There's a lot more people playing (and buying) games today. Total sales is what really matter, and even if your modern game has a piracy rate of 75%, it's likely you'll be selling more copies than a 'similar' game did 10-15 years ago which had a piracy rate of 1%.
Then there's the issue with trying to work out what the actual losses are. i.e. if your game cannot be pirated, then many of the people who would've pirated it simply won't play it. So, the high rates of piracy we have now don't necessarily indicate that if we'd had a secure cartridge system for PC games the industry would be making massively more money than it does now.
My personal hypothesis of the Terminator universe is that Skynet didn't in fact become "self-aware" and decide to discard its programming and kill all humans. It is in fact following its original programming, which was likely something along the lines of "minimise the number of human casualties". After all, it's designed to be in control of a global defence network, so the ability to kill some humans in order to minimise the total number of deaths is a given.
Since humans left to their own devices will inevitably breed in large numbers and kill each other off in large numbers, the obvious solution is:
1. Kill off lots of humans. A few billion deaths now is preferable to a few trillion deaths, which is what would occur over a longer period of time.
2. Provide the human population with a common enemy. Humans without a foe tend to turn on each other.
This also explains why an advanced AI with access to tremendous production and research capacity uses methods like "killer robots that look like humans" to infiltrate resistance positions one by one. Tremendously inefficient; but it causes a great deal of terror and makes the surviving humans value each other more, and less likely to fight amongst themselves. It also explains why it would place such a high priority on the surgical elimination of a single effective leader: destruction of Skynet would eventually (100s, 1000s of years...) lead to a civil war amongst humankind that would cost many many lives.
So, ultimately Skynet is merely trying to minimise the number of human deaths, with a forward-looking view.
I know you can read barcodes using optical cameras, but I don't think any of the automated checkouts do, and that's the thing you're trying to fool. Likewise with the weighing system - the checkouts I use only weigh in the bagging area, and the only way it can detect shenanigans is by the customer scanning an item and then putting something with a different weight into the bag.
I don't think a cell phone's display is going to actually reflect the infrared in a manner which the scanner can read.
Additionally it's a bit risky, since the self-checkout lanes are normally monitored and that's pretty suspicious behaviour.
You could probably get away with printing your own barcodes and subtly holding it over the real barcode when scanning. Even better, print out adhesive codes and stick them to the items when you're collecting them from the shelves (probably less likely to be seen), and then the checkout process looks absolutely normal. This also has the benefit that you can take your time to find the cheapest product of equivalent weight to the one you want.
backports.org is something different - that is taking a newer package and recompiling it for the older distro. Debian stable is on 2.6.26. If you're running 2.6.32, then it's probably from backports, i.e. not part of the stable distribution.
Debian do however backport security fixes into the stable packages. So the "linux-image-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem" package I have installed provides a 2.6.26 kernel, but with security fixes that are only fixed in newer mainline kernels (from kernel.org). This was last updated on 16th September.
I would assume RHEL would do the same as Debian's stable releases do, i.e. limit major changes (like going to a new kernel version) as much as possible, but backporting security and some bug fixes to whatever version they happen to have shipped. But I don't know for a fact that this is what Red Hat does.
Sure, but why would you tell them what you're planning to do? They made it sound like their reason for taking time off was a factor in the boss's decision to reject the application.
I'm loosely planning to take time off when DCS: Warthog is released. My boss isn't a douche and wouldn't reject it even if he thought it was dumb to waste annual leave on a video game, but I don't have any intention of saying what it's for all the same. It's not any of his business.
Approval/rejection should be on operational grounds only, and rejection should be a last resort.
But 'socially acceptable' doesn't automatically make it wrong, either. You dodged the question and tried to derail the conversation by making reference to an emotionally-charged issue, which has absolutely no relevance to the discussion.
it's "cheapier" and easier to hire a competent development team that doesn't require a regression testing team, as they never deliver a faulty deliverable.
I'm guessing here that the secure gambling connections to offshore sites would be a damn site more difficult (impossible?) to pass through a proxy
No harder than any other site; but obviously the people who think the proposed filter will do anything at all are banking on the majority of people never trying to circumvent it.
What's that got to do with anything? I'm pretty sure Google established a pretty compelling business case for releasing their own free web browser well before they committed resources to it.
