The ones that actually make press usually cause enough bad publicity that charges get knocked down / "covered" by the company after a while -- paying a few thou on someone's bill is STILL cheaper than a prime-time commercial, after all.
My family was one of the many caught up in the original AT&T / Cingular Merger, and promptly quit them after we found out we couldn't add my little brother onto our current (read: old AT&T) cell plan (which was $20 per phone per month) unless the entire family got whole new phones and went on a new two-year contract.
Well, we did... with T-mobile.
Fast forward to now and almost the entire family has upgraded their phones since -- only one person at a time as opposed to en masse -- and my sister and I are happy as clams with Sidekicks, and even when I traveled to Canada, it never got nuts like this. (In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
In the US, at least, compliance can be rather slow to come for no other reason, because people hold onto old phones for YEARS.
I had a rather primitive phone for three years before I got my sidekick, which now has a USB-style plug if nothing else (but seems to deal in a higher amperage than my boyfriend's Blackberry, even though they have the same plug.
Multi-year contracts slow this progress down just as much. In other words, check back in 2009, or 2010 to be certain.
If you thought the Republicans after turning Bush into a savior were scary, imagine the Democrats after turning Obama into a martyr...
For a healthy country, we need a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Yes, we need to correct for a lot of the Republicans' damage over the past eight years, but overcompensation will hurt just as much.
I think you're confusing political news for political opinion. This is an opinion piece about Political Bloggers in general (and in specific, about the most recent event to occur among them, that being Obama's selection of Biden.) Also, it's relevant to the conventions (and again, the selection of potential Veeps such as Biden).
Don't read too much into it. Obama/Biden was going to make the front page today SOMEHOW.
Let's see here... Anything to do with computers (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering) and economics (Marketing, for example) is in pretty rapid evolution right now, and will continue to be until businesses adapt to the internet and some level of streamlining / plateau of technology occurs within Computer Science.
But yeah, a brand new book just for Calculus? Fuck that.
Didn't, but I think we can safely assume that if we're talking about how easy it is to hack into the place because of a single key, we're talking something that needs a secondary system of authentication (RFID in the keys? A second key? A dongle?) to secure itself.
In other news, TWH and other places of national security are underprotected because they've not bothered to back their keys up with a secondary system, yes?
So what this guy did wrong is that his "I am Rich" App needs to signal to other iPhone users within a certain distance, "Hey, this guy is rich. Please sex him"?
Google Blog Search makes it easy for me to track a phrase of something I'm interested in - like Autism Speaks, or a Dragon*Con, or even my own name, and I use that regularly to keep track of people who I can direct to my stuff or who might cause me problems later.
A simple search set up for them with "Comcast" in the search term could have pulled this up.
All it shows is that Comcast is looking out for PR blunders in the making and responding to them. They shouldn't let them happen in the first place, of course, but at least give them credit for being smart.
I'm sick and tired of CS "professionals" like yourself who think they know all about security without realizing that the end-user is PART of the security. I may be on the softer side of CS, but even I know that eventually you reach a point where the computer can be as complex and secure as cool, complex security can be, but if you can still "social engineer" the schmuck running it into giving you his password, you've still beaten the system.
Sooner or later, the user becomes the weakest link instead of the computer.
Making sure users are using the most up-to-date browsers and software is a big part of computer security, and some of that is obsolesence, some of that is stubbornness ("I'll lose my favorite plugin if I update!"), and some of that is plain ignorance.
Being aware that two fifths of the internet is still running exploitable software IS a big deal to those trying to prevent the spread of big viruses, and the only way that's going to get fixed in the long run is if you educate users to know better and to realize that they need to take an active role in the defense of their own computers and not just trust that the "nice big software companies" will do it for them.
Perfect Security will not come when you build the ultimate foolproof software. It'll come when you can convince your grandmother "Okay, here's how you use the software to keep yourself safe, but you still need to do your part to make sure that it stays healthy and updated so it can do all that, okay?"
While I agree with you in some respects -- in fact, a lot of folks are saying the current economic downturn is WORSE than normal because people are being expected to keep up with so much more in terms of insurance and other safety nets compared to previous recessions -- just because a subsection can't handle the control doesn't mean everyone should give it up.
I don't use a blackberry (because I'm still, admittedly, on my parents' plan and nobody involved wants to pay the extra per-line-per-month data charges), but my boyfriend does and he was connected to this thing right about when his carrier cut him out from under him. He's found ways to cope with a less feature-laden device, but still rough. Then again, when you're effectively the last line of defense in keeping a 24/7 radio station on the air, it's easy to see how he needs it.
