Yeah, OK. I'm a retard. I had my camera pointed a tad differently in one of the screenshots I was comparing (which were admitadely made to brag about my new monitor and not to actually do any other sort of serious comparison between the two:D ) and it was clipping against something which made the effective camera range different (I've got my max camera range tweaked higher than what the WoW interface normally allows so this happens a lot). I still don't consider it something that needs to be fixed like the other poster does, it's just the way it is. I thought he meant the HUD was clipping off the screen or the text was nonuniformly stretched and unreadable or something, two problems I recently had to fix in a game I work on and which definitely fit the definition of broken.
What? I've got a standard monitor and a widescreen next to each other and it works perfectly on either of them. The HUD doesn't fall off the edges of the screen and I can see just as much vertically at a given zoom factor...
What I meant to say (and sorry if this wasn't clear), is that art (music, a painting) is inherently classifiable as art where a video game is inherently not classifiable as art.
What now? Music is always art? What about advertising jingles? Elevator music? Same goes for painting. Some of it is art, and some pieces are on the same level as my vacation photos (probably because they were made for the same purpose). Try digital painting - are the file and folder icons art? How about the Windows Logo? And if digital painting is not art then there's probably a host of people over on deviantart.com and cgsociety.com that want to have a word with you...
The Myst series: Some of the most fantastic and beautifully rendered worlds in any game. Themes of family bonds and betrayal. Ridiculously good music that while not as technically complex as a classical symphony can and does evoke strong emotion just the same, especially when paired with the strange loneliness of the worlds within those games.
Braid: Fantastic visual art. A deeply human story about a search for the unattainable, scattered throughout in bits of excellent prose. Puzzles that leave you with a sense of awe at the raw ingenuity of the thing.
God of War (I and II, haven't played the PSP one): Again, beautifully rendered worlds. Gameplay, imagery, and a story that explore brutality, insanity, anger, the thirst for revenge, all set within the framework of a quest for glorious redemption.
Yes, many games are just there for the raw entertainment value. But then again a lot of visual art is just advertising, and a lot of "literature" is just cheap supermarket trash (as you yourself have pointed out). How does that make entire medium non-art, while the existence of trashy fiction doesn't do the same to all novels, for instance?
And yes, many of the people that play games are in it just for the entertainment of shooting a few bad guys and bragging about their high score. I'd even go on to say that in those cases where a game is really art, most of its players will fail to take the time to appreciate, really appreciate what it is that they're looking at. But then again most of the people I saw at the Louvre were just there to take pictures that they could brag about to their friends (particularly the clusterfuck of idiots in front of the Mona Lisa), and I ended up being one of a very few people who moved through slowly, looking at everything, stopping occasionally to stare at something particularly striking.
The fact that you've never looked carefully at what makes up a video game (if you've looked at one at all, that is), and then sat back and taken it in as a whole doesn't even begin to mean that no game anywhere has ever had any significant artistic merit at all.
That isn't always a reasonable expectation. Hospitals are an excellent example of the problem with personal information and IT staff. Most industries can't afford to just hire more IT people because it would help. The groups that will get murdered by this kind of punishment aren't the big megacorps with lawyer hordes. It will be the smaller places that can't afford the extra staff and horde of lawyers.
I had a whole two paragraphs written out on how this could be avoided but after three drafts it's pretty clear that there isn't any way to make criminal charges scale well from small business to megacorp. I'd say leave it at a fine that scales with the data loss. If a company can't figure out how much data it can afford to keep reasonably secured, given the liability of not securing it, and gather that much and no more then, well, tough. Reserve criminal charges for the most extreme cases of outright negligence. There have to be some consequences for mishandling data, otherwise you're just begging for more stupidity.
The megacorps will release the lawyer horde or burn their own IT staff and noone that matters will really feel any pain for the fuckup.
That's a general problem with all sorts of law. The fact that we've set up a system that tends to sell justice to whoever paid more for his lawyers is something that has to be dealt with everywhere. I still don't like the of not punishing damaging behavior. I've been to countries where corporations aren't prosecuted for anything and that was bad enough that I just hate seeing our society move in that direction...
That said, a great deal of the personal information stuff is also on the onus of the individual as well.
Largely true. And in most cases I agree with you that yes, the individual should take more responsibility. However I despise the fact that we live in a world where abstract legal entities can get away with things that I as a person would be jailed for. If I have to be responsible, so should businesses - of all sizes.
The notion that we should hold everyone else but ourselves responsible is a growing trend in all aspects of modern American life.
Not even that. The notion that we should hold nobody responsible is the growing trend, and that's pretty scary. It's one thing for everyone to accuse everyone else of making them fuck up. It's quite another when there isn't any follow-through on the accusations and years go by with nothing being done. That seems to be how all levels of government and, from what I've seen, most of big business seems to operate these days.
My real irritation comes from the "we require credit cards". But, again, as irritating of a policy as that is if people actually gave a shit that policy would have died out when it resulted in lost business, instead, people whip out the plastic. We dug our own grave by giving up our personal information to anyone who asked, and now we are crying because the people we gave our information to lost it.
Except that if people boycotted hotels (which require credit card info to make a reservation) you'd see massive losses in everything from airlines to the local restaurants until A) the hotels notice they've lost a lot of business, B) they change their policies and get the word out and C) people hear about it and start trusting them again. The problem with trusting the market to fix itself is that the fixing is often a very painful process that involves large segments crashing and having to be rebuilt. And if you meant people not whipping out the plastic in the first place way back when it was first introduced, before every business started demanding all sorts of information, well, did identity theft even exist as something the average person had to worry about back then? How would people have known that things would get this bad. Anyone saying so would have sounded like a total crackpot, at the time.
