Remember the (admittedly not very many) times when extremely steep sales at some stores have prompted mass rushes? I would expect yes, far more often it is the other way around, but depending on how you define "mass panic", they have indeed occurred when people are trying to get to, and not from, a place. And if you're operating a chain, I would think this new model might be useful to avoid riots in your parking lots.
Some people are stupid. Often times, people will be more afraid of peer pressure -- what people will think -- than actual risk of physical harm. Look at the people who die trying to reenact stunts from Jackass. If mocking people who die in idiotic ways prevents even a very low number of extra people from offing themselves in similar ways, then it has accomplished something.
Except that in this case, not only do we have a name and other details that are commonly missing, the victim's wife was initially arrested on murder charges, then released due to lack of evidence (they would have had to prove she knew it would kill him, or would be dangerous -- she says he did it often). So while many of these are borderline urban legendish, this particular one is well documented.
And if this story doesn't deserve a Darwin award, I can't imagine what would. (Not that I hold the whole Darwin Award thing in terribly high regard, but come on -- this one clearly is a winner.)
They cannot create their own record label. Apple (the record company) settled with Apple (the computer maker) over just exactly this issue, and as a result Apple *can't*. In fact, Apple (the record company) sued over iTunes, and lost. But if Jobs tries to start an actual label, I doubt very much that it would be possible; it MIGHT fly if he wanted to give up the Apple name for the subsidiary, but I can't see why he would want to do that.
OK, sure. Funky stuff happens, polls are imperfect measuring mechanisms, OK fine. Please explain why there is a consistent mismatch between districts with the Diebold gear, and districts without. One might expect "funky stuff" to NOT have such a striking pattern, but instead be more or less uniform.
You pay for paid access with a stolen credit card. You have a mule login and buy a bunch of in-game currency with the dirty money. The mule somehow gets the money to a second mule (old-fashioned drops, briefcase exchanges, or more elaborate things like phony sales of in-game items at inflated values). The second mule pulls money out. All traffic that touches Linden Labs' servers is run thru proxies -- we're dealing with cybercrooks, they have access to an enormous legion of machines via renting a botnet.
Sure, Linden Labs will have records of where all the money went (if they really do track whenever money changes hands) so they will be able to figure out who your mules are -- but they're dummy accounts with deadend IP addresses and compromised accounts/ All you'll really get is the mule pulling money out, and those are changed frequently. If Linden Labs isn't US-only, you just make sure the sender and recipient mules are using credit cards tied to accounts in different nations, so it's not as easy to investigate.
It's far from perfect, but it would be a serviceable link in a chain of laundering transactions. The point of money laundering isn't that once it's uncovered, it still can't be traced -- it's that it is hard to pick out from background noise, and this has an added benefit of crossing jurisdictional lines. You know those work-from-home "job postings"? Often those are for mules. You get sent checks or something (say, the victims of ebay scams send you checks), you deposit and then remit 80% via something like Western Union to a foreign country. Western Union is going to know about as much about transfers done thru it as Linden Labs does about SL-money transfers.
Second Life by itself is a lousy money laundering system, but if it's "check cashed -> mule moves money to Denmark thru Second Life -> mule 2 Western Unions to Hong Kong ->... then that's totally different.
Second Life currency has an official exchange rate. It is directly convertible to real currency. If I run a bank in SL, there's a very real argument that the banking regulations apply to me (or, if they don't, that they should).
One -- you might object 'it's not real currency' -- the response to this is simple: define currency. What makes money valuable to anyone? Why can't I create Dimms, and start using them as if they were legal tender? Companies used to do that, they'd pay employees in company money, run company stores, the works. As I understand it, the answer is that money has value because a large number of people agree that it does**. So the Linden Labs currency can be fixed against real money by fiat, which goes a long way towards making it real money.
Two -- It has an official exchange rate; it can be converted to and from real money. If SL banks don't have to follow banking rules because SL currency isn't real, how long until big-name banks try to pull a fast one? Your bank account isn't actual money, no, you're not depositing anything. You don't have an account balance, no no no -- instead you're now the proud owner of Bank of Ameribucks! Oh, look, all of a sudden we're not "banks" anymore so we don't have to follow all those pesky rules. Sure, they happen to convert to dollars at a fixed rate, but they're not "currency" so it's perfectly fine!
