I think you have a mistaken understanding of the free market economy.
The seller is under no obligation to sell to you. The manufacturer is free to dictate any market restrictions on sales that they like, if they believe they are in their interests. You have no right to buy their product from whoever you like, wherever you like. Don't like this? Then you are free to buy something else from someone else, any time and any place you fancy. That is the free market economy.
It's certainly annoying, and I share your pain. But nothing about it defies logic or economics.
What you say is true, but it would leave the production of music, films, books, whatever entirely in the hands of amateurs. People who cannot do it full time because they have to spend their day earning money. Do you believe that amateurs can provide the output and quality previously provided by full-time professionals? Personally, I can't see how they can. Someone who spends their working life doing something is always likely to be more practised at it than someone who only does it a couple of hours in the evening. Someone who is paid to do something is always more likely to devote greater resources to it, because it's an investment in their living wage, not just a hobby.
A significant part of development over the last 1000 years has been allowing creative people to specialise at what they are good at, without having to spend 8 hours a day in the fields earning their next meal. Is this where we want to return?
It's always the same with these IP/Copyright/DRM stories. You get a comments forum full of budding MBAs dispensing advice about broken business models, condemning industries for their inertia and inability to compete against their own product being given away for free.
But surprisingly for the internet, where opinions are never in short supply, very few people have any credible solutions for what should be done to fix things. And, no, I'm not counting "do live concerts and sell t-shirts" as a credible solution. Not all creators of original material are bands with a fan base who buy t-shirts and attend live concerts.
So what's to be done? The creators of the original material need to make a living. They need to have some incentive to continue to produce material, or they will stop and go get a paying job. What method can those who consume the product reward its creators? Anyone?
Or are we just here for another round of unconstructive moaning and criticising?
Because being a fool isn't illegal and some people are of low intelligence and have a right to the protection of the law like anyone else.
However, in this case these people are most likely not just fools, but dishonest fools. Unless they are of markedly low intelligence, they must have expected that the offered goods were dodgy. If so, they deserved everything they got.
Either that or the sellers are accomplished confidence tricksters who manage to get otherwise sensible and law-abiding people to make stupid snap decisions.
I can't believe you are pointing this out on an IT article forum, the purpose of which is to make snide comments on views/techniques you don't agree with etc. Surely everyone here already knows this?
Captain Cook, retinal burns, exoplanets, oh the wonder of it all, blah, blah, blah. No-one cares. Let's not forget that the universe revolves around us and all this is all about determining future events.
Conjunction of Venus & the Sun means that Libras will find those keys that went missing last month. Leos will have faintly uneasy feeling they forgot to lock the door, but only for the duration of the transition. Cancers will suffer from an itch on their left ear the entire day. Aquarius will suddenly be smitten by how cute kittens are, and Geminis will die horribly in accidents involving golf.
The cosmos; never too busy being awesome to concern itself with petty human affairs.
"If prices were low and quality high then the levels of copyright infringement (Note not piracy) would be greatly reduced."
Care to explain this intriguing argument?
Prices are determined by market forces. Whether they are "low" or not is a matter of opinion determined by the resources available to each consumer. Music and movies are not essentials. The producers have no obligation to provide them at the lowest price to the most people. Either way, how "low" does a price have to be before displacing "free"?
Quality is totally a matter of opinion. If the material is so poor, then why are people so set on getting at it? If quality needs to improve (in your opinion) then what incentive can you offer to drive this? High quality files can be shared for free just as easily as low quality files.
Bizarre logic you have there. Take down a website = boring and gives protest a bad name. Take down entire ISP = a "stand" worthy of notice.
Taking a "stand" involves principles. It means identifying yourself and saying this is what you believe and this is what should be done. It means actually accepting that you are willing to be inconvenienced yourself, on principle, to make a point. You are, literally, standing up for what you believe.
What you suggest is none of these, any more than DDoS attacks are. Taking down an ISP is not a "stand". It's more of a "punching someone in a crowd in the back, then hiding".
*That* is what gives give people who are against this kind of "censorship" a bad name.
Megaupload was a free service, mainly for file sharing. It would be crazy for it to offer any guarantees what-so-ever about restoring backups of personal files. Indeed, I'd be surprised if it didn't explicitly have disclaimers about it.
So this guy was using the wrong service for the wrong job, ... and then his hard drive died. If he took protecting his work seriously, and performed proper backups, he wouldn't be in this situation. It sucks, and hopefully he'll get his files restored soon, but it is all his own fault.
"Mr Goodwin has not been able to access the files he needs to conduct his business - ie, his lawful property"
But these are not his files. They are a copy of his files. Isn't that how the argument goes? He still had his files on his computer. Not anyone else's fault that he's lost them.