Yes video games are art (see Braid). Yes, you can make artistic statements in video games. You can make all sorts of statements in games. No, all video games are not good art (the same applies to paintings, books, and movies). And no, you do not have any sort of right to a warm reception whatsoever for your work. Just like with paintings books and movies (fancy that). If your "statement" makes your game unfun or offensive then, well, suck it up, you broke your own shit. It's not our fault for "not understanding" your well-obfuscated intent.
That out of the way, I have to agree with the parent that it's stupid debating the whole "games as art" thing in the first place. We don't question whether movies are art when someone makes a film denying the Holocaust. What the hell is it with all these "controversies" we get lately (here, in blogs, in political discourse, in the MSM)? Are we really trying so hard to be "nuanced" that we have to dump illogical statements into every other sentence just to be interesting?
Although, this gives me another item for my list of "things to do if I suddenly become a god": have my prophet spout subtle logical fallacies and then laugh it up as the idiot humans get upset, and waste a bunch of time or do damage to themselves, and then finally figure it out and say, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't even make sense!"
I'm sorry...so you expect that staff of 4 people to do penetration testing to that degree on every application installed?
No. I expect a company with only four guys in IT to either hire some more staff or simply restrict itself to storing as little personal information as possible for as short a time as permitted.
Names and Addresses are hardly "private" information.
True, but most people would be pretty upset if the local porn shop "lost" purchase records that could easily be associated with names and addresses. Heck, how about records showing that the owner of 123 Rob Me While I'm Away Drive goes on a two day business trip on the first of every month - that's conceivably something you could glean from hotel records. That's the sort of stuff I was thinking of.
Wonder why healthcare costs so fucking much? [snip] The problem needs to be fixed, not just punished.
See, this is the thing that needs to be fixed before anything else can be fixed when it comes to big business: the executives responsible for company policy can get away with murder and people think that's normal. You're right, it's not reasonable to fire random IT peons for a random data leak. It is reasonable to audit the company and let them off the hook if the (we'd hope) independent auditors determine the company did whatever they could. But if they find that random sales people are walking around with 400,000 unencrypted customer profiles on their laptops then fine the company and bring the manager that OK'd putting those records there and the one that denied the request to buy/implement appropriate security measures before a judge.
Sure...while we are at it lets put a cop in jail every time someone in their city gets mugged, murdered, raped, etc.
I don't think that's what's being suggested here. The idea is to punish companies for negligence, not for any random losses. They're not saying put a random cop in jail every time a crime occurs, they're saying that if a cop could have reasonably done something to prevent the crime (like the other poster's example of leaving the jail unlocked and a murderer getting out), then that particular cop should be punished.
Why should I spend time in jail or face fines personally because Vendor X couldn't be bothered to employ better programmers or test their stuff.
If you can't be bothered to do some research and assure yourself to within a reasonable doubt that Vendor X has secured his product, then maybe you shouldn't be storing my name, address, phone number, credit card info, and shopping habits in their system - no? I have no issue with companies storing anonymous shopping habits in insecure systems because all they want to do is some simple data mining to optimize their advertising/stocking policies a bit, but if they're going to be putting info that could hurt me if in the wrong hands in that database they should damn well be liable for it, or they should have on hand evidence that they had reasonable assurances from the vendor that the data would be safe, which passes the liability on to the vendor.
Or maybe I go to jail because some worker brought in an infected USB photo frame.
Why is that worker allowed to plug a USB photo frame (or anything IT can't vouch for, really) into a workstation which you (the company) presumably own? Why does that workstation have my name and address on it in a form that the virus can send home?
That said...I think there should be something to "encourage" companies to actually invest the resources in protecting that data, or just to stop collecting it. Seems to me not collecting it is far easier and more viable in many many cases.
Simple. Make them liable for each and every record they lose. Let them know that a lost name costs $x, a lost address $y, with a multiplier of Z if that info can be linked to other leaked damaging (though not necessarily personal) records. Let there be exceptions for companies that obviously did everything that they could to secure info (as you say, there are cases that nobody could have anticipated and that shouldn't be punished). That way the companies get a fairly simple choice: pay for proper security, or pay the (steep) fines when someone loses a laptop on a subway.
We read the same two short stories in English class (among many others from other genres, of course). I can still remember sitting quietly for about an hour after reading these, just absorbing what I'd just read and thinking about it. Actually, the thing that really struck me was that even the kids that were usually far too cool to be seen caring about English (as if the study of the language we communicate in could possibly be worth their while) got visibly creeped out by "The Veldt".
We had a wonderful high school sophomore English teacher who introduced us to this and many other works.
Sorry, I get pissed when I see people trivializing the work we've put into Gallium.
I didn't mean to do that at all, and I didn't even realize I had. I kind of assumed it was general knowledge that display drivers are a bitch to build and maintain. What I was saying about GL is that the way the spec is written it does nothing to make a difficult job any easier.
My main point was that the IHV's aren't going to go to the effort of implementing any API without some assurance that someone will use it and make something that drives up demand for their hardware. DX is backed by Microsoft. GL has history and an application base. The thought is that we could get an OpenGL/DX killer, but only if the OSS community were to build it, and then use it in some killer app that demonstrates its potential. I mentioned Gallium because writing a thin API layer on top of that is going to be a hell of a lot easier than coding directly to (say) AMD's hardware specs. Typing up a new spec and hoping is, as the parent to my original post said, unlikely to accomplish anything.
And as far as contributing to Gallium goes, if I weren't in the middle of a massive crunch period right now I'd be looking pretty hard at contributing to D3D9 (or close enough) on Linux, if that's seriously a possibility (I have no idea what MS's patents/license restrictions say about the subject). Certainly something to look at during any free time I find...
