Because Facebook is really neutral to all mobile phone platforms - it has no real interest in the market, only to make itself accessible everywhere.
Google, with Android, might potentially decide to ensure the Android experience of Google+ is far better in the future to coax people onto the Android platform, hence, if Apple allows it's users to use Google+ and move to it from Facebook it might find that it's something being used to convince people to move away from it's platforms in the future.
Of course, it's worth pointing out that Apple has dragged it's heals on app approval or dreamt up arbitrary and contradictory excuses in the past from companies it simply does not like for seemingly no real reason other than it does not like them, so it wouldn't be far fetched for Apple to do this.
Whilst I agree the time taken for the approval process was no big deal and nothing to really moan about I think you'd have to be rather naive to think that this delay wasn't related to Apple examining the potential impact it could have on their business and weighing it against the PR damage it would cause if they rejected it with yet another arbitrary excuse. When you're someone like Apple and facing an application from someone like Google that might gain a real serious following, then it's simply good business sense to examine the impact on your business, that takes time, and that is likely the cause of the delay.
Anyway, sorry to interrupt your ill thought out rant, you can carry on now.
"Still, analysing even a few GB of data a day is no task for mere men."
Unless it's a word document or power point presentation in which someone has embedded an uncompressed video or bunch of uncompressed images. Then you can get through it in about 5 minutes flat, not counting the half hour it takes Word/Powerpoint to load.
No, in all seriousness though, it really depends what the data is. That's why I'm not keen on this arbitrary "many gigabytes of data" metric which articles like this are supposed to wow us with. Really, what is the data? how is it stored? Is it quick and easy for computers to process and produce intelligible results? Is it easily and quickly human decipherable? A few GB of data may well just be a high definition video of say, an hour long event somewhere in the universe that can be sped up 10 fold and watched in no time at all, to gather everything we need to know from it for all we know. If a supernova takes a day to occur in realtime, but can be compressed down to a 10 minute video or even a number of important stills for scientists to gather all they need from it, then even a terrabyte of data is unimpressive, compared to other data that really does require trawling through bit by bit.
So really, it all depends what the data is, and how easy it is to represent and digest, rather than the inherent amount of data.
Whilst I'm not agreeing with that theory per-se, I think the timing of Anonymous arrests have been very convenient. The problem is the people being arrested are almost certainly people who used LOIC without masking their IP at all.
I do think it's a little odd that each time a country has a big story relating to law enforcement the day before, the next day we get a story of "xx anonymous members arrested!"- last time it was SOCA, this time it's the whole NoW deal. Turkish police similarly did the same thing the day after they saw embarassing press.
I don't think it's unrealistic that law enforcement has kept a list of the IPs of LOIC users, and track down names relating to them, and is treating them like currency "Oh well, let's just spend 16 anonymous arrests to see if we can make us look a bit more competent after yesterdays bad press".
This coupled with some of the UK press most implicated in the whole situation- the Murdoch's papers like The Sun and The Times for example, but also other papers almost certainly guilty due to the IPCC report implicating them and the fact they've been so defensive of old Rupert like The Daily Mail that are now trying to shift the focus onto the European economy instead suggesting it's "more pressing". Well no actually, the potential downfall of our government, couple with years of police and political corruption isn't less pressing than whatever happens in Europe because it's precisely that type of ethos of things being swept under the carpet that led to the crisis.
I think you're right in that Rupert didn't just tell the FBI to go arrest them or any such thing, but I think it'd be naive to think the police haven't been using LOIC users as a bit of a PR tool when it suits, and certainly there are unquestionably forces, whether just the press, or the police and the press, or even some politicians, the police and the press trying to drawn the focus away from the whole situation right now.
Yes well I'm not really one for conspiracy theories myself but 3 weeks ago if you'd said Murdoch's empire had been spying on the phone of the Prime Minister of the UK and that he had a network of staffers and close ex-staffers with strong personal links to people running right through the upper echelons of the Metropolitan police then people would've called you a conspiracy nut too, the problem is, it turns out now that it was true.
So whilst some conspiracy theories are genuinely absurd, we must be careful to not blindly dismiss all of them and hence run the risk of missing the ones that really are true.
"Things such as proportional response to crimes, presumption of innocence, and unwillingness (or at least a strong abhorrence) to harm innocents in pursuit of the guilty all come to mind. Otherwise your vigilante cure is worse than the disease."
But therein lies the problem, vigilantism doesn't preclude these things, and that's fundamentally why I think it's a fair argument to say Lulzec are doing something relatively fair here, and Osama Bin Laden did not. Bin Laden did hit innocent people, and in fact, targetted purely innocent people. Ignoring Lulzec's past actions for now, is it really unfair that they would hack the e-mails of news of the world journalists when news of the world hacked over 4,000 innocent people's voicemail? Isn't that precisely the type of proportional response you're referring to?
Doesn't the current system of law in fact fail in these areas? Aren't many sentences too lenient, whilst others too harsh? Why can killing someone in the UK through reckless driving net you a suspended sentence and hence no jail time, but chipping cable boxes to get free pay TV can get you 5 years? Is that proportional? Presumption of innocence has long gone out the window in Western society for some crimes.
"Vigilante action is tantamount to saying the system is so broken that there's no point trying to save it, and what's needed is revolution. We have to destroy the village in order to save it."
Well that's really what's happening in much of the world. Clearly it's happening explicitly in the Middle East and North Africa, but it's happening on a much more subtle level in parts of the west. In the UK things like the expenses scandal, a change to a hung parliament decreasing party powers for the first time in decade, and now the uncovering of the hacking scandal is ripping the establishment to pieces, but even globally one shouldn't underestimate the actions of the likes of Wikileaks etc.
