The Wii is a next-gen console, and their sales have indicated that not just "cheap families" want these boxes. What gamers are doing with their dollars is saying that they want a new experience, not just some more expensive hardware. They're saying that they respect the innovation that Nintendo brought to the table. They're saying they need more fun, not more pixel resolution.
...always leads to entertaining, if wildly inaccurate conclusions.
"Such a statement -- "no reason that they even need to be collaborative" -- may be regarded by some Wikipedia devotees as heresy, but I think it hits the nail on the head. The purpose of such a project is defined by the quality of the information it produces. Collaboration is a possible means to that end, but collaboration itself is not the point."
If this is the premise upon which the conclusions are based, well, no wonder the author and I disagree. In fact, I question the sanity of someone who intimates that the purpose of any endeavor is somehow defined after the result is measured. Not only is that a serious case of putting the cart before the horse, it's also claiming the cart is a carriage magicked out of a pumpkin and that the horse is a unicorn.
Actually, if it was one's goal to create a reliable, reasonably accurate online encyclopedia, one would absolutely not create such an overtly collaborative system. Reliability requires strictures on contributions that Wikipedia just does not have. Editorial control. Trusted contributorship. Limited access. You can't control the output unless you control the input.
The fact is that the author, given to fits of divination of purpose ex post facto, defines the goal as to create an authoritative online information base, points to the graffiti and says, "you failed".
The fact is that Wikipedia was not an attempt to create an online encyclopedia.
Some would say "What?! No!!! It HAS to be because that's what popped out the end!!" Here's your pumpkin carriage, here's your unicorn, now go put them together wrong and go play in traffic.
My guess, if we are going to be given to fits of attempting to assess purpose from result, is that Wikipedia was an experiment to see if a truly open environment could achieve reliable results, with the "creation of an encyclopedia" merely as the conditions of that experiment. Put another way, could a reasonably reliable, reasonably encyclopedic repository of information be built with no restriction on contribution? Would the readership, given authorship, take ownership?
If this was indeed the purpose, did it not succeed? Hence the fallacy of guessing the purpose from the result. I can just as easily provide a scenario where the diametric opposite is the result, and be completely justified in the conclusion.
OK, for those of you who think that there would be no shell shock from a switchover to metric, please go back to bed. Here's your binky and your teddy bear. The adults want to talk.
Firstly, the metric system is known, if not actively used, by just about everyone born during or after Vietnam as a matter of school curriculum.
Secondly, the metric system is actually used by some industries, just not many. Sure you put gas into your car by the gallon, but you buy your soda by the two liter. And if you buy most any food product in the US, you'll note that you have your choice. Ounces and grams, or fluid ounces and milliliters.
But consider this, how long, and at what price, does it take to retool a car plant to use metric dimensions when everything from the blueprint to the last nut and bolt specifies US measure? Or any sort of manufaturing for that matter? And what benefit is it to them? As long as the bolts are the right size for the nuts, and all the welds are in the right places, and all the little bits fit together, then does your average US consumer care what measurement system you used? For that matter, does the US car enthusiast/tuner want to trade in his set of US tools for metric, now that they've been obsolete.
Another thing, do you know what kind of a mess you'd have on your hands if you all of a sudden changed all the speed limit signs to KPH from MPH? I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but the scalar KPH is quite a bit higher than MPH. It'd be fun for a while, watching people rocket down the highway at a good 120... MPH because they got the graduations confused.
And everyone in this country knows exactly what to wear when it's a springy 70F outside. What's that, like 20C?
The fact of the matter is, the only people who really want America to use the metric system are those whose jobs are made easier because of it, or those who already have adopted it (in other words, read you change and make all the effort). Everyone else would be forced to change for reasons they don't get or care about. It isn't that Americans don't like to change, but when they have no problem with what is, their attitude, quite reasonably, is to ask "what the fuck for?"
What other good reason exists for the average person, other than the aforementioned "everyone else is doing it", to go along with it? I believe that there is an American aphorism that goes: "If everyone jumped of a bridge, would you?"
"Those walls are several feet thick and can hold back millions of gallons of water..." translated to "High columns having much fat toe plus can carry big number aqua litres"
"I'm not feeling very well, do you have some aspirin?" translated to "This day of my health is in negative. In my possession of you are pills?"
