They are a little country that does a lot of things right, and lead the way in technology in many ways. I think it's great that they do this, and they deserve credit accordingly. However to say that this would scale to other countries of larger size is fairly disingenuous. Places like the United States are much, much larger and a comparison between the two is effectively meaningless.
Submitter also fails to mention that the NY times journalist was looking for a charging station that was poorly lit at night time. The journalist had his failings in his story, however it's intellectually dishonest to say that he was trying to run down the battery while looking for a recharging station for a moment.
This may be one of the most important decisions this court has gotten right in years. This was absolutely huge because of the implications of what would have happened if it had gone the other way. This is critical in terms of the idea of actually owning what you buy, without this manufactures could simply make things out of country and avoid first sale rights. This could have affected pretty much every aspect of Americans daily life and is a good first step in restoring Intellectual Property sanity.
It's funny how property rights have historically been a right wring agenda item until they are shown to be just as important to the left as well...
Put down the crack pipe, Manning and Swartz couldn't be more different.
Manning wanted to embarrass the United States and he made that very clear in his statement in his court martial. He didn't care about bystanders, international relationships or innocents that could be hurt in his wide spread dump of well over 100,000 documents. Swartz wanted to free information that was otherwise publicly available, had no bystanders to worry about, wasn't going to hurt international relationships and wasn't trying to embarrass anyone.
Putting Swartz on the same stand as a traitor like Manning is a dis-service to Swartz and taints his memory. If you think political dissidents in this country are routinely destroyed than you are as naive as can be. If you want to see real government destruction of dissidents that I invite you to look at country's like Venezuela, Tibet, Russia, Iran or North Korea. Swartz was the victim of an overzealous prosecutor out to make a name for herself, not a Illuminati style conspiracy.
When the spokeswoman for Electronic Arts stated that they would try to restore trust with their users I never fathomed that they would actually follow that up with action. I cannot begin to overstate my congratulations to the board of Electronic Arts for doing the right thing and ousting a CEO that had declared his customers the defacto enemy.
When the lies came out that the online requirement was for server processing I took it as yet another BS statement from a company that held it's customers in contempt. When customers showed how easily you could play offline the lie was exposed and Maxis / EA was forced to admit the truth. I never expected that action would come out of this, and must say I am surprised by this as anything in technology in twenty years. Congratulations to EA for taking a step in trying to restore the trust of your customers.
I hesitated to use "junk science" as I don't think it even deserves that title. Unfortunately there are people that actually think they are having a scientific impact in doing what they are doing and benefiting the environment in doing so. When I see comments about the amount of CO2 that will be saved getting tossed around by the ignorant that is where I have to insert "junk science". As for the rest of your comment, I'm in fair agreement.
Next time we might even get an article with a link. Finally an excuse not to RTFA!
Move to country with cheap expenses while retaining job with good pay. Sounds simple, I'm sure everyone has done it, after all there can't be any complications?
Crap like this is feel good meaningless junk science that does absolutely nothing to solve anything. This is no better than saying were going to boycott the gas stations on Sunday (and fill up on Monday). People need to get real about the environment and as long as we've got crap like this and lunatics at places like greenpeace getting the headlines were going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot. We don't need the Haliburton's of the world do the damage when we keep deluding ourselves by pulling crap like this.
A quick google search will find many examples of the North Koreans making unprovoked attacks that kill people in an attempt to show off national pride. They have a history of acting irrationally and being perfectly willing to sacrifice their people in order to achieve their leaderships goals.
They also have the most heavily armed border in the world with a significant number of troops and one of the worlds largest and most fanatic armies. They have artillery pre-positioned and in the range of Seoul that they can use if they want to attack (over 10,000 pieces). The US would be put in a position of losing a lot of our own and our allies troops or having to use nukes to defend South Korea.
They have detonated nuclear bombs successfully even if their missiles are not very good. It would probably take a years to get the miniaturization technology down well enough to fit a nuclear warhead to a missile. Technology being what it is it's pretty much inevitable.
If it was someone besides the North Koreans making this noise it probably would be security theater (the Russians and Chinese have enough missiles to overwhelm whatever defense we could put up). Placing the additional launchers in Alaska simply gives Obama a better position to say he did something in the event that they did launch an attack. This is actually a sound military decision by Obama and I'm of the opinion that most of his military decisions have been poor.
