How does one "cheat" elections using Twitter or Facebook? Could you elaborate?
Easily. Just tweet that your opponent came in to vote reeking of drink or was charged with touching a minor or some other slur. Lots of countries put specific regulation around an election to stop this kind of shit and remedies for when it does happen.
It is still censorship and a pretty stupid thing to censor at that.
Lot's of countries have similar laws. The UK for example prohibits people making statements while polls are open about the way the vote is going based on exit polls or speculation that could reasonably be interpreted as such. And of making false statements of fact about a candidate. Doing so could land you in prison for 6 months or a £5000 fine. And it's not intended as censorship but to stop people rigging polls, e.g. by passing false comments which could have an adverse affect on voters. And yes tweeting would land you in the shit too if you engaged in it.
If I want to receive targeted marketing it should be a consensual arrangement, one based on an existing relationship, one which I can opt out of at any time, and one where I know which decisions are being used to target me. Look at how Amazon makes recommendations, tells you why it's making recommendations and lets you clear recommendations via built-in tools.
Targeted marketing that is delivered by gathering on a person's personal details, friends and stealth gathering of browser history via embedded "Like" buttons is certainly not relationship building. And that's what Facebook and its advertisers are doing. They're not alone in this regard but they are the focus of this particular thread, which originally kicked off by claiming that Facebook is "free" when it is not unless you don't value your personal info.
So no I don't consider targeted advertising to particularly benefit the user unless it is consensual. And consensual means explicit consent and tools to remove consent, not some boiler plate legalese buried in 15 pages of user agreement.
I fail to see how the aggregate making a few stupid impulse buys because of advertisements directly affects you as an individual, could you please elaborate on that?
Who said it affected me? You're putting words into my mouth.
I expect people who want speed could just use eSATA devices & cables. Most external hard disk enclosures have a SATA device in the middle and bridge circuitry to convert between USB / Firewire protocols and SATA. All of that incurs a performance overhead which can be eliminated by using eSATA. It probably explains why so many PCs are shipping with eSATA ports these days.
So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.
Firewire isn't dead. It's just an also ran which is slowly losing relevance and mainstream support. I expect you'll be able to buy Firewire devices for a while to come but you can expect a premium to do it. It's clear with Thunderbolt that even Apple intend to dump it at some point.
It's quite simple: the more catastrophic the scenario, the more cash your institution will get for further research work and the more expenses paid trips you'll get to the Maldives.
Google only had themselves to blame for Wave. It had a user interface only a mother could love. You could look at this thing for hours and still not figure what the hell it's for or where to begin to use it. It's a shame because underneath there is a reasonable concept but it needed more thought gone into introducing people to the concept backed up with some decent examples.
What a load of crap. It's called self discipline(or lack thereof) and personal accountability. People don't buy things because some evil corporation forced them to, they buy things because they want things. Maybe an advertisement helped persuade them, but it was still their choice. If you think that advertising has the ability to force people into doing things then your are acknowledging that humans have no control over their actions, and if that's the case then we probably never had an "eternal soul" in the first place.
If targeted advertising didn't work, advertisers wouldn't bother doing it. As it does, they do. It's not about whether one person has the discipline to not click on ads, but what the aggregate does.
You have to explain that a little further.
Facebook haven't cost me a dime, so how is that not free?
It hasn't cost you a dime, it has cost you a lot of privacy, personal information and other behavioural data which can has been used to monetize you. Perhaps that is a reasonable quid pro quo but there is still a cost associated with using a "free" online service whether it is immediately obvious or not.
Yes it is nonsense. It's an onerous burden that has a chilling effect on online gaming. Nothing it does cannot be done in a more open and useful manner through a combination of a single sign on and parental controls.
Actually at worst he violated the terms of the DMCA given that he was disseminating DRM circumvention code. It didn't get to that point of charges being brought luckily for him.
Frozen interfaces are meant to be precisely that - frozen. It may be they extend the frozen interface with a v2 of the same which is not frozen with additional methods but it shouldn't stop you using v1 with relative confidence. If anyone is actually changing a frozen interfaces or class they should get a slap.
Exactly, the need for legislation is not required because the industry is so meek, so paranoid of bad publicity that stores ask for ID even when it is not required and will take "controversial" games off shelves. It's not like legislation would have any teeth either for non-commercial games - mods, flash content etc. where the more extreme stuff is likely to be found anyway.