You're right. I'm not a Gallium contributor. The most I've done with Mesa is trace into it a little ways to analyze GL errors - though what I did see there struck me as a pain in the ass to maintain (Enable was huge and managed all sorts of dirty bits that I assume are checked in a fair number of places, and BindTexture was full of special cases if I remember correctly). But I'm not sure I'm parsing the second sentence as you intend me to.
Are you saying writing driver code is trivial? I'm used to the low-level PS2 (DMA chain) and the original XBOX (push-buffer) APIs, and even those were a bitch to work with when it comes to all the corner cases (especially since the only error code you get at that level is a lack of output). Ah yes, the joys of compiling fixed-function style material descriptions into shader/VU code, and then making the damn thing work with any of the dozen input layouts in our data... Is that actually supposed to be a simple task...maintaining that sort of nightmare when the "short circuit this massive chunk of code that sets preconditions for other stuff" extension comes along? I don't see how, but if the answer is yes then feel free to explain it to me (as opposed to just calling me a moron), I'm genuinely interested.
Or are you saying that it is hard, but that I'm not allowed to say so it for some reason?
Microsoft provides Opengl32.dll (or something similar) which handles setting up an OpenGL-based window and has a software implementation of early (pre-1.4, I think) OpenGL. However the software layer is just a fallback. If the display driver advertises OpenGL entry points (and all decent drivers do) Microsoft's DLL handles part of the window setup and hands off everything else to the actual display driver.
If someone were to take Gallium 3D, for example, and write a decent API on top of it, then it's not that far fetched for a few of the IHV's to start supporting it elsewhere. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if some industrious individual in AMD or NV's research department is already doing that.
The thing with OpenGL is that it's obscenely difficult to write a driver that runs well because the API is simply a mess. None of the IHVs are happy to have a performance overhead imposed on them (obviously) but they do it because the only alternative (everyone having their own API) is even worse (unless you're Sony, and even they made an effort to put GL ES on the PS3). Current GL extensions are full of things like "if this is enabled and that extension is implemented and you're drawing an X or a Y (but not a Z) then this function's behavior is changed thusly". Hell, even the core GL spec has a ton of stuff like that in it (glEnable, anyone?). That's pretty much the entire reason for DX's success performance wise - Microsoft rips out whatever the IHVs can't make fast on their current/new cards every time they bump the version number. GL drags along concepts that haven't had silicon dedicated to them in nearly a decade, and all of that has to be supported (read: emulated) in new drivers with every new bit of code wasting cycles checking if it should be in compatibility mode.
I think AMD/ATI and NV would be extremely happy if they could get away from maintaining drivers where the first half of nearly every entry point is a tangle of "has my behavior been modified, if so reroute to alternate implementation 112". And they seem to have learned the "what one implements, we all implement" lesson pretty well (PhysX on AMD/ATI for example) so if a new API is good enough to catch any major IHV's attention, the others are likely to follow.
All I've really seen of the PS3 dev kit is what was on display at GDC. The Sony guys talked about GL ES and NVIDIA's Cg toolchain for shaders, so that's what I posted. This, however, sounds a lot more like what I expected from Sony and is right in line with the PS2 dev kit (emphasis mine):
Sony supply an alternative low level api called libGcm.
If libGcm is what I think it is (macro'd constants to build push buffers + raw DMA access) then pretty much nobody will be using the GL stuff. Coding right to the hardware is what PlayStation development is all about.
The theory is that they didn't think the Russians would risk upsetting the Chinese by letting rip during the olympic opening ceremony. Which was stupid.
I hadn't heard that one yet. Who's theory is this? Please don't tell me this is the official media talking point...
Anyway it was truly foolish for the Georgian government to attack the rebel region if they knew that their army was no match for the Russian forces...If they didn't know, they should leave the office at once. You didn't need to be a expert to understand that.
My guess is they thought the Russians wouldn't dare fight back too hard after the US voiced support for Georgia entering NATO. They probably overestimated what words are worth in western politics.
How does the joke go? Ah yes. "I miss the USSR, because you could always easily identify the truth - everything in Pravda was a lie." It sounds better in Russian, I'm sure.
I'm talking mainly about the exploration/new construction/site repair side of things. The people that get sent out to do this stuff work on obscenely tight schedules (else the company loses the contract) and they tend to push themselves/get pushed too hard for too long. Most people either suffer some sort of back injury or burn out within the first four to six years. The few that don't are manning existing sites (which do observe strict safety standards) or get trained into higher positions at big companies.
To give you an example, my stepdad fixes downhole tools (big heavy metal pipes full of various measuring equipment, for the uninitiated). When he used to do on-site stuff (he now manages a lab) it would typically involve a ten to twelve hour drive to the site, between six and ten hours of work (no breaks, except for waiting for things to boot/measurements to be made), a few hours sleep at the camp and the drive back. That's a quick job. Longer jobs involve two or three weeks of fourteen to sixteen hour days. It's amazing how quick you can burn out doing that for a few years. The guys that clear sites or drill wells or build big rigs, or fix any of that stuff work on the same sort of schedules.
On-site jobs at big established sites are better, but not enough that it's cheap or easy to keep the positions filled. My former roommate is a safety inspector at such sites, and his job is to sit for one to two months at a camp hundreds of kilometers from anything else with a bunch of guys (none of whom get along very well) eating awful food (hard to get anything fresh up there, and the cooks are a joke) driving between nearby wells checking the equipment to make sure things like H2S leaks don't happen. It's ridiculously hard to find people to fill those jobs (especially when exploration offers more money for a "light" two weeks on, one week off job). Safety standards do actually get observed there (still nothing as strict as making a big deal out of a little cut; those gets disinfectant and a bandage - maybe a line in someone's safety report), but the difficulty of finding and retaining decent staff lead to either long days at the understaffed locations, or idiocy at the others (where they lowered the hiring standards to fill the positions).
