Never underestimate the stupidity of humanity when it comes to anything sex-related.
Indeed. Especially Americans.
While in general American-bashing irritates me, I have to concede this one. Sigh.
As a United States citizen, taxpayer, voter, and veteran, I must say that I live in a country of pussies. I am trying to get my fiancee to go to a nudist event when it warms up a little: just a bunch of people swimming in a pool, nothing sexual, honestly it is just comfortable. She has a hard time imagining anyone seeing her naked. I explained it like this. Even fully clothed, everyone knows what she looks like naked. It is no secret that she has breasts and a vagina. Hell, half the human population has that. The other half tries to see it as much as possible anyway.
There should not be anything taboo about a naked human body, yet our society insists on making it so. As a group, we mistakenly blur the line between nudity and sex, especially sex that should be taboo and illegal: rape, incest, child molestation. We blur the line so much until the issues become as one, and use fear-mongering to keep opposing ideas in check. That is the greater crime: legislating morality.
As for the original topic: I am not opposed to such a law if worded correctly. It should not burden advertisers or publishers. Regardless of what the law says or if there is one at all, I believe it would be wise to have this information recorded somewhere. Whether the onus is on the advertiser or on the publisher, if anyone has any doubts about the age of the model, they need to record it. Copy the model's state-issued ID, and record the date the photograph was taken. Have a simple, one or two line document that states something along the lines of "based on the government-issued ID, I believe this model is of the legal age to get naked in front of a camera." Have the model, photographer, and someone able to execute contracts at the advertising agency sign it. It could literally take five minutes. Slap it in a filing cabinet indexed in a way that makes sense, scan it to PDF, whatever. Cover your ass. Even if there is no law requiring this, someone could still file a lawsuit: exploiting children is illegal regardless of this specific law.
Not only is specialized software with restricted access to the source, but the person selling the software needs to have an actual contract in place, not rely on copyright law. My company does this: we develop highly specialized software, and our customers have the option of either using it in binary form, or having access to the source so they can customize it on their own (this costs more). Either way we have contracts in place written by our corporate lawyers that basically say "whatever you do, you are not allowed to sell it, redistribute it, etc." and the contract is specific to that business relationship. It names the two companies and the specific terms of the sale that is occurring, and the terms of the contract.
Relying on copyright law would likely not work very well in this case, as it is ambiguous enough that to this day people are arguing about it in court.
This reminds me of something I read here recently about meteor strikes on Earth. Basically, we can only map about 0.001% of the sky per day or something small, and there are so many potential meteors out there we may never see that we may just die in our sleep tonight. How could body armor see all the potential trajectories of a bullet, scan them, and react all within a fraction of a second? While the longest bullet travel was 4 seconds, I would imagine that most successful sniper attacks are less, and armor doesn't exactly have eyes. Maybe I should read the article?
You can't trust any single organisation to condense a complex game / movie / whatever into a single number, telling you the minimum age for which it is appropriate. Opinions on what is appropriate will vary wildly from person to person.
If consumers want to make educated decisions, they'll actually have to educate themselves. Read the back of the box, read a review or two online. But don't expect a single number on the box to tell you what's okay for your child.
I like the idea of rating various elements that would normally go into a rating, but separately. For example, separate ratings for sex, nudity, violence, and drug use. Provide facts for each category: do not rate it for an age group, but state what it has. For example, the nudity category might have "brief glimpses of a boob or two," "no nudity," or "this is porn." Violence could be "what your big brother did to you growing up," "gratuitous mowing down of Charleys with a machine gun," or "this is a movie about the pope."
The problem with rating systems in general (so far) is people are relying on other people to dictate morals. When I see a movie is rated R, I am forced to rely on someone else's view of what people under the age of 17 should or should not see in a movie. It does not tell me, directly, what kind of cool stuff is in the movie. I learn so much more by listening to reviews, including word of mouth. Ratings alone, as they are in the U.S., are fairly worthless.
I own a bigscreen TV. And I have no clue what so ever what sort of effect it has on my energy bill.
And even if I did know, I would still be willing to spend the money... after all it's a bigscreen TV it's not a frugal purchase, it's like buying a sports car.:D
I bought a 1080p 46" LCD. I have no idea how much it costs me in electricity, especially given that I watch it about 2 hours per week. Forget energy costs, the retarded part is that I spent $1,600 on something I rarely use.
