Yeah, or put another way, we've been hearing about it for 20 years now and we've never seen anything actually in the air... take this story with the same grain of salt.
Even more retarded, why wouldn't they store the images?
What if someone slips a gun through security. We need to find out how that happened-- how are we going to find out if we can't review the image? What if there's a trial of a suspected terrorist, and we need evidence of his crime-- oh wait, we don't have the image, so we don't have the evidence.
I mean, I completely understand the objections to installing these machines on every level from "it's an invasion of privacy" to "they're expensive and not worth it." But if you prevent the machines from storing images, you're making them even *more* useless than they are already!
Without a log, there's no evidence during the trial. There's no review when something goes wrong. If a terrorist act does happen, you have no way of knowing whether the machine was effective or not at stopping it. It becomes faith-based security.
The best fight would be fighting to not have them installed at all. If they are going to be installed, then don't fight storing images-- that just makes them *more* useless.
I bought a Dell desktop, *definitely* a Home version (from the Home store... Inspiron 530 to be precise) that shipped with a physical disk containing *only* Windows Vista, and a separate disk containing the Dell drivers and applications.
As far as I can work out, the Vista disk is identical to the Microsoft-vendored one, the only difference being that the Dell logo shows up in the Computer Properties dialog. I even used it to install Vista on my HP laptop with the HP's OEM number-- worked fine!
Maybe sometime in the past, Dell did the recovery disk crap, but they certainly haven't for a few years.
Sorry, I could have warned you. I bought an HP tablet a few years ago-- never again!
HP products are crap. The hardware actually runs decently, but they piss all over the software, don't give you an OS DVD, treat you like shit on the phone when you call up and ask for the OS DVD. (Oh, and don't bother anyway-- the DVD from HP actually, unbelievably, has all the crapware ON IT! You can't restore Windows without restoring the crapware. I paid fucking $20 for that useless-ass disk.)
Meanwhile, last time I bought a Dell, it shipped with zero crapware (I think the browser homepage was changed, and it had a support program to upgrade drivers that I don't consider crapware because it didn't show me ads or slow computer performance.) They included a CLEAN OS DVD, with Dell's own programs on another (optional) disk. And when I called them up, even though the call center was in India, they sent me a spare wifi card for free, going above and beyond the warranty period. (Turns out the problem was software related.)
I'm not saying Dell is the best option out there, but I can guarantee I'm sure as hell never buying an HP again.
Over 3" if you're in a hospital. At least in my state.
BTW, if you're ever in a hospital and need a long knife, find one of the employee breakrooms. They probably have one there for slicing birthday cakes and the such. Despite the 3" law.
Can someone please write a Chrome plug-in that automatically hides any post containing the word "gives a whole new meaning?" Have these jokes ever been funny? (Who the hell is modding them up?)
Don't use Swing/AWT, use SWT. Of course, I don't know if the Eclipse UI counts as "stellar" in your mind, so YMMV...
The problem is that, because of Java's retarded "write once, run everywhere" philosophy, all Java UIs are lowest-common-denominator. I've yet to see a Java GUI that supports, for example, voice recognition in Windows or OS X. Or supports handwriting recognition in either OS. Or supports the built-in spell-checker in OS X. All of those are bog-standard OS features you simply do not get with Java UIs.
(Also note that Firefox does *not* use native widgets, and supports all of the above-listed features. It's not technically impossible, the people writing the Java libraries simply don't care to go through the work.)
And that's just the functionality. The appearance is always, always wrong. No matter how many times somebody assures me that the Java UI looks "like a native app" it invariably ignores OS appearance settings (default fonts, default colors, selection color, font zoom, etc.) Tabs are always wrong, despite being a standard OS widget in every OS... for some reason I've yet to see a Java app that uses the OS-style tabs.
And no the Eclipse UI counts as "overly complex, goofy-looking, and unresponsive" in my mind. Most of that is poor design and not the widgets' fault, but even if the UI was well-designed, the widgets would still be inferior to OS widgets.
The real problem, though, is that Java coders don't demand better. Like I said, nothing here is impossible to do-- Firefox gets 99% of the way there-- but the people writing Java GUI libraries simply do not care about getting it right. Either they're the uber-geeky coders who literally can't tell the difference between a good GUI and a bad one (my guess, since a lot of people are like you and claim Java UIs are passable), or they're simply lazy and doing the absolute bare minimum.
