While both of the situations you describe sound fairly innocuous, I personally think a no-photo policy is more in line with preserving civil liberties, and I'm surprised I seem to be in the minority. Imagine being photographed around shops, and having those photos then submitted to random corporate entities like Facebook and Flickr. With the advances in facial recognition software and increasing government/corporate control, pretty soon your privacy and freedom is a distant memory, and everything you buy and everywhere you go is public knowledge. There are even disgusting sites like http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/ dedicated to trying to publically humiliate people who have non-consensual photographs taken of them in supermarkets. In these circumstances, I think it's essential that stores have no-photograph policies (perhaps permission/supervision could be granted by staff on a case-by-case basis?)
While I am very aware of the dangers you're talking about, I think policies against photography are entirely unrealistic at this point. The real problem you're talking about is twofold:
1. Cultural attitudes toward the Internet and privacy (or lack thereof). It's gotten to the point where the upcoming generation has no expectation of privacy, doesn't think surveillance is a big deal, and doesn't even care enough to take basic precautions for the sake of their own privacy (let alone that of others). It's a problem, but what will likely happen is that society-at-large will alter its cultural attitudes to adjust for the change. Otherwise, no one would get past a job interview in the future. This is related to...
2. The corporate surveillance cloud. I could go on and on about this, but you seem to be well aware of the dangers. I'll just add that corporations are fostering an attitude of recklessness with their "gimmegimmegimme data" policies.
What you're talking about with the Wal-mart example has always been possible since the days of the early Internet (and really, before)...it's just that now everyone has network-aware cameras in their pockets. We knew this was coming; everyone's been talking about the eventual convergence of camera, Internet, games, phone since at least the late 90s. Predictably, we're handling it badly. But, like so many other things in the corrupt world we live in, you just learn to defend yourself the best you can and hope to educate yourself and others about the dangers, fighting battles where you're able.
If we're truly worried about privacy from camera survelliance, the first step would be talking about the millions (billions?) of cameras that surround us as we go on with our daily lives, not the teenager who might take a photo of us to get a laugh. The corporate/government surveillance machine has been more-or-less fragmented up to this point, but eventually there will be a convergence of all that data too. Who knows what "virtual me" will emerge on their combined servers.
So, needless to say I've done some reading up on this...from what I can tell, the law does actually seem to be on the side of the fascists because civil liberties have eroded so badly.
What does that mean? The law is not old iron in the rain - it doesn't rust or "erode". So what exactly was the law and how has it changed?
If you read my quote, you'll see I'm talking about the protection of civil liberties, which I can assure you has eroded and continues to erode. In fact, the erosion is so bad that it's difficult to summarize for you, as you seem to be asking. See my comment #37679574 above and you may understand my mindset better.
Your rights while on someone else's property have always been limited (if nothing else by good manners). There's no "fascism"[1] or "erosion" here, just a strong and mistaken sense of self-entitlement on your part.
In the U.S., we used to have a concept of public spaces, "the commons", something we inherited from the British, going back all the way to the Magna Carta. Our public spaces were fast disappearing before I was born, and they continue to be bought and sold by private interests. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd like to think I have essential rights that don't go away as soon as I step out of my house or off of the sidewalk into the vast sprawl of private property all around me.
The "my property, my rules" rationale should apply in some cases, and I would never say that people should do whatever they want on private property. But that's true on public property as well. There are some gray areas but it's generally not difficult to see where the basic rights of an individual are being infringed, or where heavy-handed enforcement of a law is unecessary. I usually just think about how I would like to be treated as a person. I know, that sounds insane.
We should be mindful that property rights have always been used to justify oppression. During Jim Crow, "my property, my rules" applied to private property and "our property, our rules" applied to public property, and I hope I don't have to explain why those were bad arguments. Private property still creates a shield for bigotry to hide behind, only it's usually more hidden, many times to those who create or enforce the rules. Take a good look at the dress codes in clubs and bars that are designed to keep out the "urban" element. People internalize bigotry and are frequently unaware of it completely, which is why personal introspection is a virtue.
As far as good manners go, who's the one being rude in the scenarios I wrote about?
