Actually the EU caps only cover calls and texts, not data.
The current EU caps (that were further lowered by a few cents per minute today) apply to calls and texts. TFA is referring to proposed EU-wide caps for mobile data. From the numbers they give it seems they would be at around 0.5 Euro per MB.
I hardly use bookmarks anymore because I can just start typing and the page I am looking for pops up in the drop down bar 99% of the time.
That's nice. Sounds like it would be great as a bookmark search field. When I start typing in a URL in a URL bar, I'd like for it to start showing me the URLs that start with what I typed, not any page that I visited previously that has the word I typed on it.
It's not any page that I visited previously that has the word I typed on it. It's just in the url or page title.
By the way, if a post discussing a "moron bar" and calling the firefox developers a "bunch of idiots" is modded +5 insightful, that is a pretty glaring failure of moderation.
No, you're just in the minority when it comes to liking the idiot firefox developers who shoved the moron bar down people's throats.
Moderation is not an opinion poll. There is no -1 Disagree modifier, nor a +1 Agree, unless moderators are abusing their role. Regardless of what you think of firefox and its developers, calling people morons is not a constructive contribution to the discussion, any more than writing micro$oft with the dollar sign or comparing everyone and his grandmother to hitler (is this a meta-godwin?).
Firefox's usage share has been slowly declining since quite some time. They introduced the rather universally hated moron-bar, and paid no attention to the feedback.
The moron bar, as you call it (Mozilla prefers to call it the awesome bar) is a ridiculously addictive feature once you get used to it. I hardly use bookmarks anymore because I can just start typing and the page I am looking for pops up in the drop down bar 99% of the time. For me it is up there with tabbed browsing, adblock, and noscript as the can't-do-without features that have kept me on firefox over the years, despite the good software that both opera and chrome have been putting together.
I'm not sure what are the unwelcome UI changes firefox 4 that you mention... Oh the tabs are above the URL bar rather than below? That's almost as evil as having the x button on the left instead of on the right! Let's stone them all!..
By the way, if a post discussing a "moron bar" and calling the firefox developers a "bunch of idiots" is modded +5 insightful, that is a pretty glaring failure of moderation...
I think people are missing the point. Of course this is not surprising. Of course a for-profit company wants to advertise their own products. Of course they want you to use their stuff before you use Groupon et al. Of course. The point is, Google touts itself as providing a fair service that doesn't favor its own services (as conflicting as that may be). It claims that its algorithms are unbiased. I think that is all the author was trying to point out (i.e. they may not be as unbiased as Google is touting themselves to be... as unsurprising as it is). A small point but an important one.
Google may be in a monopoly or nearabouts position in search, but they definitely do not have a monopoly over email. If their search algorithms were biased in favor of their products, that would be a big deal for an antitrust case. Biased email prioritization? Not so much. Using one product as leverage to promote another is legal, like it or not, and it happens all the time. Only when you use a product that is in a monopoly position as leverage does that become illegal.
Personally, I read email in thunderbird, so I do not use this prioritization feature. As a user, I would become annoyed the moment the system does not follow my indications, but slightly biased defaults would not really be an issue for me.
If we assume that Chernobyl killed EVERYONE who lived within the exclusion zone, then we'd not have had "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, since there weren't "hundreds of thousands" living in the zone.
Further, it should be noted that some people did NOT move out of the zone when told to do so, and continue to live in that area.
Let me play your game. Citation?
Oh, and where did you get the notion that single digits of people at Fukushima had died of radiation to date? I still haven't found any evidence that ANY people have died there as a result of radiation exposure.
I don't know where the great-great grandparent poster got that notion... My understanding was that a few people died at the very beginning, but not from radiation exposure, and others have been reported to have been hospitalized after stepping in radioactive water http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12845304.
Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable!!#*!"
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
You're correct, the death toll due to Fukushima is single digits.
Citation?
In both incidents, if people had been allowed to stay, the death toll would be in the thousands, at minimum, and potentially tens to hundreds of thousands, including many outside of the area...
