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That's a lot of text, and since I too have spent countless hours yelling at comcast employees, I'm not gonna read it all.
That being said, I too had a terrible experience. Signed up for service, was told I could setup without a tech. That proved to be untrue due to issues with the building I'm in. I called and explained that I couldn't set it up myself and there must be some technical issue beyond my control. I was told that that was true, and because it wasn't within my control, I wouldn't be charged. Then I was told the tech would arrive on X day to install between 2-4. At 5 that day I called and was told that the tech was scheduled for the following day. I yelled and yelled until they told me someone would be there at 6. No tech. Finally, two days later, a tech shows up unannounced and sets it up with no problem. $50 added to my bill. |
Not OP, but definitely possible, although I don't think anyone that'd have the information to say whether or not that's true would be commenting here. Generally the most customer-frustrating problems that I have seen tend to be whenever a change of some kind is made(Outside of outages, maintenance, or unannounced firmware updates to our equipment).
Someone wants a new package, and sets up an installation in the future? If you have a fancy-smancy omg $8/mo(yes the price went up for modem lease, may not be changed in all areas yet) modem with phone on it, the internet code can be lost in the interim(either by an agent activating some of the new coding early, or the system dropping the code), disabling the modem entirely, and thus you lose internet/phone both until someone completes the internet code as a separate job in the work order itself.
You're going to transfer to a new address in two weeks? Sure, we'll set that up for you. But we're not going to tell your our billing system will remove your phone service from the modem early due to a known problem that has yet to be fixed from the system's vendor, so you have to get to tier 3 to specifically refresh the service from the phone systems(the phone number's still active THERE, and can be provisioned from there separately), and not send any form of hit or refresh or else it'll deactivate again.
Want to rebundle your package? Someone can easily make a mistake and change your phone number because they have to click it in from the inventory, and if they make a mistake, it could pick a native number at random; Alternatively, the system can just up and change your phone number, no warning whatsoever with no one calling in to make any form of change, and no one knows why it changes when there's no order in the system to change it at all!
Once you git gud at the job, you can fix damn near anything, but turnover is ridiculously high as it's a call center job, and MANY people don't care. Lots of the higher level of support tend to care more due to the higher pay(cha-ching baby) and less-strict non-sales focus with the metrics that need to followed, but there's always going to be people that don't care or don't believe you, or heck, just want you off the phone because they don't know the answer.
Note that this is what I have personally seen as some examples and some parts don't hold true for our other billing system in the markets that I don't handle... |
I don't get why everyone thinks this is wrong; it is probably true. I can't think of a single movie I've ever downloaded with Tor, and most drug sites only have a couple of images. A lot of the "assassination" sites are entirely text. Meanwhile, a video is gigantic; one pedo downloading an hour long video takes more data than 100,000s of drug orders.
If the crux of your problem is the hidden service vs non-hidden measure, most people, myself included, use "Tor" (as a single word) to refer to the Darknet part of it. |
Tor is widely known, most illegal content of the above nature can't be accessed through the conventional internet. Many police forces operate "bait pages" these are websites with titles that make it clear you are viewing illegal content. For example the title of the website might make an obvious reference to the age of the individuals you are viewing. If an IP address accesses one of these fake websites the address is tagged. If multiple police operated bait pages flag the address the police then have probable cause as it is clear someone at that address is looking for illegal content. Officers are then sent to the origin point of that IP address with a search warrant. Most offenders who try and access content through the conventional web aren't very smart and that is why this works. Due to the fact that the content they are after is rare and difficult to find most offenders have a habit of saving videos or images they find. So when the police show up they usually find either hard copies or digital copies of the illegal content. This is why you so often hear about these creeps getting caught and the police recovering thousands of images, because
-A) the fucking subhuman scum have a tendency to stockpile them
-B) The police mostly go after IP addresses they know have tried to download content from their trap pages
There is a distinct advantage of going after IP addresses that the police have on record as attempting to download from the page (not just viewing it). If an IP has attempted to or managed to download the content it means the viewer was there long enough to pick a picture or video and decide to download it meaning they probably know what the content is and they are interested in it. By only going after these IP's the police manage to cut down on time and money spent investigating people who probably aren't actual criminals. Often people are misled by fake links (like when you click a video on a porn site and it takes you to a different site instead of the video) and access the content by accident. There are also people who read the link but are zoned out so they clicked it then suddenly have an ohshit.jpg moment when they realized what it is and immediately leave the site. However the police will also investigate an IP if it consistently gets flagged as this may suggest someone who is smart enough not to download anything but is still intentionally trying to view illegal content.
What this means is that very often the small time offenders (those who simply view and/or download the content but don't engage in the depicted actions themselves) are caught at a very high rate. Unfortunately this only gets rid of low risk offenders, the real problem is the people who create this content. The majority of people manufacturing and profiting off this disgusting fetish are the one's who are smart enough to use Tor or other such services. Those who access the content through encrypted methods also get caught far less often. This makes them more dangerous than those who fall into police traps purely because over time a desire can become a need and eventually that need can turn into actions. So what starts as a sick desire to view this stuff over time matures into the feeling and actions of someone who no longer is satisfied with simply viewing. The police going after low hanging fruit and the lower chance of being caught due to the protection provided by encryption gives the offenders time to metamorphosize from someone with a desire into someone who is going out and committing the crimes they were previously satisfied just viewing. |
More than 1.2% of Tor is dedicated to illegal content but the DOJ statement specifically refers to 80% of the activity being devoted to child pornography. As far as that statistic goes it is inaccurate however you are correct in that 1.2% may in fact still be a lot of activity. It would be helpful to know just how much activity occurs on the Tor service so we could get an idea of how much 1.2% really is. I'm just picking random numbers to illustrate a point but if 1000 searches are made on Tor in a day then 1.2% means 12 of those searches are for child pornography. Out of the entire United States population only roughly .24% of people are registered sex offenders, specifics about why these people are classified as sex offenders are not available to the public to protect the offenders. Given that most people spend an average of 10 minutes and 51 seconds 5 times a week looking at pornographic material we can assume that per week one offender views 54 minutes and 25 seconds of illegal material. However the offender also spends an average of 74 minutes a day or 518 minutes a week viewing legal content. Tor has between 1.5 million and 2 million active users so lets just take an average of that to get roughly users 1.75 million users. Now if we add the pornography and internet usage statistics we find that most people spend 85 minutes a day or 595 minutes a week online. If we then multiplying these numbers by the average number of users we find that Tor users spend about 148,750,000 minutes a day on Tor and 1,041,250,000 minutes a week on Tor. So if the study ran from march until september that is 214 days so for the researchers 100% of activity equates to 31,832,500,000 minutes. 214 days is 58.6 percent of a year, in other words yearly Tor users spend about 54,321,672,355 minutes online per year. So of 54,145,000,000 minutes 1.2% or about 649,740,000 minutes worth of activity per year concerns illegal pornographic content. If we go back up to an earlier statistic we can see that the average person watches 54 minutes and 25 seconds of pornography a week, this multiplied by the number of weeks in a year (52) comes to the average person watching 2830 minutes of pornography a year. So if we divide 651,860,068 by 2830 we find that about 230,339 of the roughly 1.75 million or 13.16% of Tor users are looking for this illegal content. |
How?
By knowing the distribution of new connections among the nodes it is a relay point for, and then could assume flatly that all connections use the same amount of traffic and that the distribution is representative for the network as a whole. And it could easily be.
And to be honest, you could with high probability assume that each connection to an image / video heavy server will use more bandwidth than a connection to a mostly text based server.
Actually when talking about 80% of traffic that doesn't necessarily have to mean total transfer, but it can just as well be % connected to / sessions. And for that they don't need to know the amount of data. |
No, but the average person will have their laptop shit out on them after two years. Most of the time when people's computers "break" a simple restore would fix it back to working condition.. However, most non savvy consumers will opt to buying another low end computer (read laptop)... I've never had to restore my computer in the 4+ years of ownership which is a metric that can be considered in this comparison.
I'm really only speaking about laptops in this thread. I much rather building desktops. When it comes to laptops though, I prefer Apple hands down. Yeah they come with OS X, which I do like, but I always install windows for one reason or another; Linux for fun.
People here are always up in arms about anything Apple unless it is negative. Shit even neutral mentioning of the topic results in negative or condescending joke responses. I enjoy technology in general. I have no "team" to side on... Some shit I see/experience here is of the same level of immaturity that can be found during republican/democrat arguments... |
For my HCI class this semester, I got to pick the device or interface to improve for my final project.
Taking a gamble, I decided instead of strictly improving an existing interface, I would take some "technological liberties" and design an ereader the way I felt it should work, and develop it based on usability testing.
The redesign borrowed heavily from the Nook's physical layout and interface, the iPhone's capacitive touch screen, the Kindle's method of "loaning" a book, and iTunes App Store's method of buying new books.
What I found is that existing ereaders really do suck. Both in functionality that users would expect, and in interface. The Nook's icons are abysmal based on some very basic HCI heuristics. |
Preposterous. Radiation is radiation. [Have look]( at the energies involved with cell phone radiation. Microwave energy, at what, 4 watts high estimate?
You, sitting there reading this, are emitting infrared radiation several orders of magnitude more energetic, at about 100 watts. The only thing cell phone radiation does is heat the side of your head by a fraction of a degree. |
Killing the brand would be AMD immediately discontinuing the use of the ATI brand name upon acquisition of ATI. They didn't do that however as they've owned them for a while now.
Who's to say? It's a matter of subjective opinion... hence the usage of a term such as 'kill' (i could have said 'terminate', or 'destroy' or whatever.)
>Besides, ATI isn't the more important name here, the more important name is Radeon. People don't ask "So are you getting an Nvidia or an ATI graphics card?", no, they ask "Geforce or Radeon?".
Again, your opinion. Which I happen not to give a fuck about. I've never had a conversation in which that question was asked.
>Why is it a sad day? I just can't seem to grasp that part whatsoever.
It's a sad day for all those who had fond memories of the ATI vs. NVidia battles throughout the last 20 odd years. Not much will change - now it'll be AMD vs. NVidia, but I bet that people will look back with nostalgia at those days.
>Besides, some people just don't get when they're being retarded unless somebody straight up calls them a fucking retard.