If you'd actually read (and comprehended) the applicable law as you claim to have, you'd find that the US actually has among the most liberal laws in the world protecting photographers rights.
If you've actually experienced bullying by thugs in uniform, you might think differently. There is no personification of "the law" that magically appears in real-world altercations and protects the rights you have on paper. There are a number of problems you seem to ignore, and I can think of a few off the top of my head:
1. Employees of private interests, including security guards, frequently overstep their bounds and harrass individuals because of a false sense of righteousness, a misunderstanding of company policy, an understanding of company policies that are illegal or not tested in court, a macho attitude, because they are having a bad day, or because they are bored. In my first story, I think the person bothering me was probably bored. In the second, I think there was a macho attitude along with a misunderstanding of company policy.
2. The problem with police officers and other designated enforcers of the law is that they all-too-frequently *are* the law. Pick up your local paper, there's probably coverage of a police brutality or corruption case in there.
3. Laws passed in the past decade or so *have* given police all kinds of leverage when it comes to search and seizure, especially where electronic devices are concerned. The post-9/11 hysteria set in motion a series of very serious infringements on our rights that continues to this day. You read/. don't you?
4. It's not yet clear how courts should respond to new technologies. The law moves slower than the very rapid technological changes around us and, where the law moves quickly, it is usually technophobic. You read/. don't you?
5. In many cases, older laws are expanded to cover new technologies in ways that make no sense given the nature of those technologies. These laws are frequently expl
In a mall in the U.S., I was taking a picture of a "Wet Floor" sign I found funny because the stickman on it looked like he was falling the same way I did when I broke my leg. I was still on crutches recovering from that injury, and some guy from a cell phone vendor booth had the nerve to tell me that I couldn't take pictures in the mall because "believe it or not it's private property". But he didn't try to take my phone, and I just crutched away.
About a month later, my girlfriend was harrassed in a Canadian sandwich shop for taking pictures of wall art she thought was cute. An employee had the audacity to harrass her (a paying customer, no less), block the exit, and intimidate her into deleting the photos from her phone in front of him. He spouted some nonsense about "corporate espionage". After some very loud complaints by me, the owner of the sandwich chain apologized profusely, disciplined the employee (I think he's actually gone now), and mailed us a gift certificate.
So, needless to say I've done some reading up on this...from what I can tell, the law does actually seem to be on the side of the fascists because civil liberties have eroded so badly. It's difficult to tell if the situation is worse in the U.S. or Canada, but in both countries there are a number of ways in which you can be legally harrassed for taking photos inside a place of business. However, I don't believe anyone but an actual policeman, federal agent, etc. (not a rent-a-cop or employee) can legally confiscate your property (your phone) or look through it.
This "OMG no photos" mindset is not only the product of police-state paranoia, it's fed by the ideologues of intellectual property. The irony is that businesses should be embracing the free advertising...many of these photos will end up on the Web in some form, likely mentioning the location, maybe even tagged with that info and the name of the store, products, and other data-mining fodder. Not to mention the fact that cellphone cameras are an everyday reality now, and bothering anyone who uses them in a store makes for horrible PR and customer service in a very precarious sales economy.
Really now, is Craigslist any uglier than, for instance, Slashdot? In what world is plain text ugly? God forbid you people ever read a book.
I didn't call plain text ugly. There is more than that involved; take any Wikipedia article, turn off the images in your browser and try to think about the layout in general...a lot of work goes into MediaWiki to make that all happen.
Craigslist stays stagnant in that regard, preferring the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" maxim. Although that isn't the worst philosophy to apply to design, we wouldn't have any browsers at all, or any Web, with that mindset.
And so what if slashdot is cluttered and ugly? Stay on topic.
Don't be a prick and try to paint me as some idiot who doesn't read books. You don't know who you're talking to.
Craigslist is extremely special. Very few people do simplicity anymore, and very few people do it right. Craigslist is a great example of what the rest of the web should be.
