More likely he means the migration of what would usually be traditional websites to apps and social media sites. I still don't buy it though, even if FB added e-commerce features, they'd want a cut of the profits and it would still probably be cheaper, easier and allow more control for companies to run their own sites. And there will still be plenty of people who just don't want to do things that way. I think the guy's either an idiot or just trying to stir up debate.
Have you read the linked articles? The whole affair is a clusterfuck of people, companies, real and intellectual property, law suits and whatnot. I dare you to make any sense of it!
Whereas it's a journalist's job to make sense of it. Not just say, here's a bunch of links, go knock yourself out, I'm off to the pub.
I should also point out that Doctor Who doesn't fall under "everyone speaks English" - actually everyone/everything speaks their own language and the Doctor and his companions are able to comprehend them due to an aspect of the TARDIS. Admittedly that's a huge deus ex machina to get around the issue, but at least they made the effort to explain it. I'd also say that, since it's return in 2005, it no longer falls foul of "Everyone looks human", although admittedly a fair few of the alien races are still humanoid. And they dumped all the sex into Torchwood.
Dr. Who didn't have out-and-out sex, but name one of his assistants that wasn't "hot". To juxtapose, try to imagine Mrs. Marple being the Dr.'s sidekick.
I can think of one - but then again I guess it's what "floats your boat".
For me, searching for VLC media player, I get www.videolan.org/vlc/ on both Bing and Google (so long as I ignore the crappy sponsored links on both sites).
There have been plenty of live exploits in the last few years, but as I'm sure you're fully aware, the vast majority of people are not running FF+AdBlock+NoScript. Nor would they even if they knew what that was, since most people want all the flashy stuff that drives us geeks mad. I know. The story is still relevant, since even if you're in no danger of being infected, you're still suffering from having junk search results returned.
Apparently ranking is now meant to take your previous searches into account, which might account for the difference, but I know what you mean, I've searched for very specific OS error messages before and found the first page that actually contained the full unique string was not always the first result returned, and was sometimes not even on the first page of results. Of course I can enclose it in quotes for an exact match, but that relies on the person who typed it up getting it exactly right, and besides, a 20-30 word error should be enough to bring me back relevant results at the top of the first page.
I wouldn't say Google is about to fizzle out soon, but I totally agree that a lot of people stick with them now because either it's what they've always used (if they're new to the web) or there's nothing yet that reliably does things better. I'm at the point where, if a search engine that reliably directed me to more relevant information and away from ad/malware sites (and also identified when content was just straight copy-pasted between sites, so the first five results aren't the same question and responses being mirrored across different forums), I wouldn't have any qualms about switching. They're becoming complacent, and polishing the existing offering with largely irrelevant bells and whistles is not the same as improving the underlying offering.
Choosing to work some overtime to earn more money is one thing, but why should a professional have to work more than 45 hours per week? If you can't achieve all you need to do within that time, maybe your employer needs to consider hiring more people, not forcing his existing people to work themselves into an early grave.
In the UK we have similar rules (one verbal warning and two written warnings are required), but only after the first year - so you get a full 12 months to determine if someone can do their job. That's not unreasonable, if you decide you want them gone on month 13, it's probably not related to their ability to do the job they were hired for (or you're a poor manager for not spotting that earlier) and therefore only makes sense that there is a legal paper trail to make sure you're not just firing them for personal reasons. In fact, we have most of the same laws around holidays and breaks and our unemployment figures are not unreasonable (especially considering there's no real punishment if you don't find a job - you can continue to live on state benefit as an alternative, so I'd expect that to push unemployment slightly higher rather than slightly lower).
What, allowing your employees to take holidays and regular breaks, taking responsibility if they get injured on the job and not being able to arbitrarily fire them without demonstrating poor workmanship or behaviour on their part? Yes, that must be really onerous. Hate to tear down your strawman, but we have all those rules in the UK and we don't have 43% unemployment (the last time it even hit 10% was almost twenty years ago, during the recession). Treating your employees with some respect does not, contrary to what appears to be popular belief amongst certain people, lead to the downfall of society.
There are generally exceptions where the role requires some specific attribute. For instance, if you're casting an acting role for a young, able bodied male to be the lead in a movie you're shooting, an old, disabled female couldn't take action because, although you are actively discriminating against her for reasons that would usually be illegal, those attributes are integral to the role. I don't know enough about US employment law to know if political views are protected, but if they are there may be exceptions where one's views are pivotal to the job.
