The UK and Europe have far stricter data protection laws than the United States and most other countries in the World. While there are definitely physical privacy issues raised by the explosion of CCTV in the UK and the security issues raised by the possiblity of National ID Cards and centralised medical record databases, that doesn't for one second mean that any other privacy issue should be overlooked or cast aside because "[we've] got bigger privacy problems". Every privacy concern should be raised and every single one of them should be fought to the bitter end. No exceptions.
Wait a second here... that means whoever ends up getting screwed, I win. Rock On. No I think a more realistic way of looking at it is "Whoever wins... we lose". This situation is a lot like the AvP movie in other ways too: I can't bear to watch this either.
Making "the Sims meets SimCity" is trying something new? What crack are you smoking? Trying something new would involve not tacking on the name of an established franchise to a hybrid spin-off. Care to name an existing game that this is copying? I can't think of one. Just because they're working off two existing concepts doesn't mean the result isn't something new.
So should the next MS Flight Simulator be turned into a first-person shooter tie-in with Halo? What completely unrelated game is this new game tying in with then? This is nothing like that. They're taking a game and using some elements and the basic theme of it to make a different game. MS Flight Simulator is a perfect example: maybe you've forgotten about MS Combat Flight Simulator. I bet a bunch of idiots who considered themselves the "MS Flight Simulator audience" whinged like hell about that too.
The marketing geniuses that came up with this one don't know the Sim City audience. Who says it needs to be marketed solely to the SimCity audience? From the sounds of it the "SimCity audience" are whiney little prima donnas who want Maxis to release the same game over and over. Maybe they decided they wanted to appeal to a larger audience who are still interested in creativity.
The point would be that franchises should stay mostly the same and you should innovate with new franchises. That way if the innovations fail it won't reflect poorly upon the franchise. I disagree. By your logic any existing franchise will only ever implement features that have been seen before in other games. In my opinion the worst thing that can ever happen to a game series is for it to become stale and unadventurous. After all, it's the innovation and originality that creates all good series' in the first place. To lose that quality out of fear of hurting the franchise is just crazy. If trying something new means that every once in a while a franchise gets a black mark on it's name, well that's fine by me. That's the cost of creating something great.
Nobody's complaining that they're "trying something new". The complaint is that they are taking an established name (SimCity), and increasing the version number (4 -> 5), which would imply that it is substantially the same game with some improvements From TFA:
According to an unamed EA exec, the reason behind the Societies name is that it's "completely different from SimCity 4, so they're trying to come up with something different than just calling it SimCity 5." As you can see they're not just calling it "SimCity 5", they're going out of their way to give it a variation on the name, which is line with the variation on the theme (after all, it's still going to be essentially a community-building simulation of sorts). There's no evil conspiracy here.
Gaming is constantly being dogged by how unoriginal it is and how most major games are just slightly prettier rehashes of older ones, and how evrything these days is a formulaic sequel. So Maxis have changed that. They've actually decided to try something new with an established series, even using new developers to do so, and what do they get? "Waaah! It's not a REAL SimCity", "Maxis have ruined my childhood memories". Boo-fucking-hoo. They've tried something new. So what. Everything from Simcity 2000 has been basically the same game anyway, so if you're really that intent on playing the same old thing you've already got three games to choose from. For everyone with an open mind, well maybe they'll find something fresh and slightly original thanks to a developer going out and doing something different with an established franchise for a change. If it sucks and the new concept tanks then you be damn sure Simcity 6 will be back to the old formula again, so it's worth the risk isn't it?
Amero had faced 40 years on the conviction of four counts of risk of injury to a minor Risk of injury! What, were they worried the children would all go blind or something?
Seems to me you should never give out your emmail address to your girlfriend, period. And why take any risks, don't even give them your number, or your real name for that matter. Personally I prefer to be extra careful about giving out personal information, I don't let them see my face or even let them know that we're dating.
It's going pretty well with my latest one I think. She's a bit shy though. Every time I call her it's nothing but awkward silences. Plus she's started closed the curtains:(
Am I the only person in the world who likes single player games anymore? Seriously all I hear about are MMO games. You're certainly not. MMOGs just don't appeal to me. The misanthropist in me strongly resists the idea of a game where my enjoyment rests largely on the good faith of others. Not to mention relying on the continued support of the game developers in that you're at their mercy with the direction they take the game (very rarely a choice to not "upgrade") and that the game stops when the company chooses (or folds).
