Sorry for my being extra nerdy here but its true how they both exist because of each other. The hacker groups claim to exist because governments are cracking down on freedom, and the governments claim they are cracking down because of the hackers. I don't think either side is to be praised because neither side seems to be making much progress and it is the middle users freedom and privacy that suffers. However, sadly i see it more likely that if the government would back down the hackers would disband, where as if the government had no friction against them they might start moving slower but still in the same direction.
True but I don't think its as simple as that. I work in IT and we are constant looking for ways of improving security. One of the biggest problems is that the software or devices that would improve security the most tend to cost unreasonable amounts of money and require you to keep multi-thousand dollar contracts with the companies who make them. Not to mention a week before a new security software is released the hackers are already hard at work finding the holes in it so before you know it your system is unsecured again.
If you work in a government agency where people could have important information saved on a flash drive are you just supposed to destroy the drive for fear of it being infected.
As far as opening it at work I might take some precautions when opening the files but why would I open it on my home computer that has my personal information on it. Its not really the OS's fault, a government agency a normal users account should be very limited in how much access it has to network files and how much damage it can do. I don't windows popping up with a bunch of "are you sure?" prompts every time I am working with a flash drive. Besides the idiots will still just disregard the warning boxes and directly install the virus.
Sure I have seen animals treated badly but I would think the vast majority a treated well, much better than if they were strays or in the wild. I think its funny that he really thinks that people don't think their animals have feeling and don't care about them when any pet owner knows that owning a pet is not cheap. Feeding it alone can cost hundreds of dollars a year. Add in it getting sick and buying it toys, people end up spending a lot of money on the comfort and well being of something they think has no feelings.
Right after getting my dog he ate a marble, if it was in the wild it would have died but we spent $1000 to get it surgically removed. Somehow I think my dog would agree with me more than these so call Animal Activists.
True, looking past all the loop holes people will find in the law there is just no way it could be enforced. All it would do is shut down pet stores (thus taking money out of the cities small business economy). Now all pets would just be sold more secretly out of people homes, I mean when your dog has a bunch of puppies do they expect you to keep them all. At least in a pet store laws require you to keep the animals vaccinated and semi well taken care of, private sales sorta throw that out the window. That or as stated people will just drive one city over to buy their dog.
Not to mention I see this costing a lot more of tax payer dollars than it would save. I really don't see a ton of tax money going towards watching how pet stores run. This will not at all diminish the number of animals owned by people. Now however a lot more money will be going in to the tracking down and prosecuting people selling animals in the city.
This plan may be good for Capcom sales but it most certainly degrades the value of a 3DS seeing as the 3DS is the only system they can do this on (only one that doesn't use disks). Nintendo already has a tough battle with the PSV they have to deal with. Now if a bunch of their game developers moved in this direction it would definitely hurt their sales.
I think Nintendo needs to put their foot down here. I already am leaning towards a PSV, but if I got a hint that more of 3DS developers were moving this direction and that all of my games would be a single play through then buying a 3DS would be out of the question for me. I already look at a games worth in terms of replay value why would I buy and entire system with no replay value.
I get it, it is a clever idea and just about everyone who owns an apple laptop has to bring up how they would be willing to pay an extra $100 just for the magnet plug.
I don't like it, I have tripped over cables and such but its no big deal, usually the cable pops right out. I have even had computers come to me that had the power socket almost ripped out from tripping stories. But it has never happened to me, what has happened to me is the constant unplugging of the magnetic plug when working on macs. Multiple models and always the same annoyance of any little tug from moving the laptop unplugging it.
I know its nothing to worry about, apple would never let people work around their patents to develop a similar on for pc's but man would that suck if the new standard was those weak little magnetic chargers.
It makes even more sense for it to be used by military. At least you could sort of make the argument that civilians playing these game could create hostilities or prejudices between people from these countries but soldiers have to be trained in the chance that we ever go to war with this country. It does not matter if its an enemy or an ally our soldiers have to have some plan and some amount of training for if we ever met them on opposite side of the battlefield.
If China wants their soldiers to be better at video games who are we to stop them. Now our soldiers will take them on with actual battlefield training and us here on/. will beat them on the video game front.
On a serious note, I seem to remember not to long ago when I was playing call of duty and it had me mowing down a bunch of civilians. I don't think we should be should be wagging the finger at China.