Right. You're being a fucking retard. Got it? Don't like being treated as a douchebag? Don't do the same to others - this rule also applies on the internets. It's probably also in the Reddiquette. |
Decisions like this make it harder and harder for me to want to license (since there is no software currently being sold on the market) software legitimately. By giving them money, it's condoning their unconscionable EULAs. Sure, there are exceptions, but I'm not going to go through a wall of EULA just to see whether or not a publisher is unduly restricting my rights as a purchaser, particularly since I can't even read the EULA until after I've already purchased and installed the (unrefundable) software. |
I don't really see a problem with this decision.
All the court said was that Autodesk never sold the copy to the first guy, so the first sale doctrine could not be invoked, and therefore the first guy couldn't resell the product because he didn't own it.
I don't think this was about the validty of EULAs, per se, because the customer was a business customer, and knew up front that the contract stated he was not purchasing the software, only leasing it. Or rather, the EULA here was not some sort of "gotcha" EULA like you'd find on consumer software. It's not like he bought Autocad at Best Buy and was unable to return it after he noticed he had to agree to an onerous agreement to install the software. And anyway, unconscionable contract wasn't even the issue.
As for the bigger picture, there seems to be anti-copyright sentiment in the comments. Why does Autodesk, or any other company, not have the right to value their creations and license their products any way they desire? If the marketplace finds the terms of acquisition to not be to its liking, then the marketplace will indicate this by not purchasing the product.
Yes, this may open the door to "lease" agreements becoming the norm in other media areas, like books and DVDs, for example. But if the marketplace doesn't like those agreements, then they won't last.
Anybody remember Divx? No, not the current video codec. The other Divx. Divx was a DVD rental scheme championed by Circuit City in the late 90s. You owned the physical DVD disc, but the disc was essentially worthless. You could only play the movie on special Divx players, and usually only for limited periods of time. Essentially, the software was free, but you had to pay for the right to use it every time you used it.
The point is that neither Divx nor Circuit City is around today, which shows that if a corporation has a really bad idea, the marketplace will make sure the idea dies quickly. |
I can not prove you're lying, but the issue is with the Law, not with the people who argue the Law.
> Companies' Lawyers make a point of not watching you when read them.
I would argue that that point is invalid. The nature of computers allows for no one to know who is using the them. The button represents something to the contract, and if the child does not understand the nature of the computer and the authority the computer can represent then the child should not be allowed to use the device. I don't need to prove anyone is lying, I simply need to prove that an agreement took place. "End User License Agreement" This is for the person using the product so they will agree to our terms; The End User is free to ignore these terms, however if they accept them, then play by the rules. |
It's not exploiting google's image search in any way shape or form, it's jsut a "break out of frames" bit of javascript that detects that the page isn't the top-most frame, and tells your browser to go to the page itself. The page then does this AV bullshit. |
The problem putting sales tax on price stickers in America is there is not a national sales tax. All sales tax is determined on the state, county, and city level. In a single metropolitan area there can be 50 different sales taxes. It would be impossible for a company to advertise a product for $10 when a customer could drive a few miles in any direction and never see that product for $10. Within a 10 minutes drive of were I live there are at least 4 different sales tax rates due to cities and counties different rates ranging from 6.5% up to 7.75%. For someone that lives near a state border, they could go from paying 6% sales tax to 0% sales tax but be in the same television and radio market. States, counties, and cities would hate it if advertisers said shop at our store in X for $100 or shop at our store in Y for $106. It is much easier for advertisers and consumers to know that if something is advertised for $100, it is $100 plus local sales tax. It is rare to see a sales tax above or even near 10% so even at the very least, someone should be able to figure out 10% of a purchase (hopefully) and figure out that they need to add around that much to their purchase price and the actual price will come in below that.
I can see how it may be confusing or seem stupid to outsiders, but it really doesn't catch us by surprise or trick us. I can also see how it makes sense to advertise the price after tax in the UK (and elsewhere) since no matter where you go the price is going to be consistent. I also believe we aren't the only ones that do this. I believe Canada is like this as well (at least it was the last time I was there) but their sales tax is around 16% (even on clothes and food, WTF?) which kind of makes you go, "HOLY SHIT," the first time you buy something. |
ignoring a tax break while simultaneously keeping their prices the same does nothing but increase the value of the company
This is not an accurate [model of prices](
Where taxes fall does not depend on where the tax is collected, it tends to be divided by market forces between the two sides of the transaction. This is an important economic principle known as [tax incidence](
I don't have a tax example, since I don't intend to spend more than 45 seconds Googling for this, but here's an example where prices were lowered due to lower costs of doing business. Everyone [significantly lowered costs of t-shirts]( after textile quotas were eliminated over the last few decades, even though they could have just pocketed the difference.
Taxes are a bit different, but you can treat them similarly to other input costs in many situations. |
Alright, look. Very few of you have this right. It is not Netflix' fault for booting up prices. You want to blame someone like the sheeple you are? Blame the movie studios and companies like Hulu for completely fucking Netflix over. It is because of Hulu that movie studios are hiking up the prices that Netflix has to pay in order to get content to you. As it is, Netflix is barely making any money anyways. People seem to think that Netflix is bringing in a shitload of money, but this is NOT true.
After the costs of shipping these DVD's to you, Netflix comes out making just a few dollars a customer IF they are lucky. If a customer is shipping out one DVD a month, Netflix might make some money. If that same customer is getting 4 or 5 DVD's a month on a 1 DVD subscription, they are now losing money. It's a very fine line. Now factor in the price hike from movie studios. Now, Netflix has no choice but to bring up prices otherwise they are going to be "in the red" for every month to come. |
The existence of Anonymous has become a necessity in the internet realm. This is not to say that they are good guys per se. They just provide the balance of privacy and transparency. We need their expertise to curb corruption of governments and corporations from seeping into the internet. Right now, the people in power in govs and corps are somewhat incompetent compared to groups like anonymous and this keeps them from dominating the internet much like the real world. Their actions may be seen as either benevolent or malevolent but when it comes to acts like this... .they are neither. |
Fuck his comment that everyone opposed to the bill supports child predators. FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT. I hope his career dies with that statement.
You can't make an argument in a political forum and then follow up with 'anyone who disagrees is a child rapist' that's not how debate works, that's not how democracy works, and thats not how we come to fair and proper decisions or laws. It's deceitful, it's dishonest, it's immoral, it's just wrong. These things have been said before, but in contexts like "if you aren't a part of this group, you're going in that fire pit."
Internet legislation should give at least the same rights as laws protecting physical belongings. A police officer cannot search my house without warrant, he shouldn't be able to read my emails, documents, internet history, and all other non-encrypted traffic from my connection without warrant. If you think about it, that's exactly what this bill will allow. Unencrypted data like passwords and usernames are all sent in HTTP headers and this information will then be stored and available for them to do what they want with. You may not be committing a crime, but do you want someone able to read all your private conversations with your significant other? Your Google searches of what that infection you think you may have could be? Who you're associating yourself with? Where you've been? What political pages you frequent? With great power comes great responsibility, and as we've seen from employees at Hotmail and Google before, we can't trust people with this information at their disposal. It starts with taking an inch, and before you know it you've lost a mile. |
Right. But there is a distinct difference between 3G technology and what speeds it CAN provide (and successfully does in other countries) and what we get from it. 3G is gimped in this country due to lack of investment in infrastructure, as is 4G actually. |
I see your point and this is mostly how WiFi works now. I am just saying the AM bands don't make much sense to use for this.
Even if the spectrum were available, the AM channels combined are 1 MHz. For comparison, WiFi uses up to 40 Mhz channels, so you wouldn't be able to fit much data over it.
The other thing about it is if you are the first person in your neighborhood to use the frequency band, you could pretty much bring your laptop into the next neighborhood still get online through your access point. The problem is it doesn't scale at all to having multiple people using the same frequencies. Cell phone towers and WIFi nodes require much higher frequencies to work. To change this you would have to change physics. |
Flipping your signal on will get people around you to speed up and not let you over -- this is on a bike or in a car.
Funny, when I flip my signal on, 9 times out of 10, spaces open up.
Now, this wasn't always the case. When I drove like an asshole gunner, I experienced the behavior you ascribe to your fellow drivers. |
THIS GUY IS FUCKING MAD. maybe you shouldn't comment on something that was already over. criticizing me for letting the guy who posted the mirror know i was thankful is fucking retarded. there isn't much left to say after I say hey, here is your upvote good sir, but no, you have to come rolling in with your anti-karma cavalry claiming that i have done something wrong here or that i am perpetuating karma whoring in some way... all you have accomplished is karma whoring your self out to anyone one who is pathetic enough to agree with you, trying to earn the boats for yourself. you are a hypocrite. the system is here to be made use of, if anyone agrees with me they will upvote me. im not asking for it, i was just showing appreciation for the mirror-poster. and now, since you have reared your ugly head, other people will upvote you too if they agree with you. you are a contradiction. and now, you may fuck off. |
An address book is a small folder for information that a person can carry around with them. Practically by definition, it maxes out at about as much information as a book.
A file cabinet on the other hand, contains much more information and generally requires a search warrant. It contains as much information as a few hundred books.
Cell phones are still classified like address books by the court system, not filing cabinets. This is in spite of the fact that a good smart phone could contain hundreds of thousands of books. |
I'm not arguing that it's entrapment, I'm arguing that police shouldn't be able to impersonate people via a phone number. If the police want into your computer, they need a warrant, if they want into your emails, they need a warrant. I'd argue that a phone number attached to a cellphone is as personal a form of communication as email. What would it be if the police logged into your email and setup a drug deal, then signed your name, and that'd be nearly the same as writing a physical letter to setup a drug deal and forging a signature. |
I never said cannabis sativa was the only species of cannabis. It was a joke in which greater specificity yielded greater lulz, which was also the reason for tagging the -25 onto the end of "LSD." |
still i think apple has about 3-4 years in r&d influenced by jobs to keep it slightly ahead
Possibly, but Apple seems to have some serious braindrain when it comes to their software department. They've been putting out garbage lately.