Although I agree with you in principle, I think craigslist could be more aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing simplicity. I find I've gotten used to the ugliness of the site and have just tuned out the bad aspects; also, I frequently use text-only interfaces, so such an experience becomes normal. It's wise to keep in mind that our judgment is colored by our experience, and try to view interfaces through the eyes of others. We shouldn't forget young users, those who have never used a command line interface, or those that grew up on software from the late 90s and 2000s just because we've been in the game longer. For them, it's simple *and* ugly, and there's no reason it has to be both ways. The site has gotten a tiny bit more pleasing to the eye over the past few years, but I think they can do better. Wikipedia, as an example, does a great job of simple and pleasing to the eye.
What would MS gain by buying Yahoo? They are already serving bing search results. It made sense at that time. Now I don't see much gain for MS from this buy other than for the asian assests that Yahoo may have (Alibaba investment)
On top of that, Yahoo! Mail has a substantial user base. Given Microsoft's already-close relationship with Yahoo! and its past offers to buy the company, I think they're the most logical buyer at this point. Also, they would like to keep Yahoo! out of Google's hands...that's a *lot* of dedicated users to pump into Google+ and other services, further alienating Microsoft from slicing out a presence in both search and social networking.
Microsoft already has a big stake in Facebook and now Skype, so a purchase of Yahoo! would make sense (well, maybe not to the shareholders...) Microsoft is notoriously bad at making their online services financially viable; despite this, Microsoft is not afraid of pouring money into online services and trying new strategies. An acquisition of Yahoo! might provide a helluva boost to Bing and whatever social networking strategy M$ comes up with; or it may not, and Microsoft's cash cows remain untouched.
How'd your last ice storm go? Because ours gave us a day or two of trouble. Same with the blizzard we had this winter - 4 feet of snow in one day, and cleared out the next.
With the recession budget cuts adding to the problem, the snow was *not* "cleared out the next [day]", at least not anywhere I went in New England. If you'd like, I have photos to go along with my memories of ice piles up to my 2nd floor deck in New Haven. I drove 80 miles to work in some of the worst conditions I hope I'll ever experience, and I got a good cross-section of the conditions from college campuses to rural towns to suburbs to cities. Some of the richer towns had decent snow removal, and even there it was worse than usual.
From what I can gather, this hurricane won't hit the Northeast anywhere near as hard as the big storms this past winter, and it certainly won't leave as lasting an impression. But don't downplay our winters, please. If anything, the cocky attitude amongst New Englanders adds to the problem and is a covenient cover for politicians looking to do the bare minimum to prepare and deal with winter storms.
what institutions do we have in place to protect OSS software effectively as small OSS devs? Do such institutions work?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this is why some projects assign their copyright to the FSF, so that there is a dedicated group that will pursue violations: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
At any rate, since this seems to be getting a lot of attention and could turn into a high-profile case, you may want to contact the FSF or SFLC or both.
At best, this "story" is complete trollbait and flamebait. At worse, it's an advertisement for something most of us have never heard of (Prezi?). OMG kill all the KDE5 and Gnome3 devs or teh Googles and Prezis take over! Gnome2 and KDE3 for everrrrr....
Chrome may have a nice interface and WebKit may be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
TFTFY. Seriously, how do you publish a story about browsers and get stuff like this wrong, or use such confusing language? And I don't want to get into another pissing contest between WebKit and Gecko, but do we really need a shout-out to Chrome in a Firefox story just to placate the/. users that prefer it? While we're at it, why such a dismal outlook on Firefox's future? It's not becoming a niche browser any time soon; anyone see concrete signs of that happening? Even if it did, I'm sure Mozilla will live on in some form...there are dozens of products out there still using code from the Mozilla suite. Y'know, stuff like that thing "XULrunner" from the summary.
the hottest software manager on the planet! just one click to download! one click to install!
apt is used the world over by leading government and industry agencies, including the department of defense (military grade), homeland security, IBM, NASA, and the FBI. now, through this special offer, apt is available to you, at no cost!