In words it sounds like exactly what the gaming market needs but in reality it would only be bad news for gamers. It would only lead to games being of over all lower quality but the companies justifying higher prices by saying that they spend more time building on the engine or something like that. Steam is doing a great job of fixing this, when a game sucks within a month or two the price will drop closer to what its actually worth. Yet on consoles a game that took 3 years to produce is the same price as the game that took 1 year and thousands of dollars less to produce, and this stays true even after the game has been out for a year.
You can see the companies that understand the idea of releasing quality content before they ask for an entire days pay. Ones that release a full body game, and then when the players ask for more they make extensive DLC for a very reasonable price. Yet now tons of other companies see the money to be made in DLC, release a half finished game, and then release DLC that adds an hour or two of gameplay and cost roughly 1/5 the original games price.
It sometimes seems 25% of the posts here on/. somehow mention the growing phone market and the amazing technology its bringing. Apple, Google, Microsoft, are all fighting to become the head of this new technology, now other big names like Intel are completely changing their focus to the phone market because thats where they see all the money going.
In truth after all these companies battle it out they will now be under the control of their new masters AT&T and Verizon. Both companies have the power to effectively kill the smartphone market in the US. I understand that the networks cant handle as much as we would like to throw at them, I have seen people running multiple apps transferring relatively large amounts of data 24/7. But the phone companies are just using this as an excuse to better segregate the market and milk it for all its worth.
My question is why is everybody letting them? (1) the big phone makers are putting their futures in the phone market without first striking any deals with the network providers that they stick to certain standards and not raise the prices and reduce the quality yearly. (2) Us users, after AT&T got rid of their unlimited data I waited for my contract to end and went to Verizon, now that Verizon is going to start tying the rope around my neck Sprint is looking much better. If the customer base moves the the phone makers will follow, but what am I saying, people would have to give up their iPhone for a while... (3) Government, why aren't they stepping in, Verizon and AT&T are already treating this like a Duopoly and there are still a number of good providers out there. But it wont stay like that for long as TMobile gets swallowed up, and I'm sure Verizon has its eyes on Sprint, this is why we have the government involved in corporate affairs, so they can stop all the power from accumulating in one place.
Its true that the number of viewer for sci -fi type shows doesn't compare to the viewers of other genres but even a small % of dedicated viewers could represent thousands and then the people who like some sci-fi shows as there second choice could be millions.
Now that isn't enough for all the main channels to share but there aren't really any other channels going after sci-fi type shows. If SyFy cleaned up there channel it would become the only place for sci-fi lovers to turn to. It used to be a channel I would turn to when surfing for something to watch because there was maybe a 25% chance it had something interesting on. Now the only time I ever tuned in was for a couple specific shows because everything else I felt was a making fun of their viewers.
As it stands though with the end of SGU there is absolutely nothing that interests me on SyFy any more, and they can complain its because they don't have enough viewers or funding but thats their fault. As stated first you have to produce something of quality, that will draw the viewers, and in turn your funding will rise, you don't get to reverse the order.
As some people noted we do not share the same legal defense. When I was trying to set up some new hardware I had opened my wifi and out of laziness left it. About a week later my internet was slow so I looked in to what it might be, turns out someone else had connected to my wifi, when I looked at their traffic it was to torrent trackers.
Without a doubt, I would be held responsible for whatever he downloaded unless I could find his computer and prove otherwise, and if I had left my connection open out of kindness it could end up costing me huge fines. Not to mention he wasn't just using up a little bit of my internet. It may be selfish but if I upgrade my internet speeds I don't want it to be so that my neighbor can now watch youtube in 1080p while I see no noticeable speed increase.
I have used routers that allow you to broadcast two wifi channels with separate settings. If my home router could do this so that I could block p2p sites and limit bandwidth on my open channel, and then encrypt my personal channel, then i may consider it. However, this hardware is not available at a practical cost for home users.
I doubt google would try to block apple out of the music business, one because it would just lead to more court cases against google and 2 because google has shown that they rely more on creating a superior product than cutting down the competition.
Second, apple brought the music business in to current times but has been holding it back since. ITunes offers lower sound quality compared to many other digital sellers. They have been jacking up the price, they have made sharing your music and just transferring it to other devices of your own a huge pain, and offer no cloud type services.