It isn't a matter of degrees. They simply want to lie to the public. Here's a case where they're actually getting caught in the act.
Correct, they want to educate the public with their lies. However, this is not the way they want to do it.
Step one: win the court case by any means necessary, including not following court procedures, obtaining evidence illegally, etc. However, try to be discrete. Step two: after winning the court case, spin it such that the defendant was guilty as hell and you were the shining beacon of justice and honesty. Tell everyone that they need to do whatever it is you want because hey, the court just agreed that you are right.
What they don't want is for everyone to be "educated" before winning the court case. Otherwise, people will see the tactics they use and the unwashed masses may become actively hostile toward their cause.
I'd just like to propose the possibility that the law enforcement officers in questions may have been thoroughly "educated" in TSA regulations and guidelines implementing applicable law. Could it be that the marketing people who were ignorant?
What law? I was not aware that photographing public objects while standing on public property was illegal.
I am running Vista on a Q6600 and it runs fine. But so does Linux, or anything else I throw at it. The UI seems to be quite responsive compared to earlier versions of Windows, but again I am not sure if it is due to the process speed or the fact that I have four processors.
I think operating systems need to focus on managing resources efficiently, no matter how many CPUs, and let the user-space applications focus on blazing performance. If you have a large number of cores, say 16+ on a desktop system, who cares if your OS is properly synchronizing and managing read requests to the hard drive? How do you even know? Should it matter to the end user? I say no. But when your game is crawling along or it is taking forever to edit video or whatever, people will notice and wonder why it is so slow on a multi-core system. Those are the applications that need to take advantage of multiple cores. The operating system just needs to know how to schedule threads and processes over many cores, which is a problem we have already solved.
I am pretty sure that his job as Attorney General would be to oversee the federal attorneys in their duty to prosecute according to the law, not to push legislation for a personal agenda. Of course, the president is also not able to introduce legislation, and it is not his job to push agendas, laws, etc. through congress (read the Constitution). Yet every president since Andrew Jackson (a real American asshole) has done so or attempted to do so.
I scored 90.91% (30/33). One of them I was braindead and should have gotten correct, two I was guessing on. Regardless, that is still an A, and roughly twice what my elected representatives scored in aggregate.
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about marketing. One of the first things I was taught in my marketing classes is how that is a crock.
Bad publicity has bankrupted companies, people and countries. It's drove people to suicide. There IS bad publicity.
You misunderstand. Bad publicity is bad publicity. No publicity is also bad publicity. Sometimes slightly bad publicity can drown out the really bad stuff, or divert attention without hurting too much. Especially when the issue is not selling a product to make a profit (like a business), but flinging mud at a political opponent.
This is a free market at its best. The United States provides a poor service (allow us to carry your data, and we will spy on it), so foreign telecomms decide the better value is not to route traffic through the United States. Our own laws that promote spying, snooping, invasion of privacy, and generally going against the spirit of the Constitution (I say spirit because it does not apply to foreign citizens in most cases) will be used against us. Other nations will decide that we are increasingly irrelevant: our dollar is on a trend of weakening against foreign currencies due to the massive trade deficit which in turn puts our balls squarely in the hands of countries such as China. This weakens our clout in international markets. This story is just one facet of the weakening of the United States as a superpower and our downward slide into becoming a third-world country. Our politicians and corporate executives are so concerned about maintaining their wealth that they are willing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
No, I am not cynical. I am also not sarcastic.
Re:Boost epitomizes everything that is wrong with
on
Boost 1.36 Released
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· Score: 1
Boost exemplifies everything that's wrong with C++. All of the corner-case features of C++ that Boost exploits in order to provide useful and sane functionality in an insane way, should be removed from the language (or its successor).
Maybe that is why the next version of C++ will implement many of the features and libraries in Boost, but natively, avoiding some of the mental masturbation issues you mentioned.
You can have a completely secure chain from the music store to your speakers, but as soon as it gets to your speaker wires it's in a form where someone can record it.