People really are fed up of the status quo, people genuinely do think the only option is for drastic change, and sure in some countries that's more pronounced than others, but most certainly there seems to be somewhat of a global revolution going on- people spent the last decade being shit on by their governments under the excuse of the war on terror and now people are fed up, they've had enough, and they're pushing back. Vigilantism against the ruling classes who have hoarded far too much power for themselves such that they were serving only themselves and their corporate friends, and not the people they are supposed to represent is one of many facets of that change.
"To be honest, I think it's a combination of computer books going out of date quite quickly, that the people who buy such books are more likely to do so online and that computer books in general don't (AFAIK) sell as well these days."
I don't think this is a problem for them, because they're precisely the type of books they do tend to stock- those that are replaced with a new version every 6 to 12 months. Things like "Learn Flash 9 in 5 minutes" or whatever - stuff that really could be replaced by a quick Google for a tutorial covering the exact same thing for free.
Particularly with some of the classic computer science books like those by Knuth, things like SICP, you just don't see them stocked, but I have a strong interest in math and it's the same there- many Waterstones simply outright do not even have a math section beyond GCSE/A-Level maths exam guides and that really does stink!
I can understand it's because the level of book I am seeking is probably classed as niche now, but it's a bit of a sad reflection of society if anything beyond A-Level is classed as niche- certainly they never stock any graduate level computing, maths or science books, let alone postgraduate!
The UK Borders chain closed down about a year or two ago. It's a bit of a shame because we really have nothing else comparative nationwide, perhaps the closests is Waterstones but most their stores only sell the latest romance novel or Jordan autobiography and shite like that rather than a useful range of maths/science/computing books. Short of going to a handful of cities like Cambridge which still have good book stores, there's really nothing- pretty much the whole of the North of England seems devoid of good bookstores.
I agree it was their own fault, they were overpriced, I did tend to go in to have a look because it was great for that, but do I buy the OpenGL SuperBible for £40 there or do I buy it for £25 from Amazon? Bit of a no brainer really.
But I found it wasn't just their prices, they relied heavily on misleading promotions- a series of identical kids books was 3 for 2, so we figured we'd get 3 for my neices birthday and despite them all being on that shelf when we got to the checkout it turns out that only random books in the series were 3 for 2, and they didn't tell you this and merely hope you wouldn't check your receipt to see that you'd in fact been charged for 3, and then when we go back into the store to ask why we'd been charged we get some pissy clerk try and pretend it's our fault as if we're meant to be able to magically guess which books on that shelf are part of the promotion and which aren't.
So I do miss them, and I love the likes of Chapters when I go to Canada (particularly in Ottawa where you can't travel for 5 minutes without bumping into another chapters store!), but when they ran their business like that, there's really little one can say, they were truly their own worst enemy. I wouldn't expect Amazon prices as I recognise running a store is costly, but charging £40 vs. £25 is really just greed, and there's no way they were going to get my business doing that.
How much are you paying? I've been looking at moving jobs to further my career myself lately, although am of course looking at Senior positions. In the process of that though I've stumbled across a few junior ads and it made me chuckle the amount some companies were expecting people to work as devs for.
If your wage is unreasonably low like many companies than that's probably part the issue, here in the UK a lot of junior dev posts are paying less than many run of the mill IT support roles and so I suspect a lot are just going for that instead, because it's easier, and pays better. Even if your firm is offering a decent wage this is probably a large part the reason why there are so few junior devs if it's the same where you are - they've probably just been put off by retardedly low wage offerings.
It's not limited to junior developers either, I've intereviewed for a few more senior dev posts now with my wage requirements made clear from the outset, and have been top candidate, but then have been given offers that are much lower, sometimes lower than my current wage so there are a lot of time wasters and jokers out there too- instead they then just do not fill the post and whinge there are no devs out there.
The whole market is pretty fucked up right now, I think a lot of companies are assuming because there are such high levels of unemployed they can get staff for slave wages but instead they're just finding themselves entirely unable to fill posts because devs with jobs aren't going to take less, and devs without jobs have little reason to stay in the industry and may as well go work as something else and get paid more.
For what it's worth we're not entirely unique in this though. My girlfriend is Canadian and it was only the other week her Dad was complaining about Canada being guilty of the same thing- sending people off whom the government should in fact be protecting, and failing to bother to get citizens safely home who have been arrested unfairly in foreign nations.
Perhaps we like freely sending people out the country, to counterbalance the fact we have absolutely no fucking idea how many people are actually coming in to the country.
Even the BBC is quoting him now, and The Register regularly quotes him and peddles his shit, although that's less of a suprise as The Register always relies on shills and people long discredited and full of shit to backup it's falsehoods- from music industry puppets, to discredited climate change denialists, to irrelevant military "experts" it's less of a suprise there. The BBC though? I'm dissapointed to say the least.
Yep, I find it incredible how quick people are to bash the UN when it's actually upholding a principle that most Slashdotters hold dear when they're not blinded by the irrational hate of the UN. The UN is actually allowing fairness here- it's giving everyone a chance, and you may disagree with them, but in the international community they no less have a say than anyone else.
We might not like the way other countries are run- but here's a hint- they probably don't like the way ours are run either.
Is it any less hypocritical that the US should ever chair the committee when it's expended more munitions in recent years and more nuclear weapons in history than anyone else? Is it any less hypocritical that the US ever chairs a committee on human rights when it's been one of the worst culprits for torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, firing on civilians and has even had some of it's soldiers guilty of rape in warzones?
