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A man in my town has a Microsoft Windows computer, and was arrested for manufacturing child pornography. We must have all of Microsoft arrested for creating the platform under which he accomplished his crimes. Also, he owned an iPhone, so somebody get an APB out for Tim Cook and Phil Schiller.
Uh oh, I also just found out he had a Samsung television, and an Amazon Kindle. Better arrest them too. I'm sure they enabled him in some way. Also, he was a Canadian citizen. Parliament won't be happy when the police show up to haul all their asses to jail. |
How many devices can play a dvd in your home? It makes sense that they wouldn't bother with it. Optical media is dying on favor of streaming. Bluray is the replacement for dvds, but apparently not everyone got the memo.
Plus the wii is stereo only, so anyone with surround sound wouldn't want to use it. Anyone who has sense and an HD screen wouldn't want to play an SD source when an HD source available. Many people either still buy dvds for their bluray player or they just mistakenly call them dvds. If you have an hd screen and are buying dvds over bluray because you can't see the difference, slap yourself and get glasses.
If you still have a SDTV, sucks for you, please work towards joining the rest of us in 2012. Retina TVs are about a decade away and that should be the final resolution change. |
Greed is fine
First off, this is simply your opinion, it's an assertion with nothing to back it.
Second, I would argue that your definition of greed wouldn't pass even your own inspection, and that it'd quickly devolve into a No-True-Scottsman, where every example you were presented with where greed is demonstrably damaging to a society and its individuals, you would qualify as not being the "right kind of greed".
Nothing a priori indicates that greed is good, neither human nature, nor nature itself. For example, I can think of not a single example of normal animal behaviour that could be labeled as "greedy".
Btw, greed is not the same thing as the desire to survive, nor to thrive. |
This flies right in the face of the argument that it's the "big government" that's at fault.
It is not . "Big government" does look to entrench itself through bureaucracy, but ultimately, it's power is nothing compared to the power of Big $$$$ when it comes to making laws. And lest not forget the coupling of the two, where the one seeking the coupling is prevalently the business, because it stands more to gain. |
I am not supporting Apple on what it does, but to me it seems that they are doing this because of the ambiguity of intellectual property law in the US, especially on software. These laws are out dated, and broken. So can't really fault a company trying to taking advantage of laws in place.
It's similar to US tax laws. Someone can say that the tax code is broken and geared towards the rich. But it would be stupid to not try to pay the least you can. |
Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme |
That sounds accurate. Reddit with google fibre is like a group of girls that are super horny and they're all trying to fuck one guy. The guy just finished with one girl and needs a break for a little, but they're just screaming «I don't care, just shut up and fuck me»! |
Actually, most microcontrollers sell for less and use less. Most microcontrollers, for example, do not need an RJ45 adapter on them, so unless you absolutely need to be connecting to the internet, this could have been cheaper and more power efficient. |
You wouldn't be forced. No one was ever forced. They didn't have to sign those contracts. The Grateful Dead managed to negotiate contracts on favorable terms. The Beatles eventually started their own label.
Record labels are transitioning into being "service providers" rather than owners and leasers of content. One of the biggest services they provide is marketing. If you put your content on BandCamp, big deal - you still have to drive traffic. But a label known for putting out high quality content, can get their artists blog and magazine reviews. They have connections that most independent artists do not. |
The 4th last paragraph addresses just that concern. Glad you pointed it out for the |
egads, the angst so much angst....
Most halfway decent "low cost centres" in India are run very very professionally. Most of them do have a police check (passport based), a written test and multiple layers of interviews - and this is for an ENTRY level call centre operator job.
I have been to many banking centres abroad on work (I was a mid level management dude in a "low cost" firm before I moved to a shipping and logistics company), and the level of info sec followed at the centres abroad was so pitiable that they made the infosec rules in companies I worked for almost draconian- No Cell phones in office, no internet access, metal detectors at the gate, body searches if you as much as set off a beep (pat downs mostly), NDA's, extensive background checks...all a part of daily routine (excepting the background checks), my colleagues who used to visit us in India actually said that the crap we pulled in the name of infosec would violate a 100 different laws in a country like the US or UK, and that it was fairly invasive.
Sorry for the rant, but |
Why would such a case be so bad?
Not sure it's 100% parallel, because I do Canadian tax... and it probably varies from state to state as well. But given that disclaimer:
The basic problem is payroll taxes.
You don't pay payroll taxes on a contractor, because they're a business you're buying services from, not an employee.
Workplace conditions determine if you are an employee. Stuff like if you have set hours or set duties, or if you can hire subcontractors. You need to look at the list of determining factors and make a judgement call, there's no sharp dividing line.
When you hire an employee/contractor under questionable conditions and treat them as a contractor, you're taking a risk that the government will not agree with that assessment.
If the government decides that a person is an employee instead of a contractor, then they can demand the employer pay them back taxes going back to the day they were hired (plus penalties and interest, most likely). They will also probably audit the business to see what other funny stuff is going on.
You can, of course, fight it. But that's a huge pain in the ass and there are no guarantees. The audit will be enough of a pain on it's own. They will make you prove everything you ever told them about anything.
EDIT: |
There was a guy a few months back who automoated his job at a company, after asking reddit what to do (he was getting all of the bonuses because his automation worked so well) he brought it up to his boss. I believe his immediate boss got mad and said he wasn't doing the work and was trying to fire him but the higher ups loved it and gave him a new position. (Not sure on what the real deal was with his boss and stuff, just trying to remember) |
That's what reddit.com/r/ |
I disagree. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing. It's rewarding, mentally stimulating, and you can create so many things with only a computer as your tool. I've been programming for 10 years and getting into this field is one of the best decisions I've ever made. In an economy where most people are struggling for work you can get a job as a programmer very easily. If you are a programmer with 3-5 years experience headhunters will actively recruit you. How many industries can say that? |
I was a college student at the time too and remembered thinking "oh my god it's so obvious, buy equities now". Here's the thing though: A lot of people are very intimidated by stocks, consider them no better than gambling, etc. Those people who were inclined to invest in equities are the people who were already invested in equities before the crash, and just had half of some large fraction of their net worth wiped out. |
Previous coverage of the on-going case at [PopeHat: Prenda coverage](
The [oldest post on this issue isn't that old (March 5^th, 2013)]( but that is because PopeHat is a law blog and has been looking at the case and the legal aspects that go with it.
That initial article describes the Prenda situation as:
>If you follow online copyright issues, you've probably heard of Prenda Law, a controversial shop that has filed aggressive piracy cases against porn downloaders. Supporters say they vindicate legitimate copyright interests against pirates; detractors argue they rely on speculation in identifying alleged downloaders and practice what amounts to extortion in demanding targets choose between settlement or public identification. You can follow the controversy at sites like Ars Technica or Techdirt or any number of other blogs.
>
>Recently Prenda Law — and the lawyers associated with it — have been accused of various forms of fraud in connection with their litigation strategy, including allegations that they either stole or made up an identity to serve as the corporate representative of one of their plaintiff entities. Prenda Law and its various associated attorneys hotly deny any wrongdoing. But hot denials have not prevented truly astonishing legal spectacles, like a jaw-dropping hearing in Florida or a extremely ominous inquiry by United States District Judge Otis Wright, whose inexorable wrath you should, if at all possible, avoid.
This is just coming towards the "end" of a rather interesting series of (court) events. |
There is a theater near my house (M-89 Cinema) that sells all tickets at $5.00 a piece for night showings, $4.00 for daytime. The wife and I went to see The Heat last weekend, and with two tickets, popcorn, nachos, two drinks we had an enjoyable experience for under $20. It isn't the nicest place in the world, but the fact that the prices are so low compared to most places has actually gotten us to start going to the theater again instead of just waiting for Netflix or hitting a rental store. |
Decent point. I was curious enough to draw it out to see the effect. Price increases cause a supplier surplus, and assuming most consumers aren't willing to pay more than they were already paying, demand would shift back as well. Normally, demand would shift back as well, forcing suppliers to lower prices in order to rid the surplus. If suppliers refuse to do so, they will continue to operate in a range below the maximization of profits. Of course, there are other factors at play, such as if demand decreased first, but.... that would still result in a lower price/unit. Not sure what their strategy is, but I will concede that I could be wrong in my analysis as a business student... not a business expert. |
I freely admit I haven't been paying attention to Origin sales, as I only have one game on Origin, maybe two. When I use cheapshark to find sales, however, most of the stuff that pops up on Origin on the main page is only $5 off, so that was mostly personal experience. I have stuff from GoG and a few other places that I always end up forgetting about because Steam handles everything so nice (including installation). Having a catalog of games is just...appealing. I can look down my entire library in one place and decide what I want to play. And at this point I'm basically locked in. my 150 steam games won't transfer anywhere else, so it seems stupid to start another collection somewhere else. I'm letting my anti-EA bias show, here, but I'm not exactly comfortable entrusting an entirely digital library to a company with a record of shutting down studios and servers when they show signs of being unprofitable. If they make some change and piss off their customers and start hemorrhaging money, will all the Origin games go down with the ship? Steam has the "you get to keep your games" clause, but I haven't researched Origin's policies regarding the matter. |
In this case, I would say that the appropriate position is far from the ethical one.