Might be worth the malware to finally get a nice package manager on Windows;)
Besides the obvious point that you can package any type of bloat or malware with closed-source software (spend some time putting together an installation wizard for Windows, and you'll see you can get away with pretty much anything), there's also the fact that F/OSS operating systems almost always have a package manager, which encourages only downloading through trusted sources. So the F/OSS way of doing things is to be careful about trusting where your binaries come from.
sudo apt-get install vlc is not gonna get you anything but a legit version of VLC, unless you setup JOez BaDazzz REPO by following directions on the 5th page of Google's search results.
I'm always looking for ways to give my entertainment center that badass pirate look! Now I can paint a mini skull-and-crossbones on my DVI-D --> HDMI cable adapter without feeling *too* silly in front of the ladies. And I'll feel less compelled to impress dates by explaining libdvdcss every time I pop a DVD into the MythTV box...
You have already done more to protect the rights of common people than most governments in the world have in years.
This really makes you wonder how a shadowy group of people on the internet have more influence than elected officials and regulatory boards. Of course, I guess that's because they have completely different goals... we are possibly seeing the dawn of a new world here.
A world that is increasingly-connected by computer networks is a new world, and this is one fascinating aspect of it. Powerful governments and institutions have embraced technologies that are barely understood by businessman/bureaucrats/elites and are difficult for them to protect and control; despite this, they've used their power to place this tech at the foundation of practically everything in the industrialized world. Typical short-term thinking, done in the pursuit of greed, hegemony, and increased population control. Anyone who's been paying attention should recognize the irony.
In the past year or so, it's been proven that an amorphous "organization" of individuals (including "script kiddies") can crowd-source these security breaches using methods that are simple and generally well-known. DDoS, website vandalism, and other attacks through the network have always been threats...for some pretty huge and powerful organizations, the blowback from such attacks has escalated from embarrassment to crisis. The infiltrations and leaks have been the most damaging, as it's literally child's play to broadly distribute files (via bittorrent especially) and mirror data so many times that it becomes a permanent feature of the network. Book burnings have become impossible and raids are ineffective.
The powerful are feeling vulnerable, afraid they've disrupted the "natural order" by allowing in (more than one) "Trojan horse". Some are starting to make their fears public; a few are probably hoping to pursue individuals using the old tactics of intimidation, chasing "cyber-terrorists" and so on. Everyone knows that's not going to work.
I'm glad those who would curtail freedom of speech are now scared to do so, and it's gonna be entertaining to see how things play out with Anonymous, LulzSec, and the inevitable next group that arises. I hope that historians will someday compare this to the digitization of media in general: as media companies attempted to drive down their own production and distribution costs, they made it easy for individuals to distribute their "intellectual property", until it became trivial and a real threat. There are parallels here, and we're now in the "Napster days", so to speak.
...don't throw out (or even worse, give away!) your physical CDs, or those tracks you ripped will be considered illegal when the MAFIAA audits you! Better yet, dig up the original store receipts that correlate with the items!
You know these guys are a bunch of gangsters when people get this scared of them and are taken seriously.
Any gains they make will be eaten up by the rapidly increasing version number.
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but the first thing this actually made me think of was the havok a fast-paced rolling release schedule could do to an effort like this.
These "back to basics but we're changing everything" reboots are really starting to grind on me...cycles of reboots every few years, and DC tends to do them in the worst way. Marvel leans more toward limited ones like the terrible "Heroes Reborn" or the awesome "Age of Apocalypse"...they seem to be wise enough to test out the reboots on a few titles rather than the whole Marvel Universe at once, and then merge the successful characters/storylines back into Earth-616. DC, on the other hand, will probably be doing "Zero Hour Crisis in Hypertime during Blackest Night in the Multiverse" in 2015.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the developers wanted to flag the vbox driver as tainted to keep bug submissions on it from going to kernel devs.
this is *way* overblown.
It's been a while since we had a good flamewar over the kernel, don't be a wet blanket.
While both of the situations you describe sound fairly innocuous, I personally think a no-photo policy is more in line with preserving civil liberties, and I'm surprised I seem to be in the minority. Imagine being photographed around shops, and having those photos then submitted to random corporate entities like Facebook and Flickr. With the advances in facial recognition software and increasing government/corporate control, pretty soon your privacy and freedom is a distant memory, and everything you buy and everywhere you go is public knowledge. There are even disgusting sites like http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/ dedicated to trying to publically humiliate people who have non-consensual photographs taken of them in supermarkets. In these circumstances, I think it's essential that stores have no-photograph policies (perhaps permission/supervision could be granted by staff on a case-by-case basis?)
