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Whats missing is that some like me hates the metro/unity/toy gui.
I love how people think it's ability to learn, where only just wonder why we moving backwards in terms of desktop workflow.
You can't learn "lesser".
Any to the windows centric people, you just need to bite the bullet. Ms are pretty clear in what they will force you to, any resistance is futile.
I don't get why windows people keep running old windows distros.
You know where this is heading. Just imagine how unusable win9-10 etc is going to be. |
The UI change from 7 to 8 is much more significant than any of those previous progressions. Ever since 95, Windows has revolved very heavily around the Start menu, for doing everything -- whenever you updated to a newer version of Windows, you knew you'd be able to find your way around because that Start Menu, although slightly changed, was still there.
Now, that familiar starting point / 'home' is gone, for seemingly no reason. Metro makes a lot of sense on a touchscreen, but for anyone using a mouse, its information density is far too low and it just gets in the way. Microsoft tried to make Metro be the replacement for both the desktop and the start menu, when it's really only a useful replacement for the desktop.....there is basically no need to have the conventional desktop hidden behind Metro, yet a conventional Start menu would still be very useful. |
I'm still not following you. The post office isn't using tax payer money. Not to operate, and not for it's retirement funds. The pre-funding comes from it's regular operating costs, which you and I pay for by purchasing services.
Tax payers will never have to cover the retirement benefits of postal workers unless the postal service goes out of business, and we still won't have to cover those costs as long as the postal service is pre-funding. If they go out of business, the money to cover pensions will be there because of pre-funding.
This pre-funding stuff is congress's way of saying, "Yo USPS, you suck at operating a business, and we have no faith you're going to stay in business, and we're not going to be left with the bill to cover the pensions of tens of thousands of people when you go out of business. So you need to start putting money aside now to cover those costs so the tax payer doesn't have to." |
Primer probably runs into the same quantity problem - you need what, about a gramme or less per round? For something like a (better, hypothetically workable) low-metal Liberator you won't be looking at more than one bullet per barrel because feed mechanisms are hard and the only reason you'd use one in the first place is to smuggle it into somewhere secure, so there's not a massive benefit to having a 12 round clip or whatever. If we're being really generous, let's say a 6 round revolver: maybe 7g of 'obligatory' metal content so far, in quite compact (i.e. low eddy-current, which is the primary detection method) packaging.
Stats on metal detector sensitivity aren't obviously findable, but I suspect 7g is close to, but below, the threshold on most detectors - there's more metal than that in boots with steel eyelets, and about the same amount in those exemplar Levis (zip + 8-10 rivets), or a set of braces, or a particularly extensive set of amalgam fillings. Plus, the no-false-negative threshold on an airport scanner is probably a fair bit higher; false positives slow down the line horribly, and if you had to wand everyone who was wearing jeans it would be an order of magnitude worse than today. As it stands, you only really need it to be low enough to spot a (minimum 500g for a really tiny) handgun, 200g boxcutter or possibly a 35g scalpel, though I expect most airport security would fail to detect a single scalpel blade on a composite handle - it's just too small and too light, even if it's a near-optimal shape for eddy currents to form and thus punches above its' weight in the detection stakes. If we suddenly have to detect something as low as 7g in 'optimal' shapes with a 99% reliability, airport security is going to become orders of magnitude more complex and failure-prone. I expect the actual outcome will be (as ever) to lie and say that they've upped the thresholds, while actually just doing more theatre. It's simply not practical to do it in conjunction with the required throughput through airports etc.
Casings would be much harder to minimise, as you say, but they're also more of a hurdle than a brickwall - the shitness of caseless ammo can be traded off against reduced or eliminated detection. Though I wouldn't want to be near a plastic-barreled Liberator firing caseless ammo... |
Um, no. I'm going to keep using my expensive and pretty awesome android phone. I am going to continue to use gmail, which I have tons of emails archived in, and I am going to continue using youtube, because I follow tons of awesome vlogers on there.
The best way to complain is to continue to be vocal, and eventually make the natural switch to another company that has the capability to capitalize on google/youtube's blatant disregard for their userbase's wishes. |
Personally I have no problem with having G+ as its own thing, my problem is with what they use it for. Here's a rundown of the major issues with it as both a content creator and a watcher.
As a creator:
G+ is needed to comment on your own videos. Minor issue, but its the other consequences that make it a big issue. This is silly.
No option to change your name in YT itself, only G+ name will show unless you delete it, same with your avatar icon so you are literally forced to use G+ for simplistic features.
Auto comments. Now if I "share" a video to G+ which is automatic because it uploads through YT, I get a comment on my video with "X has shared this" which is silly as the video is RIGHT FUCKING THERE. NO SHIT I SHARED MY OWN VIDEO YOU COULDN'T SEE IT IF I DIDN'T.
Auto Comments. A weirder thing is where you put a keyword and upload a vid that gets an automatic comment about the keyword, hasn't happened to me, but I have seen it on other vids before the person deleted the comment. On that note, I haven't seen "comment deleted" in this new version so that's a whole new level of creepy/potential censorship.
Comment notifications are handled through G+ now. I got Gmail spam at first since I hadn't set G+ to not email me these things. ^Good ^thing ^I ^have ^separate ^accounts ^anyway
As a user:
Goddamn trolls. They exist and always will, but now they can slow (potentially crash if it gets too bad) my browser if I've got multiple tabs open and don't realize it's a 40 page comment from Moby Dick. I'm saved from this only by point #2. EDIT: Apparently not possible CASE CLOSED
I don't want to comment anymore. I don't even want to read them. I didn't really before except on my own vids in response to questions, but now I really don't want to make someone use their G+ inbox.
No interaction with old comments. ಠ_ಠ Seriously, it's weird when you go to an old vid and see great comments that seem to have lost their upvotes upthumbs and gotten buried as a result. Whatever they did was NOT the way to go about it.
No socializing on YT anymore. New vids are like wastelands compared to before (and they're nearly all copypasta). Fuck some people with millions of subs have comments disabled because of this craziness.
Weird differences in accounts. Some people can still comment without G+, some people can't comment at all. I have no idea where the difference is but I do know that I can't reply to some definitely new comments or rate some comments and it isn't consistent.
Can only see recent replies to comments, not top replies when viewing in top comments mode. This seems like a issue to me, but that might just be me.
Major changes to buffering. I have never had a problem with buffering before, now some vids I have to randomly click the quality gear (not even changing quality) to let it know I've still got my eyeballs glued to the screen I'm still alive before it keeps loading. Doesn't seem to matter for large vids on large channels, just small channels and it's still inconsistent on that too.
And good god the potential stalkers. It's not even about Google using my info, it's about random morons on the net finding my real name/address etc and doing stupid shit with it like I know they will given half a reason. Glad I was able to lock up my G+ before anyone saw my name because G+ definitely knows my real name despite not associating this account with any of my rl stuff. Actually though, that ended up happening because I once signed into my personal Gmail from the same computer and browser and since then it just knew who I was on my YT/G+ account. There's probably something I did that was obvious, but I've no idea what it was, but at least by using a name on G+, albeit a fake one based on my username, it stops asking for my real name on YT.
All this leads to unnecessary clutter and slowdown on my video and no users want to comment because of the changes which would have been nice for feedback. Combined with general ineffectiveness, it was a poor decision to implement this without having a public and obvious beta first. I understand the business reasons for doing it, ad rev, G+ user count, etc, but none of those reasons would have conflicted with testing it on users first. Sure there would have been complaints, but there wouldn't be near as much backlash. So I'm not sure what they hope to accomplish with it, yeah you can ban someone from yt on that account if they're a dingus, whoop de doo. So then, they'll make a new account. GREAT IDEA GUYS WE'VE SOLVED IT.
EDIT: GUYS, I'm not using my real name either. BUT from YT's TOS:
>In order to access some features of the Service, you will have to create a YouTube or Google account. You may never use another's account without permission. When creating your account, you must provide accurate and complete information
Having violated the TOS you can be banned for this if they choose to enforce it (they would be stupid to, but it doesn't mean they won't or can't). There is currently no CA law I know of that requires them to know your full name for this so that's entirely their own attitude toward it. |
Documentarian here. Our team just launched our first footage and the debate how to handle vimeo/youtube/g+ has been big. Vimeo="legit," youtube=views, g+=search engine optimization (i.e. if you search us you'll probably hit us early) and film communities are actually quite sizable on it. The issue is that youtube comments are always awful and trying to coordinate the doc's account, personal accounts, youtube accounts, etc. is a nightmare especially since we don't want people personally coming after us because they don't like 'x' part of the project. |
Creator side is that all user issues are sub-issues causing lowered views, disgruntled viewers etc. For people who monetize (not me) this means lowered income.
Yes I realize that it's modules, that's why I'm saying it's hard to combine your professional/personal accounts (which Google says it wants me to do). It's too easy to not realize which one you're using if you aren't paying close attention.
Auto-comments happen when I post a video. A comment is posted on my video saying "X has shared this with G+" under my name. I find this annoying. Keyword auto-comments apparently happen when you have a certain title. A comment is posted, under your name, explaining a keyword. I've most often seen an exact copy of the video description as a comment on a video. It frequently gets deleted right after the uploader realizes it's there.
And yes, I agree about the notifications, but sometimes the bell doesn't show my notification while on YT. So I have to go to G+ to see them. Maybe it's temporary, but it is annoying.
User side:
Fair point
Maybe it's because I watch game videos or music vids that I don't see any insightful or compelling comments, just spam.
Trust me, there's a way to do it. They're just text after all no reason why they can't be replied to or receive new votes, even if they couldn't save old ones, they just weren't willing to spend a lot of time on it (probably because 98% was garbage).
Like I said, vids I look at are mostly empty, like only 50 comments on a vid that would usually have a couple thousand, might just be the community I'm in.
Staged rollouts are understandable, but I'm talking inconsistency on the same video posted yesterday or today. It looks weird and doesn't work well.
Understandable, but that just makes the old system better. If you replied to a comment, yours could be in top comments later on. Objectively this means people need to start new threads to get their comment seen even if it would be better within the original top comments thread.
I'm using Chrome so it's rather annoying that a Google product doesn't work right on a Google product.
Finally: Yes stalkers. Google wants me to use my real name, yes I'm using a fake. Fun fact: There is a chance my account will be deleted and banned because I'm not using my real name. From YT's TOS:
>In order to access some features of the Service, you will have to create a YouTube or Google account. You may never use another's account without permission. When creating your account, you must provide accurate and complete information
Not cool. I haven't seen what you seen, but to each their own I suppose. |
I think this is a good move from Google. Here's the reasoning:
Most people complaining from this change either only have a YouTube account, or a GMail and a YouTube account. You use nothing from Google, really. The change looks silly because of that.
PROBLEM:
Now, take a look at which product I use from Google: Gmail, Google Search, Google Search - developer tools (the thing that allows you to manage which pages are indexes and stuff), YouTube, G+, Drive, Google Analytics, Google Play (developer), Android, Google Drive, Google Agenda/Calendar, Google Maps (with saved maps, reviews). That's hell a lot of Google products. Now, imagine if I had to create and maintain a single account for all of these. It would be HELL . Now, imagine Google having to maintain a link between them, and manage what is accessible from one to another. Even more programming hell . That's unmaintanable , and information will leak one day or another from any of these.
