You lot have video cameras recording every innocuous moment of your lives
Wow, paranoid much? Most city centres have cameras in the shopping streets that are run by companies on behalf of local council (not the central government). They help identify muggers, thieves, vandals and thugs. They help the law enforcement know which way a criminal has gone (rather than them turning up far too late after someone got round to reporting the incident with the criminal long gone and out of sight). Crimewatch UK tend to use shots from CCTV and help catch criminals. Shops may then have their own internal CCTV for evidence against shoplifters - just like convenience stores in the US.
They're not perfect, but they're a lot more useful than letting any Joe Public who can't be trusted not to hurt himself with a spoon have a gun!
They're not just requiring ID if you look under 25 - they're requiring it if you look like you might possibly be under 25, and this is official policy. Apparently, the shops send around oldish-looking 24 year olds to check, and any cashier who doesn't ID them gets in trouble.
They're doing it badly near me, then. I only just recently turned 25 and I don't generally look my age, but I've bought a alcohol a couple of times and they didn't bother IDing me. Once was a bottle of wine and once was a bottle of Bacardi.
What do you use to identify yourself? Social Security card? Driver's license?
ID tends to be something like a driver's license or passport. Other measures can be used (e.g. by banks) if you don't drive and haven't been on holiday. Similarly the Government in the UK has some fairly simple ID cards for teenagers who want to prove their age to buy alcohol but don't have a driver's license or passport.
How hard it is to forge one of these?
It's not impossible, and it all depends on how hard the passport etc is actually checked, but there are all the normal measures of holograms and watermarks.
Anyway, what's all the fuss about ID cards?
It's generally:
a) the extra crap that the government wants to store on there for no good reason b) the extra crap that the government wants to store in a database (for probably quite bad reasons) c) the extra expense to get said extra information d) the fact that the main argument is "do it or teh terrorororoists winz!" e) the fact that so much money has been poured in to them and they're obviously so broken f) the fact that it'll become enforceable to display your ID, with the next step being "no ID on the spot? that's a crime"
You're allowed to buy alcohol from 18 in the UK, but they're now asking for ID if you look under 25. Also, my 35 year old sister-in-law has been asked for ID several times in Colorado, USA (where she lives). It's not just the young 'uns who need ID;)
Yes, DRM is different to ID, but they're making what appears to be a very similar mistake by assuming that they can give all of their important information to a user (e.g. lock and key or biometrics etc) and assuming that nothing bad can happen with it.
The best idea with keeping information secure is to not give it away, but the ID cards don't seem to follow that idea in the slightest.
The DRM thinking: "I know, lets give people the lock and the key and hope they don't break it" The "cram stuff on a smart chip" thinking: "I know, lets give people all of the data that we wrote there in some way and assume that they can't change it"
So much for "never trust a user's input" (which should cover anything that the user has access to).
You'd have thought that some kind of checksum on top of the data might have helped a bit. At least then you need a large stash of valid cards to reverse engineer the checksum algorithm.
Not only that, but check the first two "other references" in the patent:
Ayers, Larry, "AbiWord's Potential", Linux Gazette, Issue 43, Jul. 1999, pp. 1-4. cited by examiner . "XML Schema for AbiWord Markup Language", downloaded from http://www.abisource.com/awml.xsd, May 27, 2000, pp. 1-3. cited by examiner.
They specifically reference an article on AbiWord and AbiWord's XML schema! And it's cited by the examiner, so surely that means they found the prior art and said "this is relevant". Did they get confused by it having "Word" in the app name and assume it was an MS product?
Themes sound promising in terms of not having the ugly Chrome look standing out like a sore thumb against the rest of my GTK themed apps, but 64-bit is the killer. That plus the fact that they can't be bothered to make a simple RPM of it and only want to deliver a DEB. It's a shame, because I'd be interested to see how well it works and how much faster it is, especially on my quad core at work.
I think they know that, since MySpace is a huge centre of crap.
Granted, it tends to be self-contained rather than aggressive (so it is crap you land in rather than crap that is thrown at you) but it's still home to a shitload of crap;)
That depends on the static ads. Put static ads for Coke or whatever in to WoW or Warhammer Online or any other fantasy setting and you've ruined it. Put it in to some street racing game on billboards etc and it just looks like part of the scenery that makes it more real.
At the end of the day, I'd object to just about any "delivered from the Net" advertising. If they really want to put in tactful product placement at development time and get paid for then that's fine, but getting paid per impression while I play the game after I've already paid for it is pushing it too far.
Sometimes when I get up in the morning I'll notice the computer has been rebooted due to some hotfix being applied, but other than that I avoid shutting down.
That's good if you've got the money to burn, but some of us would rather not leave our home computers running for 20 or more hours per day just to make the "time to use" quicker for the four hours per day (at most) that we actually use it;) I also trust a shutdown more than a hibernate because it'll clear any remaining cruft that the apps have left in memory.
If I did shut down, wouldn't I just walk away?
You've obviously never had a shutdown fail to complete because of a dialog saying "could not shut down X, terminate?"