Piracy needs to be a present threat, because it's been the only real competition that big media has really ever had. This drives them to innovate in the customer's favor just as often as it drives them to innovate in ways that hurt the customer, and we see in the OP the effects of this innovation. If the threat of piracy ever goes away, we'll see this innovation stop. The upshot, though, is that if piracy goes away the big-name studios might green-light experimental projects more often, but that prediction is not nearly so sure.
Am I excusing the actions of pirates such as myself? No. It's morally wrong to consume that which hasn't been paid for. What I am saying is that piracy is necessary for and benefits even those consumers who are furiously against it on moral grounds, because there is otherwise no comparable substitute to blockbuster movies or hit albums . I wouldn't pirate a car, because cars are already priced fairly and I am not told by the car manufacturer where I may go with it. Media was not, but now, well, it's getting there. The fact that today you can buy a DRM-Free song for $.89 whereas ten years ago it was a locked-down affair at $.99, and that you can buy a DVD today for $15 that would have cost $30 ten years ago (and the one today comes with a digital copy), the existence and success of Netflix and Hulu, etc, is proof enough of that. |
A few things which could be improved that I can think of:
Imagine Steam, but with movies and TV shows. We pretty much already have this with iTunes and all these other streaming stuff
Some of the problems with torrenting that could be improved by a paid service is no need to surf through several links to find the right download. Sometimes the highest seeded versions are low quality and sometimes the 1080 files available are 15 GB instead of 1-2 GB. For shows in the middle of a season, you have to find a download link for each episode, as it won't be compiled into one link yet. Also, on free torrenting sites, new torrents with large demand can take forever to download because many people stop seeding once finished. Older or less popular shows can be harder to find on torrent sites, and sometimes the only ones available are kinda sketchy.
What I want is a service with an easy to navigate search and download library (not 100 results of the same thing). The service could also save and name the files locally so I won't have to run it through the same program. The paid service could also take advantage of P2P file sharing (during heavy loads), so it could arguably have slightly better download speeds because everybody could be forced to seed and there won't be 500 different torrents floating around of the exact same thing. There would only be ONE (or more if you want a choice for lower/higher quality) torrent for a movie and prior to release servers would have the file ready for seeding from several locations. Large, reliable library (no dead or nonexisting torrents for older or obscure TV shows). |
Origin may be younger than Steam, but that's not an excuse for its shortcomings. Rather, Origin could have used Steam as a greater source of inspiration in order to learn to do it right.
I don't know about you, but when I was in high school and got a C on a physics exam I didn't get to tell the teacher "It took thousands of years for mankind to learn all that stuff so I deserve an A for learning half of it in a few weeks!". The teacher would have told me mankind had to do research before knowing all these things, whereas I can just read it in a book.
If you want to join an existing market and you can just observe the successful competition to learn how to design your product right, there's no excuse for doing it wrong. If EA had tried putting a feature in Origin, thinking it would appeal to users but turned out to be unpopular, I'd understand. However, whoever designed Origin for the most part seems to have thought "Oh, you know that feature Steam has that makes it great? Let's not put that in Origin!"
Origin is a product of purely profit-driven development mindset. Unlike Steam they didn't try to put out the best product they could, instead they converted all potential features into statistics and equations to determine how much money each would make them and would cost, and they only kept the features that had (according to their calculations) the best profit/cost ratio. Unfortunately with this method, the final product sometimes makes no sense.
As an example, it's the same reason Apple came out with a laptop a few years ago which featured a built-in camera but no microphone - they had to choose between the two to keep the computer thin, the math said the camera was worth more than the microphone, nobody was thinking how that translated practically, and as a result nobody stopped to say "wait, who's actually going to have a use for a camera but no mic? And even if such users exist, are they really the majority of people who want an extra-thin and extra-light laptop?". |
the last time there was significant ash from iceland, there were concerns mostly in the north of europe, with only northernmost scotland having visible ash deposit. there werent clouds blocking out the sun anywhere, the main concern was cumulative damage to aircraft engines. |
So fucking accurate. There are movies coming out in my country (New Zealand) in December that are currently playing in the US and other countries. There are popular movies like The Perks of Being a Wallflower that were never even advertised here. Our TV viewing is very limited. With one cable company taking advantage of it's hold on the market it's $200+ to be connected and you still don't have SoHo, which hosts stuff put out by HBO. The US had started season three of Game of Thrones before season two had been advertised on free to air in New Zealand. Hell, I had to torrent Orange is The New Black because Netflix is unavailable here. Even if I wait to see if a show I want to watch is coming out in NZ, I will most likely be a year behind everyone else, and not wanting too tiptoe around the internet behind 451 blacklist extensions, I am going to torrent them. [(Not that living in a country with a broadband speed comparable to 'the world's fastest dial-up' makes that a great option either.) ]( |
I picked up GTA IV on steam a couple of weeks ago for €5. Biggest waste of €5 ever. I know it was partly my fault for not properly researching the game first (although I went on canirunit.com and according to that my pc is well able to run it). When I loaded up the game it was the laggiest piece of cheap console port crap ever to exist on my hard drive. I immediately checked the steam forums for solutions for the terrible fps but to no avail. Obviously I can't return the game but IMO it was a faulty product and steam shouldn't be allowed to sell it. |
They probably should have done what Google does:
do not open it to the entire public at once
Everyone knows that no new web-site can survive and instant onslaught and mad traffic rush. The only want is to limit who's allowed to access it.
i don't know how you decide who gets to use it first; and there would almost certainly be bitching, whining, and complaining, about how only some people are allowed into a public, tax-payer funded, government web-site. |
The bullet hitting the glass and decelerating imparts exactly the same amount of force to the glass (less a small amount for friction against the barrel and air that it transited) as it does the the gun from which it is fired. |
Does anyone else read "neural networks" and only think Terminator/Skynet. |
You know, as an American living in a second world country, when I hear Americans bitching about their 100Mbps cellular connections and overpaying, It makes me want to smack baby animals. Seriously, I'm trying to run my business here on a cruddy DSL connection with 1Mbps upload. I wish I had the burden of "overpaying" for those kind of speeds. |
You can infer that all you want -- I didn't say it. I said that comparing today's society to either Huxley's or Orwell's dystopian novels is making a terrible analogy. They are not comparable. Saying that does not imply I believe the current situation is "good." It just means that I think comparisons to those works are lazy.
Huxley wrote a book and he felt that all of the details of that book were important. The premise of Brave New World is not that if you dose up the population with drugs and provide them with entertainment they'll be docile. Hell -- they aren't even docile in the novel! The Savage interrupting the Soma distribution almost leads to a riot, for fuck's sake! Huxley devotes quite a bit more time describing the mental conditioning and physical conditioning done to "prepare" each caste for their roles. Explaining that away as unimportant so you can draw parallels to our society's use of anti-depressants and ubiquitous electronic entertainment misses the forest for the trees.
It's the same with Orwell. Sure, we have much more surveillance than most people are comfortable with; however, that's missing the point of Orwell's work by grabbing inconsequential details. The telescreen wasn't as important as the mental conditioning -- Orwell spends a great deal more time describing newspeak and doublethink than the telescreen precisely because those concepts are more important in his story.
Huxley and Orwell are trying to tell the story of how to condition human beings to fit into roles in a society that has no concern for individual goals or dreams. For Huxley that is accomplished by genetic/mental/physical conditioning to create humans that are happy with their lot in life without choosing it. For Orwell that is accomplished by creating an atmosphere of terror and privation that demands accepting the mental conditioning required by newspeak and doublethink. Incidental means of control aren't nearly as important as those concepts.
