I may not expect anything to be private if I do it in public, but I think I ought to be able to safely expect not to be carefully and actively monitored throughout public spaces. The kind of tech available now with facial recognition/tracking, tying into all kinds of other databases about seemingly every aspect of our lives means that a lot more information can be gotten by "public" means than ever before.
The change is in the ability to store, analyse and cross-reference so much more data... it's certainly beyond the capabilities of any other member of the public to find out as much about a person as state surveillance, despite theoretically having access to the same information, and you have to ask when it crosses the line from keeping an eye out for people, to keeping an eye on people - when exactly does it becomes spying, or stalking?
On the other hand, what if the stock wheel also held the receiver for the remote lock/unlock thing on your key, but could be triggered by any random LED, whereas the alternative was actually secure.
Or you lived somewhere with massive obnoxious billboards everywhere, and one of the replacement wheels was able to seamlessly filter them out of your field of view.
Or for that matter, if one of the wheels had thousands of optional extras you could install to make the wheel do almost anything... wheel-related...
Ok, I may have just pushed this analogy a little too far, but you see what I'm getting at.
Then they should probably provide a separate reference calendar, 'cause that's what everyone uses it for... or do the sensible thing and make it possible to open the thing without admin rights, but not apply any changes.
First off, you're a legally protected person before age of majority, and abortions very late in the pregnancy are (generally speaking) banned even when abortions are allowed.
Second, there are milestones in foetal development that you can use to draw a line between conception and birth, being able to survive independently of the mother being the one I'd support as a separator. That being about 24 weeks, the legal limit here in the UK
Well... I learned something new from Wikipedia when I was looking that up, turns out you can't get an abortion on request in the UK - has to be approved by 2 doctors either to protect the physical/mental health of the mother/existing children, or if the child is likely to be severely handicapped, or for "socio-economic reasons" or in the case of rape... it's not tightly restricted, but it's more restricted than I thought it was.
When has a windows administrator account ever meant that you could do whatever you please?
I'm sat here right now, running an admin account on XP, and if I try to delete the "Desktop" folder in my own account, I can't. It tells me "Desktop is a Windows system folder and is required for Windows to run properly. It cannot be deleted". Never mind the fact that I've changed the location of that folder by fiddling with the registry to put it on a separate hard drive, the redundant copy on C:\ is still protected against deletion.
Contrast this against the stories about *nix systems where some fool runs rm -rf as admin and it only stops deleting things when it deletes the delete command itself... that is being allowed to do whatever you want.
I'm not a WoW player, so I apologise if I'm missing something important... I'm not particularly in support of the bot guy so much as I'm against grindy games.
All I'm really saying is that where the game divides into a longish process, followed by a reward of some kind, the process ought to be fun in itself. If it's not, because it's just a matter of doing the same simple task a large number of times, then I can see why people would want to automate it.
On the other hand, if that's the game they signed up for... I don't even know, my support keeps flipping between sides depending on my mood when I think about it.
Ah, I was thinking of using automation in the sense of not playing, and just leaving your computer on its own to play for you. Aimbots and the like would be using automation to improve your own performance artificially, which in a game of skill is commonly known as cheating...
I guess there's also a distinction to be made between things where the challenging and automatable part is also the fun part (things like chess come under that - automating the game and coming back to see the "You Win" screen wouldn't be fun). It would be silly to automate your way through the fun part, but trying to eliminate a boring/repetitive/challenge-less part in order to skip ahead to the reward, I can understand that.
That said, I'm not totally adverse to grinding... in certain things at least. So long as the task itself is relatively engaging I can put up with a lot of repetition. Especially if I can do something else at the same time.
There's a difference between a real challenge (or time spent acquiring an actual skill) and the "challenge" of spending a lot of time performing an easy task over and over again.
The kind of challenge that's fun to play through couldn't be done by a bot. On the other hand, if a task can be automated by a computer script, then it wasn't fun or skilful (and hence was a pointless task) to begin with.
So essentially, you did it the hard way and hence feel that everyone else should also do so. Could be the case that the investment of time you've put into the game is skewing your judgement of how things should be done.