Low profit plus opportunity cost equals a bad decision. Nvidia made the right business choice. That capacity can now be used for more profitable products.
Okay, I've read this book / seen this movie and know how this turns out so I've got a checklist for when extinct pigeons inevitably become terror-pigeons.
( ) Train young child on Unix ( ) Use old fashioned door knobs ( ) Get several big guns and don't store them in another building ( ) Make sure vehicles are ICE and not electric ( ) Redundant computer systems are good. You don't have good enough backups. ( ) Happy computer administrators are important when hosting terror critters. Make admins happy. ( ) The guy with the military training and the lawyer are always the first victims, get to know one of each so that you have warning ( ) Outhouses are bad ( ) Big thick steel doors are your friend ( ) Things can go wrong, that's what the lawyer and military training guys are for ( ) Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Add more power to Jeep.
Okay, I've been on both sides of this as I've been to Australia three different times for work (but not with the visa they talk about). When I was brought in I was brought in because they had fewer than 10 people in the entire country that were certified to do what I was doing at the time (there were only a few hundred total worldwide). There well and truly was a shortage of the skills they were looking for and they could not have possibly met that need in country.
Cases like mine are the exception though, and most visas issued for workers to come in and perform IT work are issued to avoid hiring native workers. Someone who is working on a visa is much more likely to be able to be pressed to work additional free hours, won't have costs like retirement and is really easy to get rid of if you don't want them anymore. In short they are viewed as disposable workers that do more at less cost.
There is a relatively easy and balanced fix for these problems (it's a problem when large quantities of natives can't get work and your importing people to work). If you really want to measure if there is actually a shortage of workers for a given field all you have to do is monitor average pay and benefits for native workers. If there is a genuine shortage you will see pay and benefits rise accordingly (market dynamics). When average pay and benefits rise to a certain level you allow for more visas to be issued. This avoids a hard cap while allowing for genuine shortages to be addressed without decimating native workers careers.
I also think you should allow people who come in like this to stay for a limited number of years with a fast track for citizenship. If they don't obtain their citizenship after X years they return home./Loved Australia
Windows has nothing to do with patch management and in the example I gave over 90% of the servers were *nix. Every OS has issues that need to be routinely patched, Unix, Linux, Mac OS, Windows. The idea that Solaris does/did not have to patched though is absurd, and Sun/Oracle has released regular patches for Solaris from the beginning.
Let's start with that SLA, it is a Service Level Agreement, not a server level agreement. In any typical SLA you have an agreement to ensure that a given service is up 99.999% of the time, not the server. Even allowing for 99.999% uptime you still have time to perform the occasional reboot for your patch requirements.
Your argument sounds just like the arguments I encountered for allowing servers to go years at a time without being patched and it falls flat. If you have a 99.999% uptime requirement than you have the justification for failover servers that can keep your service up and running without affecting your SLA. Even if you can't get additional hardware you should be able to at least set up a VM for an interim basis to allow you to keep things up and running.
Keeping a server up for the sake of a meaningless statistic at the expense of security is shoddy administration and a practice that needs to die out. The only thing un-patched system does is provide an attacker an opportunity own your box.
Last place I was at that had server admins that bragged about/years/ of uptime quickly turned into a discovery that we had thousands of servers that had not been patched in years. Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule. It turned into a six month project but in the end we were patching systems that were vulnerable to 5 year old exploits (mix of *nix and Windows).
I had to make the argument that server uptime meant jack, and to make it I put forward the argument that the only thing that mattered was/service/ uptime. Frankly it is the service that needs to be always available, not the server. This is why you have maintenance windows, for the explicit purpose of allowing a given system to patched and rebooted at a predictable time without interrupting services.
If your server is really that important it will have a fail over server for redundancy (SQL cluster, whatever). If your server isn't important enough to have a failover server for service redundancy that it isn't so important that you can't have a maintenance window. Think service, not server!
The only thing that matters is service availability.