If you think Brave New World is a book about drugs and 1982 is about surveillance I guess these kinds of lazy comparisons will do it for you. I think diagnosing the sickness in our society as a problem of drugs and entertainment misses the point. It's a lovely way to explain why all the "sheeple" aren't seeing things your way but it doesn't do much to move the needle. |
I bought bitdefender once. And only once. Oh my god was it the worst fucking pile of shit I have ever seen in an antivirus. I also got scammed by reading online that bitdefender was supposedly a "good" antivirus. I would suck a dick before I used bitdefender ever again. Their terms are sketchy and they try to scam you out of money by stating in their terms that it is automatically renewed and there is nothing on their website that allows you to cancel the antivirus. You practically have to call the company and get on the phone with someone just to be able to cancel it. |
I read the article with interest but was put off by the indirect disdainful reference to net neutrality when he said people were trying to apply 80 year old regulations to the telecommunication industry. John Sununu is a republican senator who sits on the board of Time Warner Cable. Guess what: John Sununu doesn't give a shit one way or the other about Uber. He wrote the article to make his company's stance against net neutrality seem like an Everyman struggle. |
i feel like the article is decrying outdated regulation more than regulation in general (though they've taken some liberties). and bureaucracy needs to be streamlined and updated, rather than just tacking on new chunks that only complicate things more.
it also was scoffing at the idea of regulations in place only to hinder uber for the sake of "fair competition." or something. |
All class action suits I have ever been a party to have settled for a sum of money, not a sum per person. The lawyers take one third and the class splits the rest. The fine print sets some low threshold, like five dollars, and says if the individual payout ends up less than that, it gets to charity. |
Yes there isnt malware
However what about those grey market products that penatrate IOS android windows phone Mac windows and even linux installs.
Things change. and they are changing faster. you hold this notion in your head that somehow they are above penetration. the programs to hack those things are out there.
Finfisher is real. and the backdoors the goverment wants will find there way into the grey market/blackmarket vendors. our world is corrupt not the bright bastion people pretend and want it to be.
Macs are not secure nor is the IOS nor is android the only way to know if a product is secure is to have the code indepedently reviewed and audited.
and currently ios does have malware spreading fast through those hong kong protestors.
The issue with ios is that if there is a immediate problem with it. tell me how you can fix it? or a work around when you cant actully get into your iphone. your waiting on apple
but if its android you do have that kind of internal access independent of the manufactuer (depending on phone).
Closed source will never be secure. and close source is how you hide those backdoors. and yes..CLOSED SOURCE IS ASKING FOR FAITH not facts.
none of these companies have actully done anything to show that they are not backdooring microsoft or apple. unless the code is open source. that is all you have is faith there isnt not intentional backdoors.
unless the software/firmware of the device is open to modification. tell me then what have these companies done to earn that kind of faith with the snowden disclosures. with the nsa focused on surveillance of the american people> the security of the american people.
please tell me what closed source and apple have done both fiscally patent wise and with there overall plan to merit such a defence of who and what they are.
closed source is faith |
FICO]( invented the credit score and it became a financial industry standard. The most current credit system model involves companies taking into account information gathered on you in reports from the three credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.
Scores and reports are two different things. Your score is a just mathematical construct that's used universially in the U.S., whereas each bureau maintains its own information databse and report on you. Those three are the industry leaders but in reality you have over 50 credit scores and reports because there are a ton of bureaus. A lot of these scores are just shitty modifications of FICO scores and are often called 'FAKO' scores.
A report generally contains words and bullet points, a score is just a calculation, and both are derived from the same database which each company individually maintains. |
The actual headline:
"Will Google’s certificate change hurt China’s e-economy?"
Betteridge's law of headlines:
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." |
Did it? This is the exact reason that Mozilla distrusted the certificate, and is ostensibly the reason Google did as well. In the context of this post, it seems like this is exactly the |
Desperate no. It's more a last-chance effort to while not COMPLETELY reign in the NSA it's more a "Foot In The Door" move cause it opens the doors for more desired reforms down the line. It's called "The Long Game".
They would oppose it if it didn't move their goals along which this does.
To quote Access: "The reform we need for the reform we want." Also there's no silver bullet that will solve the problem and trying to obliterate a surveillance system that has been entrenched for the better part of 12 years is a tall order and not exactly fesable in today's political climate. They have to CAREFULLY maneuver themselves into a position to where we can demand stronger reforms and this is that step. |
From the beginning:
Say you're from the US, and you want to watch a show on Netflix like Utopia. It turns out that Utopia is only available to someone in the UK so when you try to connect, Netflix says "you're not allowed to watch this!"
So you join up on the Hola network. Instead of directly connecting to Netflix, your computer first asks the Hola network for a "peer", someone (just like you) that has Hola installed and is also in the UK.
You ask that peer to connect to Netflix for you. Netflix sees that the request is coming from the UK and sends the episode to them which they then send to you.
The issue is that someone else can use your computer the same way, Except they don't have to just go to Netflix. They could go to BuyGunsDrugsAndKiddiePorn.com, but it's actually your computer going to this site, which means you're the one that gets put on the watchlist.
Hola doesn't really advertise this "feature" and so a lot of the users are sharing their internet unknowingly.
On top of that (and this is where i'm still iffy about what's going on), Hola now has a service called Luminati. Which (for a price) allows you to access the Hola network with a lot more control. (Say you want 100000 computers to ping a site at the same time) |
You design all the interesting parts of the phone, leaving a blank spot in the diagram that says "RADIO STUFF GOES HERE"
That's... not how it works.
Remember the RAZR? Remember how it was Cingular exclusive? Remember how it took Motorola more than a year to port it to CDMA, and when they finally did, they had a phone which was bulkier and had inferior battery life?
Instead of porting the RAZR, they should have tried to get the RAZR2 out the door faster. They rested on their laurels, and fucked around for months porting their phone when they should have been working on the RAZR2.
It took them three years to get an update to their flagship product out the door, and by the time they did, everyone stopped caring, because the RAZR2 dropped in June '07... just in time for iPhone to steal it's thunder. iPhone became the new $600 fashion phone, and the RAZR became a joke.
Moral of the story: the mobile phone industry moves fast, and if you spend time porting your phone to cater to THREE FUCKING PERCENT of global cellular users, your competition will release a better GSM phone and kick your ass. This strategy fucked Palm (Treo), and it fucked Motorola. Yes, they both recovered, but how is that a good excuse to make the mistake in the first place?
Just because everyone else does it doesn't mean it's a good idea. Apple frequently avoids stupid/costly mistakes that everyone else thinks is a good idea. This is one of them. |
For a single home you do not need a 15k router or a switch. After all you are not going to be trying to share the connection with hundreds of people.
Call your local ISPs and ask them for their business packages. Then be prepared to be shocked at how expensive the bandwidth is. 10up 10down $200-$300 a month.
The reason cable companies and telcos can sell people so much bandwidth for so little is because they are overselling larger pipes.
I.E. They have a 1 gigabit connection in the area, they sell 10 gigabits worth of bandwidth to customers.
This works very well as long as people do not try to use the full bandwidth the cable companies sell them all the time. As more and more customers start using up a decent fraction of their bandwidth the main pipe fills. Forcing them to upgrade the main pipe and pass the costs on to the customers or to shut down the people using most of the bandwidth.
IMHO they should upgrade the pipe and raise prices. |
This has more to do with the fact that the majority of the questions in the Cisco tests have almost NOTHING to do with supporting, building or designing Cisco networks.
I have interviewed hundreds of people over the years for network support positions that have Cisco certs and yet can not support a network to save their lives. |
Is this feasible? One Hub has a big router and wholesale bandwidth. His neighbors if they so choose connect to his house at their own expense (and choose their own level of build out, fiber, copper, wifi, open air optical, sneakernet), they pay a small monthly fee for retail bandwidth from the hub (micro-peering?). More neighbors connect to these neighbors under the same sort of agreement, maybe under some pyramid scheme type revenue sharing agreement (if someone connects to you, you get a small cut of their monthly fee, and a smaller cut of the fees from those down the line). The further you get from the hub the higher the price and the lower the quality, until someone else on the outskirts of the network gets their own wholesale connection and opens up shop as a hub (not sure how to bill customers that get some service from multiple hubs). The big ISPs would pick up whoever is still on the outskirts of the micro-ISP network, and would have to keep their prices and service competitive if they want to discourage more hubs from being formed. |
Yeah, the antivirus defs were bad. But before everyone jumps on the "why do these idiots run antivirus", please keep in mind most companies must fall in to compliance with certain regulations (SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, PCI, etc.) All of the wonderfully entertaining viruses and worms over the years that cost companies billions, have forced these increasingly complex layers of protection. Without proper QA, McAfee is definitely at fault, but don't just rip on people or companies because of their chosen solution. Every vendor of a security product has at least "A bug". No software is perfect. The threat landscape is always changing. The good guys are doing their best, but the bad guys have the advantage of being on the offense. |
Well, theoretically there are times in which a government that is acting on behalf of the people's interests might need to secure those interests, such as security interests, in a hostile competition with other, less scrupulous, international entities. The nature of this competition is zero-sum, and thus Any information which reveals your placement or your intentions in this game usually leads to losses, both of lives and position. Thus the need to maintain total secrecy in those arenas pertaining to international politics, e.g. the Army. |
I know at reddit we like to label people as good guys or bad guys, but I'm a bit torn on this one.