Safety standards might improve across the board in the future, if the demand for oil drops (yeah, right), but until then it's an absolute clusterfuck as everyone races to find and extract as much as possible in as little time as they can get away with.
I'm going on the stories my stepdad and some of his (and my) friends that have worked up in northern Alberta on oil/mineral recovery projects have told me.
The mud is, mostly as you say, only a meter deep. Trouble is there are patches where it gets very deep, and on the surface they look the same as the rest. Nobody maps these zones out accurately (because that would be stupidly expensive) so it's very risky to go exploring an area that hasn't been driven over yet. I've seen home video of a bulldozer sinking completely out of view. That, apparently, happens a lot when new sites are being set up. Of course I can't point to any real statistics because the companies keep the actual numbers super-secret.
You probably know this bit already, but for those that don't... The cold-related deaths are rarely caused by stupidity. Most are exhaustion or simple injuries. Coat or no coat, you can freeze to death awful fast if you're pinned under the load you were carrying just a minute ago and everyone else is too busy doing whatever their jobs are to remember to wonder where you are. That's rare of course, but it does happen and the companies do get sued over it. Even if perfect safety standards were maintained and nobody died, the sheer difficulty of the work leads to a very high turnover because people are constantly injuring themselves. So not only does any company that works up there have to pay ridiculous wages to get people to sign up to (probably) get badly injured in a few years, they also have to maintain a lot of insurance in case of law suits and project setbacks. The costs of getting this stuff are obscene.
So it comes down to expense. Yep, the Arctic is an expensive place to do stuff. But that's simple economics: if you're showing a profit, it's all good.
Exactly what I was saying. Work is done up there, so it's obviously worth it. But the way some people talk about Canada's resources you'd think that getting them is as simple as stepping out into the yard and picking diamonds out from the dirt in the flower beds. That's not how it works, and anyone that would fight a war to capture that land could have saved themselves a lot of treasure simply buying what we're already selling, because there really isn't any loot just lying around waiting to be loaded onto galleons and taken back home.
The consistent, erroneous belief that Canadians feast on mounds of dead 'baby' seals is attributed to groups like PETA who are, arguably, one of the most inhumane non-governmental organisations in the world.
Hey! Don't tell them that! I like being feared as a savage.
What next? Telling them that the losing team isn't really sacrificed to ancient gods after a hockey game?!
A large nation has been warming up to us the wrong way, and our leader is a moron elected by the western provinces who are so self-centred all they seem to want is to stick their collective penis in Ontario's eye.
As an Albertan I will admit there was a bit of that (though I still voted against the fucker). Trust me, we hate him out here too now. The rush to sell every last scrap of Canada hasn't done him any favors - heck, most of us even miss Cretien and his amusing little adventures. I mean, it's almost cute, looking back on it now, the way he only did little bits of damage without jeopardizing things like, say, what little defense we have left...
Rather I see Harper likely to keep his 4-year term, because Dion is too much of a coward to overturn government and face the west.
As long as his party loses seats I'll be happy. The more hoops they have to jump through to sign their retardation into law, the better.
Sure, it'd be hard as hell to get to the real ressources, but they don't need guns. They'll just buy their way in.
Like I said, they already have. Unless you can think of any major oil/mining/forestry companies that aren't controlled by some American parent corp. And (too lazy to Google for the CSIS report now) the Chinese have a big steak in a lot of our financial and high tech companies as well, apparently.
They don't want a war. They know they'll lose. The US is an economic power.
Because who won back in 1812? Yeah, I thought so.
Right, because nothing has changed in the almost two hundred years since then. We've still got the backing of the world's largest empire and the US is still an insular little country in the process of organizing itself. The only reason the US hasn't invaded is because it doesn't have to. If we ever get a spine and stand up for ourselves and demand more money for our resources, they will - though chances are it will be little more than walking into Ottawa, inducing a bit of regime change, and saying "What now, Canada?"
And Russia would not invade either. Invasion would give clearance for the EU to occupy. What, you thought I was going to say the US? No, not today. There is something unsettling about the EU. With the US we know invasion is unlikely.
Occupy who? Us? I'd get out my Socialist Overlords welcoming kit if the idea weren't so laughable. They'd spend too much time bickering over which nation gets to invade which province to actually do anything.
And as far as invading Russia, that's suicide and the EU knows it very well. They're dependent on Russia for a big chunk of their energy needs. Not just oil but natural gas. If the EU does anything major against Russia's wishes, a very large chunk of their population will freeze their asses in the winter, and a lot of other people will face brownouts as those folks scramble to replace natural gas with electricity. Massive internal shortages are not the sort of thing you want when waging a war and already exporting a big chunk of your industrial capacity in the form of materiel. Oh, that and Russian military doctrine doesn't really prohibit the use of nukes - crossing the Russian border gets your regiments vaporized with small tactical weapons. Actually mushing through to Moscow or St. Petersburg and doing damage is a good way to have your capital cities pulverized into fine dust and set ablaze from a far.
Slashdot Mirror
He know's that's illegal, doesn't he?
His dad's lawyer clearly doesn't specialize in criminal law.