So, there are things where if you win a game, that's how you gain experience points. If you win against a higher level opponent, you get more experience points; if you bottom feed and you take advantage of lower-level players, you don't get as much, and so on.
Isn't that a somewhat old and fairly standard team rating/ranking system? I'm fairly sure that various sports games already do that kind of system so that you can't do as well by just beating low teams.
If not then half of Games Workshop's sideline table-top 'skirmish' games already do it, and Blood Bowl has already been made in to a game (once with license, and before that without a license).
You might want to check the difference between "can" and "want". In that example you can release it by opening your code up as well, you just don't want to;)
And laying out data in a fixed form where that data is just a collection of facts and not a novel or original work is a creative work?
This seems completely stupid. I can see what they're trying for (stopping people copying their pages wholesale) but copyright in its strict sense doesn't seem like it should apply here as the works aren't creative.
Except that that's not what the summary mentions. The summary is talking about people hacking websites to get more "good" links to their site, rather than having to rely on standard link farms that are then blacklisted. It's like comment spam, only with hacking of servers instead.
That depends on how they do the digital distribution. If they did DRM-riddled downloads then a) I wouldn't buy much because I've only got a 2Mbps line with a 2GB/mo cap and b) I would buy even less because I didn't own the damned thing (especially if it did online authentication as well).
I think it's more important to make them good than to make them downloadable. Making them good will bring in customers whether they're downloadable or not. Making crap games downloadable just gives you more ways to get crap games. More downloads should be cheaper than the physical product as well since you don't have the same overheads and generally have more restrictions.
I've heard about it for a while now - it's not overly new news in the UK.
At least they're not wasting resources on Vista/7 - they're using Windows XP, which is nice and secure(!) As the El Reg article points out, though, at least the submarine is generally a stand-alone network, which should protect it from a lot of vulnerabilities (although not all)
Okay, so there are two conditions: time and criticality. Still, the fact that it is "only" 9.1.0 to 9.1.2 doesn't mean that it shouldn't be updated, but if it is a short period since the patch release and it is a minor patch then the company may have website update policies that mean the new download is pushed to the web server later than the patch.
If the webmaster had ever watched an end user try to use a computer, he'd Stop Doing That.
That assumes that most corporate webmaster a) care about that kind of thing (which seems unlikely when Flash is involved in many sites), b) have any control over that kind of thing (which seems unlikely because Marketing have bad habits of doing things like decreeing pixel perfect designs that webmasters must follow) and c) are allowed to link to anything that isn't from a big corporation.
While I can imagine it would confuse people who don't know enough about computers, just having a link to an unknown file type could end up even worse as they sit there going "well that's a crap site - I've got the document but it won't open/looks like it is corrupt".
Perhaps I should have made that text a little different and gone for:
[insert link to document here]
If you don't already have it installed, you'll need Adobe Reader [insert link] to view the document
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, paranoid much? Most city centres have cameras in the shopping streets that are run by companies on behalf of local council (not the central government). They help identify muggers, thieves, vandals and thugs. They help the law enforcement know which way a criminal has gone (rather than them turning up far too late after someone got round to reporting the incident with the criminal long gone and out of sight). Crimewatch UK tend to use shots from CCTV and help catch criminals. Shops may then have their own internal CCTV for evidence against shoplifters - just like convenience stores in the US.
They're not perfect, but they're a lot more useful than letting any Joe Public who can't be trusted not to hurt himself with a spoon have a gun!
They're doing it badly near me, then. I only just recently turned 25 and I don't generally look my age, but I've bought a alcohol a couple of times and they didn't bother IDing me. Once was a bottle of wine and once was a bottle of Bacardi.
I think that's the tact they take in the UK. Something like "If you're luck enough to look under 25 we have to ask for ID" on the 'official' posters.
ID tends to be something like a driver's license or passport. Other measures can be used (e.g. by banks) if you don't drive and haven't been on holiday. Similarly the Government in the UK has some fairly simple ID cards for teenagers who want to prove their age to buy alcohol but don't have a driver's license or passport.
It's not impossible, and it all depends on how hard the passport etc is actually checked, but there are all the normal measures of holograms and watermarks.
It's generally:
a) the extra crap that the government wants to store on there for no good reason
b) the extra crap that the government wants to store in a database (for probably quite bad reasons)
c) the extra expense to get said extra information
d) the fact that the main argument is "do it or teh terrorororoists winz!"
e) the fact that so much money has been poured in to them and they're obviously so broken
f) the fact that it'll become enforceable to display your ID, with the next step being "no ID on the spot? that's a crime"
You're allowed to buy alcohol from 18 in the UK, but they're now asking for ID if you look under 25. Also, my 35 year old sister-in-law has been asked for ID several times in Colorado, USA (where she lives). It's not just the young 'uns who need ID ;)
Yes, DRM is different to ID, but they're making what appears to be a very similar mistake by assuming that they can give all of their important information to a user (e.g. lock and key or biometrics etc) and assuming that nothing bad can happen with it.
The best idea with keeping information secure is to not give it away, but the ID cards don't seem to follow that idea in the slightest.
Ditto for DRM.