Remember the old analog copy protection for VHS? The VCR would mess with the blank space between frames, which TVs ignored, but another VCR would gag on it and you would get a garbled signal. It would be unable to sync the frames. Without any encryption or anything sophisticated the manufacturers were able to stop VHS copying (at least until people found a way around it). Remember, this was the "last mile" so to speak, the last part of the chain going to the output device.
I think the whole idea is silly. I would leave the whole chain wide open, and rather than spend money on ineffective copy protection, I would invest in more, better movies; better television shows (I canceled digital cable partially due to time, partially due to the shitty quality of 95% of what is on it); and making customers happy. By providing customers with DVRs (which most cable companies do) that have features customers want, by providing high definition movies on demand for a reasonable price, customers will be more likely to spend money with the cable company (and to the content providers by proxy) and less effort on copyright infringement because they will be less motivated. I for one am willing to pay for these services if the cost is reasonable, even if I could get the same thing for free.
As for music, I think the middlemen (e.g. iTunes) are moving in the right direction by selling albums and songs in digital format with or without DRM (preferably without). If I can get a song for free via file sharing or spend a dollar to get a good quality version and "do the right thing," I will spend the dollar.
I like how the government warns about us losing billions to Chinese espionage, yet we have a far more massive trade deficit and we send them all of our jobs. Who cares about espionage when we send them everything we have of value anyway?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the core of the problem isn't the security of the computers, it's the fact that in order to use a credit card number you have to reveal it. There will always be some retailer or customer without a secure system. _We can't change this, it's too hard_.
Bullshit. Banks certify payment systems before allowing retailers to authorize through them. For smaller operations they may delegate to a payment processor that certifies devices on the network, such as mom and pop stores that use a pinpad/MSR separate from the POS. In any event, the device that handles credit/debit input must be certified by the bank.
I think the solution is a small device with an embedded secret key. All it has to do is sign data [secondary: show text, wireless, usb, etc].
This is already standard with Canadian debit. The device itself adds a MAC (message authentication code) to the core data in a message (account number, PIN, etc) and the message is encrypted. This validates that the originating device is in fact a certified device (the MAC keys are on file at the bank similar to a CA) and it helps detect fraud and hacking, even if it cannot protect against it completely. In the U.S. the communication is encrypted but there is no requirement to MAC a message or to provide for device-based security quite to the extent there is in Canada. Also note this is Canadian debit, not credit. However, the means are in place and the technology is live, right now.
...i can safely say that one doesn't need to go through any really complicated work to take financial information from consumers...
This week I personally stopped what could have been a major breach of credit card security. My company works for retail companies, and one of our clients emailed us a transaction log containing full credit card data for a day's worth of transactions. I don't mean masked data, times, etc. I mean full numbers, expiration dates, CCV numbers, names, everything. They just handed it to us (without us asking) to help us fix a bug in some software. I promptly informed my security manager, and after he was done shitting a brick, he quickly fixed the situation as best we could to include scrubbing data from the email servers.
In this case the client just handed us the data. No hacking necessary. If anyone at my company were evil or at least easily tempted they could have gotten away with a huge amount of fraud. I wonder how often situations such as this occur. People not paying attention, or maybe dealing with financial information and not being aware of PCI-DSS requirements or federal law.
Its the data, or worse yet, having to disclose that you have potentially exposed customer data that they really want to avoid.
My company-owned laptop has around 50% of its hard drive taken up by a TrueCrypt volume containing all proprietary information pertaining to the company and its customers. I chose a cryptographically-strong password and algorithm to encrypt this volume. With the way I store data (I prefer simple text files) I can guarantee that without the password for that TrueCrypt volume, 99% or more of the potentially sensitive data will be locked away. I have seen laptops lost or stolen at airports, from someone's car while he was in a restaurant, or even swiped off their desk at work by the cleaning staff at night. For this reason I lock my laptop in my desk in accordance with company policies, and if I remove it from the building (telecommuting or traveling on business) the damn thing is in my hands, or the carrying case is over my shoulder. I maintain physical and logical control over that data at all times. This protects my company and its customers from loss of sensitive data, and it protects my mortgage from a sudden loss in biweekly bank deposits:-)
Unless Blizzard has changed policies, they will refund your items, they will not refund your gold.