It changes its ABI on every version. Perhaps not on purpose but it changes. About the only things you can rely on not changing are the NPAPI and other @frozen interfaces / classes.
Except they tend to suck ass because they're designed by people with no concept of usability.
And that's the perennial problem with open source. Usability is often an afterthought and as a result open source apps suffer by comparison to their commercial counterparts. One of the best things to have happened in the last few years is that usability has become a lot more prominent in projects like GNOME, Firefox, Ubuntu and the results are there to see. Other apps like Open/LibreOffice, GIMP, Eclipse would all benefit from their own usability makeover.
If you want to see why Pandora isn't more popular take a look at the thing - it's UGLY. It looks like a knockoff of the Nintendo DS as reimagined by an 80s soviet design bureau. I think they would sell 2-3x as many of these things just by making it aesthetically pleasing. I think you get a lot more bang for your buck in a comparably priced smart phone. I realize the comparison is unfair due to economies of scale and other things, but if someone rooted an HTC Evo or similar device and ran Linux on it they could probably do far more with it than a Pandora. It has more memory, more storage, an HDMI out, USB, SD etc. It doesn't have a physical keyboard but small bluetooth keyboards & controllers do exist so you're not even depriving yourself of that.
Makers of PCs and peripherals for the home and small-business markets don't care about any sort of Linux-specific certifications.
Well they would care if people vocally told them why they favoured some rival's hardware over their own. At the end of the day it's the same as food getting certified as kosher / vegetarian. Companies would rather not do it but if they earn more sales than they lose in obtaining certification then it's worth it.
Once upon a time Netscape shipped something called the CCK. The CCK or client customization kit allowed a business to tweak settings for things like firewall, home page, bookmarks etc. bundling the modified app & settings up in a new installer so they could install it on everyone's machines.
Much of the reason for the CCK is largely gone - default settings can be defined before ghosting a PC. Other things can be controlled by limiting what the user is entitled to do or not do with their own machine by means of the firewall and user permissions. i.e. if you don't want people installing flash then don't let them install stuff or block the update url the machine calls. Same goes for autoupdate of Firefox itself - block the url Firefox phones home to and do your own thing. An extension could probably also hide or grey out particular settings and reset them if they were modified.
Therefore I think enterprises probably don't need a CCK any more, but they probably do need a technical article to describe how to do all of the above. I also think that if an enterprise really, really needs a CCK like Firefox that there is a commercial opportunity to supply it. Perhaps the solution providers could even strike a deal with Mozilla to keep the firefox branding on CCK builds in return for a cut of the support / contract fees.
If it were just features or bugfixes people wouldn't object. But it's not just features. It is to restrict what you can do with your own device, the apps you can run on it, the data you can use with it, the software you need to sync with it. It's more like a console than a phone and that gets people's backs up.
Because the makers of cards might decline to contribute to such a database of overrides.
But users and commercial distributions can. And makers could be compelled to as well assuming there was a Linux specific certification they were after which included it as a compliance requirement.
So what if he has Asperger? Are the lawyers implying that he is less responsible for his acts due his condition? Clearly they do not know anything about Asperger's syndrome and in fact are offending people with this kind of syndrome, this simply infuriates me, people with Asperger around the world are trying HARD to demonstrate that they can behave as normal as anybody else and this lawyers come with this just to save this guy's Ass, thats plain irresponsible!
Well yeah, that's more or less what the lawyers are implying. And it should be given the weight it deserves - very little. Aspergers does not mean someone cannot tell right from wrong and therefore they should have little excuse under law for their actions. The guy knew full well what he was doing and if the charges are proven then he gets shoved in some US prison then it will be 100% his own fault. One would think that someone with agrophobia would think better than to break the law given the potential consequences of being caught.
Free-to-play (F2P) usually comes about when a game does not have the appeal or simply isn't good enough to sustain enough monthly subscriptions to be profitable.
Sometimes but not always. Free Realms was F2P from the beginning and arguably the likes of Guild Wars are crude F2P games too (i.e. buy expansions for content but free once you do). There is probably a ton of Korean games in the same ilk.
