maybe a texting app... switch/switch/switch/switch/switch is annoying but reasonable on an iphone. (which I HAVE) due to the small screen, but its intolerable on an ipad (which I have used) which has enough screen real-estate for windows. I ended up just reaching for the 13" laptop, for the massive boost in efficiency at getting the task done.
What is the pragmatic difference between writing original research directly in Wikipedia, or writing the same original research into a blog article or separate domain specific wiki, and then sourcing it on Wikipedia?
It seems wikipedia shares something in common with C: "Any problem can be solved with a layer of indirection."
Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.
Its fine for people to have opinions that differ from mine.
But I do expect them to be rational and logically consistent, without being factually incorrect, or hypocrites.
But even then I'll defend someone's freedom of speech to say something idiotic, but I'll exercise my own right to that same freedom of speech to make sure as many people as possible know that it was idiotic...:)
Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to let someone say idiotic things without commenting on how idiotic they are.
Apple has conspired to ensure that these rarely happen on the typical iPad, fooling customers into think that, because their device runs perfectly
If you can only run one thing at a time, you need less memory.
Its the stupid things that drive me nuts with the iOS devices. I was doing some banking... and I couldn't have a calculator open at the same time as the bank app... and leaving the bank app meant I had to re-login. It was idiotic.
Today I'm shopping for a new car, so I was looking at web listings, while chatting with my brother. Again I wanted a calculator up so I could look at listings do currency conversions, tax calculations, and so on.
I find as soon as I want to actually do anything even remotely serious on an ios device, they drive me nuts.
You can un-tag yourself and then no one will be able to tag you again.
The only way it could capture that you weren't allowed to be re-tagged on that image is if the orginal tag remained, but had another attribute attached to it saying that the tagged individual had requested the tag be "hidden".
Thus a search for tagged images of you made by joe-public would not return those "un-tagged" images.
However, a search for tagged images of you made by someone with authority to ignore that "hidden" flag. (e.g. facebook's internal data mining alg's, a court order, a bored facebook admin...) could still return all these so-called "untagged" images.
That's like studying an IBM 1401 for 50 years and then hacking a PC with current software in an hour.
I agree.
However, do you really think the "alien space fleet" had just rolled off the assembly line? The ships that invaded, might well be the same vintage as the one that crashed 50 years ago.
Consider how much of the space shuttle is still 1970s tech... or wander into a mnaufacturing plant and see that MSDOS is still running things, or visit the mainframes running cobol applications from years ago at the hearts of big enterprises...
Just because technology evolves in 50 years, doesn't mean everything you run into is running it. And quite frankly, a military invasion fleet in service is precisely the sort of thing that like isn't likely running the latest stuff everywhere. Sure it might be here and there... but there will be tons of legacy shit that if it wasn't broken didn't get fixed.
This means you're conflating things and giving an extremely poor interpretation in order to invalidate an otherwise valid point. The simple fact is, unless ALL games are tied to steam, while unfortunate, it doesn't invalidate my point in the least.
Portal was just the natural end to the progression.
The point I'm making is that its not an argument between physical media and virtual download. Its a question of DRM or no DRM. The method by which the game is obtained is irrelevant.
There are plenty of games not tied to steam that are tied to online accounts and online activation. Buying physical media doesn't have any advantages.
Physical media on the other hand, isn't tied to an account and can frequently be resold...
That's the ideal. It's rapidly changing.
I have lots of games that need to be activated with a CD key. At that point the advantage of physical took a huge drop.
When I purchased Portal at a regular store in a regular box I did it to get the advantages of physical media. But I got burnt... the physical media was just a ruse. I still needed to tie it to a steam account, and it was EXACTLY the same as buying it virtually; except that I didn't have to wait for it to download.
Physical media at this point has no inherent advantage over a virtual purchase.
A DRM-free virtual purchase is infinitely more advantageous to a DRM laden physical purchase. Either its got DRM or it doesn't; it doesn't matter where or how you get it
Log in one one machine. Install game. Put steam in Offline mode. Play game on multiple PCs at same time.