Hazelwood cites a famous Intel mishap where microprocessors were distributed before a flaw in their fine mathematics function was detected, resulting in a massive recall. A system like Tortola could prevent such expensive glitches in the future. "We could use the software to hide flaws in the hardware, which would allow designers to release products sooner because problems could be fixed later," explains Hazelwood. Oh great. So not only do the public get to be unwitting beta testers for software but we'll soon be able to do it for hardware too.
I can't wait to pay £400 for a Beta CPU and then get to endure 6 months of crashing until it gets patched.
Who cares? They'll figure that out later. That's just one of those minor details like "the materials to build this thing don't exist yet" and "we don't have anything that could contruct it even if we had the material".
But I bet they've got some lovely artist's renderings of people smiling as they ride the space elevator. You know, the important stuff. Everything else will just fall into place.
no the main material is silicon and it's plentiful, the expenive part is the production, it requires a LOT of processing and quality control. people keep rambling on about moore's "law" but fail to realise the price of a cpu hasn't really fell very much at all in 10 years, they've just gotten faster (which is all moores prediction is to do with). in the case of solar panels this will NOT help them sell. they need to get much much cheaper for adoption to happen. - Of course it will help them sell. If one £2k solar panel currently produces 10% of what a household needs, and then in x years a £2k solar panel produces 100% of people's needs then more people will obviously buy it. The place where computing differs is that although CPUs have gotten faster, the hardware requirements of software to do basically the same thing has risen in tandem. With that in mind the key thing we have to do in relation to electricity is ensure that household electrical demand does not rise, or at least rises far slower, than the rate of increase in solar panel efficiency.
What the fuck are you talking about? They did exactly that just the other week. I even bitched about how it was biased against Microsoft that they highlighted Windows security issues but not for any other OS. And now they have. And I'm happy.
Well I don't know about memory leaks but the Downloads dialog is a fucking disgrace to efficiency. Download 50 or so things and the entire programs slows very noticeably.
I remember a few years back when I first upgraded to a version of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (forget what it was called at the time) which used the Downloads dialog and instantly the whole thing slowed to a crawl. Why? Because I'd never cleared my downloads cache before and the brand new Downloads dialog had about 2000+ entries in it. I think simply opening the dialog took a couple of minutes and the Clean Up took about five minutes. All for what is essentially just a listbox! God knows what would happen if they ever tried to make the Downloads dialog useful by doing crazy things like telling you when a download failed to actually download anything.
OK, rant over. I like Firefox for the most part but that has really pissed me off for a long time. Glad I finally got that off my chest.
Discarding the ways to make a profit from credit card numbers, how about using police ignorance to screw people over. Only a month or so ago details were revealed about the massive flaws in police operations such as Operation Ore in which thousands of people in the UK were arrested in connection with paedophilic-related charges due to their credit card numbers being used to buy access to porn affiliate networks.
Now, using the above methods may not allow you to target anyone specifically, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that there aren't plenty of people who would happily take a whole load of these credit card numbers and use them to implicate complete strangers in this way. Just for the hell of it.
Money lost on stolen credit cards can be reclaimed. Lives destroyed by false charges cannot.
Interesting article, but some of his ideas don't add up for me.
Firstly, if computers will remember everything we say, why will things be remembered out of context? If anything it will be harder in the future then ever before to take things out of context because everything about that time and that situation will also be remembered. No more situations where only one side of a conversation can be recounted because only one person saved their letters, instead we'll have perfect record of both sides of the discourse in the form of e-mails or blog entries.
Secondly, even if we don't want computers to remember everything and we come up with computers that "forget" and laws that enforce their use, anyone who wants to remember everything can still choose not to forget. No doubt government agencies would be exempt from any such laws, and of course there are plenty of people and organisations who would be happy to run the very small risk of getting caught to keep an indefinite record. The people you don't want to have that information will still have it, except now there won't be a public record to retain the context of the situation. This increases the likelihood of the "perfect memory" being used in a negative way by removing it from publicly accessible databases.