Yeah, OK. I'm a retard. I had my camera pointed a tad differently in one of the screenshots I was comparing (which were admitadely made to brag about my new monitor and not to actually do any other sort of serious comparison between the two :D ) and it was clipping against something which made the effective camera range different (I've got my max camera range tweaked higher than what the WoW interface normally allows so this happens a lot). I still don't consider it something that needs to be fixed like the other poster does, it's just the way it is. I thought he meant the HUD was clipping off the screen or the text was nonuniformly stretched and unreadable or something, two problems I recently had to fix in a game I work on and which definitely fit the definition of broken.
What? I've got a standard monitor and a widescreen next to each other and it works perfectly on either of them. The HUD doesn't fall off the edges of the screen and I can see just as much vertically at a given zoom factor...
What I meant to say (and sorry if this wasn't clear), is that art (music, a painting) is inherently classifiable as art where a video game is inherently not classifiable as art.
What now? Music is always art? What about advertising jingles? Elevator music? Same goes for painting. Some of it is art, and some pieces are on the same level as my vacation photos (probably because they were made for the same purpose). Try digital painting - are the file and folder icons art? How about the Windows Logo? And if digital painting is not art then there's probably a host of people over on deviantart.com and cgsociety.com that want to have a word with you...
I like the cut of your jib, Slashdotter.
Say that again, but with cars instead.
The Myst series: Some of the most fantastic and beautifully rendered worlds in any game. Themes of family bonds and betrayal. Ridiculously good music that while not as technically complex as a classical symphony can and does evoke strong emotion just the same, especially when paired with the strange loneliness of the worlds within those games.
Braid: Fantastic visual art. A deeply human story about a search for the unattainable, scattered throughout in bits of excellent prose. Puzzles that leave you with a sense of awe at the raw ingenuity of the thing.
God of War (I and II, haven't played the PSP one): Again, beautifully rendered worlds. Gameplay, imagery, and a story that explore brutality, insanity, anger, the thirst for revenge, all set within the framework of a quest for glorious redemption.
Yes, many games are just there for the raw entertainment value. But then again a lot of visual art is just advertising, and a lot of "literature" is just cheap supermarket trash (as you yourself have pointed out). How does that make entire medium non-art, while the existence of trashy fiction doesn't do the same to all novels, for instance?
And yes, many of the people that play games are in it just for the entertainment of shooting a few bad guys and bragging about their high score. I'd even go on to say that in those cases where a game is really art, most of its players will fail to take the time to appreciate, really appreciate what it is that they're looking at. But then again most of the people I saw at the Louvre were just there to take pictures that they could brag about to their friends (particularly the clusterfuck of idiots in front of the Mona Lisa), and I ended up being one of a very few people who moved through slowly, looking at everything, stopping occasionally to stare at something particularly striking.
The fact that you've never looked carefully at what makes up a video game (if you've looked at one at all, that is), and then sat back and taken it in as a whole doesn't even begin to mean that no game anywhere has ever had any significant artistic merit at all.
That isn't always a reasonable expectation. Hospitals are an excellent example of the problem with personal information and IT staff. Most industries can't afford to just hire more IT people because it would help. The groups that will get murdered by this kind of punishment aren't the big megacorps with lawyer hordes. It will be the smaller places that can't afford the extra staff and horde of lawyers.
I had a whole two paragraphs written out on how this could be avoided but after three drafts it's pretty clear that there isn't any way to make criminal charges scale well from small business to megacorp. I'd say leave it at a fine that scales with the data loss. If a company can't figure out how much data it can afford to keep reasonably secured, given the liability of not securing it, and gather that much and no more then, well, tough. Reserve criminal charges for the most extreme cases of outright negligence. There have to be some consequences for mishandling data, otherwise you're just begging for more stupidity.
The megacorps will release the lawyer horde or burn their own IT staff and noone that matters will really feel any pain for the fuckup.
That's a general problem with all sorts of law. The fact that we've set up a system that tends to sell justice to whoever paid more for his lawyers is something that has to be dealt with everywhere. I still don't like the of not punishing damaging behavior. I've been to countries where corporations aren't prosecuted for anything and that was bad enough that I just hate seeing our society move in that direction...
That said, a great deal of the personal information stuff is also on the onus of the individual as well.
Largely true. And in most cases I agree with you that yes, the individual should take more responsibility. However I despise the fact that we live in a world where abstract legal entities can get away with things that I as a person would be jailed for. If I have to be responsible, so should businesses - of all sizes.
The notion that we should hold everyone else but ourselves responsible is a growing trend in all aspects of modern American life.
Not even that. The notion that we should hold nobody responsible is the growing trend, and that's pretty scary. It's one thing for everyone to accuse everyone else of making them fuck up. It's quite another when there isn't any follow-through on the accusations and years go by with nothing being done. That seems to be how all levels of government and, from what I've seen, most of big business seems to operate these days.
My real irritation comes from the "we require credit cards". But, again, as irritating of a policy as that is if people actually gave a shit that policy would have died out when it resulted in lost business, instead, people whip out the plastic. We dug our own grave by giving up our personal information to anyone who asked, and now we are crying because the people we gave our information to lost it.
Except that if people boycotted hotels (which require credit card info to make a reservation) you'd see massive losses in everything from airlines to the local restaurants until A) the hotels notice they've lost a lot of business, B) they change their policies and get the word out and C) people hear about it and start trusting them again. The problem with trusting the market to fix itself is that the fixing is often a very painful process that involves large segments crashing and having to be rebuilt. And if you meant people not whipping out the plastic in the first place way back when it was first introduced, before every business started demanding all sorts of information, well, did identity theft even exist as something the average person had to worry about back then? How would people have known that things would get this bad. Anyone saying so would have sounded like a total crackpot, at the time.