Most of the games my family are interested in aren't offline games.
So if I'm playing Left4Dead 2 with few friends on online, why exactly should my wife be prevented from playing the upcoming Portal 2 with one of her friends...?
Personally, I couldn't care less about loaning games or selling them.
To be honest, its not a big thing for me either. But I recently did want to lend/give a game to my brother. And now my kids are starting to want to play the games on my account as well, and that's also creating all sorts of awkwardness and conflicts, and its going to get worse.
And now when I buy a game, I have to think about whether I want to put it in my account, or a shared family account, or an account for the child, or in its own account by itself... balancing the flexibility of having the game not tied to a bunch of other games with the hassle of having a bunch of accounts, and the issues that causes.
Steam is FAR from perfect.
Ultimately many physical games today have DRM that prevents sales, loans etc due to the limited number of installations, one time use keys bound to online accounts etc. This means there are no upsides to owning physical media anyway.
There are no upsides to DRM. Whether its physical or downloaded. I like GoG a lot, but the selection of modern stuff is, as is to be expected, is pretty thin.
As has been pointed out by others, in the past you couldn't auto-translate it into another language and back. You lose virtually all of the identifiable information that would help them analyze the document like that.
And people still don't bother most of the time; so the tech is still useful.
For example, forensic fingerprinting technology is defeated by wearing gloves, but that hasn't rendered the technology irrelevant either.
I'm not saying the research is worthless, but their techniques are easily defeated.
And...?
It would be simple to write a program that would iteratively "fuzz" your message with typos, lowercase/uppercase toggling, etc. and check the result against their algorithm until the message could no longer be tied to you. I'm sure someone could do it in 10 lines of Perl, or less.
Of course it would be easy to defeat. But document analysis techniques have been around for decades... maybe not this specific algorithm, but analyzing typos, vocabulary, etc is a pretty old concept.
Were Sarah Palin's hacked emails "fuzzed" ? Were the wikileaks cables "fuzzed"? Were the Pentagon Papers "fuzzed"? When was the last time you saw a blog, or even a comment post "fuzzed"?
I guess this technique might be pretty useful after all despite the fact that it can be "easily defeated"... because it turns out that most people don't fuzz their documents, even the embarrassing shit they might like to have plausible deniability on later...
And here I thought it was on purpose. Sarcastic satire...
I could easily imagine a future time when 99.07% of the advertised space on a storage medium was actualy reserved for 'file system / partition overhead, redundancy, wear leveling, error correction, government tax, your operating system recovery partition, secret NSA back door partition, and unlockable future upgrades via micropayments...) leaving 0.93% of the advertised space available for the buyer to actually use.
I admit I already feel a bit gipped buying a new PC with a 64GB SSD, and finding less than 20GB of available space on it, while I watch Windows update download a 1GB service pack that consumes another 5% before I've even finished registering the thing...:p
You'd look at your rapidly dwindling savings account or perhaps mounting debts, while your resume is starting grow this large unemployed gap... and quickly decide that you'd rather work for an idiot for a while than remain unemployed.
Slashdot Mirror
stalin would have never allowed cellphones for they would have seeded a revolt against him, letting people talk to each other is a big no-no if you want to keep an oppressive system going...
True of cellphones in the 80s/90s and maybe even today. But think ahead a bit, where they have the resources to track everyones movements from their cellphones, diagram associations, and monitor/scan/parse all conversations in real-time.
Who is going to use their cellphone to plan a revolt if big brother is listening on the line. Not "might be listening" if they suspect you and got a warrant to wiretap you or maybe handwaved some National Security at the carrier... but actually listening. A virtual guarantee that every text is scanned and logged (and blocked / delayed if suspect), every voice calls logged and the transcripts scanned in real-time...
Try selling at it $5.99 and see what happens to the app's piracy rate...
I expect the absolute piracy to stay the same.
I expect total legitimate sales to fall through the floor.
Thus piracy rate will skyrocket *
Note that "Piracy Rate" (defined here as the ratio of piracy to legit sales will increase dramatically as an artifact of the legitimate sales crashing, not as a result of any increase in actual piracy.