While you've been analysing social networking to reach your revelations, I've been analysing posts on forums by those who make sweeping generalisations based on sub-standard, or non-existent data, in order to reinforce their own prejudices and consequently bolster their own self-image.
I'm nowhere near reaching any conclusion I'd be happy to publish, but thank you for your post. I shall certainly quote it in my findings.
Well that'll be an interesting difference from the original series. I recall them being only humorous if your mental and social development had stagnated at aged 13. Not to mention being clunky, antiquated (even when first released) and dull, dull, dull.
Sure. Nothing gets women more annoyed than *not* being the lusted after by a post-middle-age IT creep with the urine fixation. I bet many of his male colleagues feel slighted too. He's certainly a catch worth getting in a fluster about, whatever your orientation!
London turning off analogue TV has absolutely zero impact on the rest of the planet. It may be of marginal interest to some, but as an event it is neither new or unusual. In short; not news.
Yes, there are lots of Londoners and lots of them will be readers of The Register, but I'm betting they already knew, having been told by their more local news sources.
So I don't get why this was reported here, and a "top story" into the bargain, unless it was written by someone who either thinks everything that happens in London matters to everyone, or has been blind to events in the rest of the UK.
Have to agree. There is plenty opportunity here for the power companies to abuse the connection into your home and monitor things other than energy usage. All to "help improve our service to you", of course. But the idea of there being a spy on your electricity line watching what you're doing each day isn't that far fetched.
The RADIOWAVES CANCER campaigners are, naturally, loons with very little idea of how tiny the power of these devices. They very probably already been living for years with electrical appliances that inadvertently broadcast just as much as radio noise.
Indeed. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding at work here.
If these "US Government officials" were using Megaupload to share recordings of public committee meetings, PDFs of publicly available legislation, or NASA photos, there is no case for them to answer, nothing to fear, and Dotcom, as usual, is all hot air and bullshit.
Using a service legally, and subsequently discovering that other users were breaking the law, is not illegal. Maybe a bit embarrassing, but nothing the courts are going to care about.
Additionally, does no one care that Dotcom is happy to trawl through his users' personal details and threaten to make public the ones he doesn't like the look of?
They appear to have measured the distance in arcane units of feet and inches, so I have to question whether the plane was made from A4. More likely US Letter, foolscap, parchment scroll or some other ancient standard.
And sellotape is a TM. They probably used Scotch tape.
"no scientific basis for the alternative treatment"
Please don't use that term. There is no such thing as "alternative" treatment. There is treatment and there is quackery. If homoeopathy worked, even if we didn't understand how it worked, it would be a "treatment". It doesn't work, therefore it isn't a treatment. Calling it an "alternative" is only valid if you consider an alternative to a treatment being no treatment.
You are amusingly naive if you think that Google did this to show up flaws in Apple's & Microsoft's software. They did this because they wanted the data and because they could. And they did it *despite* it being against the wishes of the end-user.
The fact that Safari and IE allowed it to occur does not negate Google's responsibility for doing it. Saying everyone else could do it too is not the point. Google claim to be better than that.
Absolutely. Dim people must be punished for not being as smart as us. That'll teach them! Being stupid means you are not deserving of any protection from criminal behaviour.
We should be facilitating this, not stopping it. Let's get a directory of everyone not too smart, or a bit slow, or old, or mentally confused, and publish it online so that rip-off merchants know exactly who deserves to have their money taken off them. This would punish dumb people and reward smart people with no morals. Exactly the kind of people we need more of and the kind of society *I* want to live in!.
And once we've done with the stupid, we can start on the blind. Make them take some personal responsibility for not reading what's there, plain as day, in jpeg images. Deserve eveything they get, they do. And slow people. If you can't run from the man-eating tigers like normal people then you deserve a mawling.
I would think that its vital that they hang around to see where the target is. It's hardly a trivial detail
Otherwise the day Pakistan nukes India, the US will nuke Pakistan, on the assumption it was for them, at which point Russia will nuke the US, on the same basis, and China will nuke Russia, who'll be nuked by Britain, who'll be nuked by France, who'll be nuked by North Korea, who'll be nuked by South Korea, just on reflex.
Kind of like a western bar fight where no-one cares whose swinging at who, everyone just joins in.
"The first problem here will be to stop everyone freaking out when someone fires off a nuke by making sure nuclear response is internationally coordinated."
I would imagine it's quite easy to distinguish between a missile aimed at Moscow/Washington and a rocket equipped to reach escape velocity and enter, at the very least, Earth orbit, before a second stage takes it into outer space.
