"Pres. Medvedev is a great troll! Unfortunately, he doesn't decide anything in Russia - Putin does."
Uhuh. That was the initial view of him when he became PM from a position of relative obscurity. Unfortunately times change, I guess you don't watch the news:
Similarly look at Medvedev's history on justice, human rights and so forth. Without a doubt, Medvedev is a much more positive force than Putin and he's never been afraid to express that in his position as PM.
"You see, there's a mandatory 'performance fee' in Russia which goes toward central agency which then distributes gathered money to artists (minus 15% commission)"
Sounds like the PRS in the UK, or GEMA in Germany, or any number of other rights collection agencies that exist in pretty much every country.
What, you thought that kind of thing only happened in Russia?
"So Medvedev can talk all he wants, it won't change a thing."
Unless of course he beats Putin to the presidency next year, severely denting Putin's ability to control anything anymore.
Your unwavering view that the rule of law is moral and just is disturbing.
I live in the UK where we have a first past the post voting system such that most governments are elected to have a majority giving them 100% of power with the support of only 30% - 35% of the population. This has led to schemes such as the ID card database which well over half the population opposed. Many laws are similarly opposed by such large proportions, but due to the nature of our voting system may be passed anyway.
I do not respect laws which go against the will of the majority and I do not even respect laws which go against the will of even a large minority. A law which negatively effects less than 1% of the population may be moral and just, but a law that even 20% of the population believe is unfair must surely be classed as an unacceptably high level of persecution.
So you can call them criminals for breaking some arbitrary law, and that's fine, but it really doesn't matter if what they do is still moral, ethical, and has the support of a non-negligible portion of the population, which, they certainly appear to have.
The irony of your comment though is that Sony truly has broken laws in many countries but due to it's size and power to lobby, has got away scott free. Even if you do truly believe in the rule of law above what is simply ethically and morally right then your position is still highly hypocritical. If Sony was correctly punished for it's illegal actions then this may not have even happened in the first place.
Those vigilante mobs are merely the powerless majority being sick of their voice being ignored, just like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and so forth where coincidentally, their actions of protest and government overthrow were illegal too.
"At least these hacks are a return to the previous trend of defacements, revenge, and lulz, as opposed to the last few years of organized crime, ID theft, and renting out botnets."
I absolutely agree with this, for some years now I've been concerned that real hackers had disspeared, many grown up and moved on, others gone over to organised crime. That new kids entering the scene were either too scared by the police to try more harmless hacking and those that weren't just going for the money in the crime game.
It was a concern because it's fundamentally the spirit that the internet was built on and is vital in keeping the internet free. I believe the encroachment of companies on the internet in the last decade trying to push for tough government restrictions on freedom is a result of a lack of backlash from hackers which was seen leading into the 90s. People like DVD Jon and the breaking of various other DRM regimes and such were rare examples where people were willing to step over into the grey area of legality to put consumer interest back in the forefront of the corporate onslaught against digital rights and freedoms.
So yeah, I welcome this recent action, it's embarassing to a company that frankly deserves embarassment from it's rootkit stuff to it's RIAA activities, and it's government lobbying for reduced personal freedoms.
Frankly, in the coming years I hope to see more of it. Between Wikileaks, the various Anonymous actions, the Arab spring, and so forth I sincerely hope this is a decade that will be as much about discontent of private citizens lashing back at their governments as the last decade was about governments and corporations controlling and restricting private citizens actions and movements, and castrating their long held freedoms.
10 years ago the Jolly Rogers cookbook was something you'd carry around on a floppy because it was cool with no intention of ever really trying any of it, video of donkey trying to mount a man on your hard drive because it was pretty fucking funny, and a couple of random midi files you had lying around as jingles of certain tunes you liked for your old cell phone.
Nowadays these 3 things would make you a terrorist sex offender pirate.
How things change, and how the innocence of intrigue, amusement, and mild entertainment can now get you listed under some of the worst crimes going.
What a sad 10 years the last 10 were, perhaps the darkest in Western history since the second world war I would argue.
"Why they feel the need to charge for something that costs them nothing to provide I do not understand."
Really? Providing services to 30 million paying subscribers is something you can do completely free? I'd love to know who your bandwidth provider, hardware provider, support, maintenance and security staff are if they do it all for free!
But seriously, even with the peer to peer aspects of XBL there are still a lot of costs to developing and running such a service. Perhaps this is in fact fundamentally where Microsoft went right- their service is of vastly higher quality than Nintendo's frankly terrible online offering, and Sony clearly weren't spending on security at least with their recent debacle. Perhaps Microsoft was right in realising that to do an online service properly the solution isn't to do it absolutely half-arsed and say "Who cares about usability, it's free, we're subsidising it with our profits from elsewhere" or "Who cares about security, they can't complain, it's free, we're subsidising it with our profits from elsehwere".
I don't disagree that Microsoft's profiteering somewhat from XBox live, but I don't agree that it's entirely the case, that it's pure profit- I think Microsoft charge, because they realised that as well as being an additional revenue stream, to make a proper go of an online service it's worth charging for it to give it it's own very healthy development, support and maintenance budget rather than subsidising it from elsewhere and hence inherently putting a squeeze on the amount of money you're willing to put into it and suffering the inevitable reduction in quality of the service that results in.
Yeah, to be fair though the difference is that the Halo games have been consistently good, whilst Guitar Hero followed by Call of Duty have become consistently worse.
Microsoft at least keeps the quality high with Halo, Activision just milks without care for quality until the franchise dies.
To be fair I'd imagine he really just meant the W3C members.
This makes sense because the membership is wide and varied representing pretty much every industry with an interest in the web and some consumer organisations too.
I sympathise with his view, HTML5 was put together by a handful of vested interests- Apple, Google, Mozilla and frankly they've done a shite job. HTML5 has been put together in an atrocious way that can be made to work on the desktop (and phones, but they're just like desktop browsers now anyway) but isn't well designed for other applications and devices that may wish to interact the web, nor is it good for developers of large web systems that require a high degree of maintainability and so forth.