Why don't we start with honest reviews that focus on the DRM that the game will use as a playability issue just as they would framerates or any other issue? If all of the major review sites started reviewing games with a DRM section saying:
Requires ( ) Serial Number ( ) Registration ( ) Activation ( ) Online connection to play ( ) Replaces DVD driver ( ) Wont work if you have installed ______ ( ) Works only on one computer ( ) etc
Let people know what their actually buying and let the market make informed choices. When game reviews start reflecting and scoring the playability of DRM and sales start trending accordingly than publishers will start to review their practices.
Unfortunately most review sites would be blacklisted if they tried by themselves, so you would have to do it en mass like the cable companies did with 6 strikes. Band together and they wouldn't be able to blacklist the few sites that started reflecting the playability of DRM.
This problem could be fixed by the review sites, if they gave a damn.
Look back at the innovative days of Silicon Valley and pick something, anything you can think of and think of what would happen if you were to try and perform the same thing again today. You could never do it, because overzealous IP has killed all American engineering innovation. Many products now spend a significant amount of their budget on patent attorneys and cross license costs. You simply cannot innovate in today's climate as things presently stand.
Some simple ideas that would help protect IP and turn the tide back for innovation:
A patent fee, every patent that is held by an organization (or it's parents organization) doubles in costs. - Allows the small time inventory to register patents without undue cost while adding some measure of expense to patent warchest building.
A patent tax, every patent is taxed at a rate that makes large patent war-chests financially unfeasible. - You can cripple IP trolls on this by increasing the tax for a patent that is not in active production.
Shortening the length of time that a patent is good for based on the type of patent. - Decreasing a patent's shelf life to 5 years would probably do more to free up the IP logjams than any other thing.
Make RAND rates standardized for everyone and don't allow them to be offset. - Everyone pays the same RAND rates and if your patent is essential than anyone can license it at a fixed and/reasonable/ rate.
End massive patent paydays like Apple's recent billion dollar court win. - Reform the financial benefits for 'going nuclear' and seeking large court settlements for patent violations and make the penalties fixed.
Bicycles can have license plates and in some countries they already do. With more and more people taking bicycles on public roads it's likely only a matter of time until they do. As for people, facial recognition technology is only going to get better and better. There is no reason a system like this could not be used for other street 'crimes' with the same level of efficiency.
I can't argue the point about their not being Arabs any more than someone from Turkey. The Arab spring is a regional concept more than an ethnic one though. My fundamental point about regional instability and people rising up against oppressive governments stands though.
Just curious, do you support automated legal fines like this for other things? Why don't we start with people that ride bicycles and often break the law, how do you think that would go over? We could extend this to jay-walking and littering too. These things could all be picked up with the same types of cameras and automatically generated tickets sent out. For some of these things the technology to implement them (face recognition) is only a matter of time.
Do you really want precedent for automating big brother and fining everyone as they go about their life? Once a precedent is set it can be just as easily applied to other things. Which laws get to be automatically enforced for big brother and who gets to choose?
They could achieve it by cutting the cables or any number of other technical means. For political purposes they need to first degrade the experience to make it less valuable for their citizens. By removing the ability to have privacy, Google and other feature that they don't want their citizens to have access to they diminish the value of the Internet before flipping the switch.
What they don't want is their own Arab spring, something are keenly aware of (is anyone better at stirring up dissonance in the middle east than Iran?). So far the track record for Muslim countries that have cut of the Internet and face revolution is pretty damn high. While cutting off the Internet is hardly causation many of their citizens would simply assume that it meant that it was time for their revolution to start. They have huge internal strife right now and have to be very careful about how far and how quickly they push their citizens.
I have no doubt they will cut off the Internet in some kind of technical fashion within the next 18 months. However I don't think they are going to do so before making the Internet suck so bad that nobody will miss it.
Their has been talk in the news about Iran building a giant Iran wide Intranet just for their own use. This would help ease the transition into their Intranet by removing the appeal and usability of the Internet. Effectively cutting their people off without actually cutting people off would probably fit very well in their political landscape.
When you work for someone you need to assume that your email is read, your website are logged, your SSL traffic decrypted and your computer inventoried. It is also a fairly safe assumption that login, logoff times, screenshots and keyboard strokes as well as mouse movements are all routinely captured.
