It's the kind of thing I'd love to see an open version of, that I could run on my own servers and leave to my children. Sadly, filling in all that data for FB's use just ain't going to happen.
My experience over the years is that one in five probably do work only an hour a day. The catch is, it's absolutely true of the non-telecommuters as well. I remember there always being a few employees who were "well liked" by management so never went away, but yet spent their days goofing off and doing the minimum required to keep their jobs. Being -at- a desk for 8 hours in an office, is not the same as working productively.
Meanwhile, owning my own company now, I work as hard as I have to keeping my company successful.
From my experience in life, my cats always liked trying to wake me up in the middle of the night. So now they'll be giving off light too? Great. Not an improvement.
All I know is, working at home, if I -could- get a 1Gb connection here where I live, even at the $300 a month Chattanooga is charging, I would do so in a heartbeat.
8 characters isn't all that bad, considering it's unlikely even the best methods will find the match in the first 3 guesses. Apple does lock accounts after 3 failed attempts and force a password change through the e-mail on file. This of course does -nothing- against phishing, but neither does the most secure password on the planet if it's typed into a false site. Of course if they hacked these peoples e-mail then they can reset the password to whatever they want... but this should just teach everyone that security is not about -one- account, it's about -all- your accounts being connected.
8 characters is absolutely -pathetic- when used in any situation like encrypted files where it's possible to get an infinite amount of attempts with no real delay.
Now of course, as others on this article have commented, given even just common dictionary attacks, there's probably a good chance you can take a random e-mail discovered however, enter it as an Apple ID, and then spend your 3 attempts trying the top 3 passwords that meet the criteria, and probably get in to a percentage of the accounts.
I always saw the crappy quality of faxes as a perfect indication that it might not be secure. After all it's far more time consuming and difficult (not impossible or even hard, just more expensive) to forge a very high quality PDF that's also digitally signed and e-mailed securely than a fax. But the crappy quality of faxes? Who would even notice if someone forged the document, printed it out, and then faxed it. With the quality so poor how could anyone tell whether it was an original faxed or something covered with whiteout?
We did require a signature, it never ever arrived. It also -did- have the addresses on both the package and all labels. It was mailed directly at the local post office. It also simply disappeared.
Sorry, while I know a single story isn't representative of the post office as a whole, it's enough to drive me away from ever shipping USPS again. I always use a shipper with reliable tracking now. Thing is, it only takes one fuckup to loose a customer. Eventually a business, even ones like USPS will have simply lost too many. Beyond that, even if the package arrived, the general hassle of improperly delivered mail, junk mailings, and other such things will make me happy to see the mailbox at my sidewalk become a thing of the past.
While I once thought the postal service was a requirement, at this point I have -two- bills I don't pay online, one because it's a local office and I actually just drop the check off (I could pay online, but it's a town thing so might as well say hi every month), and the other I mail because the company is still in the dark ages. A lack of a post office would simply force this particular company to finally update to at least take credit cards or some such. So for the inconvenience of a single business in my life it would mean I'd no longer get floods of junk mail in our box every week (that goes straight in the recycle bin, horrible waste of resources mailing that shit), and it will get rid of all the mail that goes to previous and nonexistent residents of our house. The previous residents of the house didn't put in a change of address form, so we get a LOT of mail to them. We're not legally allowed to put in a change of address form for them. We legally aren't allowed to toss the mail out. And marking it as return to sender or any other thing has served no purpose as our local postal office just doesn't seem to give a shit. Then we have the people who gave our address but never lived here, apparently they had the wrong street name or some such. Same thing, no matter how often we say they don't live here, we still get that same mail every month with no way to do anything about it.
At least e-mail I can filter.
And then sending things through them? Last package I sent by USPS never arrived... it simply vanished. They had no idea where it went. Which how that happens in this day and age I don't know.
So IMO, let the post office die, pass a law requiring every business to provide a way to accept direct bank payments at the least, and UPS and FedEx for packages. If that means people in the wilderness have to head into town to pick up their packages once a week, well you know, that's what you get for living in the wilderness.