The W3C was criticised for being slow, but it was slow for a reason- it made sure all relevant voices were heard and worked to resolve that before coming to a decision. In contrast WHATWG with HTML5 and now the companies mentioned in TFA for this have basically said "Look, what we say goes, you can give us your input but we really don't give a fuck and wont actually listen- it's our way or the highway". So whilst standards like the XHTML standards took a long time to come about at least they were fairly resilient to future change- HTML5 in contrast has some sections which are largely obsolete before the spec even went release candidate. I suspect this will be the same- an ever changing nightmare spec that will be impossible to continuously adhere to and which will break things for developers and end users alike.
"Done properly" isn't really a principle of the PHP generation.
Migrate to the UK exploiting the common market then, the median salary for a senior developer here would be at least £35,000 (~â40,000).
I don't know why Italy is so out of whack with other parts of Europe, it seems very strange. It seems unlikely that Italy pays it's senior developers less than half of what the UK does.
The issue is it lowers the barrier to starting a war, which may mean more wars.
If a kid in say, Iran hacks into some US infrastructure off his own back and causes damage then with the US' venemous hate of the country, is it sensible that they then fire back with conventional weapons such as a cruise missile? Isn't that a dangerous precedent for escalation?
Do you draw the line at whether it's state sponsored? what about when you get politicians crying state sponsorship and pushing for war when it's not?
Honestly, the best option is to make sure your infrastructure isn't vulnerable in the first place. Take critical infrastructure like power plants offline so they can't be hacked via the internet and so forth.
Creating conditions where any of 6.5bn people on the planet can unilaterally start a war from the comfort of their bedroom is pretty fucking stupid IMHO.
We do have those sorts of animal rights extremists here but they tend to target people who do lab testing on animals, and people who farm animals such as mink for fur rather than food.
These are much greyer areas IMO as there's a fair question as to whether such use of animals really is necessary- whilst medical testing on animals may in some cases be something we simply have to accept if we want new medicine it's testing of cosmetics that animal rights activists tend to target. I do somewhat agree with them doing so, I'm not convinced making animals suffer for the sake of testing the latest perfume to see if it burns skin, or the effect it has if you get it in your eyes and so forth, or farming them in abysmal conditions for the vanity of fur coats when fake fur is just as good (and doesn't cause allergic reactions, and lasts longer!) is in any way a reasonable use of animals.
I can certainly sympathise with the disrespect people would have for PETA if it believes we should all go vegetarian and does so in a militant fashion. That certainly crosses a line beyond rationality.
The reality is there's no difference between this and Windows Malware, it's already been mentioned in the news that there is a version of this that runs in userland and so doesn't actually need to ask for a username and password, just as there is Windows malware that does the same, and Windows malware that doesn't do the same and so also requires authentication to get away with certain things.
Apple fans can spin it however they want, this is EXACTLY like Windows malware, this is Apple kit suffering exactly the same things Windows has for a long while. This demonstrably dispels the myth that Apple kit is somehow more secure, but to be fair on both Apple, and Microsoft, it also demonstrates that for both vendors, the biggest security threat nowadays is generally the user.
Agreed, I'm struggling to see by what objective metric Netscape could've been deemed the better browser.
It really did lose the browser wars simply because it was shit. I dealt with any number of average users who tried it and went back to IE- it wasn't simply that IE was there, it was that it was better so that even those that did try Netscape realised it wasn't worth bothering with, and they fed that back to friends and family, who also saw little reason to bother. Netscape was just technically inferior, and worse from a usability perspective. It didn't even have a performance advantage which is really one of the major factors in pulling people from IE6 to Firefox in the end.
By the time IE3 and IE4 came out CDs were the normal distribution method for browsers from ISPs, and CDs were still big enough to stick everything an ISP would ever want to stick on them and then some so I don't know what he's on about floppies for, it was really irrelevant at the point the browser wars were truly underway. Just to highlight how big CDs seemed back then, they tended to be the classic 650mb, and a minimal Windows 95 install on your hard drive was 25mb. The install files for it were maybe 80mb, if that.
I think this is precisely the problem the likes of NATO and so forth face.
Any people they employ as "cyber soldiers" or whatever they call them nowadays are most likely to be much more closely aligned to anonymous' mindset than the mindset of NATO.
NATO is used to starting wars with people it is far stronger than and can steamroll. This time it may be making a mistake, the number of people supportive of anonymous and the average level of skill of it's members is almost certainly going to be way above anything NATO can muster. NATO may well find that this is a war that it will lose, hard.
The problem is likely further exacerbated by the fact that many militaries are embedding their "cyber soldiers" into the military structure itself, and well, good luck finding any decent number of highly intelligent geeks willing to put up with the same crap a bunch of grunts would.
They think Bradley Manning is a one off, unique, a blip. They do not realise that Bradley Manning is emblematic of his generation- they're sick of the greedy mindset of the baby boomers and they want a better world- this is also why the Arab Spring revolutions have been led largely by the young.
The world is changing, the old administrations are looking woefully out of date, they're picking a fight with the people they will need to look after them and protect them as they age. That's a pretty fucking stupid thing to do.
It's already dead to me. CoD4 (MW) was one of my favourite games in many years, CoD5 (WaW) couldn't quite hold the torch to MW but was still very good. CoD6 (MW2) was somewhat of a dissapointment to me, the story line seemed a bit incoherent and the multiplayer seemed to have been designed by an overexcited 6yr old (OMG GIEV PLAYARS NUKULARSS THAT END TEH GAME POINTLESSLY!!!!!!1111 LOL). CoD7 (Black Ops), well, the worst in the franchise so far IMO. The story was dire, the multiplayer looked unfinished, graphically it looked pretty crap compared to many other titles around now.
Personally I liked Medal of Honour, good fun game, better storyline, far better multiplayer but the only downside is it was too short, not enough single player content or multiplayer maps. Here's hoping for Battlefield 3, it looks far far better than CoD has in recent years. I can't see any point bothering with MW3, reading the "leaked" storyline it already sounds stupid:
Random location map team thought would be fun 1: Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
Random location map team thought would be fun 2: Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
Random location map team thought would be fun 3: Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
. . .
