Windows 3.11: Better than dos! Windows 95: now 32 bit!! Windows 98: uh...3 more than 95! Windows ME: grinds cats into freezer meat! Windows XP: We've been told you dont want or like having cats ground into freezer meat...so this one doesnt do that. also we're doing letters now for real instead of numbers. Dont question it.. Windows Vista: Reboot simulator included! Windows 7: ok so lets just do numbers again. 7 is less than 95, plus 3.11 minus the square root of 2000 is....eh....we changed the start button for you Windows 8:: Hello there youths! we're told you like touched screens! Also we have an app store now and that has always been there. check out the full-screen start menu there now isnt that nifty? Windows 9:: Maadamme Romani threatened to unravel my lifeweave if we ever used 9. seriously. its cursed. also all our code would mistake it for 95 or 98. Windows 10: We gave you back the start button, but also included a mini start screen in it as a big fuck you for not accepting the start screen. Also its free...because uh...Ubunt...er...apple is still our competitor...yeah.
IE was made an inextricable part of the operating system during the browser wars. Even if Microsoft decides to 'turn the corner' and do this, it would mean completely refactoring a nontrivial portion of an OS that already faces staunch resistance from both corporations and users alike. The best they had done was comply with a european court order to permit choices between browsers for users, and even then the OS still relies heavily on iexplore code without directly permitting browsing.
TL;DR: an open source internet exploreer is (gasp) an open source Windows.
As a DevOps engineer I was momentarily confused by the headline. Having had my usual 4 pints after work, i'd attributed the error to malted hops and barley. The reality however was that I'd failed to remember UK government and administrative offices have very immediate names. In america we take care to cloister our offices in overly broad vague names.
its on linux. If it were for linux it would have maintained at least a shred of hackers ethos. Instead its binaries that require patent encumbered libraries and a carefully controlled deployment. Steam violates rule 0, yet as a proprietary application expects in this case to invoke the GPL mantra of usability without warranty. Steam will be "for linux" when it can be endorsed on more than one flavor without a laundry list of legal disclaimers and warnings. Currently it exists to run with the aid of the Linux kernel, GNU userspace be damned.
users: Systemd is broken, undocumented and a single point of failure Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else. users: KDE and Gnome wont work without it and you never fixed pulseaudio, which is now default in almost every distro. Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else users: Why is there binary logging? I cant grep anything and dont know why the system crashed. the way user switching works is a huge security hole pottering:no ones forcing you to use it, use something else DEBIAN USERS:: Lets seriously reconsider the use of SystemD. its very controversial, it flies against the unix ethos, and there are some valid points raised about it security open source community: we've forked it and made it slightly more useful. Pottering: HOLD ON WE DO LISTEN TO USERS!!
And I want Bennett to stop using slashdot as a roll of shit tickets start using blogger, but ya know what? it doesnt look like anyones willing to change. Maybe we can put up a kickstarter to set up hosting and a registration for the poor guy. Or at least get together and have an intervention. Bennett, please, help us help you.
Major hotel chain pushes envelope of profiteering, quietly acquiesces with government after their cashcows start mooing, remains blameless, faultless in the eyes of stockholders.
The idea being if its complicated enough, the prosecution can just gloss over to the fireworks like 'terror' 'drug' 'kingpin' 'murder' and insist the jury just have faith because the whole damn thing is too hard to understand. to think that the united states government would be so contemptuous of its own rule of law that it would be willing to overtly insult the intelligence of not only a jury but a judge is nothing new. Ferguson jurors have a lifetime ban on ever discussing the details of the trial, for example. And the reason guantanamo bay still exists is because we demanded its closure, and legislated its perpetual existence by preventing the incarceration or trial of prisoners in american courts.
The general idea is this: admit defeat and go to jail, but fight against injustice and youre now waging a war of dissent against an ideological construct. Expose too many glaring flaws in the rule of our law and the arbitrary if not meaningless nature of our criminal justice system becomes too apparent to sustain. The prosecution at this point is a hail mary, and suggests that if the defense dissects the argument too much the prosecution may not have a leg to stand on for lifetime offenses like kingpin and RICO charges which are arguably being pursued as a form of biblical retribution. the notion that someone who once bested the FBI can walk after 6-10 years, and doesnt exist as a member of the cloistered plutocracy, flies in the face of American justice.