Yes video games are art (see Braid). Yes, you can make artistic statements in video games. You can make all sorts of statements in games. No, all video games are not good art (the same applies to paintings, books, and movies). And no, you do not have any sort of right to a warm reception whatsoever for your work. Just like with paintings books and movies (fancy that). If your "statement" makes your game unfun or offensive then, well, suck it up, you broke your own shit. It's not our fault for "not understanding" your well-obfuscated intent.
That out of the way, I have to agree with the parent that it's stupid debating the whole "games as art" thing in the first place. We don't question whether movies are art when someone makes a film denying the Holocaust. What the hell is it with all these "controversies" we get lately (here, in blogs, in political discourse, in the MSM)? Are we really trying so hard to be "nuanced" that we have to dump illogical statements into every other sentence just to be interesting?
Although, this gives me another item for my list of "things to do if I suddenly become a god": have my prophet spout subtle logical fallacies and then laugh it up as the idiot humans get upset, and waste a bunch of time or do damage to themselves, and then finally figure it out and say, "hey, wait a minute, that doesn't even make sense!"
I'm sorry...so you expect that staff of 4 people to do penetration testing to that degree on every application installed?
No. I expect a company with only four guys in IT to either hire some more staff or simply restrict itself to storing as little personal information as possible for as short a time as permitted.
Names and Addresses are hardly "private" information.
True, but most people would be pretty upset if the local porn shop "lost" purchase records that could easily be associated with names and addresses. Heck, how about records showing that the owner of 123 Rob Me While I'm Away Drive goes on a two day business trip on the first of every month - that's conceivably something you could glean from hotel records. That's the sort of stuff I was thinking of.
Wonder why healthcare costs so fucking much? [snip] The problem needs to be fixed, not just punished.
See, this is the thing that needs to be fixed before anything else can be fixed when it comes to big business: the executives responsible for company policy can get away with murder and people think that's normal. You're right, it's not reasonable to fire random IT peons for a random data leak. It is reasonable to audit the company and let them off the hook if the (we'd hope) independent auditors determine the company did whatever they could. But if they find that random sales people are walking around with 400,000 unencrypted customer profiles on their laptops then fine the company and bring the manager that OK'd putting those records there and the one that denied the request to buy/implement appropriate security measures before a judge.
Sure...while we are at it lets put a cop in jail every time someone in their city gets mugged, murdered, raped, etc.
I don't think that's what's being suggested here. The idea is to punish companies for negligence, not for any random losses. They're not saying put a random cop in jail every time a crime occurs, they're saying that if a cop could have reasonably done something to prevent the crime (like the other poster's example of leaving the jail unlocked and a murderer getting out), then that particular cop should be punished.
Why should I spend time in jail or face fines personally because Vendor X couldn't be bothered to employ better programmers or test their stuff.
If you can't be bothered to do some research and assure yourself to within a reasonable doubt that Vendor X has secured his product, then maybe you shouldn't be storing my name, address, phone number, credit card info, and shopping habits in their system - no? I have no issue with companies storing anonymous shopping habits in insecure systems because all they want to do is some simple data mining to optimize their advertising/stocking policies a bit, but if they're going to be putting info that could hurt me if in the wrong hands in that database they should damn well be liable for it, or they should have on hand evidence that they had reasonable assurances from the vendor that the data would be safe, which passes the liability on to the vendor.
Or maybe I go to jail because some worker brought in an infected USB photo frame.
Why is that worker allowed to plug a USB photo frame (or anything IT can't vouch for, really) into a workstation which you (the company) presumably own? Why does that workstation have my name and address on it in a form that the virus can send home?
That said...I think there should be something to "encourage" companies to actually invest the resources in protecting that data, or just to stop collecting it. Seems to me not collecting it is far easier and more viable in many many cases.
Simple. Make them liable for each and every record they lose. Let them know that a lost name costs $x, a lost address $y, with a multiplier of Z if that info can be linked to other leaked damaging (though not necessarily personal) records. Let there be exceptions for companies that obviously did everything that they could to secure info (as you say, there are cases that nobody could have anticipated and that shouldn't be punished). That way the companies get a fairly simple choice: pay for proper security, or pay the (steep) fines when someone loses a laptop on a subway.
We read the same two short stories in English class (among many others from other genres, of course). I can still remember sitting quietly for about an hour after reading these, just absorbing what I'd just read and thinking about it. Actually, the thing that really struck me was that even the kids that were usually far too cool to be seen caring about English (as if the study of the language we communicate in could possibly be worth their while) got visibly creeped out by "The Veldt".
We had a wonderful high school sophomore English teacher who introduced us to this and many other works.
Same.
Bradbury is a hacker of the written word.
Amen.
Sorry, I get pissed when I see people trivializing the work we've put into Gallium.
I didn't mean to do that at all, and I didn't even realize I had. I kind of assumed it was general knowledge that display drivers are a bitch to build and maintain. What I was saying about GL is that the way the spec is written it does nothing to make a difficult job any easier.
My main point was that the IHV's aren't going to go to the effort of implementing any API without some assurance that someone will use it and make something that drives up demand for their hardware. DX is backed by Microsoft. GL has history and an application base. The thought is that we could get an OpenGL/DX killer, but only if the OSS community were to build it, and then use it in some killer app that demonstrates its potential. I mentioned Gallium because writing a thin API layer on top of that is going to be a hell of a lot easier than coding directly to (say) AMD's hardware specs. Typing up a new spec and hoping is, as the parent to my original post said, unlikely to accomplish anything.