Technically they are not obligated to restore anything, neither legally nor by their own policies. They often do because it is good customer service and keeps the addicts feeding at the trough, which helps their bottom line in the long run. While they have by far the largest market segment in the MMO genre they know the reasons why that is the case and what will hurt that. Not helping customers is shooting themselves in the foot. I know several people who were shit out of luck after being hacked, while most did receive an account restoration. Often they received some, but not all, of their gold back. One guy had unrestricted access to our guild bank, and Blizzard restored the items in the bank the gold farmer took, too. They actually restored duplicates of some of the items, and let us keep the duplicates. That was really cool of them.
And even so, it can take Blizzard several weeks to find time to sort you out. A tiny one-time cost of 6 euros is extremely cheap investment. Most make that much while taking a crap at work. Small price to pay to protect hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of in-game effort.
Yeah, $6 is not a lot of money. With current gas prices this dongle costs 75% of my daily round-trip to work, or just about the same amount as lunch does if I buy a $5 sub at Subway with a drink. Given this is a one-time expense, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
One might argue that with the amount of cash Blizzard makes off of WoW, they should just hire a small country to be able to fix hacked accounts in hours instead of weeks. But, honestly... It's optional. It's 6 euros. My computer is nearly a fortress compared to the average WoW player's security, and I'm still considering getting one of those things.
Maybe the dongle costs more than $6 to manufacture, key inject, support on the back-end (authentication systems need some retooling). Maybe it costs less. However, the big picture here is that there are other hidden costs to Blizzard the scope of which we can only speculate. Regardless, it will probably mitigate some of the costs of investigating account issues, the headaches involved, etc. allowing their employees to focus their efforts on more pressing issues such as the gold spammers that stand between the bank and auction house in places like Ironforge or Orgrimmar and constantly peddle their wares (stolen video game gold).
I am considering this product as well. I used to play the game constantly because of marital problems. I needed a place to hide from my wife that did not involve huge bar tabs. So I played WoW. A lot. I have multiple 70s, thousands of gold, epics, blah blah blah. Now that I am divorced I play a fraction of the time. However, whether I keep playing (even if a small amount of time) or cancel my subscription, the thought of someone gaining access and destroying all that hard work would hurt. I spent a lot of time building up the account, made a lot of friends (some of my guild mates live close and we have actually socialized in real life), and anyone hurting those social connections or anything else would really piss me off. I think $6 may be worth it to mitigate that risk.
Then please tell us: what are the qualifications for a language that matters, if not usage?
I don't know about the GP, but my company earns many millions of dollars a year in revenue due to applications written in Java. That pays for my mortgage, so Java matters to me and my paycheck. Oh, and this is from J2SE applications, not web services. That makes it double plus good!
If he is guilty of those charges, he is a criminal. Those actions undermine society's trust in the system that if someone graduates from an institution and that institution certifies that the student did what the records say they did, they may or may not be qualified for jobs, further education, etc. While 38 years is certainly harsh, that is criminal behavior. Our education system is far from perfect but guys like this certainly do not help make it better.
I would much rather that he applied himself to do well in school and set a good example of what good behavior, studying, and hard work can do when working with the grain, not against it.
I am not Canadian, and my first impression is that you guys already pay a CD tax to pay for copying discs, making file sharing legal, how does the new bill affect that? If it prevents you (legally) from making those copies, should the media companies lose that CD tax?
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As a United States citizen, taxpayer, voter, and veteran, I must say that I live in a country of pussies. I am trying to get my fiancee to go to a nudist event when it warms up a little: just a bunch of people swimming in a pool, nothing sexual, honestly it is just comfortable. She has a hard time imagining anyone seeing her naked. I explained it like this. Even fully clothed, everyone knows what she looks like naked. It is no secret that she has breasts and a vagina. Hell, half the human population has that. The other half tries to see it as much as possible anyway.
There should not be anything taboo about a naked human body, yet our society insists on making it so. As a group, we mistakenly blur the line between nudity and sex, especially sex that should be taboo and illegal: rape, incest, child molestation. We blur the line so much until the issues become as one, and use fear-mongering to keep opposing ideas in check. That is the greater crime: legislating morality.