If a loophole like point 2) existed, someone would try to take advantage of it; therefore I'm quite sure that banking regulations apply to anyone who deals in anything that even looks like currency. IANAL, but I'd be willing to bet that the banking regulations as written technically cover entities storing accounts in Second Life dollars in most places; nobody cared before because -- well, actually, the Second Lifers cared, but nobody had ever caused a problem before, so it was ignored.
They couldn't REALLY do that. Not and live up to their assigned responsibilities. The school administration ultimately answers to the parents; parents send their kids there expecting the school to conduct its affairs in a certain way. If enough parents don't like something about how the school rears their kids, guess what, the school will cave or it will go under. While some of the parents of the kids featured in that photo might not object, by far the majority will.
So really, they couldn't ignore it. Someone slipped them a CD with photographic proof, the cat's out of the bag. If I'm whoever sent that CD, and the school tries to ignore it -- I grab a copy of the student directory, and mail a copy of the CD to each and every students' house, addressed to the parents, with a nice letter explaining the administration not only knows about this, but is actively covering it up. And if I REALLY want to be nasty, I also send one to the channel 5 news, and the channel 7 news, and MADD, and the local state's attorney's office (among others), with the same insinuation -- 'School supports underage drinking!' tends to get headlines. {Not that I personally would do such a thing myself -- but whoever sent that CD obviously wanted to get these kids in trouble.)
Like it or not, avoiding this kind of political firestorm is part of the job of running any organization, schools are no different; they're supposed to be teaching the kids, not focusing on managing PR disasters. So no, the school administration can't ignore this.
> The mesh-network is an idea so immediately obvious that I'm wondering how comes no one developed it before,
Why was the printing press invented in 1436? For centuries people copied books by hand, or not at all. The idea of a printing press should have been invented a very long time before 1436, yet it wasn't -- despite very strong incentive (defect-free reproduction of important documents like the Bible, laws, etc.)
It really is true that many of the best inventions are obvious only in hindsight.
The last generation was teetering along very dangerously heading towards collapse **. If you were following Japanese market data, the Japanese companies were very worried about an ongoing trend where total games sales were slowly but steadily decreasing. They were very worried that people were just... abandoning the hobby, that their total userbase was permanently eroding. Others were of the opinion it was generation fatigue, that a new console generation was needed because people were starting to get burned out on their PS2's.
I haven't seen that many stories about this period -- all the Japanese industry news I get is filtered thru Western news sources -- but I haven't seen ANY stories about that since next-gen hit, and I have seen plenty of stories about gangbuster sales for Nintendo.
** -- Yes, collapse. In a hit-driven market, you need huge sales for the small percent of titles that make you money. If the sales for these big titles go down, it hits everything; and once companies start cutting back to make the financials work, the quality of the product goes down -- and this starts a downward spiral of suck. The industry is like a shark, dependent on continual forward motion or else it will drown. People demand AAA titles; they're horrifically expensive to make. And if everyone started making AA titles instead of AAA, customers would just stop buying -- sales collapse, console makers have to abandon their give-away-razors-to-sell-blades strategy -- then either console prices skyrocket (to make up the profit) or console specs stagnate for a decade while they wait for Moore's Law to make up for the hidden markup.
Perhaps because EA's new CEO used to be involved with these guys who were already running Bioware? He pretty much went EA top manager -> Elevation Partners (owning Bioware) -> running EA.
So I dunno if I'd call that smart, but that could certainly be one reason. Bioware knows firsthand the guy now running EA. Does that mean EA will magically turn awesome? I think EA's problems will continue as long as they think they'll get good work out of slavedriven employees. But it also means Bioware has personal experience that I don't -- so maybe they know something I don't.
Games get delayed for lots of reasons. Setting aside notoriously pathological cases like DNF, games get delayed often because the development needs more time. I for one would much rather wait, and get a better game in the end, than put up with shovelware.
Take Zelda. The developers learned the hard way that hitting the release date was less important than finishing the game. The Wind Waker was in danger of missing its street date... so they cut two dungeons that weren't going to be finished in time. Everyone involved now admits that was a big mistake, which led to Twilight Princess' very long incubation period. Just look at the results -- Twilight Princess knocks the socks off of Wind Waker, and many people feel it took the Zelda 64 formula and perfected it.