I'm not trying to attack the US here, but the mindset of "Oh, it's North Korea, the UN is obviously bad" is kiddy thinking to say the least- it's not that simple, and this illustrates the point. North Korea deserves a say like every other country involved, we don't have to listen to them, we don't have to act on their proposals, but they deserve their turn all the same, else the UN really would be more of a bully of an organisation, which ironically, is also what most UN detractors here accuse it of anyway. If North Korea comes forward with a proposal to disarm when other nuclear nations have similarly small stockpiles can we really say they're being unfair or irrational? We might not like that proposal because we don't trust them, but do they trust Western promises to send them aid or to not attack them if they disarm their nuclear capability any more?
"True but I thought Schengen and EEA was a very large fraction of the way to EU... For all intents and purposes they're part of the EU other than some signatures?"
Not in the slightest.
EU membership requires a lot more changes than that, most prominently adherence to EU laws and regulations.
To enter the EU you have to adhere to certain principles and demands. Serbia for example has been blocked from joining the EU until it handed over all it's war criminals to the ICC, and now they've finally handed Mladic over they can start their bid, but it's taken them some time. Iceland would likely have to stop or drastically reduce whaling. All conutries joining must adhere to European directives on things like telecommunications, human rights and so forth.
The EU isn't just a free trade zone, it also mandates certain laws and rights which all have to be implemented- the European Telecommunications Directive for example mandates that ISPs should be allow common carrier status, the European Working Time directive mandates that employees are allowed to refuse to work more than 48hrs a week on average over a 3 week period with no threat of repercussions.
It standardises many such things relating to justice, infrastructure, pricing, trade and so forth. It also of course means having representatives in the European parliament which must be elected via a form of PR. Even little things must be done, for example the EU defines protected foods such that for example, Cumberland sausages must be made in Cumberland, England, to allow cultural protection of such historic goods throughout the EU- if Iceland has a firm selling Cumberland sausages made elsewhere then it has to mandate that they stop that.
There's an awful lot to do seeping into every facet of every day life, and not many people realise it. The EU has changed most people's lives in Europe for the better through again for example the Working Time Directive and again not many people realise it.
Your Texas analogy doesn't really fit - to stick on the same note though it'd be more like comparing the differences between Canada and a US state- it's like saying because Canada is a signatory to NAFTA and because border controls aren't terribly rough that Canada is like a US state already- obviously it's not, the differences between Canada's obligations to the US government and Texas' obligations to the US government are immense. Just as the obligations of Iceland to the European parliament are quite distinct from the obligations of say, Britain to the European parliament. Jokes aside, Canada is quite clearly still an independent nation from the US, just as Iceland is from the EU despite free trade agreements and more lax passport controls.
I don't think it's so much privacy per-se that people want out of this systems, it's merely the ability to know and control what vectors there are to access you information.
Google+ attempts to achieve this by making it explicit who you're sharing what with but Facebook never has, worse Facebook masks certain vectors, for example most people don't realise that just because their profile is private to everyone but their friends, this doesn't mean that their friends can't grant permission for apps to see their friends profiles bypassing any settings about "friends only" that their friends may have set- if you don't set all the options right "friends only" actually means "friends, and any app my friends use", which is quite different to friends only- it's a stealthy vector for your data to leak out to people you never wanted to be able to access it which can catch you unawares. Worse, Facebook when introducing this feature originally actually enabled it without telling anyone so that it applied retroactively- you may have thought you'd set things to friends only, but Facebook can change that when and how they want, even though doing so is a clear breach of at least the UK's data protection act, if not many other similar acts in other countries. Yet still they get away with it.
Most people realise to use these things you have to lose some privacy, but just as I only give my e-mail address to select people to minimise that chance its gets into the hands of spammers, I'd like to be certain that my personal information is only going to who I've said it's going to- sure it may leak out if my friends get a virus, but at least I've minimised the vectors, and can narrow down where and how it happened just as I can tell that it was some forum that gave my e-mail away to spammers if I used a special forums account for all forum activity separate from my main e-mail account.
Again, this is where Facebook fails- they let your data leak out left, right, and centre, and you have no idea to whom, where, or how- the only option is to not use it- Google+ is trying to do better than that, it can't guarantee perfect privacy, but at least it helps you understand and manage the vectors for data leakage better. and that's a good enough compromise between not using social networking at all, and your data goes everywhere to anyone who asks type wild-west of Facebook for many people.
Can't return the game if it's used, didn't really realise the problem until my girlfriend got her XBox.
Did write a formal complaint to trading standards though, which should be far more effective than contacting EA and Microsoft who simply wont give a shit about your letters.
It's actually worse than just that. Take Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and it's online pass for example. I had to activate this one time code to use it on my console in my gaming room, now if my girlfriend wants to play online using her profile on the XBox in the living room then she has to pay for a new pass representing a more than 33% rise in the cost of the game for two of us to be able to play it online. She could use my account of course, but what about when I want to play something else online with someone else and she wants to play that? We can't do that.
These online passes are a horrendous rape of consumer rights, they're a horrific money grab, and basically force houses with more than one gamer to buy the game once per gamer. It's not even simply 2nd hand sales that are destroyed here- it's use of the game by more than one family member in the same household.
"As for TFA? When you are hacking into and deleting a murder victim's voice mails, thus hindering an investigation, and bribing the cops for evidence? Then you've gone way past reporting the news into making it. Personally i hope that just because they close the doors won't stop the investigation and every single one who bribed or hacked gets a nice long jail term."