Mod parent up! I was livid after the recent advertising changes. Firefox is now the realMedia player of browsers. How much longer until we get an askjeeves or bonzi buddy bundle, assholes
PHP, the meth-addled brother you remember from childhood that occasionally wants to have lunch, if only to waste enormous amounts of your time. He still doesnt quite work consistently, his habits get expensive, and everyone remembers that one time he just sat in a corner screaming 'true == false!! false == TRUE!!!!' until someone called the devops.
and Node.js, the kindhearted strapping beaux from the small town with a heart of gold, even if you didnt always understand his quaint allegories. These days hes become an insufferable jackoff in a suit and tie who's managed to alienate all but a few close friends who from all indications are complete douchebags. Everyone talks about his brother io.js, though. maybe that kid's worth an email.
For those slashdotters who dont cough up the ransom fee, the New York Times should be categorically banned from a citeable source for stories pertaining to news for nerds or stuff that matters as it takes free information, namely legislation proposed by the president, and turns it into content for the cloistered elite. http://readwrite.com/2015/01/1... for the unwashed.
I really do hope with childlike glee that this legislation becomes something but to those naysayers who insist congress or the senate will not support this legislation, you're correct. They rolled back the dodd frank act in the last omnibus spending bill, and if the historic trend of Republican shutdowns and sequesters are any indication of a future course of action, this legislation will die a quick death as well. Obama is proposing populist legislation because hes a lame duck, which is a bit of a controversial label. On the one hand, he has the power to veto bullshit from the republican party like rolling back the Affordable Care Act, but on the other it means meaningful things like banking and tax reform arent going anywhere if republicans have any say. Interestingly enough, the legislation also proposes to restrict technology companies from selling the data they collect from students who use their products and services.
I2P has been the successor to Tor for more than a decade, but people continue using Tor thanks to a successful campaign by media/state to maintain the protocols use in an effort to continue exploiting it and avoid having to deal with more secure alternatives. Check out fdroid.org for open source apps that enable i2p on android as well, and expect a wholesale ban on i2p traffic in the near future.
This isnt just an EFF issue, although I can see them using this publicity to highlight the greater point. Apple TOS for the store is nothing short of a labor camp for developers. Apple owns content lock, stock, and barrel. Compared to Android they control far more of the application, its licenses, its content and how it interacts with users than many programmers are comfortable with. The cusp of their assertion is that you dont make money with your app, Apple makes money with your app. Youre just the fingers on the keys.
The app store highlights a controversial opinion but it must be said: Steve Jobs was no hacker, and he certainly wasnt the laureate inventor we all insist upon. he was just a very successful and very lucky businessman who was every bit as ruthless and myopic as Bill Gates. He just had a better PR team.
If you're a profiteering advert monetizing clickbait pandering mainstream outlet with a mandate to deliver ROI on content and ensure channel marketing buy-in consistently realizes revenue, then please work to censor all 11 forbidden media words as well as any overt references to political, social, or religious figures that may impact quarterly earnings, subscribership, and total time of view. Also take note that wearable technology is fashionable this year.
if on the other hand you're an actual newspaper, journalist, podcaster, or god forbid television news programme that works to inform viewers objectively and spark meaningful discussion of current events be they political, social, or religious regardless of their tie-in ability to a product or service, please accept my sincere condolences as this type of response has always been a threat to your work. now that someone has actualized it, the real question is, are your convictions still genuine when tested?
as an IT engineer in an analytical physics company, we ran into the same overheating issues but this was a process and workflow problem, not a laptop problem. Our users, most of which hold a PhD or patent or two, stamped their feet at having to use the ticket system and the scheduler for our high performance servers. we stopped giving them deskside compute systems with 96 gigs of ram because that was wasteful and in most cases they sat idle all day. We also enabled users to telecommute, and thats when shit hit the fan. Before we knew it we were dropping 8 grand on "mobile workstations" that would burn up and die after a year because analytics engineers would sit them on their laps and watch Big Bang theory on the couch all day. The hammer came down when we'd spent nearly 2 million on laptops for a single office and our failure rate was approaching 50%.
my advice is determine what your customer or users are doing and see if you can do it better a different way. Things that overheat a processor or lock up a laptop are good candidates for centralization in the datacenter. You'll always have prima donna users that want flagship laptops to do it the wrong way, so dont cave in. Gather MTTF and MTBF metrics to prove a case to your manager or C levels that things are getting out of control. Gaming laptops are meant to sell a marketing image, not actual sustainable performance. Finally, GPO and network firewalls are your friends. Sure, users can telecommute now but our fileservers do not communicate directly with their laptops, only the simulation cluster which they can only access through submitting jobs to the scheduler.