We are not talking about shooting down an asteroid as it enters the atmosphere over the Pacific. By that point it's game over, far too late,
If you are a recently graduate in something like electrical engineering this would be a great job. Plenty of variety, world travel, mixing with the upper echelons in the fields of science, media and communications. The experience and connections you'd gain would be invaluable if you have interests in that direction. And you want something to scream "Pick me! Pick me!" on your CV? You'll be getting your foot in the door simply because the potential employers are guaranteed an interesting interview.
They will have no trouble getting enough suitable applicants for this peach of a job.
Amazon are not 'teh bad'. They have an excellent online shop. Kindle is a nifty piece of kit. Amazon are also not likely to go out of business any time soon and leave anyone stranded.
But a lock-in to a propriety format and single retailer is totally "teh bad". It's a inexcusable policy, that only ever benefits Amazon to the disadvantage of their customers. Yes, there are ways of circumventing that lock-in, but they are a hassle I do not wish to saddle myself with and most people will not be able to do it..
This is why I won't be buying a Kindle in its current format.
The feedback of incorrect information, slowly creeping it's way up the ladder to become 'fact' has always happened. There has always been lazy and incompetent journalist happy to accept unreliable facts. There has always been people reporting "facts" they heard in good authority off a bloke down the pub. Historically people have spent their lives devoted to debunking these sort of "everyone knows" myths.
Wikipedia, like everything else in the online information age, makes the process faster. It doesn't cause it. It doesn't encourage it. It does its best to prevent it. It cannot stop it. But if anything we are better off with Wikipedia, because at least there is far greater transparency when it happens.
Or would you rather got back to the days when no-one had access to this vast store of information, and no-one knew where, when and how these myths became prevalent?
"we may refund to you the amount you paid for the license."
How can anyone get away with this sort of hedging of bets in a supposedly legal agreement? This statement means nothing, obliges no-one to do anything. They may have well said "we may give you a million dollars, a private yacht and a life-time supply of beer, but we probably won't".
You forgot the end of your little tale of cavemen. Having been banished from the tribe, our minstrel said "Screw this song-writing, if those tight free-loaders aren't going to pay me to write songs, I'll have to take up killing woolly mammoths like everyone else instead" And he never wrote another song ever again.
One year later our merry band sitting around the campfire are bored stupid with the song. "Hey, song writer", they said. "Write us another song. And not another song about killing bloody woolly mammoths! That all anyone ever does around here!" At this the song-writer laughed heartedly, before telling them where to go.
And the cavemen learned. If you don't reward someone for their effort , they won't do it again.
If you want to have your internet within the bounds of a walled garden that's controlled by one bunch of admin guys in a different country, then expect to be told by them what is, and isn't, in their expert but limited opinion, appropriate and accurate on a website. And that's if you get any kind of response from them at all.
You want your town recognised on the web? Then put it on the web, not Facebook.
Your limerick doesn't have an acceptable metre, by the way.
So... the victim who has their credit card details used suffers the anxiety and inconvenience of sorting out the charges, not to mention the possible knock on effects of having their card maxed out,
... And the victim charity who receives the money will have all the administrative hassle of the banks coming after them for their money back. You don't honestly think they'll be allowed to keep stolen money?
What an excellent idea, Anonymous. You will be able to regale all your fellow inmates of tales of your brilliance for a long time.
Simple fact is that good software makes it look easy. And in the mind of end users, if it looks easy, then it must have been easy to create. And it looks easy because, well, what it's doing is obvious, real-life behaviour, isn't it?
I remember helping out an end user once on an application I had written. As an aside, she gleefully demonstrated a neat drag and drop shortcut she had discovered by accident. She showed it as if it may be news to me, like it was a fortunate chance that this was possible. I had to explain that, yes, I knew you could do that. I had coded that. I had, in fact, spent some time designing that. These things just don't happen by chance. But in the end-user's mind, because dropping one thing on another is obvious real-life behaviour then, naturally, it would work the same on the computer. So how hard could that be to code?
The employer is asking for it really, isn't he. And why 666? Why not 600?
If I worked for them I'd go to the first aid room with a paper cut, insisting it be logged. On day 665, after the stickers had been printed, and I'd been asked to unbox them.. you see where this is going.... the irony would make it all worth while.
"iPhone 5 will grow 8mm in length to accommodate a new 4in screen,"
Yet another sign of Apple's genius, making those millimetres backwardly compatible with antiquated inches! But that still doesn't tell us how many cubits it will be in overall length, or how many shekels it will weigh.