It's worse than that, the person in charge of The News of the World at the time this happened was Rebekah Brooks, she's now a director of News International itself and Murdoch and his son James have chosen to sacrifice The News of the World, which now consists of staff who weren't even around when all this went on to save Rebekah.
So in other words he's made about 200 possibly innocent people jobless, to protect the woman who was in charge when all this happened. This absolutely stinks and it's been made clear here by many politicians and celebs that we didn't want NotW to close, we wanted the people responsible brought to justice.
We've got to keep the pressure up over here and I hope people do, because he can't be allowed to get away with it this easily and make other people scapegoats. I only hope those he has used as scapegoats as insiders have more dirt they can use against News International and now have motivation to do so.
I think Rebekah Brook's statement really summed it up:
"I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations."
I mean, seriously, either she doesn't understand what the term inconceivable means in which case she wasn't a fit editor by any measure, or she is so fucking arrogant that she thinks she's the universal dictator of conceivability and can determine what is and isn't conceivable.
I'd imagine it's the latter, so no Ms. Brooks, sorry, but fuck off, I find it quite conceivable that you were behind this event, so don't you dare try and define what I may or may not find conceivable because I find it perfectly conceivable that you might in fact be guilty of it.
You'd think when she's in such a tenuous position she might be a bit more sensitive, and a little less arrogant, but her whole statement stunk of arrogance.
VS or no VS I find it incredible that anyone could claim Eclipse is better than anything. Have you really used it extensively and compared it to other IDEs? Eclipse is bottom of the pile trash- slow, prone to crashing, broken plugin system, lacking major features, not particularly great for usability, stupid workspace system.
JDeveloper and NetBeans are far better than Eclipse at least, let alone Visual Studio.
I agree.NET was a shameless copy of Java, but it's really not anymore. A combination of things through the years like anonymous methods, operator overloading, improved delegates, generics, LINQ, lambda expressions, and dynamic objects, have put C# way ahead of Java (and most other languages) nowadays. They had a slow start, but the C# team are definitely leaders in programming language evolution now, rather than mere imitators. as they were at the start This is really why C# usage is still rapidly accelerating whilst a number of indicators suggest Java is probably now in decline.
Despite all this none of it's really new, just new in that it's all implemented together in a decent way, I do agree that the general gist of the argument in this thread that Microsoft haven't historically innovated much is true- Visual Studio really borrows more from Borland's older IDEs than anything. I don't think much truly can be called original in computing now though, you can always find something in history that looks similar but was simply implemented before it's time and so never caught on, or was never marketed right, or used with quite the right combination of other technologies and so on.
It's a shame Al Jazeera is mentioned so low, so for anyone else reading this it's worth noting that there have been two Al Jazeera's, there is the Al Jazeera at aljazeera.net, which was only founded in 2006, and there is Al Jazeera publishing which up until March this year had aljazeera.com
The former is one of the more objective news sources around, and I've found it to often be even better than the BBC. Whilst they're not too great for some areas of the world like South America, or South East Asia, their coverage of the Middle East and Africa is nothing less than stellar and their ongoing coverage of the Libya campaign and Syrian uprising for example is simply unmatched.
Thankfully the bad Al Jazeera has been disbanded completely now, so don't let this study give a misguided impression the remaining Al Jazeera is down there with Fox- far from it, it's right at the other end of the scale! Now if only Fox would go the same way as bad Al Jazeera.
Rather than setup some external networking to a different site so that e-mails can be exchanged between them it's much easier to just go plug into that pre-existing wall socket over there in the corner and tunnel via the public internet where all the infrastructure is already in place for you. I mean, no one would think to try and attack your connection right? I mean, how would they even find it amongst all those other IPs on the net!
Indeed, for Microsoft it's simple, they host their EU cloud hosting service in Europe. This way, if the US wants to lose the job creation of new data centres that could be cited in the US it can, if job creation is more important, which it kinda is right now, then they need to ditch or amend the PATRIOT act to make it possible for Microsoft to host European data in the US again.
"Comparing a lack of traffic laws against the basic right of free speech and religious tolerence is a clear sign you do not understand anything of any importance and it's ignorance such as yours that guarantees the animisioty will continue. "
Calm down it's a mere example, it extends well beyond that- there are no limits to speech in these areas either, however there's few limits on how people will treat you if you say something you don't like. You obviously haven't spent 13 years there, else you'd fully understand this, yet you don't.
"Until the countries in turmoil face the fact they have created their own problems and stop blaming everything on outsiders they will never know peace."
Right, it's Afghanistans fault that as a relatively stable democracy in the 70s the Russians invaded, fucked up their country, then the US armed extremist militants, who then fucked up their country even more, and then, when the US invaded again and fucked up their country yet more again, it's all entirely their own fault. Seriously? Do you have even the slightest clue about the history of these areas?
"Aligning themselves with those promoting international violence"
I thought they aligned against the US, not with? Oh wait, you mean you believe there's only one set of aggressors in this world and the US isn't one of them? Get a grip.
So do you say that because a dog attacked someone and hence all dogs should be put down that if a jew attacks someone that all jews should be put down? you are one sick facist nazi individual.
Yes, we can all stoop to pathetic meaningless comparisons, it doesn't change the fact you're completely and utterly full of shit though.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why should we not rise up, and take what he has, when we can make so much better of it?"
Because being poorer than him is still better than being shot dead by his guards I would imagine.