Random location map team thought would be fun 10: Chase bad guy, shoot him. The end.
Already it seems to demonstrate a lack of care over the storyline, and the storyline looks like it's been built around the map team just deciding without any coordination what places they'd like to shoot stuff in, rather than there being some kind of interesting or coherent storyline around which the maps should be built as is the case in quality games.
Activision have already killed the franchise for me, and when they put a ~15% price premium on CoD over other games this last 2 years and those to come then I have no justifiable reason to pay for it anymore. Why pay more for increasingly shit games? CoD peaked with MW, and it's been downhill since then.
I can't really comment on PETA, I know it has a very negative perception in the US, but certainly here in the UK it would be completely wrong to make such a comment about our animal welfare organisations.
When we have videos of turkeys being thrown up into the air and hit with a baseball bat then left around crippled, sometimes paralyzed, and sometimes dying to suffer until they're finally actually culled a few days later and that sort of thing then it's nothing to do with a disassociation from the reality of where our food comes from but a complete distaste of sick fucks who actually get pleasure out of seeing things suffer.
Certainly here in the UK, whilst few people like seeing animals die, they understand it's necessary for their food. What they don't think is necessary is for people to get pleasure out of making living things suffer a slow painful death for fun. Not liking unnecessary suffering at least has little to do with not wanting to have meat killed for food, and many vegetarians here are vegetarian not because they don't want to see animals killed, but because they don't like the unnecessarily cruel practices involved.
Personally I couldn't ever be a vegetarian because I don't really eat a lot of vegetables, and do eat a lot of meat, but I do have some respect for their viewpoint- importantly it's had some positive effects here in the UK, battery farming of chickens has seen a massive decrease in favour of free range eggs for example, and the best part of all that? the quality of our food has improved as a result too, and to demonstrate the fact that many of these vegetarians aren't rational, many are now happy to eat eggs again as a result knowing the animals were treated reasonably.
I'm not saying there aren't purists out there who think all killing is bad, and yes they're irrational, but they're really a minority amongst vegetarians so to bundle them all in with PETA (assuming PETA's reputation is deserved- as I say, I don't know enough about it) seems rather unfair.
But doesn't it stretch to everything? We turn a blind eye to ecosystems destroyed for our raw materials, we turn a blind eye to abysmal working conditions of people who make our clothes and gadgets- sometimes even child labour, we don't recognise what utterly filthy jobs people have to do to ensure our waste management systems work.
There's a lot of unpleasant jobs out there that people are detached from but it seems to be a new fad to focus on the food part of it. The fact is we're a consumer society, we live in a world where people can choose to pay to have these sorts of jobs done. I'm not sure it's an inherently bad thing- what exactly changes between paying for some meat at a supermarket and killing it and producing it yourself?
It strikes me as little more than a new machismo fad- "look at me, I'm a real tough guy, I kill my own food". I've snared and skinned rabbit in the past, I didn't like it in the slightest, but it was part of getting our own food. I'm not really sure what value there is in all people doing the same- it didn't teach me anything I wasn't aware of. It was just as horrible as I expected it to be. What is the value exactly of people being "reconnected" to the reality of slaughter for food? the hope they'll be shocked into going vegetarian or something? There seems to be this view that because people don't do it, they can't or wouldn't do it- they could and would, they just prefer not too, and like plumbing blocked toilets and so forth they'd rather pay someone else to do it.
"Exactly. Is it a dick move by the Palestinians? Absolutely. But it really is their right, after all, they are paying for his trip and they can put whatever conditions on it they'd like."
Yes, sadly it's also indicative of why there are so many problems in the region and it's sad that even academia have fallen into the trap of pursuing such a vicious circle.
My view? the sensible option would've been to split the cost with the Israeli universities, cheaper for everyone, and everyone benefits, academic benefits as a whole, but god forbid there be any cooperation.
Palestinians, Israelis, they're both as bad as each other and frankly deserve each other. They bring it upon themselves, and academia of all places should recognise the importance of building bridges and this is precisely the type of scenario where such a thing, no matter how small, could have been done.
"People that want cutting edge gaming rigs buy PCs, not consoles, which are behind at launch and get further so over time."
Rubbish. Console hardware unlike PC hardware is optimised purely for gaming, therefore equally specced console kit always performs much better for gaming. It gets a further boost in that it's a single hardware platform so game developers can do much more intricate optimisation than they can for the PC because the PC's combinatorial explosion of hardware combinations makes optimisation and testing an impossible task to the same degree.
Consoles are further boosted by the fact that they're often subsidised, they're built in bulk, and so the consumer gets far more bang for their buck out the box.
I agree high end consoles (i.e. PS3/360, not the Wii) perform less well than PCs towards the end of their generation - 4 - 5 years on from release, but for the vast majority of their lifetime until the next iteration they're way ahead of PC hardware in terms of their gaming performance and capability. Like it not, that's simply the advantage of dedicated hardware, if such an advantage didn't exist then consoles wouldn't use so much bespoke hardware and designs. Stating consoles are behind at launch at best shows complete ignorance of the advantage of the rather basic principle of having hardware designed primarily for a specific task rather than for generic processing as with the PC. It's a bit like saying mobile phone hardware is worse for draining battery life than desktop PC hardware- obviously that's just fucking stupid.
Some posts I've had removed are just nonsensical though and leave no room for any explanation other than bias on behalf of the moderators.
One post I had moderated that comes to mind was merely:
"I find it odd that elements of the tea party proclaim to be strong beleivers in free speech, yet also supporter suggestions that when people like Julian Assange exercise such speech he should be jailed, or assassinated"
It's not the only such post, maybe it's just my personal bias and there is something deeply offensive about that post I'm overlooking but you'll have to excuse me for not seeing it. Another post I made that was censored was:
"It's all very well people complaining about polish immigrants taking jobs, but in my experience polish immigrants have a very good work ethic- much better than many born and bred British people I have worked with"
The BBC has often been claimed to be left wing, but I've seen nothing but strong right wing sentiment and censorship from their moderation team, and frankly, it stinks.