I seriously doubt there is anyone paying for $1 apps that would jailbreak their phone to pirate a $5 one. Maybe if the app pricing overall jacked up to $5 we would see an actual expansion in the number of pirates result, but not over one app.
LOL WUT
Did I stutter?
1) Obama personally gave instructions to improve transparency
2) Obama administration fails at transparency
3) I'm not convinced Obama is the reason transparency is the problem.
4) Bush / Cheney administration also failed at transparency.
5) Bush / Cheney were personally part of that failure, having personally publicly and repeatedly defended the lack of transparency.
6) I see Bush / Cheney as part of the problem causing lack of transparency.
What part didn't make sense?
After promising us the most transparent Administration ever, he's actually (hard as it is to believe) racked up a worse record on FOIA requests than the Bush43 administration,
Yes and No.
"Obamaâ(TM)s directive, memorialized in written instructions from the Justice Department, appears to have been widely ignored."
Yes, the foia situation is getting worse. But the real question is why?
Clearly he's not reviewing all the FOIA requests personally... so who is reviewing them and why are the seemingly clear instructions to be more transparent being ignored?
Is Obama secretly telling them to be less transparent, while very publicly signing instructions to be more transparent?
Is there an entrenched bureaucracy that is essentially acting with impunity?
I give his administration a failing grade on this too, but I'd like to give Obama himself the benefit of the doubt on this one. I don't think he's the problem. Whereas in the Bush years, both Cheney and Bush were part of the problem.
when you commit a very serious crime
Like walking around with 2 ounces of marijuana?
Yep you "hurt society" and shouldn't be able to participate in the political process...because your a very bad person...
... but that seems to be how a lot of people view privacy issues.
Right up until it bites them in the ass.
Many people don't care about their privacy because they can't imagine how what they are releasing can come back and harm them, until it actually does.
Intelligence makes operations and missions safer. Safer missions means less dead soldiers. Therefore, spy sats result in less dead soldiers.
Not doing the mission at all is even safer; saves more lives, and doesn't require buying a spy satellite.
Not that I'm saying intelligence gathering is a bad thing. We definitely need good intelligence, but its a double edged sword. It does lead to operations being justified that we wouldn't/couldn't do otherwise, and I'm not convinced that most of what gets done really is all that necessary for national defense.
ever heard of; log off, timeout and security token.
Of course. However, timeouts are either too short to be useful or too long to be safe.
I unintentionally misunderstood.
your talking about "mod down as a disagree" and/or "mod up as agree"
I concede there are people on slashdot who do mod that way, most of us don't though, hell I assume most of us don't even have mod points most of the time.
To be honest, I think the majority of people who make that abuse do so because slashdot lacks a way to simply flag posts as 'agree' and 'disagree' and 'factually wrong'. In other words its not so much a desire to corrupt and abuse the moderation system, but merely a clumsy work around for a feature they want.
I'm sure some small group is actively gaming and abusing the system, but every community has that sub-group, and its not representative of the whole.
Fair enough. But since iOS doesn't have task managment, being able to leave the app running and switch to the other, means that you can very easily inadvertantly leave the app logged in...for an indefinite period of time, which may be convenient but is really bad security.
And I don't want to necessarily use an app "in between" I want to use an app ON TOP of the banking window. I want to text my brother about stocks while I'm looking at my portfolio not switch back and forth continually. I want to run some calculations while the numbers I'm working from are displayed on hte page... not cut/switch/paste/switch/cut/switch/paste/calculate/cut/switch/paste...
And funny enough, I've been able to run more than one app at a time since June of last year....
Two windows on a screen at the same time? Or just the ability to switch between two apps?
I want the former, the latter is a PITA. I want to be able to SEE the page I'm getting the numbers from at the same time I enter them into the calculator.... not cut/switch apps/paste/switch apps/cut/switch apps/paste/switch apps...
Funny, my banking app doesn't require me to re-login.....