Citation?
According to wikipedia's article on the chernobyl exclusion zone:
This predominantly rural woodland area was once home to 120,000 people, living in 90 communities (including the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat), but is now mostly uninhabited. All settlements remain designated on geographic maps but marked as nezhyl. (.) - "uninhabited".
How many of those 120000 do you think would be alive now, if they had continued living there? Do you think the evacuation was just paranoia? Reality check: if the soviets had not eventually owned up to the problem and evacuated, those people would all have died pretty quickly, given the levels of radiation they were exposed to.
And, the wikipedia article on chernobyl lists some estimates of the actual chernobyl casualties and held health effects, with a bewildering variety of numbers ranging from thousands to over a million. Getting a realistic estimate is hard, and the fact this is so controversial does not help, but even with the exclusion zone in place chernobyl was far from harmless.
So, what you are saying is that nuclear power is harmless because deaths can be prevented? What's the problem then?
How about a car analogy: the only reason why people don't die by the thousands every day is because they take the precaution to stop at red lights.
When you can get an insurer to cover the cost of abandoning an entire small region in case something goes wrong at your plant, I will buy your car analogy.
It wouldn't be hard. Just take the spreadsheet from Openoffice and you're already halfway there! Build some cheesy flash graphics on top of it and chances are it'll come out looking better than Eve does!
You should read some of their technology posts on the blog. Eve online is the largest MMO in the world, in terms of amount of players simultaneously connected to a single shared universe. To make that work half decently, they had to build lots of custom tech, from the low-level messaging across their server farm to the high level application code written in stackless python. And a lot of optimization on the client side to try to display big battles on your machine without lag (not sure how successful that effort is as it was just started when I stopped playing). Anyhow, it's not quite like running a MUD for a couple dozen friends.
http://www.economist.com/node/18805862
The argument is that wages are rising in china, and no other place has the same combination of cheap and abundant labor and good infrastructure. This, together with inflationary pressure from raising energy costs and food costs might bring the end of the era of cheap goods.
So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.
I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy.
Apple is not the first to offer this "feature". You can do that with dropbox already.
I download music illegally because that is the only way to get music where I live. The stores don't stock non-mainstream stuff, so if I want Pantera I need to go online for it.... If the *AA's wanted to prevent illegal downloading, they would have provided a legal option years ago.
I stole my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I stole it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.
When you pirate a track, you do not take it away from someone else. So your car analogy (or the shoplifing analogyin the *AA ads) fails, and screams troll to anyone on slashdot (I guess I just took your bait). And one reason piracy is so widespread is that for once, the rest of the population mostly has the same gut feeling as the slashdot crowd. It does not feel like stealing. It is not stealing. Is it illegal? In most jurisdictions. Is it unethical? Sometimes. But it is not theft.
The *AA ads try to equate it to stealing (with the slogan "you would never steal a..." repeated for a bunch of items) precisely because most of the population disagrees, and because they know that if they did perceive it as theft, many people would stop pirating.
Are there any secure online banking options in the US? That would be with real two-factor authentication of some sort. That could be a one time password sent over sms, on paper, or generated by a hardware token, or a usb dongle that signs transactions. Anyone have any experience?
Seriously, everyone calm down. If your banks security sucks, switch. It's really easy. I switched banks on monday... it took me all of about an hour.
Are there us banks that offer proper two-factor authentication? as good as what google or facebook offer with SMS-based OTPs would be the minimum acceptable level for me.
What banks really need to do is give you options to lock down your online account. I want online banking, but I only want to transfer money between my accounts with that bank and 1 other account. Why can I not pre-approve those accounts and disable everything else unless I go down to the bank? Seems like a simple concept. Even if I were to get hacked, they could only move money around in my own account!
Yeah well, that's not online banking. That's more like a glorified "view your balance online" service. In europe, since we have real two-factor authentication (at least in all banks I have seen personally), we can do real online banking, which includes transfering money to pay your bills or whatever. I have never physically visited a branch of any of the two banks that I have an account at.