I never really thought about it before, but surely the war on terror has killed the hover car as anything but a plaything for the super rich. Can you honestly imagine our twitch-reaction governments allowing people to fly around in cars? I can't even board a plane that someone else is flying without letting them pat-down search me and look in my shoes.
It is the same with the saying "You can't con an honest man". And no, this is NOT said by con men. The people who question this saying just don't want to admit they are not honest men.
How can you accept to help funnel vast sums of money out of country were people are starving to death to make yourself rich? ANY person who even considers doing that is not just a dishonest person but a not very person as well. But that is hard to admit if you fiddle your own taxes.
You really can't con an honest smart person, because an honest smart person will always ask himself, "why me?". Why are you asking me, Joe Nobody, to funnel millions out of a country. Why would I, Joe Nobody be targetted by Polisch priests out to overthrow the US government? Why would you sell me something you can sell anywhere else legally for far more? Why are you offering me 20% off, all the time, if that always applies, isn't the real price just 20% lower?
Here in the UK, charities often have drives to collect unwanted clothing. They'll post plastic bags through doors explaining what it's about, and on a set day they'll drive around and collect the bags up. Scammers have started posting their own bags with fake charity details. People are so used to the system it's second nature to put unwanted clothes in there and leave it outside. This is a con, plain and simple, yet the people falling for it are not only honest, they're also largely people who want to do good, and are not necessarily stupid either (unless you know exactly what to look for you have no easy way to tell the genuine charities from the scammers). Saying an honest man cannot be scammed is just lulling honest men into a false sense of security.
Indeed. There's a show here in the UK called The Real Hustle that proves time and again you don't need to be dishonest to fall for a scam. Scams such as dressing in a high visibility vest with some fake ID and offering to valet park cars arriving at a car park, only to drive away with them, for instance, require absolutely no dishonesty on the part of the victim. Even scams where people think they're getting something for nothing or next to nothing, while you could argue they're playing on greed, don't really require dishonesty - everyone likes to get a bargain, after all. I suspect "you can't scam an honest man" was coined by a scammer to give honest men a false sense of security, it's blatantly not true.
That's odd - because in their TV ads, the lottery company over here only ever show the "winner" basking on a beach or a yacht somewhere. You'd think, with all their honesty, and the ridiculously small chances of winning, all their adverts would show the people who don't win (and every 1 in 1.4 million ads would show someone actually winning). In fact, the bit of text telling you your actual odds of winning is microscopic on the back of the ticket, while all the posters proclaiming "IT COULD BE YOU!" and talking about how high this week's jackpot is are huge and plastered everywhere. It's a form of truth, I guess, but they're really pushing the boundaries.
The difference seems to be the gullibility of the target. Both of those ingenius scams can be avoided with a little thought and perhaps some research, if someone is willing to take $100 from me for defragging my monitor do you honestly believe they'd not take $160k from me if they thought I'd be stupid enough to fall for it?
Well loathe as I am to play devil's advocate for the media, I'm not sure how this is a failing on their part. A day doesn't go by that we're bombarded with scare stories about identity theft, some civil servant losing all our data or some company playing fast and loose with our privacy. If you listened to the media you'd believe that the only way to be safe would be to live as a hermit in a cave divorced from society (and you'd better hope your cave doesn't have an address they can use to fake an utility bill to take out a credit card in your name).
The "failing" is that most people simply don't care about this stuff until it happens to them (or someone close enough to them for it to register). Try talking to the average person about securing their system against intrusion and you can literally see their eyes glaze over - people don't want to bother about the mundane aspects of computer security, they want to be poking people and sharing cabbages. People are certainly aware of the issues, but as always they tend to cling to the belief that it couldn't ever happen to them right up until the point that it does.
The difference is, believing a news article with flaky facts might hit your credibility but it's unlikely to cost you six million dollars. There is a scale where, at one end it's not really worth checking the facts, and at the other it is very much so.
Other than a very high level overview of scamming techniques, what are you going to teach people in schools that will be relevant for the next 60+ years of their life? Scammers have shown time and again that, the second their targets become aware of the scam, they will switch tactics and it's back to square one. When I was at school the internet was practically unheard of, and I'm in my thirties - a lot of the people who get scammed are much older (in fact the elderly are the prime target for scammers), when they were at school computers were practically unheard of. What advice could they have been given back then to prepare them for the internet-based "social engineering" scams of today? Scams are in the news almost every day, we're bombarded with warnings about "identity theft" and such, yet people still frequently fall for these things - clearly awareness is not the issue.