I know it may not be the most efficient thing in the world, but its entirely possibly to write your term papers in Minecraft over the span of about 6 months to a year if you stick to harvesting wool to create a "paper" substrate and creating coal blocks for pixels. Presuming you make it long enough to avoid any creepers, the paper can be read from an enormous glass skybridge you construct over the next 2 weeks, and should only take 4 weeks to completely read, give or take a few days to a week if you fall from it a few times or if endermen start stealing text.
Listening to his speech is like sitting through a Transformers movie. You know the words, and you know the terms, but theyre all used in an entirely incoherent fashion. James seems to think hacking works just like a James Bond film in that its all about time. hackers that 'disconnect quickly' wont be found and those that 'get sloppy' will be detected by some ostentatious array of flashing lights and sirens attached to a mainframe.
James hasnt pulled his star wars head out of his NCIS ass and given any pertanent information like how hackers breeched sony, what attack vectors were used, what exploits were performed (if any) and what if any IDS or firewall technology was complicit in the breech. So given the lack of seriously technical information surrounding this leak its more than plausible by Occams Razor that Sony was the result of a simple phishing attack or bruteforce. Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat. What IS however quite possible is a disgruntled employee simply decided to dump the mail server to the pirate bay, and because you can as a business affect an insurance claim against hackers, its convenient to do so in the face of a movie that will in all likelyhood barely break even.
Charlie Hebdo is the name of the office you shot up, and i hardly imagine its going to avenge anything. 4 years ago, you firebombed the offices and razed them to ashes. It didnt work. Charlie Hebdo kept printing, and in the wake of something that would have sent any other newspaper in America scrambling to retreat Hebdo hardly seemed to care. Stephane Charbonnier, the editor in chief, issued a statement that referred to the attempt at censorship not as terrifying or vengeful, but just 'irritating.' You were nothing more than an irritation after property damage, but if history is any indication you've just opened a hundred new offices for Charlie Hebdos of all shapes and sizes. If you didnt want the prophet depicted, if he was in fact sacred, you've now effectively guaranteed Muhammad will be depicted voraceously, callously, and unabated for days to come.
Edith Ramirez said a future full of smart gadgets that watch what we do posed a threat to privacy
Edith im not sure if you've checked the news lately but we live in a country that routinely spies on every US and foreign citizen it can. Its a government that regularly hacks phones, spoofs carrier towers, and impersonates facebook users without their consent. We live in this land of, what some may call the free, where the very same companies that provide these nifty gizmos and gadgets are the ones complicit in taking these 'deeply personal' pictures and ferrying them away, sans warrant, to the government. its not like they can help it, because most are forbidden to tell us by the government. Its a government that insists hackers are people who use slashdot, root phones, and use encryption. theyre the ones who wrecklessly drove a mister Aaron Schwartz to suicide through relentless persecution. This country listens to all of our phonecalls, reads all of our email, and even copies all of our data at airports and over the wire. So for all your fearmongering I'll thank you to kindly step down from your high horse.
This is addressed to the plutocrats, so ill keep it short and sweet. I get that the cloistered elite arent to be concerned with this, but your cash cattle certainly care. If we keep going down this road, you can expect to lose everything. we will stop using your app stores, stop using your wireless towers entirely, and form small mesh networks as was the case recently in China. these networks in 20 or 30 years will grow into an encrypted tor mesh, from which you will realize no revenue outside of the occasional new "cell phone" you decide to belch forth. your films and music will never earn another cent. and in the short term i'll buy an inexpensive mp3 player and leave my phone sitting at home, turned off, as most of us should. This should be of grave concern as well, considering ubiquitous passive wireless scanning systems employed in some of the largest stores in the world would certainly become far less reliable without a willing and oblivious captive audience.
and most importantly you'll have created a new generation of hardened hackers and leakers who now believe in retribution, as freedom is clearly subject to arbitrary terms and conditions outside the realm of a government by, of, and for the people.