Not sure how much money Google Voice makes, but I for one use it regularly to make international calls to family. It's got currently the cheapest prices for calling to the countries I call from any company I've seen, so I'm happy to pay the little I do for it. Granted, I could make the same calls for free if I could get those family members to turn on their computers... but they won't, so oh well.
No, they REALLY want you to use it. As they will make boatloads of money off overcharging you for that use. It's the consumer who doesn't actually want to use it. Though sadly some won't know better until it's too late.
"Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed." straight from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
Now I'm not a lawyer, but it was always my understanding that copyright doesn't protect APIs for that reason. An API is really a statement of facts. Now a specific header -might- be covered by copyright and a specific source file (implementation) can definitely be covered by copyright. The API itself though is really a statement of fact to the compiler (And the human). Like a phone book, you can copyright layout and the specifics of a phone book, but you can't actually copyright that "xxx-xxx-xxxx" calls "john doe". Because that is a simply a statement of fact. This is why WINE can even exist. As their implementation of the Win32 APIs is -not- a implementation copy of the Win32 source, it is a implementation that follows the same "truth".
So: extern double sqrt( double );
Can't really be copyrighted, because it is a literal statement of facts. The implementation may be copyrighted. (in this case the math is ancient, but say a hand tuned assembler might be copyrighted, though a clean room implementation of the api obviously doesn't intrude upon that copyright)
And the java api:
static double sqrt(double a)
isn't violating anyone's copyright by declaring the identical facts for the appropriate language.
Anyway, obviously the courts will have to sort that out. And what the fuck do I know. But if APIs suddenly become copyrightable, then welcome to a world of hurt for everyone who writes software, including Oracle themselves.
Seriously, I'm happy to tell some fiends and family the end of a movie before they watch. Because otherwise they'll sit through the whole film asking what's going to happen rather than watching. I on the other hand -hate- having stories spoiled for me. If I really want to know I will ask. But if I don't ask, then don't tell me!.
If only he'd lost his job, but apparently according to the summary anyway, he only lost it for 45 days... Which I suppose would provide the Darwin Award category to the citizens who are supposed to be protected by Police, not beat by them, of "There is no justice."
The moment AT&T and the "major" ISP's do this, don't they loose any chance at ever claiming common carrier status? I'm not a lawyer, nor do I understand any of the telecom laws... but it seems to be as soon as they filter for copyright they can be held libel for anything they didn't filter for...
Voxel based rendering, which is all this is effectively, is hardly new. In fact I remember games from the early 90s that shipped using Voxel based rendering. There's just simply limitations around the technology. There's limitations around polygonal renderers as well. Right now polygonal gets more bang for the buck basically. To really take advantage of voxels would at a minimum require either generating your entire world procedurally (works for some games, not all), limiting the size of your world (compression of data only gets so effective), or having massive amounts of storage (we're getting there).
Honestly I'd go so far as to say that there's very little "new" possible in 3D rendering technologies. Optimizations happen, silicon gets faster (mostly because silicon continues to get smaller, so they get to add more parallelization in the same space), but I'd say while the processing speed continues to make previous impractical methods useable, it's not really creating anything new. At some point we'll very likely end up with real time raytracing/radiosity of solids based data. Not just portions of it, or single passes. Even before then we will continue to see mixtures of techniques. But all the marketing videos in the world doesn't really make something new.
As long as the bill also requires the ISP's and connections of all members of the Federal government, Congress, Senate, Whitehouse, everyone, to be tracked to the same level of detail and published openly (Since we the tax payers actually pay for those connections we should know what they're being used for...)
Oh wait, it doesn't? Well, think we found where all the vile stuff is being downloaded... When's the raid on the House Judiciary Committee?
Honestly, having used OS X Server for years, I long ago stopped using the GUI tools for anything that it wasn't required for. Simply because it was always happy to blast away any advanced changes that might have been made by hand. Nothing like having to restore backups of httpd.conf simply because Server Admin or System Update decided to just write over the existing one. Hell, I've also had System Update simply write a blank virgin setup over our LDAP setup. So if 10.7 looses half the GUI and in return (I'm hoping anyway, haven't installed the server version yet...) will simply leave files alone that are already configured, I'd consider that a welcome trade.