SOLUTION:
What Google wants you to do, is to completely seperate your public and personal accounts yourself . I have two Google accounts (now Google+, but that's just a freakin name, stop it already, you don't have to use it or to fill anything about it, just leave it dead empty and use a username). One is my personal one, which I use for GMail, Drive, YouTube and Google+. And my other one is for work: GMail, Analytics, Drive, Google Play, calendar, etc. My personal identity is protected and seperated from work.
About YouTube:
If you own a large YouTube channel, or you just don't want to have your YouTube account identity tied to yourself, that counts as a "work" our "public" account. The same rules applies: create a new account, use it only for your channel, and you can even profit from other Google products like Drive if you want to share files or stuff like that. And guess what? There's now no way EVER for you to leak personal information! Not even your E-Mail address!
Google and multiple identities
Google actually encourages its users to create multiple accounts. On some sites it's less clear like YouTube, but on Google Play they tell you straight away that you are better creating a new account just to submit your applications and avoid people getting back to your real identity, and also allow account sharing for coworkers. I think they highly suggest that from GMail as well. Hell, they even provide a menu to switch between multiple accounts! Just create a new account and stop complaining. Stop with the "Google want you to use your real name", "Google wants to help NSA track you". They are not forcing anyone on linking YouTube to your personal identity. You were supposed to seperate this years ago with the first Google/merge that failed because people did the exact same thing and complained the fuck out of it. This was preventing them to do improvement in many areas that maybe most common users don't care, but it was still preventing them from doing it. Now you can have Analytics, Play and YouTube all linked together to have better tools, check how effective a promotional video is for your App, etc. all because of the previously mentionned linking problem. |
Posted a short rant, but it probably won't make a difference. Back when G+ was new, they put a video on Youtube about how awesome it would be if we all used our real names for G+. I responded with a lengthy and thoughtful (rare for me, I know) description of why that was intrusive and inappropriate. The comment quickly got stuck to the Top Comments block with over 200 upvotes, then was somehow replaced by comments with 20 or 30. I went back a few months later to look the comment up for a thread like this to find that all comments had been deleted. |
Duh? Who's in office right now? A democrat. I served while Clinton was in office - big difference from Bush. No raises, the unit was underfunded, we had NCOs (low level managers) buying wide carriage printer paper to support the mission. (If we couldn't print, the computers filled up and stopped working and we weren't allowed to just delete the data.)
That was my first experience with Linux - we couldn't afford Novell Netware 4.x so I bought the I-forget-how-many-CDs Redhat distribution at the local bookstore and installed it on one of our PCs. Wound up getting our unit email working on it, where before we had no email outside of the unit. (Only the military communication system). Everybody loved that. Pegasus email client was FTW back then. I forget now how it hooked to the smtpd on the Linux box. |
As a satcom technician I agree, the story is bull:
-Network saturation throws up flags for the NOSC, Gateway controllers, and everyone else. If the users complain of connectivity issues, it normally triggers monitoring of circuit traffic and requests, including a constant stream to a singular IP address (Why build a new platform when a perfectly good one exists, courtesy of taxpayer dollars (DARPA)?)
-Most satellite services are tiered for bandwidth and/or access times. This means that for a few users, access was essentially zilch.
-Millions of dollars would be cost if:
A. You counted the cost to maintain the satellite system (which would be a shitton of satellites, some control stations, the ground stations, gateway access, networking equipment, etc).
B. You were using InMarSat, which shouldn't happen because use is restricted to 64kbps ISDN (military has a contract for $400/month service for this).
-Using a government system to download tv shows not only violates US law, it also violates user agreements (which everyone has to agree to when they access any government system) and is also classified as FWA (Fraud, Waste, and Abuse). |
This makes sense until you think of that in the military you might have "a" computer per 5 or 6 people. So if doing your job requires you to use a specific program that costs upwards of $400 the military has to buy 6 of that program for every computer in that office. The entire IT budget for a squadron of 300 people might be $50,000. So when you have to buy 300 copies of one piece of software for $400 a piece it takes a huge chunk of your annual budget which is impossible to justify to the higher up who has to approve that expense. This leads to pirating software which while wrong is sometimes necessary to get the job done. |
Please forgive me if it isn't too clear. It's been 3 years since then, and I've been out for 2 years in college so some of the real technical details have faded.
Aboard Al Asad in Iraq, there was a huge morale drive. I was in the Networking Division of unit on base. We had a few extra IPs. We attached a large NAS to one of our Staff NCOs machines so that if we ever got in trouble, they'd just tell them to take it down. If it was a Sergeant or below, they'd probably end up getting ninjapunched and losing rank.
Anyway, when night shift came on, I monitored was able to que up and download most of the Al Asad Morale Drive (which at the time was supported by G-6 aka the IT department at the General Officer level). When the time to return home came, we had close to 3TB of movies, music, and TV shows. We were somehow acquiring great quality copies of the newest episodes of TV shows. I remember getting the newest episode of Generation Kill within 2 days of it airing back in the U.S.
Flash forward about 13 months and my unit is deploying out to, what at the time was a small presence (MEB for those who know what that is) Camp Bastion. When we arrived there wasn't much and we did a lot of work to repair the damage the unit we were replacing had done. Since this was our unit's first full deployment into Afghanistan, we took pretty much the best people we could forward in every department. This means we had lots of experience in our unit.
When we arrived, we were told "we don't have a morale drive because we don't have the resources to manage it." Well we had more IPs than we needed at the time, so we threw that old NAS up on the network. We password protected it to our unit to preserve bandwidth. This worked fantastic for about two weeks until our S-4 happened.
For those of you who don't know, S-4 is the logistics part of a unit. They decided to give our password out to various units on the base in exchange for favors. Withing 3 days our unit could barely do any work because our bandwidth was being hammered. We decided to change the password again.
Unfortunately, this pissed off the whole base. The next day we had calls and emails from angry E-8s and above asking why the base morale drive had been taken down.
This all happened fast so we still weren't aware that it was the S-4 who got us in the mess. We start replying to the emails like this:
1.) This is our unit's asset. This isn't the base's server. Therefore we are the one's who decide if we will allow access to everyone outside our unit.
2.) Currently, the bandwidth it was using was cutting into performance on our mission critical systems. When infrastructure improves, we will consider restoring access to the morale drive.
This did not go over well. There is no fury quite like that of an entitled Master Gunnery Sergeant. Soon enough, G-6 comes calling asking about access to the morale drive. We tell them no for the aforementioned reasons. They respond that they have the power to take anything off the network and order us to hand it over to them so they can administer it.
We say no because we have a portion of it only accessible to us which had a bunch of things like cracked software, cracked versions of LAN games, etc. We had built an internal network to our department so that after shift change people could hang our and blow off steam.
We saw the writing on the wall, so we had friends back in the states ship another of the same model NAS out with extra hard drives. We backed everything up to that NAS, then hid it in some space in one of our legacy servers racks. Finally, we wiped the hard-drives and repeatedly dropped the original NAS until it wouldn't turn on anymore.
We took the broken NAS with the blank harddrives to G6. The final straw for turnover was their Information Assurance Manager deciding that he was confiscating it because it was a security vulnerability to the internal network. That's the one thing we really couldn't fight since he just has a senior officer sign off on it.
For the next couple of months, all of us had strange issues with our admin permissions being "adjusted" and other random annoying netadmin trolling commenced. What they didn't know is that we had the domain admin password because they left it in plaintext in a startup script.
At this point it probably seems really petty, and it was. However, when you're deployed for several months, these petty things build up. We were pissed because we felt like we were A.) being punished for trying to provide a service that didn't work out B.) our stuff was taken with no compensation and C.) G-6 were fucking with us just because they had nothing better to do.
After we started having random things disappear from our share drive, we started counter-attacking them. Things escalated a bit, but they didn't really know how we were getting in. Certain people started taking liberties with our billet of being information security personnel. They reasoned they could tap into other people's hard-drives if they were connected and delete anything that didn't belong on an official government network.
That all changed when someone deleted the wrong persons "pornographic material". Technically, no porn is allowed on the network. This means no naked pictures emailed from the states etc. Well apparently, these were naked pictures of this guys wife that went missing. He took his hard-drive to the Colonel of G-6 and had it given to the IAM.
That launched a pretty long investigation into my department that ended up with several senior NCOs being relieved of duty and even sent home early.
Ironically, that wasn't the worst investigation I had done to me/my department while deployed. By that point I actually knew my rights and was able to skate free. |
Other than assassinating high-ranking corporate, political, secret service members who evidently and undeniably conspire against freedoms of US citizens, whether that is their declared goal or an inevitable and known consequence of their orders, what can you do?
Most people don't have the kind of mind necessary to do things like that, but even if you are not into radical approaches, don't think there is nothing you can do. There is!
Join and/or support international groups such as:
-[Transparency International](
-[The Centre for International Governance Innovation](
-[The Sunlight Foundation](
-[The Open Society Foundations](
-[The Open Knowledge Foundation](
-[The Government Accountability Project](
Become a lobbyist of such interest groups and work for free to promote their views. Get in contact with them, ask them what the evidence for their positions is, then convince your local politicians that they should be supported.
Don't support any group that actively seeks to corrupt the government. Minimize the amount of ressources you give to such corporations or institutions. This is actually the hardest thing to accomplish on this list as, unfortunately, these institutions have their hands in more or less everything . That's what makes them so powerful and dangerous in the first place. Their huge power monopolies. So, out of all ideas, this is the one that will accomplish the least. "Voting with your pocket" doesn't work in the real world anymore.
Found your own business or any other kind of organization and behave in a way beneficial to society rather than in a profit-maximizing fashion. Then use your powers to influence politics. Found a social enterprise and focus on promoting transparency and sustainable economics. Invest all profits you make directly back into the business. Steal customers from big corporations and be the change you want to see in society yourself. How to found your own business? Start on the easiest level and ask these guys: /r/Entrepreneur. Even on this site you can find inspiration and people who can tell you how to get your ass out there.
Never neglect these topics in conversation. Politics often is seen as a taboo topic, so that's why so many people are uninvolved and apathetic about it. Especially younger populations. And always stay as calm and constructive as possible, always citing evidence for your claim and always making sure that you are not stuck with a certain opinion but always willing to learn.
There are countless of ways to get involved. Either actively or at least by funding people who are active.
Educate yourself, join a group of activists, engage actively in politics, engage actively in economics. |
Not my area anymore, but Oracle. With a couple of different RAD platforms. I don't know how big the company is now but it was just a little over 100 in house and 20-30 out of house. It was regularly ranked one of the top tech companies in the Dulles corridor (Northern Virginia).
It was a good gig. It was the only company I had close experience with that was developer driven rather than marketing. Such a different atmosphere.
I was IT, though. Not one of the devs or DBAs. Our little department managed the workstations, network, servers and portable servers. It was particularly fun because since our clients used a range of architectures, we would need to develop and test on the same. So we had IBM AIX, HP UX (by far the most annoying), Solaris, SunOS, Windows NT, etc. Never boring and always opportunity to learn and experiment.
The biggest pain in the ass, though, were the luggables... The portable servers that marketing took on site for sales demos. The fucking marketing people consistently refused to take the luggables as carry-on when flying. No matter how well packed, you cannot check a luggable as baggage on commercial air. So they'd arrive somewhere, load the machine up in the hotel the night before (hopefully) to test it out, and then find that it wouldn't boot. Then it would end up on trans-oceanic courier (hand carried at great expense) and in my lap (or one of the other three IT guys) and we'd have to fix the problem and usually do a complete rebuild and get it turned around in only a few hours so it can go back by courier in time for the multi-million dollar sales pitch to the next day. Those were the bad days. Although you'd feel like a hero when you handed it off to the courier. And when the big brass bell rings a day or two later saying that we got the deal, well, then the day is over and everyone parties on the company credit card and it's all worth it.