If only mobile phones came with an off switch, or maybe even a mute. It would also be cool if they had some kind of answering service where people could leave a message for you to pick up later.
Oh noes! My browser has provision for an optional addition that I can optionally use! But I do not want it! Well that's it, never using that browser again!
The v8 upgrade doesn't even install the Twitter search, you have to go install it separately.
Next step; boffins use twitter to determine when it's tea-time. Of course, that depends on people tweeting about it...... they don't really do that? Do they?
Who would have thought XP would last so long? It had a rocky first few years, but here I am 10 years later still using it, and having used it far longer than any other version before or after. I'll miss it when it finally goes, but that isn't looking like any time soon.
It's testament to the principle that if you give people something that does what they want, they'll not only buy it, but will need a lot of convincing to give it up and move on. Corporate desktops love XP because the expense of upgrading/training to another version is just to awful to contemplate. It does what they need, so why upgrade? Certainly not just to give Microsoft another shed load of cash.
One answer to your question; Facebook (or Google+ come to that).
Simply get your mindless sucker, I mean, customer, to "like" your card/bank/insurance/discounts scheme/any-other-subsidiary-you-care-to-mention and you've got them. Bang. Online identity synced with Financial identity. Sit back and await the social networking revolution to do its work.
Why do you think companies of all sorts are falling over themselves inventing spurious reasons for you to visit them on Facebook?
It's just a pity that an image wasn't produced that actually identified some of the "47 multiple images of 12 newly identified distant galaxies". I can see objects that appear to be the same, but I'm no expert and one galaxy can look pretty much the same as another.
A few helpful annotations would have made this picture even more awesome.
I'm wondering how this "forcing me to buy their new stuff" works. Do they come around your house with guns, or do they kidnapped your children? Maybe it's more subtle, blackmail?
If not, I am at a loss to how they force you to buy anything.
If you don't like what the votes say; ignore them. They don't affect the content of the comment in any way.
I find the votes doubly helpful. When I agree with the votes it confirms I'm right. When I disagree with the votes it confirms that most people are wrong, and I'm still right.
It's obvious what's going on here is a little power-struggle within MS. Some executive killed it, the team who produced ran crying to some other executive, who unkilled it. The top people who really should be making the decisions simply aren't interested.
So those without the real power are left to fight it out. Somewhere in Microsoft HQ there's been a few heated meetings. And anyone with any sense appreciates that the Zune is an unloved child with no future. To be avoided at all costs.
The key point here is; "no one can come after the person who sent it."
When they say no-one, they mean no-one. Seriously, who is going to take any notice of anything when it comes from someone totally unidentified, and who can then deny to have ever have said it?
So anyone can say/claim anything they like and those who read it have no way of knowing they can trust a word of it, and no way of responding if it turns out to be lies.
Only yesterday Radio 4 interrupted "Today in Parliament" to play One Direction "we had to, it's the law, innit", a spokesperson said.. And Classic FM forced Myleene Klass to play Calvin Harris last week, just in the nick of time before the Radio Playlist Police stormed the studio.
If it can happen here, just imagine what'll happen in communists countries like France. Anonymous will have the radio stations over a barrel, bang to rights. How clever!
This cookie here is called 'fb_fluffykitten' and has the values 'rainbows', 'candy' or 'giggles'.
What do they do and what do they mean? Oh, it's technical, you wouldn't understand, don't you worry yourself with that boring stuff. All you need to know is they have benign names and values.
Obviously, if you are truly serious about writing software that won't get hacked, you must write it in a language that hackers do not know. Something like... er... lemme think... COBAL.
That way, if you're ever hacked you know you're looking for a hacker in his 60s, something of a rarity.
Register
349 posts • joined Thursday 19th April 2007 09:27 GMT
Page:
Re: While they're discussing this hokum...
I think you have a mistaken understanding of the free market economy.
The seller is under no obligation to sell to you. The manufacturer is free to dictate any market restrictions on sales that they like, if they believe they are in their interests. You have no right to buy their product from whoever you like, wherever you like. Don't like this? Then you are free to buy something else from someone else, any time and any place you fancy. That is the free market economy.
It's certainly annoying, and I share your pain. But nothing about it defies logic or economics.
Re: So what's the solution?
What you say is true, but it would leave the production of music, films, books, whatever entirely in the hands of amateurs. People who cannot do it full time because they have to spend their day earning money. Do you believe that amateurs can provide the output and quality previously provided by full-time professionals? Personally, I can't see how they can. Someone who spends their working life doing something is always likely to be more practised at it than someone who only does it a couple of hours in the evening. Someone who is paid to do something is always more likely to devote greater resources to it, because it's an investment in their living wage, not just a hobby.