Developing a monitoring system for a complicated piece of storage that reacts properly to every possible failure mode is a massive undertaking. It will take a lot of time just to figure out everything that you need to monitor, and the possible values for them during normal operation; let alone actually test that your system correctly detects and responds to every possibility.
If your business is providing SAN management/support services, then I can see this as being worthwhile. It's a massive investment in technology and skills amongst your staff, but if that's what you make your money doing, it may well give you a competitive edge.
But if your business is anything else, why are you going to invest so much into something that's really just a background piece of infrastructure? What's your plan for retaining the staff that know how the monitoring system works, and know your storage system in sufficient detail to be able to understand all the things it's checking, etc?
If you really have the expertise on-hand to implement such a thing in a way that you're comfortable relying on, why on earth wouldn't you use them for something more productive that will actually make your business money? Again, if your business is monitoring storage infrastructure, it makes sense. If your business is anything else, why are you spending the time of highly skilled people to implement something you can easily buy off-the-shelf (i.e. a standard support contract)?
Of course, if I were them, I'd probably just not pirate MS software in the first place, but that's besides the point.
You're right that it's beside the point, because no piracy has to occur in order for these raids to happen. Many of these organisations have taken great pains to understand the licensing and make sure they're fully licensed, or even over-licensed, because it's often used as an excuse to disrupt them. It doesn't help, because there's always the possibility that they have an unlicensed copy of something on some old laptop in a storage room or what have you.
The blanket license is a ploy to allow Microsoft to honestly say, "there is no way this organisation is using our software without a license". This is much better than "we think they're fully licensed" or "we don't think they're unlicensed". At least, that's the theory.
In practice, at best this will probably just mean the raids will be on the suspicion of them using unlicensed software from Adobe or some other vendor. But that's something that's out of Microsoft's control; all they can do is make it very hard for the FSB to abuse Microsoft's software licensing as an excuse to raid whoever they feel like when they can't find any legitimate reason to do so.
Just because you could get up and walk around and inside the movie doesn't mean you would. I mean, you don't see audiences at theatre productions getting up and walking around behind the stage and getting up on stage so they can see a different view of the performance.
But that doesn't mean the experience when viewing it from a static location out in front wouldn't be improved by having it all in actual 3D.
In fact, think of it like that: watching a movie would be just like going to see a performance of a play, except all the scene changes would be instant, there'd be cool special effects, and your distance from the action would change without you having to get up and move.
These days most of the babies used to make baby oil are kept in cages and fed a genetically-engineered diet which is designed to greatly boost the production of the fats which most of the oil is squeezed from. So it's not really "natural" anymore; as they saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.
If you can, try to find baby oil which is squeezed from organic free range babies. It has a much higher quality due to the more varied diets and additional nutrients they get from natural foraging behaviour; however it's a fair bit more expensive and many stores don't carry it at all. I think the average free range baby yields about 3 litres of baby oil when squeezed; you get around 10L from a battery-farm baby.
Perhaps the real problem is you were talking to a stupid and/or ignorant, but strongly opinionated, woman?
I don't believe that some individual having a very strong opinion on something they have no useful knowledge of is really evidence of any kind of problem with our language, or a particular word in our language. Stupid people will say and think stupid things regardless of what words they're using to say them.
Not noticing that the complaint referred to two different domains (thedirt.com and thedirty.com) and never explained why it was mentioning two different domains?
Surely if you're going to sue someone, your initial complaint should at the very least be consistent.
Would've been a pretty good first hearing. "Is it not true that you are the owner of the domain thedirty.com?" "No, it's not true." "Oh. Never mind then. Have a nice day."
Let me quote the post you responded to, with a bit of emphasis
A Texas company writing a license agreement [...] requiring any legal claims against them be brought in Texas and limiting liabilities in ways that are expressly prohibited under Texas law
Problem 1: security clearances. Much of this information is classified, and some of it deservedly so. The more low-skilled people you have looking at it, the more likely you'll have leaks and other problems.
Problem 2: the job is probably harder than you think. Many people will give suboptimal results due to laziness or ineptitude. You have to train people, somehow test they're still performing well, give incentives, weed out the bad ones, and all the HR type stuff as well.
Problem 3: it's a tedious and boring job. People tend to get blase when doing tedious boring jobs. Consider the cliche of the sleeping security guard, or the donut-eating police officer. Most of the time, these videos will be b.o.r.i.n.g. The low-skilled analysts will get sloppy.