And that is my rambling story because I'm procrastinating on taking a shower and getting my shit together for Thanksgiving dinner. |
hahaha, Not surprising at all. Virginia hold some of the richest counties in the United States, but the laws, and way things are done, are still like its the fucking 1800s and our founding fathers are still there..
Virignia is a state that has no clue what the fuck it wants to do. Do they wanna be the state where things are to the letter, and pretty much follow and obey all the stupid old laws and too stubborn to catch up in time? Or do they just wanna be stuck up pricks with a fuck ton of money, and pretty much not care at all about the people that live in this state?
Cant stand VA. Lived here most of my life, and this state is just awful. The politicians in this state are the most useless ones I have ever seen. The education system in this state, is just so beyond fucked up its not even funny to laugh at anymore. All those VA state wide test you took in Middle/High school? That was just to see if VA kids are retards or not. None of those test mattered, and COST THE STATE THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.
Those SOL test? Standards of Learning? Those didn't mean jack shit to your grade. It was just to see if your teachers/school/county is doing their job right and to see if you should be thrown at a higher class level or not. They didn't give a fuck if you passed or failed in Richmond, WHERE THEY HAND GRADE the SOL test (Written part is now hand graded, before THE WHOLE test was hand graded). I failed that shit like 2 years in a row, nothing came bad out of me, no talk, no nothing. All i was told is i need to do better. Why? So it makes my school and teachers look better...
That test cost teachers so much useless time and money and resources spent making their students ready for that useless test. SOL prep this and that. SOL study booklets, all crap and time taken away from their yearly agenda for teaching. Every teacher that I overheard or was close with in HS/MS, hated those SOL test with a passion.
Plus the fact that it cost the state thousands.
Did I mention, other states dont have this test? Some have their own version, but most states scrapped em, and just use the nation wide test.
Course it be VA who screws over everyone. VA is just mad they last on DMV "District, Maryland, Virginia". VA is also one of the worst states you could possibly live in. Course it be VA to strip a inmate of even a learning tool via computer. Where, gee if I remember correctly. I WAS HANDED A PDA in 6TH GRADE by the STATE. Gee, and in 11th grade, the whole section of Math or Engineering, I can't remember, ALL GOT FUCKING IPADS from the state. Not funded by our school or fundraiser. Just given. Oh and gee, I also remember when VA took away "wood working class aka Shop". Because it was too costly and too many injuries. Guess what the state bought for all shop classes? Brand new workstation desk, brand new monitors, desktops, projectors. All the old shop equipment was just given away or thrown away in the trash. |
Haha yeah I thought as much, NOVA and southern VA are drastically different in politics and... Well pretty much everything. It's kind of caught on the cultural Mason-Dixon Line (from my perspective) so it's just a huge cultural and political mess (as it's been for a while). But the rest of Virginia is, biased as my opinion is, much nicer for education and life in general (with even the smaller counties still having acceptable graduation rates.)
But that's southeastern VA I am used to, NOVA and the western parts of VA are different animals entirely. |
I haven't finished it yet. I'm over halfway done and ranked first in my department (prison gave me a lot of discipline).
I got deported from the US, back to the UK, at the end of my sentence. My criminal record transferred over too. It's not held me back too much work-wise; what I got 2.5 years for in the US I'd probably get a warning for, if anything, here in the UK.
In my first day searching for a job I found a full-time one doing auto-body work (I took a one year course on it in prison). It was through a place my granddad goes to a few times a year - he simply asked if they have any work. There was no interview or background check. I just showed up for "one or two days of work," and it turned into a full-time job after they saw that I was actually willing to work hard for them. It was a small place owned by a husband and a wife. Excluding them, there are only three other employees there now. I still go visit them from time to time, and I'm welcome to work there over Summer breaks. (EDIT: They still don't have a clue I was in prison).
One month after getting out, I got accepted into a university and had to move, so I quit my job doing auto-body work. A month later I had a job in a call centre. There was an interview and screening, but I mostly just flirted with the recruitment lady, and my American accent helped me ace the assessment. I found out about 6 months later from my supervisor, who was putting something in my file, that my application and cover letter were never read (I wrote about my prison experience in the cover letter). She told me that she was happy to keep me, but not to put stuff like that on a cover letter. I quit there after a year because I started my own business and "passed" an Enhanced CRB check for another job. That is, the charges and prison time were on my CRB check, but I got references from my former supervisor, other former bosses from the same profession in the US, and even my victim. I got invited to a night-out that the call centre was having a few weeks ago and my bosses said they'd take me back any time, which is always a nice fall back.
Almost nobody outside of my family knows that I've been incarcerated. You'd never guess by being around me. I've been asked a few times if I've been in the military though. The prisons that I was at were similar to the military (marching, PT, etc.). Once you get your foot in the door somewhere, it's easy to do the job better than anyone else there (assuming it's a non-skilled job, or you have the skills required going in).
Outside of my company, and the Enhanced CRB job, I also have a job developing mobile apps. It's a local start up and there was no background check or anything. Having a CV with straight As, numerous awards, voluntary positions, and work experience helps a lot. I've had two interviews at big software companies for my placement year and none have asked if I've been in prison. I failed the assessment at one (reading five pages of assembly and writing the output down is hard, and I messed up at one point which threw the whole thing off), but I think I'll get offered a place at the other, as their lead mobile developer has looked at my Linkedin twice in the past week. |
No, it's not it at all. For starters I am very anti-prop 8, I find it retrograde and based on bigotry and fear, I find it horrible that such idea could even be proposed. But I also find this boycott retrograde, and based on bigorty and fear. Just because you are representing a abused minority doesn't immediately make you "good", you can still be an asshole and still be wrong.
The CEO is allowed to have an opinion without loosing his job because of it (or having his company threatened because of it).
You're allowed to have an opinion of said CEO, and also this opinion should not affect your ability to get work (even at that CEO's company).
What is ethically wrong, is to threaten a person because of their beliefs (even if they are wrong) on something completely unrelated. This is, threatening to fire someone because of their beliefs (when they in no way have interfered with his or her job) is wrong . Threatening to boycott someone with his or her beliefs, when this have no effect on what their business does is also wrong .
To put this in another way. What would be your opinion if Eich had to leave Mozilla because he donated money to stop prop-8. He left because he was threatened by the conservative groups in California with boycott of his company, and it was the only way to save it.
I believe that the ends don't justify the means and that believing or thinking something does not equal acting on it . Yes Eich believes against gay marriage, but he decided to act on it democratically he never threatened anyone, he never used his position in Mozilla against people of the LGBT community, he decided to work with the system, and trust that the solution best to society would be chosen, the decision was made, and it was that prop-8 is unconstitutional. Eich didn't make Firefox show a message saying how our society was going to collapse because of this on start up. He sucked it up and accepted that society had made its decision.
See the difference there? Eich, though as much as I might look down and disagree with his believes, acted in a much better fashion than the people boycotting him. He didn't attack individuals, he never threatened people, he never made a fuss or use his position as a company to push a political agenda (looking at you OKC).
So what did we (as I identify more, sadly, with the anti-prop-8 group here) win? Well we got someone that supported prop-8 to no just loose his job, but also have to abandon the work of his life. I'm sure that having your livelihood and life-projects threatened is a great way to change someone's mind. Given that people [fear being forced to loose the job if they didn't support the LGBTQ community fully]( we've just given ammo to the pro-prop-8 group. The next time they want to push anti-sexual-equality laws they'll be able to point to this case and show how the LGBT community are a bunch of bullies that if given the ability will take your job away and threaten you.
Hell not even the ends are good! This isn't the end justifying the means, this is hate justifying the means. People wanted their revenge, and in the process put the whole LGBT community (yes all of it) on the same level as the bigots and fear-mongers that work against them and have damaged what arguments they could have used. Representing such things implies a lot of responsibility. |
What makes this so frustrating is how bad they want to turn the internet into a resource for law enforcement.
I guess those centuries of actual detective work were just educated guesses, huh? But you know what, I'd be okay with LE utilizing the tech so long as they didn't interfere with the growth of technology . |
Both of you idiots that responded to me DO realize who Redhat's biggest customer is, right?
And I'm not the only one who has reservations, maybe you know who this guy is:
>
[ |
I have a strong feeling that you haven't been educated in any sort of detailed computer science classes (And that's ok, I'm certainly no computer genius and I don't expect anyone else to be), because the way that antivirus and hardware works probably isn't the way you think it does.
So let me address your questions to the best of my abilities;
1."How can you tell if a device is interacting with the computer faster than it should be?"
Well, for example, if a keyboard is sending one keypress per 10ms, and it's not just random gibberish, then it's probably inhuman. If a mouse is moving at the highest possible speeds and clicking with 100% accuracy and no dithering (i.e. it's moving in a straight line from target to target), then it's probably inhuman.
It's not very hard for programs to tell when something seems automated. There are more intricate ways of looking at it, but that's the easiest explanation I can offer right now.
2."If the user has plugged in a device and it decides to show up as a network interface with a virtual network and then tries to send your computer a virus? How can that be differentiated from a normal network interface?"
When a network is connected, the user is prompted about whether they trust the network, and what level of security to put it on; Home, Work, or Public.
Home is the most trusted, and will by default share all files and printers on the network. Work will share all documents and printers. Public will share nothing. All will prompt the user to accept incoming files from another device.
In order to initialize networking from that device, this prompt has to be clicked through. As of that moment, the nefarious plans of the rogue network adapter have been foiled. The user will see a prompt for a network they don't recognize, and click out of the screen (Disabling the network forever until the user goes back into the Network and Sharing center and opens the available networks, clicks on the rogue device, and enables the network, upon which the same prompt as before will pop up).
3."What if it looks like a normal hard drive, but sometimes when you read a sector of an executable file it's a virus and sometimes not?"
That is impossible. First of all, hard drives have sectors, files do not. Files are stored on hard drives as bits, simple 1's or 0's. These can change only if written to. If during one read, a file is virus-free, and then during another read, it has a virus, then it was written to. In order to be written to, the drive controller has to receive a write signal from, for example, the SATA controller on the motherboard. The SATA controller receives the write command from the Southbridge, which gets the write command indirectly from the CPU. A write command CAN originate from the hard drive itself, however in order for the command to complete, it would be sent to the processor for handling, and then go down the chain of command to the hard drive, again. An antivirus would be able to see this, scan the write command, notice it's writing a virus, and stop it.
4."Even if it's just playing back keyboard commands, what if it waits for the user to be away for an hour, then executes a simple command like "disable antivirus, download this botnet and run it as administrator" while typing at a reasonable speed?"
First off, no device can check the idle time of the computer. This just isn't reported to devices, because they have no need to know it. If a device is requesting it, that's a red flag for antivirus, and chances are that device will be disabled immediately. If it manages to get past that, then tries to disable antivirus (which can't be done from command line), it has to go through the antivirus program, which most of them often need the use of a mouse to fully navigate. For example, I use BitDefender, and you cannot even navigate to get to the screen where you can navigate to disable active protection without the use of a mouse. But lets say it manages to disable active protection. For me, BitDefender's firewall would notice the incoming threat and block it before it can even connect and download. My firewall scans all network activity, even if real-time protection is disabled in the antivirus part.