A significant part of development over the last 1000 years has been allowing creative people to specialise at what they are good at, without having to spend 8 hours a day in the fields earning their next meal. Is this where we want to return?
So what's the solution?
It's always the same with these IP/Copyright/DRM stories. You get a comments forum full of budding MBAs dispensing advice about broken business models, condemning industries for their inertia and inability to compete against their own product being given away for free.
But surprisingly for the internet, where opinions are never in short supply, very few people have any credible solutions for what should be done to fix things. And, no, I'm not counting "do live concerts and sell t-shirts" as a credible solution. Not all creators of original material are bands with a fan base who buy t-shirts and attend live concerts.
So what's to be done? The creators of the original material need to make a living. They need to have some incentive to continue to produce material, or they will stop and go get a paying job. What method can those who consume the product reward its creators? Anyone?
Or are we just here for another round of unconstructive moaning and criticising?
dishonest fools
Because being a fool isn't illegal and some people are of low intelligence and have a right to the protection of the law like anyone else.
However, in this case these people are most likely not just fools, but dishonest fools. Unless they are of markedly low intelligence, they must have expected that the offered goods were dodgy. If so, they deserved everything they got.
Either that or the sellers are accomplished confidence tricksters who manage to get otherwise sensible and law-abiding people to make stupid snap decisions.
Re: Hollerith 1
I can't believe you are pointing this out on an IT article forum, the purpose of which is to make snide comments on views/techniques you don't agree with etc. Surely everyone here already knows this?
*derisive snort*
Looking at the bigger picture
Captain Cook, retinal burns, exoplanets, oh the wonder of it all, blah, blah, blah. No-one cares. Let's not forget that the universe revolves around us and all this is all about determining future events.
Conjunction of Venus & the Sun means that Libras will find those keys that went missing last month. Leos will have faintly uneasy feeling they forgot to lock the door, but only for the duration of the transition. Cancers will suffer from an itch on their left ear the entire day. Aquarius will suddenly be smitten by how cute kittens are, and Geminis will die horribly in accidents involving golf.
The cosmos; never too busy being awesome to concern itself with petty human affairs.
Re: Stand up for your rights
"If prices were low and quality high then the levels of copyright infringement (Note not piracy) would be greatly reduced."
Care to explain this intriguing argument?
Prices are determined by market forces. Whether they are "low" or not is a matter of opinion determined by the resources available to each consumer. Music and movies are not essentials. The producers have no obligation to provide them at the lowest price to the most people. Either way, how "low" does a price have to be before displacing "free"?
Quality is totally a matter of opinion. If the material is so poor, then why are people so set on getting at it? If quality needs to improve (in your opinion) then what incentive can you offer to drive this? High quality files can be shared for free just as easily as low quality files.
Re: Anon needs to step up
Bizarre logic you have there. Take down a website = boring and gives protest a bad name. Take down entire ISP = a "stand" worthy of notice.
Taking a "stand" involves principles. It means identifying yourself and saying this is what you believe and this is what should be done. It means actually accepting that you are willing to be inconvenienced yourself, on principle, to make a point. You are, literally, standing up for what you believe.
What you suggest is none of these, any more than DDoS attacks are. Taking down an ISP is not a "stand". It's more of a "punching someone in a crowd in the back, then hiding".
*That* is what gives give people who are against this kind of "censorship" a bad name.
Re: Copying files is not stealing
Megaupload was a free service, mainly for file sharing. It would be crazy for it to offer any guarantees what-so-ever about restoring backups of personal files. Indeed, I'd be surprised if it didn't explicitly have disclaimers about it.
So this guy was using the wrong service for the wrong job, ... and then his hard drive died. If he took protecting his work seriously, and performed proper backups, he wouldn't be in this situation. It sucks, and hopefully he'll get his files restored soon, but it is all his own fault.
Copying files is not stealing
"Mr Goodwin has not been able to access the files he needs to conduct his business - ie, his lawful property"
But these are not his files. They are a copy of his files. Isn't that how the argument goes? He still had his files on his computer. Not anyone else's fault that he's lost them.
Re: And...
I'm sure we are all very happy for you, Atonnis.
While you've been analysing social networking to reach your revelations, I've been analysing posts on forums by those who make sweeping generalisations based on sub-standard, or non-existent data, in order to reinforce their own prejudices and consequently bolster their own self-image.
I'm nowhere near reaching any conclusion I'd be happy to publish, but thank you for your post. I shall certainly quote it in my findings.
Meh
A humorous return, eh?