Problem 4: what's deemed "interesting" may change. An analyst today might be looking for particular types of sedans, since it's currently believed the people we're looking for use that kind of vehicles. In three months time, intelligence might emerge that they actually drive vans. Now you have to have your analysts go back and re-analyze all the videos from that period looking for vans instead. Either that, or you make them tag every single thing in every single video, just in case. Massive tedium -> massive amount of errors.
Computers on the other hand, are very good at doing mind-numbing tasks hour after hour with absolutely unwavering attention to detail and consistent quality of results. A relatively small number of human analysts can (and I'm sure, will) be employed to allow the quality of the computer's output to be gauged. As improvements in the computer's algorithms are made, previous videos can be re-processed to take advantage of that.
Also, I don't think the costs make much sense either. A few hundred thousand dollars can buy a massively powerful collection of commodity computers, and this is a task which inherently lends itself to parallel processing. A few hundred thousand dollars would pay the salaries of the army of low-wage, disinterested "analysts" for a year at best.
Finally, none of this rules out using humans to also analyze videos, particularly the subset of videos that are likely to contain useful intel.
I don't think it's invasive as that. Bohemia Interactive have their games on Steam, but also sell them at retail and via their own digital distribution platform (Sprocket). They're also on Direct2Drive and other things. Only the Steam version of the game requires Steam; the others have absolutely no dependency on it whatsoever. Additionally from what I've read, the beta patches and all mods etc. work fine with the Steam version, and you don't even need to have Steam running in order to play it.
I think Eagle Dynamics are also putting (or have put) some of their games like Black Shark on Steam; but there's no way they'd be doing that if it made their other versions have to grow a Steam-dependency.
I think publishers tying the game to Steam is just out of convenience, not any kind of mandate from Valve. It's a fairly strong DRM that seems to have become widely accepted by gamers, and it essentially limits resales. I imagine a lot of publishers love it for those features alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the title of the article is "Russian Army Upgrades Its Inflatable Weapons"? Chill out, man...
There's a lot more people playing (and buying) games today. Total sales is what really matter, and even if your modern game has a piracy rate of 75%, it's likely you'll be selling more copies than a 'similar' game did 10-15 years ago which had a piracy rate of 1%.
Then there's the issue with trying to work out what the actual losses are. i.e. if your game cannot be pirated, then many of the people who would've pirated it simply won't play it. So, the high rates of piracy we have now don't necessarily indicate that if we'd had a secure cartridge system for PC games the industry would be making massively more money than it does now.
My personal hypothesis of the Terminator universe is that Skynet didn't in fact become "self-aware" and decide to discard its programming and kill all humans. It is in fact following its original programming, which was likely something along the lines of "minimise the number of human casualties". After all, it's designed to be in control of a global defence network, so the ability to kill some humans in order to minimise the total number of deaths is a given.
Since humans left to their own devices will inevitably breed in large numbers and kill each other off in large numbers, the obvious solution is:
1. Kill off lots of humans. A few billion deaths now is preferable to a few trillion deaths, which is what would occur over a longer period of time.
2. Provide the human population with a common enemy. Humans without a foe tend to turn on each other.
This also explains why an advanced AI with access to tremendous production and research capacity uses methods like "killer robots that look like humans" to infiltrate resistance positions one by one. Tremendously inefficient; but it causes a great deal of terror and makes the surviving humans value each other more, and less likely to fight amongst themselves. It also explains why it would place such a high priority on the surgical elimination of a single effective leader: destruction of Skynet would eventually (100s, 1000s of years...) lead to a civil war amongst humankind that would cost many many lives.
So, ultimately Skynet is merely trying to minimise the number of human deaths, with a forward-looking view.
I know you can read barcodes using optical cameras, but I don't think any of the automated checkouts do, and that's the thing you're trying to fool. Likewise with the weighing system - the checkouts I use only weigh in the bagging area, and the only way it can detect shenanigans is by the customer scanning an item and then putting something with a different weight into the bag.
I don't think a cell phone's display is going to actually reflect the infrared in a manner which the scanner can read.
Additionally it's a bit risky, since the self-checkout lanes are normally monitored and that's pretty suspicious behaviour.
You could probably get away with printing your own barcodes and subtly holding it over the real barcode when scanning. Even better, print out adhesive codes and stick them to the items when you're collecting them from the shelves (probably less likely to be seen), and then the checkout process looks absolutely normal. This also has the benefit that you can take your time to find the cheapest product of equivalent weight to the one you want.
backports.org is something different - that is taking a newer package and recompiling it for the older distro. Debian stable is on 2.6.26. If you're running 2.6.32, then it's probably from backports, i.e. not part of the stable distribution.