Interesting tidbit: after Wind Waker turned out the way it did, the director of the game wanted to let the series end there. This is the guy Miyamoto handed the series off to after he didn't want to be forever tied to it anymore, and he wanted to throw in the towel! (I'd pull out a cite, but I gotta run.)
Yeah. Delays suck. And when it's for a reason other than 'the game needs more time', they REALLY suck. But to just say 'there should never be a delay!' is to ignore the deeper reasons why delays happen, and that would be catastrophic.
This, in and of itself, is a good thing! It was not at all clear that Hot Coffee was going to blow over. Regulation has failed over and over, but this is no guarantee it will fail in the future. If politcos cared enough, they would find a way to make something stick; if they don't give up, one of the laws will stand eventually. Would you like to see games go the way comics did in the 50s?
Put another way -- wouldn't it be something to worry about if it WERE a factor in the Iowa caucuses? Then it's newsworthy that it wasn't despite efforts by some candidates to make it a factor.
> Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product (TFSummary)
Okay, I'll bite. Deciding not to build in a capability is "deliberately disabling" it. Sure, it doesn't play.WMA files. It's not a very good arc welder either (man was that an expensive mistake). And its automatic translation software is much worse than Babelfish. They've got illegal market segmentation agreements! Oh noes!
I suppose that the lawsuit was filed is news, but this suit is going nowhere. It'll get laughed out of court almost immediately.
Some vaccines -- you take it once, you're protected forever. Others wear off eventually. I'm not sure if this is due to the illness evolving, or whether the immune system 'forgets' certain antibodies over time.
If this vaccine is permanent, expect to see it eventually being pushed into vaccination cocktails given to kids. Totally avoids the consent issue because the parents give consent, not the child. Whether this is a good idea or not, I couldn't say, but sooner or later someone at the DEA is gonna think of it.
Parent obviously knows of what they speak. In particular "controlling" is specific legal jargon (see here) so parent obviously has legal training of some sort.
It was mentioned up before, I think it bears repeating here: the two percent figure is a grand total over everything that person does; the study projects about 65% improvement at Wii games versus the 360. It's just that most people don't spend all their time gaming, and other activities still burn more calories, so the 65% boost doesn't actually accomplish as much as you'd think. It's like Amdahl's Law, except backwards.
I tried to track down the original ruling and was unsuccessful. However according to TFA, the judge found that no less than all of the following happened (roughly in this order):
1: TorrentSpy forums openly discuss infringement
2: MPAA files lawsuit
3: Wes Parker (TorrentSpy moderator, admin, it's not quite clear) says 'we need a plan to keep piracy off the forums'
4: Another moderator suggests creating a hidden forum and moving incriminating content there. Wes agrees.
5: Some time later, they begin editing forum posts -- retroactively -- to scrub incriminating parts of the posts.
That is to say, they didn't decide to *stop* the activity. They actively took steps to conceal it, *after* they learned about the suit, and then they actually destroyed (by censoring) the information. There's not a court anywhere in the whole country -- the whole world -- that's going to look on that as anything other than tampering with evidence. And then there's this brilliant exchange:
1: TorrentSpy testifies in court that IP information simply wasn't available
2: MPAA finds evidence TorrentSpy can implement and enforce bans of users by IP address
3: Under oath, a TorrentSpy moderator testifies IPs were logged until April 07 (more than a year after they were sued)
So they said they couldn't get IP addresses at all, no matter what, they simply didn't keep them. The judge ruled that they were lying through their teeth. According to the article, they did have IP addresses -- except conveniently when they were supposed to produce them in court -- and they had been logging them for a year after they were sued. Everything makes sense now: I was wondering why the ruling from the judge directed them to start keeping logs happened. It happened because TorrentSpy tried to snow job the court. Courts really don't like it when you do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the (admittedly not very many) times when extremely steep sales at some stores have prompted mass rushes? I would expect yes, far more often it is the other way around, but depending on how you define "mass panic", they have indeed occurred when people are trying to get to, and not from, a place. And if you're operating a chain, I would think this new model might be useful to avoid riots in your parking lots.