Depending on your place of employment many of these big brother activities are demanded by law (SEC etc). It's not a question of whether or not you like or the IT department likes it, because neither of you do. It's a question of someone/way/ up your food chain has made the decision to perform that level of monitoring. If your going to get mad, get mad at the VP, the legal team, the SEC, or other person typically at the VP level that had the power to demand the level of logging to begin with.
To illustrate my point on how these things are often driven by and watched from the top you need only look at Yahoo. Their new CEO looked at the VPN logs when she saw the parking lot emptier than she thought it should be. She concluded people were slacking off and not really working and ended telecommuting for everyone at Yahoo. This was a data driven decision based on the logs that Yahoo's servers kept and their CEO reviewed.
I'm not justifying this, I'm not defending this, I'm simply explaining how these things work in the real world.
They are unrepentant about the DRM issue that caused the problem and have been busy spinning it as a popularity issue instead. They have no plans or intention of changing their ways and hope that this offering smooths over a public relations debacle.
This game, and EA themselves need to be boycotted for the good of the industry until such time as EA repents and changes their ways. A grassroots boycott that costs them far more money than their imaginary losses from piracy is the only thing that can get them to change.
Kill it dead, bury it in the textbooks of history and let daylight saving stand as a testament of the folly of man that he thought he might outwit mother nature. Incredible amounts of money and aggravation are wasted every year on this leftover from the age of agriculture.
In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom this archaic throwback to the days of the steam locomotive has gone from quaint to foolish expense. No one will miss it and society has long since moved on with these wonders we call light bulbs and headlights. We'll be okay, just like we are every other single night when the sun sets.
Articles like this can be scaremongering with misleading titles for headline purposes. "Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years" means that is has been cooler than about 2700 of the last 11,000 years. This of course can turn around and bit you when your trying to do something for political gain instead of scientific gain. After all it's all too easy to point to something like this as proof that things aren't as bad as they have been in the past pre-industrial era.
I'm not taking sides on this issue, what I'm arguing is that people need to let science do the talking and leave politics on the wayside. The result of failing to do so is that otherwise perfectly sound science research gets tainted by politics. More science and less politics please, that is all.
Slashdot Mirror
They are a little country that does a lot of things right, and lead the way in technology in many ways. I think it's great that they do this, and they deserve credit accordingly. However to say that this would scale to other countries of larger size is fairly disingenuous. Places like the United States are much, much larger and a comparison between the two is effectively meaningless.
Submitter also fails to mention that the NY times journalist was looking for a charging station that was poorly lit at night time. The journalist had his failings in his story, however it's intellectually dishonest to say that he was trying to run down the battery while looking for a recharging station for a moment.
This may be one of the most important decisions this court has gotten right in years. This was absolutely huge because of the implications of what would have happened if it had gone the other way. This is critical in terms of the idea of actually owning what you buy, without this manufactures could simply make things out of country and avoid first sale rights. This could have affected pretty much every aspect of Americans daily life and is a good first step in restoring Intellectual Property sanity.
It's funny how property rights have historically been a right wring agenda item until they are shown to be just as important to the left as well...
Put down the crack pipe, Manning and Swartz couldn't be more different.
Manning wanted to embarrass the United States and he made that very clear in his statement in his court martial. He didn't care about bystanders, international relationships or innocents that could be hurt in his wide spread dump of well over 100,000 documents. Swartz wanted to free information that was otherwise publicly available, had no bystanders to worry about, wasn't going to hurt international relationships and wasn't trying to embarrass anyone.
Putting Swartz on the same stand as a traitor like Manning is a dis-service to Swartz and taints his memory. If you think political dissidents in this country are routinely destroyed than you are as naive as can be. If you want to see real government destruction of dissidents that I invite you to look at country's like Venezuela, Tibet, Russia, Iran or North Korea. Swartz was the victim of an overzealous prosecutor out to make a name for herself, not a Illuminati style conspiracy.
When the spokeswoman for Electronic Arts stated that they would try to restore trust with their users I never fathomed that they would actually follow that up with action. I cannot begin to overstate my congratulations to the board of Electronic Arts for doing the right thing and ousting a CEO that had declared his customers the defacto enemy.