Debian do however backport security fixes into the stable packages. So the "linux-image-2.6.26-2-686-bigmem" package I have installed provides a 2.6.26 kernel, but with security fixes that are only fixed in newer mainline kernels (from kernel.org). This was last updated on 16th September.
I would assume RHEL would do the same as Debian's stable releases do, i.e. limit major changes (like going to a new kernel version) as much as possible, but backporting security and some bug fixes to whatever version they happen to have shipped. But I don't know for a fact that this is what Red Hat does.
Sure, but why would you tell them what you're planning to do? They made it sound like their reason for taking time off was a factor in the boss's decision to reject the application.
I'm loosely planning to take time off when DCS: Warthog is released. My boss isn't a douche and wouldn't reject it even if he thought it was dumb to waste annual leave on a video game, but I don't have any intention of saying what it's for all the same. It's not any of his business.
Approval/rejection should be on operational grounds only, and rejection should be a last resort.
But 'socially acceptable' doesn't automatically make it wrong, either. You dodged the question and tried to derail the conversation by making reference to an emotionally-charged issue, which has absolutely no relevance to the discussion.
it's "cheapier" and easier to hire a competent development team that doesn't require a regression testing team, as they never deliver a faulty deliverable.
Hahaha, classic!
I'm guessing here that the secure gambling connections to offshore sites would be a damn site more difficult (impossible?) to pass through a proxy
No harder than any other site; but obviously the people who think the proposed filter will do anything at all are banking on the majority of people never trying to circumvent it.
What's that got to do with anything? I'm pretty sure Google established a pretty compelling business case for releasing their own free web browser well before they committed resources to it.
Developing a monitoring system for a complicated piece of storage that reacts properly to every possible failure mode is a massive undertaking. It will take a lot of time just to figure out everything that you need to monitor, and the possible values for them during normal operation; let alone actually test that your system correctly detects and responds to every possibility.
If your business is providing SAN management/support services, then I can see this as being worthwhile. It's a massive investment in technology and skills amongst your staff, but if that's what you make your money doing, it may well give you a competitive edge.
But if your business is anything else, why are you going to invest so much into something that's really just a background piece of infrastructure? What's your plan for retaining the staff that know how the monitoring system works, and know your storage system in sufficient detail to be able to understand all the things it's checking, etc?
If you really have the expertise on-hand to implement such a thing in a way that you're comfortable relying on, why on earth wouldn't you use them for something more productive that will actually make your business money? Again, if your business is monitoring storage infrastructure, it makes sense. If your business is anything else, why are you spending the time of highly skilled people to implement something you can easily buy off-the-shelf (i.e. a standard support contract)?
To play Devil's Advocate: If there's nothing of substance behind these claims, then why has just about everybody involved with the project resigned?
Thermal Design Power. Basically a measure of the amount of cooling required to prevent the chip frying.
Of course, if I were them, I'd probably just not pirate MS software in the first place, but that's besides the point.
You're right that it's beside the point, because no piracy has to occur in order for these raids to happen. Many of these organisations have taken great pains to understand the licensing and make sure they're fully licensed, or even over-licensed, because it's often used as an excuse to disrupt them. It doesn't help, because there's always the possibility that they have an unlicensed copy of something on some old laptop in a storage room or what have you.
The blanket license is a ploy to allow Microsoft to honestly say, "there is no way this organisation is using our software without a license". This is much better than "we think they're fully licensed" or "we don't think they're unlicensed". At least, that's the theory.
In practice, at best this will probably just mean the raids will be on the suspicion of them using unlicensed software from Adobe or some other vendor. But that's something that's out of Microsoft's control; all they can do is make it very hard for the FSB to abuse Microsoft's software licensing as an excuse to raid whoever they feel like when they can't find any legitimate reason to do so.
Yep agreed, everyone knows that "Microsoft" is the operating system, not the word processor.
Just because you could get up and walk around and inside the movie doesn't mean you would. I mean, you don't see audiences at theatre productions getting up and walking around behind the stage and getting up on stage so they can see a different view of the performance.
But that doesn't mean the experience when viewing it from a static location out in front wouldn't be improved by having it all in actual 3D.