In your honest opinion, do you think posts such as the above are really just a case of being over-cautious? I think they're pretty tame, and I've seen much more offensive right wing leaning stuff than that left alone and when I've submitted complaints to try and play the game the same way the game has played against me it's never been succesful- it seems defence of immigrants is censor-worthy, but right wing zealotry and bigotry all too often go untouched and it's those double standards at the BBC that makes me sick- either censor equally, don't censor at all, or don't even run a discussion forum at all if you can't do either of those right.
"So, killing animals for food is 'going off the deep end'?"
Yeah, if you're a multi-billionaire.
"Maybe you lived in a city your whole life and got it nicely packaged for you in a supermarket or pre-cooked and now you want to consider people who actually kill the animals as somehow beneath you, or having 'gone off the deep end'? Maybe you should reconsider your food choices if you want to avoid looking like either a blatant classist or a hypocrite."
Blah blah, cutting down forests, mining for oil and other materials are all pretty destructive too but it's not really something you do yourself out of choice just so you can say "Hey, look at me, I'm Mr Ethical, I cut down my own rainforest and made my own table, and smashed up my own hill to mine my own metals to weld my own car together".
Really, the point is this, not that people don't know where their food comes from, but that ending the life of something isn't particularly pleasant. If you start doing it to make a point or as a PR stunt then yes it's a little weird. The issue is that killing something for food out of necessity because it's your job- your living, or for mere survival, is one thing, but doing it to make a point, or because you enjoy it? That's a little more strange.
You seem to recognise that slaughtering an animal isn't a particularly pleasant and enjoyable thing, so please realise if people are saying it's weird it's not because they're disrespecting people like you who have done this rather unpleasant task, but because they wonder why someone would do such a thing out of choice when they simply do not have to.
When we're talking about someone who judging by past comments and actions seems somewhat of a sociopath, one with quite a hunger for power, coupled with the fact there's a list of animals he's killed and a comment of how he killed one as if he's tallying them up on a scorecard or something (Chicken- tick, pig- tick, goat- tick, horse- tick, human- tick), then I'm not really suprised people think he may have gone off his rocker a little. That's not to say that means people like you who did this out of necessity are also in the same boat however.
I think most people recognise slaughtering animals for food is a fact of life, but as a PR stunt, to make a point, or for enjoyment? That's a little more weird.
But why even make such a statement? Why not make the point of saying that they'll consider moving their office location should there be any sign of such legal obligations? It's not as if they've had their office here for more than a few weeks so there's really very little to lose at this stage for them- again, particularly when they have the ear of the prime minister.
By simply saying "Yeah, we'll hand it over if we're legally obliged" they're really saying "We really can't be bothered to fight this one, so even if the most absurd legal ruling comes along we wont bother to fight or appeal it, we'll just bend over and screw you, our users, over". The complete lack of fighting talk, the complete lack of concern at what they might be asked is telling enough.
You only have to contrast this statement which is extremely submissive, with previous statements from them when faced with ultimatums from elsewhere, including the US government to see that they really do not seem concerned about just bowing down and handing it all over in this case.
Fundamentally you're right, that they when you say most corporations wont even fight it if compliance is cheap, but that's something I addressed in my previous post- this is classic short sighted economics, it's where Sony has fallen over and over- rootkit DRM, chasing the likes of GeoHot etc. ignoring the long term harm this does to their reputation to the point they're now being humiliated over and over and over by discontented hackers. Ignoring the long term damage this will do to them as a platform is stupid. Think any users in the middle east, africa, asia, or any other authoritarian regimes will trust them ever again if they do that?
They can't pick and choose when they want to be defenders of freedom, they've milked the suggestion that they are for some time, and if they're not then shame on them for lying to us all along.
What all these browser manufacturers are trying to do is remove as much of the browser as possible, so that when we get to their envisaged day of all our apps being web pages we can load them up in the browser and because there will be nothing left of the browser all we will see is the app as if we're just using a desktop app.
What they should really be doing however is just replacing HTTP and (X)HTML with a whole new set of standards designed to allow development and usage of such cloud based applications- a client that can have all sorts of standard controls and so forth transmitted to it in a stateful way with security by default. HTML, HTTP and so forth are such shit fits for the job I wish they'd stop trying to mangle them into something they are not, and instead just keep browsers as browsers and make their new web from scratch without trying to (badly) mangle legacy stuff into something it's not.
I agree but what I'd add is that Twitter should be absolutely lambasted for agreeing to hand over the names as that's what really stinks in this scenario.
They're a US company and the data is stored on US servers, they've only just recently opened an office in the UK and did so as part of the British Prime Minister's push for a greater digital economy in the UK but aren't yet heavily invested enough here to be harmed financially.
They are perfectly positioned to outright defy such a request with the ultimatum that they will take their European office to somewhere else such as Paris or any number of other European countries. This would put immense pressure on the PM to make the UK more suitable for tech companies by ensuring our laws are not a deterrent to such innovation as they are currently.
But instead they've chosen to just fuck their users to save themselves a little bit of hassle and at the expense of what would've been some great PR for them in doing what is right.
Worse, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't the immense hypocrisy of it. Previously Twitter has cashed in on it's useage during the Iranian protests, and the Arab Spring uprisings yet what does this precedent say, that if an authoritarian regime wants names it'll hand them over? or is it simply being two faced here and saying it'll gladly allow dissenting voices in some countries, but not others?
Twitter's stance is pathetic, completely and utterly pathetic. They had here an opportunity to really use this as an example of why countries like the UK can never have a silicon valley because of absurd laws, and instead of using that example to push for a better place for a European HQ they're just doing a Sony and fucking their users for nothing more than an absolutely tiny short term economic gain, one that will likely dent their image and do them far more harm longer term.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pres. Medvedev is a great troll! Unfortunately, he doesn't decide anything in Russia - Putin does."