It seems far more sensible to stop living in a mudslinging character assassinating world. Something like this will force that to happen. Nobody will consider long term consequences of their speech or online actions when growing up so this would be the great leveller. If everyone can get something on everyone else then it just becomes meaningless and trivial.
We still need better data protection laws though. Just not for the exact reasons given here. There's a big difference between losing the ability to forget and losing privacy.
He's just an idiot trying to get his comment modded up. And it worked. Good for him! Yeah, I'm trying to get my comment modded up. Because taking Microsoft's side is the sure way to karma heaven right? And getting modded 100% overrated is my oh-so-blatant karma-whoring "working".
OK maybe this one doesn't have an accusatory tone as such but it's pretty clearly written by someone with an agenda. If you read the article you'll see more of what I mean.
- The first line of that is misleading. It should read "19 vulnerabilities affecting either the Windows operating system, the widely deployed Office productivity suite or the dominant Internet Explorer browser". What's been written is probably grammatically acceptable but it leads the reader to believe that the 19 vulnerabilities affect all of those programs. They do not.
- The unnecessary use of "widely deployed [...] productivity suite" and "the dominant [..] browser"? Why add that in there if it's not to try and make a statement? They don't add anything of relevance or meaning so why have it? The article is about security advisories and is posted on ZDNet/Slashdot, does the article writer/submitter think that anyone reading this won't know what MS Office and Internet Explorer are?
- "A cumulative IE update addresses six potentially dangerous bugs. There are the six that apply to IE 7 on Windows Vista. Well that doesn't read very well at all, but it could be taken as talking about 6 or 12 bugs. There are 6.
- "The last bulletin in this month's batch apples to CAPICOM (Cryptographic API Component Object Model) and could also put users at risk of complete system hijack attacks." "Complete system hijack attacks"? I'm sorry did I walk into a Hollywood movie? It's a remote code execution flaw. Serious for sure, but this isn't being submitted to The Sun. Slashdot and ZDNet are technical sites, stick to the terminology and leave the dramatisations out of it.
Maybe I've read too much into it. Maybe the article writer just didn't write it very well (the summary is lifted straight from the article). Perhaps if I hadn't read the article I would've been less likely to question the submitter/authors intent. Once you've read the article I think it seems a lot clearer though, but again perhaps that's just me being over-sensitive after reading the last bunch of anti-MS zealots in the "IE dev criticises bank site security" article. Whatever the case of this particular article, I think you'd be hard pressed to deny that most/. submitters and posters have a very tough double-standard applied to Microsoft which they wouldn't think of applying to certain other companies and software products. And of course even pointing this out means I'm immediately labelled as a "Microsoft fanboy" by AC trolls and probably before long I'll be modded down for flamebaiting. It's a shame that a majority of the user base on a site which has a large number of presumably pretty intelligent people is so consumed by bitterness/anger/resentment towards Microsoft that they outright refuse to be objective in anything relating to them.
So basically what you're saying is that it's purely because the/. submissions that get through are provided by people who are angry or bitter about Microsoft's position. Illegal monopolies and wielding market control have nothing to do with security fixes but because of the submitter's or the poster's personal feelings about Microsoft it's just fine to make it into an attack?
The bias is the accusatory tone of the summary (and in this case the article itself). If you don't like the way Microsoft handles bug fixes then fine, write an article about how much it sucks and submit it so that it is clearly shown as an opinion peice.
But if someone submits something which is supposedly just news of security fixes being released then that should be neutral. If it's relevant let the reader know when the security issues became known, but let the reader reach their own conclusions on whether Microsoft took too long or did something underhanded. That's the problem with/. right now, everything submitted is drenched in someone's partisan opinion, there's no distinction between news (remember, this is supposed to be a news site) and opinion peices.
Slashdot Mirror
You see this is what happens when you get too many water chips. Vault 8, anyone?