So maybe it's almost feasible that someone could make an attempt at trying something like this. The one big, gigantic problem with all of it? It would take so long, and take so many resources, and so many people, to write this virus. Holy crap, it would take years. By the time the virus works, the vulnerability would have already been fixed ten times over. It's much easier and more effective to simply throw a popup at a grandma saying "Your flash player is outdated!" and have that grandma download the botnet that way. SO MUCH EASIER. THAT is why this is a non-issue. It takes too much to try and write the virus, just for a minimal success rate. Plus, you have to have hardware to install it on, wait for someone to buy that hardware, have it ship, yadda yadda. By the time the whole process is done, the virus wouldn't work anymore.
Now, as for rolling back before attacks, it's very simple. The antivirus looks and sees "Oh, that registry change is malicious. Just a few minutes ago it was at this state, and not it's at this state. Let's just go ahead and revert the changes." How does it find what was changed? Just read the RAM, or look at the hard drive, or the hash of the register, or the SHA-1, or anything, and simply undo.
And the sentence "Consider the amount of effort necessary to determine what a user is doing to the state of a computer by monitoring key presses." doesn't make any sense. The amount of effort necessary to see what is being done to a computer? Literally none! You just look and see what is happening. So a device is sending the signals "Win+R, type 'cmd.exe', type 'del C:\Windows\System32', Enter", well that is clearly not something that should be done. Of course, Windows won't even allow that (System protected folder, not even the highest administrative root could delete System32. The only way to delete it is to initialize the hard drive from another operating system), but antivirus has safeguards against it, too.
And I do not have too much faith in antivirus. You just don't seem to understand how antivirus works, and how well it works. "when you play a certain pattern of sounds, the HID volume control in your USB headphones wakes up and does something evil later." wat. Seriously. wat. "HID volume control"... Headphones are not HID. HID is "Human Input Device". Headphones are output. But anyways, I see what you mean. However, the only "volume control" for sound devices is the built-in windows audio driver. Anything else on a pair of headphones does not interact with the computer (For example, my Turtle Beach DSS, connects for USB power, and adjusts volume, Bass control, and Dolby sound processing, but it's all on-device, and none of it interacts with the computer). If some program adjusted volume but also did something malicious, antivirus would notice it and quarantine the file. If the Windows audio driver had a virus, antivirus would notice it and clean the driver.
As for targeted attacks, those are always pointed at big companies, not your every day user. You never have to worry about a targeted attack, unless you are a big company or hosting things that have large opposition. But still, firewalls and strong enough antivirus would usually be able to at least mitigate a targeted attack.
And if an NSA van thinks it can "broadcasts certain radio signals to take over your computer.", then those NSA people are idiots. You can't just broadcast radio signals and have magical total control over a computer. If that was the case, then every single government building with computers would be at least 30 feet underground, with 10-foot thick concrete walls protecting wherever the computers are, and have no wireless access at all.
Sure, Wi-Fi is a radio signal, but it's a protected radio signal. So a van transmits signals to my Wi-Fi. It won't get through because they don't have my PSK, which encrypts every single packet sent, and any packets received are decrypted with that key. So if an unencrypted packet is sent, it is decrypted with the key, and read as corrupted. It is then discarded and treated as a dropped packet. It's also an unwarranted packet, so firewall would block it immediately anyways. |
If my connection dropped down to 15 I would be livid, and I'd be on the phone with Charter ASAP. It's all relative I guess. |
Cox is awesome when it is working. We are having infrastructure problems that cause outages in my hood. The service organization is so bad, I am having trouble finding words to describe their incompetence. The most dysfunctional and disconnected (ironically) group I have ever dealt with. It literally takes months to get a permanent fix after at least 20 phone calls and six tech visits. No tech ever has information about the previous techs findings. I have to tell them, or, they start from square one.
This is the second outage in six months. They repair one section of an aging line at a time. Every time a new section fails, we get to start the process over again with a tech wanting to get in my attic, having absolutely no knowledge of the prior problems in the area or how many customers are impacted by the outage. Has to be costing Cox a fortune to operate this way. I can't imagine how it helps them to be so inefficient. They have lost half the neighborhood to AT&T and they still give no fucks.
OK, i feel better now. Sorry for the text wall. |
Why are you referring to it like it's just the US and Iran? Russia, China, Germany, France, and the UK are in these talks as well; all of whom have more to lose than America does in this deal.
Also, this isn't a treaty. It's no where close to a treaty. Not only is it not a treaty, the only thing Congress has a say so on this is whether or not US sanctions will be lifted. China and the EU have more to gain from lifting those sanctions and will do so if the deal has been signed. The US sanctions could stay in place if Congress wants to be douches about it. Even so... THERE IS NO DEAL! No one except for those involved know what the deal contains. For Congress to pass any sound or reasonable judgement (which we assume they will) there has to be a deal on the table to be evaluated. |
A worst case scenario here would be you crush up the capsules and capture the small quantity of tritium gass that would escape, then inhale as much gas as possible, hold your breath as long as you can, and then you might get sick. |
I see you're a regular, so I'll reply even though I've been downvoted all to hell because I'd like you to know:
Dude, I wouldn't
and dude, I'd like to know:
what? some of those quizzes are really funny, like the BADASS ones or the "what elder/under god would you be?" kind of randomnesses. I do NOT find out what Harry Potter character I am, or what my lovelife says about which celebrity hairstyle I most embody.
I find out what badass dinosaur/weapon combo I am.
So
am I really one of them or can you concede that I might not be virulent here? |
It's the fault of the hackers who then release the exploit code to the world that this gets out. This is who anti-sec is trying to stop, those hackers in favour of full disclosure. As of now, anti-sec cannot notify devs as this would result in full disclosure. Once these people have been stopped, then they very well may release info to developers.
But that's going to happen anyway . At the very least by North Korean nationals, or some other terrorist or criminal group. Leaving software unpatched is very very very dangerous. I don't think you've quite grasped that fact. If software developers never patched their software, do you have any idea how much of a world of hurt we'd be in???
See, the people who want to hack are always going to be around. It doesn't matter if they're full disclosure or not, anti-sec movement is never going to eliminate all groups of hackers. And if the hackers aren't gone, then "full disclosure" isn't gone because hacking groups help each other out.
It's such ass backwards logic that it boggles my mind.
> But what difference does it make if two people find the same exploit? Sure it'll happen.
Point being that SOMEONE IS GOING TO FIGURE OUT THE EXPLOIT, FULL DISCLOSURE OR NOT.
THAT MEANS PEOPLE ARE NOT SAFE UNLESS THEY FIX THEIR BROKEN SOFTWARE.
You need to fix your software. And if fixing software reveals vulnerabilities (which it probably will), then you might as well go for full or even partial disclosure. |
Yeah but that's not thievery. thievery is
>the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
We are not intending to deprive the rightful owner of it. they still have a copy of it same as us.
Also I don't fear punishment so much to abide by an unjust law (the free stuff is a bonus), nor will I do something immoral simply because it's legal. |
you make a valid point, but there are sometimes i cannot rely on torrents [or dvd or vhs], like when i am at work. also, MST3k is one of the only shows i really like collecting physical copies of. was so excited to find my old MST3k vhs tapes a few months back! :D |
From the "Most Popular" section of the TV Shows:
[The Secret Life of the American Teenager]( : Episodes of this series are available day after air for a limited period. They will return at a later date.
[Hell's Kitchen]( : We are able to provide Seasons 1-6 and Season 9 episodes of Hell's Kitchen.
[Pretty Little Liars]( : Episodes of this series are available day after air for a limited period. They will return at a later date
We currently don't have the rights to make this show available on TV or mobile devices — request to be notified if it becomes available in Hulu Plus. |
A the Director of R&D in a high tech company, I think the math in this article is seriously out to lunch. It doesn't understand business, investment, or economics.
There isn't a choice between spending $6B on patents or jobs. It's not like there is $6B sitting around and somebody is trying to decide what to do with it, and creating jobs was an option. If a job can be created that would generate more money than it cost, that would be done regardless of the purchase of patents.
Then there is the actual way ownership works. Imagine, if you will, the simplest case where the shareholders in Google and Motorola are the exact same people. So what happens when Google buys out Motorola from "outside the box"? Well, not much really. You haven't really gained or lost a thing. Motorola still exists. You are still an owner in both. The only real change occurs in columns of assets an debts inside that box.
Motorola still owns the patents. Google owns Motorola but in terms of ownership, "Google" is its shareholders. Google simply has rights to use those patents now without paying outside that box. If Google can exploit the patents to make more than their supposed $6B value, it is not only an asset gain, but also a wealth gain for the company (i.e., shareholders).
An investment is an investment. If it earns more than it costs, it's a good thing. Google would not have bought Motorola if it didn't think it'd make net money from it.
Patent wars are different issue. When companies are precluded, or slowed down, in making new products as people fight things out in court, that's a problem. On the other hand, if it was the other way around, and it was a technological free-for-all, then investments in R&D would lose money, so it would slow down development for fear of someone stealing your smart ideas. Neither extreme is good. |
That's the one reason I can't leave yet.
However, it looks like the link is starting to break between networks and the delivery systems. HBO-GO and similar services show that the networks want to make their product more available directly to consumers.
Right now, there probably isn’t enough extra market share out there for a company like HBO to take the risk of trying to sell its service directly to consumers. The backlash from the telecoms would be too costly, but that's not going to be the case for much longer. More TV’s are being made with RJ45 and wireless connections. Also, cheap tablets are starting to hit the market. They might not be able to do full HD video today, but in a year or two, today's high end tablets will be the cheap tablets. Once the market share is there, we are going to see some huge changes in the television landscape. |
You can do strategic hits on infrastructure points but TCP/IP is meant to have resilience.
As far as I see, They CAN take DDOS pot-shots at Google, Facebook or media hubs like CNN or key DNS servers to make our traffic seem slower but the cloud we know as the internet would be still run. The servers mentioned in that document are key but its silly to think the entire network is based on those 13 addresses alone. There's also a buttload of resources behind them, as well as their infrastructure.
In the event that this did go down, it'd take anywhere from 2hrs to 72hrs to get the entire world functional on a different set of DNS name servers.
You'd literally need to simultaneously shutdown every ISP in the world to consider the internet "Shut down" . Anything less isn't accurate. |
I did..Yes.
The |
Houses usually have minimum wage freelancers do the typesetting and proofreading and copyediting. Editors don't do that at all.
Editors have a large hand in dictating character and plot development. If things are paced too quickly or slowly, editors change that. If characters are too 2D or if their motives are ambiguous, editors point that out. A good editor helps refine an author's work, making sure to retain the author's voice but polishing the parts that are a little rough. A good editor will be able to notice promise in an author, and will fight for the author's behalf in obtaining marketing/publicity/production for the author's book, as well as championing the author's career.
Look to [Maxwell Perkins]( probably the most famous editor in history. He was the editor for Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. He had a large hand in shaping all three authors' works. For example, he dramatically revised Hemmingway's manuscript for his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which ended up ushering a whole new voice of literature in the 20s. He also had a big hand in molding The Great Gatsby, Look Homeward, Angel, and The Yearling.
They're like the professor to a student thesis writer. Keeps them focused and on topic. Keeps their writing clean and powerful. Helps them polish their work. |
This seems like a fairly worthless article to me. It has no data or numbers to back up what they are saying. They also say :
> You start by paying your top execs much less than millions of dollars a year.
It would be nice if they gave some example of book executives that make this kind of money (how many per company, etc...). Most CEO level people for large companies make a large chunk of change, it's how our country works right now. If a company wants a good CEO, it costs a lot of money (I don't like this, but it's a fact of busines right now).