Because Facebook is really neutral to all mobile phone platforms - it has no real interest in the market, only to make itself accessible everywhere.
Google, with Android, might potentially decide to ensure the Android experience of Google+ is far better in the future to coax people onto the Android platform, hence, if Apple allows it's users to use Google+ and move to it from Facebook it might find that it's something being used to convince people to move away from it's platforms in the future.
Of course, it's worth pointing out that Apple has dragged it's heals on app approval or dreamt up arbitrary and contradictory excuses in the past from companies it simply does not like for seemingly no real reason other than it does not like them, so it wouldn't be far fetched for Apple to do this.
Whilst I agree the time taken for the approval process was no big deal and nothing to really moan about I think you'd have to be rather naive to think that this delay wasn't related to Apple examining the potential impact it could have on their business and weighing it against the PR damage it would cause if they rejected it with yet another arbitrary excuse. When you're someone like Apple and facing an application from someone like Google that might gain a real serious following, then it's simply good business sense to examine the impact on your business, that takes time, and that is likely the cause of the delay.
Anyway, sorry to interrupt your ill thought out rant, you can carry on now.
"Still, analysing even a few GB of data a day is no task for mere men."
Unless it's a word document or power point presentation in which someone has embedded an uncompressed video or bunch of uncompressed images. Then you can get through it in about 5 minutes flat, not counting the half hour it takes Word/Powerpoint to load.
No, in all seriousness though, it really depends what the data is. That's why I'm not keen on this arbitrary "many gigabytes of data" metric which articles like this are supposed to wow us with. Really, what is the data? how is it stored? Is it quick and easy for computers to process and produce intelligible results? Is it easily and quickly human decipherable? A few GB of data may well just be a high definition video of say, an hour long event somewhere in the universe that can be sped up 10 fold and watched in no time at all, to gather everything we need to know from it for all we know. If a supernova takes a day to occur in realtime, but can be compressed down to a 10 minute video or even a number of important stills for scientists to gather all they need from it, then even a terrabyte of data is unimpressive, compared to other data that really does require trawling through bit by bit.
So really, it all depends what the data is, and how easy it is to represent and digest, rather than the inherent amount of data.
Whilst I'm not agreeing with that theory per-se, I think the timing of Anonymous arrests have been very convenient. The problem is the people being arrested are almost certainly people who used LOIC without masking their IP at all.
I do think it's a little odd that each time a country has a big story relating to law enforcement the day before, the next day we get a story of "xx anonymous members arrested!"- last time it was SOCA, this time it's the whole NoW deal. Turkish police similarly did the same thing the day after they saw embarassing press.
I don't think it's unrealistic that law enforcement has kept a list of the IPs of LOIC users, and track down names relating to them, and is treating them like currency "Oh well, let's just spend 16 anonymous arrests to see if we can make us look a bit more competent after yesterdays bad press".
This coupled with some of the UK press most implicated in the whole situation- the Murdoch's papers like The Sun and The Times for example, but also other papers almost certainly guilty due to the IPCC report implicating them and the fact they've been so defensive of old Rupert like The Daily Mail that are now trying to shift the focus onto the European economy instead suggesting it's "more pressing". Well no actually, the potential downfall of our government, couple with years of police and political corruption isn't less pressing than whatever happens in Europe because it's precisely that type of ethos of things being swept under the carpet that led to the crisis.
I think you're right in that Rupert didn't just tell the FBI to go arrest them or any such thing, but I think it'd be naive to think the police haven't been using LOIC users as a bit of a PR tool when it suits, and certainly there are unquestionably forces, whether just the press, or the police and the press, or even some politicians, the police and the press trying to drawn the focus away from the whole situation right now.
Yes well I'm not really one for conspiracy theories myself but 3 weeks ago if you'd said Murdoch's empire had been spying on the phone of the Prime Minister of the UK and that he had a network of staffers and close ex-staffers with strong personal links to people running right through the upper echelons of the Metropolitan police then people would've called you a conspiracy nut too, the problem is, it turns out now that it was true.
So whilst some conspiracy theories are genuinely absurd, we must be careful to not blindly dismiss all of them and hence run the risk of missing the ones that really are true.
"Things such as proportional response to crimes, presumption of innocence, and unwillingness (or at least a strong abhorrence) to harm innocents in pursuit of the guilty all come to mind. Otherwise your vigilante cure is worse than the disease."
But therein lies the problem, vigilantism doesn't preclude these things, and that's fundamentally why I think it's a fair argument to say Lulzec are doing something relatively fair here, and Osama Bin Laden did not. Bin Laden did hit innocent people, and in fact, targetted purely innocent people. Ignoring Lulzec's past actions for now, is it really unfair that they would hack the e-mails of news of the world journalists when news of the world hacked over 4,000 innocent people's voicemail? Isn't that precisely the type of proportional response you're referring to?
Doesn't the current system of law in fact fail in these areas? Aren't many sentences too lenient, whilst others too harsh? Why can killing someone in the UK through reckless driving net you a suspended sentence and hence no jail time, but chipping cable boxes to get free pay TV can get you 5 years? Is that proportional? Presumption of innocence has long gone out the window in Western society for some crimes.
"Vigilante action is tantamount to saying the system is so broken that there's no point trying to save it, and what's needed is revolution. We have to destroy the village in order to save it."
Well that's really what's happening in much of the world. Clearly it's happening explicitly in the Middle East and North Africa, but it's happening on a much more subtle level in parts of the west. In the UK things like the expenses scandal, a change to a hung parliament decreasing party powers for the first time in decade, and now the uncovering of the hacking scandal is ripping the establishment to pieces, but even globally one shouldn't underestimate the actions of the likes of Wikileaks etc.