"All of your bases are in our possession." translated to "My tank is fight."
I remember Space Ace, but it too was along the line of Dragon's lair. No, the one I'm thinking of had a fighter stick control and a sprite ship you'd maneuver.
I won't bore you with a legal analysis, nor will I attempt to use such things as "logic" and "reason" to express my views. That shit has long since circled the drain and fallen down the stack. No, if you truly must "understand" what this ruling means to most people, imagine a Jabberwocky. Got that image? Okay, now picture a vorpal blade... now the blade goes snicka-snack.
You see, I hate advertising. In all forms.
Why, you may ask?
Well, that's easy. All advertising is predicated on the idea that you need to be informed of a company's wares because you either a) don't know the company exists, b) don't know the products exist, or c) don't know how much you really, really need those products to be a well-adjusted, happy human being.
And this is really bunk. Most people who actually DO need something either already know where to get it, or are certainly capable of finding out. Your industry predicates its entire existence on convincing people to buy things they don't need, and as such, serves no purpose that we could not easily do without.
And you know what, if people stopped for a minute and thought about it, they'd probably reach the same conclusion.
Your industry pollutes the collective consciousness with meaningless phrases like "Zero Money Down" and "Easy Terms" and "No interest until 2007". Billboards and signs and junk mail and commercials and banner ads blight our landscapes and consign beauty and utility to the gloppy murk of both material and virtual ignominy.
So you will, of course, pardon my lack of sympathy for the "free speech" rights of some company which does its damnedest to make sure that unintelligible crap mail clogs my account. To me spammers are like telemarketers you can't fuck with, and as such the vilest form of creatures. At least a telemarketer has to stand there and go through his spiel while you are alternately telling him or her that your head is made of stinky cheese and that you've filled your pants with a happy poo that smells like teen spirit.
I'm sure that you have no dignity left to protect, but if there is one last little spark of soul left within your shriveled, barren minds, do yourselves and everyone else a favor, and find something constructive to do with your time, and urge all of the protoplasmic waste you call competitors to adopt a similar attitude.
I can only imagine that when all of you are old and gray, and being overcome by some terminal illness brought about by karmic justice, that you don't want to be on your deathbed thinking on your lives and having your one contribution to our sick, sad world to be known as the McDonalds of penis enlargement emails, billions served. Stop... stop now, there is still time to become a productive member of society, to heal your tattered soul, and to once again ascend from the realm of advertising troglodytes to be human.
Long about the time of the video game crash, not only was the home market being flooded with trash, but the arcades were being treated to their own brand of refuse.
One I particularly remember was Tutankham, a maze game where you guide a little dude through a blocky pyramid maze where you would grab treasures and make it to the end, while shooting various critters. What made this game suck was the fact that most of the levels had tons of "vertical" corridors, but your guy could only shoot left and right.
And the laser-disc games... sheesh. Dragon's Lair was entertaining, but I'd hardly call it a video game, but there was another space-themed one I can't remember the name of which had a standard graphics ship shooting filmed ships. The really crappy thing was that hitting anything was a guess, getting hit by something was questionable, and the angles the scenes were shot at made no sense with regard to the orientation of yours.
Does anyone remember Targ? God help you if you do.
Then in the late '80's when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat first exploded the fighter genre, there was Time Killers (a gory, nearly unplayable fighter), and Primal Rage (a gory, nearly unplayable dinosaur/beast fighter).
Oh, puh-leeeeeaassse. YouTube restricted the content probably because enough people rec'd it adult content. Since you can still get to it, at least the last time I checked, through an account login which is free, it isn't censorship. Doubly so because anyone who can legitimately claim adult age is also legitimately permitted to vote, ergo the target audience of this video.
Besides, I saw that chunk of crap. It IS offensive... to my intelligence. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a parody until I realized that they were serious about the content (albeit in a sarcastic manner). I kept expecting the punch line to come but it never did.
I know that conservatives need snark, bullshit, and unlimited access to media to convince suckers to vote for them, but my guess is that it was the viewers who caused that to be put in the back by the pornography. That's democracy for you, conservatives, I know you don't recognize it, so consider that a PSA.
Besides, "pornography" is specifically what it is, since the definition is "something that appeals to one's prurient interests". I can think of nothing more appealing to prurience than something that panders to a right-wing desire to get your rocks off while debasing your "enemy", those danged liberals.
