They weren't terrorists. All of them had specific targets - people or Government buildings - in order to take those targets out: they were murderers. They were NOT targeting groups of Americans for the sake of creating terror.
They were targeting the government for the sake of creating terror in those working for the government. Both the 90s right wing terrorists and the 60s left wing terrorists.
What that means is that they had become so jaded that they thought that terrorizing the people to change the government wouldn't work, so they terrorized government officials instead.
You're right in that this isn't really 'traditional' terrorism, but traditional terrorism is incredibly stupid and only causes a backlash. If Terrorist group X starts killing civilians randomly, civilians will run to the government for help. If, OTOH, X kills government workers, government workers will quickly find other jobs, crippling the government.
But that really is 'terrorism', just aimed at government civilians instead of other civilians.
However, while that point is valid, the 9/11 attackers did the same thing. The 9/11 attacks were against the White House, the Pentagon, and...the World Trade Center. And what that means is that they appear to think...um...the military and big business run US foreign policy.
Instead of thinking of 'the US government' as a discrete entity, they saw it linked inextricably with big business, and decided they'd terrorize bis business also, who they also think are attacking them.
This is, incidentally, probably more accurate a world-view than the left- and right-wing terrorists in the US, which seem to think that domestic policy is set at Federal buildings.
Of course, the US population doesn't see it that way.
What we do not is like telling women not to walk alone at night so they don't get raped when it would be far better to make sure men don't rape them.
No, because that's actually useful advice. That advice actually works. Women are much much much less likely to be raped if they are with someone else, even another woman, because rapists can't easily control another person while doing the actual rape, and usually aren't prepared to just murder them. (Holding a gun on two people is really only workable from a distance.)
If we're not careful, that advice can devolve into 'blame the victim', so we need to make it clear that failure to follow that advice in no way justifies being raped, but it is still good advice, nevertheless.
What we're doing is building a giant security terminus on every parking lots to make sure men don't carry in 'rape tools' like gags and ropes and knifes. (Ignoring, as always, that a) that stuff slips through anyway, b) that stuff is easy enough to construct, and c) that stuff isn't actually needed to rape people.
So, in your universe, propping up the Saudi government doesn't count as imperialism?
Every single step in imperialism always looks entirely sane and just. (Usually because the unjust steps are classified.)
And we can't seem to understand how people have come to the conclusion that we have conquered them. Sure, we're running around with guns killing the rebels at the request of the government we installed in the first place, but they have FREEDOM(TM)!
We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism
Could we? Why the FUCK don't we, then?
and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.
The problem isn't who hates us, the problem is how many people and what sort of recruitment they can do.
On 9/11, 19 people killed about three thousand...so each person killed 150, although that was partially absurd luck on their part.
But let's assume that it's still possible to blow up airplanes, and only takes two people to do that plot, so each person can still kill 150 people.
But the problem isn't the 150 people. There is functionally no way to stop that if the person is willing to die. You could fricking mix ammonia and bleach at a high school talent show and kill 150 many people which chlorine gas
It's the 19 people willing to kill and give their life to do so that many that's the problem.
And it's not really being an 'extremist nutjob' to hate the US because they blew up your house and killed your family. That's just perfectly normal hatred.
From what people are talking about, startssl is in browsers.
I know the $15 ones are. The root one is, that is...often you have to include a 'middle' key that's signed by a root key, and signed yours. (I've forgotten the term for this.)
First of all, yes, Doc Ruby really is that stupid and unaware. Trust me. Or he's a really weird troll, because he only take a weird position 1/10th of the time...the rest of the time, he takes a 'sanish' position, but doesn't seem to be able to argue it.
Secondly, actually driving next to people to take their picture probably counts as 'aggressive driving' in most states, on top of obviously being distracted driving. Deliberately harassing people while driving is illegal in many states.
Thirdly, if texting while driving is illegal under the law, texting 911 is also illegal. There are exceptions to the 'no cell phones while driving' laws to let you call 911, and those exceptions would presumably be extended texting 911, but only for actual emergencies that have actually happened, or someone threatening you, or something like that. In general, you can commit crimes to stop greater crimes...but you don't get to commit crimes to report, not even stop, just report, identical crimes. (That person broke into a house, I think I'll break into the police officer's house and leave them a note about it.)
Fourthly, taking pictures while driving can, strangely, violate another law about 'watching video while driving', a law intended to stop people from having DVD players installed in the car that the driver can see, but does indeed apply to cameras.
Demonstrating you're driving distractedly (Which is illegal) next to other people to take their picture (Which is illegal) by watching 'video' while driving (Which is illegal) and sending that while driving (Which is illegal) to the police (Which, for good measure, could be considered wasting 911's time, which is illegal) is about as spectacularly stupid as humanly imaginable.
I broke my leg, but I can't be bothered calling you so I'm texting instead
Assume that the broken leg is an emergence, why exactly is not that a serious situation?
You mean they shouldn't respond to text messages that 'should' be phone calls?
What if there's really shitty reception? What if the battery is almost dead? What if the user is deaf or mute? What if the phone got busted when they fell and broke their leg, and now it won't connect calls but can text? What if they have a concussion and don't remember how to speak or their hearing is messed up from that?
Yes, because hostage situations are always like you describe, where the hostage taker is staring at you.
And never, for instance, a bank robbery where ten people are sitting around against a wall and you could pull out a cellphone and hide it behind you to type, but not bring it up to your head and speak.
I rear-ended a guy a few years ago (My fault, luckily I was only going about 15. He was stopped at a crosswalk.), and after a quick check to make sure I seemed uninjured, I called 911.