Most of them are so vague you can't even tell what the author was thinking when he wrote it. And the links don't work, so you can't actually look them up.
What the heck does "dotNet Purity is a myth" mean? Number 3 on the list, and he's already completely lost me. (Number 1: true. Number 2: Was true; is no longer)
Saying ASP.Net is poorly-designed and crippled! Hah! Compared to *Java* frameworks, ASP.Net is poorly-designed?
Ok, I gotta stop reading that list, it'll just make me want to slap the author with a raw fish. He's an idiot.
The productivity loss from using a non-memory managed language is far more important than some lock-in effect you're worried about. For the time you waste fixing stupid C++ bugs, you could just port the C# code when/if needed.
Plus Java has some severe limitations GUI-wise. (I'm not sure if the asker cares about GUIs or not, but I'd go as far as saying it's impossible to create a truly great GUI in Java, whereas it's quite easy in C#.)
Also, it's not like the Windows API miraculously becomes more portable if you use C++. You'd still end up porting all the GUI-related code, which would be a lot.
Pick up python, ruby, or whatever, and write code. GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.
I'm guessing all the GUIs you produce are godawful.
I highly doubt that modern COBOL programming tools give you what you need to create a stellar GUI compared with C#-- hell, even Java doesn't, IMHO. I could be wrong.
According to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the biggest risk at this point is secret government weapons factories triggering an explosion of spatial anomalies. The radiation from the reactor pales in comparison to the mutated wildlife.
Except: 1) Existing IE versions use the exact same default cookie settings as IE9 will. So this change is really "no change". 2) Firefox uses the exact same default cookie settings as existing IE versions. And it certainly hasn't hurt Firefox's marketshare.
This announcement sums to: "hey let's hate Microsoft for not changing a feature. A feature that Firefox hasn't changed either. But somehow let's promote Firefox despite that."
This article, and conversation, is retarded. The only difference between now and an hour ago is that an hour ago you didn't even know Microsoft had considered this feature. Now you know they considered, and rejected, it and somehow they're going to lose an instant 10% marketshare because of that?
While we're griping, what about Chrome's utter inability to do anything useful with.rss files? Yes, Chrome, we get it: you don't do RSS. How about passing it to the OS's default RSS reader, instead of filling the screen with gibberish? Or hell, just do nothing. The behavior now is worse than useless.
When you get started on that mash-up browser, lemme know, I got ideas.
The dumbest thing here is the "use Firefox" tag. Firefox actually ships out-of-the-box in the exact same configuration (cookie-wise) that IE8 does. (Possibly because of the Google association, possibly because Firefox devs are sane and realize that cookies aren't the Biblical Mark of the Beast or whatever the hell privacy advocates think they are.)
So basically, you're saying: * Don't use IE8, it requires tweaking a setting to turn on privacy options. * Use Firefox, which requires tweaking a setting to turn on privacy options.
Tracking cookies enable them to form a profile of my web accesses. yada yada yada, accessed by warrant, etc.
But none of that answers my question. How does it hurt you? A SINGLE REASON would suffice.
But I'm not going to explain the concept of information privacy, you can read up on it in better places, written by more informed people.
I'm not an idiot, I understand the concept of information privacy.
What I don't understand is how cookies can hurt you in any way whatsoever. That's the part that nobody, not you, not any article I've read, has actually laid out to me. I haven't heard of a single scenario in which you are hurt by tracking cookies. Not a single one.
We're not talking about installing 20,000 CCTV cameras in every private space, or putting a GPS locator on every car, or a 1984-esque 2-way telescreen. We're talking about harmless little cookies.
This is what makes me think everybody is just knee-jerking and not spending a single second actually *thinking* about their opinion. Because when you think about it, tracking cookies are entirely harmless. The fact that you can't explain a single way they can cause harm only backs up my opinion.
Look, I want to have debates with people who have informed opinions, not people who are just knee-jerking because Cory Doctorow said to.
BTW, sorry to reply twice, but I *still* don't have a good sense of why you think tracking cookies are so bad. How does it hurt you exactly? I already pointed out a way in which it might help you (seeing less ads), but you haven't yet communicated to me any way you're hurt by them.