Does there need to be a long, tedious grind before a payoff to make the payoff worthwhile? I would say not... but if I'd put a lot of time and sustained effort into reaching a reward, then it was changed so that you could get the same thing with much less time put in, I'd be paying less attention to how it makes the fun part arrive quicker (ostensibly a good thing) and more focused on how unfair it is that I had to put in more time to get the thing than everyone else after me.
Where the lead-up part is itself fun, or challenging (because overcoming challenges is fun for some... myself included btw) then it's a non-issue, so I'm not suggesting a "click here to win" button, but endless false challenges like the stereotype "kill 10 boars" really are just there to bulk the game out.
Just to start, I do know the difference between bandwidth and data-rate, but the terms have been somewhat co-opted... I was being untechnical, so sue me.
I see the issue being described - people want their VoIP packets delivered fast, even if there's not a lot of total throughput, but I don't honestly really care. Arbitrarily giving priority to one person's packets over those of the next guy, based on what program is generating those packets, just doesn't seem fair, unless each person gets to individually choose what program gets priority in their traffic.
If one guy wants his torrent download to get the VIP treatment, let him... it won't do a lot of good - that's why their describing it as "non-time-sensitive", but let him. It wouldn't be particularly sensible, but let him. All that needs to be done is limit how much high-priority traffic each person can generate at a time. There's going to be a limit to how much traffic can reliably be delivered with low latency, so divide that amount equally between users and let them put it whatever use they want.
I'm thinking each person puts their applications in order of priority, and a preferred priority designation (so if you want to altruistically mark your torrents as low priority you can do). Then the limited amount of high-priority traffic they're allowed essentially gets offered to each program in turn starting from the top of the list, so if they're only using one thing, it uses their share of the fast lane (unless its marked as always being low-priority) until a higher priority program needs it.
Most people would be unaware of the system's existence and just use the defaults, resulting in the "Congestion Management" system as described, which wouldn't be a massive bad thing, but if people really want their non-time-sensitive tasks to be given priority, allow them their share of the high priority lane.
What I'm objecting to here is the idea of one person's traffic taking up more of the hypothetical fast lane than their fair share, because some other person's application has been judged to be unimportant, even if it makes perfect sense for it to not be given priority because it won't have a noticeable effect.
When there's no congestion, allow everyone to soak up as much bandwidth as the pipes will allow, then when network load gets near to capacity, give every user a precisely equal share of the available bandwidth. That's only fair.
Allow each customer to set their own preferences about what kind of packets of theirs they'd like to have prioritised. Set sensible defaults for the tech-clueless and we're done.
That way, when bandwidth is plentiful, everyone can have plenty (hopefully finishing off that download before peak time arrives) but when it runs short, everyone is slowed down by the same amount, and can see exactly what the connection they're paying for actually is (if 1/(number of users) out of the available bandwidth isn't enough to run VoIP, they need better pipes)
Prioritising one customer over another based on application is just a cheap way to try and make your network look faster than it is, at the expense of the people trying to use their connection for "non-time-sensitive" things. I'm sorry, but how important that download might be is up to _me_, not my ISP and I shouldn't suffer a downgraded service compared to the avoid VoIP-er next door.
The "up to" dodge has been used for too long, and people are starting to get pissed off. I know that here in the UK there's some action being taken by the regulatory types to force ISPs to be more up front about what kind of speed you can actually expect to get (given your distance from the exchange, amount of contention etc) rather than just the theoretical maximum they're selling.
To be fair to them, it doesn't make economic or technological sense to give every single customer a dedicated pipe fat enough for them to saturate it 24/7, because the large majority of customers will never use even close to that amount of bandwidth - most people's usage comes in relatively short bursts, which they will want to have served quickly.
So they could cater to these 2 markets in a variety of ways. They could have the normal high contention connections for most people, and a separate service with more guarantees on it being fully available all the time, but that would mean the heavy users pay heavily, which they won't like. They could do what they're doing and serve the majority of their customers as best they can, while royally screwing over the heavy users (non optimal, but might make business sense from their end). They could invest heavily in infrastructure until they actually can guarantee everyone the bandwidth they signed up for 100% of the time (would be nice, but unlikely). They could encourage heavy downloaders to do their heavy downloading when everyone else is sleeping so congestion won't be an issue (bigger download allowances in off-peak times maybe, I've seen it offered by some ISPs)... etc
Whatever they do, I think they need to start by being much more honest about exactly what we're paying for - guaranteed minimum speeds, expected maximum speeds at peak time, contention ratios, make the data public so that people can make their choice with all the information available to them. Plus of course, those infrastructure upgrades wouldn't go amiss... it has to happen eventually after all.
