It starts...
... with child porn. Then you see links like: "Lolz, look at these pics of a hippie burning a flag!!" *click* *BANG* "FBI! GET DOWN SCUMBAG!!!"
107 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
Nothing says guilty like threatening to sue when the government wants to be sure your machines aren't haxx0red like a cheap windows box connecting to the internet for the very first time.
I'm not normally one for the "Nothing to fear, nothing to hide" sort of mentality, but in elections, transparency is -absolutely- paramount.
Maybe in the rest of the world, but here in the Great White North, we're truly F'ed in the A (to quote Southpark). We have no 3g carries, and one GSM carrier. The data rates are so bad it's cheaper to buy a solid gold dildo to screw yourself with. And that isn't going to change anytime. The Situation isn't much better in the US either. You europeans have it good with your MMsing and your mobile browsing - hell, I can't even go in to a store and buy a laptop data card. My local big box retails has a demo one on display, but has never had stock, and it's like $600, with a $200/month contract for 150MB a month. Yay?!?
Flame cause, well I'm angry.
"That is horribly unfair, because Apple in particular fails to fix vulnerabilities even after they've been reported. This skews it horribly in Apple's favor. After all, what other company sits on a publicly disclosed security vulnerability for a year and STILL doesn't fix it?"
...erm... Microsoft?
I worked in a big box retail store in Canada. I never saw this product on the shelf. No one ever knew about it. I, in the years I worked there since release, saw exactly 1 of these things and it was carried by our friendly microsoft rep (who hated it - while assuring us we'd get it at some point). I'd like to give MS a chance, but I've never actually seen this thing in action. I didn't go get the ipod Touch till I had played with it.
Back when I first started using Paypal (and one reason I did instead of my bank) for my credit (ie, fake debit) card they had an option that would generate a single use number for online purchases. Was perfect! Worked well for a time, until the time the credit card companies started wanting CVV numbers off the back off the card too for online purchases and the online feature didn't have that - Making it useless. Ahh well. Don't know why more places don't use this idea. Would be great for those services that you aren't sure if they are going to suddenly turn around and charge you a monthly fee.
On the scale of things. It makes the cattle farming slightly more sustainable by recycling the waste products (IE, converting what is left of the energy that went into the feed that the cattle didn't absorb). Going back to what they taught is in grade school, eh? Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!
At any rate, it's better then tilling under wheat fields for biofuel plants.
If this thing had the multi-touch interface of my ipod touch, I'd be all over it. I do like the slightly smaller size of the touch, but the biggest draw in the magnification of websites is so damned easy and useful. I really can't imagine "mobile" browsing without it. I use my touch as a mobile web device before a music player for the most part, since I'm in wifi range pretty well everywhere I spend any time at. Plus the little bugger is light as hell too.
Note: Not a iFanboy. I actually hate most of Apple's over priced crap.
IE makes my life miserable on a daily basis. You see, I write webpages, and I test in Firefox, Opera, and Safari. It usually takes me 15 minutes to hack together a working stylesheet for those three, and then another 2 hours to butcher it to work with IE. That is why I loathe IE.
Oh, and I installed firefox on my wifes computer (because a facebook app demanded it, god bless you Jedi-vs-Sith), and she hasn't ever looked back. Loves the tabs, the way it all works well, and I hear her bitch less when IE crashes and kills Explorer.exe too, killing off all her icons in her system tray.
IE: (-842) -- FF: 1
Problem with using something like this in space is the whole newtonian physics. You know, the pesky "Every action has an equal and opposite reactiong" bit? You shoot something with that much force, and you have to have a way to compensate against all that force pushing you out of orbit.
I've got a touch. Got it for christmas. Guess what? I'm running Mail.app, along with weather, stocks, calendar, notes and all the iphone apps (short of call, and sms and what not).. so yes, I've jailbroken it. Took about 5 minutes on google and boom, I've got a nifty installer (reminds me of aptitude for debian systems), plus all the iphone apps that I want. All for the cost of bandwidth. $20? Like hell I'm going to pay that. Next they will be charging $50 to add flash support to the safari browser.
Also, to the gmail IMAP comment. The iphone mail.app already supported gmail IMAP, you just couldn't click 'Gmail' when you wanted to add the account. You needed to go to gmail's help to check out the server settings, but I've been using gmail with IMAP since day one (december 24th) on my touch.
Well, I dual boot Ubuntu and Vista. I'm in ubuntu 95% of the time, and I go in to vista to play the odd game. I have about 10 games installed, along with nod32 and firefox in vista. Nothing else. It runs mostly ok (Although, I did try installing uTorrent.. only find that every time I played a game with utorrent (or any other torrent client) open, the machine would reboot.), but I really don't like being in it. Now, I'm fortunate.. I have 2 or 3 pieces of software that I can't run in linux, but they aren't heavy weight programs so they run fine in a VM, or what I do now, my old ass computer I popped XP on and stuck in the basement so I can run a seamless RDP session, and have the programs running on my linux box as if they were local.
