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Comment Thank you Alienware (Score 1) 138

Thank you for having the guts to try something new and different.

It's so tiresome to always have Apple be the one that experiments with design, followed by everyone else copying whatever Apple did whether or not it was a good idea. When Apple introduced their gumdrop iMacs, everything else went translucent. Microwaves. Clothes irons. It was absurd.

eg: We recently got a bunch of PCs, and they included mice copied from Apple's absurdly-flat mighty mouse or whatever they call it. Had to throw the damn things out cause they were unusable. Apple should be barred from designing mice.

Comment Only one truely needed feature (Score 1) 77

There's only one feature that Android desperately needs, and it's one I doubt that will ever happen.

Google needs to copy iOS's control over app behaviour. The unfortunate fact is, most developers are no where near as good as they think they are (regardless of platform), and there are way too many apps that will obliterate your battery even when they're only running in the background.

This is inexcusable for a mobile operating system that, by definition, runs on devices with limited battery life. It's even worse when you have a phone that doesn't have an easily replaceable battery.

Too bad this will never happen. That's why I gave up on Android and switch to iOS, despite Apple's obsessive control freakery. When all's said and done, I need a device that I can trust to work reliably. If I wanted a device where I *needed* to screw around and poke at it right down to the OS level just to make it work properly, I'd be using Gentoo.

Comment Re:an opinion from the self entitled generation (Score 2) 429

Assuming you were even correct, you will be very hard pressed to find a single public network owner be upset that someone took it upon themselves to clean up their network for them.

Businesses provide wifi as a service to help bring in paying customers. The likelyhood that a paying customer is going to come in and suddenly start torrenting a boatload of crap is exceedingly low.

Case in point... I've been to places where the network was hosed, but I was the only person there with a computer. The bandwidth was all being consumed by people who weren't even customers of the establishment. What are the possible options? You can't canvas an entire neighbourhood looking for people abusing the wifi connection. Call the police? Yeah right.

So along comes someone who is fed up and finally does something about it. Assuming that he got the owners permission, he just performed a public service for free, to the benefit of everyone else that wanted to use that network. That makes him a hero, not a criminal.

What I find particularly sad is people like you who would rather defend abusers and vilify good samaritans, instead of the other way around. This is why trolls will always win, because it's easier for people like you to target and pull down the few who actually contribute something useful to society, instead of railing against the people who are instigating genuine harm.

Comment Re: Congratulations and fuck you (Score 1) 429

I'm not advocating for vigilante justice in general. I'm saying that this is an inevitable consequence when other recourses are not available. Especially so when people like you are essentially blaming the victim for standing up for themselves and giving the actual aggressor (in this case, the torrenters) a free pass.

And don't get me started on supposed Libertarian ideals. It is so completely out of touch with how the real world works, that I'm embarrassed for people who actually admit to being Libertarian.

Comment Re:So why are you entitled to mess with the networ (Score 1) 429

You seem to be confused regarding who is engaging in the DoS attack.

The script poisons bittorrent traffic in order to *stop* the DoS attack that is *already* in progress, caused by the *torrenter*.

This is not the equivalent of yelling at kids riding their bikes. It's the equivalent of having a bunch of kids forcefully and willfully blocking the driveway of you and every other person's house on your street because they want to play road hockey.

In real life, you'd be calling the police and possibly pressing charges. But that's a lot harder to do with network traffic, hence people going vigilante like this. This is an inevitable consequence when more reasonable measures are not available.

Your strawman arguments are ridiculous. Why the hell would the owner of a coffee shop be in the back room downloading CentOS ISOs? That's horse shit and you know it.

The whole point of a business providing public wifi, is to entice people to come in and use their other services. If I go in there with the expectation that I can peruse slashdot while enjoying a cappuccino, and I can't, then that will directly impact my decision to go there again.

I challenge you to find one single shop owner that wouldn't happily invite measures such as these, so that they are able to provide service to their customers.

Ilsa

Comment Re:Congratulations and fuck you (Score 0) 429

I guess then that it's a good thing there are *other* download methods other than torrenting if you need to grab an ISO that badly. And of course, we're ignoring the fact that your scenario is incredibly unlikely.

Having sane network policies require network admins to set them up and possibly police them. The likelyhood that a mom 'n pop shop is going to hire one borders on zero. They'd sooner get rid of the wifi altogether.

The issue here is simple: If you want to be an asshole, someone else is going to be an asshole back. This is a basic concept common to almost all human interactions, and it's not going to change no matter how libertarian you want to be about it.

Comment Re:an opinion from the self entitled generation (Score 2, Insightful) 429

Bittorrent users are effectively performing a denial of service attack on an entire network that doesn't belong to them.

Please explain how running a script like this, with the owners permission, makes the script-writer worse than the torrenters?

The torrenters do not have a god given right to abuse someone else's network. I've been in places where the wifi is basically useless, but the shop is almost empty, which means there are people consuming wifi bandwith and not even having the courtesy of being a patron of said shop.

I'm sorry, but people like that can go fuck themselves. If you can't express even the simplest forms of common courtesy, you don't deserve any in return.

Comment Missing the point (Score 1) 238

This fear and distrust of technology is a symptom of the bigger problem of anti-intellectualism. And this can't be fixed until:
a) the education system stops trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
b) religion stops getting a free pass on everything

In particular, there is a distressing lack of logical thinking courses. This is desperately needed, especially because there is currently nothing to counteract the dangerous and forceful indoctrination of children into religious institutions. It has already been demonstrated that children in religious households have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality, for example.

The problem is that this is a self perpetuating problem. Stupid adults who arn't able to deal with the real world, want their kids to be equally stupid and unable to deal with the real world, and so raise them accordingly, and even go out of their way to subvert the education system to push their politics on everyone whether they like it or not.

Ilsa

Comment Outrage burnout (Score 2) 150

I can't even bring myself to be outraged by this sort of thing anymore, because it's become so expected.

What's especially annoying though, is that so many *other* companies have hitched themselves to the DE bandwagon, that you cannot use their (what should be) completely legitimate services without getting bent over by Adobe. Library ebook rentals, for example, because most of them rely on Overdrive.

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