1. We don't need an LCD windshield. Because no matter what you put in front of the driver, they're looking at IT and not the ROAD. Focus on any foreground image and the background image loses focus. Any time the driver removes his/her focus from the road ahead. The rub of this is that focus on the road then blurs the foreground image and distracts the driver.
2. They have these things called sunglasses for bright sunny days. Go to any 7-11 and you can buy cheapies for $10. The issue isn't that people are blinded by headlights, or other such bright alerting device, it's that these need not be that bright. Alert, don't distract.
3. Who wants automated driving? I, for one, like to drive. I'm pretty sure, due to the popularity of motorsports, that I'm not nearly the only one.
4. Anything that turns the attention of the driver off of the road ahead and to some other device, readout, or whatever IS a distraction. Anything that can have the effect of annoying the driver, whether it be yelling into a cellphone, a heated argument with the person in the shotgun seat, or smacking the kids in the back seat, is distracting. A HUD is nothing more than a distraction. There is a reason why the instrument cluster sits where it sits and is organized the way it's organized. It's because drivers need only twitch their eyes momentarily downward to scan the gauges for all of the relevant information they require, and then resume their forward focus.
You really didn't answer my question. Whether or not security is addressed as an a priori forethought or as a response to later realizations of potential real abuses really have no practical effect the strategy for security for an Internet browser. People will want functionality and usability. It doesn't really matter what level of user you may be, whether a computer know-nothing or a software architect, people use browsers for the same reason. Just because you may be an advanced user doesn't mean that you don't want features.
But we're not even talking about features here, we are talking about user interactivity and control.
My question to you, rephrased, is how do you expect browser security to operate without some level of informed responsibility offload to the user? I don't mean this from an esoteric standpoint, I mean from a material standpoint. Do you expect the browser to take the responsibility off the user for installation of software, even if the user purports to want it? If so, I'd like to hear a strategy for implementation.
Informed consent is the middle ground between a fully non-exceptional lockdown (undesirable) and a fully open system (undesirable). From what I've seen, IE7 is addressing those issues. Where IE6 implemented modest, nearly useless controls on the automatic download of malicious or unwanted code, IE7 uses a system of informed consent to alert users of potential hazards. That some people brainlessly click OK is another discussion entirely. As a software engineer myself, I understand that you have to often make an engineering trade-off decision as to how far to go to bulletproof an application from users before you start introducing usability issues.
The problem with IE6 security is that it allows things to be done without the user's knowledge, and oft times without their agreement.
Now that the user must be complicit in the act, it's still not correct?
Seems a little ludicrous to expect the browser to "know" what good programs are and bad programs are, to automatically possess a will to protect the user, or to impose that will onto a user, and from that point, the only thing you can do is allow the user to make the determination. Would a person who ostensibly uses an OS intended for non-"baffoons" appreciate it if the OS made the determination of what software does and does not belong on their machine, even if it is their intent to install it?
I would appreciate an explanation of what the right tack would be.
The fact of the matter is, that whether or not Windows is targeted at "baffoons" is immaterial, good security is good security, and all good security involves engaging the responsibility of those being secured. That some choose not to accept that responsibility is what takes security and obviates its protection.
You can have an alarm system on your house, rabid watchdogs, a panic room, etc. but if you're going to just invite in any old stranger who walks up into the house, all of that security is precisely meaningless. The same applies to "security" as we've come to understand it in a computing environment.
...is that this is a matter of law. While most people would hope that law makes sense, in its current incarnation, it is convoluted, with many points of view. What is disturbing is that as a lawyer, because of the fact that this is currently being vetted within our legal system, that he doesn't even know, yet the RIAA is being permitted to pursue its lawsuits and being given every leniency in the quality of the evidence it provides to support its case.
What's most disheartening is that the people who are being sued neither know their rights, as the whole 'licensing' vs. 'ownership of a commodity' has muddied the waters as to what they do have a right to do with the purchase they've made, nor is there anywhere they can go to get information regarding their rights. Meanwhile, corporations with immense legal war chests prey upon their customers.
Since electronic media is so ubiquitous these days, it is very dangerous for the questions of what it is you are actually purchasing and what rights you have to remain in limbo and the have them become the subjects of lawsuits without much concern for bridging that gap.
