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Comment Re:Maybe, if we boycott Sony AND Disney (Score 1) 222

First things first: the name was "McCarthy," not "Mc Carty." As for the substance of your post, (1) did you reply to the wrong post, (2) did you fail to read the post you replied to, or (3) all of the above?

4) I forgot to add "I agree with your pos: Disney was not an example". Sorry but English is my second language. I did indeed misspell Mc Carthy surname.

Comment Re:Not sure what the "secrecy" fuss is (Score 1) 222

@schnell: 'All treaties are negotiated in secret. Furthermore, at least in the US, no treaty is in effect until it is ratified by the Senate, at which point all the elements of the treaty will be public and heavily debated down to the last comma.' -- "The cover sheet records that the draft text will not be declassified until 5 years after the TISA comes into force or the negotiations are otherwise closed. Presumably this also applies to other documents aside from the final text. This exceeds the 4 years in the super-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA)! It also contradicts the hard-won transparency at the WTO, which has published documents relating to negotiations online for a number of years." "Secrecy during the negotiation of a binding and enforceable commercial treaty is objectionable and undemocratic, and invites poorly informed and biased decisions. Secrecy after the fact is patently designed to prevent the governments from being held accountable by their legislatures and citizens." "The suppression of background documents (travaux preparatoires) also creates legal problems. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties recognises they are an essential tool for interpreting legal texts. Non-disclosure makes it impossible for policy-makers, regulators, non-government supervisory agencies, opposition political parties, financial services firms, academics and other commentators to understand the intended meaning or apply the text with confidence."

Mod parent up!

Comment Re:The issue with GMail (Score 1) 218

If you are using GMAIL professionally you are doing it wrong.

I agree if you are talking about free gmail. Gmail in apps for business is a different matter - you pay and you get support

Problem is, unless you are a company with 20 users, you CAN'T call their phone number. This leaves single professionals, small shops and small enterprises out. If you can't call a phone number during SALES/Evaluation phase, don't trust that provider. Period.

Comment The issue with GMail (Score 3, Informative) 218

Aesthetics does not account for the lack of any way of contacting a Human should you come into trouble. A prettier GMAIL? Quite frankly, who gives a hoot? GMAIL is strutture in such a way as not to request "human labour", never. This makes it very, very frail and user support is, literally, non existing. If for any reason, you loose access to your account, you are basically fucked. Lessons learned: GMAIL is OK for basic throw/away don't care type of things. If you are using GMAIL professionally you are doing it wrong. First of all set the correct DNS records of a domain you own to point to a service, any service which allows you to set some name@yourdomain.tld. Should you not like the mail provider service, you can move your account where you like, and NEVER, EVER loose access to your mail account. First thing to check if you plan to use a service: is there a way to contact a human being? is there an actual phone number you can use to ask for assistance? If you can't contact them during sales phase, go someplace else.

Submission + - Samsung Could Have Bought Android but Laughed Idea out of the Boardroom (ibtimes.co.uk)

concertina226 writes: According to Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Wired's contributing editor Fred Vogelstein, engineer Andy Rubin, who started the Android project in 2003, pitched the mobile operating system idea to Samsung.

"I pitch the whole Android vision to them like they are a venture capitalist. And at the end and I am out of breath, with the whole thing laid out ... there is silence. Literally silence, like there are crickets in the room," said Rubin, who had flown out to Seoul with his team in 2004 to pitch to the electronics giant.

Google acquired Android for $50m two weeks after the Samsung presentation and the icing on the cake for Rubin, was receiving a call from Samsung the day after the acquisition was announced, demanding that Rubin meet with them to discuss his "very, very interesting proposal".

Submission + - 500,000 Belkin WeMo Users Are Wide Open To Attackers

An anonymous reader writes: IOActive has uncovered multiple vulnerabilities in Belkin WeMo Home Automation devices that could affect over half a million users and give attackers the ability to remotely control WeMo Home Automation attached devices over the Internet, remotely monitor the devices, perform malicious firmware updates, and access an internal home network.

The vulnerabilities found within the Belkin WeMo devices expose users to several potentially costly threats, from home fires with possible tragic consequences down to the simple waste of electricity. The reason for this is that, after attackers compromise the WeMo devices, they can be used to remotely turn attached devices on and off at any time. Given the number of WeMo devices in use, it is highly likely that many of the attached appliances and devices will be unattended, thus increasing the threat posed by these vulnerabilities.

Submission + - French, German Leaders: Keep European Email Off US Severs (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: In her weekly podcast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she'd be discussing European email security with French President Francois Hollande. Specifically, in the wake of the NSA spying revelations, the two leaders will try to keep European email off of American servers altogether to avoid snooping. This comes as Merkel's government faces criminal complaints for assisting aspects of the NSA's programs.

Submission + - Android now limits write access in SD card to just app directory (androidphoneappreviews.com) 1

Hackomania writes: A new update in the latest Android OS means that apps will be more limited in the level of permission they have in external storage.

From the release of the first Android build (v 1), you may be familiar with the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. In Android 4.1 it also limited even read access with a new READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. Now it seems that Google is tightening the reins even more, and becoming more like iOS. Starting Android 4.4, WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE has been modified such as to only allow apps to write on an SD card only within its own app-specific directory.

This means that no matter the app, it can write in any folder in its "internal storage" (called Primary External Storage), but cannot write anywhere else but the app directory of the SD card (Google calls this Secondary External Storage). A good security measure, but what then happens to file managers that require write access to files on the SD card not their directory?

Submission + - U.S. home electricity use declines for 3rd straight year (www.cbc.ca) 2

An anonymous reader writes: For a third year in a row the U.S. home has used less electricity. The continuing focus on energy conservation combined with new technology has and probably will continue to show promise.

Submission + - Longest active C++ game development SDK has overdue update

rombust writes: The longest running free Game C++ SDK in development has released its latest instalment. After 14 years, ClanLib 3.0.0 is released.

With its zlib style license, it contains code and ideas for a new generation of applications. It features a CSS2 renderer, although it doesn't compete with Google chrome, you can still render slashdot.org onto a flag carried by a cyborg running through a Martian landscape. Being now based in GitHub it encourages forks to tune the SDK for dedicated uses.

It's support for Linux is still strong, with the ability to use from OpenGL 1.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and with a dedicated SSE2 based software renderer fall-back. It was come a long way, since the classic Pingus used it many years ago. You can find ClanLib SDK here

Submission + - Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu? (datamation.com) 2

jammag writes: "When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu," opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?

Comment Development speed (Score 1) 488

I couldn't help noticing that iOS development got sensibly slower: XCODE 5 is a lot slower, and debug on the simulator is a dog: takes forever to launch on a relatively fast iMac with 16 Gb and solid state hard drive. This way XCode is adding minutes every time I need to recompile, relaunch, debug. In the course of the day this adds up...

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