To encourage others. Even if it can't now be used for research there will at least be some people saying "Oh, so being a mathematician is a path to becoming a millionaire".
That will encourage some kids and uni/college students. It's an attempt to try and do something about the divide in society between the recognition given to sports stars, celebrities, manufactured pop stars, and other overly glamorised non-contributors to the human race who generally get lavished in riches for nothing other than being a fucking idiot publicly and the people who do actually contribute like scientists.
There's still a long way to go because you'll still get paid way more for nothing other than the ability to kick a ball around a field effectively than you will for curing cancer, inventing the world wide web, or sending people to the moon and robots to Mars, but at least it's an attempt at doing something about the problem of western society where idiocy is valued far more greatly than intelligence and competence.
I'm intrigued to know whether given the closed nature of North Korea and it's poor education systems whether it has the ability to perform this type of attack entirely indigenously or whether China has helped or given some kind of training on this.
I'm usually one to defend China as I think the threat of it is normally quite overblown, but I'm having a hard time believing North Korea has the talent to have done this entirely by itself.
Basically there was some dodgy site where you could pay for DDOSs which was believed to be behind these attacks. This site was amusingly and somewhat ironically insecure such that if you knew the right URL you could view a list of clients for this site to see who had paid for what, and on this list were attacks corresponding to Krebs and Ars with an e-mail address for the client stored alongside them (along with many other attacks/clients, some of which had previously been verified). Turns out this e-mail address was also registered to a Facebook account of a guy in the UK, and voila, Krebs gets the guy's identity.
Sure it could all be some master ploy to throw Krebs off the scent, but more realistically what we have here is a script kiddie who was careless with his details and just got himself caught.
So I'd say his tip is pretty decent grounds at least for the police to investigate the person in question if nothing else.
No, it only applies to commercial organisations, publishers that have more than one author, and publishers that have an editorial unit.
That doesn't in any way whatsoever apply to bloggers so the headline and summary are just FUD made up by the likes of Murdoch and his cronies in a desperate attempt to avoid the responsibility to tell the truth being forced upon them.
The problem is that the only freedom being harmed is the previous press freedom to lie, break the law, and make stuff up.
Most people just don't think that's freedom we need (just like most people don't think the freedom to murder people, abuse children, steal and so forth are freedoms we need).
So I wouldn't say it's a sad day for freedom, on the contrary, it's a great day because people's right to privacy, right not to be victims of illegality of the press, right not to be lied about in public papers is being defended over the press's freedom to lie and make stuff up.
British TV channels are already held to this sort of standard and the likes of BBC news are some of the best in the world, so it shows, losing the ability to lie, and make stuff up actually raises standards of the press.
This only appears as a bad thing if you ignore the context of why this law came around - because the British print press was rife with lies and law breaking and there wasn't even a public interest defence for them, it was just out and out lies and criminality for profit and nothing more.
As AmiMoJo pointed out, part of the law is that any future changes require 66% of MPs to vote for it in parliament.
Or in other words, being a democracy, it means an overwhelming amount of the populace and their representatives have to support the measure.
Besides this article and most the responses are 99% FUD anyway. The law also states that you need to:
1) Publish about news and current affairs and do so commercially
2) Have multiple authors publishing for said commercial entity
3) Have editorial controls
Honestly, the only people complaining are the companies who have been complicit in illegal activity or who make money off of lying about people and things - the likes of Murdoch, The Daily Mail et. al.
Guido Fawkes is complaining because he's a Tea Party-esque Murdoch loving whinger and so supports the right's previous freedom to lie, break the law, and make things up to retain power.
This is a good law, and the only arguments against it are FUD. Trying to bring bloggers into it is a pathetic attempt at the dirty lying press who are the target of these laws stirring up the internet demographic against the laws. The only way a blogger will be impacted is if they're not actually a blogger because they have multiple staff, are commercial, and have an editor - in other words, because they're actually a news publisher.
Honestly, the only problem with the law (which I still don't understand) is that the press have the choice of signing up to this regime, and can choose not to. The penalty for not doing so will be that they can face higher fines from a judge if and when they lie and a ruling is made against them. I don't understand why it's not mandatory, an equivalent is for TV companies, and yet they produce some of the best, most impartial news out there - Al Jazeera and BBC News are probably two of the best news sources on the planet for example and get by just fine under British TV regulation. Also, ITV broke the Jimmy Savile story, something the press failed to do despite all the FUD they've spread about how such things can't be possible under a proper regulator - I didn't seem them breaking it despite the fact they've had all the freedom in the world (including to break the law it seems).
Or to cut a long story short, if you're a media outlet that is honest, objective, and doesn't break the law outside of absolutely genuine public interest cases, then there is literally nothing in these laws that should be a problem. The UK has some of the best news sources in the world on TV, and online, but our print media is almost full of Fox News style rubbish - I can easily name objective online and TV news sources, it's pretty hard to do that with print media nowadays. It's about time print was cleaned up and forced to follow the same standards that make our other media great because it's also the source of 90% of the UK's idiocy, ignorance, xenophobia and general bile. We want the truth from our media, not lies and abusive illegality.
"There is evidence that if illegal downloading were to hit the 100% mark then there would be no music made. (well no professional music made) There would be no way to fund it."