When the lies came out that the online requirement was for server processing I took it as yet another BS statement from a company that held it's customers in contempt. When customers showed how easily you could play offline the lie was exposed and Maxis / EA was forced to admit the truth. I never expected that action would come out of this, and must say I am surprised by this as anything in technology in twenty years. Congratulations to EA for taking a step in trying to restore the trust of your customers.
I hesitated to use "junk science" as I don't think it even deserves that title. Unfortunately there are people that actually think they are having a scientific impact in doing what they are doing and benefiting the environment in doing so. When I see comments about the amount of CO2 that will be saved getting tossed around by the ignorant that is where I have to insert "junk science". As for the rest of your comment, I'm in fair agreement.
Next time we might even get an article with a link. Finally an excuse not to RTFA!
Move to country with cheap expenses while retaining job with good pay. Sounds simple, I'm sure everyone has done it, after all there can't be any complications?
Crap like this is feel good meaningless junk science that does absolutely nothing to solve anything. This is no better than saying were going to boycott the gas stations on Sunday (and fill up on Monday). People need to get real about the environment and as long as we've got crap like this and lunatics at places like greenpeace getting the headlines were going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot. We don't need the Haliburton's of the world do the damage when we keep deluding ourselves by pulling crap like this.
Point very well made and people should not take it as trolling.
A quick google search will find many examples of the North Koreans making unprovoked attacks that kill people in an attempt to show off national pride. They have a history of acting irrationally and being perfectly willing to sacrifice their people in order to achieve their leaderships goals.
They also have the most heavily armed border in the world with a significant number of troops and one of the worlds largest and most fanatic armies. They have artillery pre-positioned and in the range of Seoul that they can use if they want to attack (over 10,000 pieces). The US would be put in a position of losing a lot of our own and our allies troops or having to use nukes to defend South Korea.
They have detonated nuclear bombs successfully even if their missiles are not very good. It would probably take a years to get the miniaturization technology down well enough to fit a nuclear warhead to a missile. Technology being what it is it's pretty much inevitable.
If it was someone besides the North Koreans making this noise it probably would be security theater (the Russians and Chinese have enough missiles to overwhelm whatever defense we could put up). Placing the additional launchers in Alaska simply gives Obama a better position to say he did something in the event that they did launch an attack. This is actually a sound military decision by Obama and I'm of the opinion that most of his military decisions have been poor.
Low profit plus opportunity cost equals a bad decision. Nvidia made the right business choice. That capacity can now be used for more profitable products.
Okay, I've read this book / seen this movie and know how this turns out so I've got a checklist for when extinct pigeons inevitably become terror-pigeons.
( ) Train young child on Unix
( ) Use old fashioned door knobs
( ) Get several big guns and don't store them in another building
( ) Make sure vehicles are ICE and not electric
( ) Redundant computer systems are good. You don't have good enough backups.
( ) Happy computer administrators are important when hosting terror critters. Make admins happy.
( ) The guy with the military training and the lawyer are always the first victims, get to know one of each so that you have warning
( ) Outhouses are bad
( ) Big thick steel doors are your friend
( ) Things can go wrong, that's what the lawyer and military training guys are for
( ) Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Add more power to Jeep.
Okay, I've been on both sides of this as I've been to Australia three different times for work (but not with the visa they talk about). When I was brought in I was brought in because they had fewer than 10 people in the entire country that were certified to do what I was doing at the time (there were only a few hundred total worldwide). There well and truly was a shortage of the skills they were looking for and they could not have possibly met that need in country.
Cases like mine are the exception though, and most visas issued for workers to come in and perform IT work are issued to avoid hiring native workers. Someone who is working on a visa is much more likely to be able to be pressed to work additional free hours, won't have costs like retirement and is really easy to get rid of if you don't want them anymore. In short they are viewed as disposable workers that do more at less cost.
There is a relatively easy and balanced fix for these problems (it's a problem when large quantities of natives can't get work and your importing people to work). If you really want to measure if there is actually a shortage of workers for a given field all you have to do is monitor average pay and benefits for native workers. If there is a genuine shortage you will see pay and benefits rise accordingly (market dynamics). When average pay and benefits rise to a certain level you allow for more visas to be issued. This avoids a hard cap while allowing for genuine shortages to be addressed without decimating native workers careers.