I wish I had mod points to mod this up. Yes it closes a hole that made for a convenient jailbreak. It also closes a hole that could have revealed any of the information on a phone to phishing sites... just because some grandmother opens a pdf emailed her in a spam? Yeah, wonder why Apple got a fix out for this pretty quick... it must be that evil jail breaking *rolls eyes*.
Actually since by all legal definitions every member of the NSA is an employee of -us- the PEOPLE, we do indeed have a right to know what our employees are up to. Despite that we have proven throughout our short history that we the people are basically apathetic about the whole process which is why our employees get away with all the crap they get away with.
We also have the right to recall (fire) this same judge. But we the people will also be apathetic about that and let it slide.
Prior to writing humanity would have passed on all knowledge, from memory, verbally and through training... Then writing was developed, and our memories have gone downhill from there. Or on the other hand, because we only need to remember where to find the -details- now, instead of remembering every detail ourselves, we can now learn and "remember" far more than ever in history. Yes there are things that are highly important to actually remember, but to act as if the Internet is having any different effect than books, or parchment, or whatever was the invention of the moment is probably just proving the researchers aren't well versed in history.
But what I might cancel over is the horrible new website... I mean, the sorting is gone, they lost at least a thousand ratings I'd marked, and apparently no longer have any suggestions for things I should watch for Drama... except for things I specifically have marked as "Not Interested"....
Indeed. Nothing like "modern" technology to take something that was done regularly in the past, and reinvent it by taking up 100x more bandwidth and storage.
Are they sure it's the internet, and not just a lack of "professional, accountable" reporters? I mean, have they ever -watched- a modern news show. The era of professional reporters was dying when I was a kid in the 80's. Have we had any truly great, honest, accountable reporting done in this past decade at all?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the kind of thing I'd love to see an open version of, that I could run on my own servers and leave to my children. Sadly, filling in all that data for FB's use just ain't going to happen.
My experience over the years is that one in five probably do work only an hour a day. The catch is, it's absolutely true of the non-telecommuters as well. I remember there always being a few employees who were "well liked" by management so never went away, but yet spent their days goofing off and doing the minimum required to keep their jobs. Being -at- a desk for 8 hours in an office, is not the same as working productively.
Meanwhile, owning my own company now, I work as hard as I have to keeping my company successful.
From my experience in life, my cats always liked trying to wake me up in the middle of the night. So now they'll be giving off light too? Great. Not an improvement.
All I know is, working at home, if I -could- get a 1Gb connection here where I live, even at the $300 a month Chattanooga is charging, I would do so in a heartbeat.
8 characters isn't all that bad, considering it's unlikely even the best methods will find the match in the first 3 guesses. Apple does lock accounts after 3 failed attempts and force a password change through the e-mail on file. This of course does -nothing- against phishing, but neither does the most secure password on the planet if it's typed into a false site. Of course if they hacked these peoples e-mail then they can reset the password to whatever they want... but this should just teach everyone that security is not about -one- account, it's about -all- your accounts being connected.
8 characters is absolutely -pathetic- when used in any situation like encrypted files where it's possible to get an infinite amount of attempts with no real delay.
Now of course, as others on this article have commented, given even just common dictionary attacks, there's probably a good chance you can take a random e-mail discovered however, enter it as an Apple ID, and then spend your 3 attempts trying the top 3 passwords that meet the criteria, and probably get in to a percentage of the accounts.
I always saw the crappy quality of faxes as a perfect indication that it might not be secure. After all it's far more time consuming and difficult (not impossible or even hard, just more expensive) to forge a very high quality PDF that's also digitally signed and e-mailed securely than a fax. But the crappy quality of faxes? Who would even notice if someone forged the document, printed it out, and then faxed it. With the quality so poor how could anyone tell whether it was an original faxed or something covered with whiteout?