That still won't completely prevent malicious activity when the attacker has control of the end user's machine.
What if I get an sms with the amount and destination of any transaction I am making, and a pin code that you have to type in to authorize the transaction? it's not rocket science, and it gives you 100% protection unless the attacker owns your banking credentials AND your phone. And hardware tokens with one time passwords (or for that matter, sheets of paper with one time passwords printed on it) are still much better than no two-factor auth at all.
That actually depends on how do YOU answer those questions and if you want them to be easy.
The questions should serve as mnemonic such that if they ask for your favorite color you may as well go with tomatoandpepperred or a favorite Disney Character go with mysonlovesthemousewithbigears.
The problem is that people want something quick and easy to remember which normally turns into Red or Mickey
And what if they ask you for your zip code, or date of birth, or anything else they have on record about you? Then you don't get to give arbitrary answers. Happened to me with mastercard secure code.
And anyhow, even if it is a second, strong password, it does not increase security. 2 passwords or 3 or one million is not any more secure than 1 strong password. Two-factor authentication is something else: one password for login, and something else to confirm transaction, for instance a one time password that you get on a sheet of paper, from a little hardware generator, or as an SMS. I have used all 3 with my banks in europe in the past.
I see no reason why banks shouldn't be held liable for any and all fraud that happens if they do not deploy some form of 2-factor authentication.
The best security questions are for this "mastercard secure code' and "verified by visa" scam.
The problem is that somebody other than the CC user is liable for credit card fraud by default. This is because when the CC companies started and needed to gain adoption, they had to offer users good terms. So they come up with this new system that adds an extra password to your online CC transactions, which adds exactly 0 security, but if you read the small print, it shifts the liability to you.
Why does it add 0 security? First of all, because under practically all threat models where your credit card info can be stolen, so can this extra password. Multi-factor authentication is not N+1 passwords instead of N. Second, because if you want to reset your password it asks you for trivially obtainable information. I was once asked for my zip code and date of birth.
Oh, and it is also a usability nightmare... You get directed to this external site, that is not your bank's or the web shop you are buying at, and asked to enter the password. You can usually choose to skip this step, thankfully, and not use the system. Either way, you then get redirected back to the web shop: usually to its home page, with no indication whether the transaction went through or not. I have seen this happen on 3 different websites, including UK train reservation system and a big cellular network's site, and have had to cancel double transactions once already.
One, Kindle reads ePub just fine. Amazon used MobiPocket for their own content because it's a better standard. It's still an open standard. You might as well be suggesting they should use HTML2; it's also way more prevalent. It's also a very bad idea.
Thus, it will not read the adobe DRMed epubs, which was the GP poster's point. I don't care either way, as I do not and will not own any DRM books or media, but the GP has a point in the sense that there is a format war between two incompatible, DRM-encumbered formats (the one from amazon and the one from adobe).
Two, Amazon books have *no* DRM.
The kindle format (.azw) is using amazon's own DRM, and plays only on the kindle or on kindle software for other devices.
Solution:
1. Buy eBook in a restricted format
2. Download "free" format from here
3. Profit
eBooks is a technology and can be used to improve the status quo. But of course it also can be missused to restrict consumer's freedom
Step 2 may well be illegal, regardless of step 1. And by doing this, you are supporting with your wallet the companies that sell you a product designed to thwart you and restrict your usage of it (if you didn't feel restricted, you wouldn't bother to do step 2). Also, if you have to go to the bother of searching online for a non-restricted version, most people will not bother to do step 1. When to get an unencumbered mp3 from iTunes you had to buy it then burn it to CD, then rip the CD, many people chose piracy instead. How is this different?
My point of view is that most publishers are not really in favor of ebooks: they still see it as something that reduces the profits from their paper books, just like the music industry saw online music mainly as competition for their CDs. Once more people start reading ebooks, they will have to offer users what they want or risk many of them switching to piracy. Ebook piracy is even harder to fight than music piracy, because the amounts of data involved are so tiny, it is practically impossible to police.
