Yeah, because the best way to to deal with a small problem is to put it off until it becomes a really big problem. It's working with global warming, isn't it?
I simply cannot believe Slashdot linked to the Sun. Its only benefit is (in the words of Edmund Blackadder) "being highly absorbant. GoogleTruth seems interesting but lying is not what I am worried about in my leaders, I am worried about them being neo-liberal, cruel, capitalist pigs; who think nothing of crushing worker rights and trying to steal our basic needs of government away from us.
Why did the parent get rated Insightful and Interesting, when it is clearly Offtopic? I'll agree the two existing moderations are correct, but you have to admit it has nothing to do with EU software patent debates.
Thank you, Mr. Gibson. Whoever posted that should be more careful about posting links to the website of "computer security expert" Steve "Raw Sockets Will Destroy Teh Internets" Gibson.
Thinking up secure passwords is easy if you know leet speak. Taking a sentence then converting some letters to numbers is a pretty good way of getting reasonably secure passwords, then simply change some random letters to upper case to finish the job. linuxisace becomes 1inuxi5ac3 becomes 1iNuXi5aC3.
People are now willing to submit pretty non-interesting news to Slashdot for the sake of a cheap pun (sorry Theodore, your newspaper-headline-writing days are still a distant fantasy).
Note to anyone who mods this 'Off-Topic': I found TFA in the dot cache and it really is not Slashdot-worthy (though what is these days?).
You have to remember this is a UK website, so the opinions on what websites changed "the world" ie our world would be vastly different if the story was published by a US (or any other country, for that matter) media outlet. In case you were wondering, yes I am British and easyJet and FriendsReunited were pretty important websites for us - easyJet a lot more so as that was our first taste of budget airlines.
What a whole load of fuss over pretty much nothing. Apart from "speculation" that ID cards are evil and will contain your soul the actual facts are that ID cards will only contain the same amount of information found in driver's license, passport, etc - it is just consolidated in one place. Every single time there is an ID cards discussion on/. everybody starts saying "the UK is a police state", "the UK is fascist", "Britain is undemocratic". Nobody seems to realise that ID cards aren't the state trying to reach into every aspect of your life, they are just trying to consolidate your personal information into one place, rather than having it scattered all over the place, making ID theft all the easier.
And to whoever it was who said about discussing policy in the UK rarely happens and policy discussion goes on all the time in the US: a seperation of powers only works if they are pulling in different directions.
i can't tell you how many mucked up network stacks i've seen because of norton's personal firewall program. once it's uninstalled the networking magically works. go figure. even disabling it does nothing.
Somebody I know has Norton Personal Firewall, he has to manually open ports, leaving them open constantly and to use Xfire, an IM and server browser program that opens many different ports as it queries servers, he has to disable it. I'm not sure if he is using an old version (2005, he says) but it seems to function like something a computing student cooked up in his spare time, it lacks the ability to open and close ports only when a certain program using those ports is open - something that is quite frankly unacceptable.
I am so glad I have switched to alternate products, big-name AV software register false positives and firewalls that you have to disable if you want to use more than one program at a time.
I know that some people here in the UK do not really care about their EU representatives (not sure how the other European nations fare) but that does not mean that they are unaccountable. Also I would call the EU far from a US lap dog, they have conflicted with the US over America putting tariffs on European steel and got the tariff lifted. They also conflicted with the US about giving arms to China (Condoleezza Rice highlighted this on a visit to China - quite an odd place to bring that up, one would think). They have not backed down. I also could not find this "Operation X and Y", and I can't find much evidence suggesting the EU at the beck and call of corporations. It may be true that Berlusconi was corrupt but generally there is little pandering for corporations in the major European nations, the same can be said for the EU.
Plus in countries like Germany and France, English is taught as a second language in nearly all schools (something Chirac isn't too pleased about, I hear). Oh yeah and there is a small group of islands off the French coast that speak English. I think it's called the United Kingdon.
Those 3D Realms guys are pretty darn clever. They just tell everyone they are making Duke Nukem Forever, issue a press release every so often and then wait for people to start offering them money. If they wait long enough they could be offered even bigger sums of money up-front. Then just accept and release whatever crap they've got. They make massive sums of money on the offer and sales.
I personally think it would be hilarious if they did finally release it and it was worse than even the most horrible movie tie-in title.