I guess my main complaint is that law, in its most basic definition of spirit, was created to protect lawful people from criminality and to punish the unlawful. If a pre-teen girl can be sued by a multinational consortium of media companies without a single thought given a priori to whom it is they are actually suing, simply in an effort to ferret out those who are guilty, then what we see here now with the RIAA is a serious abridgment of the purpose of law.
They aren't necessary. Up until this upcoming election, I've only had to use the lever-flip mechanicals. They've always worked fine. Paper ballots? Fine. Oregon even has them mailed to them. I'm convinced that E-Voting only became an issue because of the whole hanging/dimpled/pregnant chad thing down in Florida in 2000.
Personally, I don't want them. However, it seems that we have a hardon for e-voting, so if we do, my question becomes, OK fine, but why are they being supplied using proprietary source, with no vetting of security? Why don't these things leave a paper trail? If anything should be transparent, voting should be. Hence, my question.
...but it really is a simple, honest question.
What is the open-source community doing to present an alternative to proprietary closed-source voting machines?
This is a serious question, because I'd like to know if there are efforts in this direction.
...that Monster Cables could give you reams of sales reports confirming that, yes, people do buy cables with exorbitant price tags, probably with little notes in the margins like 'Idiots!', 'OMG! Stupid pricks, but I'll take their dough!', 'Mental note: make serious attempt to sell the Brooklyn Bridge", etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are referring to things like:
Value
Desirability
Affordability
Fun
Innovation
The Wii is a next-gen console, and their sales have indicated that not just "cheap families" want these boxes. What gamers are doing with their dollars is saying that they want a new experience, not just some more expensive hardware. They're saying that they respect the innovation that Nintendo brought to the table. They're saying they need more fun, not more pixel resolution.
But those comparisons are absolutely apt.
...always leads to entertaining, if wildly inaccurate conclusions.
"Such a statement -- "no reason that they even need to be collaborative" -- may be regarded by some Wikipedia devotees as heresy, but I think it hits the nail on the head. The purpose of such a project is defined by the quality of the information it produces. Collaboration is a possible means to that end, but collaboration itself is not the point."
If this is the premise upon which the conclusions are based, well, no wonder the author and I disagree. In fact, I question the sanity of someone who intimates that the purpose of any endeavor is somehow defined after the result is measured. Not only is that a serious case of putting the cart before the horse, it's also claiming the cart is a carriage magicked out of a pumpkin and that the horse is a unicorn.
Actually, if it was one's goal to create a reliable, reasonably accurate online encyclopedia, one would absolutely not create such an overtly collaborative system. Reliability requires strictures on contributions that Wikipedia just does not have. Editorial control. Trusted contributorship. Limited access. You can't control the output unless you control the input.
The fact is that the author, given to fits of divination of purpose ex post facto, defines the goal as to create an authoritative online information base, points to the graffiti and says, "you failed".
The fact is that Wikipedia was not an attempt to create an online encyclopedia.
Some would say "What?! No!!! It HAS to be because that's what popped out the end!!" Here's your pumpkin carriage, here's your unicorn, now go put them together wrong and go play in traffic.
My guess, if we are going to be given to fits of attempting to assess purpose from result, is that Wikipedia was an experiment to see if a truly open environment could achieve reliable results, with the "creation of an encyclopedia" merely as the conditions of that experiment. Put another way, could a reasonably reliable, reasonably encyclopedic repository of information be built with no restriction on contribution? Would the readership, given authorship, take ownership?
If this was indeed the purpose, did it not succeed? Hence the fallacy of guessing the purpose from the result. I can just as easily provide a scenario where the diametric opposite is the result, and be completely justified in the conclusion.
Slashdot definition of a troll:
Someone who says something we don't like, or fails to use the words "Microsoft Sucks" somewhere in the post.
OK, for those of you who think that there would be no shell shock from a switchover to metric, please go back to bed. Here's your binky and your teddy bear. The adults want to talk.
Firstly, the metric system is known, if not actively used, by just about everyone born during or after Vietnam as a matter of school curriculum.
Secondly, the metric system is actually used by some industries, just not many. Sure you put gas into your car by the gallon, but you buy your soda by the two liter. And if you buy most any food product in the US, you'll note that you have your choice. Ounces and grams, or fluid ounces and milliliters.