While I am very aware of the dangers you're talking about, I think policies against photography are entirely unrealistic at this point. The real problem you're talking about is twofold:
1. Cultural attitudes toward the Internet and privacy (or lack thereof). It's gotten to the point where the upcoming generation has no expectation of privacy, doesn't think surveillance is a big deal, and doesn't even care enough to take basic precautions for the sake of their own privacy (let alone that of others). It's a problem, but what will likely happen is that society-at-large will alter its cultural attitudes to adjust for the change. Otherwise, no one would get past a job interview in the future. This is related to...
2. The corporate surveillance cloud. I could go on and on about this, but you seem to be well aware of the dangers. I'll just add that corporations are fostering an attitude of recklessness with their "gimmegimmegimme data" policies.
What you're talking about with the Wal-mart example has always been possible since the days of the early Internet (and really, before)...it's just that now everyone has network-aware cameras in their pockets. We knew this was coming; everyone's been talking about the eventual convergence of camera, Internet, games, phone since at least the late 90s. Predictably, we're handling it badly. But, like so many other things in the corrupt world we live in, you just learn to defend yourself the best you can and hope to educate yourself and others about the dangers, fighting battles where you're able.
If we're truly worried about privacy from camera survelliance, the first step would be talking about the millions (billions?) of cameras that surround us as we go on with our daily lives, not the teenager who might take a photo of us to get a laugh. The corporate/government surveillance machine has been more-or-less fragmented up to this point, but eventually there will be a convergence of all that data too. Who knows what "virtual me" will emerge on their combined servers.
So, needless to say I've done some reading up on this...from what I can tell, the law does actually seem to be on the side of the fascists because civil liberties have eroded so badly.
What does that mean? The law is not old iron in the rain - it doesn't rust or "erode". So what exactly was the law and how has it changed?
If you read my quote, you'll see I'm talking about the protection of civil liberties, which I can assure you has eroded and continues to erode. In fact, the erosion is so bad that it's difficult to summarize for you, as you seem to be asking. See my comment #37679574 above and you may understand my mindset better.
Your rights while on someone else's property have always been limited (if nothing else by good manners). There's no "fascism"[1] or "erosion" here, just a strong and mistaken sense of self-entitlement on your part.
In the U.S., we used to have a concept of public spaces, "the commons", something we inherited from the British, going back all the way to the Magna Carta. Our public spaces were fast disappearing before I was born, and they continue to be bought and sold by private interests. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd like to think I have essential rights that don't go away as soon as I step out of my house or off of the sidewalk into the vast sprawl of private property all around me.
The "my property, my rules" rationale should apply in some cases, and I would never say that people should do whatever they want on private property. But that's true on public property as well. There are some gray areas but it's generally not difficult to see where the basic rights of an individual are being infringed, or where heavy-handed enforcement of a law is unecessary. I usually just think about how I would like to be treated as a person. I know, that sounds insane.
We should be mindful that property rights have always been used to justify oppression. During Jim Crow, "my property, my rules" applied to private property and "our property, our rules" applied to public property, and I hope I don't have to explain why those were bad arguments. Private property still creates a shield for bigotry to hide behind, only it's usually more hidden, many times to those who create or enforce the rules. Take a good look at the dress codes in clubs and bars that are designed to keep out the "urban" element. People internalize bigotry and are frequently unaware of it completely, which is why personal introspection is a virtue.
As far as good manners go, who's the one being rude in the scenarios I wrote about?
If you'd actually read (and comprehended) the applicable law as you claim to have, you'd find that the US actually has among the most liberal laws in the world protecting photographers rights.
If you've actually experienced bullying by thugs in uniform, you might think differently. There is no personification of "the law" that magically appears in real-world altercations and protects the rights you have on paper. There are a number of problems you seem to ignore, and I can think of a few off the top of my head:
/. don't you?