Here's an example of how Apple software development has gone to shit:
That bug has been around since iOS5 and Lion. It wasn't fixed in iOS6, or in Mountain Lion. It's not a small bug either, if you use CoreData, if you mark a relationship as Ordered, any access of that relationship throws an exception. The only workaround is to reimplement all the methods that operate on that relationship. |
Apple has no problem selling their devices and that has given them a sense of laziness. The problem that consumers will run into, is that Apple knows that even if they create a lack-luster product they will still find millions of people that are willing to buy it. So if people are going to buy it anyway, why try to create something new Now, I use Apple products everyday and probably will continue to but I realize there exists a problem.
What I think Apple needs to do is sit down and think about all the things that, say, a smartphone doesn't do that it should. If the new iPhone comes out next year and is an iPhone 5S (that is to say, a new phone with limited upgrades) people will start to turn on Apple. The reason that Samsung can make commercials stating that "The next big thing is already here" is because in sense it is. Apple has to really come up with the next big thing. Not something that other phones can do something that no phone or device has done before. Android used to take their cues from Apple. Now Apple takes their cues from Android and this is bad for Apple. |
The last hotel I stayed at charged $18 for the WiFi(it was an all inclusive resort in Cabo). One rainy day I was bored and started screwing around and noticed that the "access denied" page was a bit weird and used a strange port, so I changed a few things and was asked to authenticate to the WiFi iROOM thing...well they left the default username and password(admin:admin or admin:password , whatever it was). I was unable to change any of the settings but I was able to view all the user names and passwords , and see which accounts where throttled or not. They also didn't change any of the usernames or passwords on all their Cisco Aironet APs. |
Okay some of these I think are good, others, well, let's see.
Fair enough. Actually wish some college students would understand this with the way they treat things their parents pay for.
No. This is on par with removing the door to his room. It really is. What'll end up happening is him deleting all his conversations, thus defeating your purpose and making the phone less useful for him as well.
Again, fair enough. They pay for it, and this is why they do, so they can reach him when they need to.
I never wanted to call friends purely because I had to go through their parents. It's awkward if you don't know them, you never know if you have the right number right away, and you never really feel like the call is private. It's a deterrent no matter what time of day. How his friends' parents regulate their phone usage is their business, not his problem to worry about.
Sure, no problem. He doesn't need it there. Of course, if he joins a sport, or wants to do anything not on a perfectly predictable schedule, it sure would be convenient to be able to call home and ask for permission. They seem to want a one-way leash.
Yep, also good. See my thoughts on 1. The "it will happen" is also good life advice for anything.
This is hardly relevant to the phone. This is just parenting.
Good advice I think.
So there's never an appropriate time to whisper to someone? Never? 7 and 8 covered the "things you should and shouldn't say to people" topic pretty well, but this just makes it feel like she always wants to be in the room.
Yeah yeah the "get real" comments have been made. But see 1. There's nothing wrong with parents making rules.
Back to simple etiquette. Nothing wrong there. Except you told him to turn it off when out in public, but never want him to miss your calls. You should be aware of this and not hold it against him if he doesn't pick up because he was following your guidelines.
Good advice. You really don't want to get on a sex offender list or anything.
More life advice from mom. Nothing wrong with it, just a little unnecessary here.
I wish I could do this more. And I kinda wish others could too. But if you tell him to leave it home sometimes, remember that when you want to call him.
Be a hipster. I jest, but really, this is part of a "contract"? Don't use such a binding word if you're going to stick this kind of advice in here as well.
General advice on usage. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not essential.
More life advice, mostly fine. But "wonder without googling"? What was that in bullet 15 about "Your generation has access to music like never before in history. Take advantage of that gift." This is true for far more than just music.
Good note to end on.
So yeah, if this were offered to 13-year-old me, I hope I'd be smart enough to see the logical inconsistencies and point them out, to get things clarified before anything happens. And the ones about privacy bug me a lot, to the point that I think I'd walk away from it just over 2 and 4. And honestly, I'd be uncomfortable dealing strictly with my mother like this. I don't know what this family's dynamics are like, but I feel like there should be an "appeal to dad clause" in case of disagreement.
And finally, how the hell do you go through 18 bullet points and not address things like data/text/minutes overages? Assuming this isn't an unlimited everything plan, that's something that should've been addressed in bullet 2. |
First off, don't give him anything other than a basic phone until he is 14 or 15. After then, let him have an iPhone without this 18 point contract. Let him make mistakes, he will learn from them. If your child is smart and respectful, he will not do 99% of the things in that contract anyways. Being so attached to your child is definitely not a good thing, he will grow up to be someone who is still dependent on his mom. Let him be independent.
I'm 16. I have had an Android and iPhone, I have never had limits placed on me like those in this contract. I have never sent nude photos, ignored mom's calls, or any of the above. |
skewed statistics, volume and then percentages to make it seem like they are better than they are. 100% growth in macs sold, vs pcs 18% (18% of 1 trillion vs 100% of 10 million ... hmmm) |
Ok. Let me rephrase it. Polish isn't an idea. It's not something that can be patented. It's a symptom of good design. If Android ups its design, you can't say they stole that from Apple. Because Apple didn't create polish or good design. If they make it look more like iOS, sure. But they don't. Project Butter doesn't have Android doing iOS animations. Polish can be found in professional websites and other OSes.
Similarly, something as simple as updates cannot be credited to Apple. Android always updated. It's just that the OEM's had to adapt the updates to their flavor of Android.
And if we're going to start our comparisons from before the two OSes were even competing with each other, then this is a dumb, nitpicky argument. That would be like holding it against Linux and Windows for having windows and using a mouse in today's world. People aren't looking at those things -- they're pretty much what people expect in a modern OS and not what consumers care about. It's simply where the OSes are.
So Android, since its inception, has always had updates. There is no time when it didn't. It's a moot point.
Notification bar, settings toggles, swipe gestures, true multitasking, wireless syncing, tabbed browsers, opening apps from the lock screen, OTA updates, and sharing between apps were all parts of Android either originally or first. Apple applied all of these later in a time period when both were competitors with each other.
Android's innovation was uh actual innovation, following the innovation that yes iPhone did unleash. Since Android came on the scene however, Apple has fallen behind and have simply integrated the ideas of others into their platform. |
Its not just that "big medicine" makes devices like this so expensive. The cost has a lot to do with these devices all being custom made. 3d printing can, and will significantly lower the cost of the custom fabrication of the sockets for these types of devices, but until they can 3d print low weight and high strength materials (such as the carbon fiber shell that comprises over half the cost of my own leg), these homebrewed prosthetics will remain little more than expensive toys. Really freaking awesome toys, but still less useful than an actual limb, and thus spurned by most. one of many sources on low percentages of prosthetic use in upper extremity amputees:
What will revolutionize prosthetics is a reliable brain to electric circuit interface. When you have that working, all in society will benefit, but for an amputee, suddenly the weight and fit of their artificial limb will be something that can in a large part born by the device itself. Unfortunately for all of us, it doesnt look like these techniques will be very easy to create, and will likely involve some surgery - likely at significant cost. |
Most of the time it's stealing from a faceless corporation though. Nobody cares about that. Films for example, everyone still got paid to do the job, be it actors or the catering. The backers then make the money back (and in most cases profit) by selling the film. Even if it flops they'll make money back from another one. This perpetual cycle is only making the backers a bit less money then they used to. They didn't move with the times quick enough and are getting grumpy at not making as much as they used to/thought they would (can't lose what you never had).
Pretty sure if they cut back on profits and made things affordable and available to view via whatever source the customer wants then they'd make up that "lost" revenue. Not saying piracy will disappear as it won't, but I'd be willing go to the cinema or buy a new movie online if the price was fair. I know there's a lot of licensing bullshit still preventing such things in the terms of online and downloadable content unfortunately, but the costumer will only pay what they deem a fair price (anything over £5 to watch a film once is ridiculous personally). Cinemas get hit the hardest as they make money from concession stands and advertising, that's why the ticket alone cost so much. Something like 80% minimum goes to the film maker. |
Why wouldn't you be able to acess your files from linux. I just use a partition for each os and a data partition. Besides the fact that linux can read ntsf just fine. |
Linux isn't hard to use? Can you show me a GUI-only method for setting up my 3-monitor display on an NVidia Geforce 760? You can't, because (at least, a maintstream one) doesn't exist. Ubuntu, RH, Gentoo, Mandrake, they all barf all over themselves because multiple monitors with multiple refresh rates / resolutions is not something X has ever done well.
I love the idea of Linux. In fact, I love tinkering with Linux. Back in the day I used to love setting up custom desktops in e (back around e 0.14 IIRC) because it could do so much more than Windows could. That said, I am a pretty technical person -- employed in IT -- and getting Linux to do everything I want it to do always requires some effort. I need a certain version of a lib, or I need to recompile for my setup, or I need to hack around in the config file. Back in Windowsland most people can't even grok their event log -- do you think they are going to enjoy the Linux experience? Do you think that Valve would really bet the farm (and the first-day sales of the game) on the idea that the same CoD high-fiving bros are going to monkey around in x.conf to get their 3d working correctly, find/download a Linux driver for their naga / g930, get all of the above working to about 85% and then play the game without complaining? That's my latest afternoon of Linux, which I like to throw on a VM every so often to see how the end user experience is.
Linux has come a long long way, don't get me wrong. On stock hardware for stock tasks -- email, web, basic office editing, basic photo editing -- I daresay it's completely accessible by Grandma. But a game, while easy to install on Windows, has a lot of dependencies. It is designed to make the system it's being run on sweat (at least, HL3 will be) and look good while doing it. The reason DirectX is so dominant isn't that it's better than OpenGL, it's that it's very effective as an abstraction layer (and, IMO, easier to talk to but that's neither here nor there and I'm not a professional programmer). Linux doesn't have those. It has whatever driver the user chose to install, and it may or may not be as heavily QC'd as the Windows driver (probably not). It has some version/versions of glibc and hopefully they are a stock compile which hasn't had anything modified as opposed to a custom version that some other application installed and registered over the original (have had this happen more than once, with predictably weird results). Hopefully they aren't running an ATI card because that Linux driver is just garbage. |
Installed Ubuntu on an old laptop of mine last year, realized the WiFi card wasn't working as planned. Went on a forum...went on another forum...got confused...went into the terminal...fucked around...fucked it up...quit....came back two weeks later...spent 4 hours on it...quit...came back in a month....spent an hour on it and fixed it. |
No it doesn't and no it won't. People have have been saying this since 2000 at least. It just does not and will have the critical mass that the public requires.
