Posts by Aaron Em

"The strange move caused a bit of a blog storm from people who felt their content had been stolen."

Some people are stupid.

Why are they bothering?

The last time somebody sued RIM, the US Department of Justice stepped in and said no, you can't have an injunction to stop them doing anything they're currently doing, we rely on them too much. Why expect it to go differently now?

Yeah. real funny.

Nice they're hiring people of Gallagher's and Carrot Top's caliber. Gives a real clear picture of this supposedly vital piece of our nation's security infrastructure.

It's not banned in China?

Wow, there's a surprise.

Pedophilia: contagious?

"...a growing tendency in some legislatures to regard nudity – particularly nudity of children – as sexual..."

Maybe they should start these police sweeps and sting operations in the House of Lords, rather than the art galleries.

So instead, of course, the TSA gropes people's genitals.

Seriously, somebody -- the Reg, I think -- published their procedure update they did in response to Mutallab's comedy attack, and now everybody gets patted down with a special concentration on the "abdomen and upper thighs area", I believe it was.

Cowards. Fuck 'em, I'll take the train.

What a great idea!

So you mean I can try to walk with my phone an inch from my face, spin around, trip on the curb, stumble, fall over, break my phone, and end up looking like an ass-grabbing fool, all before I even *get* to the bar? Sign me up yesterday!

Hah.

Trademark? I'd *love* to see the prior-art claims on that one.

doggerel

If Comcast says 'no'

Then I've got a feelin'

When Hulu goes down

We'll go back to stealin'

Oh for pity's sake

I'm a lot more worried about my users giving out their passwords to strangers on the street in exchange for candy bars than I am about my users publishing PDFs which expose information about the filesystems of their machines, which live behind NAT and a heavy firewall, and which serve nothing at all to the world because only an idiot provides services to the Internet from a Windows XP box anyway.

Yeah, sure, ten years ago when we all just plugged our modems straight into the wall, this might've been a vulnerability which actually mattered. These days, though, it's a pitiful joke, not even fit for a worthwhile example of metadata leakage -- you know, the sort of example that'd incline people to think "gee, there could be a real problem here", instead of "this is supposed to be a vuln? okay, guess only idiots worry about metadata leakage, then..."

"...not enough space."

Well done, sir!

Title required? That's almost as foolish as letting people share usernames!

"...once allowed access to the site what does it offer?"

The most deliberately judgmental online dating community on the planet. Who could possibly refuse?

OMNISCIENT

Guess they could call it that -- the Navy isn't covered by truth-in-advertising laws, right?

Buttons.

An iPhone has exactly one button, and it's hardware-bound. When Microsoft comes out with a multitouch XBox 360 controller, I'll believe that console-type games without buttons are a plausible idea; until then, there's still going to be reasons -- at least six of them, if you don't count the D-pad -- to buy a DS instead of an iPhone.

Wait a minute, what?

Who said anybody here had a problem with the idea of masturbation? We're *technical people*, for God's sake! No, it's a completely *different* set of unsavory habits, not suitable for public indulgence, that we're getting onto iPhone owners about. Do *try* to keep up, won't you?

Goddammit, Page...

...stick to what you know; that's where you are worth reading. This article, on the other hand, is crap, and the comments are worse.

Christ almighty...

...this is what we get for having a soldier in charge of biology news.

"So exactly how did they get to Hawaii?"

Incompetent would-be "exotic pet" owners discarding them, that's how. Bet you five dollars that's how they got to Miami, too -- I mean, every other place on this planet you encounter a fucked-up biome, you can safely assume that humans are responsible. So why not this place too?

"They couldn't be bothered" is an excuse?

Where I come from, if you can't be bothered to do your job, you generally don't get to stay in it; speaking as somebody who's both worked on a helpdesk and occasionally needed to call one, I tend to prefer it that way.

So, TeeCee...

...what you're saying there is that they're basically Internet trolls?

I mean, I'm sorry, maybe it's just because I am an uncultured rube. But there is a significant difference between "this is not a pipe" and the dumb shit we're discussing today -- "this is not a pipe" actually has a *point* to make: this is not a pipe, but a picture of a pipe; don't confuse the menu with the meal. I fail to see what similarly useful point exists in the ignorant garbage currently under discussion.