Common sense is the only real defence against these scams, and it's pretty clear that schools have no way of teaching that.
Good luck with that. I don't know any store that will let you return a game for being buggy, if the packaging is open the best they'll do is let you swap it for a new copy of the same game (in case the disk is scratched or the data corrupted on that pressing, etc). I wonder at what point a game becomes unfit for purpose - if I've invested 60 hours in a game and a game breaking bug not only means I can't complete the game, but that I basically have to start right back from the beginning, I wonder if that would be sufficient grounds. Probably not, we seem to have been conditioned to give software a free pass when it comes to poor QA.
Agreed - I just finished up playing Fallout 3 and the DLC on the 360 ahead of buying New Vegas (I originally played it on PC but I mostly play console these days) and I encountered a few bugs. The worst of these were bugs around entering new areas causing the game to just completely freeze. Some of these (Rivet City) I managed to fix by reverting to an earlier save, others (the ant nest in Shalebridge) remained broken even then. Other bugs were incredibly annoying while not necessarily game breaking - the Brotherhood Outcasts, who I was on good terms with, seemed to randomly turn on me, making the Anchorage mission almost impossible (the part at the beginning where I had to escort a group to the Outcast base, the team would randomly turn hostile and attack me instead, in the end I only got through by letting the super mutants kill them all then doing the treck alone), fortunately for me this was the last thing I did in the game so it didn't affect me too much, for anyone doing Anchorage early they'll miss out on a lot of options by turning the Outcasts hostile this way. Then there are the usual clipping issues, particularly annoying to get stuck behind a rock with an enemy nearby but not in a position where you can kill them, so you can't escape and you can't fast travel away because of the nearby enemy. I was prepared to give Fallout a lot of leeway simply because of the sheer size, but with a lot of the bug reports I'm seeing for NV, there's no way these were missed in QA so it has to be that they knowingly sold a hugely bug-ridden game. I hope the patches help because I was really looking forward to this game.
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More likely he means the migration of what would usually be traditional websites to apps and social media sites. I still don't buy it though, even if FB added e-commerce features, they'd want a cut of the profits and it would still probably be cheaper, easier and allow more control for companies to run their own sites. And there will still be plenty of people who just don't want to do things that way. I think the guy's either an idiot or just trying to stir up debate.
Have you read the linked articles? The whole affair is a clusterfuck of people, companies, real and intellectual property, law suits and whatnot. I dare you to make any sense of it!
Whereas it's a journalist's job to make sense of it. Not just say, here's a bunch of links, go knock yourself out, I'm off to the pub.
I should also point out that Doctor Who doesn't fall under "everyone speaks English" - actually everyone/everything speaks their own language and the Doctor and his companions are able to comprehend them due to an aspect of the TARDIS. Admittedly that's a huge deus ex machina to get around the issue, but at least they made the effort to explain it. I'd also say that, since it's return in 2005, it no longer falls foul of "Everyone looks human", although admittedly a fair few of the alien races are still humanoid. And they dumped all the sex into Torchwood.
Dr. Who didn't have out-and-out sex, but name one of his assistants that wasn't "hot". To juxtapose, try to imagine Mrs. Marple being the Dr.'s sidekick.
I can think of one - but then again I guess it's what "floats your boat".
Then whatever secret the government is hiding behind Duke Nukem Forever must be truly terrifying.
For me, searching for VLC media player, I get www.videolan.org/vlc/ on both Bing and Google (so long as I ignore the crappy sponsored links on both sites).
There have been plenty of live exploits in the last few years, but as I'm sure you're fully aware, the vast majority of people are not running FF+AdBlock+NoScript. Nor would they even if they knew what that was, since most people want all the flashy stuff that drives us geeks mad. I know. The story is still relevant, since even if you're in no danger of being infected, you're still suffering from having junk search results returned.
Apparently ranking is now meant to take your previous searches into account, which might account for the difference, but I know what you mean, I've searched for very specific OS error messages before and found the first page that actually contained the full unique string was not always the first result returned, and was sometimes not even on the first page of results. Of course I can enclose it in quotes for an exact match, but that relies on the person who typed it up getting it exactly right, and besides, a 20-30 word error should be enough to bring me back relevant results at the top of the first page.