Uhuh. That was the initial view of him when he became PM from a position of relative obscurity. Unfortunately times change, I guess you don't watch the news:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12810566
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-31/medvedev-tests-limits-of-power-with-plan-to-oust-putin-allies.html
http://www.euractiv.com/en/global-europe/medvedev-putin-tensions-grow-2012-elections-get-closer-analysis-504662
Similarly look at Medvedev's history on justice, human rights and so forth. Without a doubt, Medvedev is a much more positive force than Putin and he's never been afraid to express that in his position as PM.
"You see, there's a mandatory 'performance fee' in Russia which goes toward central agency which then distributes gathered money to artists (minus 15% commission)"
Sounds like the PRS in the UK, or GEMA in Germany, or any number of other rights collection agencies that exist in pretty much every country.
What, you thought that kind of thing only happened in Russia?
"So Medvedev can talk all he wants, it won't change a thing."
Unless of course he beats Putin to the presidency next year, severely denting Putin's ability to control anything anymore.
Your unwavering view that the rule of law is moral and just is disturbing.
I live in the UK where we have a first past the post voting system such that most governments are elected to have a majority giving them 100% of power with the support of only 30% - 35% of the population. This has led to schemes such as the ID card database which well over half the population opposed. Many laws are similarly opposed by such large proportions, but due to the nature of our voting system may be passed anyway.
I do not respect laws which go against the will of the majority and I do not even respect laws which go against the will of even a large minority. A law which negatively effects less than 1% of the population may be moral and just, but a law that even 20% of the population believe is unfair must surely be classed as an unacceptably high level of persecution.
So you can call them criminals for breaking some arbitrary law, and that's fine, but it really doesn't matter if what they do is still moral, ethical, and has the support of a non-negligible portion of the population, which, they certainly appear to have.
The irony of your comment though is that Sony truly has broken laws in many countries but due to it's size and power to lobby, has got away scott free. Even if you do truly believe in the rule of law above what is simply ethically and morally right then your position is still highly hypocritical. If Sony was correctly punished for it's illegal actions then this may not have even happened in the first place.
Those vigilante mobs are merely the powerless majority being sick of their voice being ignored, just like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and so forth where coincidentally, their actions of protest and government overthrow were illegal too.
"At least these hacks are a return to the previous trend of defacements, revenge, and lulz, as opposed to the last few years of organized crime, ID theft, and renting out botnets."
I absolutely agree with this, for some years now I've been concerned that real hackers had disspeared, many grown up and moved on, others gone over to organised crime. That new kids entering the scene were either too scared by the police to try more harmless hacking and those that weren't just going for the money in the crime game.
It was a concern because it's fundamentally the spirit that the internet was built on and is vital in keeping the internet free. I believe the encroachment of companies on the internet in the last decade trying to push for tough government restrictions on freedom is a result of a lack of backlash from hackers which was seen leading into the 90s. People like DVD Jon and the breaking of various other DRM regimes and such were rare examples where people were willing to step over into the grey area of legality to put consumer interest back in the forefront of the corporate onslaught against digital rights and freedoms.
So yeah, I welcome this recent action, it's embarassing to a company that frankly deserves embarassment from it's rootkit stuff to it's RIAA activities, and it's government lobbying for reduced personal freedoms.
Frankly, in the coming years I hope to see more of it. Between Wikileaks, the various Anonymous actions, the Arab spring, and so forth I sincerely hope this is a decade that will be as much about discontent of private citizens lashing back at their governments as the last decade was about governments and corporations controlling and restricting private citizens actions and movements, and castrating their long held freedoms.
10 years ago the Jolly Rogers cookbook was something you'd carry around on a floppy because it was cool with no intention of ever really trying any of it, video of donkey trying to mount a man on your hard drive because it was pretty fucking funny, and a couple of random midi files you had lying around as jingles of certain tunes you liked for your old cell phone.
Nowadays these 3 things would make you a terrorist sex offender pirate.
How things change, and how the innocence of intrigue, amusement, and mild entertainment can now get you listed under some of the worst crimes going.
What a sad 10 years the last 10 were, perhaps the darkest in Western history since the second world war I would argue.
"Why they feel the need to charge for something that costs them nothing to provide I do not understand."
Really? Providing services to 30 million paying subscribers is something you can do completely free? I'd love to know who your bandwidth provider, hardware provider, support, maintenance and security staff are if they do it all for free!
But seriously, even with the peer to peer aspects of XBL there are still a lot of costs to developing and running such a service. Perhaps this is in fact fundamentally where Microsoft went right- their service is of vastly higher quality than Nintendo's frankly terrible online offering, and Sony clearly weren't spending on security at least with their recent debacle. Perhaps Microsoft was right in realising that to do an online service properly the solution isn't to do it absolutely half-arsed and say "Who cares about usability, it's free, we're subsidising it with our profits from elsewhere" or "Who cares about security, they can't complain, it's free, we're subsidising it with our profits from elsehwere".
I don't disagree that Microsoft's profiteering somewhat from XBox live, but I don't agree that it's entirely the case, that it's pure profit- I think Microsoft charge, because they realised that as well as being an additional revenue stream, to make a proper go of an online service it's worth charging for it to give it it's own very healthy development, support and maintenance budget rather than subsidising it from elsewhere and hence inherently putting a squeeze on the amount of money you're willing to put into it and suffering the inevitable reduction in quality of the service that results in.
Yeah, to be fair though the difference is that the Halo games have been consistently good, whilst Guitar Hero followed by Call of Duty have become consistently worse.
Microsoft at least keeps the quality high with Halo, Activision just milks without care for quality until the franchise dies.
To be fair I'd imagine he really just meant the W3C members.
This makes sense because the membership is wide and varied representing pretty much every industry with an interest in the web and some consumer organisations too.
I sympathise with his view, HTML5 was put together by a handful of vested interests- Apple, Google, Mozilla and frankly they've done a shite job. HTML5 has been put together in an atrocious way that can be made to work on the desktop (and phones, but they're just like desktop browsers now anyway) but isn't well designed for other applications and devices that may wish to interact the web, nor is it good for developers of large web systems that require a high degree of maintainability and so forth.