Why not?

Everything else about Mozilla's been steadily going to hell for the last half decade or more. Why not this too?

You know...

...I can't think of anything more finely calculated to turn law-abiding citizens into criminals, terrorists, and revolutionaries, than for people to be punished for crimes they weren't even *thinking* of committing. After all, if you're going to be treated as though you've been convicted of a crime no matter what you do -- why not actually commit the crime? At least that way you stand a chance of getting a little good out of it.

"Most enthusiastic" blah blah.

"Wow, what an efficient way to completely alienate the most enthusiastic section of your customer base."

Why should TI care about the 'most enthusiastic' section of their customer base?

No, that's an honest question. Explain to me why it makes more sense for TI to keep a bunch of cheapskate hobbyists happy, than to work as hard as they possibly can to retain their lock on the market for calculators acceptable to standardized testing organizations.

I mean, yeah, sure, if TI's products are no longer permissible for use when you're taking the SAT or the ACT, they'll lose probably the only money left in that entire product line and have no remaining reason to keep manufacturing the things at all, but they'll have kept the hobbyists happy. So that's good, right?

Have some perspective, y'all. Hobbyists and hobbyists' interests are indeed important and worthy of concern -- to hobbyists. From the perspective of a company as large and diversified as TI, y'all don't even exist. Feel free to rail about it all you like, though.

Jason, that wouldn't have been much better --

First, what you were dealing with there was a cowardly police officer, of whom we have far too many. Second, would a taser jolt be that much less likely to kill a dog in that shape than a handgun round would've been?

Consider the source

Or, as you limeys so charmingly put it, "Well he would say that, wouldn't he?"

"...only stocked eggs."

Nicely done!

One wonders...

...whether a sysadmin insufficiently competent to take ONE BACKUP IN TEN YEARS is sufficiently competent to "preserve forensic evidence" in such a way that it can be used in a criminal prosecution.

Somehow I do not think it likely!

Not a great way to keep a job I think

Am I correct in thinking that Ms Bunz just publicly, if somewhat subtly, slagged her new employer? After all, the Guardian is an "existing media structure", presumably as rife with "boundaries and oligopolies" as any other.

oh what the --

"While we are fortunate to live in a more enlightened social climate, we can't retroactively apply current social standards to the times in which he lived."

That's a hell of a statement! It'd be even more potent if I had any idea what you were trying to say. Right now, it sounds like you're trying to argue that we can't make meaningful moral judgments about anything that had the good fortune of happening before we were personally born, and that's just stupid.

HOLY CRAP ASHLEE VANCE IS MALE

Well, there goes the shrine.

Well...

...they would say that, wouldn't they?

Oh, grow up

Roger, if we're going to exist off this planet at all, we're going to have dirty our hands by "mining scarce resources" in the process. The alternative is to remain planet-bound and go through one Malthusian mass die-off after another until we finally grind ourselves down to a miserable extinction; if there's one thing we can learn from our own history, it's that we are not a species which will be satisfied with anything in between. We're not going to go back to our environmentally-sustainable hunter-gatherer prehistory, because we *can't*, any more than you can go back to your three-year-old self by sheer force of will. So we're left with one or the other, expansion or extinction, and mood disorders aside I know which *I* prefer.

And goggyturk's right, anyway: anything that once lived on the Moon died very shortly after that celestial body calved from our own planet and shed its atmosphere, and anything that still lives on Mars is either microscopic, or far underground, not interested in visitors, and not dependent on water to survive -- if it were anything more obvious than that we'd *know* it by now, and if it were dependent on macroscopic water for survival then it would be long dead by now, assuming you don't want to join the Hollow Mars Society and postulate on no evidence at all that that planet's crust is floating on world-girdling underground oceans.

So aside from the whole environmentalist insistence that humans are by definition unnatural and that a human so much as looking cross-eyed at a blade of grass is viciously raping the biosphere for selfish gain, what are you left with, Roge? The idea of mining Mars for water ice and extracting vapor from the atmosphere is something you find distasteful, is it? Fine, then -- don't go.

Perfect as always

This is why nobody much minds going three months or more between Stob articles -- while I'll grant it may seem that's just because nobody much notices or cares whether Ms. Stob has turned in anything recently or not, but in fact it's actually because we're all so thoroughly comforted by the knowledge that we'll be blown right out of our socks when Stob finally comes through.