We did require a signature, it never ever arrived. It also -did- have the addresses on both the package and all labels. It was mailed directly at the local post office. It also simply disappeared.
Sorry, while I know a single story isn't representative of the post office as a whole, it's enough to drive me away from ever shipping USPS again. I always use a shipper with reliable tracking now. Thing is, it only takes one fuckup to loose a customer. Eventually a business, even ones like USPS will have simply lost too many. Beyond that, even if the package arrived, the general hassle of improperly delivered mail, junk mailings, and other such things will make me happy to see the mailbox at my sidewalk become a thing of the past.
While I once thought the postal service was a requirement, at this point I have -two- bills I don't pay online, one because it's a local office and I actually just drop the check off (I could pay online, but it's a town thing so might as well say hi every month), and the other I mail because the company is still in the dark ages. A lack of a post office would simply force this particular company to finally update to at least take credit cards or some such. So for the inconvenience of a single business in my life it would mean I'd no longer get floods of junk mail in our box every week (that goes straight in the recycle bin, horrible waste of resources mailing that shit), and it will get rid of all the mail that goes to previous and nonexistent residents of our house. The previous residents of the house didn't put in a change of address form, so we get a LOT of mail to them. We're not legally allowed to put in a change of address form for them. We legally aren't allowed to toss the mail out. And marking it as return to sender or any other thing has served no purpose as our local postal office just doesn't seem to give a shit. Then we have the people who gave our address but never lived here, apparently they had the wrong street name or some such. Same thing, no matter how often we say they don't live here, we still get that same mail every month with no way to do anything about it.
At least e-mail I can filter.
And then sending things through them? Last package I sent by USPS never arrived... it simply vanished. They had no idea where it went. Which how that happens in this day and age I don't know.
So IMO, let the post office die, pass a law requiring every business to provide a way to accept direct bank payments at the least, and UPS and FedEx for packages. If that means people in the wilderness have to head into town to pick up their packages once a week, well you know, that's what you get for living in the wilderness.
Not sure how much money Google Voice makes, but I for one use it regularly to make international calls to family. It's got currently the cheapest prices for calling to the countries I call from any company I've seen, so I'm happy to pay the little I do for it. Granted, I could make the same calls for free if I could get those family members to turn on their computers... but they won't, so oh well.
No, they REALLY want you to use it. As they will make boatloads of money off overcharging you for that use.
It's the consumer who doesn't actually want to use it. Though sadly some won't know better until it's too late.
"Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed." straight from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
Now I'm not a lawyer, but it was always my understanding that copyright doesn't protect APIs for that reason. An API is really a statement of facts. Now a specific header -might- be covered by copyright and a specific source file (implementation) can definitely be covered by copyright. The API itself though is really a statement of fact to the compiler (And the human). Like a phone book, you can copyright layout and the specifics of a phone book, but you can't actually copyright that "xxx-xxx-xxxx" calls "john doe". Because that is a simply a statement of fact. This is why WINE can even exist. As their implementation of the Win32 APIs is -not- a implementation copy of the Win32 source, it is a implementation that follows the same "truth".
So:
extern double sqrt( double );
Can't really be copyrighted, because it is a literal statement of facts. The implementation may be copyrighted. (in this case the math is ancient, but say a hand tuned assembler might be copyrighted, though a clean room implementation of the api obviously doesn't intrude upon that copyright)
And the java api:
static double sqrt(double a)
isn't violating anyone's copyright by declaring the identical facts for the appropriate language.
Anyway, obviously the courts will have to sort that out. And what the fuck do I know. But if APIs suddenly become copyrightable, then welcome to a world of hurt for everyone who writes software, including Oracle themselves.
People should respect others wishes?
Seriously, I'm happy to tell some fiends and family the end of a movie before they watch. Because otherwise they'll sit through the whole film asking what's going to happen rather than watching. I on the other hand -hate- having stories spoiled for me. If I really want to know I will ask. But if I don't ask, then don't tell me!.
If only he'd lost his job, but apparently according to the summary anyway, he only lost it for 45 days...
Which I suppose would provide the Darwin Award category to the citizens who are supposed to be protected by Police, not beat by them, of "There is no justice."