They also don't talk about prices of marketing, editing, paying the author, etc... There are a lot of people involved in publishing a book and that costs money. Publishers can guess how many people will buy certain types of books and they need to be able to recover costs, so a book that is destined to sell fewer copies may cost more. |
You're a fucking moron. First, learn to address others with some respect. Second, look at the fucking headline, this is beyond sensationalist. |
Small parts of it are accurate,... but most of it is hyperbole.
On the good side:.... There are a lot of great sub-reddits that are cordial, welcoming and have built helpful niche communities that do great things. While these accomplishments are admirable, I'd hesitate to project/imply anything from them out onto the larger population of Reddit.
On the bad/negative side:
The trolls, flamewars, douchebags and other drama that goes on inside Reddit is similar to what goes on inside many social websites (Fark, Metafilter, 4Chan, 9Gag,etc). We're not exempt from those things, and I don't think anyone truly believes Reddit is some bastion of uniqueness. |
I do not consider it wrong to provide links to the site.
I consider it wrong to make money for providing links to download content other people have made.
I don't give a damn about downvotes. Clearly those people are idiots who made wild assumptions of me.
I know I'm write on this one based on your argument that you gave to me. Your argument is for someone who knows jack all about copyright and is on a basic level.
Firstly. I know about copyright. I know copyright needs to change. Current copyright laws are not suitable for the internet. Furthermore the entire industry needs to change. It will if the entertainment industry decides to let Kit dotcom do his "Mega Box" business where content creators can sell directly to the public removing the need for middle men publishers which take large sums of money to apply forceful marketing.
So anyway. Like I said. NO sympathy for someone who MADE money from linking the content.
Imagine 10 artists of whatever career type were best friends. They all make a bunch of stuff and try to sell it. They make a living. Then one guy provides a link to your stuff. GREAT! wonderful. More exposure. Okay...now hang on a minute he is making quite a lot of money from this. That isn't quite fair. It's the MONEY part that is the problem here.
Few extra things about copyright at the moment. Copyright is a GOOD thing. It's (original) job is to protect the owner of intellectual property. IE - I make a song. I own the song. I get to choose what can be done with the song. This mainly applies to music by the way. A song writer creates a song and he tends to have to relinquish control of his song to the record label. That way they can sell it however they want. This is the current problem. It worked in an age where the world was so disconnected. Now we can sell stuff digitally from the other side of the planet but the way copyright is handled hasn't changed. In fact it's become more restrictive.
I mentioned copyright is a good thing to creators. To protect their property. I don't want people using my art, music or whatever for their baby adverts. I don't want people making money from my hard work. I don't want someone to take a 5 second clip from my own music and push it in their own music and it becomes that "really cool part of the song". At the same time no one wants their stuff to be inaccessible. When it does become accessible for free you want to know that people are enjoying it. When it's accessible and "SuperJoe.com" is making money from you when your wanting to make more stuff for people to enjoy but you don't have the money for it. Well....fuck. |
Are you a troll or just without any kind of reading comprehension? Maybe you've got the wrong news story? He hasn't been to the US since he was 5! Are you suggesting he hosted a website when he was 5? Even the UK judge who ruled in favour of extradition said that he never left the North of England.
Look at the amazing double speak contained in this ridiculous sentence from Judge Quentin Purdy:
“There is a direct consequences of the criminal activities of Richard O’Dwyer in the United States, although he never left the north of England."
Which wording in particular are you confused about? I assure you he never left the UK, which makes the suggestion that he committed crimes in the US all the more ridiculous. The very fact you can't accept that he was in the UK the whole time, the same country in which the website was hosted, reveals just how absurd and self-contradictory the notion that he could have committed a crime in the US is. When you realise that, you will see how screwed up this situation is. |
Here's what we wrote on our facebook page a few days ago:
>Our site is down from time to time. Or suffer a broken css or is slow as hell or is ddosed. You wanna know why? Cause we are nothing like the other sites on the internets most visited top 100.
>
>Because we are just a few guys and gals running this ship on our spare time. Because we too wanna get drunk, take a vacation and sleep a little too much.
>
>Because we don't have an office. Hell, we barely own any servers anymore.
>
>But we do know how to stay alive. And we hope that you appreciate that fact more, and therefore can stand the discomfort of us being down a bit now and then.
>
>Oh, we run this free of charge too. k? thx, bye.
>
>//Winona Bay |
From those prices I assume it's blau.de or another E-Plus reseller. Yeah, it's cheap service, but it also is the worst service you can get in Germany. I used to believe for a long time that my cellphones reception sucked in Edge mode (everything's fine on the very rare occassion you get HSPA), till I switched to a T-Mobile based reseller, where I get blazing fast speeds everywhere . Even Edge is bearable there. |
It's a failure of regulation. Here, let me repost this from a few months ago:
Fun fact: In the 1990s phone companies were given massive tax breaks.
Basically, it only costs them about 1 cent a month to offer services like Call Waiting and #69, but they charged 99 cents. In the old model they would have to pay around 94 cents of that in taxes, because of price gouging rules.
Well, they brokered an agreement whereby they could keep that 98c in profits IF they used most of that extra money to build infrastructure (in this case, specifically high speed internet lines).
Oh, here's the twist... they didn't! They kept all the money, their profits doubled, and they laughed all the way to the bank.
Why? Because their lobbyists made sure that there were little-to-no enforcement mechanisms within the laws, and they bought off the people regulating them by offering them high paying jobs within their companies after 'retirement'.
As a fun bonus they could charge double what other countries do for internet because they had the excuse of horrible infrastructure that only really covers major cities. |
Who's to say you use actual text and not just use a mouse and a paint program and say paint rough letters into say a video frame and the letters are slightly a lighter green than a lawn and only every 10 frames. So it isn't actual text but rough painted letters that almost don't show and super small so you would have to actually look for them and since they are painted an E wouldn't be perfect or the same every time so there would be no real pattern to find or to match for a machine.
A) It would stick out as aberrant in a patterned way, especially if found in a suspicious context.
B) OCR is pretty good by now. That it's rough-painted instead of perfect is not a major obstacle. Plus, at that point you can have a person look at it.
C) Doing that would play merry hell with your video compression, making it clear something was not right.
> I have no faith in the ability for them to cover even that thoroughly not to mention images, or even hidden like an easter egg in some program on some warez site that they modified an uploaded.
They don't need to cover every site. They just need to care about the ones suspicious people use. Then they can see what the persons of interest access and go from there. Get on their machines, and it's easier still, as you can see what they do to extract it.
> There's also the dark web and there's also a chance they use p2p and it's hidden in a file that needs a magnet link to even find.
They don't need to find the file. They'll backdoor your machine and wait to see what files you grab. Even if you extract the steganographic data on a separate secure workstation, they already have the file and know where you got it. Which means they have the data and a lead to who put it there.
This may surprise you, but the intelligence world has been dealing with this sort of thing for decades now. They've picked up a few tricks, and they can't be easily stymied by parlor tricks. |
It's highly unlikely that the Court will even reach the merits in this case. Just this year the Court decided a case that basically involved these same surveillance techniques, brought by US lawyers representing people like Guantanamo detainees. Essentially, the lawyers argued that the amendments to FISA allowing for the kind of broad, meta-data collection almost guaranteed that their communications would be monitored, and they would, therefore, be injured by the law. The injury point is important, because the federal courts require that a plaintiff show standing to bring suit, and in order to do so a plaintiff must show either actual or constructive injury. Because these types of operations are covert, it is almost impossible to prove that the NSA has intercepted one's communications, so the lawyers basically had to argue that it was highly probable they would be injured. The Court declined to accept this argument, instead insisting the plaintiff show their injury would be "practically certain" to result.
So yeah, I highly doubt Rand Paul has standing to bring suit, unless of course he can prove he has been spied on under the Patriot Act's FISA provisions.
For those who are interested, the case is Clapper v. Amnesty International USA. The opinion is short, and fairly easy to read. |
Or maybe I'm reacting that way bc this exact same thing happens every 3-4 months on here and has for years. Like clockwork. The Paul's (much like this program that everyone is so appalled by) aren't new to the scene. They've been saying the same shit for years. Just bc many on here are dumbasses who just decided to care about the political world doesn't mean the rest of us have to froth at the mouth and declare this guy our savior. Many people have been fighting this and have been against this for years.
Feingold I think was the only senator to vote against the Patriot act originally. We're you proud of him then? Did you call him a terrorist supporting scum? We're you 4 years old?
The Paul supporters magically show up in support and come out of nowhere every few months and have for 30 years. Then people forget and they talk about something else. |
The government has had this in place since 2007, and illegal wiretapping scandals long before that. They've also had the equipment in place to completely subjugate the country for decades.
And they haven't.
A modern mechanized military like ours would literally roll over any civilian resistance. No amount of personal munitions will actually stop a full-on fascist takeover.
I'm not saying that it's impossible for the government to do it - but it's highly unlikely. The truth is that they don't really give a rat's ass about the vast majority of Internet traffic, because most of it is of no consequence.
What, they're going to find out that you buy pot or crack with Bitcoins? Maybe that you've got an incest fetish? Do you honestly think the government has nothing better to do than to pry in on the banal details of your life? Or that they even have the money to do it?
There are countless possibilities for abuse with any technology in anyone's hands. The question we need to ask is: do we have evidence that it is being abused, or used in an unacceptable manner? If we do, then we've got something. If we don't, all we've got is self-centered paranoia.
And to be totally honest, keeping you paranoid is an excellent way to control you. Instead of collectively focusing on change, it reduces us to bickering on the Internet and retreating into our tight paranoia-reinforcing social circles. |
Soooo, let me get this straight? They can tell who's a terrorist by the numbers they call and the length of the calls?
It's not like terrorist do a mandatory one hour check in at 1-800-MY-JIHAD.
Of course they have people hearing and reading your shit. Of course this applies to citizens. I don't believe they get approval on an individual basis.
All your calls are filtered for fucking accent, keywords, possible word and letter based encryption (think prison communication), time in US, time line active/deactivated as well as where and how many pre-paid phones you're buying. You're damn right if they have a red flag, they're also checking your purchase history, what you read, what you watch, what you've had delivered to your home, who your friends and family are and if they're flagged for something too. The list goes on and on and on with possible ways they can fuck you.
This doesn't really concern me too much. What does is the thought that in let's say 100 years, the government goes full-retard. Think 1984. Think V for Vendetta. Shit, our right to bear arms has several purposes, one being to prevent government tyranny. Really. I don't even own a gun, but you can bet after they shit all over our 4th Amendment they'll be coming after the 2nd. Think how much more difficult it's be to keep a government in check who knows everything about everyone. Then take away your power to resist. It's about control. It's about fucking money. I look at Washington and can't for the life of me see many people in high power who haven't been bought out somehow. The whole fucking thing is corrupt, we're getting lied to, and it will get worse. |
I'm just glad Obama is President while this shit floats to the surface, and here is why:
For the past few elections, Republican voters have been 100% behind anything that a Republican leader wants or says.
I've personally known Republicans who don't know what their view on an issue is, until they are able to consult with party doctrine, then it becomes binary (if Republicans like it, I am for it; and vice versa) :
>"Am I in favor of the new plan for pollution credits or against it? I need to find out which party likes/hates it, so I can have the 'right' opinion on this!"
This new Republican Party has become the self-policing party that demanded flag pins as a sign of patriotism, actual oaths of fealty within their party, said that "questioning the government = treason", "How dare you question the motives of a President!?", etc, etc.