A system needs more than games for people to adopt. I can play games on PS4, XBOX One and various Nintendo handhelds. Oh yeah, and the PC. And my Mac to a lesser extent.
It needs universally supported productivity apps. Business and government use MS Office. Yeah a tiny amount have moved to open source, but it is minute. When you are working in a major company or department you need shit that works and IS SUPPORTED.
It's free. So what? Blender is free 3D software and it is barely used in the industry. Why? Partly because of it's horrible user interface but also because there are several other major players that are better and have been around longer. Entire pipelines and toolsets have been built around these apps. Companies aren't going to change OS because it saves them comparatively few dollars in a one of purchase.
It's powerful. No one cares. You care because you are a nerd (as do I). Literally 95% (and figuratively, given the new definition of literally) of the computer using population DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. They want to write their reports, check facebook and play Angry Birds. "But you can do that on Linux". Yeah, and you can do it on whatever you have now without having to learn an entire new arcane OS.
Look, the fact is, there is almost ZERO ACTUAL REASONS to switch to Linux for the average person. Hell, I am slightly above average, tried it for a while and just got sick of having to hit forums for almost every minor problem that came up, and there were a lot. I am sure a lot of people will come back with "That was years ago, have you tried it recently" or "It's foolproof" blah de blah.
To them I say, I have to do tech support with elderly parents who get flummoxed by the DVR. You think Linux will cut it? How about the people at work who aren't even aware that MS Word has keyboard shortcuts, or if they do "I just like to use the mouse". |
This is such a stupid posts. Most Linux forums aren't like that and haven't been like it in ages. Plus you're probably ignorant enough to not realize what a detrimental and enabling act it is to not discourage use of resources.
Its amazing that you complain about getting calls as it is. Who takes those calls now? The same exact people. You guys act like its a regular occurrence for people to PAY for actual support for MS. Its ad hoc regardless of OS. |
Can Reddit not have a wikipedia style monetization? Add a feature where users can get a star for paying $1 per month. The star gets bigger as they pay more. The payment is clearly indicated as helping reddit pay for servers, development, r&d, etc.
Have reddit open source code left and right from it's core stack, make it seem like a company for the people, and then people will pay. They will pay because they will see value.
Have an awesome reddit mobile app that trumps what is out there now. For a small fee. Or maybe you must pay $1 for mobile commenting, but you can use the site otherwise from anywhere. |
Leadership is a really rare skill.
Think: what does a team manager do? How is it different from a higher up (but still mid-way) manager? How is it different from a CEO?
Would you think a manager is more like a: squad leader, shepherd, or gardener?
Very few people actually know the answer to this question and they are thrust into management positions eitherway. I can't blame them for taking the job: it pays better. But they don't know what to do, and they need to do something to justify their job. This is even worse when you realize that people value an employee's worth based on how much work they do not how much better the company is with them than without . The perfect manager is invisible, and rarely does anything, like a gardener, s/he tends to his/her team and does the minimum to ensure health and the team achieving their goals. This manager is invaluable to the company, they'd be worse off if they didn't have it. But this manager barely does any work (their value comes from knowing where to put the X so people consider that their work is not very valuable. |
I haven't been interested enough to find out why they're doing it. Sentence summary, please?
They were writing [their own browser engine]( which was one of the best for a long time, but it was slowing down their work on what they are best at, which is user interface and rolling out features.
So they switched to the open source engine that Google uses in Chromium (and by extent Chrome) .
^^^Note: ^^^they ^^^haven't ^^^brought ^^^every ^^^feature ^^^back ^^^yet. |
I think your completely in the right on this. Not only are these people illiterate, in their ignorance they often cause extreme damage to the system that a competent user wouldn't have done. They also tend to immediately cause the same problem again once you've fixed it, blame the fix you performed for future problems, and in general make the job hell.
Mechanics regularly gouge prices if a) you don't know what your talking about
b) you caused the damage through ignorance, say, driving a thousand miles with no oil. The extra damage and time spent to fix it raises the price
c)if you are a terrible customer, complain, and blame them for breaking the car. Its your fault, why shouldn't you pay?
People seem to view computer techs as some sort of charity. Guess what? This is our job. If you don't know how to use and maintain your product your going to have to pay a premium to get it fixed. That's why we get educated to understand these systems in the first place. I need a return on my investment spent learning how to fix all the problems users have caused. I will not ever do anything for free. I started off being all ideological about it, but then you get customers that expect you to start doing other things for free.
The company I work for charges $100 dollars an hour to explain an operating system to a user. We charge $200 for a software diagnostic and repair. If you don't know how to use the system you have no right to complain about prices, no right to ask for free work, and no right to complain. No mechanic would teach you to drive, change your oil, and run wiring on the house because fixing cars IS THEIR JOB. They are not driving instructors, and they are not a trade school. If my customer wants to become self-reliant, $100 bucks for every hour, period. I need to pay my rent and put food on the table and I'm not going to teach you to do my job for me, especially if you've installed 800 toolbars, a program called 'SuperFastPCRegCleanRepair!.bat' and then try to get work for free. |
The spread of personal computers in China came at about the same time as Windows XP, and the ease of use and friendly UI made XP the absolute choice for a significantly large portion of the market. As is the case elsewhere, so many people are computer illiterate or near that they don't even know what OS a machine is running; for them, personal computer = Microsoft Windows XP = the blue default theme. I suspect they don't even understand the concept of upgrading a system or the software provider ending support. And some of those who understand a little refuse to upgrade to a better system for a variety of reasons, among which there are the usual "I only know how XP works and 7 and 8 are too different" or "I need to run this and it only runs on XP." Windows 7 and 8 provide compatibility mode for programs to run but not many know that. Also, reinstalling a system means all important personal files get lost, and frankly not many people I've met consciously back up their files. |
Just in case anyone wants to know what the different features are of the different cloud storage products: |
I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile two months ago and absolutely love it. I slashed my bill in half and get a whole lot more for the money. I have unlimited data, two gigs of wifi hotspot and unlimited talk & text. Although I had to jump through a few complicated hoops, they fully reimbursed me for my contract cancellation fee from AT&T. T-Mobile's customer service about the best I have ever dealt with. I have had to call them for various reasons and everytime I call I wait no longer than a minute for a rep to get on the phone and they are extremely kind, courteous and thorough. I do get a few more dropped calls but honestly, it is a fair tradeoff for all of the benefits I am reaping from being with T-Mobile. |
EFax.com does this as well. They are a terrible company. I signed up and used them for a few months, went to cancel and you have to call them during business hours.
6 months later they are still billing my card, my credit card company told me they couldn't do anything about the charges after 60 days. I spent an hour on the phone with them and they finally said we have record of your call, but you didn't respond to some email they never sent, so it wasn't cancelled properly. Eventually they refunded me, but it was a nightmare. |
in the last 3 months essentially, 85% of all smartphones SOLD were android based. Obviously, though, this is not representative of total market share. Android phones are made by many companies and all release phones at different times of the year, vs. Apple, the main competitor, and only manufacturer of the iPhone. Since the new iPhones should be coming out within the next 3 months, the number of people buying new iPhones is very limited. |
I have an iphone for work, and an android for personal use. I like both. I prefer the iPhone for work because of its simplicity and battery for calls and emails. I use it for music as well, better battery and music player.
I prefer the Android for personal use because of dat screen size and fun. |
Full Disclosure: I'm a mobile application developer who develops mainly for iOS, but is a big Android user personally. I'll try to be as un-biased as I can here
There are a couple of things I'd like to point out here from a historic standpoint;
The Apple approach has always worked well for Apple, but only in the scope of it serving as a ludicrously profitable hardware / software company. Considering they handle both hardware and software, the fact that they have complete control over their product and the premium message it conveys to users is a boon to them, and it likely wouldn't work under any other scenario. Imagine an Apple laptop running windows? Do you think they would have been able to get away with charging +-30% more for their laptops strictly on build quality? Because they control both hardware and software, they are able to do this. However, this comes at a price; market share. Microsoft, on the other hand, is mainly a software company, and put the power in the hands of OEMs to build devices that ran Windows. Both Microsoft and Apple have existed very, very comfortably in their own spaces for a long time, and the market share isn't likely to sway to a major degree in one direction or another (with the possible, dim-light exception of Chromebooks).
I don't think I'd be saying anything controversial by stating that the same could be said in the smart phone market with Apple vs. Google. However, in my humble opinion; the foregone conclusion when Google got into the Android game was that it would eventually gain a vast share of the market. The first iterations of Android were rough to say the least, but with Googles ability to rapidly develop the operating system, combined with the marketing and the open nature of the platform, the game they were playing was always meant to be the long one. Apple is a monoculture, and is exceedingly good at being so. However, it comes at a price; namely market share.
However, it's worth mentioning that controlling both the hardware and the software doesn't always fair well if a company isn't able to innovate fast enough to compete with others in the marketplace. The same goes for the Android approach. See also: Blackberry (closed) and WebOS (open). In other words; even if the models work, innovation, marketing and the ability to deliver (and in the case of WebOS, timing) play a very big factor in the success or failure as a platform. In the tech world today, mountains can be moved and institutions brought to their knees in a matter of years / months. (fun fact: Garmin's stock plummeted 40% the day that Android 2.0 was announced with free Google Maps-based Navigation on Android phones)
With all of that in mind, I'd like to point to one piece of the puzzle that I don't think anyone has mentioned on here yet; incentive. In particular, Google has a tremendous incentive to release low cost phones to people in emerging markets and across the world; and that's search. The ability to get a phone into someones hands and get them searching using your technology is such a money maker for Google that their business model for hardware / software could not have existed any other way.
Food for thought; if Google had gone the Apple route, and had exceptional hardware and tightly manufactured software that only they could control, and launched when they did, it's extremely likely that the ROI for their investment in Android might not have justified keeping the program going more then a few years at best. Google simply doesn't operate on the scale of tens of millions. They shipped almost ten phones for every iPhone that has shipped over the same period. That's ten devices built almost entirely around search for every iPhone shipped, and that's where Google's sweet spot lies.