And as far as contributing to Gallium goes, if I weren't in the middle of a massive crunch period right now I'd be looking pretty hard at contributing to D3D9 (or close enough) on Linux, if that's seriously a possibility (I have no idea what MS's patents/license restrictions say about the subject). Certainly something to look at during any free time I find...
You're right. I'm not a Gallium contributor. The most I've done with Mesa is trace into it a little ways to analyze GL errors - though what I did see there struck me as a pain in the ass to maintain (Enable was huge and managed all sorts of dirty bits that I assume are checked in a fair number of places, and BindTexture was full of special cases if I remember correctly). But I'm not sure I'm parsing the second sentence as you intend me to.
Are you saying writing driver code is trivial? I'm used to the low-level PS2 (DMA chain) and the original XBOX (push-buffer) APIs, and even those were a bitch to work with when it comes to all the corner cases (especially since the only error code you get at that level is a lack of output). Ah yes, the joys of compiling fixed-function style material descriptions into shader/VU code, and then making the damn thing work with any of the dozen input layouts in our data... Is that actually supposed to be a simple task...maintaining that sort of nightmare when the "short circuit this massive chunk of code that sets preconditions for other stuff" extension comes along? I don't see how, but if the answer is yes then feel free to explain it to me (as opposed to just calling me a moron), I'm genuinely interested.
Or are you saying that it is hard, but that I'm not allowed to say so it for some reason?
Microsoft provides Opengl32.dll (or something similar) which handles setting up an OpenGL-based window and has a software implementation of early (pre-1.4, I think) OpenGL. However the software layer is just a fallback. If the display driver advertises OpenGL entry points (and all decent drivers do) Microsoft's DLL handles part of the window setup and hands off everything else to the actual display driver.
If someone were to take Gallium 3D, for example, and write a decent API on top of it, then it's not that far fetched for a few of the IHV's to start supporting it elsewhere. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if some industrious individual in AMD or NV's research department is already doing that.
The thing with OpenGL is that it's obscenely difficult to write a driver that runs well because the API is simply a mess. None of the IHVs are happy to have a performance overhead imposed on them (obviously) but they do it because the only alternative (everyone having their own API) is even worse (unless you're Sony, and even they made an effort to put GL ES on the PS3). Current GL extensions are full of things like "if this is enabled and that extension is implemented and you're drawing an X or a Y (but not a Z) then this function's behavior is changed thusly". Hell, even the core GL spec has a ton of stuff like that in it (glEnable, anyone?). That's pretty much the entire reason for DX's success performance wise - Microsoft rips out whatever the IHVs can't make fast on their current/new cards every time they bump the version number. GL drags along concepts that haven't had silicon dedicated to them in nearly a decade, and all of that has to be supported (read: emulated) in new drivers with every new bit of code wasting cycles checking if it should be in compatibility mode.
I think AMD/ATI and NV would be extremely happy if they could get away from maintaining drivers where the first half of nearly every entry point is a tangle of "has my behavior been modified, if so reroute to alternate implementation 112". And they seem to have learned the "what one implements, we all implement" lesson pretty well (PhysX on AMD/ATI for example) so if a new API is good enough to catch any major IHV's attention, the others are likely to follow.
All I've really seen of the PS3 dev kit is what was on display at GDC. The Sony guys talked about GL ES and NVIDIA's Cg toolchain for shaders, so that's what I posted. This, however, sounds a lot more like what I expected from Sony and is right in line with the PS2 dev kit (emphasis mine):
Sony supply an alternative low level api called libGcm.
If libGcm is what I think it is (macro'd constants to build push buffers + raw DMA access) then pretty much nobody will be using the GL stuff. Coding right to the hardware is what PlayStation development is all about.
The PS3 uses OpenGL ES for basic rendering (GL with all the ancient cruft ripped out) and NVIDIA's Cg for the actual shaders.
The theory is that they didn't think the Russians would risk upsetting the Chinese by letting rip during the olympic opening ceremony. Which was stupid.
I hadn't heard that one yet. Who's theory is this? Please don't tell me this is the official media talking point...
Anyway it was truly foolish for the Georgian government to attack the rebel region if they knew that their army was no match for the Russian forces...If they didn't know, they should leave the office at once. You didn't need to be a expert to understand that.
My guess is they thought the Russians wouldn't dare fight back too hard after the US voiced support for Georgia entering NATO. They probably overestimated what words are worth in western politics.
How does the joke go? Ah yes. "I miss the USSR, because you could always easily identify the truth - everything in Pravda was a lie." It sounds better in Russian, I'm sure.
Can't we impeach him ourselves already?
I'd rather see him hanged until dead, myself. But one step at a time, I suppose.
I'm talking mainly about the exploration/new construction/site repair side of things. The people that get sent out to do this stuff work on obscenely tight schedules (else the company loses the contract) and they tend to push themselves/get pushed too hard for too long. Most people either suffer some sort of back injury or burn out within the first four to six years. The few that don't are manning existing sites (which do observe strict safety standards) or get trained into higher positions at big companies.
To give you an example, my stepdad fixes downhole tools (big heavy metal pipes full of various measuring equipment, for the uninitiated). When he used to do on-site stuff (he now manages a lab) it would typically involve a ten to twelve hour drive to the site, between six and ten hours of work (no breaks, except for waiting for things to boot/measurements to be made), a few hours sleep at the camp and the drive back. That's a quick job. Longer jobs involve two or three weeks of fourteen to sixteen hour days. It's amazing how quick you can burn out doing that for a few years. The guys that clear sites or drill wells or build big rigs, or fix any of that stuff work on the same sort of schedules.