The UK and Europe have far stricter data protection laws than the United States and most other countries in the World. While there are definitely physical privacy issues raised by the explosion of CCTV in the UK and the security issues raised by the possiblity of National ID Cards and centralised medical record databases, that doesn't for one second mean that any other privacy issue should be overlooked or cast aside because "[we've] got bigger privacy problems". Every privacy concern should be raised and every single one of them should be fought to the bitter end. No exceptions.
Gaming is constantly being dogged by how unoriginal it is and how most major games are just slightly prettier rehashes of older ones, and how evrything these days is a formulaic sequel. So Maxis have changed that. They've actually decided to try something new with an established series, even using new developers to do so, and what do they get? "Waaah! It's not a REAL SimCity", "Maxis have ruined my childhood memories". Boo-fucking-hoo. They've tried something new. So what. Everything from Simcity 2000 has been basically the same game anyway, so if you're really that intent on playing the same old thing you've already got three games to choose from. For everyone with an open mind, well maybe they'll find something fresh and slightly original thanks to a developer going out and doing something different with an established franchise for a change. If it sucks and the new concept tanks then you be damn sure Simcity 6 will be back to the old formula again, so it's worth the risk isn't it?
Seems to me you should never give out your emmail address to your girlfriend, period. And why take any risks, don't even give them your number, or your real name for that matter. Personally I prefer to be extra careful about giving out personal information, I don't let them see my face or even let them know that we're dating.
:(
It's going pretty well with my latest one I think. She's a bit shy though. Every time I call her it's nothing but awkward silences. Plus she's started closed the curtains
I can't wait to pay £400 for a Beta CPU and then get to endure 6 months of crashing until it gets patched.
Who cares? They'll figure that out later. That's just one of those minor details like "the materials to build this thing don't exist yet" and "we don't have anything that could contruct it even if we had the material".
But I bet they've got some lovely artist's renderings of people smiling as they ride the space elevator. You know, the important stuff. Everything else will just fall into place.
Wow. How very defeatist. "Oh corruption is rife, so let's give up and resign ourselves to being fucked over for the rest of our lives". Good attitude.
What the fuck are you talking about? They did exactly that just the other week. I even bitched about how it was biased against Microsoft that they highlighted Windows security issues but not for any other OS. And now they have. And I'm happy.
Well I don't know about memory leaks but the Downloads dialog is a fucking disgrace to efficiency. Download 50 or so things and the entire programs slows very noticeably.
I remember a few years back when I first upgraded to a version of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (forget what it was called at the time) which used the Downloads dialog and instantly the whole thing slowed to a crawl. Why? Because I'd never cleared my downloads cache before and the brand new Downloads dialog had about 2000+ entries in it. I think simply opening the dialog took a couple of minutes and the Clean Up took about five minutes. All for what is essentially just a listbox! God knows what would happen if they ever tried to make the Downloads dialog useful by doing crazy things like telling you when a download failed to actually download anything.
OK, rant over. I like Firefox for the most part but that has really pissed me off for a long time. Glad I finally got that off my chest.
Discarding the ways to make a profit from credit card numbers, how about using police ignorance to screw people over. Only a month or so ago details were revealed about the massive flaws in police operations such as Operation Ore in which thousands of people in the UK were arrested in connection with paedophilic-related charges due to their credit card numbers being used to buy access to porn affiliate networks.
Now, using the above methods may not allow you to target anyone specifically, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that there aren't plenty of people who would happily take a whole load of these credit card numbers and use them to implicate complete strangers in this way. Just for the hell of it.
Money lost on stolen credit cards can be reclaimed. Lives destroyed by false charges cannot.
Interesting article, but some of his ideas don't add up for me.
Firstly, if computers will remember everything we say, why will things be remembered out of context? If anything it will be harder in the future then ever before to take things out of context because everything about that time and that situation will also be remembered. No more situations where only one side of a conversation can be recounted because only one person saved their letters, instead we'll have perfect record of both sides of the discourse in the form of e-mails or blog entries.
Secondly, even if we don't want computers to remember everything and we come up with computers that "forget" and laws that enforce their use, anyone who wants to remember everything can still choose not to forget. No doubt government agencies would be exempt from any such laws, and of course there are plenty of people and organisations who would be happy to run the very small risk of getting caught to keep an indefinite record. The people you don't want to have that information will still have it, except now there won't be a public record to retain the context of the situation. This increases the likelihood of the "perfect memory" being used in a negative way by removing it from publicly accessible databases.