For more proof of this you need to look no further then the Nexus line of devices. The Nexus line shows that Google can work with manufacturers to create a pure Android experience on a device with top of the line specs for next to nothing cost. Take the Nexus 5 for instance; $349 for the 16gb version when it first launched. Beautiful hardware and fantastic, capable software at a price that's almost half what the iPhone 5s is. ($349 vs. $649). The incentive is clear. |
Here is where I butcher trying to describe bitcoins
To really wrap your head around bitcoin you shouldn't think of it as a currency. Think of it as a transaction network. The novelty/value of bitcoin is the fact that it is a network where the trust is decentralized. In any exchange of goods/services there is always trust involved. In a cash transaction, a merchant is trusting that a) the currency that you are exhanging for good/service isn't counterfit and b) has the stated value e.g $1,$20,$100. You give a storeowner some cash, and he trusts that he is recieving fair compensation. In a credit card transaction, the trust is in the credit network (visa,mastercard) and when you swipe your card the merchant is trusting that they will be paid by the credit card company. When you deposit money, or take out a mortage, or buy a car, there needs to be trust between the end user and the lender. This is why bitcoin, or rather the underlying network, can have such a huge impact on the way transactions are handled in the future. It is a decentralized and anonymous network, which (on paper) can be completely trusted. Imagine having the deed to your house, or the title to your car/boat, and all of your cash stored in an 'online wallet as opposed to a bank. This online wallet can't be seized by anyone or lost, or destroyed, or stolen (if correctly implemented). This is a major reason why a lot of governments were afraid of bitcoin when it first popped up on the radar.
The way that this trust works has to do with the 'mining' portion that most people don't really understand. What miners are doing is essentially validating and documenting ALL transactions happening on the bitcoing network. They are all coming to a consensus on which transactions are authentic, and making sure non-authentic transactions dont accidentily happen. The reason that people get confused is they think, 'wow these things are valuable and I can just get some software to solve some math problems and make money?'. Technically, yes, but that is completely missing the point of what the mining operation is doing. There has to be a reward for the people doing the mining, they are litereally the only thing securing and maintaining the trust of the network. The basics of mining are that there is supposed to be a predetermined influxs of 'new' bitcoins minted into the network every so often. Obviously when the price of BTC started to skyrocket it became economically adventagous for lots of people to try mining coins. You would think that with all these new people mining, that there would be way more bitcoins in the ecosystem, but that isn't the case. In a situation like this, the network itself can essentially monitor how much horsepower is behind it and adjust the difficulty of mining(make the math problems harder to solve) to regulate the slow drip of new coins. |
At the risk of sounding like an ass, I'd like to point out the fact that net neutrality would result in same level priority for everything you do on the Web. While this sounds great in theory, this means that no matter what you're doing on the Internet, it's going to be just as fast/slow as everything else. So if you're in the middle of a Skype call (which uses VOIP and ) while someone else on your network is trying to browse Reddit, both are completing these tasks at the same speed. This probably isn't an issue for people with a large bandwidth. However, if you only have a 2mbps connection, (which is considered high speed in the US) your Skype call is probably going to get choppy. I fully believe in the idea of sticking it to Comcast and the rest, but unfortunately this may result in an overall shitty experience for anybody trying to perform high stress activities on their Internet. |
Upvoted, didn't call. |
My rep said" net neutrality violates the first amendment". Maybe ill post it later.
Edit: This is what he said.
Dear Mr. [redacted],
Thank you for contacting me concerning net neutrality. I appreciate your opinion and value your input on this important issue.
As an Internet governance concept, so-called "net neutrality" means that Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Comcast and Verizon, should treat all data traveling over their network equally in terms of hosting rates and speeds of service. In 2005, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that broadband Internet service is not a "telecommunications service," and therefore not subject to existing FCC rules that prohibit variations in rates and services.
Despite ruling that ISPs are not telecom companies, the FCC also adopted rules to define neutrality principles limiting how ISPs could handle traffic over the Internet. These "open internet" rules banned broadband providers from blocking or discriminating against online content based on user, source, or application.
Earlier this year, in Verizon v. FCC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down FCC rules that regulate how ISPs handle the data passing through their networks. Verizon successfully claimed that the FCC lacked jurisdiction over broadband service. The ruling struck down the "open internet" rules the FCC adopted.
Regulating the Internet is no different than regulating the press; both are protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment, like others, was meant to be a limitation on government power; a means of shielding citizens from government intrusion. Therefore, not only is this regulation explicitly unconstitutional, but it also sets a dangerous precedent.
Net neutrality violates not only the First Amendment's free speech guarantee, but also constitutes an illegal taking of private property without providing just compensation, as required by the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. The FCC's proposed net neutrality rules would require a permanent occupation of private broadband networks. This would amount to taking broadband providers' property without providing just compensation. Net neutrality would grant Internet content providers permanent access across privately-owned broadband networks to deliver content to end-users. By depriving broadband providers of the right to exclude others from their networks, FCC regulations would interfere with what has long been considered by the Court as property.
Thank you again for writing and expressing your thoughts on this important issue. Please visit my website at to send me another message with your thoughts and opinions, read my positions on major issues, or sign up for my E-Newsletter. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the links below. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.
Sincerely,
(signed)
Jim Bridenstine
U.S. House of Representatives
Edit: |
Ayn Rand was an author and philosopher from the USSR who then moved to the USA. She was clearly against the current functioning of social programs: welfare is a basic amount per month that you can receive when unemployed (?) and Medicare is health insurance for the elderly (?). As well as bureaucracy as a whole.
Her books clearly denounce moochers, people who take from society while never giving back, and outline characters who are ready to go their own way so that they can create what they've seemingly been destined to create.
The irony of this is that, from what I know, her books and ideas were rather successful (and currently popular with a lot of right leaning Americans) after her death, much like painters often time see none of their potential fortune as their masterpieces become popular after they're deceased.
The |
This is only the official data they've officially been allowed to collect. It is easy to collect far more info than that.
If your browser's fingerprint is unique, it doesn't matter what tracking and cookies you try to block. You are still remarkably individual, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out where you've clicked. Location by cellphone may be less trackable, but still, if your cellular radio is on and you've been near at least one cell tower, it is possible to estimate your location pretty accurately. |
Telecom guy here. That is not as easy of a task as it sounds. Disregarding the huge budget and global power of the US defense and intelligence establishment, most of the worlds major global telecommunications carriers, the so called Tier 1 providers, are US companies [Level3, AT&T, Verizon Business, XO, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, Sprint]. Even foreign owned telecoms have large amounts of data flowing through the US because of its geographic location and importance as a world market. Companies like [NTT, Telecom Italia, Tata Communications, TeliaSonera, etc.] are foreign owned and thus you'd assume free of US influence. The problem is all of these networks have large US footprints and extensive interconnections in the US, thus fall under NSA surveillance.
You'd think the largest factor in choosing how traffic is routed would be geography. The shortest path means less latency and intermediate steps. This is not always the case. There are two other huge factors:
Interconnect Opportunities : For the Internet to work, networks need to be connect to each other to exchange traffic. Companies are likely to add nodes to cities that offer good connection opportunities. Since the US got a head start on building Internet infrastructure and commercializing it, cities like NYC, San Jose, Miami, and Seattle have become major global telecommunications switch hubs. This leads to the second issue...
Link Costs : Renting a circuit to carry data between cities is expensive, especially one that uses undersea cables. Just like freight shipping and air travel, the busier a route is, the more competitors swarm in to ply it, and the cheaper the prices. From a cost standpoint, it often made more sense to send traffic across the ocean to the US then back, rather then regionally between two nearby countries. Circuits to the US were cheap and plentiful, connections between smaller countries were not.
Taken all together you have a situation where many global telecom companies are US owned or have large US operations and assets and a business environment that favors using the United States as a waypoint for global communications. As the Internet continues to expand this is slowly changing but it is still a huge factor. |
to be honest. in this case microsoft. and oddly the reason is litterally because microsoft does not want the government to let things like comcast take over their Xbox server's, computers, etc if you let that happen you can essentially drive microsoft out of business and ruin things for just about everyone involved in that company and easily those who have or do use products created by the company.... while i agree both are evil. for once i can say Microsoft is the lesser evil. it may not be for the reasons we like but Microsoft is basically saying "yo.. wait a minute you think I'm gonna sit by and let you run over my customers? that will put me in a bad spot and i don't like that" even if you are a billion dollar business, your still a business and that means you need people to buy your stuff to survive and continue to grow. so, keep a watchfull eye. but look on the guy that provides you the most benefit if they win. |
No not 'flaming' just exasperated that the ms marketing team can't seem to come up with a decent representative name for a program to save their lives. Remember the time ms bought a great little image viewing app called "Media Pro" and renamed it "Microsoft Expressions"?... Too much attempted cleverness and way too out of touch, and this just keeps happening, like... "Spartan" for example. Apple's "Safari" while also being a shitty name at least has connotations of travel and exploration... Microsofts naming style is too inward looking, they name things for the Image they want people to get when they think of other Microsoft products and past failures, not what they think a person using the app wants to do...
So anyway, as far as names informing people what to expect, Spartan is either "let's armor up to wage a battle on the internet, for THIS IS SPARTA!" Or else is an attemp to show people that the NEW MICROSOFT is stripped down and simple, tight, and clean and tough. Either way it's a failure in naming an app that's intended I suppose to attract people who want to easily and casually browse the internet.
2¢ |
I think that the start menu coming back (and several other initiatives much more important than that) is a very good sign of a changing Microsoft. It was a compromise that wasn't difficult, so the downside to not including the option is negligible.
On a more broad scale, Microsoft is becoming far more transparent. They are live streaming some of their meetings, open sourcing a large portion of .NET so that Mac, Unix, and mobile users aren't left in the cold, and initiating a more cost-efficient paradigm of OS upgrades for the end user.
Their increased awareness about the importance of community has led them to realizing that Windows isn't what they make all of their money from. Windows is easy to give away because the platform unification is more important than the revenue that you will recoup elsewhere. In order to have a profitable and attractive application store, you need more developers who care about what they are doing. Visual Studio Community Edition is exactly what they needed to kick start app development for non-businesses. |
From the Arstechnica article:
> A blog post from Terry Myerson clears up what "Windows as a service" means, though the duration of "the supported lifetime of the device" is still foggy. "This is more than a one-time upgrade," writes Myerson. "Once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device—at no additional charge."