Now I think about it, it's sort of the Twitter-antithesis, isn't it? You wait for it, and then when it arrives there's actual substance there! Well done that Stob!

It's a retreat for rich people.

Must be nice. "Internet addiction" makes the perfect excuse, don'tcherknow?

Pull quotes?

What the hell's that about? Trust me, y'all are in no danger of creating a wall of text in the pitiful little area that's left over for content once the masthead, footer, and all that right-column garbage are in place.

Free speech? What? This is stupid.

All of you idiots who think the first amendment to the US constitution has anything to do with this ought to try actually reading it. Where does it say anything about regulating what private corporations say or do, or how they treat religion et cetera? This is not a free-speech issue.

As to the actual situation, if I were Horizon what's-their-nuts, I wouldn't be too terribly worried. Yes, the Internet is angry at them right now, and that means what exactly to them? A bunch of phone calls, emails, comment-form submissions (which I very confidently assure you are going to /dev/null already, so y'all just have a blast with that!), and bad press. Oh, God, not that!

Y'all, this is a company which already makes its business model around screwing people who have no idea at all going in of what kind of belly-crawling evil they're dealing with; they do this because they have to know that anyone aware of their reputation will only do business with them at gunpoint. (The "sue first and ask questions later" comment is what really makes this clear; it's really, really hard to argue that a company whose representatives will take that attitude in public is simply unaware of its vileness.)

A little bad press means what to them? You think a bunch of noise on Twitter and blogs is going to significantly reduce their range of potential victims, or impact their bottom line? Let me tell you something that maybe you haven't had occasion to hear before: not everybody is on the goddamned Internet, and people who aren't on the Internet still matter -- I know that last one's a shocker, but try to encompass it, okay? So the most -- the very most -- this fifth-grade harassment campaign is going to accomplish is to maybe get a couple of two-minute stories on the five o'clock news somewhere within a hundred miles of Chicago, and that's going to be watched by maybe one one-hundredth of Horizon's potential customer base. How much effect do you really think that's likely to have on how they do business?

All that's being accomplished by any of this is to make life difficult for the lowest-level office peons at Horizon -- people who, I assure you, were hired (as cheaply as possible) for the purpose of making this sort of thing a minimal sub-nuisance at best to the people who're actually responsible for, and who really benefit from, Horizon's miserable practices. Congratulations! You've further complicated the already-miserable process of earning a minimal living -- and all for people who are completely powerless to effect the change you'd like to see! FUCK THE MAN WOOO

And you know what the other funny part here is? The Internet gets bored. Hell, the Internet gets bored *fast* -- how long'd Iran last? Two weeks, three at the outside? And only one of those really counted for anything, in the sense of people actually paying attention instead of going "Oh...yeah...Iran." The Internet got bored with the Green Revolution *real* quick. How long's this one going to last? A day? Half a day? I bet you a dollar that two-thirds of these people who've made these big deals of what they're doing -- I bet they don't even come back to this comment thread after lunch, except maybe to check and see whether anyone's been fellating them as the obvious gods among men that they are.

And it's all over a bunch of swollen smug self-righteousness, exercised on behalf of someone who's only worth even *pretending* to care about on account of being enough Like Us to use Twitter. Y'all didn't give a damn about people stuck in Chicago tenements yesterday, and y'all won't give a damn about people stuck in Chicago tenements tomorrow, and the people who own and take profits from Chicago tenements aren't going to be affected one whit in any direction by all this pointless heat and noise, and it took Twitter -- *Twitter*, for God's sake! -- to alert you to the existence of a problem that's been around since long before your grandparents were born. And now you're all fired up, gonna scream at somebody and change the whole world.

What are y'all, five? And what real difference do you honestly think you're making?

Wow.

Sure wish I could hit the sauce like that while I'm working.

Also, screencap: http://aaron.acephalo.us/be-there-ugly.png -- that's with stock Firefox 3.5, no special whatsits or widgets, no Flashblock or Adblock or NoScript or what-have-you. Ugly as sin, ain't it?

Signed by Palm --

-- well, so much for that plan: another locked-up-tight smartphone that I just don't want.

Pity. I was looking forward to this one.