I told them the location of the accident and that no one seemed injured...then they wanted my name...and then they wanted my address, and my home phone number, and all sorts of crap.
I said 'I was just in a damn car accident and I'm going to see what's going on and if the other people are actually okay, I don't have time for stupid questions. Send the police.' and hung up.
I'm sure there are a lot of bogus dials and pranks and crap, but they have my damn telephone number...surely if I was just making this up they'd send the police out to track me down and give me a fine or something. I didn't call 911 to chat with the damn dispatcher, I called to inform the authorities a car accident had just happened. If I'm lying, slap a giant fine on my phone bill or something. (And if I was lying, I'd probably lie about who I was, wouldn't I?)
Sorry, to reply to myself, but my post was a little confusing and vindictive unless you remember the last time this comes up. Every time SSL certs are mentioned, people are 'I don't understand why self-signed HTTPS is treated worse than HTTP?' and everyone agrees until idiots show up to disagree for some utterly inane reason.
Many of them are convinced, convinced, that self-signed certs are as insecure as no encryption, despite people constantly pointing out that sniffing and recording is a hell of a lot easier than intercepting and rewriting.
There's really no reason the entire web shouldn't be encrypted. Signed certs for the important stuff, unsigned for everything else, your web browser keeping the cert hashes in your history, and even with an option to keep specific ones permanently.
Of course, now with DNSSEC, signatures are utterly stupid to start with. HTTPS cert hashes should simply be listed in the DNS for a domain, tada, our work here is done, the end.
Yeah, that's pretty much what all the non-idiots have decided.
About 10% of this site is in some delusional world where users might get 'tricked' by the fact it's https, but, gasp, unsigned...which totally ignores the actual fact that either users are smart enough to check for a padlock, or they have no damn idea what you're talking about and will trust any domain that claims to be anything.
There's no middle ground of users, who are running around checking for 'https', and not noticing the lack of a padlock. And if that really was the damn problem, we could just invent that unsigned certs use 'httpe' or something instead, which would also be port 443 but not checked for signed certs, just use general encryption and store a hash of the key to compare to next time.
But the goddamn standards are run by the signing companies, and they certainly don't want to make themselves useless. So instead of sites being 1% signed, 50% partially encrypted for non-critical, user stuff, and 49% unencrypted, we have them being 3% signed, and 97% unencrypted.
Gives them three times as much business, renders half the goddamn internet insecure.
There is, indeed, a middle ground for security. A place where username and passwords to forums get sent encrypted so people can't sniff them. A place where you can use the same cert on multiple domains so you don't need to waste an IP per-site. A place for moderately secure traffic, or intranets. The stuff now that either has no security, or a giant warning about self-signed certs.
And the 10% of slashdot composed of total idiots on this issue about to start leaping in talking about 'a false sense of security is no security at all', which is also why you shouldn't lock your house unless you're using a bank vault door.
That's a good point, and I will gladly concede it. Overly bitter about King's Quest VIII because of the entire concept of adding motor coordination skills to my adventure gaming (which hurt more because it was a Sierra game, and their flagship franchise at that, which to me signaled the end of the genre). I want a good story, and I want to solve puzzles, I don't want to fight random monsters. I'd be playing an FPS if that's what I wanted to do.
Yeah, you make a good point. After the failure of the 'total inaction, not even a character to walk around', adventure games were functionally dead, so all the people who wanted to do them ended up doing action-adventure games instead.
The crappy ones were little more than platformers with puzzles added. The good stuff was innovative, like Half-Life, but not really what adventure gamers were looking for.
Eh...haven't played all of those, but at least Fahrenheit suffers from the problem that I keep seeing with the modern adventure games. They're trying to add twitchy skills to them. Everyone seems to love Fahrenheit, because it does have an interesting storyline. However, I don't remember ever having to think while playing it. I just had to press the right button when a certain color lighted up on the screen.
Fahrenheit is certainly an action-adventure game, but I humbly suggest you're misremembering it. It had quite complicated puzzles...it's just the stupid button pushes overshadowed it. At one point you had to play a damn pointless basketball game. (And, as always, the end was very rushed. I'll never figure out why game developers don't start at the end, and then, if the producers on their back, rush the middle.)
I don't know why I included Fahrenheit on that list, though. I mean to just include adventure, not action adventure. The most action any of the others had were 'timed' things, where you had to do X when the guard wasn't looking or or you only had 30 seconds to push a button...fairly simple things that just required a single instance of 'good timing'. Usually only two or so a game.
Which is what Fahrenheit was sorta aiming for, but totally failed at, in my book. It wasn't helped by the weird RPG elements they put in. (Your characters could get depressed and commit suicide.)
And now I need to dig out my copy of Under a Killing Moon. Hadn't given a thought to Tex Murphy in years...
It runs under DOSBox.
Oh, and the people who made those games have formed a new company and reacquired those rights back from Microsoft (Microsoft bought damn Access Software for their golf game, and ended up with Tex Murphy.)
I'm pretty sure that, for the most part, the members of the general public have a reasonably good idea of how science works.
You can 'be sure' of that all you want, but that doesn't make it true.
Perhaps you should test your hypothesis by asking people if they can describe either what scientists do in general (and, no, 'experiments' doesn't count.) or the scientific method.
And I don't mean getting it exactly how it's phrased in some book, I mean they can't get it at all. They can't explain 'Come up with a theory about something or take someone else's, figure out a way to test that, actually test it, see and tell people what the test said and modify their theory if the test didn't say what they said it would, repeat'.
The average person knows that scientists are running experiments, and measuring them, and just generally supposes that's it, without the slightest hint there's anything else, that all of science is about predicting things and testing the predictions.