That's such an awfully stupid comment. If no music was paid for due to 100% illegal downloading there'd be no professional music made - no shit, professional by definition requires payment. Professional is the key qualifier though, there'd still be music made, I know any number of people who have made their own bands for the sheer enjoyment of making music rather than any inherent interest in making a profit.
"Ongoing activity is not evidence of a "win." Look at the drug war for your benchmark."
It's not evidence of a lose either, merely that the war is still underway.
"You think facing down the corporate interests with a "so what" mentality will win the day, I'm really afraid you're not only wrong, but wrong in a way that's going to get a lot of people hurt."
It's better than running scared of the system and acting like a good little sheep that has no freedom that's for sure.
"Yes, but again, they don't know very much about it yet, nor do they understand the potential consequences. There's a great deal of "Internet Superman" behavior -- loudmouthery and etc. -- but when it comes time to face the judge, that stuff tends to evaporate like the worthless bluster it is."
Which is fine, but it's not as if they can even come close to catching and dealing with a non-negligible proportion of the people involved. The GP agreed with you that yes, some people will get caught and run through the grinders and that sucks for them, but that doesn't stop the hundreds of millions of other people carrying on as is. Even those who do get ruled against by a rigged system it seems to be of little use, most of The Pirate Bay guys who were found guilty are still free and not a penny in compensation has reached the RIAA, Jammie Thomas will likely declare bankruptcy and not have a penny she can even give to them too - the RIAA's legal costs will be far higher than anything she can pay to them even if she were to pay the full $220,000. So sure, some people get caught, some people get run through the courts but so what? It does nothing to help the content industry win the war, they still lose at the end of the day.
"The drug war, in the meantime, has turned prison into a for-profit enterprise; it's no longer a negative to the state to incarcerate you (and take all your stuff, ruin your life, etc.) The more, the merrier: They'll just build more prisons and use you as slave labor. So when they begin to really reap the violators -- and you may be dead certain they will -- the prison system is ready to pack you in there like sardines, no problem."
This point is really US centric, so I'll simply make the point that even if they managed to jail the entire population of the US there's still over a billion pirates elsewhere in the world they can't deal with, they still don't win.
"Now you're beginning to get it. Weed -- only one drug, and one so harmless it's amazing -- is just barely getting traction at the state level"
You grossly understate this (but I assume it's probably down to lack of awareness of global politics). Other countries are making moves too, the deputy PM in the UK wants legalisation after a committee of MPs decided it made sense following a year long study into it, a couple of countries such as Uruguay have decided to defy the global ban on drugs and are legalising them, and the next summit on global drug laws is due soon where there is expected to be removal of the global legal ban on drugs precisely so nations can legislate to legalise some or all of them and put them under state or legal private control. It's not just a handful of US state legalising cannabis, the whole game is changing globally such that it looks like the war on drugs is actually coming to an end, and it wasn't those waging the war that won.
But here's the thing, here's what you really ignore, there have been countless examples through history of people not carring what the law is to the point the law had to be overturned, from giving women the vote, to US prohibition to British pirate radio stations in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, to the arab spring, to equalisation of gay rights and legalisation of drugs now that are slowly coming to a close in some parts of the world- these sorts of things forced governments to change after decades of attempts at policing them failed.
You can't win when you try to legislate out something that the vast majority of people want, it has never worked, not once throughout histor
It really does depend on the public sector service in question though.
My local council thought it'd be amusing to blow £2million upgrading every computer to Office 2010 from Office 2007 at the same time as cutting useful services and doing nothing about inept services.
Because of course there was some pressing feature that Office 2010 offered that 2007 didn't that the whole entire council's network required at a time when they were supposed to be streamlining and making efficiency gains.
To be fair, I'm not convinced there isn't enough money to deal with the problem, there certainly is, it's just that public sector in it's almost entirety is ineptly managed so rather than making real actual savings, they'd rather cut things as a hole without a shit for the impact on their customers (the public), in some places that will be IT, in others it will be frontline staff. Pet projects still seem to get funded no matter the idiocy and pointlessness of them, so even in our time of "austerity" there's still more than enough money to go round if large proportions of it weren't just outright being thrown away.
In the UK we follow the idea of policing by consent. The principle is that the police are not above other citizens but work with and for them. This is why they do not carry firearms as standard because that breaks this social contract that they are our equals, rather than there to control us. The firearms come out when they are dealing with someone who themselves have firearms. I'll admit this has been corrupted somewhat since 9/11 where we do have officers patrolling some airports with guns, but for the most part it's still very much intact.
Countries like the US could learn lessons from this, there are simply too many powerful police and police related units (TSA, DHS, FBI, etc.) with too much power over the populace which has led to a decade of abuse against citizens that have been permitted by successive governments ranging from warrantless wiretaps, far too heavy handed use of SWAT teams and national security letters. Absolutely law enforcement in America needs to remember who it serves - the people.
Reviews have always been protection rackets. Companies pay for them with money or freebies and in turn the reviewers give it a good review.
This is why just every once in a while great games get oddly bad reviews - someone in the marketing department forgot to pay a certain reviewer their protection money.
There are very very few review sites (if any?) now that review honestly and independently. The best metric you can get I guess are post-release user scores, assuming they're never manipulated.
For what it's worth this isn't new, I remember all the way back in the 80s there was some scandal about print magazines here in the UK doing the exact same thing back then.