It seems far more sensible to stop living in a mudslinging character assassinating world. Something like this will force that to happen. Nobody will consider long term consequences of their speech or online actions when growing up so this would be the great leveller. If everyone can get something on everyone else then it just becomes meaningless and trivial.
We still need better data protection laws though. Just not for the exact reasons given here. There's a big difference between losing the ability to forget and losing privacy.
Ahh. My personal troll is back. Just a hint, don't use the same childish misspelling of "fanboi" if you don't want me to know it's you.
He's just an idiot trying to get his comment modded up. And it worked. Good for him! Yeah, I'm trying to get my comment modded up. Because taking Microsoft's side is the sure way to karma heaven right? And getting modded 100% overrated is my oh-so-blatant karma-whoring "working".
And I'm the idiot?
OK maybe this one doesn't have an accusatory tone as such but it's pretty clearly written by someone with an agenda. If you read the article you'll see more of what I mean.
/. submitters and posters have a very tough double-standard applied to Microsoft which they wouldn't think of applying to certain other companies and software products. And of course even pointing this out means I'm immediately labelled as a "Microsoft fanboy" by AC trolls and probably before long I'll be modded down for flamebaiting. It's a shame that a majority of the user base on a site which has a large number of presumably pretty intelligent people is so consumed by bitterness/anger/resentment towards Microsoft that they outright refuse to be objective in anything relating to them.
- The first line of that is misleading. It should read "19 vulnerabilities affecting either the Windows operating system, the widely deployed Office productivity suite or the dominant Internet Explorer browser". What's been written is probably grammatically acceptable but it leads the reader to believe that the 19 vulnerabilities affect all of those programs. They do not.
- The unnecessary use of "widely deployed [...] productivity suite" and "the dominant [..] browser"? Why add that in there if it's not to try and make a statement? They don't add anything of relevance or meaning so why have it? The article is about security advisories and is posted on ZDNet/Slashdot, does the article writer/submitter think that anyone reading this won't know what MS Office and Internet Explorer are?
- "A cumulative IE update addresses six potentially dangerous bugs. There are the six that apply to IE 7 on Windows Vista.
Well that doesn't read very well at all, but it could be taken as talking about 6 or 12 bugs. There are 6.
- "The last bulletin in this month's batch apples to CAPICOM (Cryptographic API Component Object Model) and could also put users at risk of complete system hijack attacks."
"Complete system hijack attacks"? I'm sorry did I walk into a Hollywood movie? It's a remote code execution flaw. Serious for sure, but this isn't being submitted to The Sun. Slashdot and ZDNet are technical sites, stick to the terminology and leave the dramatisations out of it.
Maybe I've read too much into it. Maybe the article writer just didn't write it very well (the summary is lifted straight from the article). Perhaps if I hadn't read the article I would've been less likely to question the submitter/authors intent. Once you've read the article I think it seems a lot clearer though, but again perhaps that's just me being over-sensitive after reading the last bunch of anti-MS zealots in the "IE dev criticises bank site security" article. Whatever the case of this particular article, I think you'd be hard pressed to deny that most
So basically what you're saying is that it's purely because the /. submissions that get through are provided by people who are angry or bitter about Microsoft's position. Illegal monopolies and wielding market control have nothing to do with security fixes but because of the submitter's or the poster's personal feelings about Microsoft it's just fine to make it into an attack?
The bias is the accusatory tone of the summary (and in this case the article itself). If you don't like the way Microsoft handles bug fixes then fine, write an article about how much it sucks and submit it so that it is clearly shown as an opinion peice.
/. right now, everything submitted is drenched in someone's partisan opinion, there's no distinction between news (remember, this is supposed to be a news site) and opinion peices.
But if someone submits something which is supposedly just news of security fixes being released then that should be neutral. If it's relevant let the reader know when the security issues became known, but let the reader reach their own conclusions on whether Microsoft took too long or did something underhanded. That's the problem with
Haha, lovely. Replying with mindless goading instead of even trying to respond to my points.
Careful, your trollidermis is showing.