Which is why the Mythbusters are so important. They take someone else's theory about how the world works (Aka, the myth.), explain what they think would happen, run the experiment, draw conclusions, and do it again. It's as clear a demonstration of the scientific method as possible.
Yes, they have almost no rigor, but considering the experiment they're 'repeating' had no fucking rigor to start with, and was just people repeating stories to each other without any proof they happened at all, much less that they happened under controled circumstances...the Mythbusters win the 'rigor' contest.
If someone is asserting that wooden things fall up, without an actual experiment behind them, you don't really need rigor in your experiment to disprove them. 'I shall let go of this piece of wood that can move up or down...I observe it's on the ground' is good enough.
I was not trying to imply that, I was saying no one had heard of the term 'action-adventure' at the time. Although I could easily be wrong there, it's not really important. The problem was that no one thought of Half-Life as one, regardless whether or not the term was in use. To this day people, including you, apparently think of it as an FPS.
It's not. It's an action-adventure game, specifically, a FPS-adventure game.
Incidentally, I can't figure out what you think the difference is, gameplay-wise, between Tomb Raider and Half-Life. Nor Legend of Zelda, for that matter.
All of them you run around killing things, or trying not to get killed, while solving puzzles.
I never considered Myst part of the adventure games genre. I really liked it, but I just labeled it in my mind as a puzzle game...with a bit of a story sprinkled in as a reward when you solve the puzzles.
Strictly speaking, Myst was indeed an adventure game.
But it sold more copies than any computer game until The Sims. And to basically the same people....casual gamers who didn't own any other game.
And, somehow, it entered the public consciousness as what 'non-violent' computer games were. Which would have been fine, except that video game publishers also decided that was what a video game should be. So if they made one of those, instead of an adventure game, they'd make MILLIONS!
Well, everyone but Sierra and LucasArts, but Sierra imploded and LucasArts just gave up on the genre, they had plenty of other stuff on their plate.
I don't think Myst is what killed adventure games. In fact, I would much rather blame 3D, as in the abomination that was King's Quest VIII.
King's Quest VIII was a symptom of Sierra's disintegration, and rather too late to cause the death of adventure games.
Remember, games have a long development time. Yes, a lot of very good adventure games came out after Myst, but most were a) started well before, and/or b) done by Sierra or LucasArts, who didn't buy into the nonsense.
And, to be fair to Myst, Myst didn't do it. Myst clones did it. Myst by itself would probably just be remembered as a somewhat quirky adventure game if every single damn person with a Windows 3.1 machine wasn't running it.
First everyone making and funding Myst clones screwed up adventure game development, and then the failure of said clones screwed up player expectations and the ability to get funded. And the withdrawal of the two Big Guns from the market didn't help.
For a decade, from 1996 when the existing pre-Myst development ran dry, to 2005 or so, you can count the number of large-scale adventure games by American publishers on one hand. Access kept Tex Murphy alive, and a few other companies kept going too. Sierra managed to get Phantasmagoria out the door, then melted.
But the torch got picked up by Amerzone, The Longest Journey, Runaway, Fahrenheit, Anhk, etc, all notable for being non-American studios. Because adventure games couldn't get funding in American until 2004 or so.
In fact, I'm not entirely sure they can now! The end of the 'death of adventure games' seems to be that foreign companies are smart enough to plan to release the game in America from the start.
After I beat Fallout:New Vegas on the 'Seize control of New Vegas yourself' path, I wondered how many people have picked which ending pages, which control who end up in charge of New Vegas. There are at least four obvious ones I could see. (You, House, NCR, Legion(1). Might be more.)
Then I realized that there was an achievement given for that ending, and remembered I could look up how many people got each achievement, so could see what endings people picked. I was shocked, I will repeat them because I think people can't see the stats if they don't have the game. (Here is the link if I am wrong, although you still won't know the names of things.)
The stats for each achievement that I could figure out are the ending ones: 9.6%, 6.5%, 4.7%, and 1.2%.
That means less than 25% completed the game, and it might be lower, as some players probably did it in multiple ways.
Only 58.2% got to level ten, which is about a third through the game. 34.5% reached lever 20. (There's a level cap of 30, I only got to 27.)
Only 58.8% completed the quest to get to the strip at all! (Technically, you could get to the strip without that, but I doubt anyone skipped it, at least not without doing it once.) Yes, 40% of the people playing the game haven't made it to the strip.
Of course, it's only been out a month, so some people just might not have done those things yet.
Same here Fallout 3 and NV. Yeah, I get CTD every once in a while, probably every 10 hours of play, but whatever. The autosave keeps that from being too annoying. I think the most I've ever lost is 30 minutes or so working my way across the countryside, but, hell, I'm much more likely to lose that much from ambushes. (Well, on FO3. If you stick to the roads, not that many ambushes on NV. And I'm not at the point where I've started wandering randomly far off the roads.)
And New Vegas appears to have less engine bugs. It appears to have more scripting bugs, but most of those will get fixed by the publisher, and the rest by mods.
Oh, and speaking of crash bugs, there is one bug that happens all the time in NV. When I exit the game, the damn launcher hangs. Every time. Of course, I don't particularly want the launcher running, (In fact, I don't think it should be running.) but it's annoying to have to kill.
What happened to all the cool ideas? There were tons of them in the late 90s early 00s! We had the GHOUL system in Soldier of Fortune, where you could shoot a gun out of the bad guys hand (or shoot the hand clean off) or No One Lives Forever with the funny spy stuff (who could forget the "wanna buy a monkey?" story) or Red Faction with the destructible walls, or SWAT with its cool mixing of the bad guys and good guys so you never knew how many of each you'd have, or even Nosferatu where the entire GAME completely rearranged itself so that even restoring from a save you couldn't take rooms being cleared for granted!