We got an ebook reader at work (to read papers with and reduce printing).
It is quite convenient, especially as a replacement for those books that are unwieldy to carry and/or disposable (in the sense that I have no intention of rereading them). But I did not really find any of the books I wanted for sale in DRM-free formats (though there is some good free stuff around, including project guthenberg of course). So the e-book publishing industry has yet to see a single dollar from me.
It's not just ideological, it's also practical. Will my next ebook reader support the same DRM crap as my current one? Who knows. Can I read a few chapters on my smartphone when I am not carrying the 10 inch reader around? No (N900 user). Can I read it on my computer once in a while, perhaps when I want to search through the text or cite something? No (Linux user). Do I want to bother finding out how to break the DRM, and whether it is even legal to do so in the country I live in? No. Conclusion: no books with DRM. No money to the publishers. And for those same bulky/disposable books: no, I am not buying a paper version either. Too bulky and disposable (especially in hardcover!).
What about videoconferencing? You see the person you are calling on the TV, and whatever you are filming with the controller (usually yourself) on the controller...
Sounds like a simple way of having videoconferencing that is as living-room friendly as the kinekt version, without all the fancy skeleton tracking.
Of course, to be really useful it would need to talk to skype or google talk or something... And they could beat the competition by making it free since it doesn't cost them anything (why should I need to pay a subscription to use a device I own to talk over the internet connection I pay for?).
And it's: ERASE the IP Rights. If we, as HUMANITY, want to evolute, we must ERRADICATE what it's a scourge to the society and what impossibilitate new creations.
I'm not 100% sure about impossibilitate, but I can promise you that ERRADICATE is not a word. Please spell-check your all-caps words at least...
You can say what you want about him, but he does have an annoying tendency to be right. This is exactly the same as his right to read article/story: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the EU caps only cover calls and texts, not data.
The current EU caps (that were further lowered by a few cents per minute today) apply to calls and texts. TFA is referring to proposed EU-wide caps for mobile data. From the numbers they give it seems they would be at around 0.5 Euro per MB.
I hardly use bookmarks anymore because I can just start typing and the page I am looking for pops up in the drop down bar 99% of the time.
That's nice. Sounds like it would be great as a bookmark search field. When I start typing in a URL in a URL bar, I'd like for it to start showing me the URLs that start with what I typed, not any page that I visited previously that has the word I typed on it.
It's not any page that I visited previously that has the word I typed on it. It's just in the url or page title.
By the way, if a post discussing a "moron bar" and calling the firefox developers a "bunch of idiots" is modded +5 insightful, that is a pretty glaring failure of moderation.
No, you're just in the minority when it comes to liking the idiot firefox developers who shoved the moron bar down people's throats.
Moderation is not an opinion poll. There is no -1 Disagree modifier, nor a +1 Agree, unless moderators are abusing their role. Regardless of what you think of firefox and its developers, calling people morons is not a constructive contribution to the discussion, any more than writing micro$oft with the dollar sign or comparing everyone and his grandmother to hitler (is this a meta-godwin?).
Firefox's usage share has been slowly declining since quite some time. They introduced the rather universally hated moron-bar, and paid no attention to the feedback.
The moron bar, as you call it (Mozilla prefers to call it the awesome bar) is a ridiculously addictive feature once you get used to it. I hardly use bookmarks anymore because I can just start typing and the page I am looking for pops up in the drop down bar 99% of the time. For me it is up there with tabbed browsing, adblock, and noscript as the can't-do-without features that have kept me on firefox over the years, despite the good software that both opera and chrome have been putting together.
I'm not sure what are the unwelcome UI changes firefox 4 that you mention... Oh the tabs are above the URL bar rather than below? That's almost as evil as having the x button on the left instead of on the right! Let's stone them all!..
By the way, if a post discussing a "moron bar" and calling the firefox developers a "bunch of idiots" is modded +5 insightful, that is a pretty glaring failure of moderation...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html
Thanks... that's a good article.