Having touch linked with robotics isn't that new. A while ago I heard about a scientist here in the UK who had a microchip implanted in his arm. This chip was able to communicate with a robotic arm. He was able to move the robotic arm just be moving his own. The robotic arm also had touch sensors. When they switched the communications the other way and got somebody to touch the robotic hand the scientist reported strange sensations in the fingers - as if it were actually happening to his real arm. This technology I believe was meant to be research into advanced prosthetics, but I shouldn't imagine this technology would be too far off what is required, if they had an array of sensors on a probing device and a surgeon with this microchip that just communicated with the tip of his finger. If the sensors were sensitive enough he could "feel" what the probe was touching.
Advertising. Plain and simple.
Soccer does not stop for anything. There's no stopping for injuries, time-outs for strategies, etc.
Well, that's not strictly true. Most teams will kick the ball out of play if they notice a player is injured, so as not to gain an unfair advantage. I really admire those guys spending 90 minutes running and doing stuff.
Apart from the substitutions.
I think that Soccer, as a TV spectator sport, has not catched on major networks because advertisers here in the US do not like it. There's no place for 30 second ads! Gasp! Egads! There's no place for gimmicky Super Bowl ads!
In the UK we miss out on those ads. Most of the time it is amusing to watch American football, if only for the padding, the over-the-top fanfare and the exhaggerated celebrations. Think lots of "Yeeeeeaaaaaah!"s and "Wooooooooooooooooooo!"s. Why do they make it so you can hear those celebrations? It does not add anything to the content of the game. I really would not want to hear David Beckham's whiney voice shouting every time he scores (which, despite this, I hope will be many, many times).
When there are fans in the stands with blatantly racist signs, and large groups of them wearing Nazi logos and giving the Nazi salute to on-field players - who occasionally return the salute - as well as players being hounded *on the field by other players* and FIFA does *nothing at all about it* something is fucked up. If someone showed up at an American football game and waved a swastika while calling Daunte Culpepper racist slurs, or even simply *threw bananas at him*, he would be escorted out of the stadium and probably brought up on charges.
I am so sick of all of this uninformed rubbish about racism in football. What you are referring to are isolated incidents of very small groups of fans - and if you think football teams would return a Nazi salute then you really are living in the dark ages. Some other posters imply it is only European fans - like we are the real problem. The fact that this World Cup is being held in Germany, would you also say that Germany is the hub of racism in Europe? All developed countries in Europe have strict anti-racism policies in football, any team that is subject to racism on the pitch can go home and file a complaint - they do not have to put up with it. Believe it or not Europe is not still a dangerous continent filled with Nazis and Communists, football is a civilised game of skill that is open to any nation and does not have limits of sexuality or ethnicity. What some nations may believe about how their own club is run is their problem, not FIFA's. If we can please drop the whole subject of racism in football, it is no longer an issue at all.
Good luck to all countries competing in the World Cup.
So your broadband speeds are not what are advertised. Big deal! As a resident of the UK I find it startling that your grandmother can afford 3Mbps DSL when most companies in the UK still charge ludicrous amounts for speeds around that, and you have to pay a whole lot more if you want no download limits. We are just about edging towards 8Mbps as a reasonably viable option, but that is still very expensive and most services have download limits of 1 or 2 GB, which is completely unusable for the kind of people who need those speeds.
Of course you are not going to get the full potential of your speed. But think yourself lucky you can get speeds like that for a good price and with companies you can trust.
Unless your grandmother is a millionaire and I have got the wrong end of the stick completely.
I'm sorry, "Leftist"? More like "Leftish". New Labour is centre-left. And the Conservatives are now centre-right, with the Liberal Democrats being equidistant. That basically means that all the serious (well, half-serious for Lib Dems) choices for government differ very little in terms of policy. So these "leftist" laws are probably (either publicly or privately) endorsed by the Conservatives. And the Lib Dems (who have little to no power) stand around muttering something about rights, but nobody listens to them so they don't really count. Yes, we are stuck with a lot of ministers who try to make stupid laws, but that's what you get from a fusion of powers, people from the legislative have to work in the executive - meaning you get a lot of people working for the PM who are entirely useless. My eyes are darting wildly between Ruth Kelly, Charles Clark and John Prescott.
I couldn't agree more. I got MPC with the K-Lite codec pack and have never looked back. If any of my friends have trouble playing certain media I just tell them to get the K-Lite codec pack and they all get hooked on Media Player Classic, even if they don't like the codec pack.
Nearly 5 years ago, the great and all knowing Steve Gibson predicted that the raw sockets in Windows XP would allow packet spoofing that would bring down the internet with unstoppable DOS attacks.
So it must be true.