I also think you should allow people who come in like this to stay for a limited number of years with a fast track for citizenship. If they don't obtain their citizenship after X years they return home. /Loved Australia
Windows has nothing to do with patch management and in the example I gave over 90% of the servers were *nix. Every OS has issues that need to be routinely patched, Unix, Linux, Mac OS, Windows. The idea that Solaris does/did not have to patched though is absurd, and Sun/Oracle has released regular patches for Solaris from the beginning.
Let's start with that SLA, it is a Service Level Agreement, not a server level agreement. In any typical SLA you have an agreement to ensure that a given service is up 99.999% of the time, not the server. Even allowing for 99.999% uptime you still have time to perform the occasional reboot for your patch requirements.
Your argument sounds just like the arguments I encountered for allowing servers to go years at a time without being patched and it falls flat. If you have a 99.999% uptime requirement than you have the justification for failover servers that can keep your service up and running without affecting your SLA. Even if you can't get additional hardware you should be able to at least set up a VM for an interim basis to allow you to keep things up and running.
Keeping a server up for the sake of a meaningless statistic at the expense of security is shoddy administration and a practice that needs to die out. The only thing un-patched system does is provide an attacker an opportunity own your box.
Last place I was at that had server admins that bragged about /years/ of uptime quickly turned into a discovery that we had thousands of servers that had not been patched in years. Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule. It turned into a six month project but in the end we were patching systems that were vulnerable to 5 year old exploits (mix of *nix and Windows).
I had to make the argument that server uptime meant jack, and to make it I put forward the argument that the only thing that mattered was /service/ uptime. Frankly it is the service that needs to be always available, not the server. This is why you have maintenance windows, for the explicit purpose of allowing a given system to patched and rebooted at a predictable time without interrupting services.
If your server is really that important it will have a fail over server for redundancy (SQL cluster, whatever). If your server isn't important enough to have a failover server for service redundancy that it isn't so important that you can't have a maintenance window. Think service, not server!
The only thing that matters is service availability.
Why don't we start with honest reviews that focus on the DRM that the game will use as a playability issue just as they would framerates or any other issue? If all of the major review sites started reviewing games with a DRM section saying:
Requires
( ) Serial Number
( ) Registration
( ) Activation
( ) Online connection to play
( ) Replaces DVD driver
( ) Wont work if you have installed ______
( ) Works only on one computer
( ) etc
Let people know what their actually buying and let the market make informed choices. When game reviews start reflecting and scoring the playability of DRM and sales start trending accordingly than publishers will start to review their practices.
Unfortunately most review sites would be blacklisted if they tried by themselves, so you would have to do it en mass like the cable companies did with 6 strikes. Band together and they wouldn't be able to blacklist the few sites that started reflecting the playability of DRM.
This problem could be fixed by the review sites, if they gave a damn.
Look back at the innovative days of Silicon Valley and pick something, anything you can think of and think of what would happen if you were to try and perform the same thing again today. You could never do it, because overzealous IP has killed all American engineering innovation. Many products now spend a significant amount of their budget on patent attorneys and cross license costs. You simply cannot innovate in today's climate as things presently stand.
Some simple ideas that would help protect IP and turn the tide back for innovation:
A patent fee, every patent that is held by an organization (or it's parents organization) doubles in costs.
- Allows the small time inventory to register patents without undue cost while adding some measure of expense to patent warchest building.
A patent tax, every patent is taxed at a rate that makes large patent war-chests financially unfeasible.
- You can cripple IP trolls on this by increasing the tax for a patent that is not in active production.
Shortening the length of time that a patent is good for based on the type of patent.
- Decreasing a patent's shelf life to 5 years would probably do more to free up the IP logjams than any other thing.
Make RAND rates standardized for everyone and don't allow them to be offset. /reasonable/ rate.
- Everyone pays the same RAND rates and if your patent is essential than anyone can license it at a fixed and
End massive patent paydays like Apple's recent billion dollar court win.
- Reform the financial benefits for 'going nuclear' and seeking large court settlements for patent violations and make the penalties fixed.
Bicycles can have license plates and in some countries they already do. With more and more people taking bicycles on public roads it's likely only a matter of time until they do. As for people, facial recognition technology is only going to get better and better. There is no reason a system like this could not be used for other street 'crimes' with the same level of efficiency.