Upgrading is free for the first year, after that it most likely will require an upgrade fee similar to OS Upgrade costs today. |
TBH I don't even want the additional confusion of choosing to install programs as they were designed or getting the "app" version from the MS store.
In my experience, silly desktop "apps" and unnecessary changes to services like netflix take up system resources and are poorer quality than simply using the base service. I understand why there's an "app" for netflix on my nintendo Wii... I cannot fathom an argument that would convince me to waste hard drive space on something that works perfectly well in a browser windows. |
The whole industry is going to have to adapt to 10 though. Sure, 7 wasn't perfect, and 8 just doesnt feel nice with a mouse. 7 came out in late 2009, which is 5 years, which is a 50 years in the tech world.
But now every pc will have to come with it, and windows tech support will have a lot more to do and windows will profit from the calls and it's basically still a good old windows with a lot of the old features hidden elsewhere. And if you build your pc, buying 10 will cost a fortune , putting you off of building a pc in the first place, why not just buy a ready made box with 10 for cheaper with some of the hardware being not the one you want.
It's not exactly free. It's a windows, i already have one, thanks. It's like buying a zippo. The design hasn't really changed since what 1936? Sure - windows t-shirts, mugs with zippo, doll houses featuring windows etc. But it's still just a lighter. It's supposed to just give you the toolbox to let your games, editors, browsers and whatever else just work. It's not supposed to be some sort of houseplant, it's an OS.
A real programmer would probably tell me that windows 7 is made of matchsticks held together by toothpaste, and explain why the new one will make his job easier and we'd all live in the wonderful magical land of happiness and a tolerable work environment. |
Sure, let's assume you somehow manage to remove every gun on Planet Earth, along with the factories and the blueprints for guns and the knowledge about gunpowder. Your anarchistic revolution succeeds.
One month starts the infighting- with baseball bats, knives and other old-time weapons. Violence works just as well, only with lesser means. Whoever has more knives and more people ready to kill for him will win at a local level. Several barons spring up. People need to organize and defend against this new tyranny, forming militias. |
The brits during WW1 told the Jews and Arabs to revolt and expand their power and influence in the region.
The Arabs fought the Ottomans.
The Jews simply immigrated, they never took part in the war on either side, this is when anti-semitism gained strength back home in Germany, the jews were at odds with German Ideals and even were Pacifists.
In WW2, the Jews, sticking to their nature continued the cycle of self-martyrdom and claim victim rather than fight back against Nazi Germany, they either let themselves be captured or attempted to flee.
Israel formed in the 40's
1948, Jews stole land from Palestine.
Jews then put up walls.
Between then and now, the Jewish state of Israel has been classified as illegal several times, but then repealed by the UN, mostly because of American influence.
Jews have never represented themselves in a war, even when they lived in a Nation that was at war. They have only fought in wars where they are the primary power, aka killing palestinian civilians.
In recent years, they have gone about treating Africans in a similar fashion Nazi Germany treated jews just before they started shipping them off to work camps.
Israel also shot down civilian aircraft and attempted to sink a US warship under the guise of an Arab attack just so the US would invade the surrounding area.
They also run huge multi-national conglomerates, with specific interest in news empires and banking. |
I can't live with just Linux, but people who claim it isn't viable should really learn how computers actually work. 99% of the time I can just build my own fix on Linux. Guarantee the Windows and Mac users that complain about Linux don't have the know-how to do that.
Edit: ITT butthurt people with the same opinion as me that feel the need to differentiate their argument. |
Time Critical data that relies on a connection that can only support a non-stop one-way transmission.
Netflix streams TCP. Because DRM and quality mater. the buffer is there to compensate for instant errors, and has room to handle bandwidth spikes/dips.
If your audio streaming app used UDP you would have noticeable squeals, hisses and pops almost like a vinyl
To say that an Ethernet cable capable of sending 1,048,576 kbps of audio would need to use UDP to stream an even 4,506 kbps (4.4mbps) audio stream is asinine.
a simple TCP error correction in the stack would be invisible to the encoder and decoder, as the NIC in the devices could send the song back and forth several times in the span of a few seconds.
The only really commercially available UDP streams that you see are your Cable provider (you see those green checkerboard screens on cable but not Netflix? That's why) and radio. Broadcast TV and Radio, as well as some streaming audio sources from the internet to your home, use UDP. These also stream in UDP far lower than any "audiophile" would appreciate their music in.
The only other example is video games, which will drop packets to keep the game going, but if you drop too many packets, you get disconnected. A dropped packet in a game is far less destructive than a dropped packet in a song.
knowing what UDP means and how it applies are totally different things, and you shouldn't make such assumptions about networking if you don't grasp the concepts. |
He was 'awarded' his own fucking money.
They froze his accounts at the start of this bullshit, and now the are allowing him to have access to some of it ($200k+ a month -- The man had ~$30 million and they took it all), essentially dulling out his own money to him in increments like he is a child. |
AFAIK, that permission lasts as long as you have the app. The difference between android and ios being when apps are allowed to interact with each other relative to permission granted.
On android if I download a photo sharing app and it asks for my contacts, I don't know if it immediately sends my contacts because it has permission to see them.
On ios if that app asks to access my contacts when I'm not actively trying to share something, I know there's something not right going on.
That's not to say it can't share them now that I have given permission, but with how apple handles app store approvals, it seems less likely. |
True enough. It actually seems like a pretty bizarre economic problem. Apps are dirt cheap, yet people evaluate them entirely on their market rate rather than their actual value. Plus the act of paying for an app creates a transaction barrier which feels steep, even though the actual amount is small and there is no real transaction cost. I have no idea how to solve that problem.
For devs though, I think the bigger problem is the shit CPMs advertisers pay. If they paid anywhere near the per audience rates they continue to pay for even low-tier legacy media, like local newspapers and trade magazines (which don't offer any user data), then devs wouldn't need to show nearly as many ads and a lot more could operate for free. But again, they're paying market rates, not what the apps are actually worth. |
I don't know specifically that there aren't -- I haven't read every last 1983 case out there -- but I have read my fare share of opinions in general and that's just not something that judges do. They may come down with a surprising judgment one way or the other every once in a while in borderline cases, but it would never in a million years be of the type to just blatantly ignore the existing law in that area. If anything, the judge would logic his way into an incorrect judgment, but if it was ever obvious in any way shape or form it would just get overturned on appeal in a millisecond. Usually when you hear stuff on reddit about terrible opinions/judgments, simply reading the opinion with any type of legal background or knowledge will easily reveal that the opinion is solidly grounded in the law. That's not to say that political leanings of judges don't play any role -- I've interned for a federal appeals court judge and seen it first hand -- but generally it's in cases where the law in the area is right on the borderline and the arguments either way are more-or-less equally valid; in such situations the side closest to the most judges' political leanings will win. BUT even in that type of case, reading the opinion will make it obvious that there truly is a valid legal argument for that outcome 99.99% of the time. I follow politics a decent amount so I understand the nervousness regarding bias and corruption but, having seen the court system and dealt with and studied the judiciary at length, I can honestly say that I have the utmost confidence that, while not perfect, the U.S. court system is pretty damn solid when it comes to avoiding that type of stuff. |
Pain pills, but he had to go out of state to get treatment because he knew that his fellow members of the PD would look down on him, yet he looked down at us.
Lol, it was funny, the crackhead in there (who was a fucking awesome person), after he was ranting and raving about drug addicts and what horrible people they are and how they all need to be locked up, laughed and was like, "Well, look where you ended up."
I "graduated" so I don't know how his story ever semi-turned out, but by my last session he was talking more and I saw him almost smile.
Seriously though, rehab was a joke, and our major resource for rehabilitation and psych meds out here just pushes drugs, and has a lot of lobbying with big tobacco and big alcohol and big pharma, and once "marijuana" is mentioned, holy shit, it's like you just killed five kids, wtf is wrong with you.
I almost got kicked out a few times because I argued that their facts were wrong, and even was like, "if cannabis came on the ballot to be legalized, would you legalize it?" And the rehab coordinater was like, "this isn't the type of discussion we should be having" and I said, "No, it's the perfect type of discussion you should be having, like adults do," and half the people raised their hands, and I was like, "Really? Only half?" and this one lady was like, "oh hell, of course I'd vote for it. I'm a super alcoholic and cannabis is a recreational thing that I'll do occasionally" and all the people raised their hands, and the leader lady was just flabbergasted, and then we explained how smoking cannabis works. She literally had no idea what a batty was. I'm thinking, you're a rehab coordinater yet you lack the initiative to learn how drugs work on a level on intake? That's just some next level ignorance.
She literally had no fucking clue, and she would talk all the time about how perfect her life was, no fucking joke "last night was perfect/my husband is perfect/my kids are perfect", and we're all in there like, "Shut the fuck up."
Yeah, drama city, but honestly, the only thing that makes me not turn to my vices again is knowing how these older adults, from a few millionaires in there to poor people, all were having issues, and I just thought of the older lady (who was a fucking BAMF on all accounts), saying, "pyro, you're too young to have these probs, and you have health issues to boot."
It's bad when the crack addict says, "Jesus, pyro, you could have died!"
But all in all, everybody I met in rehab were all splendid people, and it just gives you a perspective on who's really addicted and addicted to what. |
Sure. Simply put: because you don't deal with any of the technical stuff.
Maybe I can still use the mail analogy for this. But, for this to work, imagine that it's really complex to work with envelopes and post offices. Meaning: nobody wants to dive into that.
Now, imagine you are in an office cubicle, with a mail room responsible for handling the mail. When you want to send outgoing mail, you hand the letter to the mail boy, who takes it to the mail room. You don't see what happens there, but they put your own location as the sender on an envelope, make sure the postage is correct and either drop it in a local mail box or deliver it in bulk to the post office (doesn't matter for you).
The mail room won't fake a different sender address for you even if you ask them to. Why would they? That's not their job.
However, that doesn't prevent anyone who is willing to learn exactly how envelopes work, how you buy stamps at the source (a post office) and how to send envelopes on their way without help of a mail room, from dropping anonymous (or with faked senders) letters in a mailbox.