In terms of other devices, though, I've been juggling at any given time:
- my laptop (obviously) - a Nintendo DS - a "smart" pedometer (technically a DS peripheral, but whatever) - a Swatch smartwatch (which means it gets a little radio signal with things like important news bulletins, weather, and some vague stock reports. I could get MSN on it but I don't feel like paying for it) - And my current "dumb" phone, which does calls, texting, and is my alarm clock.
Only one of these (the laptop) has any pertinent importance, and yet I notice the ones on my person the most (the pedometer and the watch) get my attention more often. There's something about a device that's attached to your body that makes you more attentive to it.
Combine this with the immediacy we already attach to phones, and a Blackberry becomes a risky combination. It's easy to see how such a thing can take over your life.
Put bluntly, a society predisposed to patriarchial control (i.e. a Masculine Regime) correlates highly to not only higher levels and tolerance to violence, but also a much more "sexually repressive" culture.
Now while you could argue that most societies are inclined this way, note how more egalitarian societies (like the UK) behave compared to, say, the highly gender-imbalanced Middle East.
I have been reading this conversation looking to see if ANYBODY actually thought about this from the Artist's Perspective. Corporate Copyright Aside, Much of the Artistic aspects of altering Intellectual Property have been ignored.
I know earlier on one person was mocking the idea of someone stockpiling their entire archive of artistic work for the sake of profits -- well why NOT?
I don't mention this often on Slashdot for obvious reasons, but I do a webcomic. One that I intend to make profitable (or at least worthwhile!) at some point, in fact. Given the length some comics can be (there are already comics out there reaching 10 years of online archives!), imposing a fixed time limit on IP can be disastrous -- especially when the timespan of a comic's archives became longer than whatever this fixed length turns out to be! What would I do when the earliest parts of my archive started to expire? I can't very well continue to work and profit on characters that have somehow already become public domain just by the sheer length it's taken to produce the work.
Life + X Years provides a VERY elegant answer; it just doesn't expire until the creator says it does, and then it all falls into the public domain at the same time. I never have to worry about losing control of my works while I'm still building upon them, and when they become public domain, the entire work is now public, so it can all be kept intact.
Corporate Copyright is one thing, but don't confuse Corporate Rights with Personal Ones. Unfortunately, trying to limit the impact of Corporate IP may well impact the ability of Personal / Artstic IP to remain viable.
So, by encouraging people who are wealthy enough that they have smartphones to either a) not have them on their persons in case of an emergency or b) leave them in the trust of a total stranger who could just hock their iPhones without a second thought...
We're using torture as a sales improvement tactic?
Implications on the applications of torture aside, this just feels like a REALLY stupid lesson. "Selling Harder" does jack shit if it's the same sold techniques.
I suppose, oh I dunno, teaching them better sales techniques was just too expensive for their budget. A pity, as I hope they set aside a couple thousand in that budget to get this guy to settle out of court.
Wordpress has some features I still wish blogger had. For example, I'd like to be able to show my freaking comment count in my RSS feed so my RSS readers can see if actual discussion is going on.
Features may not always be useful, but Blogger's missing some fairly obvious ones if that's any indication!
Blogger is not without utility. However, a bit of a "feature War" has sprung up between it and Wordpress, and Wordpress's abilities have expanded far beyond that of Blogger's.
Google hasn't been neglecting Blogger so much as Blogger has been getting PWNED by faster-developing companies who can roll out more / better features faster.
Are we trying to put the entire creative sector out of business here?
If I had to put a copyright claim out for every single piece of work I had, it would quickly engulf any profits I had made on those works. Hell, DeviantArt alone has over 56 MILLION images in its repositories - are we supposed to believe that everyone is going to rush out and get those images copyrighted immediately?
If you're looking to crush small businesses, this is the way to do it.
(Hell, the art communities threw their arms up in the air about this TWO WEEKS AGO -- To put it bluntly, this is how you piss off the internet.)
FWIW, food alone is about twice as much, and the cost of driving is far more expensive as well (then again, they have less need to drive).
It's enough for me to think that overall, stuff is more expensive than it has to be, but I would still imagine they treat their employees better as well.
I use it as a unifying force between my blogs, Twittersig to keep it up in my forum signatures, an additional RSS feed for services like Squidoo... Unlike websites like OnXIAm and FriendFeed that force folk to use an entirely new site just to keep up, Twitter goes the other route and merges itself into everyone else's pages.
Slashdot Mirror
The ones that actually make press usually cause enough bad publicity that charges get knocked down / "covered" by the company after a while -- paying a few thou on someone's bill is STILL cheaper than a prime-time commercial, after all.
Otherwise, I'm not so sure.
How does placing a cap in at, say, $500 worth of charges count as babysitting?