I can't argue the point about their not being Arabs any more than someone from Turkey. The Arab spring is a regional concept more than an ethnic one though. My fundamental point about regional instability and people rising up against oppressive governments stands though.
Just curious, do you support automated legal fines like this for other things? Why don't we start with people that ride bicycles and often break the law, how do you think that would go over? We could extend this to jay-walking and littering too. These things could all be picked up with the same types of cameras and automatically generated tickets sent out. For some of these things the technology to implement them (face recognition) is only a matter of time.
Do you really want precedent for automating big brother and fining everyone as they go about their life? Once a precedent is set it can be just as easily applied to other things. Which laws get to be automatically enforced for big brother and who gets to choose?
They could achieve it by cutting the cables or any number of other technical means. For political purposes they need to first degrade the experience to make it less valuable for their citizens. By removing the ability to have privacy, Google and other feature that they don't want their citizens to have access to they diminish the value of the Internet before flipping the switch.
What they don't want is their own Arab spring, something are keenly aware of (is anyone better at stirring up dissonance in the middle east than Iran?). So far the track record for Muslim countries that have cut of the Internet and face revolution is pretty damn high. While cutting off the Internet is hardly causation many of their citizens would simply assume that it meant that it was time for their revolution to start. They have huge internal strife right now and have to be very careful about how far and how quickly they push their citizens.
I have no doubt they will cut off the Internet in some kind of technical fashion within the next 18 months. However I don't think they are going to do so before making the Internet suck so bad that nobody will miss it.
Their has been talk in the news about Iran building a giant Iran wide Intranet just for their own use. This would help ease the transition into their Intranet by removing the appeal and usability of the Internet. Effectively cutting their people off without actually cutting people off would probably fit very well in their political landscape.
When you work for someone you need to assume that your email is read, your website are logged, your SSL traffic decrypted and your computer inventoried. It is also a fairly safe assumption that login, logoff times, screenshots and keyboard strokes as well as mouse movements are all routinely captured.
Depending on your place of employment many of these big brother activities are demanded by law (SEC etc). It's not a question of whether or not you like or the IT department likes it, because neither of you do. It's a question of someone /way/ up your food chain has made the decision to perform that level of monitoring. If your going to get mad, get mad at the VP, the legal team, the SEC, or other person typically at the VP level that had the power to demand the level of logging to begin with.
To illustrate my point on how these things are often driven by and watched from the top you need only look at Yahoo. Their new CEO looked at the VPN logs when she saw the parking lot emptier than she thought it should be. She concluded people were slacking off and not really working and ended telecommuting for everyone at Yahoo. This was a data driven decision based on the logs that Yahoo's servers kept and their CEO reviewed.
I'm not justifying this, I'm not defending this, I'm simply explaining how these things work in the real world.
They are unrepentant about the DRM issue that caused the problem and have been busy spinning it as a popularity issue instead. They have no plans or intention of changing their ways and hope that this offering smooths over a public relations debacle.
This game, and EA themselves need to be boycotted for the good of the industry until such time as EA repents and changes their ways. A grassroots boycott that costs them far more money than their imaginary losses from piracy is the only thing that can get them to change.
Kill it dead, bury it in the textbooks of history and let daylight saving stand as a testament of the folly of man that he thought he might outwit mother nature. Incredible amounts of money and aggravation are wasted every year on this leftover from the age of agriculture.
In a modern world where clocks are set by the atom this archaic throwback to the days of the steam locomotive has gone from quaint to foolish expense. No one will miss it and society has long since moved on with these wonders we call light bulbs and headlights. We'll be okay, just like we are every other single night when the sun sets.
Articles like this can be scaremongering with misleading titles for headline purposes. "Warmer than 75% of the last 11,000 years" means that is has been cooler than about 2700 of the last 11,000 years. This of course can turn around and bit you when your trying to do something for political gain instead of scientific gain. After all it's all too easy to point to something like this as proof that things aren't as bad as they have been in the past pre-industrial era.
I'm not taking sides on this issue, what I'm arguing is that people need to let science do the talking and leave politics on the wayside. The result of failing to do so is that otherwise perfectly sound science research gets tainted by politics. More science and less politics please, that is all.