But consider this, how long, and at what price, does it take to retool a car plant to use metric dimensions when everything from the blueprint to the last nut and bolt specifies US measure? Or any sort of manufaturing for that matter? And what benefit is it to them? As long as the bolts are the right size for the nuts, and all the welds are in the right places, and all the little bits fit together, then does your average US consumer care what measurement system you used? For that matter, does the US car enthusiast/tuner want to trade in his set of US tools for metric, now that they've been obsolete.
Another thing, do you know what kind of a mess you'd have on your hands if you all of a sudden changed all the speed limit signs to KPH from MPH? I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but the scalar KPH is quite a bit higher than MPH. It'd be fun for a while, watching people rocket down the highway at a good 120... MPH because they got the graduations confused.
And everyone in this country knows exactly what to wear when it's a springy 70F outside. What's that, like 20C?
The fact of the matter is, the only people who really want America to use the metric system are those whose jobs are made easier because of it, or those who already have adopted it (in other words, read you change and make all the effort). Everyone else would be forced to change for reasons they don't get or care about. It isn't that Americans don't like to change, but when they have no problem with what is, their attitude, quite reasonably, is to ask "what the fuck for?"
What other good reason exists for the average person, other than the aforementioned "everyone else is doing it", to go along with it? I believe that there is an American aphorism that goes: "If everyone jumped of a bridge, would you?"
"Genius begets genius. Explain yourself, son."
"Ordinarily, I'd stop. You're beyond help."
"Move along, nothing to see here."
"He zigged. I zagged. We missed."
"I thought, once. Didn't work out."
A few samples from Japanese->English:
"Those walls are several feet thick and can hold back millions of gallons of water..." translated to "High columns having much fat toe plus can carry big number aqua litres"
"I'm not feeling very well, do you have some aspirin?" translated to "This day of my health is in negative. In my possession of you are pills?"
"All of your bases are in our possession." translated to "My tank is fight."
And so on.
It's called Astron Belt
I remember Space Ace, but it too was along the line of Dragon's lair. No, the one I'm thinking of had a fighter stick control and a sprite ship you'd maneuver.
Dear Fuckers,
I won't bore you with a legal analysis, nor will I attempt to use such things as "logic" and "reason" to express my views. That shit has long since circled the drain and fallen down the stack. No, if you truly must "understand" what this ruling means to most people, imagine a Jabberwocky. Got that image? Okay, now picture a vorpal blade... now the blade goes snicka-snack.
You see, I hate advertising. In all forms.
Why, you may ask?
Well, that's easy. All advertising is predicated on the idea that you need to be informed of a company's wares because you either a) don't know the company exists, b) don't know the products exist, or c) don't know how much you really, really need those products to be a well-adjusted, happy human being.
And this is really bunk. Most people who actually DO need something either already know where to get it, or are certainly capable of finding out. Your industry predicates its entire existence on convincing people to buy things they don't need, and as such, serves no purpose that we could not easily do without.
And you know what, if people stopped for a minute and thought about it, they'd probably reach the same conclusion.
Your industry pollutes the collective consciousness with meaningless phrases like "Zero Money Down" and "Easy Terms" and "No interest until 2007". Billboards and signs and junk mail and commercials and banner ads blight our landscapes and consign beauty and utility to the gloppy murk of both material and virtual ignominy.
So you will, of course, pardon my lack of sympathy for the "free speech" rights of some company which does its damnedest to make sure that unintelligible crap mail clogs my account. To me spammers are like telemarketers you can't fuck with, and as such the vilest form of creatures. At least a telemarketer has to stand there and go through his spiel while you are alternately telling him or her that your head is made of stinky cheese and that you've filled your pants with a happy poo that smells like teen spirit.
I'm sure that you have no dignity left to protect, but if there is one last little spark of soul left within your shriveled, barren minds, do yourselves and everyone else a favor, and find something constructive to do with your time, and urge all of the protoplasmic waste you call competitors to adopt a similar attitude.
I can only imagine that when all of you are old and gray, and being overcome by some terminal illness brought about by karmic justice, that you don't want to be on your deathbed thinking on your lives and having your one contribution to our sick, sad world to be known as the McDonalds of penis enlargement emails, billions served. Stop... stop now, there is still time to become a productive member of society, to heal your tattered soul, and to once again ascend from the realm of advertising troglodytes to be human.