As a scientist ive studied this for quite some time. the troops who buried him were themselves killed by troops who were also killed, but not before the troops who killed the troops who killed the villagers were themselves killed and yet another regiment was dispatched to kill the troops killing the troops killing the troops.. Now in 2014 as we all know most of asia spends its time restlessly murdering anyone who has so much as heard of the poor chap. Its why textbooks today refer to the man as Gengles Mc. Kringle and hes portrayed as a bloated hamster living somewhere in cleveland.
its actually "Come and Take It Texas," an antagonistic reference by gun owners to the perceived threat to their second amendment. CATI has organized armed marches through grocery stores and starbucks. their members have been arrested for disrupting executive sessions of government meetings and marched through Houstons Fifth Ward despite the communities objection. Theyre convinced the Bureau of Land Management is somehow "stealing" texas land, that gun control is racist, and that a new "bundy 2.0" is coming to Texas as well. The most 'hacktivism' theyve done to date has been a march on SXSW, but i guess its a matter of opinion as to whether these are hacktivists or crackpots with a printer.
for sony to slap a little golden sticker on what essentially amounts to a modern mp3 player is a little rambunctious without at least contextualizing its price in terms of features and performance. Rarely does an audiophile acquiesce to the horrorshow pricing offered to their demographic without a full breakout of exactly what and how a device functions. showing it off at CES is fine, but Sony is a little late to this game if they assume 'walkman' nostalgia alone is going to carry this device.
for much, much less, (on the order of 100 bucks) you can pick up a Cowon media player. the A5 or J3 boasts a WM8960 codec driver and is worlds away better than what you'll find in an ipod or android cellphone, even with your cheapest headphones.
the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration.
we did this due to the cold war. the Soviet Union had managed to put the first satellite into orbit, the first man into orbit, and made the first hard landing on the moon with Luna 2. they invented the first ion engine and autonymous rover and the worst part for the United States was that as a nation they did this without any regard for profiteering or revenue. this was directly contradictory to our doctrine, yet made a very immediate statement about the apparent superiority of the soviet system of sciences and education. We did not explore space for any other reason than the fact that we as a nation had been directly challenged and bested. That had we not made great efforts to explore space, the state would have sustained damning losses to their thesis of governance.
we dont explore space at a greater pace because the nature of our government, a plutocratic oligarchy, cannot derive any immediate or long-term profit from it. purse strings are clinch knotted to the waistcoat of our 21st century robber barons and so far, fleecing the government of the public-sector technologies and sciences used to propel our space exploration during the 70's and 80's in an effort to privatize and monitize is the only apparent gain. To continue exploring space, we need to stop funneling money to SpaceX in the form of tax-backed loans and grants and instead apply tax revenue directly to the only organization that has consistently and successfully acted in the public interest of exploration and knowledge of space: NASA.
its referred to as 'the chilling effect' and actions like the edward snowden witch hunt and warrantless detention of journalists in the UK are performed intentionally in order to ensure it remains an effective tool of the state. The things you write about, including the things you research, have enormous consequences. Become too curious about government policies and procedures? The government will have you quietly added to a secret list of people who cannot fly on a plane without meaningless scrutiny. Write a book on how to defeat pseudoscience like polygraph tests? You'll enjoy more than a few nights in jail. People forget that Theo De Raadt was once not only defunded from, but barred entirely from his own conference for speaking out critically of the US governments involvement in iraq. and its not just confined to literature, but code as well. Did you write any ToR code or the exploit to detect cellular phreaking devices secretly used by the government? Maybe bluetooth code to access passports?
it comes down to this: Anything that cannot be marginalized, or trivialized as unamerican and antipatriotic becomes a direct threat to the ruling establishment and while they arent comfortable silencing your freedom of speech, theyre more than capable of making your life a living hell. Ask Chelsea Manning about her christmas.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 3.11: Better than dos!