It works every time - post something against the perceived prevailing opinion of Slashdotters, and then end the post with "I wonder how much I'll get modded down" or "I have karma to burn" or any other statement implying an expectation of negative moderation, and magically you end up with +5 Insightful.
I took that GCSE a couple of years back... there's a handful of multiple choice questions from the exam that I won't forget quickly.
One described a service similar to Google Earth (same basic thing but without the brand name) and asked why it couldn't be used by the police to catch criminals. Alongside the correct answers that it wasn't real-time and didn't have high enough resolution there was "because criminals could hide under umbrellas" and "because you could only catch fat criminals, not thin ones"
Another was to tick all the true statements about RFID chips... as well as the sensible ones there was the absolute gem, "You shouldn't keep too many close together in case they join together and form an evil network". No joke, their words not mine. Evil network.
Over the course of the past papers we did we gradually learned the stock answers that the examiners were looking for... truly was a parallel world that they were living in.
Seems our school had realised that it was a shitty course - ours was the last year before they switched to a different exam board's IT course, with a different syllabus that was apparently much better.
Slashdot Mirror
I may not expect anything to be private if I do it in public, but I think I ought to be able to safely expect not to be carefully and actively monitored throughout public spaces. The kind of tech available now with facial recognition/tracking, tying into all kinds of other databases about seemingly every aspect of our lives means that a lot more information can be gotten by "public" means than ever before.
The change is in the ability to store, analyse and cross-reference so much more data... it's certainly beyond the capabilities of any other member of the public to find out as much about a person as state surveillance, despite theoretically having access to the same information, and you have to ask when it crosses the line from keeping an eye out for people, to keeping an eye on people - when exactly does it becomes spying, or stalking?
Technically you could hurt the bank more by racking up vast amounts of debt, then defaulting... seems like a lot of people already had that idea.
On the other hand, what if the stock wheel also held the receiver for the remote lock/unlock thing on your key, but could be triggered by any random LED, whereas the alternative was actually secure.
Or you lived somewhere with massive obnoxious billboards everywhere, and one of the replacement wheels was able to seamlessly filter them out of your field of view.
Or for that matter, if one of the wheels had thousands of optional extras you could install to make the wheel do almost anything... wheel-related...
Ok, I may have just pushed this analogy a little too far, but you see what I'm getting at.
I'd mod you funny, just for shits and giggles... or at least I would, if I weren't so busy trying to get myself modded funny.
Then they should probably provide a separate reference calendar, 'cause that's what everyone uses it for... or do the sensible thing and make it possible to open the thing without admin rights, but not apply any changes.
That was a clerical error, your bill is in the mail.
First off, you're a legally protected person before age of majority, and abortions very late in the pregnancy are (generally speaking) banned even when abortions are allowed.
Second, there are milestones in foetal development that you can use to draw a line between conception and birth, being able to survive independently of the mother being the one I'd support as a separator. That being about 24 weeks, the legal limit here in the UK
Well... I learned something new from Wikipedia when I was looking that up, turns out you can't get an abortion on request in the UK - has to be approved by 2 doctors either to protect the physical/mental health of the mother/existing children, or if the child is likely to be severely handicapped, or for "socio-economic reasons" or in the case of rape... it's not tightly restricted, but it's more restricted than I thought it was.
Are either of you aware that the plural of Lego is Lego?
"Legos"... you make me sick.
When has a windows administrator account ever meant that you could do whatever you please?
I'm sat here right now, running an admin account on XP, and if I try to delete the "Desktop" folder in my own account, I can't. It tells me "Desktop is a Windows system folder and is required for Windows to run properly. It cannot be deleted". Never mind the fact that I've changed the location of that folder by fiddling with the registry to put it on a separate hard drive, the redundant copy on C:\ is still protected against deletion.