As for the original topic: I am not opposed to such a law if worded correctly. It should not burden advertisers or publishers. Regardless of what the law says or if there is one at all, I believe it would be wise to have this information recorded somewhere. Whether the onus is on the advertiser or on the publisher, if anyone has any doubts about the age of the model, they need to record it. Copy the model's state-issued ID, and record the date the photograph was taken. Have a simple, one or two line document that states something along the lines of "based on the government-issued ID, I believe this model is of the legal age to get naked in front of a camera." Have the model, photographer, and someone able to execute contracts at the advertising agency sign it. It could literally take five minutes. Slap it in a filing cabinet indexed in a way that makes sense, scan it to PDF, whatever. Cover your ass. Even if there is no law requiring this, someone could still file a lawsuit: exploiting children is illegal regardless of this specific law.
Not only is specialized software with restricted access to the source, but the person selling the software needs to have an actual contract in place, not rely on copyright law. My company does this: we develop highly specialized software, and our customers have the option of either using it in binary form, or having access to the source so they can customize it on their own (this costs more). Either way we have contracts in place written by our corporate lawyers that basically say "whatever you do, you are not allowed to sell it, redistribute it, etc." and the contract is specific to that business relationship. It names the two companies and the specific terms of the sale that is occurring, and the terms of the contract.
Relying on copyright law would likely not work very well in this case, as it is ambiguous enough that to this day people are arguing about it in court.
This reminds me of something I read here recently about meteor strikes on Earth. Basically, we can only map about 0.001% of the sky per day or something small, and there are so many potential meteors out there we may never see that we may just die in our sleep tonight. How could body armor see all the potential trajectories of a bullet, scan them, and react all within a fraction of a second? While the longest bullet travel was 4 seconds, I would imagine that most successful sniper attacks are less, and armor doesn't exactly have eyes. Maybe I should read the article?
I like the idea of rating various elements that would normally go into a rating, but separately. For example, separate ratings for sex, nudity, violence, and drug use. Provide facts for each category: do not rate it for an age group, but state what it has. For example, the nudity category might have "brief glimpses of a boob or two," "no nudity," or "this is porn." Violence could be "what your big brother did to you growing up," "gratuitous mowing down of Charleys with a machine gun," or "this is a movie about the pope."
The problem with rating systems in general (so far) is people are relying on other people to dictate morals. When I see a movie is rated R, I am forced to rely on someone else's view of what people under the age of 17 should or should not see in a movie. It does not tell me, directly, what kind of cool stuff is in the movie. I learn so much more by listening to reviews, including word of mouth. Ratings alone, as they are in the U.S., are fairly worthless.
I bought a 1080p 46" LCD. I have no idea how much it costs me in electricity, especially given that I watch it about 2 hours per week. Forget energy costs, the retarded part is that I spent $1,600 on something I rarely use.
Correct, they want to educate the public with their lies. However, this is not the way they want to do it.
Step one: win the court case by any means necessary, including not following court procedures, obtaining evidence illegally, etc. However, try to be discrete. Step two: after winning the court case, spin it such that the defendant was guilty as hell and you were the shining beacon of justice and honesty. Tell everyone that they need to do whatever it is you want because hey, the court just agreed that you are right.
What they don't want is for everyone to be "educated" before winning the court case. Otherwise, people will see the tactics they use and the unwashed masses may become actively hostile toward their cause.
Dungeon Siege also played itself. The player was just along for the ride with minimal interaction.
What law? I was not aware that photographing public objects while standing on public property was illegal.
I am running Vista on a Q6600 and it runs fine. But so does Linux, or anything else I throw at it. The UI seems to be quite responsive compared to earlier versions of Windows, but again I am not sure if it is due to the process speed or the fact that I have four processors.
I think operating systems need to focus on managing resources efficiently, no matter how many CPUs, and let the user-space applications focus on blazing performance. If you have a large number of cores, say 16+ on a desktop system, who cares if your OS is properly synchronizing and managing read requests to the hard drive? How do you even know? Should it matter to the end user? I say no. But when your game is crawling along or it is taking forever to edit video or whatever, people will notice and wonder why it is so slow on a multi-core system. Those are the applications that need to take advantage of multiple cores. The operating system just needs to know how to schedule threads and processes over many cores, which is a problem we have already solved.