If you're in a position of trust and you come across information that is being "classified" in order to cover up illegal activity, it's your duty to report it. Obviously you should try the official chain of command wherever possible, but in cases where it's clear that that's not going to accomplish anything, I agree that it can be noble of someone to "fall on his sword" and report it publicly.
But according to the reports, that's not really what was going on here. This guy was just trolling around for stuff to download and leak. He leaked 250,000 embassy cables?!? He surely didn't look through them and decide that they were being used to cover up illegal activities. From the [Wired article]( he really sounds like a disgruntled employee who just wanted to get back at his employer:
> “I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.” |
i don't really buy that idea, apple got tons of hype because of their branding, but the truth is that the product was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else on the market in terms of usability, not features, not storage, but usability. That polish and attention to detail and a well thought out ecosystem is what made it a continued success. Other phones have had big hype (not as big of course), only to fizzle out as soon as people had to use the thing, think Palm Pre. To say that the hype and branding alone has made the iphone sell as well as it has is misguided when there are recent examples of other apple products with tons of hype flopping once users got a shot at them (G4 cube, appletv)
Also to say that "if anyone else would have made the iphone first..." is ridiculous, that was the whole reason it sold so well, every other company out there had no idea how to make a phone with the attention to detail and prioritizing of usability that apple brings to the table. Shoot, features wise (the usual metric for every other phone company out there) the iphone has always been out-gunned (just as the ipod was for most of its history), but what people figured out when they used it is that bullet points on the back of the box weren't all that mattered.
I just think apple earned the success of its latest products, they just out classed their competitors and bring much more to the table. They didn't have to keep others out of the arena or smash competitors to stay on top, they've simply competed. (we'll see how i feel about that after the HTC hearings get going of course) |
I am not saying there isn't a problem. I am saying the problem is overblown, and not nearly as bad as reddit would have you believe. I guess this comment serves as the culmination of my frustration with reddit's obvious bias when it comes to anything Apple. Particularly, in this case, that the poster I responded to claims that the iPhone ships "broken".
The point of my post was to say that while an issue exists, as can be shown in several places, it's not nearly as bad as it's portrayed to be here, and I think is less likely to be completely hardware (meaning that iPhone 4 would need a complete redesign), and more likely that it requires a software update to report what kind of signal the phone is actually getting. I think it was Mossberg's review that said something about being able to make clear calls even though the phone reports there are no bars.
I guess the best illustration of my point comes with Reddit's reaction to the Nexus One having the [call quality problems] gets completely ignored. And that would be that there wasn't a reaction. Which was probably fine - small section of buyers (which is probably actually a higher percentage than iPhone, given that the iPhone will probably move more units this week than N1's total) have problems, and it gets ignored. Same thing happens with Apple - daily front page articles proclaiming that the iPhone is a piece of shit.
In any case, I don't own stock in either company, but I do get annoyed with the vitriol that gets directed towards Apple's customers , of which I am one. It just seems ironic given reddit's general proclamation that they [redditors] are among the cognitive elite, and damn Fox news and the like for painting an unfair portrait, but they happily do that with whatever is cool to hate at the moment.
Anyway, as to my status as a fanboy - I like Apple products for some applications. I prefer iPhone because for this class of device I don't want to have to fuck with it. I like that I can (via jailbreaking), but I don't want to have to, as you sometimes do with Android, Blackberry, and WinMo. I use a Macbook as my portable for much the same reason. My desktop is Windows because it works decently and I want to game a bit. My home server runs a decently modified Ubuntu. I defend the companies and people involved in making those products when I feel it warrants it, as I did in this case. Will I give a free pass just because I use the device? No. Even though I poked a bit of fun in the original post, I'll jump right on the bandwagon railing on Apple about it's opaque, totalitarian policies concerning the App Store (but, unlike many here, I am happy to acknowledge it's successes as well). |
The number of revolts is irrelevant, at least to me.
In the past, sure, revolts happened, but digg continued chugging along like it always had, more or less.
Then v4 hit.
After skimming over the same stories on the 'Top News' page for two days, which I had to switch to from the now default 'My News' tab, it finally dawned on me: I have to set this shit up myself?!?
I don't call in to CNN and request news stories on puppies, I sure as hell don't need to do it in the online world either.
Yeah, I'm lazy, whatever - here's the logic: I am but one person, it will take me forever to comb the web to find the feeds I want to read. Enter Digg, reddit, diggit, whatever - now I am legion, able to cover the web and take a viable sample of it, everyday.
Kevin Corp. took that away, I took my click-throughs away, simple as that.
Now, for better or worse, here I am, on reddit. And y'know, in the past few days I've found myself enjoying reading through comments again, chuckling at the wit, admiring the insight, reminded of days of yore lost, nay, stolen, by greed? stupidity? progress?
I mean really, what is he up to? How can this possibly be good for his site? |
I have something to say that people will not like and I am prepared for the ensuing downvotes..but. Digg is completely different than before, if I liked old digg I would absolutely be pissed. However, old Digg was just a reddit mirror redirected by people getting too much attention for stealing. I didnt use digg except to see if I missed something from reddit's frontpage 1-2 days ago. Now I see digg as actually different than reddit, so I actually subscribed to the sites I follow and put my facebook account on digg. I think itll be interesting to see what my friends have been digging. |
They are working to that part. At least a part of the current market of laptops is advertising currently, so they are not going to buck the trend of advertising, but it is nice that they want to respect the customer's customization methods. Eventually, when processors get powerful enough to homogenize all of the various name aspects to a computer that are commonly labeled (I haven't had a laptop in years, and, to make it worse I'm an iMac owner (I've pried it open once. Seeing the gymnastics that Apple went through to make everything fit made me realize that I'm perfectly willing to part with $100 to let someone else go through the headache of taking a can of air to it (somewhat drunk, and underwent some mildly demeaning surgery recently, I want to communicate...)) I'm not certain what currently is advertised for being "inside." I will hazard a guess towards physics capabilities (commonly advertised by Ageia I think ,) graphics cards (currently a race between "ATI" (dumped I believe I read to just be under the AMD name, which would remove another sticker, and maintain AMD as one of the main advertisers prior to sticker removal (at least in the future,)) and nVidia (of whom I'm fairly ignorant at the moment as my current rig uses AMD, hence little desire to read about things that would make me jealous of people who can customize their computers beyond RAM and OS,)) and system board chipset (AMD or Intel for a hella lot of cases. IBM may make processors, but I only own consoles that use them, not computers, and I'm fairly certain that this is the general situation.),) (I use way too many parenthesis... and I'm a little too ignorant as to the punctuation recommendations this far nested down... if a grammar nazi gets this far before |
I do agree with you; More towers are definitely better. They can definitely afford to throw some cash at that.
However, there's a logistical limit on airwave traffic. At some point, you start getting interference, and your towers can't handle them. The issue with the Google proposal is that it's addressing a network management issue, and being called a net neutrality issue. The two are different, and when you take the solution for network management (slow down the big data hogs) and hear it applied in the context of net neutrality, you wind up with people concocting scenarios like "Slow down the data hogs? DOWN WITH YOUTUBE!"
That's the problem: The solution is sound: Prioritize traffic pertinent to a wireless network: Phone data needs to be always available (what good is your mobile data without phone calls and texting). They're simply suggesting that maybe, carriers should be able to look at the type ( NOT the source of such data), and prioritize it: Phone first, TC/IP express (voip, video chat, messaging), High priority (standard web data/downloads), and then low priority and bulk traffic (streaming videos, torrents).