I would be happy if Amazon took over over the music industry, they cant be any worse than the people currently in charge. The only problem is I don't think google should only buy one label. That would lead to all the labels being bought by different companies and then a new place for the tech companies to war. Can you say iphone exclusive songs.
I’m not sure Microsoft should be placing all their bets on the hopes on this being a fad and not another huge market they were late to enter. Even if it does end up being a fad, it is a multibillion dollar fad and I think Microsoft is only hurting themselves by dragging their feet when entering any market they don’t feel they can dominate.
Also I think the fate of the tablet is more controlled by the tablet developers rather than the consumers. If the companies decide to keep tablets as they are only upgrading the hardware from time to time, then they will eventually phase out of the market when they become the ignored middle child between phones and laptops. However if just one company pushes them to be equal to laptops and even better in areas such as price and portability and more powerful than smart phones, they could very well become a long term distinguished market.
This makes me remember a Futurama quote,
"Shut up friends. My internet browser heard us saying the word Fry and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us... It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some french fries."
I would have to say I dont mind paying the $15 a month, I used to stay away from the MMO's because of that reason but then i tried Guild Wars and WoW, man I am hooked, i couldnt stick with Guild Wars and as you may know it is now free.
I used to play games on XBox GameCube all those things and was buying a new game very mounth because of how fast i would beat them, that was about $50 every month. Now with WoW for the small price Im paying I get and Update roughly every month. Now with an expansion coming out Im trying even harder to lvl my char so i can try the new stuff.
Aside from that I have seen all the people that complain about blizzard and how the servers are slow, and Im ussually one of the people compaining, but do you know how hard it is to keep that many servers and updates running that smoothly.
WoW is obviously doing something right because i dont think i have ever seen an advertisment for them and if I didnt play Warcraft3 I might not have known about it. When I get home however I find it fun to sit at the computer and while talking to my freinds over Vent kill them in the game. Like others have said if you dont like it read a book or stop complaining about the $15 a month and go buy a game for $50. As for me i could never get into a book and so i will stick with this, I might sound dumb when I feel I acomplished something and yell I GOT LVL 60! but i think it sounds better than, I FINISHED READING HARRY POTTER!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for my being extra nerdy here but its true how they both exist because of each other. The hacker groups claim to exist because governments are cracking down on freedom, and the governments claim they are cracking down because of the hackers. I don't think either side is to be praised because neither side seems to be making much progress and it is the middle users freedom and privacy that suffers. However, sadly i see it more likely that if the government would back down the hackers would disband, where as if the government had no friction against them they might start moving slower but still in the same direction.
True but I don't think its as simple as that. I work in IT and we are constant looking for ways of improving security. One of the biggest problems is that the software or devices that would improve security the most tend to cost unreasonable amounts of money and require you to keep multi-thousand dollar contracts with the companies who make them. Not to mention a week before a new security software is released the hackers are already hard at work finding the holes in it so before you know it your system is unsecured again.
If you work in a government agency where people could have important information saved on a flash drive are you just supposed to destroy the drive for fear of it being infected.
As far as opening it at work I might take some precautions when opening the files but why would I open it on my home computer that has my personal information on it. Its not really the OS's fault, a government agency a normal users account should be very limited in how much access it has to network files and how much damage it can do. I don't windows popping up with a bunch of "are you sure?" prompts every time I am working with a flash drive. Besides the idiots will still just disregard the warning boxes and directly install the virus.
Sure I have seen animals treated badly but I would think the vast majority a treated well, much better than if they were strays or in the wild. I think its funny that he really thinks that people don't think their animals have feeling and don't care about them when any pet owner knows that owning a pet is not cheap. Feeding it alone can cost hundreds of dollars a year. Add in it getting sick and buying it toys, people end up spending a lot of money on the comfort and well being of something they think has no feelings.
Right after getting my dog he ate a marble, if it was in the wild it would have died but we spent $1000 to get it surgically removed. Somehow I think my dog would agree with me more than these so call Animal Activists.
True, looking past all the loop holes people will find in the law there is just no way it could be enforced. All it would do is shut down pet stores (thus taking money out of the cities small business economy). Now all pets would just be sold more secretly out of people homes, I mean when your dog has a bunch of puppies do they expect you to keep them all. At least in a pet store laws require you to keep the animals vaccinated and semi well taken care of, private sales sorta throw that out the window. That or as stated people will just drive one city over to buy their dog.