Well that'll be an interesting difference from the original series. I recall them being only humorous if your mental and social development had stagnated at aged 13. Not to mention being clunky, antiquated (even when first released) and dull, dull, dull.
Re: Double insult
Sure. Nothing gets women more annoyed than *not* being the lusted after by a post-middle-age IT creep with the urine fixation. I bet many of his male colleagues feel slighted too. He's certainly a catch worth getting in a fluster about, whatever your orientation!
Re: South East News Bias ? - Nahhhhhh.......
London turning off analogue TV has absolutely zero impact on the rest of the planet. It may be of marginal interest to some, but as an event it is neither new or unusual. In short; not news.
Yes, there are lots of Londoners and lots of them will be readers of The Register, but I'm betting they already knew, having been told by their more local news sources.
So I don't get why this was reported here, and a "top story" into the bargain, unless it was written by someone who either thinks everything that happens in London matters to everyone, or has been blind to events in the rest of the UK.
Apostrophe abuse coming around
You shall feel the wrath of the brotherhood of apostrophes in that case.
Watching you
Have to agree. There is plenty opportunity here for the power companies to abuse the connection into your home and monitor things other than energy usage. All to "help improve our service to you", of course. But the idea of there being a spy on your electricity line watching what you're doing each day isn't that far fetched.
The RADIOWAVES CANCER campaigners are, naturally, loons with very little idea of how tiny the power of these devices. They very probably already been living for years with electrical appliances that inadvertently broadcast just as much as radio noise.
Re: Pah
Indeed. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding at work here.
If these "US Government officials" were using Megaupload to share recordings of public committee meetings, PDFs of publicly available legislation, or NASA photos, there is no case for them to answer, nothing to fear, and Dotcom, as usual, is all hot air and bullshit.
Using a service legally, and subsequently discovering that other users were breaking the law, is not illegal. Maybe a bit embarrassing, but nothing the courts are going to care about.
Additionally, does no one care that Dotcom is happy to trawl through his users' personal details and threaten to make public the ones he doesn't like the look of?
How quaint
They appear to have measured the distance in arcane units of feet and inches, so I have to question whether the plane was made from A4. More likely US Letter, foolscap, parchment scroll or some other ancient standard.
And sellotape is a TM. They probably used Scotch tape.
The alternative to actually working
"no scientific basis for the alternative treatment"
Please don't use that term. There is no such thing as "alternative" treatment. There is treatment and there is quackery. If homoeopathy worked, even if we didn't understand how it worked, it would be a "treatment". It doesn't work, therefore it isn't a treatment. Calling it an "alternative" is only valid if you consider an alternative to a treatment being no treatment.
Re: Errr or this really
You are amusingly naive if you think that Google did this to show up flaws in Apple's & Microsoft's software. They did this because they wanted the data and because they could. And they did it *despite* it being against the wishes of the end-user.
The fact that Safari and IE allowed it to occur does not negate Google's responsibility for doing it. Saying everyone else could do it too is not the point. Google claim to be better than that.
Re: What ever happened to personal liability?
Absolutely. Dim people must be punished for not being as smart as us. That'll teach them! Being stupid means you are not deserving of any protection from criminal behaviour.
We should be facilitating this, not stopping it. Let's get a directory of everyone not too smart, or a bit slow, or old, or mentally confused, and publish it online so that rip-off merchants know exactly who deserves to have their money taken off them. This would punish dumb people and reward smart people with no morals. Exactly the kind of people we need more of and the kind of society *I* want to live in!.
And once we've done with the stupid, we can start on the blind. Make them take some personal responsibility for not reading what's there, plain as day, in jpeg images. Deserve eveything they get, they do. And slow people. If you can't run from the man-eating tigers like normal people then you deserve a mawling.
Nuke first, apologise later
I would think that its vital that they hang around to see where the target is. It's hardly a trivial detail
Otherwise the day Pakistan nukes India, the US will nuke Pakistan, on the assumption it was for them, at which point Russia will nuke the US, on the same basis, and China will nuke Russia, who'll be nuked by Britain, who'll be nuked by France, who'll be nuked by North Korea, who'll be nuked by South Korea, just on reflex.
Kind of like a western bar fight where no-one cares whose swinging at who, everyone just joins in.
Missle Command
"The first problem here will be to stop everyone freaking out when someone fires off a nuke by making sure nuclear response is internationally coordinated."
I would imagine it's quite easy to distinguish between a missile aimed at Moscow/Washington and a rocket equipped to reach escape velocity and enter, at the very least, Earth orbit, before a second stage takes it into outer space.
We are not talking about shooting down an asteroid as it enters the atmosphere over the Pacific. By that point it's game over, far too late,
Fall Out
You really think it's a good idea to place nuclear waste on top of a big rocket and fire it into the air, on route to the moon?