But now, all of this has been turned on it's head, because the HNIC is a Democrat, and the NSA leak has come at the perfect time.
The Republican lock-step follow-the-President attitude evaporates when Obama is President:
The Republicans would be out there making excuses for all of this, except for one little glitch: There's a Democrat in charge right now.
Therefore, we have Republicans acting skeptically of leadership for a change (or maybe they just hate Obama enough that the outrage over NSA is automatic - it matters little which one is the case)
The Democrats are outraged because Obama smells exactly like GW Bush to them now:
We have Democrats who thought their vote for Obama was a vote against Bush policies (and so now they are outraged).
How do constituents see you if you back NSA?
If a Republican backs the NSA on this, he/she can be accused of being a "suck up" to Obama's "regime".
If a Democrat backs the NSA on this, he/she will be told of Bush's programs along these lines, and called a hypocrite (which few Republicans seem to understand, "hypocrite" is one of the most stinging things you can call a Democrat if you can make it stick -- even though Dems are not without their own types of hypocrisy)
I absolutely hated the Clinton witch-hunt impeachment, but I would honestly love some equally vicious and partisan impeachment hearings on this - just to get the public to take note, and to get the press to dig around in the dark corners a bit. Blow jobs don't matter, but this stuff about NSA matters plenty. |
martial law doesn't quite work that way. What you just described is tantamount to the actions Caesar took to turn the Republic in to an empire While the federal government can put down the populace it can not disagree with the Judicial branch as such an action would likely topple international relations and potentially lead to world wide boycotts and trade embargos on the us. |
As a southern Illinos resident I can confirm this. [Chicago]( is the most crooked city in this country. Too many of our governors have been suspected of crooked acts. Our last governor is serving jail time because of it and Jesse Jackson Jr was being investigated for improper misuse of funds before his resignation. Both of them were powerful Chicago politicians.
Just to give you an idea of how powerful Chicago is, take a look at the last gubernatorial election between Brady (R) and Quinn (D). Even though Brady won 109 of 112 counties he still lost. Quinn won the two most populous counties in Illinois and became our Governor.
There is no equal representation in Illinois. As an example we can look at a proposal by representatives in my area who proposed that we allow Illinois residents the right to buy St. Louis sports team license plates as the majority of southern Illinois are St. Louis fans since we have no connection to Chicago. Instead of just granting this one, tiny little proposal, Chicago politicians shut it down because as residents of Illinois we should only support Illinois teams.
The majority of every part of Illinois has the same wants and needs yet Chicago had the highest population, thus ruining this state for the rest of us. /rant |
That's fine, Rep. Cardenas, but top down technology training has already lost out to bottom up training in affluent areas where infants have access to ipads and other consumer technology. If you really want to energize a segment of society that needs it, I would suggest cutting the middle layers of bureaucracy and getting technology directly into the hands of lower income families. Such an approach could start simply with having technology available in daycares for small children. I've seen children as young as 12 months take to technology once they see adults using it.
source: I've run a hands-on interactive museum for 18 years. |
Bring on the downvotes you asses. (Edit: Damn, that was quick.)
Disclaimer: Male in tech here. Consider myself intelligent but I know there are many who are ridiculously smarter than I.
I'm not sure which is worse, the behavior of the boys in her class or the comments on this thread the effectively defend their behavior.
Is the author's tone a bit pretentious? Sure. Okay, I'll accept that. But, there's an underlying point here that says "You're belittling a girl in computer science because she's a girl, despite her being really good at it." Not to say they should do this even if she wasn't, but I bet most of them barely even know much about programming. I'm amazed this girl has done as much as she has.
I wonder how you guys would react if this story ended in the girl's suicide. Probably no different. There have been plenty of storied like this where that was the actual result. What if she was a gay guy being harassed at school? Just because it's "part of a high school experience" or whatever, it doesn't make it right. And guess what, this bullshit follows women in computer science their entire lives, unlike high school bullying. There's a horrible "women can't do computer science" culture that still exists in programming environments.
And for those of you questioning why she's ragging on Visual Basic: The intersection between visual basic jobs and jobs you want is basically non-existent. They tend to be corporate environments where your skills are considered disposable. In addition, it's just not a really transferable skill; something like C, C++, Java, or Python* is much better suited for getting a feel for how programmers actually operate.
*I feel languages like Ruby (too web-exclusive), PHP (too broken), Javascript (too specialized), Objective-C (only really used for iOS), and Go (not established yet) aren't as good for beginners. C# might be good, but maybe I didn't list it for my dislike of Windows-exclusive development? |
Unless I'm interpreting T-mobile's plans wrong, the $70 unlimited plan is unlimited mobile data and 2.5GB of tethered/hotspot data. T-Mobile's 10.5 data only plan is $70/mo in itself which indicates the mobile plan does not expect people to use more than 10.5GB worth of data less the value for voice/text services.
I agree the $80/mo for comcast is absurd, but that doesn't mean it's right to abuse service provided by the one carrier that doesn't price gouge the shit out of their customers. |
whether the economic system is called capitalism or communism
Communism is not an economic system, it's a form of Government. That being said, I think economic systems do "evolve" in a way, and this "marriage of government and business" is just a natural outcome of Capitalism.
As an example let's say we had a completely free, Laissez-faire, form of capitalism. As companies grow and die in this system there will, as in any given market, eventually be only a few top competitors left, and then those competitors agree to not compete (like we have now) or get bought out and only one giant monopoly is left. This is especially apparent in emerging markets. A similar real-world example would be rise of John D. Rockefeller in the then new petroleum market, and the monstrously huge monopoly he created.
Naturally this is the reason the government imposes regulation on these companies, so what do the companies do? They bribe current officials, or campaign for those who they support and end up regulating themselves.
> which happens as a result of the growth of government |
Are they not robots? Every time I hopped in for a game or two the same things would happen to me around the same time. Total domination within minutes.
^I ^might ^just ^be ^that ^bad |
just like the /r/bestof and /r/funny
A while ago, the creator of /r/standupshots quit because /r/funny started banning any OC posted by comedians...it became a subreddit filled with people stealing jokes from comedians, and not giving them due credit (which was NOT banned)..the post was posted to /r/bestof, but because it's all run by the same mods, it all got deleted as well |
Because i cant make his point for him, i can only draw my own conclusions. and to be honest, its not my place to think for someone else. I came looking to gain other peoples insight on this subject, not to pull my own opinion out of my ass. If i have something worth contributing to the discussion i will, but if i feel like someone has something valuable to contribute i'd like to encourage that they do so in a way thats easily understood, especially when so many people are dismissing this comment as " |
Maybe he doesn't know what to do about the problem, but he does know that he can help educate the people around him? If enough people are aware of the problem, there's a shift in general consciousness of the problem, and then there's a chance that somebody or some group will both have the capability of solving the problem and the passion to follow through with it. At that point, there will be plenty of people out there aware of the problem, wishing they could help, ready to support somebody who is doing something about it.
If only a small minority of people even know an issue exists, or don't know enough about it to realize the extent of the problem and how it affects their life and society, then there's really no chance of that problem being addressed. Maybe getting people to watch a movie is the best this person, or a lot of us, could offer, and it's better than nothing? |
While the knee-jerk reaction here is to call for the immediate disbanding of the NSA, the reality is that the US political system is far too impotent to carry out such a task. Instead of just complaining about the situation, I suggest a few actions:
Never lose sight of the fact that the NSA is monitoring every digital communication of which they are technically capable, which gives them unhead of power to influence, coerce, and otherwise pervert all apsects of society to their whim.
Start using whatever technical measures you can to make mass-surveillance much more difficult. Come to /r/privacy for guidance, or read our [FAQ](
The US political system is bought and paid for by special interests, so it's ultimately a futile effort to fight each battle being waged against the interests of the public. The war is only growing in magnitude, and the population at large is losing. It's far more efficient to try and reform the underlying system and greatly reduce the conflicts of interest which have killed US democracy. Take a look the likes of the [Mayday PAC]( to see how reform might come about. |
I think people who post mundane and self obsessed bullshit about their kids, their job, and themselves are infinitely more annoying than those who actually discuss important things.
Their narcissism and willful ignorance to the world at large is what allows this bullshit to happen in the first place.
Most of my FB friends are political because I won't allow my feed to be clogged with selfies and pics of people's bratty kids and what kind of alcohol they drink.
The idea that you have to be an acclaimed "expert" on any topic to have a valid opinion is a fallacy of arguing through authority and only serves to further mutilate the idea of free speech. |
Large mobile carriers are extremely profitable. If they wanted to alleviate congestion on their mobile networks, they easily do it. The argument you are using is the same exact false argument that the large mobile carriers use.
I read on reddit that ISPs also use this false excuse. |
T-Mobile has different plans and do offer unlimited 4G LTE plans. I'm currently on a plan that has unlimited 4G but only 1GB of LTE.
Something I didn't notice until I read the fine print on a commercial after having the service for awhile already. Haha
I'm currently at 6.5GB usage and my data usage cycle started the 16th. I could never affordably be with a carrier implementing a data cap.
I wanted to unlock my LG G3 and go back on big V with my parents family plan, utilizing my moms unlimited plan she hardly used.
BUT screw Verizon and their increasingly non consumer friendly practices. |
From what I understand, Verizon started throttling it's 3G unlimited data customers in 2011, but patrons who upgraded to 4G devices without renewing their contract were allowed to keep their current unlimited data service, which wasn't throttled...until now. |
The problem is that phone companies ignored the fact that 4g had a definition years ago and started marketing anything faster than GSM as 4g. So now we have 3g standards ranging from anything over 200kbps up to a theoretical max of 156mbps and 4g ranges from anything over 7mbps up to over 500mbps. With the line of what constitutes a 4g connection (funny fact is that if you follow the original definition of 4g, we don't technically have 4g service in North America yet) being so arbitrary they could limit you to 8mbps and still claim you are getting "4g" speeds by their (now generally accepted thanks to marketing) definition of the term. |
That's not the way it works. The issue has already been to the Supreme Court and is binding, black letter law. You would not even get certified as a class and would likely lose in summary judgment or be compelled into arbitration right away. Because of all this it is extremely unlikely any lawyer would take your case on contingency and you would be paying hourly. The company has high powered lawyers on retainer ready to fight you. You may even face a motion from them seeking for the court to order you to pay their fees for filing a lawsuit unsupported by the law. So no, it's not arduous task at all for them, but for the consumer it is nearly impossible. This is the exact problem class actions were created to solve. People love
you talk trash about class actions, but that vehicle was created for a very important reason. And without it, there is no practical, effective way to combat this sort of thing. |
Just because someone is a SCOTUS justice doesn't make them an expert in anything except pandering.
They may have more time on the bench before getting a SCOTUS nomination, but the Supreme Court has become as much a tool of big business and greedy politicians as the rest of the federal system. I don't say this to disparage any current or former SCOTUS justices - at least not more than they deserve on any particular ruling - but as a warning against holding any of these people up on a pedestal. One of President Obama's nominations was 100% ideologue (I'm not sure if she got selected, I had to get off the Internet for a time after her announcement as a nominee) with no qualifications - as far as I could see from her public record - for even being nominated other then she agreed with the President on a number of divisive issues.