Mine does. And if it doesn't, how do you exit it so someone can't pick up your device, select your banking app, and already be logged in? Do you ahve to remember to logout manually with every use? That's just as bad, if not worse.
I want the banking up to stay logged in as long as its visible. But I want to have a calculator visible too, and maybe a texting app... switch/switch/switch/switch/switch is annoying but reasonable on an iphone. (which I HAVE) due to the small screen, but its intolerable on an ipad (which I have used) which has enough screen real-estate for windows. I ended up just reaching for the 13" laptop, for the massive boost in efficiency at getting the task done.
What is the pragmatic difference between writing original research directly in Wikipedia, or writing the same original research into a blog article or separate domain specific wiki, and then sourcing it on Wikipedia?
It seems wikipedia shares something in common with C: "Any problem can be solved with a layer of indirection."
Slashdot people love free speech - as long as it agrees with theirs.
Its fine for people to have opinions that differ from mine.
But I do expect them to be rational and logically consistent, without being factually incorrect, or hypocrites.
But even then I'll defend someone's freedom of speech to say something idiotic, but I'll exercise my own right to that same freedom of speech to make sure as many people as possible know that it was idiotic... :)
Freedom of speech doesn't mean I have to let someone say idiotic things without commenting on how idiotic they are.
Apple has conspired to ensure that these rarely happen on the typical iPad, fooling customers into think that, because their device runs perfectly
If you can only run one thing at a time, you need less memory.
Its the stupid things that drive me nuts with the iOS devices. I was doing some banking... and I couldn't have a calculator open at the same time as the bank app... and leaving the bank app meant I had to re-login. It was idiotic.
Today I'm shopping for a new car, so I was looking at web listings, while chatting with my brother. Again I wanted a calculator up so I could look at listings do currency conversions, tax calculations, and so on.
I find as soon as I want to actually do anything even remotely serious on an ios device, they drive me nuts.
You can un-tag yourself and then no one will be able to tag you again.
The only way it could capture that you weren't allowed to be re-tagged on that image is if the orginal tag remained, but had another attribute attached to it saying that the tagged individual had requested the tag be "hidden".
Thus a search for tagged images of you made by joe-public would not return those "un-tagged" images.
However, a search for tagged images of you made by someone with authority to ignore that "hidden" flag. (e.g. facebook's internal data mining alg's, a court order, a bored facebook admin...) could still return all these so-called "untagged" images.
That's like studying an IBM 1401 for 50 years and then hacking a PC with current software in an hour.
I agree.
However, do you really think the "alien space fleet" had just rolled off the assembly line? The ships that invaded, might well be the same vintage as the one that crashed 50 years ago.
Consider how much of the space shuttle is still 1970s tech... or wander into a mnaufacturing plant and see that MSDOS is still running things, or visit the mainframes running cobol applications from years ago at the hearts of big enterprises...
Just because technology evolves in 50 years, doesn't mean everything you run into is running it. And quite frankly, a military invasion fleet in service is precisely the sort of thing that like isn't likely running the latest stuff everywhere. Sure it might be here and there... but there will be tons of legacy shit that if it wasn't broken didn't get fixed.
This means you're conflating things and giving an extremely poor interpretation in order to invalidate an otherwise valid point. The simple fact is, unless ALL games are tied to steam, while unfortunate, it doesn't invalidate my point in the least.
Portal was just the natural end to the progression.
The point I'm making is that its not an argument between physical media and virtual download. Its a question of DRM or no DRM. The method by which the game is obtained is irrelevant.
There are plenty of games not tied to steam that are tied to online accounts and online activation. Buying physical media doesn't have any advantages.
Buying DRM free has advantages.
Physical media on the other hand, isn't tied to an account and can frequently be resold...
That's the ideal. It's rapidly changing.
I have lots of games that need to be activated with a CD key. At that point the advantage of physical took a huge drop.
When I purchased Portal at a regular store in a regular box I did it to get the advantages of physical media. But I got burnt... the physical media was just a ruse. I still needed to tie it to a steam account, and it was EXACTLY the same as buying it virtually; except that I didn't have to wait for it to download.