Cos there's nothing that could go horribly, catastrophically wrong with that idea, is there?
My what?
Nope.
It's not about the money
If you are a recently graduate in something like electrical engineering this would be a great job. Plenty of variety, world travel, mixing with the upper echelons in the fields of science, media and communications. The experience and connections you'd gain would be invaluable if you have interests in that direction. And you want something to scream "Pick me! Pick me!" on your CV? You'll be getting your foot in the door simply because the potential employers are guaranteed an interesting interview.
They will have no trouble getting enough suitable applicants for this peach of a job.
'teh bad
Amazon are not 'teh bad'. They have an excellent online shop. Kindle is a nifty piece of kit. Amazon are also not likely to go out of business any time soon and leave anyone stranded.
But a lock-in to a propriety format and single retailer is totally "teh bad". It's a inexcusable policy, that only ever benefits Amazon to the disadvantage of their customers. Yes, there are ways of circumventing that lock-in, but they are a hassle I do not wish to saddle myself with and most people will not be able to do it..
This is why I won't be buying a Kindle in its current format.
Same as its ever been
The feedback of incorrect information, slowly creeping it's way up the ladder to become 'fact' has always happened. There has always been lazy and incompetent journalist happy to accept unreliable facts. There has always been people reporting "facts" they heard in good authority off a bloke down the pub. Historically people have spent their lives devoted to debunking these sort of "everyone knows" myths.
Wikipedia, like everything else in the online information age, makes the process faster. It doesn't cause it. It doesn't encourage it. It does its best to prevent it. It cannot stop it. But if anything we are better off with Wikipedia, because at least there is far greater transparency when it happens.
Or would you rather got back to the days when no-one had access to this vast store of information, and no-one knew where, when and how these myths became prevalent?
"May" - small word, big implications
"we may refund to you the amount you paid for the license."
How can anyone get away with this sort of hedging of bets in a supposedly legal agreement? This statement means nothing, obliges no-one to do anything. They may have well said "we may give you a million dollars, a private yacht and a life-time supply of beer, but we probably won't".
Cavemen
You forgot the end of your little tale of cavemen. Having been banished from the tribe, our minstrel said "Screw this song-writing, if those tight free-loaders aren't going to pay me to write songs, I'll have to take up killing woolly mammoths like everyone else instead" And he never wrote another song ever again.
One year later our merry band sitting around the campfire are bored stupid with the song. "Hey, song writer", they said. "Write us another song. And not another song about killing bloody woolly mammoths! That all anyone ever does around here!" At this the song-writer laughed heartedly, before telling them where to go.
And the cavemen learned. If you don't reward someone for their effort , they won't do it again.
Facebook is not the web
If you want to have your internet within the bounds of a walled garden that's controlled by one bunch of admin guys in a different country, then expect to be told by them what is, and isn't, in their expert but limited opinion, appropriate and accurate on a website. And that's if you get any kind of response from them at all.
You want your town recognised on the web? Then put it on the web, not Facebook.
Your limerick doesn't have an acceptable metre, by the way.
Stupidity
So... the victim who has their credit card details used suffers the anxiety and inconvenience of sorting out the charges, not to mention the possible knock on effects of having their card maxed out,
... And the victim charity who receives the money will have all the administrative hassle of the banks coming after them for their money back. You don't honestly think they'll be allowed to keep stolen money?
What an excellent idea, Anonymous. You will be able to regale all your fellow inmates of tales of your brilliance for a long time.
Obvious behaviour
Simple fact is that good software makes it look easy. And in the mind of end users, if it looks easy, then it must have been easy to create. And it looks easy because, well, what it's doing is obvious, real-life behaviour, isn't it?
I remember helping out an end user once on an application I had written. As an aside, she gleefully demonstrated a neat drag and drop shortcut she had discovered by accident. She showed it as if it may be news to me, like it was a fortunate chance that this was possible. I had to explain that, yes, I knew you could do that. I had coded that. I had, in fact, spent some time designing that. These things just don't happen by chance. But in the end-user's mind, because dropping one thing on another is obvious real-life behaviour then, naturally, it would work the same on the computer. So how hard could that be to code?
Employer is a nutcase
The employer is asking for it really, isn't he. And why 666? Why not 600?
If I worked for them I'd go to the first aid room with a paper cut, insisting it be logged. On day 665, after the stickers had been printed, and I'd been asked to unbox them.. you see where this is going.... the irony would make it all worth while.