All the cool ideas migrated to the 'RPG' genre. First person-RPGs are essentially what you're talking about. In fact, you can shoot guns out of hands in Fallout 3/Fallout NV.
Fallout NV took the original Fallout sensibility and put it in FO3.
Now you can do do things in different ways. Instead of just being 'good' or 'evil', you can support various factions or not, making the game much more playable.
The first time through, I supported...me. That's right, I ended up in control of New Vegas. But I was such a good guy that NCR didn't have an issues with me until I made it clear that I wasn't turning control of New Vegas over to them. (You can actually keep this up until the very end, having the NCR on your side until the very end, if you stealth-boy into the two NCR-secured areas you need to be be in, instead of shooting them.)
This time through, I'm helping out NCR, the somewhat corrupt and over-extended government. (Which sounds bad, but is the only even vaguely 'legitimate government'.)
Next time, perhaps the Brotherhood of Steel and the Khans.
I don't know why people are buying games and not finishing, especially RPGs. Every RPG I've owned I've finished at least once, and started through a second time, although I'll admit I never finished my second Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2 Renegade character. She can wrap up ME right now, if I wasn't in the middle of F:NV I'd fire it up, finish ME real quick, and start ME2 with her.
You probably should have played Half-Life like the action-adventure game it was, instead of an FPS.
To be fair, no one had heard of action-adventure games at the time, but there were a lot of clues that they weren't expecting you to kill everything with your guns.
I'm glad someone else felt the way I did about Myst. It was, quite possibly, the shittiest adventure game of all time. All the puzzles were mechanical things, you had no interactions with the only other characters, the plot was, literally, 'find six things'.
Sure, it looked nice, but that's damn easy to do with first-person still photographs.
And, yeah, it did kill the genre, although that was more other companies fault for jumping on the 'acclaim' of Myth. 'Oh, let's make adventure games with as beautiful graphics as possible. Which means we can't have characters or an interface.'
As opposed to the 3-D games which had just become possible, and were quite well received by actual adventure gamers. And as opposed to the FMV games, which weren't really catching on, but were also getting there, and actually had a chance to improve the adventure game genre. Okay, both those were slightly early, but Tex Murphy pulled it off, combining both those into a perfectly good adventure game.
Sierra, of course, saw the value and went ahead with FMV, whereas Lucas decided to go with just 3-D.
Everyone else attempted to turn adventure games into damn postcards displayed in hypercard. Myst was incredibly well selling to people who'd never bought a computer game in their life. Why, those people are the perfect customers! Let's finish developing the games we've started, and then develop a game exactly like that!
Half those damn games came out straight to the $10 rack.
Then there was the infamous problems at Sierra, causing it to be sold and dismantled, and the LucasArts just giving up on the genre because of the fact the market got flooded with crappy Myst clones, the bottom dropped out because no one was building 'adventure games' because that had come to mean 'wander around and poke things with a stick while reading a background novel you get two pages at a time', with no actual plot or characters or anything.
I strongly suspect that more injury and death can be attributed to distracted drivers talking and/or texting while trying to drive than would be saved by having the situational ability to call for help in the event of an accident.
If you suspect that, you're an idiot. Car accidents are much less dangerous due to the fact that emergency services are reported in real time, as opposed to waiting until someone driving by actually made it where they were going and decided to call it in just in case it hadn't been called in before.
Seriously, how do you think it used to work before cell phones? Magic? It didn't work. People could sit in accidents for an hour before anyone contacted the police, even on well-traveled roads.
You can probably also factor in the possibility that once the vehicle crashes, the technology that disrupts the use of cell phones will most likely be damaged as well.
If you think that, you're also an idiot. Car accidents never disable the electrical system of a car. It is statistically a zero-percent chance of happening, rounded to the nearest percent. The electrical system of cars are amazingly robust. It even keeps working underwater, as you'd know if you'd ever seen video of a car with headlights on being dropped into the water.
For a good proportion of car accidents, there's no way the electrical system could even possibly fail. Like being rear-ended. How's that going to stop something electrical from working?
Hell, in many car accidents the damn car is still running afterward, even in crazy head-on collisions and people driving off cliffs. Forget the electrical system failing, the engine is still running. Can't drive it because the wheels and frame are bent, but the engine still works, at least until all the oil and water leaks out. (Incidentally, if the engine is running, there is electrical power by definition.)
Go talk to people who've been in fucking car accidents, instead of just making shit up. The electrical system never fails. Ever. Even in 'the front of the car is compacted into two feet', the battery manages to hold together enough to keep supplying power. It might be crushed with battery acid leaking out, but still has enough power to keep running a stupid jammer, just like you'll see people get out of smashed cars and the fricking dome light somehow comes on when they open the door.
Oh, and you entirely ignored the fact this would stop other people, driving by in working cars, from calling the police. In fact, their cell phone jammer could easily interfere with victim's cell phone.
too many people learn all their science technique from the show
In other words, too many people have no knowledge of the scientific method at all, and you're complaining that they learn it from a place that doesn't take itself very seriously or worry about publishing results.
Instead, you would rather they have no idea how science work at all.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't terrorists. All of them had specific targets - people or Government buildings - in order to take those targets out: they were murderers. They were NOT targeting groups of Americans for the sake of creating terror.
They were targeting the government for the sake of creating terror in those working for the government. Both the 90s right wing terrorists and the 60s left wing terrorists.
What that means is that they had become so jaded that they thought that terrorizing the people to change the government wouldn't work, so they terrorized government officials instead.