Who the hell actually WANTS to pay $500 worth of charges without knowing it?!
My family was one of the many caught up in the original AT&T / Cingular Merger, and promptly quit them after we found out we couldn't add my little brother onto our current (read: old AT&T) cell plan (which was $20 per phone per month) unless the entire family got whole new phones and went on a new two-year contract.
Well, we did... with T-mobile.
Fast forward to now and almost the entire family has upgraded their phones since -- only one person at a time as opposed to en masse -- and my sister and I are happy as clams with Sidekicks, and even when I traveled to Canada, it never got nuts like this. (In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
So... yeah, not surprised.
In the US, at least, compliance can be rather slow to come for no other reason, because people hold onto old phones for YEARS.
I had a rather primitive phone for three years before I got my sidekick, which now has a USB-style plug if nothing else (but seems to deal in a higher amperage than my boyfriend's Blackberry, even though they have the same plug.
Multi-year contracts slow this progress down just as much. In other words, check back in 2009, or 2010 to be certain.
If you thought the Republicans after turning Bush into a savior were scary, imagine the Democrats after turning Obama into a martyr...
For a healthy country, we need a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Yes, we need to correct for a lot of the Republicans' damage over the past eight years, but overcompensation will hurt just as much.
I think you're confusing political news for political opinion. This is an opinion piece about Political Bloggers in general (and in specific, about the most recent event to occur among them, that being Obama's selection of Biden.) Also, it's relevant to the conventions (and again, the selection of potential Veeps such as Biden).
Don't read too much into it. Obama/Biden was going to make the front page today SOMEHOW.
Let's see here... Anything to do with computers (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering) and economics (Marketing, for example) is in pretty rapid evolution right now, and will continue to be until businesses adapt to the internet and some level of streamlining / plateau of technology occurs within Computer Science.
But yeah, a brand new book just for Calculus? Fuck that.
There is no gap in the production of cartoon porn between Japan and the US.
The problem is that right now it's all in the furry fandom.
Didn't, but I think we can safely assume that if we're talking about how easy it is to hack into the place because of a single key, we're talking something that needs a secondary system of authentication (RFID in the keys? A second key? A dongle?) to secure itself.
In other news, TWH and other places of national security are underprotected because they've not bothered to back their keys up with a secondary system, yes?
Makes sense.
Screw your cheap microfludics! ... There goes my etsy store!
So what this guy did wrong is that his "I am Rich" App needs to signal to other iPhone users within a certain distance, "Hey, this guy is rich. Please sex him"?
Google Blog Search makes it easy for me to track a phrase of something I'm interested in - like Autism Speaks, or a Dragon*Con, or even my own name, and I use that regularly to keep track of people who I can direct to my stuff or who might cause me problems later.
A simple search set up for them with "Comcast" in the search term could have pulled this up.
All it shows is that Comcast is looking out for PR blunders in the making and responding to them. They shouldn't let them happen in the first place, of course, but at least give them credit for being smart.
I'm sick and tired of CS "professionals" like yourself who think they know all about security without realizing that the end-user is PART of the security. I may be on the softer side of CS, but even I know that eventually you reach a point where the computer can be as complex and secure as cool, complex security can be, but if you can still "social engineer" the schmuck running it into giving you his password, you've still beaten the system.
Sooner or later, the user becomes the weakest link instead of the computer.
Making sure users are using the most up-to-date browsers and software is a big part of computer security, and some of that is obsolesence, some of that is stubbornness ("I'll lose my favorite plugin if I update!"), and some of that is plain ignorance.
Being aware that two fifths of the internet is still running exploitable software IS a big deal to those trying to prevent the spread of big viruses, and the only way that's going to get fixed in the long run is if you educate users to know better and to realize that they need to take an active role in the defense of their own computers and not just trust that the "nice big software companies" will do it for them.
Perfect Security will not come when you build the ultimate foolproof software. It'll come when you can convince your grandmother "Okay, here's how you use the software to keep yourself safe, but you still need to do your part to make sure that it stays healthy and updated so it can do all that, okay?"
While I agree with you in some respects -- in fact, a lot of folks are saying the current economic downturn is WORSE than normal because people are being expected to keep up with so much more in terms of insurance and other safety nets compared to previous recessions -- just because a subsection can't handle the control doesn't mean everyone should give it up.
I don't use a blackberry (because I'm still, admittedly, on my parents' plan and nobody involved wants to pay the extra per-line-per-month data charges), but my boyfriend does and he was connected to this thing right about when his carrier cut him out from under him. He's found ways to cope with a less feature-laden device, but still rough. Then again, when you're effectively the last line of defense in keeping a 24/7 radio station on the air, it's easy to see how he needs it.