I really hope that is sarcasm. Yes, it must be. However some of the other replies are not, which worries me slightly as people don't seem to realise Gibson is the guy behind Spin Rite. Spin Rite, people. Think of that next time you read some of his "advice".
I'd recommend the ClickteamThe Games Factory 1.0 / Multimedia Fusion 1.5 software line. TGF is pretty old now and you can pick some copies up for free but MMF is its advanced bigger brother, with a lot more features and a more professional direction. You might want to get TGF to start with then move on to MMF when you find TGF's limitations. Both Clickteam products are great for learning fundamentals and the fact that programming is arranged into a grid means that there is very little typing involved, things are mainly point and click. You will find that you can make quite complex programs, with the help of the freely-available extensions. It is a nice way of getting into programming and can aid in learning the building blocks that the user will encounter if they attempt to learn more complex, less visual programming languages.
May blessings forever fall on whoever created bugmenot.com's head. It's interesting we can speculate so much over China as a Communist state, but by the mere fact that we can speculate it means that China may be seeing winds of change. We know virtually nothing about North Korea, I've heard conflicting reports of 24Mb broadband being the standard and all forms of outside communication being banned. Apart from that I've only ever seen a programme from North Korean TV courtesy of Tarrant on TV which was just three kids jumping up and down nervously whilst subtitles informed us "these little flowers are filled with love for their emporer". I'm not saying that China will suddenly turn into a world-benchmark democracy overnight, but China may be on the road to reform in a similar way to the USSR through the cold war. This is a basic flaw of Communism, that the very first leader is put on such a pedastall that when a new leader is introduced people will probably reject him, but will still abide by the law. Eventually politicians and members of the population get sick of all the new leaders pretending to be as "good" as the first and will decide that Communism doesn't really seem to do the job that well, and they are better off with democracy. How long this process will take is anyone's guess. The difference with China is that their economy is booming so it will probably take a lot longer for Communism to be eradicated.
I am familiar with that website, however I found their positioning of world leaders to somewhat biased. Oh and great going whoever labelled my comment trying to clear up what I thought many people may be confused about as a "troll" they probably just skip-read it, saw "BNP" and "Nazi" and probably thought I was trying to support Nazism. I wish there was some way to contest these moderations.
Actually the warranty/EULA information or whatever name it is given will probably scare people into using inferior and expensive products over their superior and free counterparts. The reason for this is simple: people trust commercial software to agree to any of its conditions. What user (except a Slashdotter, perhaps) will look at a Microsoft EULA and say "wow I don't think I will trust this well-known company with my computer, even if it does give technical support". Whereas free/open source software will usually include documents that imply zero to no protection with little to no support if things go wrong. At least with commercial EULAs you have to browse a bit to get to the scary bits about invasion of privacy. Free/open source software documents often open with something like this:
This software is provided as is, and no warranty is expressed or implied, (Company) will not be held accountable for any damage or distress caused, directly or indirectly by the use of this software. By reading this notice and/or using the software you (the user) are agreeing to the terms of this written contract.
Most users will run a mile after reading something like that, flocking to the nearest wholesaler of privacy-infringing, compliance-ignoring tat.
Slashdot Mirror
Parody is still legal in the UK, I seem to remember Joel Veitch making a parody of a government website, he was never shut down.
I simply cannot believe Slashdot linked to the Sun. Its only benefit is (in the words of Edmund Blackadder) "being highly absorbant. GoogleTruth seems interesting but lying is not what I am worried about in my leaders, I am worried about them being neo-liberal, cruel, capitalist pigs; who think nothing of crushing worker rights and trying to steal our basic needs of government away from us.
Why did the parent get rated Insightful and Interesting, when it is clearly Offtopic? I'll agree the two existing moderations are correct, but you have to admit it has nothing to do with EU software patent debates.
https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
Thank you, Mr. Gibson. Whoever posted that should be more careful about posting links to the website of "computer security expert" Steve "Raw Sockets Will Destroy Teh Internets" Gibson.
Thinking up secure passwords is easy if you know leet speak. Taking a sentence then converting some letters to numbers is a pretty good way of getting reasonably secure passwords, then simply change some random letters to upper case to finish the job. linuxisace becomes 1inuxi5ac3 becomes 1iNuXi5aC3.
Note to anyone who mods this 'Off-Topic': I found TFA in the dot cache and it really is not Slashdot-worthy (though what is these days?).
You have to remember this is a UK website, so the opinions on what websites changed "the world" ie our world would be vastly different if the story was published by a US (or any other country, for that matter) media outlet. In case you were wondering, yes I am British and easyJet and FriendsReunited were pretty important websites for us - easyJet a lot more so as that was our first taste of budget airlines.