Maybe you live somewhere backwards where wifi and the computers using it are powered by some kind of device that you have to manually power by rotating a wheel or something, but in the western world the effort involved would simply be turning a computer on which is pre-configured to simply log passively all wifi data.
Neither the pre-configuration or pressing the power button before you do your streetview drive on the morning though add any merit to your debate, the fundamental point still remains that Google were passively collecting data that was publicly available in a public space and not protected at all.
"You're just wrong. Get over it."
Well aren't you acting like an irrational little child. Rather than accept that your original argument was trivially disproven with a simple example you cover your ears, close your eyes and pretend reality isn't reality. I guess it sucks to be you. Oh well, keep telling yourself you're not wrong, the rest of us will just keep laughing at you.
Has since at least Windows 2000... so only 13 years then.
"When the default application isn't set for a document type, the first choice that's provided in the resulting pop-up is "Do you want to wander around on the web to find an application that can open this document?" rather than the option of selecting an application from the list of installed applications."
Is it really such a hardship to select the other option? Bare in mind this functionality exists because most end users have no idea about file associations and they just want it to work. If they click on a PDF that has no reader it's kinda nice if the OS goes off to the internet and finds out that they have a choice of Acrobat and whatever else available to open it.
"In SQL Server Management Studio, when you have multiple sessions open, they are tabbed."
That's why there is a little downwards arrow to the right of the tabs that instead just displays them as a vertical list if you so choose.
To cut a long story short, the reason you hate Windows it seems is because you know absolutely nothing about it.
Honestly, the fact you had to resort to obscure things that aren't actually real problems would to me suggest it must be doing pretty decent. If the OS was actually seriously deficient one would think you could come up with some real actual problems.
"Ridiculous. You have to be actively listening for it on a given frequency."
The same applies to hearing someone's conversation as you walk past, the frequency in question is standard to Wifi.
"In short you have to expend effort to get the information."
Rubbish, all Wifi receiving equipment automatically works on the frequencies it's built for, you don't have to do any kind of magical tuning to receive wifi data - the same is true of your ears, when you overhear someone.
"This propensity to blame victims in this case is just astounding."
The same goes for my overhearing someone talking loudly in their garden example. So if they talk to loudly, you hear them, and they call you an annoying little eavesdropper and you tell them they shouldn't talk so loud then then you're blaming the victim?
The thing is I'd have sympathy and side with you if they really were expending effort - i.e. they were breaking WEP keys and bypassing security etc. but that's not the case, it was passive monitoring and the very fact it was passive explains why no effort was expended.
"Google knew they shouldn't be doing it. They told staff not to do it. And they admitted by doing it they did wrong. What more do you need?"
Right, and we've had numerous politicians have to apologise that something they said was wrong. Sometimes it genuinely was, other times not. Just because they had to to keep their job doesn't mean they really were actually wrong though, it just means they were forced into it.
"I have had "premium" contracts from Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, whoever, and I have *never* had response like this from a commercial supplier, and this has happened multiple times to me."
The problem is that proprietary vendors have these layers of customer support that are intended to filter out the silly trivial requests that don't require a high level of expertise (the sorts of one's that Alan Cox would see on the mailing list and just ignore leaving for someone with more time and patience to deal with). These premium contacts are a similar thing, you're told they're premium but ultimately they're often just another level of filtering that's only slightly higher up the chain than the bog standard support desk folks.
But for what it's worth when I've had genuine issues that need need this level of support I've had the same experience you have from proprietary vendors, whether it's posting on Microsoft's forums or contact their devs directly with bugs I've found in the past, or whether it was e-mailing John Carmack about some issues I was having with the Quake 3 mod tools many years back, through to the non-technical world of e-mailing the chief exec of BT in the UK because my phone line was screwed and their usual support line was being hopeless (he responded within a few hours to my direct e-mail to him on a Saturday afternoon from his Blackberry and had an engineer out to fix it on a fricking Sunday which still amazes me to this day).
So I don't think your assertion is really fair, yes proprietary vendors have layers of crap that you're supposed to go through, but if you post in the right places, just as you did with your issue, or if you contact the devs directly, you'll get equally good help, not just in tech but in many organisations that on the face of it are seen as faceless and difficult to deal with.
Just because FOSS doesn't have layers of support lines to deal with the chaff (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean that if you go straight to the talent of those companies that do that you're going to get any better a reply than if you do the same with proprietary vendors.
As a counter example, the fact FOSS people are often working in a personal capacity can be detrimental to the responses you get to them - some of the responses I've seen from the PHP folks for example to well written, intelligent, honest and legitimate questions would result in a disciplinary at best, or sacking at worst if the same response was given by a member of staff from a commercial organisation.
This isn't to talk down people like Cox, on the contrary the fact he gave you the response he does was fantastic, but my point is more to defend the devs working at even some of the organisations Slashdot hates like Microsoft - there are some damn good people there too who are damn nice and damn helpful and despite who they work for they deserve the same recognition for the good job they do in going out their way to be equally helpful.
Most highly talented people, the best of the best are contactable and responsive. You just have to actually know where they hang out or take steps to get in touch directly.
Honestly, I could care less. I'm a developer but to me if you have to rely on users behave to make it worth your while then you've got a flawed business model and have no right to complain when it doesn't work.