That's type of prioritization was built into the TCIP stack in the 80s, and now people are claiming the use of it as a violation of net neutrality without clearly understanding what "neutrality" is actually applying to. You cannot run a network efficiently with all types of traffic being equal. As mentioned, torrents are designed to fully utilize available bandwidth. Videos use a lot of data, but it's not high priority; as long as it's uninterrupted play, it doesn't matter whether a 90 second clip loads in 2 seconds or 45, save for ability to skip, and total network usage. |
I'd say it's energy demand as well as shrinking devices. Battery capacity doesn't increase linearly with size. At least on a small level it increases exponentially. For example on my cell phone half the batteries volume is in it's protective shell. Double the battery size and the shell stays the same size while the actually capacity would be triple. |
The operative word being can .
As other commenters have noted, getting OS X running (and continuing to work through updates) on non-Apple hardware is a complete bitch, whereas new OS X updates (on Apple hardware) are guaranteed to work unless you've messed with your operating system's crucial files. |
The fact that the Mac Pro uses server-grade components is certainly part of it. It is a professional workstation, not a l33t gaming rig.
I'm betting the home-built PC on the left doesn't use buffered ECC memory, for example.
Also, the 2.66GHz Westmere processors used in the Mac cost $1019 each from Newegg. So obviously the homebuilt PC is certainly not using Westmere cores (note that currently the 2.66GHz Mac Pro uses dual 6-core, not dual 4-core chips, so the image is not accurate to begin with).
Apple does not currently sell a 24" display either-- only the 27" CinemaDisplay. How much do you want to bet that the cheap 24" monitors are LED-backlit IPS glass panel displays? Yeah, didn't think so. |
Xeon CPU's are no better than i7's - it's true that currently the fastest processor at the moment is a Xeon, but only marginally and only because it's the fastest stock-clocked hexcore CPU - if you overclocked an i7 a tiny bit more you'd get pretty much the same result.
That's true. A Westmere Xeon is basically a Westmere i7 with ECC support. See the next bullet.
> ECC RAM has no effect on performance other than potentially hindering it, as it forces all data to go through a 9th error correction chip on the RAM - good for servers or other extremely sensitive operations, but on a day-to-day basis it's advantages are just about moot.
People use Mac Pros for servers or extremely sensitive operations, most of the time. They're popular for recording and film studios where you pay by the hour (and a lot of money, too) and the ones I recorded at do not deduct time if the computer acts up. They're also popular for laboratory research — MIT's Tonegawa lab and most of the labs at CSHL on Long Island pretty much exclusively use Macs. (I'm sure the educational discounts are a factor in it, though).
ECC memory does detract from performance. That was my point, and why I didn't want to pay extra for ECC memory and just put standard DDR3 into my Mac Pro.
>Unless things have changed in the past couple of years, Mac's can't upgrade to non-Apple-approved hardware without updates and fiddling in order to get it to recognise non-Apple firmware.
Updates? That's understandable, I don't see any reason that requiring updates for newer hardware is a problem. And most of them install automatically. You can't entirely use a 3rd party PC graphics card out of the box without firmware updates or third-party kernel extensions (drivers) on Mac OS X, but you can if you boot Windows on that very same Mac, and using a non-EFI graphics card on a Hackintosh would pose the same problem. And if you're using your Mac for such hardcore gaming that a Radeon HD 5770 or 5870 isn't enough, aren't you gonna end up dual booting Windows, anyway?
>While this is fairly minor - hex screws?
I think it's because it's not officially a user replaceable part, just like the processor is on any OEM PC, but they're standard hex screws and there's no warranty seal or anything. If you want to keep your warranty, buy a bottom-end Mac Pro and keep the stock processors in your drawer or something (in a static envelope) so you can swap them back in if you need warranty service. But you probably won't, and I'd just sell them on eBay, myself.
>That's not bad, but there are PC motherboards that have 7 PCI-E slots and 12 DDR3 slots, so it's not exactly groundbreaking.
I said PCIe x16. I've never seen a PC motherboard with 7 PCIe x16 slots, but if there is one I can tell you right now that building a PC around it will cost a lot more than a Mac Pro. As for the DDR3 slots, the current dual processor Mac Pro does only have 8, but that's easily enough for at least 64 GB, and given the fact that the 2009 Xserve has 12 DDR3 slots I'm sure the 2011 Mac Pro will, too. The Xeon processors support triple-channel if you use 3 slots per processor rather than 4, but that's still 48 GB. What are you going to do with 12 slots? 96 GB of RAM is a little overkill for most gaming…
Sure, a Mac Pro is expensive compared to an i7 PC. That's because it's not meant for you. Just like a Dell Precision or HP Workstation isn't, either. If you want a Mac for gaming and the Mac Pro isn't in your budget, iMac is a good choice, but a Mac Pro isn't that much more expensive and is much, much more upgradeable.
Also, the Mac Pro's case is absolutely amazing for upgrading and cooling. If you ever mess around inside one you'll see what I mean.
Oh, and I bought mine on eBay for spit. Unless I need the latest, greatest one, I really like buying on eBay. I paid $1200 for a Mac Pro that would've gone for $2200 and upgraded the shit out of it, and I paid $650 shipped for an Xserve with 32 GB RAM that would've gone for more like $4,000 (either it was stolen or a company was liquidating, I'm guessing). |
Actually,
First off, it's not a 4 pin standard, but a 5 pin standard (spread across 15 individual pins). Apple added two pins for temperature sensing, making it seven, but it still has the same 15 pin package.
Second, standard drives still work. The Apple Hardware Test is used for diagnostics. Yes, it will fail the test. It can't see a hard drive that it needs to see since the hard drive is not returning temperature values. The Apple factory drives have a custom firmware to just return temperature values.
Third, using a standard drive will cause the fan to spin up to maximum. This is because of the previously mentioned issue. Software can be used to control this fan, and aside from that, the fan isn't as loud as you might thing anyways. |
Yep.
Got a Toshiba because the comparable Macbook Pro cost quite a bit more (if they had managed to get me the free iPod touch it would have made up the difference).
I wanted to believe, I really did.
The half-of-advertised battery life and ripoff artist/salespeople in China (I remember posting in /r/china about Toshiba China salespeople ripping me off on a spare battery I wouldn't have needed if battery life was even 3/4 of advertised) killed it for me. (and these people were idiots too; they said all Toshiba laptops were physically incapable of dual-booting and insisted that the battery they got me didn't look or feel like an extended-life instead of standard battery because of said setup. Head, meet wall.)
And this wasn't my first time with a PC since my last Powerbook.
Tried Samsung, repair people kept breaking new things when they tried fixing my existing problems (came in with a display ribbon cable issue and left with a fan that ran abnormally loud; took it in for that and came out with a keyboard with broken modifier keys; not taking it in for that because I'm tired of paying for each repair they wouldn't claim responsibility for). Tried Sony. Asking Sony to fix things is an exercise in frustration, and the only models I liked never made it out of Japan (though these days they've harmonized their Japan and international lineups, it seems). And Dell... nope, never again. Same with most US-based makers.
Nope. With my luck in electronics I need a maker with good after-sale service, and thus far it seems to be Apple
(well, there's also Panasonic, but if you thought a Macbook series was a bad value proposition... But that Let's Note T5 actually got the advertised 12 hours of battery life, and it made a great Hackintosh- if only it wasn't so expensive to repair). |
I worked at bestbuy for over a year, Best buy lives and thrives on stupid people, old people, young kids and parents who don't know better. One thing I learned while working at best buy. There's a whole culture of people out there that lined up every sunday sometimes an hour before the store opened jsut to get in first, see the deals and buy what they wanted. I swear to god some of these people were crazy, banging on the window for us to let them in while we did our daily talk. We looked at them, pointed at the store times sign right next to them, sometimes in front of them, and went back to business. |
Independent of the mess that is our patent system (particularly when it comes to media compression patents -- talk about a minefield), I agree with the premise of the article.
But Stanford vs. Roche has absolutely nothing to do with this. Stanford v. Roche was entirely about the assignment process under the Bayh Dole Act, which has to do with patents arising from federally-sponsored research conducted at universities and small businesses. Bayh-Dole granted first rights to the patent to the contracting organization (the university or small business), NOT the actual inventor who does the hard work to create the patent. This is pretty standard; if you're at work and create something patentable, the vast majority of private and public employers have assignment agreements with their employees where the employees give up all rights to any potential patents.