On-site jobs at big established sites are better, but not enough that it's cheap or easy to keep the positions filled. My former roommate is a safety inspector at such sites, and his job is to sit for one to two months at a camp hundreds of kilometers from anything else with a bunch of guys (none of whom get along very well) eating awful food (hard to get anything fresh up there, and the cooks are a joke) driving between nearby wells checking the equipment to make sure things like H2S leaks don't happen. It's ridiculously hard to find people to fill those jobs (especially when exploration offers more money for a "light" two weeks on, one week off job). Safety standards do actually get observed there (still nothing as strict as making a big deal out of a little cut; those gets disinfectant and a bandage - maybe a line in someone's safety report), but the difficulty of finding and retaining decent staff lead to either long days at the understaffed locations, or idiocy at the others (where they lowered the hiring standards to fill the positions).
Safety standards might improve across the board in the future, if the demand for oil drops (yeah, right), but until then it's an absolute clusterfuck as everyone races to find and extract as much as possible in as little time as they can get away with.
I'm going on the stories my stepdad and some of his (and my) friends that have worked up in northern Alberta on oil/mineral recovery projects have told me.
The mud is, mostly as you say, only a meter deep. Trouble is there are patches where it gets very deep, and on the surface they look the same as the rest. Nobody maps these zones out accurately (because that would be stupidly expensive) so it's very risky to go exploring an area that hasn't been driven over yet. I've seen home video of a bulldozer sinking completely out of view. That, apparently, happens a lot when new sites are being set up. Of course I can't point to any real statistics because the companies keep the actual numbers super-secret.
You probably know this bit already, but for those that don't... The cold-related deaths are rarely caused by stupidity. Most are exhaustion or simple injuries. Coat or no coat, you can freeze to death awful fast if you're pinned under the load you were carrying just a minute ago and everyone else is too busy doing whatever their jobs are to remember to wonder where you are. That's rare of course, but it does happen and the companies do get sued over it. Even if perfect safety standards were maintained and nobody died, the sheer difficulty of the work leads to a very high turnover because people are constantly injuring themselves. So not only does any company that works up there have to pay ridiculous wages to get people to sign up to (probably) get badly injured in a few years, they also have to maintain a lot of insurance in case of law suits and project setbacks. The costs of getting this stuff are obscene.
So it comes down to expense. Yep, the Arctic is an expensive place to do stuff. But that's simple economics: if you're showing a profit, it's all good.
Exactly what I was saying. Work is done up there, so it's obviously worth it. But the way some people talk about Canada's resources you'd think that getting them is as simple as stepping out into the yard and picking diamonds out from the dirt in the flower beds. That's not how it works, and anyone that would fight a war to capture that land could have saved themselves a lot of treasure simply buying what we're already selling, because there really isn't any loot just lying around waiting to be loaded onto galleons and taken back home.
The consistent, erroneous belief that Canadians feast on mounds of dead 'baby' seals is attributed to groups like PETA who are, arguably, one of the most inhumane non-governmental organisations in the world.
Hey! Don't tell them that! I like being feared as a savage.
What next? Telling them that the losing team isn't really sacrificed to ancient gods after a hockey game?!
A large nation has been warming up to us the wrong way, and our leader is a moron elected by the western provinces who are so self-centred all they seem to want is to stick their collective penis in Ontario's eye.
As an Albertan I will admit there was a bit of that (though I still voted against the fucker). Trust me, we hate him out here too now. The rush to sell every last scrap of Canada hasn't done him any favors - heck, most of us even miss Cretien and his amusing little adventures. I mean, it's almost cute, looking back on it now, the way he only did little bits of damage without jeopardizing things like, say, what little defense we have left...
Rather I see Harper likely to keep his 4-year term, because Dion is too much of a coward to overturn government and face the west.
As long as his party loses seats I'll be happy. The more hoops they have to jump through to sign their retardation into law, the better.
Sure, it'd be hard as hell to get to the real ressources, but they don't need guns. They'll just buy their way in.
Like I said, they already have. Unless you can think of any major oil/mining/forestry companies that aren't controlled by some American parent corp. And (too lazy to Google for the CSIS report now) the Chinese have a big steak in a lot of our financial and high tech companies as well, apparently.
They don't want a war. They know they'll lose. The US is an economic power.
Because who won back in 1812? Yeah, I thought so.
Right, because nothing has changed in the almost two hundred years since then. We've still got the backing of the world's largest empire and the US is still an insular little country in the process of organizing itself. The only reason the US hasn't invaded is because it doesn't have to. If we ever get a spine and stand up for ourselves and demand more money for our resources, they will - though chances are it will be little more than walking into Ottawa, inducing a bit of regime change, and saying "What now, Canada?"
And Russia would not invade either. Invasion would give clearance for the EU to occupy. What, you thought I was going to say the US? No, not today. There is something unsettling about the EU. With the US we know invasion is unlikely.
Occupy who? Us? I'd get out my Socialist Overlords welcoming kit if the idea weren't so laughable. They'd spend too much time bickering over which nation gets to invade which province to actually do anything.
And as far as invading Russia, that's suicide and the EU knows it very well. They're dependent on Russia for a big chunk of their energy needs. Not just oil but natural gas. If the EU does anything major against Russia's wishes, a very large chunk of their population will freeze their asses in the winter, and a lot of other people will face brownouts as those folks scramble to replace natural gas with electricity. Massive internal shortages are not the sort of thing you want when waging a war and already exporting a big chunk of your industrial capacity in the form of materiel. Oh, that and Russian military doctrine doesn't really prohibit the use of nukes - crossing the Russian border gets your regiments vaporized with small tactical weapons. Actually mushing through to Moscow or St. Petersburg and doing damage is a good way to have your capital cities pulverized into fine dust and set ablaze from a far.