I am pretty sure that his job as Attorney General would be to oversee the federal attorneys in their duty to prosecute according to the law, not to push legislation for a personal agenda. Of course, the president is also not able to introduce legislation, and it is not his job to push agendas, laws, etc. through congress (read the Constitution). Yet every president since Andrew Jackson (a real American asshole) has done so or attempted to do so.
I scored 90.91% (30/33). One of them I was braindead and should have gotten correct, two I was guessing on. Regardless, that is still an A, and roughly twice what my elected representatives scored in aggregate.
I am sure it does sting, considering they have spent quite a bit of that money on lawyers, corporate executive benefits, etc.
You misunderstand. Bad publicity is bad publicity. No publicity is also bad publicity. Sometimes slightly bad publicity can drown out the really bad stuff, or divert attention without hurting too much. Especially when the issue is not selling a product to make a profit (like a business), but flinging mud at a political opponent.
This is a free market at its best. The United States provides a poor service (allow us to carry your data, and we will spy on it), so foreign telecomms decide the better value is not to route traffic through the United States. Our own laws that promote spying, snooping, invasion of privacy, and generally going against the spirit of the Constitution (I say spirit because it does not apply to foreign citizens in most cases) will be used against us. Other nations will decide that we are increasingly irrelevant: our dollar is on a trend of weakening against foreign currencies due to the massive trade deficit which in turn puts our balls squarely in the hands of countries such as China. This weakens our clout in international markets. This story is just one facet of the weakening of the United States as a superpower and our downward slide into becoming a third-world country. Our politicians and corporate executives are so concerned about maintaining their wealth that they are willing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
No, I am not cynical. I am also not sarcastic.
Maybe that is why the next version of C++ will implement many of the features and libraries in Boost, but natively, avoiding some of the mental masturbation issues you mentioned.
Remember the old analog copy protection for VHS? The VCR would mess with the blank space between frames, which TVs ignored, but another VCR would gag on it and you would get a garbled signal. It would be unable to sync the frames. Without any encryption or anything sophisticated the manufacturers were able to stop VHS copying (at least until people found a way around it). Remember, this was the "last mile" so to speak, the last part of the chain going to the output device.
I think the whole idea is silly. I would leave the whole chain wide open, and rather than spend money on ineffective copy protection, I would invest in more, better movies; better television shows (I canceled digital cable partially due to time, partially due to the shitty quality of 95% of what is on it); and making customers happy. By providing customers with DVRs (which most cable companies do) that have features customers want, by providing high definition movies on demand for a reasonable price, customers will be more likely to spend money with the cable company (and to the content providers by proxy) and less effort on copyright infringement because they will be less motivated. I for one am willing to pay for these services if the cost is reasonable, even if I could get the same thing for free.
As for music, I think the middlemen (e.g. iTunes) are moving in the right direction by selling albums and songs in digital format with or without DRM (preferably without). If I can get a song for free via file sharing or spend a dollar to get a good quality version and "do the right thing," I will spend the dollar.
I like how the government warns about us losing billions to Chinese espionage, yet we have a far more massive trade deficit and we send them all of our jobs. Who cares about espionage when we send them everything we have of value anyway?
Stay home.
Bullshit. Banks certify payment systems before allowing retailers to authorize through them. For smaller operations they may delegate to a payment processor that certifies devices on the network, such as mom and pop stores that use a pinpad/MSR separate from the POS. In any event, the device that handles credit/debit input must be certified by the bank.
This is already standard with Canadian debit. The device itself adds a MAC (message authentication code) to the core data in a message (account number, PIN, etc) and the message is encrypted. This validates that the originating device is in fact a certified device (the MAC keys are on file at the bank similar to a CA) and it helps detect fraud and hacking, even if it cannot protect against it completely. In the U.S. the communication is encrypted but there is no requirement to MAC a message or to provide for device-based security quite to the extent there is in Canada. Also note this is Canadian debit, not credit. However, the means are in place and the technology is live, right now.