/. don't you?
1. Employees of private interests, including security guards, frequently overstep their bounds and harrass individuals because of a false sense of righteousness, a misunderstanding of company policy, an understanding of company policies that are illegal or not tested in court, a macho attitude, because they are having a bad day, or because they are bored. In my first story, I think the person bothering me was probably bored. In the second, I think there was a macho attitude along with a misunderstanding of company policy.
2. The problem with police officers and other designated enforcers of the law is that they all-too-frequently *are* the law. Pick up your local paper, there's probably coverage of a police brutality or corruption case in there.
3. Laws passed in the past decade or so *have* given police all kinds of leverage when it comes to search and seizure, especially where electronic devices are concerned. The post-9/11 hysteria set in motion a series of very serious infringements on our rights that continues to this day. You read
4. It's not yet clear how courts should respond to new technologies. The law moves slower than the very rapid technological changes around us and, where the law moves quickly, it is usually technophobic. You read
5. In many cases, older laws are expanded to cover new technologies in ways that make no sense given the nature of those technologies. These laws are frequently expl
In a mall in the U.S., I was taking a picture of a "Wet Floor" sign I found funny because the stickman on it looked like he was falling the same way I did when I broke my leg. I was still on crutches recovering from that injury, and some guy from a cell phone vendor booth had the nerve to tell me that I couldn't take pictures in the mall because "believe it or not it's private property". But he didn't try to take my phone, and I just crutched away.
About a month later, my girlfriend was harrassed in a Canadian sandwich shop for taking pictures of wall art she thought was cute. An employee had the audacity to harrass her (a paying customer, no less), block the exit, and intimidate her into deleting the photos from her phone in front of him. He spouted some nonsense about "corporate espionage". After some very loud complaints by me, the owner of the sandwich chain apologized profusely, disciplined the employee (I think he's actually gone now), and mailed us a gift certificate.
So, needless to say I've done some reading up on this...from what I can tell, the law does actually seem to be on the side of the fascists because civil liberties have eroded so badly. It's difficult to tell if the situation is worse in the U.S. or Canada, but in both countries there are a number of ways in which you can be legally harrassed for taking photos inside a place of business. However, I don't believe anyone but an actual policeman, federal agent, etc. (not a rent-a-cop or employee) can legally confiscate your property (your phone) or look through it.
This "OMG no photos" mindset is not only the product of police-state paranoia, it's fed by the ideologues of intellectual property. The irony is that businesses should be embracing the free advertising...many of these photos will end up on the Web in some form, likely mentioning the location, maybe even tagged with that info and the name of the store, products, and other data-mining fodder. Not to mention the fact that cellphone cameras are an everyday reality now, and bothering anyone who uses them in a store makes for horrible PR and customer service in a very precarious sales economy.
Can itworld.com survive an obvious lack of valid topics to talk about?
Only with the help of /.
Really now, is Craigslist any uglier than, for instance, Slashdot? In what world is plain text ugly? God forbid you people ever read a book.
I didn't call plain text ugly. There is more than that involved; take any Wikipedia article, turn off the images in your browser and try to think about the layout in general...a lot of work goes into MediaWiki to make that all happen. Craigslist stays stagnant in that regard, preferring the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" maxim. Although that isn't the worst philosophy to apply to design, we wouldn't have any browsers at all, or any Web, with that mindset. And so what if slashdot is cluttered and ugly? Stay on topic. Don't be a prick and try to paint me as some idiot who doesn't read books. You don't know who you're talking to.
Craigslist is extremely special. Very few people do simplicity anymore, and very few people do it right. Craigslist is a great example of what the rest of the web should be.
Although I agree with you in principle, I think craigslist could be more aesthetically pleasing without sacrificing simplicity. I find I've gotten used to the ugliness of the site and have just tuned out the bad aspects; also, I frequently use text-only interfaces, so such an experience becomes normal. It's wise to keep in mind that our judgment is colored by our experience, and try to view interfaces through the eyes of others. We shouldn't forget young users, those who have never used a command line interface, or those that grew up on software from the late 90s and 2000s just because we've been in the game longer. For them, it's simple *and* ugly, and there's no reason it has to be both ways. The site has gotten a tiny bit more pleasing to the eye over the past few years, but I think they can do better. Wikipedia, as an example, does a great job of simple and pleasing to the eye.