People really are fed up of the status quo, people genuinely do think the only option is for drastic change, and sure in some countries that's more pronounced than others, but most certainly there seems to be somewhat of a global revolution going on- people spent the last decade being shit on by their governments under the excuse of the war on terror and now people are fed up, they've had enough, and they're pushing back. Vigilantism against the ruling classes who have hoarded far too much power for themselves such that they were serving only themselves and their corporate friends, and not the people they are supposed to represent is one of many facets of that change.
"To be honest, I think it's a combination of computer books going out of date quite quickly, that the people who buy such books are more likely to do so online and that computer books in general don't (AFAIK) sell as well these days."
I don't think this is a problem for them, because they're precisely the type of books they do tend to stock- those that are replaced with a new version every 6 to 12 months. Things like "Learn Flash 9 in 5 minutes" or whatever - stuff that really could be replaced by a quick Google for a tutorial covering the exact same thing for free.
Particularly with some of the classic computer science books like those by Knuth, things like SICP, you just don't see them stocked, but I have a strong interest in math and it's the same there- many Waterstones simply outright do not even have a math section beyond GCSE/A-Level maths exam guides and that really does stink!
I can understand it's because the level of book I am seeking is probably classed as niche now, but it's a bit of a sad reflection of society if anything beyond A-Level is classed as niche- certainly they never stock any graduate level computing, maths or science books, let alone postgraduate!
The UK Borders chain closed down about a year or two ago. It's a bit of a shame because we really have nothing else comparative nationwide, perhaps the closests is Waterstones but most their stores only sell the latest romance novel or Jordan autobiography and shite like that rather than a useful range of maths/science/computing books. Short of going to a handful of cities like Cambridge which still have good book stores, there's really nothing- pretty much the whole of the North of England seems devoid of good bookstores.
I agree it was their own fault, they were overpriced, I did tend to go in to have a look because it was great for that, but do I buy the OpenGL SuperBible for £40 there or do I buy it for £25 from Amazon? Bit of a no brainer really.
But I found it wasn't just their prices, they relied heavily on misleading promotions- a series of identical kids books was 3 for 2, so we figured we'd get 3 for my neices birthday and despite them all being on that shelf when we got to the checkout it turns out that only random books in the series were 3 for 2, and they didn't tell you this and merely hope you wouldn't check your receipt to see that you'd in fact been charged for 3, and then when we go back into the store to ask why we'd been charged we get some pissy clerk try and pretend it's our fault as if we're meant to be able to magically guess which books on that shelf are part of the promotion and which aren't.
So I do miss them, and I love the likes of Chapters when I go to Canada (particularly in Ottawa where you can't travel for 5 minutes without bumping into another chapters store!), but when they ran their business like that, there's really little one can say, they were truly their own worst enemy. I wouldn't expect Amazon prices as I recognise running a store is costly, but charging £40 vs. £25 is really just greed, and there's no way they were going to get my business doing that.
How much are you paying? I've been looking at moving jobs to further my career myself lately, although am of course looking at Senior positions. In the process of that though I've stumbled across a few junior ads and it made me chuckle the amount some companies were expecting people to work as devs for.
If your wage is unreasonably low like many companies than that's probably part the issue, here in the UK a lot of junior dev posts are paying less than many run of the mill IT support roles and so I suspect a lot are just going for that instead, because it's easier, and pays better. Even if your firm is offering a decent wage this is probably a large part the reason why there are so few junior devs if it's the same where you are - they've probably just been put off by retardedly low wage offerings.
It's not limited to junior developers either, I've intereviewed for a few more senior dev posts now with my wage requirements made clear from the outset, and have been top candidate, but then have been given offers that are much lower, sometimes lower than my current wage so there are a lot of time wasters and jokers out there too- instead they then just do not fill the post and whinge there are no devs out there.
The whole market is pretty fucked up right now, I think a lot of companies are assuming because there are such high levels of unemployed they can get staff for slave wages but instead they're just finding themselves entirely unable to fill posts because devs with jobs aren't going to take less, and devs without jobs have little reason to stay in the industry and may as well go work as something else and get paid more.
For what it's worth we're not entirely unique in this though. My girlfriend is Canadian and it was only the other week her Dad was complaining about Canada being guilty of the same thing- sending people off whom the government should in fact be protecting, and failing to bother to get citizens safely home who have been arrested unfairly in foreign nations.
Perhaps we like freely sending people out the country, to counterbalance the fact we have absolutely no fucking idea how many people are actually coming in to the country.
Even the BBC is quoting him now, and The Register regularly quotes him and peddles his shit, although that's less of a suprise as The Register always relies on shills and people long discredited and full of shit to backup it's falsehoods- from music industry puppets, to discredited climate change denialists, to irrelevant military "experts" it's less of a suprise there. The BBC though? I'm dissapointed to say the least.
Yep, I find it incredible how quick people are to bash the UN when it's actually upholding a principle that most Slashdotters hold dear when they're not blinded by the irrational hate of the UN. The UN is actually allowing fairness here- it's giving everyone a chance, and you may disagree with them, but in the international community they no less have a say than anyone else.
We might not like the way other countries are run- but here's a hint- they probably don't like the way ours are run either.
Is it any less hypocritical that the US should ever chair the committee when it's expended more munitions in recent years and more nuclear weapons in history than anyone else? Is it any less hypocritical that the US ever chairs a committee on human rights when it's been one of the worst culprits for torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, firing on civilians and has even had some of it's soldiers guilty of rape in warzones?