To me it's just plain stupid relying on ad revenue, or complaining about piracy, good enough apps can be sold as is and even with piracy factored in will be profitable. If you produce good enough apps and don't have an entitlement attitude ("but the world owes me 3x what I'm making from this, it's piracy's fault!" bullshit) then there's no problem.
It's only the selfish greedy whiners who think the world owes them that are bothered about lost ad revenue or piracy. Those people need to accept that their product just isn't commercially viable, and, if they made it their full time job, need to accept they failed at business and should just get a 9 - 5 job like anyone else.
People like Notch get it, he doesn't care about piracy nor does he care about ad revenue because he's made his millions by simply producing something good enough for enough people to pay for to make it worthwhile regardless.
"* Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really."
What's wrong with your home button?
"* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really."
I don't understand this. Are you complaining the lock screen doesn't change orientation? why does that matter? on Android slide to unlock works in any direction.
If you're talking about the home screen in general then locking and unlocking it is an option. Just turn it back off?
"* Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it."
Don't think it's crashed once for me since I had an old HTC Magic running 1.6 about 3 years ago.
"* Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest."
Has anyone at Google actually ever said it's not?
"* Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted."
That's not an Android specific thing, it's down to your device manufacturer. Rooting/unlocking has been trivial, consistent, and often even unnecessary (as devices were already unlocked) on everything I've bought, but that's because I've avoided manufacturers known for locking their handsets down.
"* Android is not a community project. Fix that."
Horrible idea, last thing we want is it turning into a clusterfuck of bad ideas when it's been making such stable consistent progress over the years.
Maybe instead of the internet they could get DARPA to create this thing where different government departments can connect together to allow rapid communication with each other without the inefficiency caused by relying on postal services for communication.
When it's up and running they could then expand it to departments they have overseas. When this is all working okay they could use it to communicate with friendly governments and research institutes. At some point they could make it accessible from anywhere so there staff can be contacted and can contact them using say, phone lines.
It would be like some kind of international network...
"And suicide is just one of those "counter productive" things people do when depressed. I know, I considered it. I don't have sympathy, with his choices, he made that bed."
Sorry but here you just further highlight the GPs point, considering suicide as a passing thought when you've been depressed is a far removed idea from people who actually enter a genuine suicidal state which has been determined to be a roughly 30minute window where you lose all rationality.
This is why in some countries, such as the UK, we have limits on how many painkillers you can buy at once - because it's been found that whilst yes, you could skirt round this by going to another shop, that creating that additional delay for someone who is suicidal can often be enough to get them through that period of irrationality and that is why it has been effective in decreasing suicides.
This is also why places like prisons have suicide watch - because when you're in that state the only way out is for someone to stop you, or for you to be unable to achieve suicide before you snap out of it. If suicide was a rational choice then prisoners would be in a fit state of mind to figure out how to kill themselves well before whoever was on suicide watch got to them, but it's not a rational choice. Just yesterday I was reading an article on PTSD in young soldiers on the BBC, and another example there was how a soldier who was stood at a sink with a knife over his wrists was snapped out of it by his dog barking - without that interruption he'd almost certainly not be here. As yet another example, this is why seemingly normal fathers sometimes commit atrocities such as murder-suicides involving killing their own young children before killing themselves.
So that's why people are saying you don't understand suicide, you don't. You think it's a choice, you think it's something you consciously and knowingly decide to do, it's not. It's a state you enter and really have no control over when you do. The fact you don't understand this is evidence enough that you do not understand suicide. Being depressed and having simply thought about suicide is a different thing and does not make you qualified to talk about the issue, the fact you didn't actually try and kill yourself means that you were fortunate that you simply never entered that true suicidal state.
Aaron didn't choose to kill himself, he was pushed to the point where he did at some point snap and enter that state, and put an end to his life as a result.
It's only like a peeping Tom if said peeping Tom is peeping at someone running round in the middle of a public street naked.
It's not like they creeped into people's gardens to gather this data, it was being broadcast all over the local neighbourhood unencrypted.
What next? you're going to say that someone who overheard someone else speaking too loud in their front garden as they walked past along the pavement is a creepy little snooper too?
Artists are often as much to blame, you only have to look at the entitlement attitude of many of them that they have a god given right to make money from performing whether their performances are good enough to be commercially viable or not.
I'd like to be a ninja assassin and get paid for it even if I wouldn't be very good at it and don't ever actually kill or harm anyone, but I don't expect to be paid for it regardless, no, I go back to the real world and get a real job where I'm paid for what I actually can do.
Artists need to stop thinking they're different in this respect too. For me there's very few artists or publishers I'd give money to, they're nearly all just a leech on society because they cause immense cost to society in wasting government and judicial time trying to enforce their failed business models. Most my entertainment money goes towards video games with publishers that don't actually screw me around.
What happened is the US government found a good excuse for saying one thing and doing another to make it appear like it was on your side without that actually being so.
No, we didn't already know this. Prior to this it was perfectly feasible that in fact Mars COULDN'T have supported life.
Now that we know that Mars still COULD have supported life, there is even more reason to keep looking for evidence of it, because the possibility remains.
Slashdot Mirror
To encourage others. Even if it can't now be used for research there will at least be some people saying "Oh, so being a mathematician is a path to becoming a millionaire".
That will encourage some kids and uni/college students. It's an attempt to try and do something about the divide in society between the recognition given to sports stars, celebrities, manufactured pop stars, and other overly glamorised non-contributors to the human race who generally get lavished in riches for nothing other than being a fucking idiot publicly and the people who do actually contribute like scientists.