Back to technical reality: modern phone lines are not "lines," phone calls are done by packets on a switched network. Like the internet. In fact, usually it is the internet these calls travel over. The phone provider (e.g. Comcast or AT&T) handles all this. They encapsulate the audio and connection info into their right containers, make sure the sender's address is your phone number, make sure it reaches the correct provider for the addressee number being dialed, etc. And there's the reason you can't spoof your number: because Comcast or AT&T won't do this for you .
On the other hand, as a consumer, you can get an account with a company that doesn't handle copper to your house, but let's you log into their phone service over the internet, skipping the "box/wall socket in your house" service that Comcast and AT&T provide. Some simple examples of this are: Sonetel ]( These are services that cater to consumers or small businesses, so they try to be responsible: they try to enforce only using outgoing caller ID that you actually own. In the case of Easyvoip, you enter a phone number for caller ID, and to verify it, you get a call/text with some numbers, and you need to enter those numbers on the website. That proves to them that you own (or at least have access to) the number you want to use as outgoing caller ID.
The important part taken from that is not that they still try and do the right thing: not allow a consumer to spoof a random number. The important part is: they technically can allow any phone number to be used as caller ID .
If you go one step further (and these robocallers would, if they really wanted to) and not use companies that cater to consumers, but sit at the level that these VoIP (Voice over IP) resellers are, they could do whatever the hell they wanted. And when dealing with business VoIP, that's usually how it's done. Nobody wants to deal with "verification texts" when you're configuring the phone settings for a medium-sized company.
For technical reference, it's a really good idea to skip "box in your house" companies like comcast and get VoIP/SIP (SIP is the technical name for the standard phone-over-internet protocol) directly from the internet. Compare that switch to ditching your @home.com email address for a @gmail.com email address. Don't just access what your local ISP offers, shop around, choosing the best phone company... in the world! To use a SIP-based (read: internet-located) phone provider, you need a machine that talks SIP, like this base station from Gigaset an old-fashioned but awesome "business desk phone" ( image |
Well, SSD's strong point is their read access time. This is basically 0 (>1 ms) compared to mechanical drives (10 ms in the real world). I guess what I'm saying is that I have an SSD and in the real world it rox any raid combo currently available in the same price range.
By rocks, I mean "hands down kicks it's butt". The trouble comes with large storage. SSD can handle your OS and a few applications, but for large storage you need a mechanical hard drive or a big wallet. |
Tingtingting! We have a winner.
People just don't get worked up about piracy or copyright infringement the way we instinctively understand physical theft or loss, so plenty of people (rightly or wrongly) don't tend to see it as a moral issue.
As such, they frequently see a simple choice: acquire game vs. jump through a few arbitrary, annoying hoops and then acquire game.
And in fact, with non-indie games this choice is more often between:
Acquire latest, fully-patched, de-DRMed and No-CD cracked version of the game vs. jump through hoops to buy game, acquire old version which then frequently needs to be patched and/or download huge updates off the net before it will work, and then jump through more hoops fiddling with CDs and DVDs, DRM and the like every time you play it . |
I like how the article boast about not spending time on anti-piracy technology and then goes on to talk about their anti-piracy technology.
Prior to the last year or two the common DRM was SecureROM and other disk protection schemes. Then came along online activation which was cried about as draconian DRM.
The only new type of DRM out now is the kind that require a constant Internet connection to play and validate. This is only being done by a few games.
So maybe Blizzard thinks anti-piracy technology is a waste of everyone's time that doesn't stop them from implementing the latest anti-piracy technology that everyone is up in arms about.
Not only that they also have removed features from their games to to prevent piracy (Starcraft LAN play). While not technically anti-piracy technology it is probably a worse concept. |
So many people here are complaining that Toshiba doesn't/shouldn't have to provide restore discs so it's the guy's fault. But.. if a computer fails under warranty, shouldn't it be Toshiba's obligation to restore the computer to at least factory condition? That includes the software. Toshiba didn't just sell him the hardware. They also sold him the software. I'm not saying the solution should necessarily be to have Toshiba send him the restore discs for free, but I do think Toshiba should be obligated to restore the system to factory condition after it failed under warranty. And I suspect that the cheapest and easiest way for all involved is for them to send him the restore discs. |
He should take the computer back to the shop that installed the drive and ask that the warranty work be done in full - not halfway. This is not Toshiba's issue, they commissioned the repair shop to fix the computer and the repair shop did not deliver. There's so many crappy computer shops around now because every kid that's fixed a virus for someone thinks he can fix any computer problem.
Since every repair shop that's worth a crap has images of pretty much every Windows disk, it would be trivial for them to install Windows 7 for him. A standard Windows 7 OEM disk will work with the key attached to the chassis of the laptop.
The bottom line is this: slapping an unformatted HDD into a laptop does NOT fix the problem of the laptop not working. To most customers, "working" means it boots to the desktop without significant delay and is ready to use. |
I wasn't addressing the patent at all. I was commenting that many people will hear about "a patent on peanut butter sandwiches" and rave over how broken the patent system is, without ever bothering to read the claims of the patent to see that it's talking about a new machine to manufacture peanut butter sandwiches already packaged for shipment into the back of a truck or something.
I was saying "sounds like a patent on addition and subtraction" is a foolish complaint given that the reader obviously read nothing except the title of the work being patented and has dismissed based solely on the title anything the patent could possibly actually be covering. |
Update: [You need to already "get CNBC & MSNBC as part of your television package" then use your cable/satelite account info to gain access to the stream's.]( |
Stuxnet was supposed to attack] in a way that would make the thing look like it had been hit by a bunker buster
I'm pretty sure that's wrong (unless you can come up with a source). As far as I know, it was designed to be as hidden as possible, while causing as much damage as possible, so that the scientists would keep checking the physical equipment for problems without expecting a hacking-related problem. The hackers could have made the centrifuges spin so fast they'd spew crap everywhere. they didn't because they couldn't possibly infect all the logic controllers at once, so the Iranians would have noticed something was wrong and shut down the power or something to investigate; |
Well, from general knowledge: It has been made public (to a degree) what kind of systems they've developed and how they use them. Most notably, the NSA call database in 2006, but also projects such as thinthread and trailblazer. We know about those because thomas drake bitched about how much he thought it was wasteful. On top of that, this kind of thing would be a multi billion dollar project (in the hundreds) and they're spending their money elsewhere.
The one continuing theme is that the NSA has been filtering and reading through all communications. That's distinct from actually recording them. We know that they have SOME of the infrastructure for a full recording project, but nothing indicates that they've got it all ready.
It is known that they are building a massive datacentre, but nothing indicates that it has gone into production. This video describes a working system.
From rumour: The trailblazer system and related projects indicate a massive filtering effort. Presumably, NSA has been sifting through communications from all suspicious persons, and to a degree, discards useless messages. Rumours consistently indicate that they're keeping records of the messages, but not the messages themselves.
From speculation: There are three threats to the NSA:
The judicial branch of government, which can order them to cease action.
the electorate, which will influence the legislative/executive branches to restrict their abilities in the event of public outrage.
internally damaging elements (wikileaks, spies, nepotists, morons) who can expose the organization or hurt its image by doing stupid shit.
The protections in order are legal arguments, plausible deniability, and security/training. The security isn't great, but they have threats to keep people in line (Manning's torture, Drake's charges)
Regarding legal argument: If they filter emails automatically they could argue that they weren't wiretapping because the system (to that point) is anonymous and free from human influence. It's just like the post office can screen packages. They can record the to/from because that information is public broadcast, they can do that for regular mail too.
They can't legally save copies without a warrant. But - if the communication is automatically screened and determined to be a "potential threat," they've got a reason to keep a copy. They're protected by that "national security" legislation that they used to get away with warrantless wiretapping.
Essentially, they'd be able to sidestep privacy protection by only invading the privacy of people who are flagged as potential threats.
Regarding plausible deniability: having a huge database of everybody's email? That's not going to fly with the American public. What if wikileaks got a hold of that? They don't even need to flag anybody really important. One state legislator with connections, one idle rich guy who loves lawsuits, and there could be serious problems for the NSA.
And lastly, they can't sort through all the info they have. Saving everything wouldn't help them, it hasn't helped them, and they wouldn't even need it anyway. The "communications with a terrorist" is enough to hold somebody for questioning, and they'd probably have flagged that one for recording anyway.
So the reason I know they don't save everything is because I know that'd be a terrible idea, and it wouldn't help them. It'd be strategically useless, and most importantly it would be an obvious political threat that they would spot from the second it got proposed .
The fact that none of their whistleblowers have exposed this level of surveillance is actually not too important to me. I can imagine them missing it, or not getting it out, or something. I am primarily basing this off the NSA's pattern of development these last ten years. |
There is a new facility that is being built in Bluffdale, UT that is 1 million square feet in size. The facility is expected to be completed by September 2013. This is more than enough to handle the incoming data needs.
As to processing power. Right now, the fastest public computer is the DOE Sequoia built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which does 16.32 petaflops. (FLOPS = Floating Operations Per Second...A petaflop is 10^15 operations per second.)
I would imagine that they would not publish how fast their machine(s) go as that would be considered a matter of national security. (and rightly so)
However, it's currently estimated that in order to brute force 128-bit encryption, it would take 340 undecillion (1036) attempts. But do not let the big numbers make you feel all warm and fuzzy. There are quantum computing algorithms that you can learn about that tackle problems such as these. ( Grover's Though so far, we've only been discussing conventional computing power and not QC. Don't think for a second that they do not have their best minds working on it though. Remember, most of the things the public knows about is stuff that's relatively "safe" and has been around for 10 or more years for them...it's just "new to you". lol
So that's not saying that they couldn't read your supa-secret emails to grandma exchanging fruit cake recipes, it's that they simply just don't care enough to go through the expense of pointing such a ginormous gun at you...unless of course it's really good fruitcake! |
I say goodluck to them, 20 trillion transactions is a crapload of information to try and sift through (half of which are just probably useless bank and tax records), I still say trying to find information about anything within a number of 20 trillion, is like trying to hit the planet pluto with a pea shooter... its going to be extremely ineffective, but with lots of energy and a bit of luck you might see some small results... Overall, the fact that they have 20 trillion records, will start to scare me, when I figure out where and what I saved my papers as for second semester english in college.... If I can't find 5 papers on a 500 gig harddrive then the NSA cant find me within possibly 20 trillion transactions... |
One cool exception to that I've seen is the Volvo S60 plugin: (
Yes, the weight is still there, but it uses the hybrid system to get 4 wheel drive! A desirable option even without a hybrid system! The front axle is driven by a diesel engine, the rear axle is driven by an electric motor and battery, with either a pure rear axle/electric option, a normal hybrid option, or a 'I'm Drag Racing' option that uses both the engine and the motor.
