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Books

Book Review: The Internet Police 27

Nerval's Lobster writes "When Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson sat down to write The Internet Police, Edward Snowden hadn't yet decided to add some excitement to the National Security Agency's summer by leaking a trove of surveillance secrets to The Guardian. As a result, Anderson's book doesn't mention Snowden's escapade, which will likely become the security-and-paranoia story of the year, if not the decade. For anyone unaware of the vast issues highlighted by Snowden's leak, however, The Internet Police is a handy guide to the slow and unstoppable rise of the online security state, as well as the libertarian and criminal elements that have done their level best to counter that surveillance." Read below for the rest of Nerval's Lobster's review.

Comment Re:Sure it's a loopy idea (Score 1) 385

If you think this is bad, check out the recent story about this on Arstechnica. Like 2/3s of the comments are trying to prove that the hyperloop won't work because of... terrorists! Sure, you can screen anyone at the entrance like in the airport, but what if the terrorist drives to the middle of the route and blows it up with an RPG? How do you counter that, Musk?

Comment Re:Microsoft is in deep shit now! (Score 1) 295

Oh no, I certainly didn't expect anything else. I just wanted to (humorously) highlight the fact that the original post is making MS sound like a sinking ship with struggling product lines and a bailing CFO, while overall their situation is nowhere near as gloomy.

Comment Re:It's Not New, Really. (Score 1) 397

>Just because a Head Chef job is really rough, doesn't mean that the IT job is any less rough.
Well, it could mean just that. I'm not going to comment on the head chef as I have no experience, but extrapolate that to miners or fishermen, say: you have to catch at least a certain amount of fish to get paid, work outside in shitty weather, and there's a non-trivial chance of dying horribly. Does i make sitting on your naked ass at home sound less rough?

I think the point might be that the echo chamber is developing some sort of persecution complex, whereby only the IT employees are hard working, valuable, over-stressed, underpaid, and most threatened by offshoring and immigration.

It's important to keep an overall perspective, otherwise you come off as VW Phaeton owners complaining about slow ashtrays to the rest of the world.

Comment Re:There would be no need... (Score 1) 337

And in Austria you need a reflective vest for every passenger. And if this wasn't silly enough, then in Russia and Ukraine, as I suspect in most ex-Soviet countries, also a fire extinguisher. In the Czech Republic a year or so ago they changed the requirements for the first aid kit, thus screwing anyone who didn't buy the new version. Cops love to check all of this too if they're bored or aren't reaching their quotas otherwise, so be prepared to unload everything from the trunk to demonstrate that you do, in fact, have all of this crap.

Shit's getting ridiculous, really, soon I'll be going for Sunday drives with a surgeon riding shotgun, just in case.

Comment That's a weirdly specific topic to post on /. (Score 3, Informative) 68

But nevertheless quite interesting. The idea of updatable views is certainly a good one, but it seems that the current limitations make this feature more or less useless for now:

  • The view must have exactly one entry in its FROM, which must be a table or another updatable view.
  • The view definition must not contain WITH, DISTINCT, GROUP BY, HAVING, LIMIT, or OFFSET clauses at the top level.
  • The view definition must not contain set operations (UNION, INTERSECT or EXCEPT) at the top level.
  • All columns in the viewâ(TM)s select list must be simple references to columns of the underlying relation. They cannot be expressions, literals or functions. System columns cannot be referenced, either.
  • No column of the underlying relation can appear more than once in the viewâ(TM)s select list.
  • The view must not have the security_barrier property.
Businesses

O'Reilly Discounts Every eBook By 50% 108

destinyland writes "O'Reilly and Associates just announced that they're offering a 50% discount on every ebook they publish for Cyber Monday. Use the code CYBERDAY when checking out to claim the discount (which expires at midnight). Amazon has also discounted their Kindle Fire tablets to just $129. Due to a production snafu, they've already sold out of the new Kindle Paperwhite, and won't be able to ship any more until December 21"

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C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]

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