There's still a long way to go because you'll still get paid way more for nothing other than the ability to kick a ball around a field effectively than you will for curing cancer, inventing the world wide web, or sending people to the moon and robots to Mars, but at least it's an attempt at doing something about the problem of western society where idiocy is valued far more greatly than intelligence and competence.
I'm intrigued to know whether given the closed nature of North Korea and it's poor education systems whether it has the ability to perform this type of attack entirely indigenously or whether China has helped or given some kind of training on this.
I'm usually one to defend China as I think the threat of it is normally quite overblown, but I'm having a hard time believing North Korea has the talent to have done this entirely by itself.
Basically there was some dodgy site where you could pay for DDOSs which was believed to be behind these attacks. This site was amusingly and somewhat ironically insecure such that if you knew the right URL you could view a list of clients for this site to see who had paid for what, and on this list were attacks corresponding to Krebs and Ars with an e-mail address for the client stored alongside them (along with many other attacks/clients, some of which had previously been verified). Turns out this e-mail address was also registered to a Facebook account of a guy in the UK, and voila, Krebs gets the guy's identity.
Sure it could all be some master ploy to throw Krebs off the scent, but more realistically what we have here is a script kiddie who was careless with his details and just got himself caught.
So I'd say his tip is pretty decent grounds at least for the police to investigate the person in question if nothing else.
No, it only applies to commercial organisations, publishers that have more than one author, and publishers that have an editorial unit.
That doesn't in any way whatsoever apply to bloggers so the headline and summary are just FUD made up by the likes of Murdoch and his cronies in a desperate attempt to avoid the responsibility to tell the truth being forced upon them.
The problem is that the only freedom being harmed is the previous press freedom to lie, break the law, and make stuff up.
Most people just don't think that's freedom we need (just like most people don't think the freedom to murder people, abuse children, steal and so forth are freedoms we need).
So I wouldn't say it's a sad day for freedom, on the contrary, it's a great day because people's right to privacy, right not to be victims of illegality of the press, right not to be lied about in public papers is being defended over the press's freedom to lie and make stuff up.
British TV channels are already held to this sort of standard and the likes of BBC news are some of the best in the world, so it shows, losing the ability to lie, and make stuff up actually raises standards of the press.
This only appears as a bad thing if you ignore the context of why this law came around - because the British print press was rife with lies and law breaking and there wasn't even a public interest defence for them, it was just out and out lies and criminality for profit and nothing more.
As AmiMoJo pointed out, part of the law is that any future changes require 66% of MPs to vote for it in parliament.
Or in other words, being a democracy, it means an overwhelming amount of the populace and their representatives have to support the measure.
Besides this article and most the responses are 99% FUD anyway. The law also states that you need to:
1) Publish about news and current affairs and do so commercially
2) Have multiple authors publishing for said commercial entity
3) Have editorial controls
Honestly, the only people complaining are the companies who have been complicit in illegal activity or who make money off of lying about people and things - the likes of Murdoch, The Daily Mail et. al.
Guido Fawkes is complaining because he's a Tea Party-esque Murdoch loving whinger and so supports the right's previous freedom to lie, break the law, and make things up to retain power.
This is a good law, and the only arguments against it are FUD. Trying to bring bloggers into it is a pathetic attempt at the dirty lying press who are the target of these laws stirring up the internet demographic against the laws. The only way a blogger will be impacted is if they're not actually a blogger because they have multiple staff, are commercial, and have an editor - in other words, because they're actually a news publisher.
Honestly, the only problem with the law (which I still don't understand) is that the press have the choice of signing up to this regime, and can choose not to. The penalty for not doing so will be that they can face higher fines from a judge if and when they lie and a ruling is made against them. I don't understand why it's not mandatory, an equivalent is for TV companies, and yet they produce some of the best, most impartial news out there - Al Jazeera and BBC News are probably two of the best news sources on the planet for example and get by just fine under British TV regulation. Also, ITV broke the Jimmy Savile story, something the press failed to do despite all the FUD they've spread about how such things can't be possible under a proper regulator - I didn't seem them breaking it despite the fact they've had all the freedom in the world (including to break the law it seems).
Or to cut a long story short, if you're a media outlet that is honest, objective, and doesn't break the law outside of absolutely genuine public interest cases, then there is literally nothing in these laws that should be a problem. The UK has some of the best news sources in the world on TV, and online, but our print media is almost full of Fox News style rubbish - I can easily name objective online and TV news sources, it's pretty hard to do that with print media nowadays. It's about time print was cleaned up and forced to follow the same standards that make our other media great because it's also the source of 90% of the UK's idiocy, ignorance, xenophobia and general bile. We want the truth from our media, not lies and abusive illegality.
"There is evidence that if illegal downloading were to hit the 100% mark then there would be no music made. (well no professional music made) There would be no way to fund it."
That's such an awfully stupid comment. If no music was paid for due to 100% illegal downloading there'd be no professional music made - no shit, professional by definition requires payment. Professional is the key qualifier though, there'd still be music made, I know any number of people who have made their own bands for the sheer enjoyment of making music rather than any inherent interest in making a profit.
"Ongoing activity is not evidence of a "win." Look at the drug war for your benchmark."