Backwards Compatibilty
"iPhone 5 will grow 8mm in length to accommodate a new 4in screen,"
Yet another sign of Apple's genius, making those millimetres backwardly compatible with antiquated inches! But that still doesn't tell us how many cubits it will be in overall length, or how many shekels it will weigh.
@Hollerith 1
"And the phone call kills it off."
If only mobile phones came with an off switch, or maybe even a mute. It would also be cool if they had some kind of answering service where people could leave a message for you to pick up later.
Why, oh why, has no-one thought of this?
Oh noes!
Oh noes! My browser has provision for an optional addition that I can optionally use! But I do not want it! Well that's it, never using that browser again!
The v8 upgrade doesn't even install the Twitter search, you have to go install it separately.
Pizza & chips.
Next step; boffins use twitter to determine when it's tea-time. Of course, that depends on people tweeting about it...... they don't really do that? Do they?
Why upgrade?
Who would have thought XP would last so long? It had a rocky first few years, but here I am 10 years later still using it, and having used it far longer than any other version before or after. I'll miss it when it finally goes, but that isn't looking like any time soon.
It's testament to the principle that if you give people something that does what they want, they'll not only buy it, but will need a lot of convincing to give it up and move on. Corporate desktops love XP because the expense of upgrading/training to another version is just to awful to contemplate. It does what they need, so why upgrade? Certainly not just to give Microsoft another shed load of cash.
This is how
One answer to your question; Facebook (or Google+ come to that).
Simply get your mindless sucker, I mean, customer, to "like" your card/bank/insurance/discounts scheme/any-other-subsidiary-you-care-to-mention and you've got them. Bang. Online identity synced with Financial identity. Sit back and await the social networking revolution to do its work.
Why do you think companies of all sorts are falling over themselves inventing spurious reasons for you to visit them on Facebook?
the bleeding obvious
I don't follow much of the detail of this, not being a network techie, but I'd file the conclusions under "the bleeding obvious".
Putting your granny into a high performance sports car will not make her drive any faster.
Spot the duplicates
It's just a pity that an image wasn't produced that actually identified some of the "47 multiple images of 12 newly identified distant galaxies". I can see objects that appear to be the same, but I'm no expert and one galaxy can look pretty much the same as another.
A few helpful annotations would have made this picture even more awesome.
Use of Force
I'm wondering how this "forcing me to buy their new stuff" works. Do they come around your house with guns, or do they kidnapped your children? Maybe it's more subtle, blackmail?
If not, I am at a loss to how they force you to buy anything.
win-win scenario
If you don't like what the votes say; ignore them. They don't affect the content of the comment in any way.
I find the votes doubly helpful. When I agree with the votes it confirms I'm right. When I disagree with the votes it confirms that most people are wrong, and I'm still right.
unloved child
It's obvious what's going on here is a little power-struggle within MS. Some executive killed it, the team who produced ran crying to some other executive, who unkilled it. The top people who really should be making the decisions simply aren't interested.
So those without the real power are left to fight it out. Somewhere in Microsoft HQ there's been a few heated meetings. And anyone with any sense appreciates that the Zune is an unloved child with no future. To be avoided at all costs.
The Perfect Trolling App
The key point here is; "no one can come after the person who sent it."
When they say no-one, they mean no-one. Seriously, who is going to take any notice of anything when it comes from someone totally unidentified, and who can then deny to have ever have said it?
So anyone can say/claim anything they like and those who read it have no way of knowing they can trust a word of it, and no way of responding if it turns out to be lies.
It's a troll's dream app!
What do you think
Only yesterday Radio 4 interrupted "Today in Parliament" to play One Direction "we had to, it's the law, innit", a spokesperson said.. And Classic FM forced Myleene Klass to play Calvin Harris last week, just in the nick of time before the Radio Playlist Police stormed the studio.
If it can happen here, just imagine what'll happen in communists countries like France. Anonymous will have the radio stations over a barrel, bang to rights. How clever!
Guilty
"you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures."
And here lies the crucial confusion that Faceborg units have between privacy, and concealment.
Wishing to not share your every movement with the internet does not mean that you are hiding something.
benign
This cookie here is called 'fb_fluffykitten' and has the values 'rainbows', 'candy' or 'giggles'.
What do they do and what do they mean? Oh, it's technical, you wouldn't understand, don't you worry yourself with that boring stuff. All you need to know is they have benign names and values.
Security Alert!
Oh noes! It's written in C++!
Obviously, if you are truly serious about writing software that won't get hacked, you must write it in a language that hackers do not know. Something like... er... lemme think... COBAL.
That way, if you're ever hacked you know you're looking for a hacker in his 60s, something of a rarity.
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