In terms of other devices, though, I've been juggling at any given time:
- my laptop (obviously)
- a Nintendo DS
- a "smart" pedometer (technically a DS peripheral, but whatever)
- a Swatch smartwatch (which means it gets a little radio signal with things like important news bulletins, weather, and some vague stock reports. I could get MSN on it but I don't feel like paying for it)
- And my current "dumb" phone, which does calls, texting, and is my alarm clock.
Only one of these (the laptop) has any pertinent importance, and yet I notice the ones on my person the most (the pedometer and the watch) get my attention more often. There's something about a device that's attached to your body that makes you more attentive to it.
Combine this with the immediacy we already attach to phones, and a Blackberry becomes a risky combination. It's easy to see how such a thing can take over your life.
I loved that thing circa 8th grade. Read it after I got curious from seeing a question/excerpt about it on our standardized testing for that year.
Good stuff.
(Yes, I was a nerd, but aren't we all?)
Put bluntly, a society predisposed to patriarchial control (i.e. a Masculine Regime) correlates highly to not only higher levels and tolerance to violence, but also a much more "sexually repressive" culture.
Now while you could argue that most societies are inclined this way, note how more egalitarian societies (like the UK) behave compared to, say, the highly gender-imbalanced Middle East.
THANK YOU.
I have been reading this conversation looking to see if ANYBODY actually thought about this from the Artist's Perspective. Corporate Copyright Aside, Much of the Artistic aspects of altering Intellectual Property have been ignored.
I know earlier on one person was mocking the idea of someone stockpiling their entire archive of artistic work for the sake of profits -- well why NOT?
I don't mention this often on Slashdot for obvious reasons, but I do a webcomic. One that I intend to make profitable (or at least worthwhile!) at some point, in fact. Given the length some comics can be (there are already comics out there reaching 10 years of online archives!), imposing a fixed time limit on IP can be disastrous -- especially when the timespan of a comic's archives became longer than whatever this fixed length turns out to be! What would I do when the earliest parts of my archive started to expire? I can't very well continue to work and profit on characters that have somehow already become public domain just by the sheer length it's taken to produce the work.
Life + X Years provides a VERY elegant answer; it just doesn't expire until the creator says it does, and then it all falls into the public domain at the same time. I never have to worry about losing control of my works while I'm still building upon them, and when they become public domain, the entire work is now public, so it can all be kept intact.
Corporate Copyright is one thing, but don't confuse Corporate Rights with Personal Ones. Unfortunately, trying to limit the impact of Corporate IP may well impact the ability of Personal / Artstic IP to remain viable.
So, by encouraging people who are wealthy enough that they have smartphones to either a) not have them on their persons in case of an emergency or b) leave them in the trust of a total stranger who could just hock their iPhones without a second thought...
this is a good business decision?
We're using torture as a sales improvement tactic?
Implications on the applications of torture aside, this just feels like a REALLY stupid lesson. "Selling Harder" does jack shit if it's the same sold techniques.
I suppose, oh I dunno, teaching them better sales techniques was just too expensive for their budget. A pity, as I hope they set aside a couple thousand in that budget to get this guy to settle out of court.
Wordpress has some features I still wish blogger had. For example, I'd like to be able to show my freaking comment count in my RSS feed so my RSS readers can see if actual discussion is going on.
Features may not always be useful, but Blogger's missing some fairly obvious ones if that's any indication!
Blogger is not without utility. However, a bit of a "feature War" has sprung up between it and Wordpress, and Wordpress's abilities have expanded far beyond that of Blogger's.
Google hasn't been neglecting Blogger so much as Blogger has been getting PWNED by faster-developing companies who can roll out more / better features faster.
Are we trying to put the entire creative sector out of business here?
If I had to put a copyright claim out for every single piece of work I had, it would quickly engulf any profits I had made on those works. Hell, DeviantArt alone has over 56 MILLION images in its repositories - are we supposed to believe that everyone is going to rush out and get those images copyrighted immediately?
If you're looking to crush small businesses, this is the way to do it.
(Hell, the art communities threw their arms up in the air about this TWO WEEKS AGO -- To put it bluntly, this is how you piss off the internet.)
FWIW, food alone is about twice as much, and the cost of driving is far more expensive as well (then again, they have less need to drive).
It's enough for me to think that overall, stuff is more expensive than it has to be, but I would still imagine they treat their employees better as well.
I use it as a unifying force between my blogs, Twittersig to keep it up in my forum signatures, an additional RSS feed for services like Squidoo... Unlike websites like OnXIAm and FriendFeed that force folk to use an entirely new site just to keep up, Twitter goes the other route and merges itself into everyone else's pages.
How can you argue with that?