The DRM thinking: "I know, lets give people the lock and the key and hope they don't break it"
The "cram stuff on a smart chip" thinking: "I know, lets give people all of the data that we wrote there in some way and assume that they can't change it"
So much for "never trust a user's input" (which should cover anything that the user has access to).
You'd have thought that some kind of checksum on top of the data might have helped a bit. At least then you need a large stash of valid cards to reverse engineer the checksum algorithm.
Or "You want to buy alcohol*? Can I see some ID? Can you prove that's your real age and not a faked infallible ID card?" :)
* Proper phrase inserted since I'm English ;)
Not only that, but check the first two "other references" in the patent:
They specifically reference an article on AbiWord and AbiWord's XML schema! And it's cited by the examiner, so surely that means they found the prior art and said "this is relevant". Did they get confused by it having "Word" in the app name and assume it was an MS product?
Themes sound promising in terms of not having the ugly Chrome look standing out like a sore thumb against the rest of my GTK themed apps, but 64-bit is the killer. That plus the fact that they can't be bothered to make a simple RPM of it and only want to deliver a DEB. It's a shame, because I'd be interested to see how well it works and how much faster it is, especially on my quad core at work.
No, but then I never turned it off in the first place ;)
A slideshow? A SLIDESHOW? Oh, what I wouldn't give to have a slideshow. Bloody favouritism.
I've got Firefox 3.5.2 on Fedora 11 and it won't even get beyond a black page with "Loading" on it and lots of brief "transferring data" messages :\
I think they know that, since MySpace is a huge centre of crap.
Granted, it tends to be self-contained rather than aggressive (so it is crap you land in rather than crap that is thrown at you) but it's still home to a shitload of crap ;)
That depends on the static ads. Put static ads for Coke or whatever in to WoW or Warhammer Online or any other fantasy setting and you've ruined it. Put it in to some street racing game on billboards etc and it just looks like part of the scenery that makes it more real.
At the end of the day, I'd object to just about any "delivered from the Net" advertising. If they really want to put in tactful product placement at development time and get paid for then that's fine, but getting paid per impression while I play the game after I've already paid for it is pushing it too far.
That's good if you've got the money to burn, but some of us would rather not leave our home computers running for 20 or more hours per day just to make the "time to use" quicker for the four hours per day (at most) that we actually use it ;) I also trust a shutdown more than a hibernate because it'll clear any remaining cruft that the apps have left in memory.
You've obviously never had a shutdown fail to complete because of a dialog saying "could not shut down X, terminate?"
Isn't that a somewhat old and fairly standard team rating/ranking system? I'm fairly sure that various sports games already do that kind of system so that you can't do as well by just beating low teams.
If not then half of Games Workshop's sideline table-top 'skirmish' games already do it, and Blood Bowl has already been made in to a game (once with license, and before that without a license).
You might want to check the difference between "can" and "want". In that example you can release it by opening your code up as well, you just don't want to ;)
And laying out data in a fixed form where that data is just a collection of facts and not a novel or original work is a creative work?
This seems completely stupid. I can see what they're trying for (stopping people copying their pages wholesale) but copyright in its strict sense doesn't seem like it should apply here as the works aren't creative.
Except that that's not what the summary mentions. The summary is talking about people hacking websites to get more "good" links to their site, rather than having to rely on standard link farms that are then blacklisted. It's like comment spam, only with hacking of servers instead.
Poor guy. For his sake I hope he's bound, gagged and preferably sedated as well rather than having to be subjected to that!
That'd be why they're using Wine under Linux instead of full Windows VMs ;)
That depends on how they do the digital distribution. If they did DRM-riddled downloads then a) I wouldn't buy much because I've only got a 2Mbps line with a 2GB/mo cap and b) I would buy even less because I didn't own the damned thing (especially if it did online authentication as well).
I think it's more important to make them good than to make them downloadable. Making them good will bring in customers whether they're downloadable or not. Making crap games downloadable just gives you more ways to get crap games. More downloads should be cheaper than the physical product as well since you don't have the same overheads and generally have more restrictions.
I've heard about it for a while now - it's not overly new news in the UK.
At least they're not wasting resources on Vista/7 - they're using Windows XP, which is nice and secure(!) As the El Reg article points out, though, at least the submarine is generally a stand-alone network, which should protect it from a lot of vulnerabilities (although not all)
Okay, so there are two conditions: time and criticality. Still, the fact that it is "only" 9.1.0 to 9.1.2 doesn't mean that it shouldn't be updated, but if it is a short period since the patch release and it is a minor patch then the company may have website update policies that mean the new download is pushed to the web server later than the patch.
That assumes that most corporate webmaster a) care about that kind of thing (which seems unlikely when Flash is involved in many sites), b) have any control over that kind of thing (which seems unlikely because Marketing have bad habits of doing things like decreeing pixel perfect designs that webmasters must follow) and c) are allowed to link to anything that isn't from a big corporation.
While I can imagine it would confuse people who don't know enough about computers, just having a link to an unknown file type could end up even worse as they sit there going "well that's a crap site - I've got the document but it won't open/looks like it is corrupt".
Perhaps I should have made that text a little different and gone for: