Monkey just decided he likes strawberry icecream.
Category: General
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NO! CAT NO that is a human treat, stop NO get your paw out of there.
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Google reaches into customers’ homes and bricks their gadgets
Revolv is a home automation hub that Google acquired 17 months ago; yesterday, Google announced that as of May 15, it will killswitch all the Revolvs in the field and render them inert. Section 1201 of the DMCA – the law that prohibits breaking DRM – means that anyone who tries to make a third-party OS for Revolv faces felony charges and up to 5 years in prison.
Revolv is apparently being killswitched because it doesn’t fit in with Google’s plan for Nest, the other home automation system it acquired. Google’s FAQ tells its customers that this is OK because their warranties have expired, and besides, this is all covered in the fine-print they clicked through, or at least saw, or at least saw a link to.
This isn’t the earthquake, it’s the tremor. From your car to your lightbulbs to your pacemaker, the gadgets you own are increasingly based on networked software. Remove the software and they become inert e-waste. There is no such thing as a hardware company: the razor-thin margins on hardware mean that every funded hardware company is a service and data company, and almost without exception, these companies use DRM to acquire the legal right to sue competitors who provide rival services or who give customers access to their own data on “their” data.
We are entering the era where dishwashers can reject third-party dishes, and their manufacturers can sue anyone who makes “third-party dishes” out of existence. Selling you a toaster has never afforded companies the power to dictate your bread choices, nor has making a record player given a company the right to control which records get made.
The last-millennium Digital Millennium Copyright Act has managed to stay on the books because we still think of it as a way to pull off small-potatoes ripoffs like forcing you to re-buy the movies you own on DVD if you want to watch them on your phone. In reality, the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules are a system that makes corporations into the only “people” who get to own property – everything you “buy” is actually a license, dictated by terms of service that you’ve never read and certainly never agreed to, which give companies the right to reach into your home and do anything they want with the devices you’ve paid for.
https://boingboing.net/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers.html
Vert the ferk, Google.
Saw this coming approximately 80 miles off…
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Just a little bit…
Because Linux’s move command is actually copy-then-delete if it’s not within one partition, I have to do this file shuffling in multiple chunks. Which means selecting a group of files, saying “move them”, waiting an hour while it does that, then selecting more files and doing it again. It seems to be working, so far, and I’ve done a teeeensy bit of tidying of the files on the way past (I really need to either sit down and suck-up tidying up this server, or obtain a minion to do it for me. Given the latter’s beyond unlikely, I think the former will have to occur at some point).
What I really need to do is borrow a few 4Tb drives, shuffle everything onto there, then set up a nice raid array, and shuffle it all back. It’s 11Tb worth of data (well, about 10Tb plus a 1Tb install disk, which is, yes, a ridiculous install disk, but it was a data disk until it got ‘too small to be useful’). But I don’t really have the cash to throw at a new multidisk array. Not if I want to get an EV to relieve my poor Minor of it’s 60 mile commute each work day. I don’t mind taking her some of the time, but I don’t really want to destroy her. So I think, for the time being, we’ll just have to put up with things being the way they are. Mind you, at least they’re now in a case where the disks are all in proper bays. That’s quite exciting. And I can take disks out without disassembling the entire PC.
Still as I watch file 481 of 1,702 move from one directory to another at a whopping 52Mb/sec (the other board was faster, when it worked, it used to hit about 80Mb/sec – then die), I can’t help but think of the fantastic musical treat that popped into my head as I considered that I had to move the files just a bit at a time.
Sorry.
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please read the text message I just woke up to
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OKAY BUT GUYS I DON’T THINK YOU REALISE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHAT THIS MAN IS WEARING
That guy in the Rogue One trailer, with the white Imperial uniform? There’s only ever been one rank in the entire Imperial Navy which wears a white uniform: Grand Fucking Admiral.
For those unfamiliar with the old EU, in the entirety of the Galactic Empire, which at its peak ruled over literally trillions of sentients, there were never more than twelve Grand Admirals at any given time. These guys outranked Grand Moff Tarkin, the old dude who kept Vader in check in Episode IV. There were only like four people in the galaxy more powerful than them, and one of those was the Emperor.
But what made these guys so important wasn’t just their rank. It was that they were all hand-picked by Palpatine for their sheer genius. Their tactical brilliance was literally the stuff of legends. Five years after the second Death Star was destroyed, just the rumour that a Grand Admiral might have survived the fall of the Empire was enough to cause all sorts of strife in the New Republic.
When that rumour turned out to be true, Grand Admiral Thrawn single-handedly brought the New Republic government to its knees, holding the entire planet of Coruscant hostage to terror for months with a brilliant tactical ploy.
Like. If this film does this character anywhere near the justice the Grand Admiral rank deserves, he is going to be one hell of a fucking villain.
THANK YOU!
I’m such a slut for Grand Admirals, you’ve no idea. I loved the Thrawn trilogy, I love the Empire. Please make this guy worthy of the uniform he’s wearing.I’m sorry all I can see is Thrawn going NO CAPES ^_^