The W3C was criticised for being slow, but it was slow for a reason- it made sure all relevant voices were heard and worked to resolve that before coming to a decision. In contrast WHATWG with HTML5 and now the companies mentioned in TFA for this have basically said "Look, what we say goes, you can give us your input but we really don't give a fuck and wont actually listen- it's our way or the highway". So whilst standards like the XHTML standards took a long time to come about at least they were fairly resilient to future change- HTML5 in contrast has some sections which are largely obsolete before the spec even went release candidate. I suspect this will be the same- an ever changing nightmare spec that will be impossible to continuously adhere to and which will break things for developers and end users alike.
"Done properly" isn't really a principle of the PHP generation.
Migrate to the UK exploiting the common market then, the median salary for a senior developer here would be at least £35,000 (~â40,000).
I don't know why Italy is so out of whack with other parts of Europe, it seems very strange. It seems unlikely that Italy pays it's senior developers less than half of what the UK does.
The issue is it lowers the barrier to starting a war, which may mean more wars.
If a kid in say, Iran hacks into some US infrastructure off his own back and causes damage then with the US' venemous hate of the country, is it sensible that they then fire back with conventional weapons such as a cruise missile? Isn't that a dangerous precedent for escalation?
Do you draw the line at whether it's state sponsored? what about when you get politicians crying state sponsorship and pushing for war when it's not?
Honestly, the best option is to make sure your infrastructure isn't vulnerable in the first place. Take critical infrastructure like power plants offline so they can't be hacked via the internet and so forth.
Creating conditions where any of 6.5bn people on the planet can unilaterally start a war from the comfort of their bedroom is pretty fucking stupid IMHO.
We do have those sorts of animal rights extremists here but they tend to target people who do lab testing on animals, and people who farm animals such as mink for fur rather than food.
These are much greyer areas IMO as there's a fair question as to whether such use of animals really is necessary- whilst medical testing on animals may in some cases be something we simply have to accept if we want new medicine it's testing of cosmetics that animal rights activists tend to target. I do somewhat agree with them doing so, I'm not convinced making animals suffer for the sake of testing the latest perfume to see if it burns skin, or the effect it has if you get it in your eyes and so forth, or farming them in abysmal conditions for the vanity of fur coats when fake fur is just as good (and doesn't cause allergic reactions, and lasts longer!) is in any way a reasonable use of animals.
I can certainly sympathise with the disrespect people would have for PETA if it believes we should all go vegetarian and does so in a militant fashion. That certainly crosses a line beyond rationality.
"You can become infected on Windows just by surfing the wrong website."
Only if you're running an unpatched machine.
Just like with Apple devices in fact:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9197184/Apple_patches_critical_drive_by_Safari_bugs
The reality is there's no difference between this and Windows Malware, it's already been mentioned in the news that there is a version of this that runs in userland and so doesn't actually need to ask for a username and password, just as there is Windows malware that does the same, and Windows malware that doesn't do the same and so also requires authentication to get away with certain things.
Apple fans can spin it however they want, this is EXACTLY like Windows malware, this is Apple kit suffering exactly the same things Windows has for a long while. This demonstrably dispels the myth that Apple kit is somehow more secure, but to be fair on both Apple, and Microsoft, it also demonstrates that for both vendors, the biggest security threat nowadays is generally the user.
Agreed, I'm struggling to see by what objective metric Netscape could've been deemed the better browser.
It really did lose the browser wars simply because it was shit. I dealt with any number of average users who tried it and went back to IE- it wasn't simply that IE was there, it was that it was better so that even those that did try Netscape realised it wasn't worth bothering with, and they fed that back to friends and family, who also saw little reason to bother. Netscape was just technically inferior, and worse from a usability perspective. It didn't even have a performance advantage which is really one of the major factors in pulling people from IE6 to Firefox in the end.
By the time IE3 and IE4 came out CDs were the normal distribution method for browsers from ISPs, and CDs were still big enough to stick everything an ISP would ever want to stick on them and then some so I don't know what he's on about floppies for, it was really irrelevant at the point the browser wars were truly underway. Just to highlight how big CDs seemed back then, they tended to be the classic 650mb, and a minimal Windows 95 install on your hard drive was 25mb. The install files for it were maybe 80mb, if that.
I think this is precisely the problem the likes of NATO and so forth face.
Any people they employ as "cyber soldiers" or whatever they call them nowadays are most likely to be much more closely aligned to anonymous' mindset than the mindset of NATO.
NATO is used to starting wars with people it is far stronger than and can steamroll. This time it may be making a mistake, the number of people supportive of anonymous and the average level of skill of it's members is almost certainly going to be way above anything NATO can muster. NATO may well find that this is a war that it will lose, hard.
The problem is likely further exacerbated by the fact that many militaries are embedding their "cyber soldiers" into the military structure itself, and well, good luck finding any decent number of highly intelligent geeks willing to put up with the same crap a bunch of grunts would.
They think Bradley Manning is a one off, unique, a blip. They do not realise that Bradley Manning is emblematic of his generation- they're sick of the greedy mindset of the baby boomers and they want a better world- this is also why the Arab Spring revolutions have been led largely by the young.
The world is changing, the old administrations are looking woefully out of date, they're picking a fight with the people they will need to look after them and protect them as they age. That's a pretty fucking stupid thing to do.
Yes, primarily these people are mathematicians, programming is only a secondary skill that helps them in their role.
It's already dead to me. CoD4 (MW) was one of my favourite games in many years, CoD5 (WaW) couldn't quite hold the torch to MW but was still very good. CoD6 (MW2) was somewhat of a dissapointment to me, the story line seemed a bit incoherent and the multiplayer seemed to have been designed by an overexcited 6yr old (OMG GIEV PLAYARS NUKULARSS THAT END TEH GAME POINTLESSLY!!!!!!1111 LOL). CoD7 (Black Ops), well, the worst in the franchise so far IMO. The story was dire, the multiplayer looked unfinished, graphically it looked pretty crap compared to many other titles around now.