Please, give me just one concrete example of how a tracking cookie that tracked you across 40 sites actually hurts you. One example.
I honestly am starting to think it's just crazy Slashdot paranoia. Of the kind we used to see in all the RFID threads.
They don't. Either get by with non-targeted ads, or charge for it. When I was talking about website content, I meant public content, not private, obviously.
I think I proved that it wasn't obvious. You have to say what you mean, we're not psychic.
Most Slashdotters would claim that, for example, the content of emails they received was "private information." when Gmail first came out, there was a pretty huge outcry about that.
Yes, and I agree.
So, wait... you said sites should serve ads targeted using the text of the page. Now you're saying you agree that emails you receive are private information.
So how do sites hosting email (or private message forums, or whatever) target ads using your model? You can't have it both ways!
The only app I use on a regular basis written in Perl is... Slashdot. And it's a gigantic piece of buggy crap. Not a very good ambassador you have there.:)
It's the gradual move to a society where privacy is regarded as a bad thing, when in fact it's one of the most important.
Yes, but that's a BRAND NEW concept. It's not like privacy is this age-old thing we've always had and it's going way. Fifty years ago, there was no privacy (not in the way we're talking about today) and nobody minded.
I think the move towards targeted ads to website content is much more useful, and doesn't depend on tracking.
Most Slashdotters would claim that, for example, the content of emails they received was "private information." when Gmail first came out, there was a pretty huge outcry about that.
And websites survived fine with less ads.
This is so vague I can't really address it.
Yes, but how many sites depend on cookies or flash to work properly? Quite a few. I fear we may come to a point where an access with disabled tracking will become like disabling Javascript - it works, but it misses too much stuff.
Then don't visit those sites. Sometimes you have to just suck it up and solve your own problems-- even if you have to make sacrifices-- instead of crying for your big nanny government to swoop in and diaper your bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, or put another way, we've been hearing about it for 20 years now and we've never seen anything actually in the air... take this story with the same grain of salt.
You can also buy a SecureID to secure your WOW account with (real) 2-factor authentication. Most US banks do not offer this service.
Dell is selling AMD CPUs right now. They have for ages. What are you talking about?
Even more retarded, why wouldn't they store the images?
What if someone slips a gun through security. We need to find out how that happened-- how are we going to find out if we can't review the image? What if there's a trial of a suspected terrorist, and we need evidence of his crime-- oh wait, we don't have the image, so we don't have the evidence.
I mean, I completely understand the objections to installing these machines on every level from "it's an invasion of privacy" to "they're expensive and not worth it." But if you prevent the machines from storing images, you're making them even *more* useless than they are already!
Without a log, there's no evidence during the trial. There's no review when something goes wrong. If a terrorist act does happen, you have no way of knowing whether the machine was effective or not at stopping it. It becomes faith-based security.
The best fight would be fighting to not have them installed at all. If they are going to be installed, then don't fight storing images-- that just makes them *more* useless.
And... the thread is over in one comment.
Sorry for the Farkism, but there's really nothing more here to be said.
How long ago is your experience?
I bought a Dell desktop, *definitely* a Home version (from the Home store... Inspiron 530 to be precise) that shipped with a physical disk containing *only* Windows Vista, and a separate disk containing the Dell drivers and applications.
As far as I can work out, the Vista disk is identical to the Microsoft-vendored one, the only difference being that the Dell logo shows up in the Computer Properties dialog. I even used it to install Vista on my HP laptop with the HP's OEM number-- worked fine!
Maybe sometime in the past, Dell did the recovery disk crap, but they certainly haven't for a few years.
Sorry, I could have warned you. I bought an HP tablet a few years ago-- never again!
HP products are crap. The hardware actually runs decently, but they piss all over the software, don't give you an OS DVD, treat you like shit on the phone when you call up and ask for the OS DVD. (Oh, and don't bother anyway-- the DVD from HP actually, unbelievably, has all the crapware ON IT! You can't restore Windows without restoring the crapware. I paid fucking $20 for that useless-ass disk.)