You're right in that this isn't really 'traditional' terrorism, but traditional terrorism is incredibly stupid and only causes a backlash. If Terrorist group X starts killing civilians randomly, civilians will run to the government for help. If, OTOH, X kills government workers, government workers will quickly find other jobs, crippling the government.
But that really is 'terrorism', just aimed at government civilians instead of other civilians.
However, while that point is valid, the 9/11 attackers did the same thing. The 9/11 attacks were against the White House, the Pentagon, and...the World Trade Center. And what that means is that they appear to think...um...the military and big business run US foreign policy.
Instead of thinking of 'the US government' as a discrete entity, they saw it linked inextricably with big business, and decided they'd terrorize bis business also, who they also think are attacking them.
This is, incidentally, probably more accurate a world-view than the left- and right-wing terrorists in the US, which seem to think that domestic policy is set at Federal buildings.
Of course, the US population doesn't see it that way.
What we do not is like telling women not to walk alone at night so they don't get raped when it would be far better to make sure men don't rape them.
No, because that's actually useful advice. That advice actually works. Women are much much much less likely to be raped if they are with someone else, even another woman, because rapists can't easily control another person while doing the actual rape, and usually aren't prepared to just murder them. (Holding a gun on two people is really only workable from a distance.)
If we're not careful, that advice can devolve into 'blame the victim', so we need to make it clear that failure to follow that advice in no way justifies being raped, but it is still good advice, nevertheless.
What we're doing is building a giant security terminus on every parking lots to make sure men don't carry in 'rape tools' like gags and ropes and knifes. (Ignoring, as always, that a) that stuff slips through anyway, b) that stuff is easy enough to construct, and c) that stuff isn't actually needed to rape people.
So, in your universe, propping up the Saudi government doesn't count as imperialism?
Every single step in imperialism always looks entirely sane and just. (Usually because the unjust steps are classified.)
And we can't seem to understand how people have come to the conclusion that we have conquered them. Sure, we're running around with guns killing the rebels at the request of the government we installed in the first place, but they have FREEDOM(TM)!
We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism
Could we? Why the FUCK don't we, then?
and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.
The problem isn't who hates us, the problem is how many people and what sort of recruitment they can do.
On 9/11, 19 people killed about three thousand...so each person killed 150, although that was partially absurd luck on their part.
But let's assume that it's still possible to blow up airplanes, and only takes two people to do that plot, so each person can still kill 150 people.
But the problem isn't the 150 people. There is functionally no way to stop that if the person is willing to die. You could fricking mix ammonia and bleach at a high school talent show and kill 150 many people which chlorine gas
It's the 19 people willing to kill and give their life to do so that many that's the problem.
And it's not really being an 'extremist nutjob' to hate the US because they blew up your house and killed your family. That's just perfectly normal hatred.
From what people are talking about, startssl is in browsers.
I know the $15 ones are. The root one is, that is...often you have to include a 'middle' key that's signed by a root key, and signed yours. (I've forgotten the term for this.)
But regardless, it works in all browsers.
First of all, yes, Doc Ruby really is that stupid and unaware. Trust me. Or he's a really weird troll, because he only take a weird position 1/10th of the time...the rest of the time, he takes a 'sanish' position, but doesn't seem to be able to argue it.
Secondly, actually driving next to people to take their picture probably counts as 'aggressive driving' in most states, on top of obviously being distracted driving. Deliberately harassing people while driving is illegal in many states.
Thirdly, if texting while driving is illegal under the law, texting 911 is also illegal. There are exceptions to the 'no cell phones while driving' laws to let you call 911, and those exceptions would presumably be extended texting 911, but only for actual emergencies that have actually happened, or someone threatening you, or something like that. In general, you can commit crimes to stop greater crimes...but you don't get to commit crimes to report, not even stop, just report, identical crimes. (That person broke into a house, I think I'll break into the police officer's house and leave them a note about it.)
Fourthly, taking pictures while driving can, strangely, violate another law about 'watching video while driving', a law intended to stop people from having DVD players installed in the car that the driver can see, but does indeed apply to cameras.
Demonstrating you're driving distractedly (Which is illegal) next to other people to take their picture (Which is illegal) by watching 'video' while driving (Which is illegal) and sending that while driving (Which is illegal) to the police (Which, for good measure, could be considered wasting 911's time, which is illegal) is about as spectacularly stupid as humanly imaginable.
I broke my leg, but I can't be bothered calling you so I'm texting instead
Assume that the broken leg is an emergence, why exactly is not that a serious situation?
You mean they shouldn't respond to text messages that 'should' be phone calls?
What if there's really shitty reception? What if the battery is almost dead? What if the user is deaf or mute? What if the phone got busted when they fell and broke their leg, and now it won't connect calls but can text? What if they have a concussion and don't remember how to speak or their hearing is messed up from that?
Yes, because hostage situations are always like you describe, where the hostage taker is staring at you.
And never, for instance, a bank robbery where ten people are sitting around against a wall and you could pull out a cellphone and hide it behind you to type, but not bring it up to your head and speak.
No shit.
I rear-ended a guy a few years ago (My fault, luckily I was only going about 15. He was stopped at a crosswalk.), and after a quick check to make sure I seemed uninjured, I called 911.
I told them the location of the accident and that no one seemed injured...then they wanted my name...and then they wanted my address, and my home phone number, and all sorts of crap.
I said 'I was just in a damn car accident and I'm going to see what's going on and if the other people are actually okay, I don't have time for stupid questions. Send the police.' and hung up.
I'm sure there are a lot of bogus dials and pranks and crap, but they have my damn telephone number...surely if I was just making this up they'd send the police out to track me down and give me a fine or something. I didn't call 911 to chat with the damn dispatcher, I called to inform the authorities a car accident had just happened. If I'm lying, slap a giant fine on my phone bill or something. (And if I was lying, I'd probably lie about who I was, wouldn't I?)