In Stanford v Roche, SCOTUS decided that Stanford's assignment agreement ("I agree to assign") was too weak compared to aa agreement the inventor had signed after the Stanford agreement with a third party Cetus ("I hereby do assign"), which I personally think is a bullshit reason to deny Stanford it's Bayh-Dole rights (and I'm not alone; Justice Breyer . (too lazy to go find the district court ruling)
But time to get off of my soapbox. |
I believe that they are somewhat organized, yes there are many members of Anonymous, but I believe they have a small focused group that puts together these crusades/statements. I don't 100% agree with their methods, but their intention is good(for now). Cheezy, cliched, over-dramatic, maybe. But quasi-noble imo. |
I find it difficult to imagine the Government being able to fully censor/control the Internet, for a variety of reasons:
1.) .... It'd be a technically massive project (in both time and infrastructure)
2.) They would have to find a way to block/filter/censor packets in such a pervasive/complete way..... I'm just not sure thats possible given the unreliability I've seen of things like spam filters and comtent filters tjat are so easy to bypass.
3.) .... If they did find some way to completely lock down traffic, the negative effects on everyday bussiness would be untenable. |
I've had a similar idea to the one proposed. Instead of only investing in 'Power Towers' the government would invest in all different forms of renewable energy; wind, water, solar, steam, and possibly nuclear. Each state and territory would have resources that maximize energy generation(e.g. coastal states would have wave turbines). This would benefit the greatest amount of companies and promote jobs across the board in every state.
To pay for the cost of implementing a grid of renewable energy the government can stop subsidies of the oil and coal industries along with reducing the defense budget.
PROS:
The government can then provide free energy to every household/business
Little/no impact on the environment b/c coal/oil isn't being used to power homes/businesses
Huge switch to electric vehicles (People charge their cars at home, and w/free energy mpg increases to infinity) can you say ROAD TRIP!!!!
More funds for households to spend or save
Major savings for businesses thereby reducing the cost of goods to consumers (this would also increase exports while decreasing imports; the cost of US goods would be cheaper than foreign made goods)
This would bring the US Of A back to #1 in terms of leading by example
Cost of oil/coal would decrease dramatically
Possible increased tax revenue from the purchase of goods/services by consumers along with more jobs created from increased spending.
CONS:
OIL/COAL industries would take huge hits in revenue
Energy companies would go out of business
Possible decrease in tax revenue/jobs created
Overall, the pros outweigh the cons by a considerable margin. |
As I said to the other person
> If you don't see this as a problem, or you think there is some threshold for a problem minimum before anything is ever addressed, then fine for you. You can live in a world of half-broken things because deriding the fact an issue is recognized is apparently more valuable than correcting it. I don't understand that. I think that problems should be addressed when recognized, faulty reasoning for procedures corrected, and nonsense explanation eleminated. |
Here's how I think it'll go:
Well, let's first look at the things that are already happening. Probably much more than you think. Like fishdicks said, there's things like automatic transmission, cruise control and ABS. But there's also a system that takes over control of your car when it detects you're going to crash ([source]( [automatic parking]( etc.
So I think that lots of small, barely noticeable and undeniably positive changes like this will keep coming, but in the end humans will still hold a steering wheel in their hands for a sense of control. The car would then go generally in the direction you steer it to, but just be able to do a better job than most people can.
And then, after cars have become "smart" enough, there will be an option in your GPS to let your car drive to the destination automatically. I think this will cause lots of debate, and it'll take a long time to become accepted and legal, but with enough scientific progress cars will be so much better at driving than us (and there'll be studies to show that) that that will become a moot point.
And then, because we're all inherently lazy as fuck, we'll all start to use that option. Less and less people will still drive manually. And then there'll be a point at which manual drivers will be such a minority (yet cause most of the accidents) that manual driving will be able to be banned without a massive outcry.
And then skynet. |
But that's like saying: first they come for the murderers, then they come for the rapists, then they come for the pregnant mothers.
Are you saying we shouldn't lock criminals in prisons because, if our regime would turn dictatorial, those prisons could be used to lock up innocent people? |
Image editing can be done. The interface and the way you interact is different, but it can be done. High precision tasks can use a stylus, and all the other things only need some more user interface and experience research.
CAD editing can be done too, and I think a tablet is naturally suited to this task. Use the fingers to position elements, then adjust their exact position parametrically. Miriads of gestures to do complex things that now can only be done by swimming through menus. |
I'd like to think of people not as lazy, but discriminating as to what they wish to spend their time on. Sure they could learn to use a PC, just like I could learn to fix my car when it has issues. I'd rather pay someone else to do that and free up my time for other pursuits.
As an IT professional, learning to click is easy. Figuring out why an update won't install when the only message you get back is something like "Error: 0x012ef829." That's an entirely different thing. Figuring out why your game crashes... could be a driver problem, it could be a hardware problem, it could be an error with the game's installation... People don't give a shit about that -- they want it to "just work". |
To be fair, the "spec heads" have never understood it. |
Let's sum it up, shall we? (If this is too long for you, just read the last few paragraphs)
1) she self-describes as an "Apple fangirl". Not a good way to start - more because of the fangirl part than because of the Apple part. I instinctively don't trust anyone who unashamedly admits to being faithful to a brand more because of the brand itself than for more sensible reasons (if it even makes sense to be faithful to a brand at all nowadays).
2) she states the phone can literally be dropped on the ground with no fear of damage. This is patently false - even ruggedized phones shouldn't be dropped on the ground as if they were invulnerable, let alone standard consumer phones like the Lumias. It might resist a few falls, but if you keep dropping it it will fail. (Yes, you can start making 3310 jokes now.)
3) she believes Instagram is a vital app no phone can be without, and "loves and depends on" the Instagram network. I suppose I shouldn't expect any different from a hipsterish Apple fangirl, but surely other far more essential things would take precedence even for such a person? Well, apparently not, for Instagram is "symbolic", a sign that "a platform matters", and is apparently capable all by itself of making or breaking investment deals by independent developers.
At this point I considered the review relatively n00bish, but still at least somewhat sound.
( |
Okay then.
In a hypothetical world where TPB would be legal and have every book, movie etc. under the sun people would still buy and pay for stuff to support the creators and ensure they put out more. |
moving through space, seriously?
So, you clearly are not an engineer of any sort. If you were, then you would know that if you are going to be absolutely thorough in your testing, then you would need to look at every possible scenario, including the positions of any number of devices in any number of possible locations. So, yes, the fact that the PEDs are moving through space (relative to the cabin) is important.
And the straw man with the laughable conclusion is a direct response to alchemeron's statement that "the idea of 'losing face' is a very real issue."
It's meant to sound ridiculous because his/her assertation is itself ridiculous.
> There is no evidence that these devices have any effect on plane electronics.
Hey, if you're willy to bet the life and limb of every person who flies on a plane on such a lack of evidence, then I am certainly happy that you are not in charge of anything as important as airline safety.
And, none of my points were refuted by the article (which I did in fact read). So the guy went to some lab and they said "oh, one puts out this small amount, ergo 100s would not even put out 100s of times as much as that small amount" and he comes away from that with the idiotic idea that that must prove that there is no danger whatsoever from hundreds of these on a plane. Sorry, that just does not compute. |
Why are we treating it as if he did no wrong? Probably because of the facts you mentioned above. That's pretty damn expensive just to get access to some publications.
It's a bit like professional software piracy. For example, probably the most commonly pirated professional software product is photoshop. This is because professional software is usually prohibitively expensive. On the order of a hundred dollars to a few thousand for certain software products. Photoshop is around 100 dollars I think. That's too expensive for some kid who wants to play around, they'll just buy a videogame instead. Society doesn't really mind when young people pirate a program like photoshop so they can learn to draw, produce a webcomic, or something like that. However, when a company uses software like photoshop in a professional environment, they will actually buy licenses for the software because they can afford it, and have greater legal oversight. So photoshop stays in business. In fact, if there weren't young people pirating photoshop and learning to use it, there might not be as many professionals who can use it to produce art for a company. Allowing people to pirate photoshop is also beneficial to Adobe because it means you're driving out competing free software.
With JSTOR, you're still going to have universities and things buying subscriptions which will keep it as alive as it's ever been. Nobody is going to pay $120 a year if they're not a professional anyways. A hobbyist who wants to check out some publications will look elsewhere the moment they hit a pay wall. Allowing individuals to pirate JSTOR causes very little to no harm to JSTOR themselves since universities and professionals will still buy it. However, it opens up that information to curious individuals who want to educate themselves. And it might just convince such individuals to pursue a professional career in that field, driving demand for more actual JSTOR subscriptions. |
I'll try to remember that the next 50 times I have to fix a malware ridden Windows box.