Meanwhile, last time I bought a Dell, it shipped with zero crapware (I think the browser homepage was changed, and it had a support program to upgrade drivers that I don't consider crapware because it didn't show me ads or slow computer performance.) They included a CLEAN OS DVD, with Dell's own programs on another (optional) disk. And when I called them up, even though the call center was in India, they sent me a spare wifi card for free, going above and beyond the warranty period. (Turns out the problem was software related.)
I'm not saying Dell is the best option out there, but I can guarantee I'm sure as hell never buying an HP again.
Over 3" if you're in a hospital. At least in my state.
BTW, if you're ever in a hospital and need a long knife, find one of the employee breakrooms. They probably have one there for slicing birthday cakes and the such. Despite the 3" law.
Can someone please write a Chrome plug-in that automatically hides any post containing the word "gives a whole new meaning?" Have these jokes ever been funny? (Who the hell is modding them up?)
Don't use Swing/AWT, use SWT. Of course, I don't know if the Eclipse UI counts as "stellar" in your mind, so YMMV...
The problem is that, because of Java's retarded "write once, run everywhere" philosophy, all Java UIs are lowest-common-denominator. I've yet to see a Java GUI that supports, for example, voice recognition in Windows or OS X. Or supports handwriting recognition in either OS. Or supports the built-in spell-checker in OS X. All of those are bog-standard OS features you simply do not get with Java UIs.
(Also note that Firefox does *not* use native widgets, and supports all of the above-listed features. It's not technically impossible, the people writing the Java libraries simply don't care to go through the work.)
And that's just the functionality. The appearance is always, always wrong. No matter how many times somebody assures me that the Java UI looks "like a native app" it invariably ignores OS appearance settings (default fonts, default colors, selection color, font zoom, etc.) Tabs are always wrong, despite being a standard OS widget in every OS... for some reason I've yet to see a Java app that uses the OS-style tabs.
And no the Eclipse UI counts as "overly complex, goofy-looking, and unresponsive" in my mind. Most of that is poor design and not the widgets' fault, but even if the UI was well-designed, the widgets would still be inferior to OS widgets.
The real problem, though, is that Java coders don't demand better. Like I said, nothing here is impossible to do-- Firefox gets 99% of the way there-- but the people writing Java GUI libraries simply do not care about getting it right. Either they're the uber-geeky coders who literally can't tell the difference between a good GUI and a bad one (my guess, since a lot of people are like you and claim Java UIs are passable), or they're simply lazy and doing the absolute bare minimum.
Most of them are so vague you can't even tell what the author was thinking when he wrote it. And the links don't work, so you can't actually look them up.
What the heck does "dotNet Purity is a myth" mean? Number 3 on the list, and he's already completely lost me. (Number 1: true. Number 2: Was true; is no longer)
Saying ASP.Net is poorly-designed and crippled! Hah! Compared to *Java* frameworks, ASP.Net is poorly-designed?
Ok, I gotta stop reading that list, it'll just make me want to slap the author with a raw fish. He's an idiot.
The productivity loss from using a non-memory managed language is far more important than some lock-in effect you're worried about. For the time you waste fixing stupid C++ bugs, you could just port the C# code when/if needed.
Plus Java has some severe limitations GUI-wise. (I'm not sure if the asker cares about GUIs or not, but I'd go as far as saying it's impossible to create a truly great GUI in Java, whereas it's quite easy in C#.)
Also, it's not like the Windows API miraculously becomes more portable if you use C++. You'd still end up porting all the GUI-related code, which would be a lot.
Pick up python, ruby, or whatever, and write code. GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.
I'm guessing all the GUIs you produce are godawful.
I highly doubt that modern COBOL programming tools give you what you need to create a stellar GUI compared with C#-- hell, even Java doesn't, IMHO. I could be wrong.
According to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, the biggest risk at this point is secret government weapons factories triggering an explosion of spatial anomalies. The radiation from the reactor pales in comparison to the mutated wildlife.
Except:
1) Existing IE versions use the exact same default cookie settings as IE9 will. So this change is really "no change".
2) Firefox uses the exact same default cookie settings as existing IE versions. And it certainly hasn't hurt Firefox's marketshare.
This announcement sums to: "hey let's hate Microsoft for not changing a feature. A feature that Firefox hasn't changed either. But somehow let's promote Firefox despite that."
This article, and conversation, is retarded. The only difference between now and an hour ago is that an hour ago you didn't even know Microsoft had considered this feature. Now you know they considered, and rejected, it and somehow they're going to lose an instant 10% marketshare because of that?