Anyway my experience of LOTRO is that F2P has completely reinvigorated the game (and apparently tripled profits) so it's not always bad for the game or players. The dynamics definitely do change in F2P since the aim is to keep people progressing so you can't make the grind too bad or people are grinding when they should be buying. That too should be seen as a good thing.
I realise if you play an MMO enough to justify a sub then F2P looks pointless, however if you're casual then F2P is definitely the way to go. Play 1 hour a week if you want it doesn't matter. Go on holiday it doesn't matter. It's not like you're wasting money (unless you bought some time limited perk) so you can set your own pace. But LOTRO does offer a monthly sub "VIP" version albeit over the top of the F2P game, so if you want to pay a fixed amount you can.
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How does one "cheat" elections using Twitter or Facebook? Could you elaborate?
Easily. Just tweet that your opponent came in to vote reeking of drink or was charged with touching a minor or some other slur. Lots of countries put specific regulation around an election to stop this kind of shit and remedies for when it does happen.
It is still censorship and a pretty stupid thing to censor at that.
Lot's of countries have similar laws. The UK for example prohibits people making statements while polls are open about the way the vote is going based on exit polls or speculation that could reasonably be interpreted as such. And of making false statements of fact about a candidate. Doing so could land you in prison for 6 months or a £5000 fine. And it's not intended as censorship but to stop people rigging polls, e.g. by passing false comments which could have an adverse affect on voters. And yes tweeting would land you in the shit too if you engaged in it.
I don't need to explain the sentence, it is quite clear in context what I was saying.
Targeted marketing that is delivered by gathering on a person's personal details, friends and stealth gathering of browser history via embedded "Like" buttons is certainly not relationship building. And that's what Facebook and its advertisers are doing. They're not alone in this regard but they are the focus of this particular thread, which originally kicked off by claiming that Facebook is "free" when it is not unless you don't value your personal info.
So no I don't consider targeted advertising to particularly benefit the user unless it is consensual. And consensual means explicit consent and tools to remove consent, not some boiler plate legalese buried in 15 pages of user agreement.
I fail to see how the aggregate making a few stupid impulse buys because of advertisements directly affects you as an individual, could you please elaborate on that?
Who said it affected me? You're putting words into my mouth.
I expect people who want speed could just use eSATA devices & cables. Most external hard disk enclosures have a SATA device in the middle and bridge circuitry to convert between USB / Firewire protocols and SATA. All of that incurs a performance overhead which can be eliminated by using eSATA. It probably explains why so many PCs are shipping with eSATA ports these days.
So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.
Firewire isn't dead. It's just an also ran which is slowly losing relevance and mainstream support. I expect you'll be able to buy Firewire devices for a while to come but you can expect a premium to do it. It's clear with Thunderbolt that even Apple intend to dump it at some point.
It's quite simple: the more catastrophic the scenario, the more cash your institution will get for further research work and the more expenses paid trips you'll get to the Maldives.
Bollocks.
Google only had themselves to blame for Wave. It had a user interface only a mother could love. You could look at this thing for hours and still not figure what the hell it's for or where to begin to use it. It's a shame because underneath there is a reasonable concept but it needed more thought gone into introducing people to the concept backed up with some decent examples.
What a load of crap. It's called self discipline(or lack thereof) and personal accountability. People don't buy things because some evil corporation forced them to, they buy things because they want things. Maybe an advertisement helped persuade them, but it was still their choice. If you think that advertising has the ability to force people into doing things then your are acknowledging that humans have no control over their actions, and if that's the case then we probably never had an "eternal soul" in the first place.
If targeted advertising didn't work, advertisers wouldn't bother doing it. As it does, they do. It's not about whether one person has the discipline to not click on ads, but what the aggregate does.
You have to explain that a little further. Facebook haven't cost me a dime, so how is that not free?
It hasn't cost you a dime, it has cost you a lot of privacy, personal information and other behavioural data which can has been used to monetize you. Perhaps that is a reasonable quid pro quo but there is still a cost associated with using a "free" online service whether it is immediately obvious or not.
Yes it is nonsense. It's an onerous burden that has a chilling effect on online gaming. Nothing it does cannot be done in a more open and useful manner through a combination of a single sign on and parental controls.
Actually at worst he violated the terms of the DMCA given that he was disseminating DRM circumvention code. It didn't get to that point of charges being brought luckily for him.