The moment AT&T and the "major" ISP's do this, don't they loose any chance at ever claiming common carrier status? I'm not a lawyer, nor do I understand any of the telecom laws... but it seems to be as soon as they filter for copyright they can be held libel for anything they didn't filter for...
Voxel based rendering, which is all this is effectively, is hardly new. In fact I remember games from the early 90s that shipped using Voxel based rendering. There's just simply limitations around the technology. There's limitations around polygonal renderers as well. Right now polygonal gets more bang for the buck basically. To really take advantage of voxels would at a minimum require either generating your entire world procedurally (works for some games, not all), limiting the size of your world (compression of data only gets so effective), or having massive amounts of storage (we're getting there).
Honestly I'd go so far as to say that there's very little "new" possible in 3D rendering technologies. Optimizations happen, silicon gets faster (mostly because silicon continues to get smaller, so they get to add more parallelization in the same space), but I'd say while the processing speed continues to make previous impractical methods useable, it's not really creating anything new. At some point we'll very likely end up with real time raytracing/radiosity of solids based data. Not just portions of it, or single passes. Even before then we will continue to see mixtures of techniques. But all the marketing videos in the world doesn't really make something new.
As long as the bill also requires the ISP's and connections of all members of the Federal government, Congress, Senate, Whitehouse, everyone, to be tracked to the same level of detail and published openly (Since we the tax payers actually pay for those connections we should know what they're being used for...)
Oh wait, it doesn't? Well, think we found where all the vile stuff is being downloaded... When's the raid on the House Judiciary Committee?
Honestly, having used OS X Server for years, I long ago stopped using the GUI tools for anything that it wasn't required for. Simply because it was always happy to blast away any advanced changes that might have been made by hand. Nothing like having to restore backups of httpd.conf simply because Server Admin or System Update decided to just write over the existing one. Hell, I've also had System Update simply write a blank virgin setup over our LDAP setup. So if 10.7 looses half the GUI and in return (I'm hoping anyway, haven't installed the server version yet...) will simply leave files alone that are already configured, I'd consider that a welcome trade.
I wish I had mod points to mod this up. Yes it closes a hole that made for a convenient jailbreak. It also closes a hole that could have revealed any of the information on a phone to phishing sites... just because some grandmother opens a pdf emailed her in a spam? Yeah, wonder why Apple got a fix out for this pretty quick... it must be that evil jail breaking *rolls eyes*.
Actually since by all legal definitions every member of the NSA is an employee of -us- the PEOPLE, we do indeed have a right to know what our employees are up to. Despite that we have proven throughout our short history that we the people are basically apathetic about the whole process which is why our employees get away with all the crap they get away with.
We also have the right to recall (fire) this same judge. But we the people will also be apathetic about that and let it slide.
Prior to writing humanity would have passed on all knowledge, from memory, verbally and through training...
Then writing was developed, and our memories have gone downhill from there. Or on the other hand, because we only need to remember where to find the -details- now, instead of remembering every detail ourselves, we can now learn and "remember" far more than ever in history. Yes there are things that are highly important to actually remember, but to act as if the Internet is having any different effect than books, or parchment, or whatever was the invention of the moment is probably just proving the researchers aren't well versed in history.
But what I might cancel over is the horrible new website... ...
I mean, the sorting is gone, they lost at least a thousand ratings I'd marked, and apparently no longer have any suggestions for things I should watch for Drama... except for things I specifically have marked as "Not Interested".
Indeed. Nothing like "modern" technology to take something that was done regularly in the past, and reinvent it by taking up 100x more bandwidth and storage.
There is nothing practical about making me smell whatever horrible smell they'd want to send me over a TV... ever.
Then bitch about that to Microsoft. Demand your cross platform compatibility! :)
Are they sure it's the internet, and not just a lack of "professional, accountable" reporters? I mean, have they ever -watched- a modern news show. The era of professional reporters was dying when I was a kid in the 80's. Have we had any truly great, honest, accountable reporting done in this past decade at all?