I don't use ad-blocker to block google ads. They have never bothered me, and I've only accidently clicked it once, when a page (for El Reg) hadn't fully rendered, and did as I clicked, shifting the ad under my cursor. Unlike all the other flash shite ads with sound and what not. Those people need to go to hell.
I have it on reliable sources (Read: Me), that after the resounding success of switching the Outlook 2007 rendering engine to the Word engine, they are going to do the same for IE. After all, who uses things like.. padding.. or %s in css? No one! That's who! You'll use it and you'll like it!
I lived outside of Atlanta, GA for a while.. so I was on the highway every day. When it's not rush our, -every- car, bar one or two, was doing at least 20 over the speed limit. Going to speed limit was downright dangerous because you'd run the risk of being rear-ended constantly. I'd be forced to go 20 over, and -still- be passed by about 40% of the cars, and I sure wouldn't be overtaking anyone at that speed.
of Futureshop, which is a canadian arm of Best Buy, I can say very little is done to protect anything. We had a laptop returned/exchanged, so I put it back on the shelf (after it was -supposed- to be formatted/restored), booted it up, and on the desktop was an excel file of bank accounts for this guy, his resume, and a few pictures of him and his family.
Also, as for the copying CD thing.. as a guy in the computer sales area, I was told many times to copy copyrighted disks by the managers. Movies, music, etc. I was threatened with being written up when I refused to do it once after one of my coworkers got fired over copying a movie for one of the home theatre guys.
You'd think that being sent nude pictures of your favorite celebrity by "John_ax323dz@ups.net" would be enough to make people go "Hmm, do I know this John person? No? Why are they sending me pr0n? I think I'll not open this message." Especially since the subject lines are all "F/R/E/E P_R0_/\/!!!!!", I mean, it's been a bit since I was fluent in aol speak, and maybe they talk like that now... but really..? The big thing is emails from trusted sources. Like when your friend gets his inbox haxx0red and spams his contact list.
That being said, I've got 3 email accounts I use daily, 1 work and 2 personal. I get almost -no- spam. Gmails blockers are kick ass, and what ever my work uses works really well. The only spam that slips through gmail is the very rare weak ass phish from Bank of America where it is like:
"Dear Customer, please visit the address below and enter your username and password: http://123.35.121.41/somejibberish.php"
where they don't even bother to spoof the address.
We've got the levy here, it is built in to the price of CDs.. people don't even know it exists. At the retail outlet I worked at, a spindle of 50 CDRs would be say, $25. A competitor would advertise the same bundle with out the levy for $12.50. But of course you had to pay the levy at the till.
..was overwhelmingly good. I had Fiesty 7.04 installed, with a fair number of custom tweaks (most of which were broken because I'm an idiot), did the upgrade from the package manager.. kept working while it was upgrading, rebooted and voom, pretty much everything works perfectly. I still have one minor annoyance that has resulted from my own configurations in fiesty, but everything else works perfectly.
In fact, I discovered I needed to print something off my printer, which happens to be plugged in to my wifes windows PC. I never got around to installing it under windows on my computer because it would have taken my 15-20 minutes, and it was faster to go three steps to her computer and print.. but I had read that 7.10 had better printer support. I clicked the printers button-> add new printer-> It scanned for about 15 seconds (during which I thought "Yeah, right like it will find it"), it found it, discovered the that it was an hp 5850, set up the driver, and within 30 seconds and three mouse clicks I had installed a working printer and printed a test page. -Never- has it been that easy in windows. Never. Even if it was as simple as pop the disk in, it would take half an hour for a modern HP printer to install.
You forgot the best advice of all.. Don't f'ing use that piece of crap known as Realplayer. Realplayer hasn't been decent for the better part of a decade. If you really must view .rm files (and I personally just do without if I can't find alternate encodings), for the love of all that is holy in IT.. use Media Player Classic or what not.
.. although, using Firefox is a step in the right direction.
"On another note, why does this mars lander look so much different than the current (successful) Mars Rovers? It seems a waste to reinvent the wheel, couldn't they just use the current Rover landing techniques and basic platform and just add new tools? That seems logical to me, but then again, I'm no rocket scientist."
Those mars landers cost something like half to three quarters of a billion dollars, this cost a fraction of that. The only way NASA would approve a mission like this is if it was significantly cheaper then the previous ones.
I'm glad I moved to Canada. I was in my first year of Uni in the US when the planes hit the towers, and my prof told the class that one of two things would happen, either the US security would collapse and would become an open country (Like it used to be.. you know, give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free?), or would completely close down on its self. I was telling people that as much as I hoped for the former, I knew the later would be the case.