I'm not trying to attack the US here, but the mindset of "Oh, it's North Korea, the UN is obviously bad" is kiddy thinking to say the least- it's not that simple, and this illustrates the point. North Korea deserves a say like every other country involved, we don't have to listen to them, we don't have to act on their proposals, but they deserve their turn all the same, else the UN really would be more of a bully of an organisation, which ironically, is also what most UN detractors here accuse it of anyway. If North Korea comes forward with a proposal to disarm when other nuclear nations have similarly small stockpiles can we really say they're being unfair or irrational? We might not like that proposal because we don't trust them, but do they trust Western promises to send them aid or to not attack them if they disarm their nuclear capability any more?
"True but I thought Schengen and EEA was a very large fraction of the way to EU... For all intents and purposes they're part of the EU other than some signatures?"
Not in the slightest.
EU membership requires a lot more changes than that, most prominently adherence to EU laws and regulations.
To enter the EU you have to adhere to certain principles and demands. Serbia for example has been blocked from joining the EU until it handed over all it's war criminals to the ICC, and now they've finally handed Mladic over they can start their bid, but it's taken them some time. Iceland would likely have to stop or drastically reduce whaling. All conutries joining must adhere to European directives on things like telecommunications, human rights and so forth.
The EU isn't just a free trade zone, it also mandates certain laws and rights which all have to be implemented- the European Telecommunications Directive for example mandates that ISPs should be allow common carrier status, the European Working Time directive mandates that employees are allowed to refuse to work more than 48hrs a week on average over a 3 week period with no threat of repercussions.
It standardises many such things relating to justice, infrastructure, pricing, trade and so forth. It also of course means having representatives in the European parliament which must be elected via a form of PR. Even little things must be done, for example the EU defines protected foods such that for example, Cumberland sausages must be made in Cumberland, England, to allow cultural protection of such historic goods throughout the EU- if Iceland has a firm selling Cumberland sausages made elsewhere then it has to mandate that they stop that.
There's an awful lot to do seeping into every facet of every day life, and not many people realise it. The EU has changed most people's lives in Europe for the better through again for example the Working Time Directive and again not many people realise it.
Your Texas analogy doesn't really fit - to stick on the same note though it'd be more like comparing the differences between Canada and a US state- it's like saying because Canada is a signatory to NAFTA and because border controls aren't terribly rough that Canada is like a US state already- obviously it's not, the differences between Canada's obligations to the US government and Texas' obligations to the US government are immense. Just as the obligations of Iceland to the European parliament are quite distinct from the obligations of say, Britain to the European parliament. Jokes aside, Canada is quite clearly still an independent nation from the US, just as Iceland is from the EU despite free trade agreements and more lax passport controls.
I don't think it's so much privacy per-se that people want out of this systems, it's merely the ability to know and control what vectors there are to access you information.
Google+ attempts to achieve this by making it explicit who you're sharing what with but Facebook never has, worse Facebook masks certain vectors, for example most people don't realise that just because their profile is private to everyone but their friends, this doesn't mean that their friends can't grant permission for apps to see their friends profiles bypassing any settings about "friends only" that their friends may have set- if you don't set all the options right "friends only" actually means "friends, and any app my friends use", which is quite different to friends only- it's a stealthy vector for your data to leak out to people you never wanted to be able to access it which can catch you unawares. Worse, Facebook when introducing this feature originally actually enabled it without telling anyone so that it applied retroactively- you may have thought you'd set things to friends only, but Facebook can change that when and how they want, even though doing so is a clear breach of at least the UK's data protection act, if not many other similar acts in other countries. Yet still they get away with it.
Most people realise to use these things you have to lose some privacy, but just as I only give my e-mail address to select people to minimise that chance its gets into the hands of spammers, I'd like to be certain that my personal information is only going to who I've said it's going to- sure it may leak out if my friends get a virus, but at least I've minimised the vectors, and can narrow down where and how it happened just as I can tell that it was some forum that gave my e-mail away to spammers if I used a special forums account for all forum activity separate from my main e-mail account.
Again, this is where Facebook fails- they let your data leak out left, right, and centre, and you have no idea to whom, where, or how- the only option is to not use it- Google+ is trying to do better than that, it can't guarantee perfect privacy, but at least it helps you understand and manage the vectors for data leakage better. and that's a good enough compromise between not using social networking at all, and your data goes everywhere to anyone who asks type wild-west of Facebook for many people.
Mount some solar panels up high and use them to power cooled tents- shade from the panels, and cooling in the tents!
Can't return the game if it's used, didn't really realise the problem until my girlfriend got her XBox.
Did write a formal complaint to trading standards though, which should be far more effective than contacting EA and Microsoft who simply wont give a shit about your letters.
It's actually worse than just that. Take Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and it's online pass for example. I had to activate this one time code to use it on my console in my gaming room, now if my girlfriend wants to play online using her profile on the XBox in the living room then she has to pay for a new pass representing a more than 33% rise in the cost of the game for two of us to be able to play it online. She could use my account of course, but what about when I want to play something else online with someone else and she wants to play that? We can't do that.
These online passes are a horrendous rape of consumer rights, they're a horrific money grab, and basically force houses with more than one gamer to buy the game once per gamer. It's not even simply 2nd hand sales that are destroyed here- it's use of the game by more than one family member in the same household.