It's the most elegant solution I've seen to the inherent inefficiencies of having two drive trains. |
and other "environmentally harmful" components
Yes, lets all breathe toxic garbage so you can save 2 dollars at the pump. What could possibly go wrong there? Sorry, I have to go check the smog report in my town today and refill my inhaler.
I'm not even going to go into how much safer your new-ish Saturn is than some mid 90s deathtrap, but I don't suppose you care about that either.
[I should also mention the avg fuel economy is rising for passenger cars in the US and has been for a long time.]( Only exception is big ass over-powered SUVs. |
Its less about targeted ads and more about a better way to capture viewing. More viewing equals more $$$. Set Top Boxes can capture second to second viewing from every household that has one (most). Opposed to Nielsen which samples a portion of the population & are not very good at it.
The only problem with set top box data is that it doesn't capture demographic information. Verizon (and countless other companies) have been working to change that.
I work in Media Research |
This needs some clarification. This work was presented at ACM SenSys this year ( and, while a very good paper and a well-executed idea, the energy numbers presented do not include the overhead of offloading the data to the cloud.
The product as presented can best be used as a GPS / timestamp logger that can be analyzed offline and not in real time. If you wanted a real-time GPS sensor, you'd have to evaluate the cost of sending the raw GPS traces over the radio, and these are nontrivial. |
No you didn't.
You are wrong, and rude. Being called a liar and lots of downvotes. Bah, it's the internet, might as well defend myself, I might even educate someone :)
I've been trading tech stocks on a hobbyist basis using keytrade for about two years now, I beat the market even after transfer charges, though not by much. I like to buy cheep companies with a possible large upside (currently long OCZ for example). Nokia also fitted this bill, and ofcourse this wasn't the only reason I sold.
> Anyone that owns Nokia stock knows that in the last six months their stock has been climbing
Um yeah... I try and sell stock that has been climbing... that's how you make the money and stuff...
> if you think that this sudden change of policy (hint, it's not a sudden change of policy) means that their stock is going to tank then you're an idiot.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating; down over 5% since selling... which about covers the wine I'm drinking while sighing over how wrong you are.
[Exhibit A]( |
BlackBerry needs to die'
I still have those thought. I was one who used BB before it became a trend in my country (Indonesia), my first BB is Curve 8320. Slow & buggy, and the BIS plan was damn expensive. It has more troubles than the benefit. A few months later, the hardware had problems, fix it a couple of times, and decided to abandon it.
A year later, because I needed it for communication in my college, I decided to buy Curve 8520 from TAM (authorized reseller), using my own money. I'm really disappointed with it. A month after using it, the screen cracked, probably because it was in my pocket. However TAM said, the screen is not included in the guarantee and I have to pai 1/5 price of a new handset (WTF). I fixed it and decided to sell it to someone when there's a chance to do so. I sold it and bought SGS2, it has no problems since.
The BB users in Indonesia (99% of them) really getting on my nerve. They spread information using BBM, they could afford paying $10 for monthly BIS service (BBM and social network), and changing their handset everytime they drop theirs, but they don't want to spend $0.01 to send an important SMS to those who don't have BB and $0.01 is too damn expensive. I missed so much information, miss a lot of schedules because of it. They even told me "just buy a BB".
I'm really disappointed with BB and the users. |
Develop a framework of cybersecurity practices to reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure.... Include strong privacy and civil liberties protections based on the Fair Information Practice Principles." |
First of all, stop. Too much panic in this thread. I've seen a thread similar to this in the past regarding OMG hackers are watching me.
I want to clarify some things for you. First of all, if you do all of the right things with your computer, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. People can't just hack into your computer and install something like this unless you give them permission to do so. Don't worry about your webcam or your mic right now.
First thing is this specific "hack" REQUIRES that you gave it permission to run and use your file system and manage your settings. Generally this "permission granting" is disguised in some executable file. An executable file is one that ends in .exe for windows. They come attached in folders where you downloaded your song, but they CAN be disguised as "somesong.mp3". Other ways is through emails. Don't touch files in email if you don't know 100% where that is from. If you are unsure about a file, try googling the name. More often than not, websites can tell you what is a malicious or untrusted file. Or call that friend/family member that does computers for a living and ask them.
Make sure your wifi is WPA2 encrypted with a password that is not easy to guess. I spent some time attempting to crack wifis in my neighborhood. If you are using a WEP password, it is easy to get onto your network in an hour or less. From there it's easy to do bad things to unprotected computers. With WPA2, the techniques generally revolve around brute forcing the password. If you password is a common word, or word play with vowels replaced with numbers or random capital letters, then it might get cracked. Completely random numbers and letters make it damn near impossible.
Don't torrent, don't click on ads on sketchy websites, don't click on files you don't know what they do.
These viruses cannot hide themselves other exe files that were already on your system (unless you "give them permission"). So if you have a game, Sim3.exe, if you double click on it and run the game, there is no hidden program inside that will infect your computer.
These kind of hacks RELY on you double clicking on their misleading file. So don't interact with popups (clicking the x in the top right/left is fine) and if the popup is that kind that makes it impossible to close, ctrl alt delete it.
If you don't torrent, if you don't mess with unknown emails, if you don't click on popups from sketchy websites (most popups from well known sites like facebook, cnn, google, microsoft are safe), then you are fine.
If you want to torrent, get a virtual machine. If that get's a virus, delete that instance of the virtual machine. Use that virtual machine only to torrent and then immediately close it when done. If it gets infected, you are only using it for 1 hour to torrent. You can also disable the webcam and mic from the virtual machine.
If you don't have virus protection, get AVG. It's free and it works. If you have mac, the policy is the same. Don't open executables that you don't trust.
These guys don't aim for hard targets. They wont take the time trying to hack your WPA2 secure wifi that has a good password (it would take weeks, months, years). They want non-tech savvy people who make things easy for them. |
A lot of very sound advice here, though with one major problem that I can see:
>These viruses cannot come hidden inside of other exe files. So if you have a game, Sim3.exe, if you double click on it and run the game, there is no hidden program inside that will infect your computer.
That is in fact exactly how malware gets installed every day. If you are running any form of executable code, you have to be able to trust the provider. Where did that Sim3.exe come from? Did you buy the game from Amazon or did your little brother "find" it for you? Malware can be and is installed wrapped around legitimate installers and applications. In fact, there are even ways to get the MD5 sums of the compromised versions to match the MD5 sums of the original, non-compromised versions. |
I think its hysterical that right now the only real "anti Piracy" and DRM that is being used only punishes those who DONT pirate. I buy the BluRay but I still download a copy of it so I don't have to buy ads, DRM, and limit myself to my bluray player. |
Even better is the fact the only reason they lock people up at all is to make an example of them. How do you stop people from doing something you don't like? make them deeply terrified they might be throwing away their lives doing it.
Pair that with the fact that I've never met a person who wasn't somehow involved with the media industry who thought piracy was anywhere close to being a problem. Laws are supposed to represent the people's will, not the corporations. |
For what this opinion is worth, I did get my BA in Criminal Justice.
How RIAA and MPAA are combating P2P sharing of their content is no different than how the U.S. is fighting its War on Drugs.
First, we ignore any macro-level solution (e.g. legalizing drugs/increase rehabilitation spending, or in the case of P2P making and selling content that's cheaper and easier to access).
Next, we spend copious amounts of time, money and energy researching the various power players in a specific crime and developing tools to aid in our fight against said crime.
Then, we build a case and arrest those power players and charge them to the fullest extent of the law to set an example for all who engage in said crime. Note: Since high sentences don't actually set examples for would-be criminals, laws only get more extreme over time.
After shutting down a power player, the level of crime decreases temporarily and everyone pats themselves on the back for decreasing it. Authorities earn their budget and lobby for increases because results were provided.
Meanwhile, the temporary decrease in crime is actually a power vacuum . The small players who were shut out of the criminal market before are now vying for more power and increasing the level of crime.
A power player emerges and authorities respond by repeating the cycle. |
I love how they think piracy can be killed.
I will admit it, I pirate stuff, but it's kind of a moot point when the malls in my country have stores that outright sell pirated shows and movies upfront.
And that's not counting that half of the things I pirate are not even available here.
But I do see a way to stop a lot of it, make people CARE for you, and do not shove DRM in their throats, I mostly download games, and I can honestly say that several I have completed 100%, several times, and I still bought it later on, why? Because I want more of the saga.
Stardock is my favorite company for a reason, not only they are nice and talk to the fans, but they have no DRM whatsoever, I still bought their stuff, because I would really feel bad if they went under (Heck, they even gave us 2 sequels of a game of theirs that was buggy, for free!)
But that's what I mean when I say make us care for you, you think I liked in the very least when I decided to be legal and buy Simcity 5? 80$ in the most useless crap ever? YEeeahhh, EA lost me as a customer, they can go fuck themselves with a cactus. |
Honestly convenience. Unless I factor in a two day waiting period for everything I want to see, for something I wanted to see two hours ago, I don't see much of a purpose for me.
Again.. I could find that same film/show, of the same or lesser quality, in my boxers without batting an eye lash with a torrent when and wherever I want to. Also I was talking about their release schedule being extremely shoddy with weeks of delay to even get it to a mail carrier option. |
Several years ago, when I used RSS some, you put in a specific string of code/address that was helpfully posted by the site you wanted to read.
Now, it seems like all these 'reader' programs will only allow you to use whatever database the creator maintains and can't accept something they don't 'know about', e.g. if (after not seeing the desired site on search results) I go to the desired site, get the RSS and put it into the 'search' function, I still get no results. |
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