Contrast this against the stories about *nix systems where some fool runs rm -rf as admin and it only stops deleting things when it deletes the delete command itself... that is being allowed to do whatever you want.
Which of those was the good thing?
I'm not a WoW player, so I apologise if I'm missing something important... I'm not particularly in support of the bot guy so much as I'm against grindy games.
All I'm really saying is that where the game divides into a longish process, followed by a reward of some kind, the process ought to be fun in itself. If it's not, because it's just a matter of doing the same simple task a large number of times, then I can see why people would want to automate it.
On the other hand, if that's the game they signed up for... I don't even know, my support keeps flipping between sides depending on my mood when I think about it.
Ah, I was thinking of using automation in the sense of not playing, and just leaving your computer on its own to play for you. Aimbots and the like would be using automation to improve your own performance artificially, which in a game of skill is commonly known as cheating...
I guess there's also a distinction to be made between things where the challenging and automatable part is also the fun part (things like chess come under that - automating the game and coming back to see the "You Win" screen wouldn't be fun). It would be silly to automate your way through the fun part, but trying to eliminate a boring/repetitive/challenge-less part in order to skip ahead to the reward, I can understand that.
That said, I'm not totally adverse to grinding... in certain things at least. So long as the task itself is relatively engaging I can put up with a lot of repetition. Especially if I can do something else at the same time.
There's a difference between a real challenge (or time spent acquiring an actual skill) and the "challenge" of spending a lot of time performing an easy task over and over again.
The kind of challenge that's fun to play through couldn't be done by a bot. On the other hand, if a task can be automated by a computer script, then it wasn't fun or skilful (and hence was a pointless task) to begin with.
So essentially, you did it the hard way and hence feel that everyone else should also do so. Could be the case that the investment of time you've put into the game is skewing your judgement of how things should be done.
Does there need to be a long, tedious grind before a payoff to make the payoff worthwhile? I would say not... but if I'd put a lot of time and sustained effort into reaching a reward, then it was changed so that you could get the same thing with much less time put in, I'd be paying less attention to how it makes the fun part arrive quicker (ostensibly a good thing) and more focused on how unfair it is that I had to put in more time to get the thing than everyone else after me.
Where the lead-up part is itself fun, or challenging (because overcoming challenges is fun for some... myself included btw) then it's a non-issue, so I'm not suggesting a "click here to win" button, but endless false challenges like the stereotype "kill 10 boars" really are just there to bulk the game out.
I have to assume that your comment was sarcasm. But then why did you get an "insightful" mod? Maybe the insightful mod was also sarcasm?
Either that or people are intelligent enough to read through the sarcasm, see his actual intended meaning, and moderate accordingly.
Just to start, I do know the difference between bandwidth and data-rate, but the terms have been somewhat co-opted... I was being untechnical, so sue me.
I see the issue being described - people want their VoIP packets delivered fast, even if there's not a lot of total throughput, but I don't honestly really care. Arbitrarily giving priority to one person's packets over those of the next guy, based on what program is generating those packets, just doesn't seem fair, unless each person gets to individually choose what program gets priority in their traffic.
If one guy wants his torrent download to get the VIP treatment, let him... it won't do a lot of good - that's why their describing it as "non-time-sensitive", but let him. It wouldn't be particularly sensible, but let him. All that needs to be done is limit how much high-priority traffic each person can generate at a time. There's going to be a limit to how much traffic can reliably be delivered with low latency, so divide that amount equally between users and let them put it whatever use they want.
I'm thinking each person puts their applications in order of priority, and a preferred priority designation (so if you want to altruistically mark your torrents as low priority you can do). Then the limited amount of high-priority traffic they're allowed essentially gets offered to each program in turn starting from the top of the list, so if they're only using one thing, it uses their share of the fast lane (unless its marked as always being low-priority) until a higher priority program needs it.
Most people would be unaware of the system's existence and just use the defaults, resulting in the "Congestion Management" system as described, which wouldn't be a massive bad thing, but if people really want their non-time-sensitive tasks to be given priority, allow them their share of the high priority lane.
What I'm objecting to here is the idea of one person's traffic taking up more of the hypothetical fast lane than their fair share, because some other person's application has been judged to be unimportant, even if it makes perfect sense for it to not be given priority because it won't have a noticeable effect.