In fact, think of it like that: watching a movie would be just like going to see a performance of a play, except all the scene changes would be instant, there'd be cool special effects, and your distance from the action would change without you having to get up and move.
These days most of the babies used to make baby oil are kept in cages and fed a genetically-engineered diet which is designed to greatly boost the production of the fats which most of the oil is squeezed from. So it's not really "natural" anymore; as they saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.
If you can, try to find baby oil which is squeezed from organic free range babies. It has a much higher quality due to the more varied diets and additional nutrients they get from natural foraging behaviour; however it's a fair bit more expensive and many stores don't carry it at all. I think the average free range baby yields about 3 litres of baby oil when squeezed; you get around 10L from a battery-farm baby.
Perhaps the real problem is you were talking to a stupid and/or ignorant, but strongly opinionated, woman?
I don't believe that some individual having a very strong opinion on something they have no useful knowledge of is really evidence of any kind of problem with our language, or a particular word in our language. Stupid people will say and think stupid things regardless of what words they're using to say them.
Not noticing that the complaint referred to two different domains (thedirt.com and thedirty.com) and never explained why it was mentioning two different domains?
Surely if you're going to sue someone, your initial complaint should at the very least be consistent.
Would've been a pretty good first hearing. "Is it not true that you are the owner of the domain thedirty.com?" "No, it's not true." "Oh. Never mind then. Have a nice day."
Let me quote the post you responded to, with a bit of emphasis
A Texas company writing a license agreement [...] requiring any legal claims against them be brought in Texas and limiting liabilities in ways that are expressly prohibited under Texas law
You're welcome. Have a nice day!
Problem 1: security clearances. Much of this information is classified, and some of it deservedly so. The more low-skilled people you have looking at it, the more likely you'll have leaks and other problems.
Problem 2: the job is probably harder than you think. Many people will give suboptimal results due to laziness or ineptitude. You have to train people, somehow test they're still performing well, give incentives, weed out the bad ones, and all the HR type stuff as well.
Problem 3: it's a tedious and boring job. People tend to get blase when doing tedious boring jobs. Consider the cliche of the sleeping security guard, or the donut-eating police officer. Most of the time, these videos will be b.o.r.i.n.g. The low-skilled analysts will get sloppy.
Problem 4: what's deemed "interesting" may change. An analyst today might be looking for particular types of sedans, since it's currently believed the people we're looking for use that kind of vehicles. In three months time, intelligence might emerge that they actually drive vans. Now you have to have your analysts go back and re-analyze all the videos from that period looking for vans instead. Either that, or you make them tag every single thing in every single video, just in case. Massive tedium -> massive amount of errors.
Computers on the other hand, are very good at doing mind-numbing tasks hour after hour with absolutely unwavering attention to detail and consistent quality of results. A relatively small number of human analysts can (and I'm sure, will) be employed to allow the quality of the computer's output to be gauged. As improvements in the computer's algorithms are made, previous videos can be re-processed to take advantage of that.
Also, I don't think the costs make much sense either. A few hundred thousand dollars can buy a massively powerful collection of commodity computers, and this is a task which inherently lends itself to parallel processing. A few hundred thousand dollars would pay the salaries of the army of low-wage, disinterested "analysts" for a year at best.
Finally, none of this rules out using humans to also analyze videos, particularly the subset of videos that are likely to contain useful intel.
There's nothing wrong with being a man, but if you refer to a woman as "he" she'll likely take it as an insult, and vice versa.
People don't like to be incorrectly labeled.
(Some people don't like to be correctly labeled, but that's another matter.)
I don't think it's invasive as that. Bohemia Interactive have their games on Steam, but also sell them at retail and via their own digital distribution platform (Sprocket). They're also on Direct2Drive and other things. Only the Steam version of the game requires Steam; the others have absolutely no dependency on it whatsoever. Additionally from what I've read, the beta patches and all mods etc. work fine with the Steam version, and you don't even need to have Steam running in order to play it.
I think Eagle Dynamics are also putting (or have put) some of their games like Black Shark on Steam; but there's no way they'd be doing that if it made their other versions have to grow a Steam-dependency.
I think publishers tying the game to Steam is just out of convenience, not any kind of mandate from Valve. It's a fairly strong DRM that seems to have become widely accepted by gamers, and it essentially limits resales. I imagine a lot of publishers love it for those features alone.
Score -1, TryingTooHardToBeFunny.
Better luck next time.