Personally I liked Medal of Honour, good fun game, better storyline, far better multiplayer but the only downside is it was too short, not enough single player content or multiplayer maps. Here's hoping for Battlefield 3, it looks far far better than CoD has in recent years. I can't see any point bothering with MW3, reading the "leaked" storyline it already sounds stupid:
Random location map team thought would be fun 1:
Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
Random location map team thought would be fun 2:
Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
Random location map team thought would be fun 3:
Chase bad guy, fail to catch him
.
.
.
Random location map team thought would be fun 10:
Chase bad guy, shoot him. The end.
Already it seems to demonstrate a lack of care over the storyline, and the storyline looks like it's been built around the map team just deciding without any coordination what places they'd like to shoot stuff in, rather than there being some kind of interesting or coherent storyline around which the maps should be built as is the case in quality games.
Activision have already killed the franchise for me, and when they put a ~15% price premium on CoD over other games this last 2 years and those to come then I have no justifiable reason to pay for it anymore. Why pay more for increasingly shit games? CoD peaked with MW, and it's been downhill since then.
I can't really comment on PETA, I know it has a very negative perception in the US, but certainly here in the UK it would be completely wrong to make such a comment about our animal welfare organisations.
When we have videos of turkeys being thrown up into the air and hit with a baseball bat then left around crippled, sometimes paralyzed, and sometimes dying to suffer until they're finally actually culled a few days later and that sort of thing then it's nothing to do with a disassociation from the reality of where our food comes from but a complete distaste of sick fucks who actually get pleasure out of seeing things suffer.
Certainly here in the UK, whilst few people like seeing animals die, they understand it's necessary for their food. What they don't think is necessary is for people to get pleasure out of making living things suffer a slow painful death for fun. Not liking unnecessary suffering at least has little to do with not wanting to have meat killed for food, and many vegetarians here are vegetarian not because they don't want to see animals killed, but because they don't like the unnecessarily cruel practices involved.
Personally I couldn't ever be a vegetarian because I don't really eat a lot of vegetables, and do eat a lot of meat, but I do have some respect for their viewpoint- importantly it's had some positive effects here in the UK, battery farming of chickens has seen a massive decrease in favour of free range eggs for example, and the best part of all that? the quality of our food has improved as a result too, and to demonstrate the fact that many of these vegetarians aren't rational, many are now happy to eat eggs again as a result knowing the animals were treated reasonably.
I'm not saying there aren't purists out there who think all killing is bad, and yes they're irrational, but they're really a minority amongst vegetarians so to bundle them all in with PETA (assuming PETA's reputation is deserved- as I say, I don't know enough about it) seems rather unfair.
But doesn't it stretch to everything? We turn a blind eye to ecosystems destroyed for our raw materials, we turn a blind eye to abysmal working conditions of people who make our clothes and gadgets- sometimes even child labour, we don't recognise what utterly filthy jobs people have to do to ensure our waste management systems work.
There's a lot of unpleasant jobs out there that people are detached from but it seems to be a new fad to focus on the food part of it. The fact is we're a consumer society, we live in a world where people can choose to pay to have these sorts of jobs done. I'm not sure it's an inherently bad thing- what exactly changes between paying for some meat at a supermarket and killing it and producing it yourself?
It strikes me as little more than a new machismo fad- "look at me, I'm a real tough guy, I kill my own food". I've snared and skinned rabbit in the past, I didn't like it in the slightest, but it was part of getting our own food. I'm not really sure what value there is in all people doing the same- it didn't teach me anything I wasn't aware of. It was just as horrible as I expected it to be. What is the value exactly of people being "reconnected" to the reality of slaughter for food? the hope they'll be shocked into going vegetarian or something? There seems to be this view that because people don't do it, they can't or wouldn't do it- they could and would, they just prefer not too, and like plumbing blocked toilets and so forth they'd rather pay someone else to do it.
"Exactly. Is it a dick move by the Palestinians? Absolutely. But it really is their right, after all, they are paying for his trip and they can put whatever conditions on it they'd like."
Yes, sadly it's also indicative of why there are so many problems in the region and it's sad that even academia have fallen into the trap of pursuing such a vicious circle.
My view? the sensible option would've been to split the cost with the Israeli universities, cheaper for everyone, and everyone benefits, academic benefits as a whole, but god forbid there be any cooperation.
Palestinians, Israelis, they're both as bad as each other and frankly deserve each other. They bring it upon themselves, and academia of all places should recognise the importance of building bridges and this is precisely the type of scenario where such a thing, no matter how small, could have been done.
"People that want cutting edge gaming rigs buy PCs, not consoles, which are behind at launch and get further so over time."
Rubbish. Console hardware unlike PC hardware is optimised purely for gaming, therefore equally specced console kit always performs much better for gaming. It gets a further boost in that it's a single hardware platform so game developers can do much more intricate optimisation than they can for the PC because the PC's combinatorial explosion of hardware combinations makes optimisation and testing an impossible task to the same degree.
Consoles are further boosted by the fact that they're often subsidised, they're built in bulk, and so the consumer gets far more bang for their buck out the box.
I agree high end consoles (i.e. PS3/360, not the Wii) perform less well than PCs towards the end of their generation - 4 - 5 years on from release, but for the vast majority of their lifetime until the next iteration they're way ahead of PC hardware in terms of their gaming performance and capability. Like it not, that's simply the advantage of dedicated hardware, if such an advantage didn't exist then consoles wouldn't use so much bespoke hardware and designs. Stating consoles are behind at launch at best shows complete ignorance of the advantage of the rather basic principle of having hardware designed primarily for a specific task rather than for generic processing as with the PC. It's a bit like saying mobile phone hardware is worse for draining battery life than desktop PC hardware- obviously that's just fucking stupid.
Some posts I've had removed are just nonsensical though and leave no room for any explanation other than bias on behalf of the moderators.
One post I had moderated that comes to mind was merely:
"I find it odd that elements of the tea party proclaim to be strong beleivers in free speech, yet also supporter suggestions that when people like Julian Assange exercise such speech he should be jailed, or assassinated"
It's not the only such post, maybe it's just my personal bias and there is something deeply offensive about that post I'm overlooking but you'll have to excuse me for not seeing it. Another post I made that was censored was:
"It's all very well people complaining about polish immigrants taking jobs, but in my experience polish immigrants have a very good work ethic- much better than many born and bred British people I have worked with"
The BBC has often been claimed to be left wing, but I've seen nothing but strong right wing sentiment and censorship from their moderation team, and frankly, it stinks.