The article basically said that MSE is terrible at detecting 0 day vulnerabilities. Luckily for "the real world", 0 days are very expensive and usually used for high value attacks. |
Have been reading it. Best I can do for prior art with 10mins of google is this concept developed by Ryoichi Mori Circa ~1983. (Not really being rigorous here due to not getting paid for it.)
The only seminovell thing this guy suggests is using a smart-card or other portable physical medium to act as the users decryption key. Don't really have to time to look up if this is unique but I imagine not.
Ultimately however he is trying to argue that the phone/tablet being portable and containing user decryption keys is totally the same thing as a smart card storing the keys connected to a desktop computer. When, even if the phone is being used to push the decryption keys to the desktop it is actually behaving as two computers sharing decryption keys by some medium (which I imagine has even more prior art than the smart-card authentication). |
Ah, ok. Well, there are two things to consider. One is access to a (very large) database of information, and the other is making sense of that information.
Watson's main goal is to make sense of the information, and respond to specific queries with specific answers. While it could theoretically leverage Google's vast database of information (via queries), the truth is that Google is an indexer of the internet and not an encyclopedia.
(Basically, it's the librarian for the internet. "Excuse me, where can I find information about post-modern underwater basket-weaving? Oh sure, that's right over here; let me bring up a list of sources/links related to your search.") As an indexer of the internet , there is a LOT of junk that's unnecessary, irrelevant, incorrect, etc. People can go on the internet and just lie.
I'm not sure exactly how Watson maintains its database of information, but I'm certain it's not in the form of references to websites. They're more likely to have many hierarchical clusters of related information (an example that I'm basing this on is something like taxonomy. I'm spitballing here as far as the inner workings of Watson, so take that bit with a grain of salt).
Furthermore, it's in the Watson project's best interest to have as much control of the data as possible, and to have the quickest access to it as possible. In other words, Watson's own memory (either in RAM or on disk) will contain the majority, if not entirety of its knowledge bank. As such, it's unlikely that they are at all concerned with making Waston capable of querying Google for results.
Google does have something called the [Knowledge Graph]( which could be considered their equivalent of Watson. You should look into that if this is something that interests you. |
Honestly, the first place to start is to create some sort of realistic goal . When I first started out, I went through the various tutorials and learned basics but it was very difficult for me to really learn the material because I was asking myself the whole time "What will I ever use this for?". I could come up with all sorts of 'cool ideas' but at the end of the day they were all unrealistic and far too advanced for me. When you don't have some sort of job that requires you to be scripting, plotting data, manipulating data, etc. on a daily basis, it is really hard to envision a target goal that can be motivating, at least in my experience.
One thing that most people do (even my father who is not computer savvy) is create documents whether in Word or some other program. My gateway into programming was learning how to use LaTeX . LaTeX is a (free) typesetting engine that requires you to program your document rather than using the Word-type 'WYSIWYG'. You have to code, compile, etc. to get what you want. (LaTeX is amazing and I recommend it to anyone who makes any sort of document). Here is something you can practice on a daily basis while applying it to a real life situation. From there you can learn good syntax skills, logic constructs, etc. as well as programming interfaces (such as vim if you use Linux, highly recommended). You'll notice how the ball will start rolling. Maybe you need to make a graph for your document. Drop that Excel program and explore things like Gnuplot, pgfplots, or even Python to create your graphs in and then import them into your LaTeX document. You will inevitably expand into data manipulation once you start doing this as well, opening the door again into Python, R or even simple shell scripting (things like bash, awk, sed, etc.). With this type of 'roadmap', you will easily transition yourself from not knowing what to do into a full-fledged programming enthusiast who will begin to come up with tons of programming ideas that will help your workflow.
Here's a |
you'd think wouldn't you?
the scary fact is most hospitals are more concerned with avoiding litigation, than what they would actually rather be doing which is helping people stay healthy. the staff want to do their best to help you stay healthy (it's what they trained for all their years), the management want to stay in "business".
Unfortunately, you can thank litigious people, both greedy citizens and companies such as law firms, etc, that use the legal system to make medical cases a cash-cow. thus, healthcare is compromised instead of valued as one of the most important pillars of any modern society together with education. |
It has that access for the purposes of, you know, being able to be the keyboard for those functions. It needs permissions for everything it's going to replace the keyboard in. Permissions to access internally and permissions to transmit data are two completely different things. Nothing the app uses that permission for - i.e. to correct your typing, etc - is ever transmitted "off phone", unless you enable anonymous usage statistics.
In addition to address some things from your original comment:
>since Google itself has so much more information about its users.
Which you willingly provide so they can provide relevant services. You don't have to give them any information. My G+ page for example. doesn't contain my real name, or really anything personally identifiable. Not even a picture of me. I have instant upload turned off so my pictures aren't sent to Google and my information is in Google checkout simply because I buy stuff on the Play Store. It's exactly the same as putting your information into Amazon or literally ANY other online retailer, but because so many services are rolled under the Google banner, people somehow make it out like it's a massive snooping operation.
>Google Now already monitors my movement
No it doesn't. If you go into Google Maps and turn off all Location Reporting including the options for using network and wifi for location aware content, it monitors and records nothing. Google Now cards will appear based on recent Google searches in this instance. It's an app you're WILLINGLY ALLOWING to monitor your movement for the sole purpose of providing you functionality. There's nothing "creepy" about it and if you still think so - feel free to turn it off. It's always been this way since the inception of location aware services on Google. |
That's because the biggest improvement we could make was moving from single-shot rockets to reusable spaceplanes... but we haven't had the budgets, interest or technology to do that until SABRE came along.
We were dreaming of a space-bourne future in the 60s and 70s, but people ignored the fact that the entire development of space technology back then was being driven primarily by Cold War cock-waving, and the limited technology and effectively unlimited budgets that that caused meant there was no scope and little impetus to develop sustainable space travel technologies.
Then the USA got to the moon and the USSR folded, and with the cock-waving over and bragging rights firmly won by the USA, both the motivation and budgets dried up.
In the intervening time technology has improved to the point that now it's possible for private commercial companies to launch into space and space-planes are realistically feasible, so now we're seeing a space-industry renaissance that should mark the true birth of the human exploration and exploitation of space; finally [it's steam-engine time]( |
Holy cow, that's really awesome. Thanks for the nice |
Yes, it does, but it's prolonged G-force that causes problems, not repeated low-duration exposure (though that can have other effects).
Pilots can be exposed to 9g for short periods - and a car crash can have a very short burst of up to 100g, which is survivable. A car reversing into a wall at 5mph can experience around 11g. High g and long g (forgive the appalling terminology) are entirely different beasts.
But even a low g-force for a continued period of time will affect blood flow and countless other biological processes. |
No, you don't want to reach escape velocity when you want to stay in orbit. It's called "escape" velocity because an object reaching escape velocity escapes from the orbit.
You don't want to fly directly upward, unless perhaps if you want to reach a geostationary orbit. (I'm not entirely sure about that) You need to fly fast enough around the Earth to stay in orbit.
It would be still much cheaper even if it was much less efficient, since fuel is just a tiny fraction of the cost. |
This is also why some eBay sellers are a joke:
"Insurance can be added for an additional fee."
Well, that's completely for the SELLER'S benefit, not the buyer. If the seller doesn't get the thing to your doorstep then into your hands in the condition described, that's THEIR problem. eBay/PayPal will side with the buyer 99% of the time.
Furthermore, it's the seller who takes out the insurance and thus they deal with it. They refund the buyer as they would in any situation, then they are made whole when they get the insurance money. |
Indeed it's not a security hole. I'm just commenting on /u/Buckwheat469's logic - especially the |
As the lead developer of (a large company's) iframe-based login solution I ran into this problem a bit. Safari uses a third-party/first-party cookie policy, where websites that you've visited are considered first party cookies and cookies within an iframe are considered third party.
An iframe is like a window into another website from a parent website, in case you didn't know. Iframes are used mainly for advertising purposes but they're also used for login systems like Google's OAuth 2.0 javascript library as well as Facebook's. These libraries use postMessage as well, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Safari used to have a couple of hacks that would promote a third party to first party status. The first was to submit a form to the domain in question. The form didn't have to do anything, and it could be completely written in Javascript, but this bug was soon closed after a lawsuit to Google (IIRC). Something around $13 mil.