It's not evidence of a lose either, merely that the war is still underway.
"You think facing down the corporate interests with a "so what" mentality will win the day, I'm really afraid you're not only wrong, but wrong in a way that's going to get a lot of people hurt."
It's better than running scared of the system and acting like a good little sheep that has no freedom that's for sure.
"Yes, but again, they don't know very much about it yet, nor do they understand the potential consequences. There's a great deal of "Internet Superman" behavior -- loudmouthery and etc. -- but when it comes time to face the judge, that stuff tends to evaporate like the worthless bluster it is."
Which is fine, but it's not as if they can even come close to catching and dealing with a non-negligible proportion of the people involved. The GP agreed with you that yes, some people will get caught and run through the grinders and that sucks for them, but that doesn't stop the hundreds of millions of other people carrying on as is. Even those who do get ruled against by a rigged system it seems to be of little use, most of The Pirate Bay guys who were found guilty are still free and not a penny in compensation has reached the RIAA, Jammie Thomas will likely declare bankruptcy and not have a penny she can even give to them too - the RIAA's legal costs will be far higher than anything she can pay to them even if she were to pay the full $220,000. So sure, some people get caught, some people get run through the courts but so what? It does nothing to help the content industry win the war, they still lose at the end of the day.
"The drug war, in the meantime, has turned prison into a for-profit enterprise; it's no longer a negative to the state to incarcerate you (and take all your stuff, ruin your life, etc.) The more, the merrier: They'll just build more prisons and use you as slave labor. So when they begin to really reap the violators -- and you may be dead certain they will -- the prison system is ready to pack you in there like sardines, no problem."
This point is really US centric, so I'll simply make the point that even if they managed to jail the entire population of the US there's still over a billion pirates elsewhere in the world they can't deal with, they still don't win.
"Now you're beginning to get it. Weed -- only one drug, and one so harmless it's amazing -- is just barely getting traction at the state level"
You grossly understate this (but I assume it's probably down to lack of awareness of global politics). Other countries are making moves too, the deputy PM in the UK wants legalisation after a committee of MPs decided it made sense following a year long study into it, a couple of countries such as Uruguay have decided to defy the global ban on drugs and are legalising them, and the next summit on global drug laws is due soon where there is expected to be removal of the global legal ban on drugs precisely so nations can legislate to legalise some or all of them and put them under state or legal private control. It's not just a handful of US state legalising cannabis, the whole game is changing globally such that it looks like the war on drugs is actually coming to an end, and it wasn't those waging the war that won.
But here's the thing, here's what you really ignore, there have been countless examples through history of people not carring what the law is to the point the law had to be overturned, from giving women the vote, to US prohibition to British pirate radio stations in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, to the arab spring, to equalisation of gay rights and legalisation of drugs now that are slowly coming to a close in some parts of the world- these sorts of things forced governments to change after decades of attempts at policing them failed.
You can't win when you try to legislate out something that the vast majority of people want, it has never worked, not once throughout histor
I hear they're run by lizard men and are responsible for 9/11 too!
It really does depend on the public sector service in question though.
My local council thought it'd be amusing to blow £2million upgrading every computer to Office 2010 from Office 2007 at the same time as cutting useful services and doing nothing about inept services.
Because of course there was some pressing feature that Office 2010 offered that 2007 didn't that the whole entire council's network required at a time when they were supposed to be streamlining and making efficiency gains.
To be fair, I'm not convinced there isn't enough money to deal with the problem, there certainly is, it's just that public sector in it's almost entirety is ineptly managed so rather than making real actual savings, they'd rather cut things as a hole without a shit for the impact on their customers (the public), in some places that will be IT, in others it will be frontline staff. Pet projects still seem to get funded no matter the idiocy and pointlessness of them, so even in our time of "austerity" there's still more than enough money to go round if large proportions of it weren't just outright being thrown away.
In the UK we follow the idea of policing by consent. The principle is that the police are not above other citizens but work with and for them. This is why they do not carry firearms as standard because that breaks this social contract that they are our equals, rather than there to control us. The firearms come out when they are dealing with someone who themselves have firearms. I'll admit this has been corrupted somewhat since 9/11 where we do have officers patrolling some airports with guns, but for the most part it's still very much intact.
Have a look here for the list of principles:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/policeNine.php
Countries like the US could learn lessons from this, there are simply too many powerful police and police related units (TSA, DHS, FBI, etc.) with too much power over the populace which has led to a decade of abuse against citizens that have been permitted by successive governments ranging from warrantless wiretaps, far too heavy handed use of SWAT teams and national security letters. Absolutely law enforcement in America needs to remember who it serves - the people.
Reviews have always been protection rackets. Companies pay for them with money or freebies and in turn the reviewers give it a good review.
This is why just every once in a while great games get oddly bad reviews - someone in the marketing department forgot to pay a certain reviewer their protection money.
There are very very few review sites (if any?) now that review honestly and independently. The best metric you can get I guess are post-release user scores, assuming they're never manipulated.
For what it's worth this isn't new, I remember all the way back in the 80s there was some scandal about print magazines here in the UK doing the exact same thing back then.
Maybe you live somewhere backwards where wifi and the computers using it are powered by some kind of device that you have to manually power by rotating a wheel or something, but in the western world the effort involved would simply be turning a computer on which is pre-configured to simply log passively all wifi data.