I think people are missing the point. Of course this is not surprising. Of course a for-profit company wants to advertise their own products. Of course they want you to use their stuff before you use Groupon et al. Of course. The point is, Google touts itself as providing a fair service that doesn't favor its own services (as conflicting as that may be). It claims that its algorithms are unbiased. I think that is all the author was trying to point out (i.e. they may not be as unbiased as Google is touting themselves to be... as unsurprising as it is). A small point but an important one.
Google may be in a monopoly or nearabouts position in search, but they definitely do not have a monopoly over email. If their search algorithms were biased in favor of their products, that would be a big deal for an antitrust case. Biased email prioritization? Not so much. Using one product as leverage to promote another is legal, like it or not, and it happens all the time. Only when you use a product that is in a monopoly position as leverage does that become illegal.
Personally, I read email in thunderbird, so I do not use this prioritization feature. As a user, I would become annoyed the moment the system does not follow my indications, but slightly biased defaults would not really be an issue for me.
If we assume that Chernobyl killed EVERYONE who lived within the exclusion zone, then we'd not have had "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, since there weren't "hundreds of thousands" living in the zone.
Further, it should be noted that some people did NOT move out of the zone when told to do so, and continue to live in that area.
Let me play your game. Citation?
Oh, and where did you get the notion that single digits of people at Fukushima had died of radiation to date? I still haven't found any evidence that ANY people have died there as a result of radiation exposure.
I don't know where the great-great grandparent poster got that notion... My understanding was that a few people died at the very beginning, but not from radiation exposure, and others have been reported to have been hospitalized after stepping in radioactive water http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12845304.
Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable!!#*!"
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
Citation?
Citation?
According to wikipedia's article on the chernobyl exclusion zone:
This predominantly rural woodland area was once home to 120,000 people, living in 90 communities (including the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat), but is now mostly uninhabited. All settlements remain designated on geographic maps but marked as nezhyl. (.) - "uninhabited".
How many of those 120000 do you think would be alive now, if they had continued living there? Do you think the evacuation was just paranoia? Reality check: if the soviets had not eventually owned up to the problem and evacuated, those people would all have died pretty quickly, given the levels of radiation they were exposed to.
And, the wikipedia article on chernobyl lists some estimates of the actual chernobyl casualties and held health effects, with a bewildering variety of numbers ranging from thousands to over a million. Getting a realistic estimate is hard, and the fact this is so controversial does not help, but even with the exclusion zone in place chernobyl was far from harmless.
So, what you are saying is that nuclear power is harmless because deaths can be prevented? What's the problem then?
How about a car analogy: the only reason why people don't die by the thousands every day is because they take the precaution to stop at red lights.
When you can get an insurer to cover the cost of abandoning an entire small region in case something goes wrong at your plant, I will buy your car analogy.
It wouldn't be hard. Just take the spreadsheet from Openoffice and you're already halfway there! Build some cheesy flash graphics on top of it and chances are it'll come out looking better than Eve does!
You should read some of their technology posts on the blog. Eve online is the largest MMO in the world, in terms of amount of players simultaneously connected to a single shared universe. To make that work half decently, they had to build lots of custom tech, from the low-level messaging across their server farm to the high level application code written in stackless python. And a lot of optimization on the client side to try to display big battles on your machine without lag (not sure how successful that effort is as it was just started when I stopped playing). Anyhow, it's not quite like running a MUD for a couple dozen friends.
Take a look at this article from the economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/18805862 The argument is that wages are rising in china, and no other place has the same combination of cheap and abundant labor and good infrastructure. This, together with inflationary pressure from raising energy costs and food costs might bring the end of the era of cheap goods.
So let's get this straight... iTunes will allow you to replace a pirated copy of your music with an official download, presumably identifying the original track based on audio fingerprinting and/or file hashes.