I jumped at the first chance I had to move to Canada and become a permanent resident here.. going to be a citizen eventually. Best decision I ever made. Once we get MiniBush (Harper) out of office (he doesn't have much power right now, so the damage he can do is much more limited) we'll be peachy. The US scares me these days. I still visit my family every year in the states... but maybe not for much longer.
Oh, and the UK isn't any better.. all those cameras and just as many idiot policies. It's just the UK policies are more targetted to its own people I'd say, where as the US policeis try to give them a thin veil of protecting against external threats.
Correct me if I'm wrong, previous posters, but it seems that this company -has- their own mail server.. the problem is Hotmail is refusing to allow more then 10 recipients receive emails from one address within a certain timeframe. The problem -isn't- that the company is using hotmail to deliver the messages.
It's actually ATI that doesn't support linux. If you had nvidia cards it would work pretty well flawlessly. How do I know this? Cause I have a damn ati graphics card and I spent -hours- trying to get it set up and working in various linux flavours. It's the same old story, vendors won't support OSes that have no user base, and users won't use those OSes (in any quantity) until there is vendor support. I eventually decided to go back to windows, and run Ubuntu in a virtual machine. But damn do I miss Beryl.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboy.. I only switched to linux because I needed to for work (work from home programming), and managed to bork my dual boot config so I'm stuck in linux till I get around to fixing it.. going on a year now.. Just don't have the desire to.
The biggest thing that makes me love linux for the desktop is the ability to 'kill -9'... Windows has to ask the frozen program nicely to close.. 'kill' does just that, instantly, irrevocably kills the offending PID. If windows had a foolproof kill, I'd be happier using it.
Smarter men then me can debate the value/truth of global warming, I personally think it is an issue, but hey..
My issue with the people posting here are things like:
"Not one of the models can predict todays climate starting from 50 years ago so if they are that inaccurate then they need to shut up and actually make them work before preaching fear and destruction"
I don't know about you, but I was taught that universal assumptions (hard line statements), you know.. things that use the words "always", "never", "all" and what not, are generally, and nearly always false. In that vein, many of the scientific journals I read seem to have no problems predicting the general climate of today. Not saying they can take all the weather data and say that there will be 4mm of rain at W40.23' E30.19'42" at between 4-5am on the 22nd of may next year, or what not, but they are getting more accurate all the time.
Also, what irks me on both sides of any debate (climate, evolution, etc), is that people usually sit there and quote websites that are off the wall (www.jesusrules.com for evolution.. www.climatechangesucks/isreal.com).. I want to see quotes from pages that are scientific by nature.. and well respected by the academic community. Science, Nature, etc..
While this doesn't relate to music/movies as such, it does relate to the DRM crap. I love PC games, as I'm sure many of you do, and I have no issues dropping $50-$70 on a good game (I figure 20-30 hours of gameplay, which means $2/hr or so.. cheaper then pool or drinking). The issue I have is when I pay this large amount of money, bring my shiny disk home and pop it in the drive.. only to find out that it refuses to run because of the copy protection. Maybe it detected a virtual drive, maybe securom just sucks so hard core it THOUGHT it MAYBE detected something strange and refuses to run. So I have to go download a crack from what may be a suspect site in order to run my legally purchased game.. which naturally throws out of whack my ambitions to play online. When it is easier for me to download a game online (and maybe faster), then going to the store and buying it and installing it, there is a problem.
I understand the sentiment that Google is basically trying to buy the auction rules... but on the flip side, the FCC is horrible at doing its job. I happen to agree with Googles rule and I'm tired of the FCC being morons about everything (million dollar fine for a nipple anyone?). I'd rather it be Google buying the auction then Verizon doing the same thing. Cell companies have had it too good for too long, I mean look at the state of networks from the US to Europe? No 3g, no innovation, just price gouging.
I've always hated touch screens. I have a first G ipod (old school, with the hardware buttons and scrolly wheel), and I loved it until my battery gave the goat last year. The reason? I could control it from inside my pocket. A subtle press against my pocket and I could change songs, volume, everything. It's probably saved me from getting mugged once or twice while walking around downtown. The next media player I got is the same thing.. it was a bit older when I bought it, but it has buttons on the front face, so I can control it from my pocket without an annoying little remote (ala sony). I don't see the fascination with touch screens.
So, does this mean that if I buy a product.. they'll still have the ability to stream me ads? Isn't it enough that I buy something, you have to make money on me more? Screw all you people. Word is already crappy enough without ads. I hate being locked in to windows for things I need to do. And things like this just re-enforce it. Every step of the way, MS and their friends have been removing my ability to control my computer, what it does, and what I see.