Some people are stupid. Often times, people will be more afraid of peer pressure -- what people will think -- than actual risk of physical harm. Look at the people who die trying to reenact stunts from Jackass. If mocking people who die in idiotic ways prevents even a very low number of extra people from offing themselves in similar ways, then it has accomplished something.
It still doesn't make us very nice people.
Except that in this case, not only do we have a name and other details that are commonly missing, the victim's wife was initially arrested on murder charges, then released due to lack of evidence (they would have had to prove she knew it would kill him, or would be dangerous -- she says he did it often). So while many of these are borderline urban legendish, this particular one is well documented.
And if this story doesn't deserve a Darwin award, I can't imagine what would. (Not that I hold the whole Darwin Award thing in terribly high regard, but come on -- this one clearly is a winner.)
They cannot create their own record label. Apple (the record company) settled with Apple (the computer maker) over just exactly this issue, and as a result Apple *can't*. In fact, Apple (the record company) sued over iTunes, and lost. But if Jobs tries to start an actual label, I doubt very much that it would be possible; it MIGHT fly if he wanted to give up the Apple name for the subsidiary, but I can't see why he would want to do that.
It's so nice to have someone finally fighting the good fight against global warming ...
Why you think the net was born?
OK, sure. Funky stuff happens, polls are imperfect measuring mechanisms, OK fine. Please explain why there is a consistent mismatch between districts with the Diebold gear, and districts without. One might expect "funky stuff" to NOT have such a striking pattern, but instead be more or less uniform.
You pay for paid access with a stolen credit card. You have a mule login and buy a bunch of in-game currency with the dirty money. The mule somehow gets the money to a second mule (old-fashioned drops, briefcase exchanges, or more elaborate things like phony sales of in-game items at inflated values). The second mule pulls money out. All traffic that touches Linden Labs' servers is run thru proxies -- we're dealing with cybercrooks, they have access to an enormous legion of machines via renting a botnet.
... then that's totally different.
Sure, Linden Labs will have records of where all the money went (if they really do track whenever money changes hands) so they will be able to figure out who your mules are -- but they're dummy accounts with deadend IP addresses and compromised accounts/ All you'll really get is the mule pulling money out, and those are changed frequently. If Linden Labs isn't US-only, you just make sure the sender and recipient mules are using credit cards tied to accounts in different nations, so it's not as easy to investigate.
It's far from perfect, but it would be a serviceable link in a chain of laundering transactions. The point of money laundering isn't that once it's uncovered, it still can't be traced -- it's that it is hard to pick out from background noise, and this has an added benefit of crossing jurisdictional lines. You know those work-from-home "job postings"? Often those are for mules. You get sent checks or something (say, the victims of ebay scams send you checks), you deposit and then remit 80% via something like Western Union to a foreign country. Western Union is going to know about as much about transfers done thru it as Linden Labs does about SL-money transfers.
Second Life by itself is a lousy money laundering system, but if it's "check cashed -> mule moves money to Denmark thru Second Life -> mule 2 Western Unions to Hong Kong ->
Second Life currency has an official exchange rate. It is directly convertible to real currency. If I run a bank in SL, there's a very real argument that the banking regulations apply to me (or, if they don't, that they should).
One -- you might object 'it's not real currency' -- the response to this is simple: define currency. What makes money valuable to anyone? Why can't I create Dimms, and start using them as if they were legal tender? Companies used to do that, they'd pay employees in company money, run company stores, the works. As I understand it, the answer is that money has value because a large number of people agree that it does**. So the Linden Labs currency can be fixed against real money by fiat, which goes a long way towards making it real money.
Two -- It has an official exchange rate; it can be converted to and from real money. If SL banks don't have to follow banking rules because SL currency isn't real, how long until big-name banks try to pull a fast one? Your bank account isn't actual money, no, you're not depositing anything. You don't have an account balance, no no no -- instead you're now the proud owner of Bank of Ameribucks! Oh, look, all of a sudden we're not "banks" anymore so we don't have to follow all those pesky rules. Sure, they happen to convert to dollars at a fixed rate, but they're not "currency" so it's perfectly fine!