Plus, her quote is more worrisome then you would like to think. Does she think we'll become slaves to technology (ala The Matrix) without proper privacy safeguards? Or is she saying that there need to be laws protecting people who use technology from invasive government? If the former, she's a moron who doesn't need to be listened to on this very important subject. If the latter - and I dearly pray she means the latter - then yes, she just scored herself a win in my book. |
People keep repeting this highly inacurate information. Please read [this link]( from the EFF which summarizes the bill. I don't know where did people get this idea that this bill is anti-privacy when it does the exact opposite. |
Democratic and Republican opinions are polar opposites on nearly every issue.
Not nearly, and that you would say this un-ironically only goes to prove how effective the tactics of two-party system have become.
The polar opposite of the Republican party line is not the Democrats' party line - it's probably a libertarian socialist gift economy. Yes, that's a real thing, and yes, it's actually quite a good idea in the opinion of literally millions of people , but you would have no idea of that if your political and economic understanding was entirely gained through the lens of the two-party system and the mass media that endorse it as a given.
Another way to look at it is given extremely well by [Jon Stewart when he appeared on CNN's "Crossfire"]( - an appearance that's widely understood to be a major cause of that program's cancellation. |
As someone who sells phones for a living let me explain it simply.
This is the discount normally given to lines that are out of contract or sometimes still in contract but is close to getting out. And it's 15$ monthly for the discount unless you have 10gbs of data or more then it's 25%.
So let's say 2 lines with 10gbs are out of contract the price is 130 or if the phones are still in contract it is 180 because the discount Is on the line access fee which is 40$ across the board for contract phones. So if you are out of contract and sign a new one you lose the discount since you are now in contract.
"Luckily" At&T has a 'new' plan called next that is not a contract but you have to pay for the phone on a monthly basis for either *20/24/30 months and a new iPhone 6 cost $27.09 a month for 24 months. Since Americans have been sheltered from the phone prices most people don't realize that an iPhone cost around $700.
So basically if you are looking to get a new phone your bill will go up. Either 15/25 a month if you sign a new contract or 27.09 if you get an iPhone 6. And they have incentives to have people switch to Next like no activation fee or some places like best buy offer gift cards.
So say you had the plan I said eariler with 2 lines and 10gbs of data and you both want to get iphones the plan will go up by $50 for signing a 2 year contract plus activation fees ($80) and the subsidized price $200. Or you switch to next your bill goes up by $54.18, no activation fee and you play tax off the total (around $55 per iphone).
Now while I'm using the iPhone 6 as an example it works for any phone so it doesn't have to be a new phone like the galaxy s4. You have the same options but the price will be different because they are different phones.
Now let's take a moment to thank T-Mobile for starting this shit storm and soon most major carriers like At&t verizon and sprint will no longer offer contracts. And also the other carriers I mentioned offer the same discount but they only give it to you when to switch over to installment billing (Next, verizon edge, sprint easy pay).
So if you did the same thing with the same plans and phones at Verizon your bill will go up by 27.09 per phone but will also decrease by 25 per phone so for getting a new iPhone is roughly $4 monthly and not that much when you get the phone.
And also I saw someone mention a discount. With at&t this is referred to as a fan discount which is applied on everything except installment billings to my knowledge. |
Yeah, I did (well, a single sentence that included a link to an article and two pictures, but still). |
I have both the 360 and the PS3. Sony's offering seems competent until you get a chance to see what the competition has to offer.
In my mind, Sony is the mostly competent brand. They have great hardware build quality, but the usability and every part of the software blows monkey chunks. This is true for the PS3 as well. There's no attention to detail, and annoying things are embraced rather than fixed. |
I have one of those expensive HDMI cables and a couple of them cheap ones. Because I needed the cables "now" back when I bought them, I didn't care that one of the cheap cables was 5 meters long when I only really needed 1 meter. Digital cables are just digital cables, right?
However for my PS3 it's impossible to get reliable audio using the cheap 5 meter cable, while with the more expensive one (which is equally long) it actually works. For my other equipment the cheap one works fine though. So I just swapped the cables and forgot about it.
Yes I know. Anecdotal evidence and all. I'm not advocating you go buy Monster HDMI-cables, because even an audiophile should realize that is silly. There is however, despite these being digital signal carriers, something called engineering quality and for 5-15Gbs realtime signals, quality does matter to some extent. |
You aren't stealing from the people who make the cables, you're stealing from the shop.
Even with a 30% mark-up they're still looking at a $38 bill. From the perspective of the companies producing the cables this is a sale unless they have some kind of sales forecasting report (but even in this theft of goods is seen positively - since it implies consumer demand). |
I almost never buy cables, I usually find them in free piles or Ham radio flea markets, but the next time I need one that I can't find, mainly longer ones, I think I will buy them from him. His website is a virtual encyclopedia of cables and his prices are exactly what I would expect to pay for a decent cable. |
Just a few replies for everyone:
I don't sell Monster cables and I would never recommend anyone buy them. I'm simply saying that I don't install the cheap monoprice type cables. I only install professional grade HDMI cables and I warranty them. If one fails, I come out and replace it free of charge within the first year. If I have to go out and replace a customers cable, its typically a hour's worth of work (travel time, actual work to replace it) so I'm eating anywhere from $50 - $100 every time a cable fails after an install. I would much rather the customer spend $5 - $10 extra for a quality cable that I know work well than for everyone to go through the head ache of a cable failing (not only do I have to make a trip out there, the customer's setup doesn't work 100% until I come out there so it's a head ache for them as well. No one wants to pay $15,000 for an audio/video system and then have the entire thing fail because I installed a $3 HDMI cable instead of a $15 or $20 cable). Norseman - I understand how to swap out a cable and have used your technique thousands of times, but about 10 - 20% of the time, there is just no way to pull a new cable through if one fails. For instance if you run 25 HDMI cables back to a server room closet and zip tie the bundle during pre construction to keep it clean and safe, there is no way to pull an HDMI cable back through the bundle. Usually when there is a situation where we cannot pull more cables through if one fails, we will run video signals over CAT5 which have a MUCH MUCH lower fail rate than HDMI and have a much longer length limit. We use a video balon on each end and skip the HDMI cable completely during preconstruction. |
Was there data loss in Amazon S3? No.
Why wouldn't people be putting their backups from EC2 into S3? That's what S3 is for, high retention, highly available storage. |
I do not enjoy being called indoctrinated. Take it back you scallywag.
That aside, I am in no way rejecting the definition of mutual aid, every human is judge for another, pseudo-leaderless-communism, common ownership (all is public) version of communism. I'm not even denying that this is what most realistic anarchists define anarchy as.
Hell, if it wasn't for the reliance on humans being morally just I would agree.
Rather, I am implying that Lulzsec are not examples of popular anarchy. They are not even examples of functional anarchy. They are examples of Chaotic Anarchy; the kind of anarchy an angsty rebellious teen envokes when s/he disreguards the rules imposed on him/her from an authority figure; this is the lawless anarchy, where everything goes simply because it is possible.
I'm not saying I agree with their message, disagree, or don't care., I am simply defining 'Just for the Lulz' as one plausable definition of Anarchy.
Always is a strong word. I like when you describe it as "virtually all" as opposed to "always" as I beleive it more accurately reflects the diversity of ideas among human kind.
- |
Yeah, the KGB used to get rock hard about informing people of their actions, obtaining consent, and then only looking at publicly available information. |
Right, it is just matching known data (the name discovered by facial recognition software). So if you have access to someone's facebook photo, you probably already know his name anyway (as well as age and place of birth). Do you really need facial recognition software for that? Anyway, the face itself is not revealing any interesting data the interesting data could have been know without any photo, so is this a risk at all? |
I've been a sysadmin of one sort or another for twenty years :-)
The downtimes on a modern system are almost zero if you're running your servers on ESX/ Hyper-V - and what problems you do have will usually limited to certain users (or offices if a switch dies). You also have control over how and where your hardware is used (cloud computing could be summarised as paying someone else to maintain your rented hardware).
If the internet connection goes down at a 'normal' site, everyone can still access their files, email internally, access internal apps etc. and carry on working - if you're all connected to a remote/ cloud system, you may as well all go to the pub until it comes back up.
This isn't the first time thin-clients have been pushed, but nothing has changed since Citrix appeared - put all your eggs in one basket, and your problems reduce in number but increase in size. |
Hi - Robotics PhD student here.
This is actually completely uninteresting and pretty trivial. See those glowy red cameras and the little silver balls on the quadrotors? That's a Motion capture system that gives millimeter-accuracy position accuracy for each of the little balls. Using that, you eliminate any sort of autonomy in order to build those towers because all you do is pre-program a bunch of flight paths to put the bricks together. The only autonomy is the control required for completing those paths, but when you know your exact position and orientation, that's pretty easy.
This kind of thing gets a lot of attention due to the flashy videos, but research wise isn't really novel or interesting at all because of the "cheating" using motion-capture. What would be interesting (and is actually part of my PhD research) is trying to do that WITHOUT motional capture, ie. have sensors on-board the quadrotor that you use to estimate the exact position while you are moving. These would be things like cameras/IMUs/altimeters/even a kinect. To get more points for awesome, we'd like to be able to do all of the processing on-board as well, instead of on an external computer that transmits commands to the motors on the quadrotor. Note: THIS IS VERY VERY HARD. |
No, SOPA isn't finished yet and the exact mechanisms for this aren't decided on. I watched for 2.5 hours while the House Judiciary Committee discussed amending this very part of the bill and they haven't established that a takedown order has to come from the DOJ. In fact, unamended the bill operates by offering full immunity to any ISP who acts to takedown the website or interrupt related services (like payment processing) based on a "credible" claim from a supposed copyright holder. There is absolutely no requirement for a court order or any other involvement by government to have a site taken down. If an ISP refuses to take down a site, they may be sued by the rights holder for not complying, but if they do take down the site they are immune... This means that if your local ISP gets a well written letter from a company making a takedown request it's virtually guaranteed that they will comply. |
There's been (as I understand it) one court case that says that a link itself can violate copyright (even though it was linking back to the original source, if I recall correctly a blog was linking to an original news article) but it was fairly recent and up for appeal.
SOPA, again, as I understand it, makes that decision universal though. |
I'm currently reading the bill and the section that stands out most is
§104. Immunity for taking voluntary action against sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.
These sections state that any action taken in order to enforce the act are able to be executed without repercussions. This means that people/companies/opponents could easily claim copyright ownership and most sites of reasonable size would be inclined to honor it, in order to avoid conflict. It makes it easier for the sites to pull down any content reported than to follow through and see if the claim is valid.
It is easy enough to see where companies could abuse this system against those who don't have the resources to invest in a law department to advise them otherwise. |
But they'll bomb it with offensive content, and so the copyrighted content wont even be noticed. They will think they're getting raided, but not know why. Or at least 'SOPA' might be among the comments, but it wont be regarded as any tangible protest that sysadmins would feed back to the company. NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER doesn't really cut it as a protest which a sysadmin can relate to their bosses. Do you get me? Also 4chan will do something for a night, reddit could do this for days and days, but only so long as its not associated with the NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER kind of stuff. |
Have any other Redditors read SOPA (H.R. 3261) yet?
My rep. is a cosponsor of this thing. So, I spent my entire Saturday reading this bill and all referenced U.S. Code to try to wrap my head around it before calling him (UGH!).
I'm no lawyer, but it looks like SOPA will only apply to sites whose domain name is registered or whose IP addresses are not inside United States territory (i.e. only to foreign sites).
It looks like the Attorney General is required to contact the domain owner prior to taking any action unless the domain owner has no physical address within the U.S. In that case, he can proceed immediately and is only required to notify the owner after the fact.