Sincerely,
Elbo Ruum
Long about the time of the video game crash, not only was the home market being flooded with trash, but the arcades were being treated to their own brand of refuse.
One I particularly remember was Tutankham, a maze game where you guide a little dude through a blocky pyramid maze where you would grab treasures and make it to the end, while shooting various critters. What made this game suck was the fact that most of the levels had tons of "vertical" corridors, but your guy could only shoot left and right.
And the laser-disc games... sheesh. Dragon's Lair was entertaining, but I'd hardly call it a video game, but there was another space-themed one I can't remember the name of which had a standard graphics ship shooting filmed ships. The really crappy thing was that hitting anything was a guess, getting hit by something was questionable, and the angles the scenes were shot at made no sense with regard to the orientation of yours.
Does anyone remember Targ? God help you if you do.
Then in the late '80's when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat first exploded the fighter genre, there was Time Killers (a gory, nearly unplayable fighter), and Primal Rage (a gory, nearly unplayable dinosaur/beast fighter).
Oh, puh-leeeeeaassse. YouTube restricted the content probably because enough people rec'd it adult content. Since you can still get to it, at least the last time I checked, through an account login which is free, it isn't censorship. Doubly so because anyone who can legitimately claim adult age is also legitimately permitted to vote, ergo the target audience of this video.
Besides, I saw that chunk of crap. It IS offensive... to my intelligence. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a parody until I realized that they were serious about the content (albeit in a sarcastic manner). I kept expecting the punch line to come but it never did.
I know that conservatives need snark, bullshit, and unlimited access to media to convince suckers to vote for them, but my guess is that it was the viewers who caused that to be put in the back by the pornography. That's democracy for you, conservatives, I know you don't recognize it, so consider that a PSA.
Besides, "pornography" is specifically what it is, since the definition is "something that appeals to one's prurient interests". I can think of nothing more appealing to prurience than something that panders to a right-wing desire to get your rocks off while debasing your "enemy", those danged liberals.
I'm going to indulge in it a little.
1. We don't need an LCD windshield. Because no matter what you put in front of the driver, they're looking at IT and not the ROAD. Focus on any foreground image and the background image loses focus. Any time the driver removes his/her focus from the road ahead. The rub of this is that focus on the road then blurs the foreground image and distracts the driver.
2. They have these things called sunglasses for bright sunny days. Go to any 7-11 and you can buy cheapies for $10. The issue isn't that people are blinded by headlights, or other such bright alerting device, it's that these need not be that bright. Alert, don't distract.
3. Who wants automated driving? I, for one, like to drive. I'm pretty sure, due to the popularity of motorsports, that I'm not nearly the only one.
4. Anything that turns the attention of the driver off of the road ahead and to some other device, readout, or whatever IS a distraction. Anything that can have the effect of annoying the driver, whether it be yelling into a cellphone, a heated argument with the person in the shotgun seat, or smacking the kids in the back seat, is distracting. A HUD is nothing more than a distraction. There is a reason why the instrument cluster sits where it sits and is organized the way it's organized. It's because drivers need only twitch their eyes momentarily downward to scan the gauges for all of the relevant information they require, and then resume their forward focus.
You really didn't answer my question. Whether or not security is addressed as an a priori forethought or as a response to later realizations of potential real abuses really have no practical effect the strategy for security for an Internet browser. People will want functionality and usability. It doesn't really matter what level of user you may be, whether a computer know-nothing or a software architect, people use browsers for the same reason. Just because you may be an advanced user doesn't mean that you don't want features.
But we're not even talking about features here, we are talking about user interactivity and control.
My question to you, rephrased, is how do you expect browser security to operate without some level of informed responsibility offload to the user? I don't mean this from an esoteric standpoint, I mean from a material standpoint. Do you expect the browser to take the responsibility off the user for installation of software, even if the user purports to want it? If so, I'd like to hear a strategy for implementation.
Informed consent is the middle ground between a fully non-exceptional lockdown (undesirable) and a fully open system (undesirable). From what I've seen, IE7 is addressing those issues. Where IE6 implemented modest, nearly useless controls on the automatic download of malicious or unwanted code, IE7 uses a system of informed consent to alert users of potential hazards. That some people brainlessly click OK is another discussion entirely. As a software engineer myself, I understand that you have to often make an engineering trade-off decision as to how far to go to bulletproof an application from users before you start introducing usability issues.