I can't think of any way in which this could be designed not to be broken. I'm expecting people will quickly figure out a way to trade hashes/fingerprints, bypassing the requirement to even bother downloading a pirated copy.
Apple is not the first to offer this "feature". You can do that with dropbox already.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/26/1645200/Dropbox-Attempts-To-Kill-Open-Source-Project
I stole my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I stole it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town. When you pirate a track, you do not take it away from someone else. So your car analogy (or the shoplifing analogyin the *AA ads) fails, and screams troll to anyone on slashdot (I guess I just took your bait). And one reason piracy is so widespread is that for once, the rest of the population mostly has the same gut feeling as the slashdot crowd. It does not feel like stealing. It is not stealing. Is it illegal? In most jurisdictions. Is it unethical? Sometimes. But it is not theft.
..." repeated for a bunch of items) precisely because most of the population disagrees, and because they know that if they did perceive it as theft, many people would stop pirating.
The *AA ads try to equate it to stealing (with the slogan "you would never steal a
Are there any secure online banking options in the US? That would be with real two-factor authentication of some sort. That could be a one time password sent over sms, on paper, or generated by a hardware token, or a usb dongle that signs transactions. Anyone have any experience?
Seriously, everyone calm down. If your banks security sucks, switch. It's really easy. I switched banks on monday... it took me all of about an hour.
Are there us banks that offer proper two-factor authentication? as good as what google or facebook offer with SMS-based OTPs would be the minimum acceptable level for me.
What banks really need to do is give you options to lock down your online account. I want online banking, but I only want to transfer money between my accounts with that bank and 1 other account. Why can I not pre-approve those accounts and disable everything else unless I go down to the bank? Seems like a simple concept. Even if I were to get hacked, they could only move money around in my own account!
Yeah well, that's not online banking. That's more like a glorified "view your balance online" service. In europe, since we have real two-factor authentication (at least in all banks I have seen personally), we can do real online banking, which includes transfering money to pay your bills or whatever. I have never physically visited a branch of any of the two banks that I have an account at.
That still won't completely prevent malicious activity when the attacker has control of the end user's machine.
What if I get an sms with the amount and destination of any transaction I am making, and a pin code that you have to type in to authorize the transaction? it's not rocket science, and it gives you 100% protection unless the attacker owns your banking credentials AND your phone. And hardware tokens with one time passwords (or for that matter, sheets of paper with one time passwords printed on it) are still much better than no two-factor auth at all.
That actually depends on how do YOU answer those questions and if you want them to be easy. The questions should serve as mnemonic such that if they ask for your favorite color you may as well go with tomatoandpepperred or a favorite Disney Character go with mysonlovesthemousewithbigears. The problem is that people want something quick and easy to remember which normally turns into Red or Mickey
And what if they ask you for your zip code, or date of birth, or anything else they have on record about you? Then you don't get to give arbitrary answers. Happened to me with mastercard secure code.
And anyhow, even if it is a second, strong password, it does not increase security. 2 passwords or 3 or one million is not any more secure than 1 strong password. Two-factor authentication is something else: one password for login, and something else to confirm transaction, for instance a one time password that you get on a sheet of paper, from a little hardware generator, or as an SMS. I have used all 3 with my banks in europe in the past.
I see no reason why banks shouldn't be held liable for any and all fraud that happens if they do not deploy some form of 2-factor authentication.
The best security questions are for this "mastercard secure code' and "verified by visa" scam.
The problem is that somebody other than the CC user is liable for credit card fraud by default. This is because when the CC companies started and needed to gain adoption, they had to offer users good terms. So they come up with this new system that adds an extra password to your online CC transactions, which adds exactly 0 security, but if you read the small print, it shifts the liability to you.
Why does it add 0 security? First of all, because under practically all threat models where your credit card info can be stolen, so can this extra password. Multi-factor authentication is not N+1 passwords instead of N. Second, because if you want to reset your password it asks you for trivially obtainable information. I was once asked for my zip code and date of birth.