If a loophole like point 2) existed, someone would try to take advantage of it; therefore I'm quite sure that banking regulations apply to anyone who deals in anything that even looks like currency. IANAL, but I'd be willing to bet that the banking regulations as written technically cover entities storing accounts in Second Life dollars in most places; nobody cared before because -- well, actually, the Second Lifers cared, but nobody had ever caused a problem before, so it was ignored.
** -- Yes, I know, horrible oversimplification.
They couldn't REALLY do that. Not and live up to their assigned responsibilities. The school administration ultimately answers to the parents; parents send their kids there expecting the school to conduct its affairs in a certain way. If enough parents don't like something about how the school rears their kids, guess what, the school will cave or it will go under. While some of the parents of the kids featured in that photo might not object, by far the majority will.
So really, they couldn't ignore it. Someone slipped them a CD with photographic proof, the cat's out of the bag. If I'm whoever sent that CD, and the school tries to ignore it -- I grab a copy of the student directory, and mail a copy of the CD to each and every students' house, addressed to the parents, with a nice letter explaining the administration not only knows about this, but is actively covering it up. And if I REALLY want to be nasty, I also send one to the channel 5 news, and the channel 7 news, and MADD, and the local state's attorney's office (among others), with the same insinuation -- 'School supports underage drinking!' tends to get headlines. {Not that I personally would do such a thing myself -- but whoever sent that CD obviously wanted to get these kids in trouble.)
Like it or not, avoiding this kind of political firestorm is part of the job of running any organization, schools are no different; they're supposed to be teaching the kids, not focusing on managing PR disasters. So no, the school administration can't ignore this.
> The mesh-network is an idea so immediately obvious that I'm wondering how comes no one developed it before,
Why was the printing press invented in 1436? For centuries people copied books by hand, or not at all. The idea of a printing press should have been invented a very long time before 1436, yet it wasn't -- despite very strong incentive (defect-free reproduction of important documents like the Bible, laws, etc.)
It really is true that many of the best inventions are obvious only in hindsight.
The last generation was teetering along very dangerously heading towards collapse **. If you were following Japanese market data, the Japanese companies were very worried about an ongoing trend where total games sales were slowly but steadily decreasing. They were very worried that people were just ... abandoning the hobby, that their total userbase was permanently eroding. Others were of the opinion it was generation fatigue, that a new console generation was needed because people were starting to get burned out on their PS2's.
I haven't seen that many stories about this period -- all the Japanese industry news I get is filtered thru Western news sources -- but I haven't seen ANY stories about that since next-gen hit, and I have seen plenty of stories about gangbuster sales for Nintendo.
** -- Yes, collapse. In a hit-driven market, you need huge sales for the small percent of titles that make you money. If the sales for these big titles go down, it hits everything; and once companies start cutting back to make the financials work, the quality of the product goes down -- and this starts a downward spiral of suck. The industry is like a shark, dependent on continual forward motion or else it will drown. People demand AAA titles; they're horrifically expensive to make. And if everyone started making AA titles instead of AAA, customers would just stop buying -- sales collapse, console makers have to abandon their give-away-razors-to-sell-blades strategy -- then either console prices skyrocket (to make up the profit) or console specs stagnate for a decade while they wait for Moore's Law to make up for the hidden markup.
Perhaps because EA's new CEO used to be involved with these guys who were already running Bioware? He pretty much went EA top manager -> Elevation Partners (owning Bioware) -> running EA.
So I dunno if I'd call that smart, but that could certainly be one reason. Bioware knows firsthand the guy now running EA. Does that mean EA will magically turn awesome? I think EA's problems will continue as long as they think they'll get good work out of slavedriven employees. But it also means Bioware has personal experience that I don't -- so maybe they know something I don't.
So the moral of the story is ... keep mail order Russian brides away from talking snakes?
Games get delayed for lots of reasons. Setting aside notoriously pathological cases like DNF, games get delayed often because the development needs more time. I for one would much rather wait, and get a better game in the end, than put up with shovelware.
... so they cut two dungeons that weren't going to be finished in time. Everyone involved now admits that was a big mistake, which led to Twilight Princess' very long incubation period. Just look at the results -- Twilight Princess knocks the socks off of Wind Waker, and many people feel it took the Zelda 64 formula and perfected it.