But back to the main point, I think we paid $200 for three years' worth of SSL for these sites.
Even that's a lot. You can get SSL certs for about $15 a year.
Some people are talking about startssl ,which apparently gives them out for free, but I don't know anything about that.
Sorry, to reply to myself, but my post was a little confusing and vindictive unless you remember the last time this comes up. Every time SSL certs are mentioned, people are 'I don't understand why self-signed HTTPS is treated worse than HTTP?' and everyone agrees until idiots show up to disagree for some utterly inane reason.
Many of them are convinced, convinced, that self-signed certs are as insecure as no encryption, despite people constantly pointing out that sniffing and recording is a hell of a lot easier than intercepting and rewriting.
There's really no reason the entire web shouldn't be encrypted. Signed certs for the important stuff, unsigned for everything else, your web browser keeping the cert hashes in your history, and even with an option to keep specific ones permanently.
Of course, now with DNSSEC, signatures are utterly stupid to start with. HTTPS cert hashes should simply be listed in the DNS for a domain, tada, our work here is done, the end.
Yeah, that's pretty much what all the non-idiots have decided.
About 10% of this site is in some delusional world where users might get 'tricked' by the fact it's https, but, gasp, unsigned...which totally ignores the actual fact that either users are smart enough to check for a padlock, or they have no damn idea what you're talking about and will trust any domain that claims to be anything.
There's no middle ground of users, who are running around checking for 'https', and not noticing the lack of a padlock. And if that really was the damn problem, we could just invent that unsigned certs use 'httpe' or something instead, which would also be port 443 but not checked for signed certs, just use general encryption and store a hash of the key to compare to next time.
But the goddamn standards are run by the signing companies, and they certainly don't want to make themselves useless. So instead of sites being 1% signed, 50% partially encrypted for non-critical, user stuff, and 49% unencrypted, we have them being 3% signed, and 97% unencrypted.
Gives them three times as much business, renders half the goddamn internet insecure.
There is, indeed, a middle ground for security. A place where username and passwords to forums get sent encrypted so people can't sniff them. A place where you can use the same cert on multiple domains so you don't need to waste an IP per-site. A place for moderately secure traffic, or intranets. The stuff now that either has no security, or a giant warning about self-signed certs.
And the 10% of slashdot composed of total idiots on this issue about to start leaping in talking about 'a false sense of security is no security at all', which is also why you shouldn't lock your house unless you're using a bank vault door.
Why the hell would they agree to $100 per cert? I've never ever seen such a high price on a non-EV cert.
If it's a damn internal cert, you can spend $15 and get the cheapest one that works on the stuff you support.
Hell, you can probably find a wildcard for $150 if you look around.
Of course, all this is stupid, you shouldn't have to sign stuff to get encryption, but we've all beaten that dead horse.
That's a good point, and I will gladly concede it. Overly bitter about King's Quest VIII because of the entire concept of adding motor coordination skills to my adventure gaming (which hurt more because it was a Sierra game, and their flagship franchise at that, which to me signaled the end of the genre). I want a good story, and I want to solve puzzles, I don't want to fight random monsters. I'd be playing an FPS if that's what I wanted to do.
Yeah, you make a good point. After the failure of the 'total inaction, not even a character to walk around', adventure games were functionally dead, so all the people who wanted to do them ended up doing action-adventure games instead.
The crappy ones were little more than platformers with puzzles added. The good stuff was innovative, like Half-Life, but not really what adventure gamers were looking for.
Eh...haven't played all of those, but at least Fahrenheit suffers from the problem that I keep seeing with the modern adventure games. They're trying to add twitchy skills to them. Everyone seems to love Fahrenheit, because it does have an interesting storyline. However, I don't remember ever having to think while playing it. I just had to press the right button when a certain color lighted up on the screen.
Fahrenheit is certainly an action-adventure game, but I humbly suggest you're misremembering it. It had quite complicated puzzles...it's just the stupid button pushes overshadowed it. At one point you had to play a damn pointless basketball game. (And, as always, the end was very rushed. I'll never figure out why game developers don't start at the end, and then, if the producers on their back, rush the middle.)
I don't know why I included Fahrenheit on that list, though. I mean to just include adventure, not action adventure. The most action any of the others had were 'timed' things, where you had to do X when the guard wasn't looking or or you only had 30 seconds to push a button...fairly simple things that just required a single instance of 'good timing'. Usually only two or so a game.
Which is what Fahrenheit was sorta aiming for, but totally failed at, in my book. It wasn't helped by the weird RPG elements they put in. (Your characters could get depressed and commit suicide.)
And now I need to dig out my copy of Under a Killing Moon. Hadn't given a thought to Tex Murphy in years...
It runs under DOSBox.
Oh, and the people who made those games have formed a new company and reacquired those rights back from Microsoft (Microsoft bought damn Access Software for their golf game, and ended up with Tex Murphy.)
Check their home page. Notice anything?
I'm pretty sure that, for the most part, the members of the general public have a reasonably good idea of how science works.
You can 'be sure' of that all you want, but that doesn't make it true.
Perhaps you should test your hypothesis by asking people if they can describe either what scientists do in general (and, no, 'experiments' doesn't count.) or the scientific method.
And I don't mean getting it exactly how it's phrased in some book, I mean they can't get it at all. They can't explain 'Come up with a theory about something or take someone else's, figure out a way to test that, actually test it, see and tell people what the test said and modify their theory if the test didn't say what they said it would, repeat'.
The average person knows that scientists are running experiments, and measuring them, and just generally supposes that's it, without the slightest hint there's anything else, that all of science is about predicting things and testing the predictions.
Which is why the Mythbusters are so important. They take someone else's theory about how the world works (Aka, the myth.), explain what they think would happen, run the experiment, draw conclusions, and do it again. It's as clear a demonstration of the scientific method as possible.
Yes, they have almost no rigor, but considering the experiment they're 'repeating' had no fucking rigor to start with, and was just people repeating stories to each other without any proof they happened at all, much less that they happened under controled circumstances...the Mythbusters win the 'rigor' contest.
If someone is asserting that wooden things fall up, without an actual experiment behind them, you don't really need rigor in your experiment to disprove them. 'I shall let go of this piece of wood that can move up or down...I observe it's on the ground' is good enough.
I was not trying to imply that, I was saying no one had heard of the term 'action-adventure' at the time. Although I could easily be wrong there, it's not really important. The problem was that no one thought of Half-Life as one, regardless whether or not the term was in use. To this day people, including you, apparently think of it as an FPS.
It's not. It's an action-adventure game, specifically, a FPS-adventure game.
Incidentally, I can't figure out what you think the difference is, gameplay-wise, between Tomb Raider and Half-Life. Nor Legend of Zelda, for that matter.
All of them you run around killing things, or trying not to get killed, while solving puzzles.
I never considered Myst part of the adventure games genre. I really liked it, but I just labeled it in my mind as a puzzle game...with a bit of a story sprinkled in as a reward when you solve the puzzles.
Strictly speaking, Myst was indeed an adventure game.
But it sold more copies than any computer game until The Sims. And to basically the same people....casual gamers who didn't own any other game.
And, somehow, it entered the public consciousness as what 'non-violent' computer games were. Which would have been fine, except that video game publishers also decided that was what a video game should be. So if they made one of those, instead of an adventure game, they'd make MILLIONS!
Well, everyone but Sierra and LucasArts, but Sierra imploded and LucasArts just gave up on the genre, they had plenty of other stuff on their plate.
I don't think Myst is what killed adventure games. In fact, I would much rather blame 3D, as in the abomination that was King's Quest VIII.
King's Quest VIII was a symptom of Sierra's disintegration, and rather too late to cause the death of adventure games.
Remember, games have a long development time. Yes, a lot of very good adventure games came out after Myst, but most were a) started well before, and/or b) done by Sierra or LucasArts, who didn't buy into the nonsense.
And, to be fair to Myst, Myst didn't do it. Myst clones did it. Myst by itself would probably just be remembered as a somewhat quirky adventure game if every single damn person with a Windows 3.1 machine wasn't running it.
First everyone making and funding Myst clones screwed up adventure game development, and then the failure of said clones screwed up player expectations and the ability to get funded. And the withdrawal of the two Big Guns from the market didn't help.
For a decade, from 1996 when the existing pre-Myst development ran dry, to 2005 or so, you can count the number of large-scale adventure games by American publishers on one hand. Access kept Tex Murphy alive, and a few other companies kept going too. Sierra managed to get Phantasmagoria out the door, then melted.
But the torch got picked up by Amerzone, The Longest Journey, Runaway, Fahrenheit, Anhk, etc, all notable for being non-American studios. Because adventure games couldn't get funding in American until 2004 or so.
In fact, I'm not entirely sure they can now! The end of the 'death of adventure games' seems to be that foreign companies are smart enough to plan to release the game in America from the start.
Indeed, I noticed this the other day.
After I beat Fallout:New Vegas on the 'Seize control of New Vegas yourself' path, I wondered how many people have picked which ending pages, which control who end up in charge of New Vegas. There are at least four obvious ones I could see. (You, House, NCR, Legion(1). Might be more.)
Then I realized that there was an achievement given for that ending, and remembered I could look up how many people got each achievement, so could see what endings people picked. I was shocked, I will repeat them because I think people can't see the stats if they don't have the game. (Here is the link if I am wrong, although you still won't know the names of things.)
The stats for each achievement that I could figure out are the ending ones: 9.6%, 6.5%, 4.7%, and 1.2%.
That means less than 25% completed the game, and it might be lower, as some players probably did it in multiple ways.
Only 58.2% got to level ten, which is about a third through the game. 34.5% reached lever 20. (There's a level cap of 30, I only got to 27.)
Only 58.8% completed the quest to get to the strip at all! (Technically, you could get to the strip without that, but I doubt anyone skipped it, at least not without doing it once.) Yes, 40% of the people playing the game haven't made it to the strip.
Of course, it's only been out a month, so some people just might not have done those things yet.
1) No relation to ME2's Legion, heh.
Same here Fallout 3 and NV. Yeah, I get CTD every once in a while, probably every 10 hours of play, but whatever. The autosave keeps that from being too annoying. I think the most I've ever lost is 30 minutes or so working my way across the countryside, but, hell, I'm much more likely to lose that much from ambushes. (Well, on FO3. If you stick to the roads, not that many ambushes on NV. And I'm not at the point where I've started wandering randomly far off the roads.)
And New Vegas appears to have less engine bugs. It appears to have more scripting bugs, but most of those will get fixed by the publisher, and the rest by mods.
Oh, and speaking of crash bugs, there is one bug that happens all the time in NV. When I exit the game, the damn launcher hangs. Every time. Of course, I don't particularly want the launcher running, (In fact, I don't think it should be running.) but it's annoying to have to kill.
What happened to all the cool ideas? There were tons of them in the late 90s early 00s! We had the GHOUL system in Soldier of Fortune, where you could shoot a gun out of the bad guys hand (or shoot the hand clean off) or No One Lives Forever with the funny spy stuff (who could forget the "wanna buy a monkey?" story) or Red Faction with the destructible walls, or SWAT with its cool mixing of the bad guys and good guys so you never knew how many of each you'd have, or even Nosferatu where the entire GAME completely rearranged itself so that even restoring from a save you couldn't take rooms being cleared for granted!
All the cool ideas migrated to the 'RPG' genre. First person-RPGs are essentially what you're talking about. In fact, you can shoot guns out of hands in Fallout 3/Fallout NV.
Fallout NV took the original Fallout sensibility and put it in FO3.
Now you can do do things in different ways. Instead of just being 'good' or 'evil', you can support various factions or not, making the game much more playable.
The first time through, I supported...me. That's right, I ended up in control of New Vegas. But I was such a good guy that NCR didn't have an issues with me until I made it clear that I wasn't turning control of New Vegas over to them. (You can actually keep this up until the very end, having the NCR on your side until the very end, if you stealth-boy into the two NCR-secured areas you need to be be in, instead of shooting them.)
This time through, I'm helping out NCR, the somewhat corrupt and over-extended government. (Which sounds bad, but is the only even vaguely 'legitimate government'.)
Next time, perhaps the Brotherhood of Steel and the Khans.
I don't know why people are buying games and not finishing, especially RPGs. Every RPG I've owned I've finished at least once, and started through a second time, although I'll admit I never finished my second Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2 Renegade character. She can wrap up ME right now, if I wasn't in the middle of F:NV I'd fire it up, finish ME real quick, and start ME2 with her.
You probably should have played Half-Life like the action-adventure game it was, instead of an FPS.
To be fair, no one had heard of action-adventure games at the time, but there were a lot of clues that they weren't expecting you to kill everything with your guns.
I'm glad someone else felt the way I did about Myst. It was, quite possibly, the shittiest adventure game of all time. All the puzzles were mechanical things, you had no interactions with the only other characters, the plot was, literally, 'find six things'.
Sure, it looked nice, but that's damn easy to do with first-person still photographs.
And, yeah, it did kill the genre, although that was more other companies fault for jumping on the 'acclaim' of Myth. 'Oh, let's make adventure games with as beautiful graphics as possible. Which means we can't have characters or an interface.'
As opposed to the 3-D games which had just become possible, and were quite well received by actual adventure gamers. And as opposed to the FMV games, which weren't really catching on, but were also getting there, and actually had a chance to improve the adventure game genre. Okay, both those were slightly early, but Tex Murphy pulled it off, combining both those into a perfectly good adventure game.
Sierra, of course, saw the value and went ahead with FMV, whereas Lucas decided to go with just 3-D.
Everyone else attempted to turn adventure games into damn postcards displayed in hypercard. Myst was incredibly well selling to people who'd never bought a computer game in their life. Why, those people are the perfect customers! Let's finish developing the games we've started, and then develop a game exactly like that!
Half those damn games came out straight to the $10 rack.
Then there was the infamous problems at Sierra, causing it to be sold and dismantled, and the LucasArts just giving up on the genre because of the fact the market got flooded with crappy Myst clones, the bottom dropped out because no one was building 'adventure games' because that had come to mean 'wander around and poke things with a stick while reading a background novel you get two pages at a time', with no actual plot or characters or anything.
Yes, it's a crime to scramble in theaters, but it's not dangerous, especially if people were informed their cell would not work in advance.
Whereas disabling them on the roads is dangerous, rather or not the law allows or even requires it. (And you can't choose to not use the roads.)
I strongly suspect that more injury and death can be attributed to distracted drivers talking and/or texting while trying to drive than would be saved by having the situational ability to call for help in the event of an accident.
If you suspect that, you're an idiot. Car accidents are much less dangerous due to the fact that emergency services are reported in real time, as opposed to waiting until someone driving by actually made it where they were going and decided to call it in just in case it hadn't been called in before.
Seriously, how do you think it used to work before cell phones? Magic? It didn't work. People could sit in accidents for an hour before anyone contacted the police, even on well-traveled roads.
You can probably also factor in the possibility that once the vehicle crashes, the technology that disrupts the use of cell phones will most likely be damaged as well.
If you think that, you're also an idiot. Car accidents never disable the electrical system of a car. It is statistically a zero-percent chance of happening, rounded to the nearest percent. The electrical system of cars are amazingly robust. It even keeps working underwater, as you'd know if you'd ever seen video of a car with headlights on being dropped into the water.
For a good proportion of car accidents, there's no way the electrical system could even possibly fail. Like being rear-ended. How's that going to stop something electrical from working?
Hell, in many car accidents the damn car is still running afterward, even in crazy head-on collisions and people driving off cliffs. Forget the electrical system failing, the engine is still running. Can't drive it because the wheels and frame are bent, but the engine still works, at least until all the oil and water leaks out. (Incidentally, if the engine is running, there is electrical power by definition.)
Go talk to people who've been in fucking car accidents, instead of just making shit up. The electrical system never fails. Ever. Even in 'the front of the car is compacted into two feet', the battery manages to hold together enough to keep supplying power. It might be crushed with battery acid leaking out, but still has enough power to keep running a stupid jammer, just like you'll see people get out of smashed cars and the fricking dome light somehow comes on when they open the door.
Oh, and you entirely ignored the fact this would stop other people, driving by in working cars, from calling the police. In fact, their cell phone jammer could easily interfere with victim's cell phone.
too many people learn all their science technique from the show
In other words, too many people have no knowledge of the scientific method at all, and you're complaining that they learn it from a place that doesn't take itself very seriously or worry about publishing results.
Instead, you would rather they have no idea how science work at all.