While we're griping, what about Chrome's utter inability to do anything useful with .rss files? Yes, Chrome, we get it: you don't do RSS. How about passing it to the OS's default RSS reader, instead of filling the screen with gibberish? Or hell, just do nothing. The behavior now is worse than useless.
When you get started on that mash-up browser, lemme know, I got ideas.
The dumbest thing here is the "use Firefox" tag. Firefox actually ships out-of-the-box in the exact same configuration (cookie-wise) that IE8 does. (Possibly because of the Google association, possibly because Firefox devs are sane and realize that cookies aren't the Biblical Mark of the Beast or whatever the hell privacy advocates think they are.)
So basically, you're saying:
* Don't use IE8, it requires tweaking a setting to turn on privacy options.
* Use Firefox, which requires tweaking a setting to turn on privacy options.
The article mentioned Hunt the Wumpus. Are you posting just to hear yourself speak? (Or read yourself... comment?)
How would you even calculate that? Do you know how much the gas and electricity rates vary, even within the same state?
Tracking cookies enable them to form a profile of my web accesses. yada yada yada, accessed by warrant, etc.
But none of that answers my question. How does it hurt you? A SINGLE REASON would suffice.
But I'm not going to explain the concept of information privacy, you can read up on it in better places, written by more informed people.
I'm not an idiot, I understand the concept of information privacy.
What I don't understand is how cookies can hurt you in any way whatsoever. That's the part that nobody, not you, not any article I've read, has actually laid out to me. I haven't heard of a single scenario in which you are hurt by tracking cookies. Not a single one.
We're not talking about installing 20,000 CCTV cameras in every private space, or putting a GPS locator on every car, or a 1984-esque 2-way telescreen. We're talking about harmless little cookies.
This is what makes me think everybody is just knee-jerking and not spending a single second actually *thinking* about their opinion. Because when you think about it, tracking cookies are entirely harmless. The fact that you can't explain a single way they can cause harm only backs up my opinion.
Look, I want to have debates with people who have informed opinions, not people who are just knee-jerking because Cory Doctorow said to.
BTW, sorry to reply twice, but I *still* don't have a good sense of why you think tracking cookies are so bad. How does it hurt you exactly? I already pointed out a way in which it might help you (seeing less ads), but you haven't yet communicated to me any way you're hurt by them.
Please, give me just one concrete example of how a tracking cookie that tracked you across 40 sites actually hurts you. One example.
I honestly am starting to think it's just crazy Slashdot paranoia. Of the kind we used to see in all the RFID threads.
They don't. Either get by with non-targeted ads, or charge for it. When I was talking about website content, I meant public content, not private, obviously.
I think I proved that it wasn't obvious. You have to say what you mean, we're not psychic.
Most Slashdotters would claim that, for example, the content of emails they received was "private information." when Gmail first came out, there was a pretty huge outcry about that.
Yes, and I agree.
So, wait... you said sites should serve ads targeted using the text of the page. Now you're saying you agree that emails you receive are private information.
So how do sites hosting email (or private message forums, or whatever) target ads using your model? You can't have it both ways!
The only app I use on a regular basis written in Perl is... Slashdot. And it's a gigantic piece of buggy crap. Not a very good ambassador you have there. :)
It's the gradual move to a society where privacy is regarded as a bad thing, when in fact it's one of the most important.
Yes, but that's a BRAND NEW concept. It's not like privacy is this age-old thing we've always had and it's going way. Fifty years ago, there was no privacy (not in the way we're talking about today) and nobody minded.
I think the move towards targeted ads to website content is much more useful, and doesn't depend on tracking.
Most Slashdotters would claim that, for example, the content of emails they received was "private information." when Gmail first came out, there was a pretty huge outcry about that.
And websites survived fine with less ads.
This is so vague I can't really address it.
Yes, but how many sites depend on cookies or flash to work properly? Quite a few. I fear we may come to a point where an access with disabled tracking will become like disabling Javascript - it works, but it misses too much stuff.
Then don't visit those sites. Sometimes you have to just suck it up and solve your own problems-- even if you have to make sacrifices-- instead of crying for your big nanny government to swoop in and diaper your bottom.