Windows 95: now 32 bit!!
Windows 98: uh...3 more than 95!
Windows ME: grinds cats into freezer meat!
Windows XP: We've been told you dont want or like having cats ground into freezer meat...so this one doesnt do that. also we're doing letters now for real instead of numbers. Dont question it..
Windows Vista: Reboot simulator included!
Windows 7: ok so lets just do numbers again. 7 is less than 95, plus 3.11 minus the square root of 2000 is....eh....we changed the start button for you
Windows 8:: Hello there youths! we're told you like touched screens! Also we have an app store now and that has always been there. check out the full-screen start menu there now isnt that nifty?
Windows 9:: Maadamme Romani threatened to unravel my lifeweave if we ever used 9. seriously. its cursed. also all our code would mistake it for 95 or 98.
Windows 10: We gave you back the start button, but also included a mini start screen in it as a big fuck you for not accepting the start screen. Also its free...because uh...Ubunt...er...apple is still our competitor...yeah.
IE was made an inextricable part of the operating system during the browser wars. Even if Microsoft decides to 'turn the corner' and do this, it would mean completely refactoring a nontrivial portion of an OS that already faces staunch resistance from both corporations and users alike. The best they had done was comply with a european court order to permit choices between browsers for users, and even then the OS still relies heavily on iexplore code without directly permitting browsing.
TL;DR: an open source internet exploreer is (gasp) an open source Windows.
As a DevOps engineer I was momentarily confused by the headline. Having had my usual 4 pints after work, i'd attributed the error to malted hops and barley. The reality however was that I'd failed to remember UK government and administrative offices have very immediate names. In america we take care to cloister our offices in overly broad vague names.
its on linux. If it were for linux it would have maintained at least a shred of hackers ethos. Instead its binaries that require patent encumbered libraries and a carefully controlled deployment. Steam violates rule 0, yet as a proprietary application expects in this case to invoke the GPL mantra of usability without warranty. Steam will be "for linux" when it can be endorsed on more than one flavor without a laundry list of legal disclaimers and warnings. Currently it exists to run with the aid of the Linux kernel, GNU userspace be damned.
users: Systemd is broken, undocumented and a single point of failure
Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else.
users: KDE and Gnome wont work without it and you never fixed pulseaudio, which is now default in almost every distro.
Pottering: no ones forcing you to use it, use something else
users: Why is there binary logging? I cant grep anything and dont know why the system crashed. the way user switching works is a huge security hole
pottering:no ones forcing you to use it, use something else
DEBIAN USERS:: Lets seriously reconsider the use of SystemD. its very controversial, it flies against the unix ethos, and there are some valid points raised about it security
open source community: we've forked it and made it slightly more useful.
Pottering: HOLD ON WE DO LISTEN TO USERS!!
And I want Bennett to stop using slashdot as a roll of shit tickets start using blogger, but ya know what? it doesnt look like anyones willing to change. Maybe we can put up a kickstarter to set up hosting and a registration for the poor guy. Or at least get together and have an intervention. Bennett, please, help us help you.
Major hotel chain pushes envelope of profiteering, quietly acquiesces with government after their cashcows start mooing, remains blameless, faultless in the eyes of stockholders.
The idea being if its complicated enough, the prosecution can just gloss over to the fireworks like 'terror' 'drug' 'kingpin' 'murder' and insist the jury just have faith because the whole damn thing is too hard to understand. to think that the united states government would be so contemptuous of its own rule of law that it would be willing to overtly insult the intelligence of not only a jury but a judge is nothing new. Ferguson jurors have a lifetime ban on ever discussing the details of the trial, for example. And the reason guantanamo bay still exists is because we demanded its closure, and legislated its perpetual existence by preventing the incarceration or trial of prisoners in american courts.
The general idea is this: admit defeat and go to jail, but fight against injustice and youre now waging a war of dissent against an ideological construct. Expose too many glaring flaws in the rule of our law and the arbitrary if not meaningless nature of our criminal justice system becomes too apparent to sustain. The prosecution at this point is a hail mary, and suggests that if the defense dissects the argument too much the prosecution may not have a leg to stand on for lifetime offenses like kingpin and RICO charges which are arguably being pursued as a form of biblical retribution. the notion that someone who once bested the FBI can walk after 6-10 years, and doesnt exist as a member of the cloistered plutocracy, flies in the face of American justice.