Not to mention I see this costing a lot more of tax payer dollars than it would save. I really don't see a ton of tax money going towards watching how pet stores run. This will not at all diminish the number of animals owned by people. Now however a lot more money will be going in to the tracking down and prosecuting people selling animals in the city.
This plan may be good for Capcom sales but it most certainly degrades the value of a 3DS seeing as the 3DS is the only system they can do this on (only one that doesn't use disks). Nintendo already has a tough battle with the PSV they have to deal with. Now if a bunch of their game developers moved in this direction it would definitely hurt their sales.
I think Nintendo needs to put their foot down here. I already am leaning towards a PSV, but if I got a hint that more of 3DS developers were moving this direction and that all of my games would be a single play through then buying a 3DS would be out of the question for me. I already look at a games worth in terms of replay value why would I buy and entire system with no replay value.
I get it, it is a clever idea and just about everyone who owns an apple laptop has to bring up how they would be willing to pay an extra $100 just for the magnet plug.
I don't like it, I have tripped over cables and such but its no big deal, usually the cable pops right out. I have even had computers come to me that had the power socket almost ripped out from tripping stories. But it has never happened to me, what has happened to me is the constant unplugging of the magnetic plug when working on macs. Multiple models and always the same annoyance of any little tug from moving the laptop unplugging it.
I know its nothing to worry about, apple would never let people work around their patents to develop a similar on for pc's but man would that suck if the new standard was those weak little magnetic chargers.
ok rant complete
It makes even more sense for it to be used by military. At least you could sort of make the argument that civilians playing these game could create hostilities or prejudices between people from these countries but soldiers have to be trained in the chance that we ever go to war with this country. It does not matter if its an enemy or an ally our soldiers have to have some plan and some amount of training for if we ever met them on opposite side of the battlefield.
If China wants their soldiers to be better at video games who are we to stop them. Now our soldiers will take them on with actual battlefield training and us here on /. will beat them on the video game front.
On a serious note, I seem to remember not to long ago when I was playing call of duty and it had me mowing down a bunch of civilians. I don't think we should be should be wagging the finger at China.
In words it sounds like exactly what the gaming market needs but in reality it would only be bad news for gamers. It would only lead to games being of over all lower quality but the companies justifying higher prices by saying that they spend more time building on the engine or something like that. Steam is doing a great job of fixing this, when a game sucks within a month or two the price will drop closer to what its actually worth. Yet on consoles a game that took 3 years to produce is the same price as the game that took 1 year and thousands of dollars less to produce, and this stays true even after the game has been out for a year.
You can see the companies that understand the idea of releasing quality content before they ask for an entire days pay. Ones that release a full body game, and then when the players ask for more they make extensive DLC for a very reasonable price. Yet now tons of other companies see the money to be made in DLC, release a half finished game, and then release DLC that adds an hour or two of gameplay and cost roughly 1/5 the original games price.
It sometimes seems 25% of the posts here on /. somehow mention the growing phone market and the amazing technology its bringing. Apple, Google, Microsoft, are all fighting to become the head of this new technology, now other big names like Intel are completely changing their focus to the phone market because thats where they see all the money going.
In truth after all these companies battle it out they will now be under the control of their new masters AT&T and Verizon. Both companies have the power to effectively kill the smartphone market in the US. I understand that the networks cant handle as much as we would like to throw at them, I have seen people running multiple apps transferring relatively large amounts of data 24/7. But the phone companies are just using this as an excuse to better segregate the market and milk it for all its worth.
My question is why is everybody letting them? (1) the big phone makers are putting their futures in the phone market without first striking any deals with the network providers that they stick to certain standards and not raise the prices and reduce the quality yearly. (2) Us users, after AT&T got rid of their unlimited data I waited for my contract to end and went to Verizon, now that Verizon is going to start tying the rope around my neck Sprint is looking much better. If the customer base moves the the phone makers will follow, but what am I saying, people would have to give up their iPhone for a while... (3) Government, why aren't they stepping in, Verizon and AT&T are already treating this like a Duopoly and there are still a number of good providers out there. But it wont stay like that for long as TMobile gets swallowed up, and I'm sure Verizon has its eyes on Sprint, this is why we have the government involved in corporate affairs, so they can stop all the power from accumulating in one place.