Oh, and it is also a usability nightmare... You get directed to this external site, that is not your bank's or the web shop you are buying at, and asked to enter the password. You can usually choose to skip this step, thankfully, and not use the system. Either way, you then get redirected back to the web shop: usually to its home page, with no indication whether the transaction went through or not. I have seen this happen on 3 different websites, including UK train reservation system and a big cellular network's site, and have had to cancel double transactions once already.
One, Kindle reads ePub just fine. Amazon used MobiPocket for their own content because it's a better standard. It's still an open standard. You might as well be suggesting they should use HTML2; it's also way more prevalent. It's also a very bad idea.
Thus, it will not read the adobe DRMed epubs, which was the GP poster's point. I don't care either way, as I do not and will not own any DRM books or media, but the GP has a point in the sense that there is a format war between two incompatible, DRM-encumbered formats (the one from amazon and the one from adobe).
Two, Amazon books have *no* DRM.
The kindle format (.azw) is using amazon's own DRM, and plays only on the kindle or on kindle software for other devices.
Solution: 1. Buy eBook in a restricted format 2. Download "free" format from here 3. Profit
eBooks is a technology and can be used to improve the status quo. But of course it also can be missused to restrict consumer's freedom
Step 2 may well be illegal, regardless of step 1. And by doing this, you are supporting with your wallet the companies that sell you a product designed to thwart you and restrict your usage of it (if you didn't feel restricted, you wouldn't bother to do step 2). Also, if you have to go to the bother of searching online for a non-restricted version, most people will not bother to do step 1. When to get an unencumbered mp3 from iTunes you had to buy it then burn it to CD, then rip the CD, many people chose piracy instead. How is this different?
My point of view is that most publishers are not really in favor of ebooks: they still see it as something that reduces the profits from their paper books, just like the music industry saw online music mainly as competition for their CDs. Once more people start reading ebooks, they will have to offer users what they want or risk many of them switching to piracy. Ebook piracy is even harder to fight than music piracy, because the amounts of data involved are so tiny, it is practically impossible to police.
We got an ebook reader at work (to read papers with and reduce printing).
It is quite convenient, especially as a replacement for those books that are unwieldy to carry and/or disposable (in the sense that I have no intention of rereading them). But I did not really find any of the books I wanted for sale in DRM-free formats (though there is some good free stuff around, including project guthenberg of course). So the e-book publishing industry has yet to see a single dollar from me.
It's not just ideological, it's also practical. Will my next ebook reader support the same DRM crap as my current one? Who knows. Can I read a few chapters on my smartphone when I am not carrying the 10 inch reader around? No (N900 user). Can I read it on my computer once in a while, perhaps when I want to search through the text or cite something? No (Linux user). Do I want to bother finding out how to break the DRM, and whether it is even legal to do so in the country I live in? No. Conclusion: no books with DRM. No money to the publishers. And for those same bulky/disposable books: no, I am not buying a paper version either. Too bulky and disposable (especially in hardcover!).
What about videoconferencing? You see the person you are calling on the TV, and whatever you are filming with the controller (usually yourself) on the controller...
Sounds like a simple way of having videoconferencing that is as living-room friendly as the kinekt version, without all the fancy skeleton tracking.
Of course, to be really useful it would need to talk to skype or google talk or something... And they could beat the competition by making it free since it doesn't cost them anything (why should I need to pay a subscription to use a device I own to talk over the internet connection I pay for?).
And it's: ERASE the IP Rights. If we, as HUMANITY, want to evolute, we must ERRADICATE what it's a scourge to the society and what impossibilitate new creations.
I'm not 100% sure about impossibilitate, but I can promise you that ERRADICATE is not a word. Please spell-check your all-caps words at least...
You can say what you want about him, but he does have an annoying tendency to be right. This is exactly the same as his right to read article/story: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That Daleks and Sonic Screwdrivers may cause cancer
nah, daleks are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe, I wouldn't worry... http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/01/007210/Daleks-To-Be-Given-A-Rest-From-Dr-Who