What a whole load of fuss over pretty much nothing. Apart from "speculation" that ID cards are evil and will contain your soul the actual facts are that ID cards will only contain the same amount of information found in driver's license, passport, etc - it is just consolidated in one place. Every single time there is an ID cards discussion on /. everybody starts saying "the UK is a police state", "the UK is fascist", "Britain is undemocratic". Nobody seems to realise that ID cards aren't the state trying to reach into every aspect of your life, they are just trying to consolidate your personal information into one place, rather than having it scattered all over the place, making ID theft all the easier.
And to whoever it was who said about discussing policy in the UK rarely happens and policy discussion goes on all the time in the US: a seperation of powers only works if they are pulling in different directions.
Somebody I know has Norton Personal Firewall, he has to manually open ports, leaving them open constantly and to use Xfire, an IM and server browser program that opens many different ports as it queries servers, he has to disable it. I'm not sure if he is using an old version (2005, he says) but it seems to function like something a computing student cooked up in his spare time, it lacks the ability to open and close ports only when a certain program using those ports is open - something that is quite frankly unacceptable.
I am so glad I have switched to alternate products, big-name AV software register false positives and firewalls that you have to disable if you want to use more than one program at a time.
www.nsa.gov/careers actually.
You see its not just a job...it's a career!
I know that some people here in the UK do not really care about their EU representatives (not sure how the other European nations fare) but that does not mean that they are unaccountable. Also I would call the EU far from a US lap dog, they have conflicted with the US over America putting tariffs on European steel and got the tariff lifted. They also conflicted with the US about giving arms to China (Condoleezza Rice highlighted this on a visit to China - quite an odd place to bring that up, one would think). They have not backed down. I also could not find this "Operation X and Y", and I can't find much evidence suggesting the EU at the beck and call of corporations. It may be true that Berlusconi was corrupt but generally there is little pandering for corporations in the major European nations, the same can be said for the EU.
Plus in countries like Germany and France, English is taught as a second language in nearly all schools (something Chirac isn't too pleased about, I hear). Oh yeah and there is a small group of islands off the French coast that speak English. I think it's called the United Kingdon.
What does it say about the human race when all our advances in technology can be linked to porn or the military?
That, despite what we may think, we are all, actually, apes with less hair. Not that that is a bad thing of course...
Those 3D Realms guys are pretty darn clever. They just tell everyone they are making Duke Nukem Forever, issue a press release every so often and then wait for people to start offering them money. If they wait long enough they could be offered even bigger sums of money up-front. Then just accept and release whatever crap they've got. They make massive sums of money on the offer and sales.
I personally think it would be hilarious if they did finally release it and it was worse than even the most horrible movie tie-in title.
Having touch linked with robotics isn't that new. A while ago I heard about a scientist here in the UK who had a microchip implanted in his arm. This chip was able to communicate with a robotic arm. He was able to move the robotic arm just be moving his own. The robotic arm also had touch sensors. When they switched the communications the other way and got somebody to touch the robotic hand the scientist reported strange sensations in the fingers - as if it were actually happening to his real arm. This technology I believe was meant to be research into advanced prosthetics, but I shouldn't imagine this technology would be too far off what is required, if they had an array of sensors on a probing device and a surgeon with this microchip that just communicated with the tip of his finger. If the sensors were sensitive enough he could "feel" what the probe was touching.
Advertising. Plain and simple. Soccer does not stop for anything. There's no stopping for injuries, time-outs for strategies, etc.
Well, that's not strictly true. Most teams will kick the ball out of play if they notice a player is injured, so as not to gain an unfair advantage.
I really admire those guys spending 90 minutes running and doing stuff.
Apart from the substitutions. I think that Soccer, as a TV spectator sport, has not catched on major networks because advertisers here in the US do not like it. There's no place for 30 second ads! Gasp! Egads! There's no place for gimmicky Super Bowl ads!
In the UK we miss out on those ads. Most of the time it is amusing to watch American football, if only for the padding, the over-the-top fanfare and the exhaggerated celebrations. Think lots of "Yeeeeeaaaaaah!"s and "Wooooooooooooooooooo!"s. Why do they make it so you can hear those celebrations? It does not add anything to the content of the game. I really would not want to hear David Beckham's whiney voice shouting every time he scores (which, despite this, I hope will be many, many times).