Mod parent up! I was livid after the recent advertising changes. Firefox is now the realMedia player of browsers. How much longer until we get an askjeeves or bonzi buddy bundle, assholes
PHP, the meth-addled brother you remember from childhood that occasionally wants to have lunch, if only to waste enormous amounts of your time. He still doesnt quite work consistently, his habits get expensive, and everyone remembers that one time he just sat in a corner screaming 'true == false!! false == TRUE!!!!' until someone called the devops.
and Node.js, the kindhearted strapping beaux from the small town with a heart of gold, even if you didnt always understand his quaint allegories. These days hes become an insufferable jackoff in a suit and tie who's managed to alienate all but a few close friends who from all indications are complete douchebags. Everyone talks about his brother io.js, though. maybe that kid's worth an email.
For those slashdotters who dont cough up the ransom fee, the New York Times should be categorically banned from a citeable source for stories pertaining to news for nerds or stuff that matters as it takes free information, namely legislation proposed by the president, and turns it into content for the cloistered elite.
http://readwrite.com/2015/01/1... for the unwashed.
I really do hope with childlike glee that this legislation becomes something but to those naysayers who insist congress or the senate will not support this legislation, you're correct. They rolled back the dodd frank act in the last omnibus spending bill, and if the historic trend of Republican shutdowns and sequesters are any indication of a future course of action, this legislation will die a quick death as well. Obama is proposing populist legislation because hes a lame duck, which is a bit of a controversial label. On the one hand, he has the power to veto bullshit from the republican party like rolling back the Affordable Care Act, but on the other it means meaningful things like banking and tax reform arent going anywhere if republicans have any say. Interestingly enough, the legislation also proposes to restrict technology companies from selling the data they collect from students who use their products and services.
I2P has been the successor to Tor for more than a decade, but people continue using Tor thanks to a successful campaign by media/state to maintain the protocols use in an effort to continue exploiting it and avoid having to deal with more secure alternatives. Check out fdroid.org for open source apps that enable i2p on android as well, and expect a wholesale ban on i2p traffic in the near future.
This isnt just an EFF issue, although I can see them using this publicity to highlight the greater point. Apple TOS for the store is nothing short of a labor camp for developers. Apple owns content lock, stock, and barrel. Compared to Android they control far more of the application, its licenses, its content and how it interacts with users than many programmers are comfortable with. The cusp of their assertion is that you dont make money with your app, Apple makes money with your app. Youre just the fingers on the keys.
The app store highlights a controversial opinion but it must be said: Steve Jobs was no hacker, and he certainly wasnt the laureate inventor we all insist upon. he was just a very successful and very lucky businessman who was every bit as ruthless and myopic as Bill Gates. He just had a better PR team.
If you're a profiteering advert monetizing clickbait pandering mainstream outlet with a mandate to deliver ROI on content and ensure channel marketing buy-in consistently realizes revenue, then please work to censor all 11 forbidden media words as well as any overt references to political, social, or religious figures that may impact quarterly earnings, subscribership, and total time of view. Also take note that wearable technology is fashionable this year.
if on the other hand you're an actual newspaper, journalist, podcaster, or god forbid television news programme that works to inform viewers objectively and spark meaningful discussion of current events be they political, social, or religious regardless of their tie-in ability to a product or service, please accept my sincere condolences as this type of response has always been a threat to your work. now that someone has actualized it, the real question is, are your convictions still genuine when tested?
as an IT engineer in an analytical physics company, we ran into the same overheating issues but this was a process and workflow problem, not a laptop problem. Our users, most of which hold a PhD or patent or two, stamped their feet at having to use the ticket system and the scheduler for our high performance servers. we stopped giving them deskside compute systems with 96 gigs of ram because that was wasteful and in most cases they sat idle all day. We also enabled users to telecommute, and thats when shit hit the fan. Before we knew it we were dropping 8 grand on "mobile workstations" that would burn up and die after a year because analytics engineers would sit them on their laps and watch Big Bang theory on the couch all day. The hammer came down when we'd spent nearly 2 million on laptops for a single office and our failure rate was approaching 50%.