This week I personally stopped what could have been a major breach of credit card security. My company works for retail companies, and one of our clients emailed us a transaction log containing full credit card data for a day's worth of transactions. I don't mean masked data, times, etc. I mean full numbers, expiration dates, CCV numbers, names, everything. They just handed it to us (without us asking) to help us fix a bug in some software. I promptly informed my security manager, and after he was done shitting a brick, he quickly fixed the situation as best we could to include scrubbing data from the email servers.
In this case the client just handed us the data. No hacking necessary. If anyone at my company were evil or at least easily tempted they could have gotten away with a huge amount of fraud. I wonder how often situations such as this occur. People not paying attention, or maybe dealing with financial information and not being aware of PCI-DSS requirements or federal law.
My company-owned laptop has around 50% of its hard drive taken up by a TrueCrypt volume containing all proprietary information pertaining to the company and its customers. I chose a cryptographically-strong password and algorithm to encrypt this volume. With the way I store data (I prefer simple text files) I can guarantee that without the password for that TrueCrypt volume, 99% or more of the potentially sensitive data will be locked away. I have seen laptops lost or stolen at airports, from someone's car while he was in a restaurant, or even swiped off their desk at work by the cleaning staff at night. For this reason I lock my laptop in my desk in accordance with company policies, and if I remove it from the building (telecommuting or traveling on business) the damn thing is in my hands, or the carrying case is over my shoulder. I maintain physical and logical control over that data at all times. This protects my company and its customers from loss of sensitive data, and it protects my mortgage from a sudden loss in biweekly bank deposits :-)
Technically they are not obligated to restore anything, neither legally nor by their own policies. They often do because it is good customer service and keeps the addicts feeding at the trough, which helps their bottom line in the long run. While they have by far the largest market segment in the MMO genre they know the reasons why that is the case and what will hurt that. Not helping customers is shooting themselves in the foot. I know several people who were shit out of luck after being hacked, while most did receive an account restoration. Often they received some, but not all, of their gold back. One guy had unrestricted access to our guild bank, and Blizzard restored the items in the bank the gold farmer took, too. They actually restored duplicates of some of the items, and let us keep the duplicates. That was really cool of them.
Yeah, $6 is not a lot of money. With current gas prices this dongle costs 75% of my daily round-trip to work, or just about the same amount as lunch does if I buy a $5 sub at Subway with a drink. Given this is a one-time expense, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe the dongle costs more than $6 to manufacture, key inject, support on the back-end (authentication systems need some retooling). Maybe it costs less. However, the big picture here is that there are other hidden costs to Blizzard the scope of which we can only speculate. Regardless, it will probably mitigate some of the costs of investigating account issues, the headaches involved, etc. allowing their employees to focus their efforts on more pressing issues such as the gold spammers that stand between the bank and auction house in places like Ironforge or Orgrimmar and constantly peddle their wares (stolen video game gold).
I am considering this product as well. I used to play the game constantly because of marital problems. I needed a place to hide from my wife that did not involve huge bar tabs. So I played WoW. A lot. I have multiple 70s, thousands of gold, epics, blah blah blah. Now that I am divorced I play a fraction of the time. However, whether I keep playing (even if a small amount of time) or cancel my subscription, the thought of someone gaining access and destroying all that hard work would hurt. I spent a lot of time building up the account, made a lot of friends (some of my guild mates live close and we have actually socialized in real life), and anyone hurting those social connections or anything else would really piss me off. I think $6 may be worth it to mitigate that risk.
I don't know about the GP, but my company earns many millions of dollars a year in revenue due to applications written in Java. That pays for my mortgage, so Java matters to me and my paycheck. Oh, and this is from J2SE applications, not web services. That makes it double plus good!
If he is guilty of those charges, he is a criminal. Those actions undermine society's trust in the system that if someone graduates from an institution and that institution certifies that the student did what the records say they did, they may or may not be qualified for jobs, further education, etc. While 38 years is certainly harsh, that is criminal behavior. Our education system is far from perfect but guys like this certainly do not help make it better.
I would much rather that he applied himself to do well in school and set a good example of what good behavior, studying, and hard work can do when working with the grain, not against it.
I am not Canadian, and my first impression is that you guys already pay a CD tax to pay for copying discs, making file sharing legal, how does the new bill affect that? If it prevents you (legally) from making those copies, should the media companies lose that CD tax?