"As for TFA? When you are hacking into and deleting a murder victim's voice mails, thus hindering an investigation, and bribing the cops for evidence? Then you've gone way past reporting the news into making it. Personally i hope that just because they close the doors won't stop the investigation and every single one who bribed or hacked gets a nice long jail term."
It's worse than that, the person in charge of The News of the World at the time this happened was Rebekah Brooks, she's now a director of News International itself and Murdoch and his son James have chosen to sacrifice The News of the World, which now consists of staff who weren't even around when all this went on to save Rebekah.
So in other words he's made about 200 possibly innocent people jobless, to protect the woman who was in charge when all this happened. This absolutely stinks and it's been made clear here by many politicians and celebs that we didn't want NotW to close, we wanted the people responsible brought to justice.
We've got to keep the pressure up over here and I hope people do, because he can't be allowed to get away with it this easily and make other people scapegoats. I only hope those he has used as scapegoats as insiders have more dirt they can use against News International and now have motivation to do so.
I think Rebekah Brook's statement really summed it up:
"I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations."
I mean, seriously, either she doesn't understand what the term inconceivable means in which case she wasn't a fit editor by any measure, or she is so fucking arrogant that she thinks she's the universal dictator of conceivability and can determine what is and isn't conceivable.
I'd imagine it's the latter, so no Ms. Brooks, sorry, but fuck off, I find it quite conceivable that you were behind this event, so don't you dare try and define what I may or may not find conceivable because I find it perfectly conceivable that you might in fact be guilty of it.
You'd think when she's in such a tenuous position she might be a bit more sensitive, and a little less arrogant, but her whole statement stunk of arrogance.
VS or no VS I find it incredible that anyone could claim Eclipse is better than anything. Have you really used it extensively and compared it to other IDEs? Eclipse is bottom of the pile trash- slow, prone to crashing, broken plugin system, lacking major features, not particularly great for usability, stupid workspace system.
JDeveloper and NetBeans are far better than Eclipse at least, let alone Visual Studio.
I agree .NET was a shameless copy of Java, but it's really not anymore. A combination of things through the years like anonymous methods, operator overloading, improved delegates, generics, LINQ, lambda expressions, and dynamic objects, have put C# way ahead of Java (and most other languages) nowadays. They had a slow start, but the C# team are definitely leaders in programming language evolution now, rather than mere imitators. as they were at the start This is really why C# usage is still rapidly accelerating whilst a number of indicators suggest Java is probably now in decline.
Despite all this none of it's really new, just new in that it's all implemented together in a decent way, I do agree that the general gist of the argument in this thread that Microsoft haven't historically innovated much is true- Visual Studio really borrows more from Borland's older IDEs than anything. I don't think much truly can be called original in computing now though, you can always find something in history that looks similar but was simply implemented before it's time and so never caught on, or was never marketed right, or used with quite the right combination of other technologies and so on.
It's a shame Al Jazeera is mentioned so low, so for anyone else reading this it's worth noting that there have been two Al Jazeera's, there is the Al Jazeera at aljazeera.net, which was only founded in 2006, and there is Al Jazeera publishing which up until March this year had aljazeera.com
The former is one of the more objective news sources around, and I've found it to often be even better than the BBC. Whilst they're not too great for some areas of the world like South America, or South East Asia, their coverage of the Middle East and Africa is nothing less than stellar and their ongoing coverage of the Libya campaign and Syrian uprising for example is simply unmatched.
Thankfully the bad Al Jazeera has been disbanded completely now, so don't let this study give a misguided impression the remaining Al Jazeera is down there with Fox- far from it, it's right at the other end of the scale! Now if only Fox would go the same way as bad Al Jazeera.
Laziness.
Rather than setup some external networking to a different site so that e-mails can be exchanged between them it's much easier to just go plug into that pre-existing wall socket over there in the corner and tunnel via the public internet where all the infrastructure is already in place for you. I mean, no one would think to try and attack your connection right? I mean, how would they even find it amongst all those other IPs on the net!
That's really the mindset you're dealing with.
Indeed, for Microsoft it's simple, they host their EU cloud hosting service in Europe. This way, if the US wants to lose the job creation of new data centres that could be cited in the US it can, if job creation is more important, which it kinda is right now, then they need to ditch or amend the PATRIOT act to make it possible for Microsoft to host European data in the US again.
"Comparing a lack of traffic laws against the basic right of free speech and religious tolerence is a clear sign you do not understand anything of any importance and it's ignorance such as yours that guarantees the animisioty will continue. "
Calm down it's a mere example, it extends well beyond that- there are no limits to speech in these areas either, however there's few limits on how people will treat you if you say something you don't like. You obviously haven't spent 13 years there, else you'd fully understand this, yet you don't.
"Until the countries in turmoil face the fact they have created their own problems and stop blaming everything on outsiders they will never know peace."
Right, it's Afghanistans fault that as a relatively stable democracy in the 70s the Russians invaded, fucked up their country, then the US armed extremist militants, who then fucked up their country even more, and then, when the US invaded again and fucked up their country yet more again, it's all entirely their own fault. Seriously? Do you have even the slightest clue about the history of these areas?
"Aligning themselves with those promoting international violence"
I thought they aligned against the US, not with? Oh wait, you mean you believe there's only one set of aggressors in this world and the US isn't one of them? Get a grip.
So do you say that because a dog attacked someone and hence all dogs should be put down that if a jew attacks someone that all jews should be put down? you are one sick facist nazi individual.
Yes, we can all stoop to pathetic meaningless comparisons, it doesn't change the fact you're completely and utterly full of shit though.