my advice is determine what your customer or users are doing and see if you can do it better a different way. Things that overheat a processor or lock up a laptop are good candidates for centralization in the datacenter. You'll always have prima donna users that want flagship laptops to do it the wrong way, so dont cave in. Gather MTTF and MTBF metrics to prove a case to your manager or C levels that things are getting out of control. Gaming laptops are meant to sell a marketing image, not actual sustainable performance. Finally, GPO and network firewalls are your friends. Sure, users can telecommute now but our fileservers do not communicate directly with their laptops, only the simulation cluster which they can only access through submitting jobs to the scheduler.
I know it may not be the most efficient thing in the world, but its entirely possibly to write your term papers in Minecraft over the span of about 6 months to a year if you stick to harvesting wool to create a "paper" substrate and creating coal blocks for pixels. Presuming you make it long enough to avoid any creepers, the paper can be read from an enormous glass skybridge you construct over the next 2 weeks, and should only take 4 weeks to completely read, give or take a few days to a week if you fall from it a few times or if endermen start stealing text.
Listening to his speech is like sitting through a Transformers movie. You know the words, and you know the terms, but theyre all used in an entirely incoherent fashion. James seems to think hacking works just like a James Bond film in that its all about time. hackers that 'disconnect quickly' wont be found and those that 'get sloppy' will be detected by some ostentatious array of flashing lights and sirens attached to a mainframe.
James hasnt pulled his star wars head out of his NCIS ass and given any pertanent information like how hackers breeched sony, what attack vectors were used, what exploits were performed (if any) and what if any IDS or firewall technology was complicit in the breech. So given the lack of seriously technical information surrounding this leak its more than plausible by Occams Razor that Sony was the result of a simple phishing attack or bruteforce. Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat. What IS however quite possible is a disgruntled employee simply decided to dump the mail server to the pirate bay, and because you can as a business affect an insurance claim against hackers, its convenient to do so in the face of a movie that will in all likelyhood barely break even.
Charlie Hebdo is the name of the office you shot up, and i hardly imagine its going to avenge anything. 4 years ago, you firebombed the offices and razed them to ashes. It didnt work. Charlie Hebdo kept printing, and in the wake of something that would have sent any other newspaper in America scrambling to retreat Hebdo hardly seemed to care. Stephane Charbonnier, the editor in chief, issued a statement that referred to the attempt at censorship not as terrifying or vengeful, but just 'irritating.' You were nothing more than an irritation after property damage, but if history is any indication you've just opened a hundred new offices for Charlie Hebdos of all shapes and sizes. If you didnt want the prophet depicted, if he was in fact sacred, you've now effectively guaranteed Muhammad will be depicted voraceously, callously, and unabated for days to come.
Edith Ramirez said a future full of smart gadgets that watch what we do posed a threat to privacy
Edith im not sure if you've checked the news lately but we live in a country that routinely spies on every US and foreign citizen it can. Its a government that regularly hacks phones, spoofs carrier towers, and impersonates facebook users without their consent. We live in this land of, what some may call the free, where the very same companies that provide these nifty gizmos and gadgets are the ones complicit in taking these 'deeply personal' pictures and ferrying them away, sans warrant, to the government. its not like they can help it, because most are forbidden to tell us by the government. Its a government that insists hackers are people who use slashdot, root phones, and use encryption. theyre the ones who wrecklessly drove a mister Aaron Schwartz to suicide through relentless persecution. This country listens to all of our phonecalls, reads all of our email, and even copies all of our data at airports and over the wire. So for all your fearmongering I'll thank you to kindly step down from your high horse.
This is addressed to the plutocrats, so ill keep it short and sweet. I get that the cloistered elite arent to be concerned with this, but your cash cattle certainly care. If we keep going down this road, you can expect to lose everything. we will stop using your app stores, stop using your wireless towers entirely, and form small mesh networks as was the case recently in China. these networks in 20 or 30 years will grow into an encrypted tor mesh, from which you will realize no revenue outside of the occasional new "cell phone" you decide to belch forth. your films and music will never earn another cent. and in the short term i'll buy an inexpensive mp3 player and leave my phone sitting at home, turned off, as most of us should. This should be of grave concern as well, considering ubiquitous passive wireless scanning systems employed in some of the largest stores in the world would certainly become far less reliable without a willing and oblivious captive audience.
and most importantly you'll have created a new generation of hardened hackers and leakers who now believe in retribution, as freedom is clearly subject to arbitrary terms and conditions outside the realm of a government by, of, and for the people.