What would MS gain by buying Yahoo? They are already serving bing search results. It made sense at that time. Now I don't see much gain for MS from this buy other than for the asian assests that Yahoo may have (Alibaba investment)
Yahoo! is pretty consistently ranked the top U.S. "web portal", meaning the place people bookmark, make their homepage, and their general pathway to other links (through Yahoo! News etc.): http://news.ebrandz.com/yahoo/2011/4013-yahoo-ranked-most-visited-us-site-in-march-2011-comscore-.html
On top of that, Yahoo! Mail has a substantial user base. Given Microsoft's already-close relationship with Yahoo! and its past offers to buy the company, I think they're the most logical buyer at this point. Also, they would like to keep Yahoo! out of Google's hands...that's a *lot* of dedicated users to pump into Google+ and other services, further alienating Microsoft from slicing out a presence in both search and social networking.
Microsoft already has a big stake in Facebook and now Skype, so a purchase of Yahoo! would make sense (well, maybe not to the shareholders...) Microsoft is notoriously bad at making their online services financially viable; despite this, Microsoft is not afraid of pouring money into online services and trying new strategies. An acquisition of Yahoo! might provide a helluva boost to Bing and whatever social networking strategy M$ comes up with; or it may not, and Microsoft's cash cows remain untouched.
Who needs GPS to figure that out?
How'd your last ice storm go? Because ours gave us a day or two of trouble. Same with the blizzard we had this winter - 4 feet of snow in one day, and cleared out the next.
With the recession budget cuts adding to the problem, the snow was *not* "cleared out the next [day]", at least not anywhere I went in New England. If you'd like, I have photos to go along with my memories of ice piles up to my 2nd floor deck in New Haven. I drove 80 miles to work in some of the worst conditions I hope I'll ever experience, and I got a good cross-section of the conditions from college campuses to rural towns to suburbs to cities. Some of the richer towns had decent snow removal, and even there it was worse than usual.
From what I can gather, this hurricane won't hit the Northeast anywhere near as hard as the big storms this past winter, and it certainly won't leave as lasting an impression. But don't downplay our winters, please. If anything, the cocky attitude amongst New Englanders adds to the problem and is a covenient cover for politicians looking to do the bare minimum to prepare and deal with winter storms.
what institutions do we have in place to protect OSS software effectively as small OSS devs? Do such institutions work?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this is why some projects assign their copyright to the FSF, so that there is a dedicated group that will pursue violations: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
At any rate, since this seems to be getting a lot of attention and could turn into a high-profile case, you may want to contact the FSF or SFLC or both.
At best, this "story" is complete trollbait and flamebait. At worse, it's an advertisement for something most of us have never heard of (Prezi?). OMG kill all the KDE5 and Gnome3 devs or teh Googles and Prezis take over! Gnome2 and KDE3 for everrrrr....
Chrome may have a nice interface and WebKit may be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko , but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
TFTFY. Seriously, how do you publish a story about browsers and get stuff like this wrong, or use such confusing language? And I don't want to get into another pissing contest between WebKit and Gecko, but do we really need a shout-out to Chrome in a Firefox story just to placate the /. users that prefer it? While we're at it, why such a dismal outlook on Firefox's future? It's not becoming a niche browser any time soon; anyone see concrete signs of that happening? Even if it did, I'm sure Mozilla will live on in some form...there are dozens of products out there still using code from the Mozilla suite. Y'know, stuff like that thing "XULrunner" from the summary.
I've never seen such an obvious pitch for vi, Windows, and Ubuntu
I'm pretty there's a more obvious one buried in the man pages for emacs.
*pretty sure*
...if I had been using ed, I wouldn't have made that error.
I've never seen such an obvious pitch for vi, Windows, and Ubuntu
I'm pretty there's a more obvious one buried in the man pages for emacs.
Way to be timely and relevant, GNU.
I, for one, welcome our micro-kernel-wielding Hurd overlords.