In your honest opinion, do you think posts such as the above are really just a case of being over-cautious? I think they're pretty tame, and I've seen much more offensive right wing leaning stuff than that left alone and when I've submitted complaints to try and play the game the same way the game has played against me it's never been succesful- it seems defence of immigrants is censor-worthy, but right wing zealotry and bigotry all too often go untouched and it's those double standards at the BBC that makes me sick- either censor equally, don't censor at all, or don't even run a discussion forum at all if you can't do either of those right.
"So, killing animals for food is 'going off the deep end'?"
Yeah, if you're a multi-billionaire.
"Maybe you lived in a city your whole life and got it nicely packaged for you in a supermarket or pre-cooked and now you want to consider people who actually kill the animals as somehow beneath you, or having 'gone off the deep end'? Maybe you should reconsider your food choices if you want to avoid looking like either a blatant classist or a hypocrite."
Blah blah, cutting down forests, mining for oil and other materials are all pretty destructive too but it's not really something you do yourself out of choice just so you can say "Hey, look at me, I'm Mr Ethical, I cut down my own rainforest and made my own table, and smashed up my own hill to mine my own metals to weld my own car together".
Really, the point is this, not that people don't know where their food comes from, but that ending the life of something isn't particularly pleasant. If you start doing it to make a point or as a PR stunt then yes it's a little weird. The issue is that killing something for food out of necessity because it's your job- your living, or for mere survival, is one thing, but doing it to make a point, or because you enjoy it? That's a little more strange.
You seem to recognise that slaughtering an animal isn't a particularly pleasant and enjoyable thing, so please realise if people are saying it's weird it's not because they're disrespecting people like you who have done this rather unpleasant task, but because they wonder why someone would do such a thing out of choice when they simply do not have to.
When we're talking about someone who judging by past comments and actions seems somewhat of a sociopath, one with quite a hunger for power, coupled with the fact there's a list of animals he's killed and a comment of how he killed one as if he's tallying them up on a scorecard or something (Chicken- tick, pig- tick, goat- tick, horse- tick, human- tick), then I'm not really suprised people think he may have gone off his rocker a little. That's not to say that means people like you who did this out of necessity are also in the same boat however.
I think most people recognise slaughtering animals for food is a fact of life, but as a PR stunt, to make a point, or for enjoyment? That's a little more weird.
Maybe she's hot.
But why even make such a statement? Why not make the point of saying that they'll consider moving their office location should there be any sign of such legal obligations? It's not as if they've had their office here for more than a few weeks so there's really very little to lose at this stage for them- again, particularly when they have the ear of the prime minister.
By simply saying "Yeah, we'll hand it over if we're legally obliged" they're really saying "We really can't be bothered to fight this one, so even if the most absurd legal ruling comes along we wont bother to fight or appeal it, we'll just bend over and screw you, our users, over". The complete lack of fighting talk, the complete lack of concern at what they might be asked is telling enough.
You only have to contrast this statement which is extremely submissive, with previous statements from them when faced with ultimatums from elsewhere, including the US government to see that they really do not seem concerned about just bowing down and handing it all over in this case.
Fundamentally you're right, that they when you say most corporations wont even fight it if compliance is cheap, but that's something I addressed in my previous post- this is classic short sighted economics, it's where Sony has fallen over and over- rootkit DRM, chasing the likes of GeoHot etc. ignoring the long term harm this does to their reputation to the point they're now being humiliated over and over and over by discontented hackers. Ignoring the long term damage this will do to them as a platform is stupid. Think any users in the middle east, africa, asia, or any other authoritarian regimes will trust them ever again if they do that?
They can't pick and choose when they want to be defenders of freedom, they've milked the suggestion that they are for some time, and if they're not then shame on them for lying to us all along.
What all these browser manufacturers are trying to do is remove as much of the browser as possible, so that when we get to their envisaged day of all our apps being web pages we can load them up in the browser and because there will be nothing left of the browser all we will see is the app as if we're just using a desktop app.
What they should really be doing however is just replacing HTTP and (X)HTML with a whole new set of standards designed to allow development and usage of such cloud based applications- a client that can have all sorts of standard controls and so forth transmitted to it in a stateful way with security by default. HTML, HTTP and so forth are such shit fits for the job I wish they'd stop trying to mangle them into something they are not, and instead just keep browsers as browsers and make their new web from scratch without trying to (badly) mangle legacy stuff into something it's not.
I agree but what I'd add is that Twitter should be absolutely lambasted for agreeing to hand over the names as that's what really stinks in this scenario.
They're a US company and the data is stored on US servers, they've only just recently opened an office in the UK and did so as part of the British Prime Minister's push for a greater digital economy in the UK but aren't yet heavily invested enough here to be harmed financially.
They are perfectly positioned to outright defy such a request with the ultimatum that they will take their European office to somewhere else such as Paris or any number of other European countries. This would put immense pressure on the PM to make the UK more suitable for tech companies by ensuring our laws are not a deterrent to such innovation as they are currently.
But instead they've chosen to just fuck their users to save themselves a little bit of hassle and at the expense of what would've been some great PR for them in doing what is right.
Worse, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't the immense hypocrisy of it. Previously Twitter has cashed in on it's useage during the Iranian protests, and the Arab Spring uprisings yet what does this precedent say, that if an authoritarian regime wants names it'll hand them over? or is it simply being two faced here and saying it'll gladly allow dissenting voices in some countries, but not others?
Twitter's stance is pathetic, completely and utterly pathetic. They had here an opportunity to really use this as an example of why countries like the UK can never have a silicon valley because of absurd laws, and instead of using that example to push for a better place for a European HQ they're just doing a Sony and fucking their users for nothing more than an absolutely tiny short term economic gain, one that will likely dent their image and do them far more harm longer term.