When there's no congestion, allow everyone to soak up as much bandwidth as the pipes will allow, then when network load gets near to capacity, give every user a precisely equal share of the available bandwidth. That's only fair.
Allow each customer to set their own preferences about what kind of packets of theirs they'd like to have prioritised. Set sensible defaults for the tech-clueless and we're done.
That way, when bandwidth is plentiful, everyone can have plenty (hopefully finishing off that download before peak time arrives) but when it runs short, everyone is slowed down by the same amount, and can see exactly what the connection they're paying for actually is (if 1/(number of users) out of the available bandwidth isn't enough to run VoIP, they need better pipes)
Prioritising one customer over another based on application is just a cheap way to try and make your network look faster than it is, at the expense of the people trying to use their connection for "non-time-sensitive" things. I'm sorry, but how important that download might be is up to _me_, not my ISP and I shouldn't suffer a downgraded service compared to the avoid VoIP-er next door.
The "up to" dodge has been used for too long, and people are starting to get pissed off. I know that here in the UK there's some action being taken by the regulatory types to force ISPs to be more up front about what kind of speed you can actually expect to get (given your distance from the exchange, amount of contention etc) rather than just the theoretical maximum they're selling.
To be fair to them, it doesn't make economic or technological sense to give every single customer a dedicated pipe fat enough for them to saturate it 24/7, because the large majority of customers will never use even close to that amount of bandwidth - most people's usage comes in relatively short bursts, which they will want to have served quickly.
So they could cater to these 2 markets in a variety of ways. They could have the normal high contention connections for most people, and a separate service with more guarantees on it being fully available all the time, but that would mean the heavy users pay heavily, which they won't like. They could do what they're doing and serve the majority of their customers as best they can, while royally screwing over the heavy users (non optimal, but might make business sense from their end). They could invest heavily in infrastructure until they actually can guarantee everyone the bandwidth they signed up for 100% of the time (would be nice, but unlikely). They could encourage heavy downloaders to do their heavy downloading when everyone else is sleeping so congestion won't be an issue (bigger download allowances in off-peak times maybe, I've seen it offered by some ISPs)... etc
Whatever they do, I think they need to start by being much more honest about exactly what we're paying for - guaranteed minimum speeds, expected maximum speeds at peak time, contention ratios, make the data public so that people can make their choice with all the information available to them. Plus of course, those infrastructure upgrades wouldn't go amiss... it has to happen eventually after all.
I was thinking of that thing too... thought his name was just 'Autopilot'.
But "Attopilot"? They missed an opportunity for something much funnier...
It works every time - post something against the perceived prevailing opinion of Slashdotters, and then end the post with "I wonder how much I'll get modded down" or "I have karma to burn" or any other statement implying an expectation of negative moderation, and magically you end up with +5 Insightful.
Actually he never closed the first parenthesis. Count 'em - 5 openings, only 4 closed.
If that's the AQA Computing A-Level, I'm halfway through it. I remember we learned about assembler... in theory.
Didn't spend more than about one lesson on it and we were never expected to actually learn to do anything in it.
I took that GCSE a couple of years back... there's a handful of multiple choice questions from the exam that I won't forget quickly.
One described a service similar to Google Earth (same basic thing but without the brand name) and asked why it couldn't be used by the police to catch criminals. Alongside the correct answers that it wasn't real-time and didn't have high enough resolution there was "because criminals could hide under umbrellas" and "because you could only catch fat criminals, not thin ones"
Another was to tick all the true statements about RFID chips... as well as the sensible ones there was the absolute gem, "You shouldn't keep too many close together in case they join together and form an evil network". No joke, their words not mine. Evil network.
Over the course of the past papers we did we gradually learned the stock answers that the examiners were looking for... truly was a parallel world that they were living in.
Seems our school had realised that it was a shitty course - ours was the last year before they switched to a different exam board's IT course, with a different syllabus that was apparently much better.
The Turing test isn't like a litmus test - you don't get a clear and definite result either way.
Failing to pass the Turing Test doesn't mean a thing isn't intelligent, but if we make something that can pass, then it's something to take notice of.
The part that bothers me is that the moonwalk being a fake is considered 10 times as likely as life on Mars.