...I may see how this can be applied to brewing beer. Been looking for a cheap temp control for a while.
the hottest software manager on the planet! just one click to download! one click to install!
apt is used the world over by leading government and industry agencies, including the department of defense (military grade), homeland security, IBM, NASA, and the FBI. now, through this special offer, apt is available to you, at no cost!
Might be worth the malware to finally get a nice package manager on Windows ;)
Besides the obvious point that you can package any type of bloat or malware with closed-source software (spend some time putting together an installation wizard for Windows, and you'll see you can get away with pretty much anything), there's also the fact that F/OSS operating systems almost always have a package manager, which encourages only downloading through trusted sources. So the F/OSS way of doing things is to be careful about trusting where your binaries come from.
sudo apt-get install vlc is not gonna get you anything but a legit version of VLC, unless you setup JOez BaDazzz REPO by following directions on the 5th page of Google's search results.
I'm always looking for ways to give my entertainment center that badass pirate look! Now I can paint a mini skull-and-crossbones on my DVI-D --> HDMI cable adapter without feeling *too* silly in front of the ladies. And I'll feel less compelled to impress dates by explaining libdvdcss every time I pop a DVD into the MythTV box...
You have already done more to protect the rights of common people than most governments in the world have in years. This really makes you wonder how a shadowy group of people on the internet have more influence than elected officials and regulatory boards. Of course, I guess that's because they have completely different goals... we are possibly seeing the dawn of a new world here.
A world that is increasingly-connected by computer networks is a new world, and this is one fascinating aspect of it. Powerful governments and institutions have embraced technologies that are barely understood by businessman/bureaucrats/elites and are difficult for them to protect and control; despite this, they've used their power to place this tech at the foundation of practically everything in the industrialized world. Typical short-term thinking, done in the pursuit of greed, hegemony, and increased population control. Anyone who's been paying attention should recognize the irony.
In the past year or so, it's been proven that an amorphous "organization" of individuals (including "script kiddies") can crowd-source these security breaches using methods that are simple and generally well-known. DDoS, website vandalism, and other attacks through the network have always been threats...for some pretty huge and powerful organizations, the blowback from such attacks has escalated from embarrassment to crisis. The infiltrations and leaks have been the most damaging, as it's literally child's play to broadly distribute files (via bittorrent especially) and mirror data so many times that it becomes a permanent feature of the network. Book burnings have become impossible and raids are ineffective.
The powerful are feeling vulnerable, afraid they've disrupted the "natural order" by allowing in (more than one) "Trojan horse". Some are starting to make their fears public; a few are probably hoping to pursue individuals using the old tactics of intimidation, chasing "cyber-terrorists" and so on. Everyone knows that's not going to work.
I'm glad those who would curtail freedom of speech are now scared to do so, and it's gonna be entertaining to see how things play out with Anonymous, LulzSec, and the inevitable next group that arises. I hope that historians will someday compare this to the digitization of media in general: as media companies attempted to drive down their own production and distribution costs, they made it easy for individuals to distribute their "intellectual property", until it became trivial and a real threat. There are parallels here, and we're now in the "Napster days", so to speak.
...don't throw out (or even worse, give away!) your physical CDs, or those tracks you ripped will be considered illegal when the MAFIAA audits you! Better yet, dig up the original store receipts that correlate with the items!
You know these guys are a bunch of gangsters when people get this scared of them and are taken seriously.
Any gains they make will be eaten up by the rapidly increasing version number.
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but the first thing this actually made me think of was the havok a fast-paced rolling release schedule could do to an effort like this.
These "back to basics but we're changing everything" reboots are really starting to grind on me...cycles of reboots every few years, and DC tends to do them in the worst way. Marvel leans more toward limited ones like the terrible "Heroes Reborn" or the awesome "Age of Apocalypse"...they seem to be wise enough to test out the reboots on a few titles rather than the whole Marvel Universe at once, and then merge the successful characters/storylines back into Earth-616. DC, on the other hand, will probably be doing "Zero Hour Crisis in Hypertime during Blackest Night in the Multiverse" in 2015.