As a scientist ive studied this for quite some time. the troops who buried him were themselves killed by troops who were also killed, but not before the troops who killed the troops who killed the villagers were themselves killed and yet another regiment was dispatched to kill the troops killing the troops killing the troops.. Now in 2014 as we all know most of asia spends its time restlessly murdering anyone who has so much as heard of the poor chap. Its why textbooks today refer to the man as Gengles Mc. Kringle and hes portrayed as a bloated hamster living somewhere in cleveland.
its actually "Come and Take It Texas," an antagonistic reference by gun owners to the perceived threat to their second amendment. CATI has organized armed marches through grocery stores and starbucks. their members have been arrested for disrupting executive sessions of government meetings and marched through Houstons Fifth Ward despite the communities objection. Theyre convinced the Bureau of Land Management is somehow "stealing" texas land, that gun control is racist, and that a new "bundy 2.0" is coming to Texas as well. The most 'hacktivism' theyve done to date has been a march on SXSW, but i guess its a matter of opinion as to whether these are hacktivists or crackpots with a printer.
for sony to slap a little golden sticker on what essentially amounts to a modern mp3 player is a little rambunctious without at least contextualizing its price in terms of features and performance. Rarely does an audiophile acquiesce to the horrorshow pricing offered to their demographic without a full breakout of exactly what and how a device functions. showing it off at CES is fine, but Sony is a little late to this game if they assume 'walkman' nostalgia alone is going to carry this device.
for much, much less, (on the order of 100 bucks) you can pick up a Cowon media player. the A5 or J3 boasts a WM8960 codec driver and is worlds away better than what you'll find in an ipod or android cellphone, even with your cheapest headphones.
the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration.
we did this due to the cold war. the Soviet Union had managed to put the first satellite into orbit, the first man into orbit, and made the first hard landing on the moon with Luna 2. they invented the first ion engine and autonymous rover and the worst part for the United States was that as a nation they did this without any regard for profiteering or revenue. this was directly contradictory to our doctrine, yet made a very immediate statement about the apparent superiority of the soviet system of sciences and education. We did not explore space for any other reason than the fact that we as a nation had been directly challenged and bested. That had we not made great efforts to explore space, the state would have sustained damning losses to their thesis of governance.
we dont explore space at a greater pace because the nature of our government, a plutocratic oligarchy, cannot derive any immediate or long-term profit from it. purse strings are clinch knotted to the waistcoat of our 21st century robber barons and so far, fleecing the government of the public-sector technologies and sciences used to propel our space exploration during the 70's and 80's in an effort to privatize and monitize is the only apparent gain. To continue exploring space, we need to stop funneling money to SpaceX in the form of tax-backed loans and grants and instead apply tax revenue directly to the only organization that has consistently and successfully acted in the public interest of exploration and knowledge of space: NASA.
its referred to as 'the chilling effect' and actions like the edward snowden witch hunt and warrantless detention of journalists in the UK are performed intentionally in order to ensure it remains an effective tool of the state. The things you write about, including the things you research, have enormous consequences. Become too curious about government policies and procedures? The government will have you quietly added to a secret list of people who cannot fly on a plane without meaningless scrutiny. Write a book on how to defeat pseudoscience like polygraph tests? You'll enjoy more than a few nights in jail. People forget that Theo De Raadt was once not only defunded from, but barred entirely from his own conference for speaking out critically of the US governments involvement in iraq. and its not just confined to literature, but code as well. Did you write any ToR code or the exploit to detect cellular phreaking devices secretly used by the government? Maybe bluetooth code to access passports?
it comes down to this: Anything that cannot be marginalized, or trivialized as unamerican and antipatriotic becomes a direct threat to the ruling establishment and while they arent comfortable silencing your freedom of speech, theyre more than capable of making your life a living hell. Ask Chelsea Manning about her christmas.