I wouldn't say Google is about to fizzle out soon, but I totally agree that a lot of people stick with them now because either it's what they've always used (if they're new to the web) or there's nothing yet that reliably does things better. I'm at the point where, if a search engine that reliably directed me to more relevant information and away from ad/malware sites (and also identified when content was just straight copy-pasted between sites, so the first five results aren't the same question and responses being mirrored across different forums), I wouldn't have any qualms about switching. They're becoming complacent, and polishing the existing offering with largely irrelevant bells and whistles is not the same as improving the underlying offering.
Choosing to work some overtime to earn more money is one thing, but why should a professional have to work more than 45 hours per week? If you can't achieve all you need to do within that time, maybe your employer needs to consider hiring more people, not forcing his existing people to work themselves into an early grave.
In the UK we have similar rules (one verbal warning and two written warnings are required), but only after the first year - so you get a full 12 months to determine if someone can do their job. That's not unreasonable, if you decide you want them gone on month 13, it's probably not related to their ability to do the job they were hired for (or you're a poor manager for not spotting that earlier) and therefore only makes sense that there is a legal paper trail to make sure you're not just firing them for personal reasons. In fact, we have most of the same laws around holidays and breaks and our unemployment figures are not unreasonable (especially considering there's no real punishment if you don't find a job - you can continue to live on state benefit as an alternative, so I'd expect that to push unemployment slightly higher rather than slightly lower).
What, allowing your employees to take holidays and regular breaks, taking responsibility if they get injured on the job and not being able to arbitrarily fire them without demonstrating poor workmanship or behaviour on their part? Yes, that must be really onerous. Hate to tear down your strawman, but we have all those rules in the UK and we don't have 43% unemployment (the last time it even hit 10% was almost twenty years ago, during the recession). Treating your employees with some respect does not, contrary to what appears to be popular belief amongst certain people, lead to the downfall of society.
There are generally exceptions where the role requires some specific attribute. For instance, if you're casting an acting role for a young, able bodied male to be the lead in a movie you're shooting, an old, disabled female couldn't take action because, although you are actively discriminating against her for reasons that would usually be illegal, those attributes are integral to the role. I don't know enough about US employment law to know if political views are protected, but if they are there may be exceptions where one's views are pivotal to the job.
I never really thought about it before, but surely the war on terror has killed the hover car as anything but a plaything for the super rich. Can you honestly imagine our twitch-reaction governments allowing people to fly around in cars? I can't even board a plane that someone else is flying without letting them pat-down search me and look in my shoes.
It is the same with the saying "You can't con an honest man". And no, this is NOT said by con men. The people who question this saying just don't want to admit they are not honest men.
How can you accept to help funnel vast sums of money out of country were people are starving to death to make yourself rich? ANY person who even considers doing that is not just a dishonest person but a not very person as well. But that is hard to admit if you fiddle your own taxes.
You really can't con an honest smart person, because an honest smart person will always ask himself, "why me?". Why are you asking me, Joe Nobody, to funnel millions out of a country. Why would I, Joe Nobody be targetted by Polisch priests out to overthrow the US government? Why would you sell me something you can sell anywhere else legally for far more? Why are you offering me 20% off, all the time, if that always applies, isn't the real price just 20% lower?
Here in the UK, charities often have drives to collect unwanted clothing. They'll post plastic bags through doors explaining what it's about, and on a set day they'll drive around and collect the bags up. Scammers have started posting their own bags with fake charity details. People are so used to the system it's second nature to put unwanted clothes in there and leave it outside. This is a con, plain and simple, yet the people falling for it are not only honest, they're also largely people who want to do good, and are not necessarily stupid either (unless you know exactly what to look for you have no easy way to tell the genuine charities from the scammers). Saying an honest man cannot be scammed is just lulling honest men into a false sense of security.
Indeed. There's a show here in the UK called The Real Hustle that proves time and again you don't need to be dishonest to fall for a scam. Scams such as dressing in a high visibility vest with some fake ID and offering to valet park cars arriving at a car park, only to drive away with them, for instance, require absolutely no dishonesty on the part of the victim. Even scams where people think they're getting something for nothing or next to nothing, while you could argue they're playing on greed, don't really require dishonesty - everyone likes to get a bargain, after all. I suspect "you can't scam an honest man" was coined by a scammer to give honest men a false sense of security, it's blatantly not true.