The Attorney General will serve an order to relevant ISP's (Comcast, Verizon, etc.), search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), and any payment gateway services (PayPal, Authorize, etc.) to block, cut off, and cease all business with the "foreign infringing site" within 5 days of the order.
If anybody has questions, I can try to answer them (unauthoritatively, of course).
( |
Lobbying is the standard (and legal) way for corporations and 'interest groups' to influence decisions of congressman by way of campaign contributions. It is absolutely illegal for a congressman to deposit a single cent of 'campaign money' into their personal bank account. Individuals ( NOT corporations - they pull the strings, but cannot legal donate directly) can donate up to two thousand dollars to a certain congress person's re-election campaign. An organized fundraiser - strategically run by lobbying groups - essentially rounds up people to pool together 2k donations, collectively accumulating some serious dough. A well organized fundraiser generally earns the congress-person's ear, and a case is made for the congress person to support or not-support a piece of legislation. A donation does not in any way garuentee that a Representative will vote one way or another, it's simply an effective way to influence their decision. |
Hard drive failures is just a statistical game. It's hard to get your head around as a home user because you have an extremely limited sample size.
Read this, it's very interesting:
Google is apparently the world authority on disk failures, since they likely own more than anyone else. |
Funny, I found this out about relatively cheap SYBA RAID cards. I bought one that said supported RAID 5. A few months go by and one of my hard drives goes bad. RMA it to WD and get a new one back. Put it back in the array and attempt to rebuild it, but find that this card doesn't support rebuilding...
Then what the fuck is the point of doing RAID5 if you can't rebuild the array!!!??? |
This isn't HD video but there's an interview of Gabe Newell, the guy running Valve, who runs Steam, and his take on at least video game DRM was this:
> You know, I get fairly frustrated when I hear how the issue is framed in a lot of cases. To us it seems pretty obvious that people always want to treat it as a pricing issue, that people are doing this because they can get it for free and so we just need to create these draconian DRM systems or ani-piracy systems, and that just really doesn’t match up with the data. If you do a good job of providing a great service giving people… as a customer I want to be able to access my stuff wherever I am, and if you put in place a system that makes me wonder if I’ll be able to get it then you’ve significantly decreased the value of it.
...
> We tend to try to avoid being super dictatorial to either customers or partners. Recently I was in a meeting and there’s a company that had a third party DRM solution and we showed them look, this is what happens, at this point in your life cycle your DRM got hacked, right? Now let’s look at the data, did your sales change at all? No, your sales didn’t change one bit. Right? So here’s before and after, here’s where you have DRM that annoys your customers and causing huge numbers of support calls and in theory you would think that you would see a huge drop off in sales after that got hacked, and instead there was absolutely no difference in sales before or after. You know, and then we tell them you actually probably lost a whole bunch of sales as near as we can tell, here’s how much money you lost by bundling that with your product. So we do that all the time, we’re just – you know, I wouldn’t be super happy if some other third party tried to tell me how to have relationships with our customers and I expect other people feel the same way, and I also tend to think that customers don’t really like it when you try to impose rigid rules on them as well, so we tend to think and hope that over time people will move towards doing the things that are in the best interests of both the customers and the content developers. |
That's what I'm doing. I bought X-Men: First class.
I own two blu ray players: one on my European PS3, and one on my American laptop. On the PS3 I get the region error which I kind of expected. On the laptop it just blocks for the first 10 minutes. After a while it works but I still couldn't play it.
There is also the shitty portable version, and here it gets even funnier. My itunes account was created in Europe, and therefore I couldn't watch the film on my account because it was meant for american customers only. The wmp version after a bunch of error messages worked, but as I mentioned it's shitty quality.
So I had to go and rip the blu ray. It took me several hours (it's been a while since I did it last) but eventually I was successful. I believe in total I probably wasted 8 hours in the whole process for something I PAID FOR! |
Let's assume that no 'old Hollywood' company would ever come up with something like Steam - which seems likely, given the piles of anecdotal evidence at hand. Valve was a fairly young company when Steam happened, and had a number of advantages no young-Hollywood company would have.
Valve had an extremely loyal, if small, customer base
Valve started the service by distributing IP that it owned outright
Valve was, for the most part, first.
Valve was part of an industry that, while not wholly embracing the idea of digital content distribution, was technologically focused and thus could see the fact that digital distribution was going to happen, regardless.
A new up-and-coming company (say, Netflix) has the HUGE problem that if they wanted to create Movie Steam (to use the least original name possible) they own none of the intellectual property they are distributing and thus can take no independent risk. The companies that own the content they want to distribute are huge and entrenched into an existing archaic and slow-moving business. This is exacerbated by the fact that they're so risk-averse that it borders on paranoid/delusional.
I don't think there's really any hope for old media, and the only thing we really have to hope for is that the next generation is so completely detached from the existing movie studio/theater/physical media distribution model that they will simply ignore it completely. If this happens, and physical media companies continue their streak of being completely detached and inept enough to allow a whole wellspring of independently-produced media to spring up, they may be drug into the future by force, or allowed to die screaming.
So most likely, this is going to end up being a legislation problem.But this is already turning into a wall of text... |
Yeah exactly. They think they are fucking up the pirates. No. They are fucking up their paying customers. Pirates release DRM free version for free. This is what they should try to compete with. If you look at it as someone who has a brain, what will you get?
DRM infested version that you have to pay for, or DRM free version that you dont have to pay for?
Anyone who came up with the idea to make it harder for paying customers is absolute fucking idiot, should be kicked in the balls and fired.
They should COMPETE with pirates by offering better services(steam does that really well for example). But what do they do? Make it harder for paying customers, brilliant idea! |
For the past 6 or 7 years I have been pirating a good amount of movies. Before I buy one I check and see if I can hit the menu button and skip all of the previews and whatever else might be on there. I want to be able to hit the menu button and go straight to the DVD or Blu-Ray menu. If I find that you cant skip all of that bullshit then I download a torrent and burn it to a disc. I miss out on a lot of extra features but I have never watched a director or actor commentary on any movie that I own so I doubt I'm missing much. I also check to see if it is going to try to install anything on my computer if I watch it on here. Lots of them install DRM silently and you never know anything about it unless you look at the running programs and ask what the hell warnerdiscsafety is. Thats not a real program just an example.
When I but something I expect to be able to watch it however I want. I did not pay for the movie to watch commercials. Especially after I have watched the disc once. I hate putting in a disc thats 5 years old and seeing a preview for a movie that was released 4 years ago and I am not allowed to skip it.
Put the movie on there and the menu that's all we need guys. It's just like pc games. Put the game on the disc and give each customer a unique serial number. If it has to connect to the internet or install some DRM it's easier just to pirate it and avoid the DRM possibly causing problems on my computer or the online check keeping me from playing when the internet is down.
I am the customer and yes I am entitled to getting what I want. That's the way it works you see. I want to watch a movie or play a game. You make the movie or game and sell it to me. I watch or play it and that's the end of our transaction. I will be glad when the companies forcing this shit on us go out of business and someone steps in to give us the entertainment we want packaged the way we want it.
There will always be piracy. By making it difficult for paying customers to play the game you are only creating new pirates. I used to spend a lot of money on games and my wife watches movies like its a contest and she wants to see them all first. You are losing quite a bit of money from me and people who want the same thing. Piracy is here to stay. People used to copy cassette tapes and VHS movies. They recorded songs off the radio. They bought fake copies on the street in big cities. They ripped CDs and burned it to disc for their friends.
The easier and more convenient you make purchasing your products the fewer people will pirate them and the more money you will make. Taking the opposite path costs you double because you have to pay people to invent new DRM and you lose customers because of that DRM. If you stop now it may not be to late. The old way doesn't work anymore. Good luck with your new DRM. |
The main thing about piracy is that it's mainly cost and time to purchase vs. cost and time to pirate .
Pirating takes time, has kinks (download issues, plugging your computer into your TV to watch on a big screen), and more often than not is of lesser quality than the real thing (not always the case). Piracy will always have these problems, thus purchasing will always have a relative advantage.
The PS3 was largely safe because it was 1.) expensive, 2.) hard to crack, and 3.) had little audience. The Wii wasn't trivial to crack, and ultimately it took custom firmware (HackMii) and several years to have 99% compatible HD loaders (custom IOSes). It was fun for hackers to tinker with because it was cheap and everyone had one. Even now, the PS3 is cracked wide open but piracy is very limited. Who wants to pirate when you need to purchase a huge external HDD and then download 20-40 GB games? This is very much a case where pirating is not worth the effort put into it; you might as well buy a used game. Time is money, after all.
Piracy in movies can be killed quickly and simply. Movies should be cheaper and more available. Last week I went out to buy Pirates of the Caribbean 1-3. I went to two Best Buys, Wal-Mart, and Target before I found a single copy of Pirates of the Caribbean 1, and only two copies each of Pirates 2 and 3 left. Of course, all of these places has a wall of Pirates 4 which I didn't care about. After all that, I was lucky--I got all three movies for $10 each. Typically movies cost $15+, maybe $25 if they're Disney. Movies are cheap to produce, so Hollywood should sell to retailers at a bargain so they can stock huge amounts for little price. Make the movies cheap for consumers, too. If movies are $25, I'll rarely buy them. At $10, I'll buy them sometimes. If they were $2-$3 like in China, I'd have a wall of movies, myself. |
Good question!
Bitcoin is not a company. It's a computer program and it's the network of computers that are running the program. That's (basically) all it is. There's no company that runs it.
When the Bitcoin network was started in early 2009, the first user (the inventor) began "mining" Bitcoins. When a user mines Bitcoins, their computer is performing complex mathematical calculations. These calculations are used to process transactions by other users, which makes the network more secure. When people mine Bitcoins, they also have a chance at earning Bitcoins themselves. Every 10 minutes (approximately), one of the miners gets 50 Bitcoins. They can then send those Bitcoins to other people in exchange for goods and services they want, just like US dollars (or any other currency). They can also trade those Bitcoins for another currency.
(Side note: every four years, the reward that miners can receive is cut in half until it reaches zero, so that the currency will not suffer from inflation, and there will never be too many Bitcoins. Around the year 2140 the reward will reach zero. At that time, there will be 21 million, and new Bitcoins will never be created).
There are multiple exchanges where users can trade Bitcoins for other currencies. These exchanges let users connect with each other and make sure that users can trade Bitcoins and dollars with each other, and the exchanges charge a little bit of commission to make a little bit of money.
A bitcoin has worth because other people believe it has worth. I will sell products to other people in return for Bitcoins using the current exchange rates because everyone else agrees on the exchange rate. The rate changes rapidly based on how other people feel about the value of Bitcoin, just like any other currency.
The main idea of Bitcoin is that it is "decentralized". Unlike any other currency, there is no main body that regulates the amount of Bitcoins that exist, and there is no main server where transaction data is stored. There is no company that runs it. The network is run by the users.
Instead of a company "fabricating them out of nowhere", it's the actual users that can make them, which means that Bitcoin is fully decentralized, and no one person has any control over anyone else's bitcoins.
If what you described (a company creating its own currency) was real, it would be the biggest scam in history! And it also would have been shut down and its owners arrested, which has happened before (like with Liberty Dollars).
I'm kinda tired, so this might not be a great explanation. The Wikipedia article is pretty well-written, albeit a bit more in-depth than necessary for most new users. |
While yes, you've broken down my statement into parts, even when i said, that being on twitter and carrying a long conversation ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE you've failed to read my piece and see it in it's entirity. You also didn't read anything about what Johnathan Zittrain argues about the internet and where it's going. |
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