Neither the pre-configuration or pressing the power button before you do your streetview drive on the morning though add any merit to your debate, the fundamental point still remains that Google were passively collecting data that was publicly available in a public space and not protected at all.
"You're just wrong. Get over it."
Well aren't you acting like an irrational little child. Rather than accept that your original argument was trivially disproven with a simple example you cover your ears, close your eyes and pretend reality isn't reality. I guess it sucks to be you. Oh well, keep telling yourself you're not wrong, the rest of us will just keep laughing at you.
"Command Console doesn't have simple highlight / copy / paste functionality."
Has since at least Windows 2000... so only 13 years then.
"When the default application isn't set for a document type, the first choice that's provided in the resulting pop-up is "Do you want to wander around on the web to find an application that can open this document?" rather than the option of selecting an application from the list of installed applications."
Is it really such a hardship to select the other option? Bare in mind this functionality exists because most end users have no idea about file associations and they just want it to work. If they click on a PDF that has no reader it's kinda nice if the OS goes off to the internet and finds out that they have a choice of Acrobat and whatever else available to open it.
"In SQL Server Management Studio, when you have multiple sessions open, they are tabbed."
That's why there is a little downwards arrow to the right of the tabs that instead just displays them as a vertical list if you so choose.
To cut a long story short, the reason you hate Windows it seems is because you know absolutely nothing about it.
Honestly, the fact you had to resort to obscure things that aren't actually real problems would to me suggest it must be doing pretty decent. If the OS was actually seriously deficient one would think you could come up with some real actual problems.
"Ridiculous. You have to be actively listening for it on a given frequency."
The same applies to hearing someone's conversation as you walk past, the frequency in question is standard to Wifi.
"In short you have to expend effort to get the information."
Rubbish, all Wifi receiving equipment automatically works on the frequencies it's built for, you don't have to do any kind of magical tuning to receive wifi data - the same is true of your ears, when you overhear someone.
"This propensity to blame victims in this case is just astounding."
The same goes for my overhearing someone talking loudly in their garden example. So if they talk to loudly, you hear them, and they call you an annoying little eavesdropper and you tell them they shouldn't talk so loud then then you're blaming the victim?
The thing is I'd have sympathy and side with you if they really were expending effort - i.e. they were breaking WEP keys and bypassing security etc. but that's not the case, it was passive monitoring and the very fact it was passive explains why no effort was expended.
"Google knew they shouldn't be doing it. They told staff not to do it. And they admitted by doing it they did wrong. What more do you need?"
Right, and we've had numerous politicians have to apologise that something they said was wrong. Sometimes it genuinely was, other times not. Just because they had to to keep their job doesn't mean they really were actually wrong though, it just means they were forced into it.
"I have had "premium" contracts from Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, whoever, and I have *never* had response like this from a commercial supplier, and this has happened multiple times to me."
The problem is that proprietary vendors have these layers of customer support that are intended to filter out the silly trivial requests that don't require a high level of expertise (the sorts of one's that Alan Cox would see on the mailing list and just ignore leaving for someone with more time and patience to deal with). These premium contacts are a similar thing, you're told they're premium but ultimately they're often just another level of filtering that's only slightly higher up the chain than the bog standard support desk folks.
But for what it's worth when I've had genuine issues that need need this level of support I've had the same experience you have from proprietary vendors, whether it's posting on Microsoft's forums or contact their devs directly with bugs I've found in the past, or whether it was e-mailing John Carmack about some issues I was having with the Quake 3 mod tools many years back, through to the non-technical world of e-mailing the chief exec of BT in the UK because my phone line was screwed and their usual support line was being hopeless (he responded within a few hours to my direct e-mail to him on a Saturday afternoon from his Blackberry and had an engineer out to fix it on a fricking Sunday which still amazes me to this day).
So I don't think your assertion is really fair, yes proprietary vendors have layers of crap that you're supposed to go through, but if you post in the right places, just as you did with your issue, or if you contact the devs directly, you'll get equally good help, not just in tech but in many organisations that on the face of it are seen as faceless and difficult to deal with.
Just because FOSS doesn't have layers of support lines to deal with the chaff (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean that if you go straight to the talent of those companies that do that you're going to get any better a reply than if you do the same with proprietary vendors.
As a counter example, the fact FOSS people are often working in a personal capacity can be detrimental to the responses you get to them - some of the responses I've seen from the PHP folks for example to well written, intelligent, honest and legitimate questions would result in a disciplinary at best, or sacking at worst if the same response was given by a member of staff from a commercial organisation.
This isn't to talk down people like Cox, on the contrary the fact he gave you the response he does was fantastic, but my point is more to defend the devs working at even some of the organisations Slashdot hates like Microsoft - there are some damn good people there too who are damn nice and damn helpful and despite who they work for they deserve the same recognition for the good job they do in going out their way to be equally helpful.
Most highly talented people, the best of the best are contactable and responsive. You just have to actually know where they hang out or take steps to get in touch directly.
Honestly, I could care less. I'm a developer but to me if you have to rely on users behave to make it worth your while then you've got a flawed business model and have no right to complain when it doesn't work.
To me it's just plain stupid relying on ad revenue, or complaining about piracy, good enough apps can be sold as is and even with piracy factored in will be profitable. If you produce good enough apps and don't have an entitlement attitude ("but the world owes me 3x what I'm making from this, it's piracy's fault!" bullshit) then there's no problem.