Physical media at this point has no inherent advantage over a virtual purchase.
A DRM-free virtual purchase is infinitely more advantageous to a DRM laden physical purchase. Either its got DRM or it doesn't; it doesn't matter where or how you get it
Log in one one machine. Install game. Put steam in Offline mode. Play game on multiple PCs at same time.
Most of the games my family are interested in aren't offline games.
So if I'm playing Left4Dead 2 with few friends on online, why exactly should my wife be prevented from playing the upcoming Portal 2 with one of her friends...?
Personally, I couldn't care less about loaning games or selling them.
To be honest, its not a big thing for me either. But I recently did want to lend/give a game to my brother. And now my kids are starting to want to play the games on my account as well, and that's also creating all sorts of awkwardness and conflicts, and its going to get worse.
And now when I buy a game, I have to think about whether I want to put it in my account, or a shared family account, or an account for the child, or in its own account by itself... balancing the flexibility of having the game not tied to a bunch of other games with the hassle of having a bunch of accounts, and the issues that causes.
Steam is FAR from perfect.
Ultimately many physical games today have DRM that prevents sales, loans etc due to the limited number of installations, one time use keys bound to online accounts etc. This means there are no upsides to owning physical media anyway.
There are no upsides to DRM. Whether its physical or downloaded. I like GoG a lot, but the selection of modern stuff is, as is to be expected, is pretty thin.
if he has the physical media he could just create a new account...
Unless the "key" printed on the disc is already activated under his old account.
Obviously that wouldn't be the case if it was a brand new purchase. But what if he was reinstalling a game he'd purchased a few months ago...
Usually, it starts with an innocuous law like "No having sex with animals".
Would this be the same florida that failed to pass anti-bestiality laws as recently as last year?
2009 --- http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/legislature/article982771.ece
2010 --- http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/why-the-state-legislature-failed-to-pass-a-law-banning-bestiality/1092905
I can't offhand find any statute that specifically addresses porcupines; but its possibly some local thing... or perhaps its completely fabricated.
As has been pointed out by others, in the past you couldn't auto-translate it into another language and back. You lose virtually all of the identifiable information that would help them analyze the document like that.
And people still don't bother most of the time; so the tech is still useful.
For example, forensic fingerprinting technology is defeated by wearing gloves, but that hasn't rendered the technology irrelevant either.
I'm not saying the research is worthless, but their techniques are easily defeated.
And...?
It would be simple to write a program that would iteratively "fuzz" your message with typos, lowercase/uppercase toggling, etc. and check the result against their algorithm until the message could no longer be tied to you. I'm sure someone could do it in 10 lines of Perl, or less.
Of course it would be easy to defeat. But document analysis techniques have been around for decades... maybe not this specific algorithm, but analyzing typos, vocabulary, etc is a pretty old concept.
Were Sarah Palin's hacked emails "fuzzed" ? Were the wikileaks cables "fuzzed"? Were the Pentagon Papers "fuzzed"? When was the last time you saw a blog, or even a comment post "fuzzed"?
I guess this technique might be pretty useful after all despite the fact that it can be "easily defeated"... because it turns out that most people don't fuzz their documents, even the embarrassing shit they might like to have plausible deniability on later...
And here I thought it was on purpose. Sarcastic satire...
I could easily imagine a future time when 99.07% of the advertised space on a storage medium was actualy reserved for 'file system / partition overhead, redundancy, wear leveling, error correction, government tax, your operating system recovery partition, secret NSA back door partition, and unlockable future upgrades via micropayments...) leaving 0.93% of the advertised space available for the buyer to actually use.
I admit I already feel a bit gipped buying a new PC with a 64GB SSD, and finding less than 20GB of available space on it, while I watch Windows update download a 1GB service pack that consumes another 5% before I've even finished registering the thing... :p
I'd have to think twice about working for them.
so think twice:
You'd look at your rapidly dwindling savings account or perhaps mounting debts, while your resume is starting grow this large unemployed gap... and quickly decide that you'd rather work for an idiot for a while than remain unemployed.