Take Zelda. The developers learned the hard way that hitting the release date was less important than finishing the game. The Wind Waker was in danger of missing its street date
Interesting tidbit: after Wind Waker turned out the way it did, the director of the game wanted to let the series end there. This is the guy Miyamoto handed the series off to after he didn't want to be forever tied to it anymore, and he wanted to throw in the towel! (I'd pull out a cite, but I gotta run.)
Yeah. Delays suck. And when it's for a reason other than 'the game needs more time', they REALLY suck. But to just say 'there should never be a delay!' is to ignore the deeper reasons why delays happen, and that would be catastrophic.
This, in and of itself, is a good thing! It was not at all clear that Hot Coffee was going to blow over. Regulation has failed over and over, but this is no guarantee it will fail in the future. If politcos cared enough, they would find a way to make something stick; if they don't give up, one of the laws will stand eventually. Would you like to see games go the way comics did in the 50s?
Put another way -- wouldn't it be something to worry about if it WERE a factor in the Iowa caucuses? Then it's newsworthy that it wasn't despite efforts by some candidates to make it a factor.
> Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product (TFSummary)
.WMA files. It's not a very good arc welder either (man was that an expensive mistake). And its automatic translation software is much worse than Babelfish. They've got illegal market segmentation agreements! Oh noes!
Okay, I'll bite. Deciding not to build in a capability is "deliberately disabling" it. Sure, it doesn't play
I suppose that the lawsuit was filed is news, but this suit is going nowhere. It'll get laughed out of court almost immediately.
Some vaccines -- you take it once, you're protected forever. Others wear off eventually. I'm not sure if this is due to the illness evolving, or whether the immune system 'forgets' certain antibodies over time.
If this vaccine is permanent, expect to see it eventually being pushed into vaccination cocktails given to kids. Totally avoids the consent issue because the parents give consent, not the child. Whether this is a good idea or not, I couldn't say, but sooner or later someone at the DEA is gonna think of it.
Self-training is still training, and most people have none of that either.
Parent obviously knows of what they speak. In particular "controlling" is specific legal jargon (see here) so parent obviously has legal training of some sort.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I post as I please
And so can you
It was mentioned up before, I think it bears repeating here: the two percent figure is a grand total over everything that person does; the study projects about 65% improvement at Wii games versus the 360. It's just that most people don't spend all their time gaming, and other activities still burn more calories, so the 65% boost doesn't actually accomplish as much as you'd think. It's like Amdahl's Law, except backwards.
I'll say your bias is showing. 'Bluster' is an interesting euphemism for "souls of the damned".
*BLAM* Don't you lie to me!
I tried to track down the original ruling and was unsuccessful. However according to TFA, the judge found that no less than all of the following happened (roughly in this order):
1: TorrentSpy forums openly discuss infringement
2: MPAA files lawsuit
3: Wes Parker (TorrentSpy moderator, admin, it's not quite clear) says 'we need a plan to keep piracy off the forums'
4: Another moderator suggests creating a hidden forum and moving incriminating content there. Wes agrees.
5: Some time later, they begin editing forum posts -- retroactively -- to scrub incriminating parts of the posts.
That is to say, they didn't decide to *stop* the activity. They actively took steps to conceal it, *after* they learned about the suit, and then they actually destroyed (by censoring) the information. There's not a court anywhere in the whole country -- the whole world -- that's going to look on that as anything other than tampering with evidence. And then there's this brilliant exchange:
1: TorrentSpy testifies in court that IP information simply wasn't available
2: MPAA finds evidence TorrentSpy can implement and enforce bans of users by IP address
3: Under oath, a TorrentSpy moderator testifies IPs were logged until April 07 (more than a year after they were sued)
So they said they couldn't get IP addresses at all, no matter what, they simply didn't keep them. The judge ruled that they were lying through their teeth. According to the article, they did have IP addresses -- except conveniently when they were supposed to produce them in court -- and they had been logging them for a year after they were sued. Everything makes sense now: I was wondering why the ruling from the judge directed them to start keeping logs happened. It happened because TorrentSpy tried to snow job the court. Courts really don't like it when you do that.