It's only the selfish greedy whiners who think the world owes them that are bothered about lost ad revenue or piracy. Those people need to accept that their product just isn't commercially viable, and, if they made it their full time job, need to accept they failed at business and should just get a 9 - 5 job like anyone else.
People like Notch get it, he doesn't care about piracy nor does he care about ad revenue because he's made his millions by simply producing something good enough for enough people to pay for to make it worthwhile regardless.
"* Apps need a standard user interface way to exit. Really."
What's wrong with your home button?
"* Locking the Nexus homescreen to portrait is idiotic. Really."
I don't understand this. Are you complaining the lock screen doesn't change orientation? why does that matter? on Android slide to unlock works in any direction.
If you're talking about the home screen in general then locking and unlocking it is an option. Just turn it back off?
"* Maps crashes all the time. Surely you know that. Fix it."
Don't think it's crashed once for me since I had an old HTC Magic running 1.6 about 3 years ago.
"* Pretending that Android is not Linux is intellectually dishonest."
Has anyone at Google actually ever said it's not?
"* Support for unlocking and root access is still half hearted."
That's not an Android specific thing, it's down to your device manufacturer. Rooting/unlocking has been trivial, consistent, and often even unnecessary (as devices were already unlocked) on everything I've bought, but that's because I've avoided manufacturers known for locking their handsets down.
"* Android is not a community project. Fix that."
Horrible idea, last thing we want is it turning into a clusterfuck of bad ideas when it's been making such stable consistent progress over the years.
Maybe instead of the internet they could get DARPA to create this thing where different government departments can connect together to allow rapid communication with each other without the inefficiency caused by relying on postal services for communication.
When it's up and running they could then expand it to departments they have overseas. When this is all working okay they could use it to communicate with friendly governments and research institutes. At some point they could make it accessible from anywhere so there staff can be contacted and can contact them using say, phone lines.
It would be like some kind of international network...
"And suicide is just one of those "counter productive" things people do when depressed. I know, I considered it. I don't have sympathy, with his choices, he made that bed."
Sorry but here you just further highlight the GPs point, considering suicide as a passing thought when you've been depressed is a far removed idea from people who actually enter a genuine suicidal state which has been determined to be a roughly 30minute window where you lose all rationality.
This is why in some countries, such as the UK, we have limits on how many painkillers you can buy at once - because it's been found that whilst yes, you could skirt round this by going to another shop, that creating that additional delay for someone who is suicidal can often be enough to get them through that period of irrationality and that is why it has been effective in decreasing suicides.
This is also why places like prisons have suicide watch - because when you're in that state the only way out is for someone to stop you, or for you to be unable to achieve suicide before you snap out of it. If suicide was a rational choice then prisoners would be in a fit state of mind to figure out how to kill themselves well before whoever was on suicide watch got to them, but it's not a rational choice. Just yesterday I was reading an article on PTSD in young soldiers on the BBC, and another example there was how a soldier who was stood at a sink with a knife over his wrists was snapped out of it by his dog barking - without that interruption he'd almost certainly not be here. As yet another example, this is why seemingly normal fathers sometimes commit atrocities such as murder-suicides involving killing their own young children before killing themselves.
So that's why people are saying you don't understand suicide, you don't. You think it's a choice, you think it's something you consciously and knowingly decide to do, it's not. It's a state you enter and really have no control over when you do. The fact you don't understand this is evidence enough that you do not understand suicide. Being depressed and having simply thought about suicide is a different thing and does not make you qualified to talk about the issue, the fact you didn't actually try and kill yourself means that you were fortunate that you simply never entered that true suicidal state.
Aaron didn't choose to kill himself, he was pushed to the point where he did at some point snap and enter that state, and put an end to his life as a result.
"What is especially ironic is that the Catholic Church does not have anything against homosexuals per se, so long as they are celibate."
So in other words it does have something against them?
I don't have anything against Catholics per-se, as long as they don't ever practice their religion.
It's only like a peeping Tom if said peeping Tom is peeping at someone running round in the middle of a public street naked.
It's not like they creeped into people's gardens to gather this data, it was being broadcast all over the local neighbourhood unencrypted.
What next? you're going to say that someone who overheard someone else speaking too loud in their front garden as they walked past along the pavement is a creepy little snooper too?
Artists are often as much to blame, you only have to look at the entitlement attitude of many of them that they have a god given right to make money from performing whether their performances are good enough to be commercially viable or not.
I'd like to be a ninja assassin and get paid for it even if I wouldn't be very good at it and don't ever actually kill or harm anyone, but I don't expect to be paid for it regardless, no, I go back to the real world and get a real job where I'm paid for what I actually can do.
Artists need to stop thinking they're different in this respect too. For me there's very few artists or publishers I'd give money to, they're nearly all just a leech on society because they cause immense cost to society in wasting government and judicial time trying to enforce their failed business models. Most my entertainment money goes towards video games with publishers that don't actually screw me around.
What happened is the US government found a good excuse for saying one thing and doing another to make it appear like it was on your side without that actually being so.
Welcome to politics.
No, we didn't already know this. Prior to this it was perfectly feasible that in fact Mars COULDN'T have supported life.
Now that we know that Mars still COULD have supported life, there is even more reason to keep looking for evidence of it, because the possibility remains.