That's odd - because in their TV ads, the lottery company over here only ever show the "winner" basking on a beach or a yacht somewhere. You'd think, with all their honesty, and the ridiculously small chances of winning, all their adverts would show the people who don't win (and every 1 in 1.4 million ads would show someone actually winning). In fact, the bit of text telling you your actual odds of winning is microscopic on the back of the ticket, while all the posters proclaiming "IT COULD BE YOU!" and talking about how high this week's jackpot is are huge and plastered everywhere. It's a form of truth, I guess, but they're really pushing the boundaries.
The difference seems to be the gullibility of the target. Both of those ingenius scams can be avoided with a little thought and perhaps some research, if someone is willing to take $100 from me for defragging my monitor do you honestly believe they'd not take $160k from me if they thought I'd be stupid enough to fall for it?
Well loathe as I am to play devil's advocate for the media, I'm not sure how this is a failing on their part. A day doesn't go by that we're bombarded with scare stories about identity theft, some civil servant losing all our data or some company playing fast and loose with our privacy. If you listened to the media you'd believe that the only way to be safe would be to live as a hermit in a cave divorced from society (and you'd better hope your cave doesn't have an address they can use to fake an utility bill to take out a credit card in your name).
The "failing" is that most people simply don't care about this stuff until it happens to them (or someone close enough to them for it to register). Try talking to the average person about securing their system against intrusion and you can literally see their eyes glaze over - people don't want to bother about the mundane aspects of computer security, they want to be poking people and sharing cabbages. People are certainly aware of the issues, but as always they tend to cling to the belief that it couldn't ever happen to them right up until the point that it does.
The difference is, believing a news article with flaky facts might hit your credibility but it's unlikely to cost you six million dollars. There is a scale where, at one end it's not really worth checking the facts, and at the other it is very much so.
Playing someone else playing someone else.
Other than a very high level overview of scamming techniques, what are you going to teach people in schools that will be relevant for the next 60+ years of their life? Scammers have shown time and again that, the second their targets become aware of the scam, they will switch tactics and it's back to square one. When I was at school the internet was practically unheard of, and I'm in my thirties - a lot of the people who get scammed are much older (in fact the elderly are the prime target for scammers), when they were at school computers were practically unheard of. What advice could they have been given back then to prepare them for the internet-based "social engineering" scams of today? Scams are in the news almost every day, we're bombarded with warnings about "identity theft" and such, yet people still frequently fall for these things - clearly awareness is not the issue.
Common sense is the only real defence against these scams, and it's pretty clear that schools have no way of teaching that.
Good luck with that. I don't know any store that will let you return a game for being buggy, if the packaging is open the best they'll do is let you swap it for a new copy of the same game (in case the disk is scratched or the data corrupted on that pressing, etc). I wonder at what point a game becomes unfit for purpose - if I've invested 60 hours in a game and a game breaking bug not only means I can't complete the game, but that I basically have to start right back from the beginning, I wonder if that would be sufficient grounds. Probably not, we seem to have been conditioned to give software a free pass when it comes to poor QA.
Agreed - I just finished up playing Fallout 3 and the DLC on the 360 ahead of buying New Vegas (I originally played it on PC but I mostly play console these days) and I encountered a few bugs. The worst of these were bugs around entering new areas causing the game to just completely freeze. Some of these (Rivet City) I managed to fix by reverting to an earlier save, others (the ant nest in Shalebridge) remained broken even then. Other bugs were incredibly annoying while not necessarily game breaking - the Brotherhood Outcasts, who I was on good terms with, seemed to randomly turn on me, making the Anchorage mission almost impossible (the part at the beginning where I had to escort a group to the Outcast base, the team would randomly turn hostile and attack me instead, in the end I only got through by letting the super mutants kill them all then doing the treck alone), fortunately for me this was the last thing I did in the game so it didn't affect me too much, for anyone doing Anchorage early they'll miss out on a lot of options by turning the Outcasts hostile this way. Then there are the usual clipping issues, particularly annoying to get stuck behind a rock with an enemy nearby but not in a position where you can kill them, so you can't escape and you can't fast travel away because of the nearby enemy. I was prepared to give Fallout a lot of leeway simply because of the sheer size, but with a lot of the bug reports I'm seeing for NV, there's no way these were missed in QA so it has to be that they knowingly sold a hugely bug-ridden game. I hope the patches help because I was really looking forward to this game.
Or rather you don't get Duke Nukem Forever...