Its true that the number of viewer for sci -fi type shows doesn't compare to the viewers of other genres but even a small % of dedicated viewers could represent thousands and then the people who like some sci-fi shows as there second choice could be millions.
Now that isn't enough for all the main channels to share but there aren't really any other channels going after sci-fi type shows. If SyFy cleaned up there channel it would become the only place for sci-fi lovers to turn to. It used to be a channel I would turn to when surfing for something to watch because there was maybe a 25% chance it had something interesting on. Now the only time I ever tuned in was for a couple specific shows because everything else I felt was a making fun of their viewers.
As it stands though with the end of SGU there is absolutely nothing that interests me on SyFy any more, and they can complain its because they don't have enough viewers or funding but thats their fault. As stated first you have to produce something of quality, that will draw the viewers, and in turn your funding will rise, you don't get to reverse the order.
As some people noted we do not share the same legal defense. When I was trying to set up some new hardware I had opened my wifi and out of laziness left it. About a week later my internet was slow so I looked in to what it might be, turns out someone else had connected to my wifi, when I looked at their traffic it was to torrent trackers.
Without a doubt, I would be held responsible for whatever he downloaded unless I could find his computer and prove otherwise, and if I had left my connection open out of kindness it could end up costing me huge fines. Not to mention he wasn't just using up a little bit of my internet. It may be selfish but if I upgrade my internet speeds I don't want it to be so that my neighbor can now watch youtube in 1080p while I see no noticeable speed increase.
I have used routers that allow you to broadcast two wifi channels with separate settings. If my home router could do this so that I could block p2p sites and limit bandwidth on my open channel, and then encrypt my personal channel, then i may consider it. However, this hardware is not available at a practical cost for home users.
I doubt google would try to block apple out of the music business, one because it would just lead to more court cases against google and 2 because google has shown that they rely more on creating a superior product than cutting down the competition. Second, apple brought the music business in to current times but has been holding it back since. ITunes offers lower sound quality compared to many other digital sellers. They have been jacking up the price, they have made sharing your music and just transferring it to other devices of your own a huge pain, and offer no cloud type services. I would be happy if Amazon took over over the music industry, they cant be any worse than the people currently in charge. The only problem is I don't think google should only buy one label. That would lead to all the labels being bought by different companies and then a new place for the tech companies to war. Can you say iphone exclusive songs.
I’m not sure Microsoft should be placing all their bets on the hopes on this being a fad and not another huge market they were late to enter. Even if it does end up being a fad, it is a multibillion dollar fad and I think Microsoft is only hurting themselves by dragging their feet when entering any market they don’t feel they can dominate. Also I think the fate of the tablet is more controlled by the tablet developers rather than the consumers. If the companies decide to keep tablets as they are only upgrading the hardware from time to time, then they will eventually phase out of the market when they become the ignored middle child between phones and laptops. However if just one company pushes them to be equal to laptops and even better in areas such as price and portability and more powerful than smart phones, they could very well become a long term distinguished market.
This makes me remember a Futurama quote, "Shut up friends. My internet browser heard us saying the word Fry and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us... It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some french fries."
I would have to say I dont mind paying the $15 a month, I used to stay away from the MMO's because of that reason but then i tried Guild Wars and WoW, man I am hooked, i couldnt stick with Guild Wars and as you may know it is now free. I used to play games on XBox GameCube all those things and was buying a new game very mounth because of how fast i would beat them, that was about $50 every month. Now with WoW for the small price Im paying I get and Update roughly every month. Now with an expansion coming out Im trying even harder to lvl my char so i can try the new stuff. Aside from that I have seen all the people that complain about blizzard and how the servers are slow, and Im ussually one of the people compaining, but do you know how hard it is to keep that many servers and updates running that smoothly. WoW is obviously doing something right because i dont think i have ever seen an advertisment for them and if I didnt play Warcraft3 I might not have known about it. When I get home however I find it fun to sit at the computer and while talking to my freinds over Vent kill them in the game. Like others have said if you dont like it read a book or stop complaining about the $15 a month and go buy a game for $50. As for me i could never get into a book and so i will stick with this, I might sound dumb when I feel I acomplished something and yell I GOT LVL 60! but i think it sounds better than, I FINISHED READING HARRY POTTER!