The other hack was to open a popup to the third party domain, have the user click a button that allowed the domain to write a cookie. The domain could then delete the cookie and close the popup window, then refresh the parent website. Once the user had interacted with the domain it was assumed that they wanted to allow it to write cookies (elevated to first party status). As far as I could tell this breach was closed recently.
With OAuth 2.0 a new model has been added where the user clicks a button or link within the first party website, which redirects the user to another website's login form. The other website allows the user to login and redirects the user back to the original website with a token. Now that the user interacted with a first party website, that website can write cookies from within an iframe.
This is not a problem with Google, this is a problem with Safari. In Chrome and Firefox if you block third party cookies then it blocks all third party cookies no matter what. This is why we now use localStorage, which doesn't have the problems with third party cookie blocking (or it didn't when I worked on it). Some discussion on the Firefox forums has been had to attempt to close this hole as well.
The other option could be to use localStorage on the parent website by calling postMessage methods that wrote cookies for the third party website. I designed a solution around this as well. You could even use cookies in this case, but localStorage is so much faster. |
Actually, that's not a workaround. This has very little to do with using the Google search engine. It has to do with Google tracking everyone (even not logged in users) with the +1 buttons everywhere. That's right, those things track you (in case you needed any more reason to install ad blocking software). Facebook does it too.
Google didn't get in hot water for tracking users without consent. Google got in trouble for tracking users whose browsers (e.g. mobile safari) explicitly rejected 3rd party tracking. So, users were using browsers that had a cookie policy in place that stopped google's tracking of all users with the +1 buttons. Google used some seriously devious JavaScript to accomplish this. |
It's been used in their marketing material. There's a prospectus for potential shareholders that was on a prospectus package somewhere on their site during their IPO. I remember because I didn't have the money to buy a single share at the time. :( |
you're right, I didn't care enough to read the whole thing. Thanks for the |
Wheeler will just throw that in the " |
we don't need to fcc, we raise up and literally march into all comcast/cox/verizon/att/whoeverthefuckelse buildings and swarm the motherfuckers into submission. |
Why shouldn't they be allowed to? It's their network. Considering they tend to have monopolies, you may have a point, but the primary reason they're a monopoly is the government in the first place. Just look at taxi medallions, for example, to understand how big business and government works together to keep out new/smaller competition. Obama was right with the "you didn't build it yourself", when it comes to huge companies like Comcast and Time Warner. They wouldn't have their monopolies without government on their side. |
Just before Ballmer took over, Microsoft released a tech demo of all the shizzle they were working on. There were advanced smartphones; cloud storage; and interactive and interconnected television, computers, and picture frames. Web video conferencing; instant mobile messaging; and fucking modern tablets that weren't pen based ordinary laptops !
Ballmer steps in and shuts down all of it . He claimed that there was no market for anything like that. Microsoft could have introduced the mobile computing revolution years before Apple sparked it off.
Don't even get me started on how Ballmer killed Microsoft Courier because he didn't like the fact that there was no start bar (seriously) and he thought there was no market for it. For clarification: Microsoft Courier was Microsoft's Ipad. It was a dual-screen Ipad that could Ipad equally as well as an Ipad, two years before the Ipad ... and he killed it for inane reasons. |
reassuring
> I trust his vision. Hopefully they will improve on execution.
Why? Microsoft behaved awfully in the last decades, why do still people still wish that it does good? The quicker microsoft gets insignificant the better for everyone. Well, except for microsoft.
Do people forget how they got where they are today? Because of "Bill Gates' vision"? Or by their history of downright criminal behavior towards their competitors? Their history of antitrust lawsuits should be alone to make very careful with them.
And if not illegal, still unethical. Take for example how they got people to buy windows bundled with their pcs:
> According to the Findings of Fact in the United States Microsoft antitrust case of 1998, "One of the ways Microsoft combats piracy is by advising OEMs that they will be charged a higher price for Windows unless they drastically limit the number of PCs that they sell without an operating system pre-installed. In 1998, all major OEMs agreed to this restriction."[5] Microsoft also once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included; Microsoft was forced to end this practice due to a consent decree.[10]
The difficulty to buy a PC that does not come bundled with windows or return windows in case you don't want it (e.g. you don't accept their EULA) is still informally called the [windows tax](
The latest "coup" I'm aware of is the "study" they did with HP on munich:
That's only one of many studies that are not designed to tell the truth but to convince decision makers who are not so technical to choose their products. Another one would be their high profile "Get the Facts" campaign where they claimed Linux had a higher TCO than windows. To find out about the problems with this study is left as an exercise to the reader.
Of course for technical people it's quickly obvious how biased and worthless these studies are, but they are not done to convince technical people, they are done to create FUD , but not so technical people might have only seen allegations that the patent situation in linux is insecure. Of course microsoft contributed directly too with the 235 patents linux allegedly contained that belonged to microsoft.
Microsoft coined terms like [Embrace, Extend, Extinguish]( which describes how to take posession of open standards and effectively make them proprietary under their control.
And then there is of course their practice of vendor lock-in , their lock-in of game developers to directx as a "quasi-standard", but of course without a public specification, etc. Or take web browsers. They were supposed to render content via standard protocols. Instead Microsoft made them a host for proprietary plug-ins like ActiveX or Silverlight. Thankfully silverlight failed, but it was still so successful, that the only way of accessing netflix, lovefilm, etc. for users of non-microsoft and non-apple operating systems is by a reverse engineered re-implementation of hundreds over hundreds of proprietary microsoft APIs with something by pipelight. |
I find this interview painful to watch.
It brings back memories of proofing poorly-researched papers in high-school. He throws around soft buzz words without expressing anything more concrete than that the computing of the future will be very "software driven". That's not false, but it's a sophomoric truism, no more mind-blowing than if the CEO of Coca-Cola told us that the future of soft drinks was very "taste-driven". His "plans for the future of Microsoft" include such meaningless MBA aphorisms as "remove obstacles to innovation", and "focus on what makes us unique". It's the kind of boiler-plate crap you say when you have no actual ideas, but want to sound "thoughtful". MS has had a lot of this sort of leadership in the last few years, and it's killing the company. |
Let me rephrase then. Technically lower energy xrays can "reflect", but not in the likeness of visible light. The reflection angle has to be very shallow, it basically grazes the mirror. Interestingly enough, this really only works with low energy xray photons (these would overlap with or be just a little more energetic than high energy ultraviolet photons). The material is even more important. For gold at 1 keV, the critical reflection angle is 3.72 degrees.
However, it seems like scientists were able to get even higher energy photons to graze. From "An X-ray mirror optic for NuStar space telescope working up 79 keV, was made using multi-layered coatings, computer aided manufacturing, and other techniques.[12] The mirrors use a Tungsten (W)/Silicon (Si) or Platinum(Pt)/Silicon Carbide(SiC) multi-coating on slumped glass, allowing a Wolter telescope design.[12]"
So technically this could be applied to the device in question, but it would have to be much bigger and more expensive to utilize enough mirrors to focus. The main disadvantage though is the X-ray signal would degrade since it is partially transmitted through the mirror. So it still wouldn't be practical. |
See [ Kyllo v. United States ](
> Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a "search" and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.
> Since we hold the Thermovision imaging to have been an unlawful search, it will remain for the District Court to determine whether, without the evidence it provided, the search warrant issued in this case was supported by probable cause--and if not, whether there is any other basis for supporting admission of the evidence that the search pursuant to the warrant produced. |
No, it's part of the development cycle. Every other OS they release is basically a test bed for whatever new things they think users will want in windows, and then the release after is a polished and better formed system thanks to feedback from the preceding system.
Remember when Vista was released, and it had that absolutely terrible security system that in some cases caused trouble even logging on? Windows 7 still has that, but it's been refined and almost all of the kinks have been worked out thanks to the response to Vista.
Did you notice that the advertising campaign for windows 8 wasn't as large as the one for Win7? It's been pretty noticeable, but those "I'm a PC" ads were everywhere , there was no getting away from them, whereas Windows 8, whilst still high profile, hasn't been pushed quite as hard. Expect Win7 levels of advertising and hype for Win9, as this is the polished OS they want you to take up. Win9 will still incorporate a lot of the features from Windows 8, but things like bringing back the start menu are clearly decisions that stem from customer feedback. |
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