I am so sick of all of this uninformed rubbish about racism in football. What you are referring to are isolated incidents of very small groups of fans - and if you think football teams would return a Nazi salute then you really are living in the dark ages. Some other posters imply it is only European fans - like we are the real problem. The fact that this World Cup is being held in Germany, would you also say that Germany is the hub of racism in Europe? All developed countries in Europe have strict anti-racism policies in football, any team that is subject to racism on the pitch can go home and file a complaint - they do not have to put up with it. Believe it or not Europe is not still a dangerous continent filled with Nazis and Communists, football is a civilised game of skill that is open to any nation and does not have limits of sexuality or ethnicity. What some nations may believe about how their own club is run is their problem, not FIFA's. If we can please drop the whole subject of racism in football, it is no longer an issue at all.
Good luck to all countries competing in the World Cup.
Of course you are not going to get the full potential of your speed. But think yourself lucky you can get speeds like that for a good price and with companies you can trust.
Unless your grandmother is a millionaire and I have got the wrong end of the stick completely.
I'm sorry, "Leftist"? More like "Leftish". New Labour is centre-left. And the Conservatives are now centre-right, with the Liberal Democrats being equidistant. That basically means that all the serious (well, half-serious for Lib Dems) choices for government differ very little in terms of policy. So these "leftist" laws are probably (either publicly or privately) endorsed by the Conservatives. And the Lib Dems (who have little to no power) stand around muttering something about rights, but nobody listens to them so they don't really count. Yes, we are stuck with a lot of ministers who try to make stupid laws, but that's what you get from a fusion of powers, people from the legislative have to work in the executive - meaning you get a lot of people working for the PM who are entirely useless. My eyes are darting wildly between Ruth Kelly, Charles Clark and John Prescott.
I bet you run a conspiracy website. Just look at those unnecessary capitalizations.
I couldn't agree more. I got MPC with the K-Lite codec pack and have never looked back. If any of my friends have trouble playing certain media I just tell them to get the K-Lite codec pack and they all get hooked on Media Player Classic, even if they don't like the codec pack.
So it must be true.
I really hope that is sarcasm. Yes, it must be. However some of the other replies are not, which worries me slightly as people don't seem to realise Gibson is the guy behind Spin Rite. Spin Rite, people. Think of that next time you read some of his "advice".
I'd recommend the Clickteam The Games Factory 1.0 / Multimedia Fusion 1.5 software line. TGF is pretty old now and you can pick some copies up for free but MMF is its advanced bigger brother, with a lot more features and a more professional direction. You might want to get TGF to start with then move on to MMF when you find TGF's limitations. Both Clickteam products are great for learning fundamentals and the fact that programming is arranged into a grid means that there is very little typing involved, things are mainly point and click. You will find that you can make quite complex programs, with the help of the freely-available extensions. It is a nice way of getting into programming and can aid in learning the building blocks that the user will encounter if they attempt to learn more complex, less visual programming languages.
May blessings forever fall on whoever created bugmenot.com's head.
It's interesting we can speculate so much over China as a Communist state, but by the mere fact that we can speculate it means that China may be seeing winds of change. We know virtually nothing about North Korea, I've heard conflicting reports of 24Mb broadband being the standard and all forms of outside communication being banned. Apart from that I've only ever seen a programme from North Korean TV courtesy of Tarrant on TV which was just three kids jumping up and down nervously whilst subtitles informed us "these little flowers are filled with love for their emporer". I'm not saying that China will suddenly turn into a world-benchmark democracy overnight, but China may be on the road to reform in a similar way to the USSR through the cold war. This is a basic flaw of Communism, that the very first leader is put on such a pedastall that when a new leader is introduced people will probably reject him, but will still abide by the law. Eventually politicians and members of the population get sick of all the new leaders pretending to be as "good" as the first and will decide that Communism doesn't really seem to do the job that well, and they are better off with democracy. How long this process will take is anyone's guess. The difference with China is that their economy is booming so it will probably take a lot longer for Communism to be eradicated.
I am familiar with that website, however I found their positioning of world leaders to somewhat biased. Oh and great going whoever labelled my comment trying to clear up what I thought many people may be confused about as a "troll" they probably just skip-read it, saw "BNP" and "Nazi" and probably thought I was trying to support Nazism. I wish there was some way to contest these moderations.
This software is provided as is, and no warranty is expressed or implied, (Company) will not be held accountable for any damage or distress caused, directly or indirectly by the use of this software. By reading this notice and/or using the software you (the user) are agreeing to the terms of this written contract.
Most users will run a mile after reading something like that, flocking to the nearest wholesaler of privacy-infringing, compliance-ignoring tat.