So, let me get this straight...
The problem with IE6 security is that it allows things to be done without the user's knowledge, and oft times without their agreement.
Now that the user must be complicit in the act, it's still not correct?
Seems a little ludicrous to expect the browser to "know" what good programs are and bad programs are, to automatically possess a will to protect the user, or to impose that will onto a user, and from that point, the only thing you can do is allow the user to make the determination. Would a person who ostensibly uses an OS intended for non-"baffoons" appreciate it if the OS made the determination of what software does and does not belong on their machine, even if it is their intent to install it?
I would appreciate an explanation of what the right tack would be.
The fact of the matter is, that whether or not Windows is targeted at "baffoons" is immaterial, good security is good security, and all good security involves engaging the responsibility of those being secured. That some choose not to accept that responsibility is what takes security and obviates its protection.
You can have an alarm system on your house, rabid watchdogs, a panic room, etc. but if you're going to just invite in any old stranger who walks up into the house, all of that security is precisely meaningless. The same applies to "security" as we've come to understand it in a computing environment.
...material diversions to the driver's attention, with the advent of the cellphone, that ship, as they say, has sailed.
"men initiate 73.3% of messages, but their initiations are 17.9% less likely to be reciprocated; 78.2% of messages are never responded to."
Sounds like the numbers for offline dating, don't they?
I wonder if people still use the "what's your sign" line? Probably updated for the internet age though. "What's your URL?"
It's good to know that rejection is automated these days. Getting turned down at a bar is so... so... 1987.
Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy.
How non-Americans get this oft times more than Americans do.
Thank you for your comments.
...is that this is a matter of law. While most people would hope that law makes sense, in its current incarnation, it is convoluted, with many points of view. What is disturbing is that as a lawyer, because of the fact that this is currently being vetted within our legal system, that he doesn't even know, yet the RIAA is being permitted to pursue its lawsuits and being given every leniency in the quality of the evidence it provides to support its case.
What's most disheartening is that the people who are being sued neither know their rights, as the whole 'licensing' vs. 'ownership of a commodity' has muddied the waters as to what they do have a right to do with the purchase they've made, nor is there anywhere they can go to get information regarding their rights. Meanwhile, corporations with immense legal war chests prey upon their customers.
Since electronic media is so ubiquitous these days, it is very dangerous for the questions of what it is you are actually purchasing and what rights you have to remain in limbo and the have them become the subjects of lawsuits without much concern for bridging that gap.
I guess my main complaint is that law, in its most basic definition of spirit, was created to protect lawful people from criminality and to punish the unlawful. If a pre-teen girl can be sued by a multinational consortium of media companies without a single thought given a priori to whom it is they are actually suing, simply in an effort to ferret out those who are guilty, then what we see here now with the RIAA is a serious abridgment of the purpose of law.
They aren't necessary. Up until this upcoming election, I've only had to use the lever-flip mechanicals. They've always worked fine. Paper ballots? Fine. Oregon even has them mailed to them. I'm convinced that E-Voting only became an issue because of the whole hanging/dimpled/pregnant chad thing down in Florida in 2000. Personally, I don't want them. However, it seems that we have a hardon for e-voting, so if we do, my question becomes, OK fine, but why are they being supplied using proprietary source, with no vetting of security? Why don't these things leave a paper trail? If anything should be transparent, voting should be. Hence, my question.
n/t
...but it really is a simple, honest question. What is the open-source community doing to present an alternative to proprietary closed-source voting machines? This is a serious question, because I'd like to know if there are efforts in this direction.
That was quite a screed against the "American Way of Doing Things".
May I ask a simple question? Since 8x11in paper standard long predates these JCL standards, why didn't they simply adopt 8x11 as the standard?
Put another way, why should we reward obstinacy with anything but obstinacy?
You're missing the point, Samir, the idea is to think about what you'd do if you didn't have to work, then that's supposed to be your...
PC Load Letter?! What the fuck does THAT mean?!
...that Monster Cables could give you reams of sales reports confirming that, yes, people do buy cables with exorbitant price tags, probably with little notes in the margins like 'Idiots!', 'OMG! Stupid pricks, but I'll take their dough!', 'Mental note: make serious attempt to sell the Brooklyn Bridge", etc.