Frozen interfaces are meant to be precisely that - frozen. It may be they extend the frozen interface with a v2 of the same which is not frozen with additional methods but it shouldn't stop you using v1 with relative confidence. If anyone is actually changing a frozen interfaces or class they should get a slap.
Exactly, the need for legislation is not required because the industry is so meek, so paranoid of bad publicity that stores ask for ID even when it is not required and will take "controversial" games off shelves. It's not like legislation would have any teeth either for non-commercial games - mods, flash content etc. where the more extreme stuff is likely to be found anyway.
It changes its ABI on every version. Perhaps not on purpose but it changes. About the only things you can rely on not changing are the NPAPI and other @frozen interfaces / classes.
Except they tend to suck ass because they're designed by people with no concept of usability.
And that's the perennial problem with open source. Usability is often an afterthought and as a result open source apps suffer by comparison to their commercial counterparts. One of the best things to have happened in the last few years is that usability has become a lot more prominent in projects like GNOME, Firefox, Ubuntu and the results are there to see. Other apps like Open/LibreOffice, GIMP, Eclipse would all benefit from their own usability makeover.
If you want to see why Pandora isn't more popular take a look at the thing - it's UGLY. It looks like a knockoff of the Nintendo DS as reimagined by an 80s soviet design bureau. I think they would sell 2-3x as many of these things just by making it aesthetically pleasing. I think you get a lot more bang for your buck in a comparably priced smart phone. I realize the comparison is unfair due to economies of scale and other things, but if someone rooted an HTC Evo or similar device and ran Linux on it they could probably do far more with it than a Pandora. It has more memory, more storage, an HDMI out, USB, SD etc. It doesn't have a physical keyboard but small bluetooth keyboards & controllers do exist so you're not even depriving yourself of that.
Makers of PCs and peripherals for the home and small-business markets don't care about any sort of Linux-specific certifications.
Well they would care if people vocally told them why they favoured some rival's hardware over their own. At the end of the day it's the same as food getting certified as kosher / vegetarian. Companies would rather not do it but if they earn more sales than they lose in obtaining certification then it's worth it.
Much of the reason for the CCK is largely gone - default settings can be defined before ghosting a PC. Other things can be controlled by limiting what the user is entitled to do or not do with their own machine by means of the firewall and user permissions. i.e. if you don't want people installing flash then don't let them install stuff or block the update url the machine calls. Same goes for autoupdate of Firefox itself - block the url Firefox phones home to and do your own thing. An extension could probably also hide or grey out particular settings and reset them if they were modified.
Therefore I think enterprises probably don't need a CCK any more, but they probably do need a technical article to describe how to do all of the above. I also think that if an enterprise really, really needs a CCK like Firefox that there is a commercial opportunity to supply it. Perhaps the solution providers could even strike a deal with Mozilla to keep the firefox branding on CCK builds in return for a cut of the support / contract fees.
If it were just features or bugfixes people wouldn't object. But it's not just features. It is to restrict what you can do with your own device, the apps you can run on it, the data you can use with it, the software you need to sync with it. It's more like a console than a phone and that gets people's backs up.
Because the makers of cards might decline to contribute to such a database of overrides.
But users and commercial distributions can. And makers could be compelled to as well assuming there was a Linux specific certification they were after which included it as a compliance requirement.
If this was a clampdown on torrent clients, then they'd all be toast. As it's one particular client, it is likely an issue specific to that client.
So what if he has Asperger? Are the lawyers implying that he is less responsible for his acts due his condition? Clearly they do not know anything about Asperger's syndrome and in fact are offending people with this kind of syndrome, this simply infuriates me, people with Asperger around the world are trying HARD to demonstrate that they can behave as normal as anybody else and this lawyers come with this just to save this guy's Ass, thats plain irresponsible!
Well yeah, that's more or less what the lawyers are implying. And it should be given the weight it deserves - very little. Aspergers does not mean someone cannot tell right from wrong and therefore they should have little excuse under law for their actions. The guy knew full well what he was doing and if the charges are proven then he gets shoved in some US prison then it will be 100% his own fault. One would think that someone with agrophobia would think better than to break the law given the potential consequences of being caught.
Free-to-play (F2P) usually comes about when a game does not have the appeal or simply isn't good enough to sustain enough monthly subscriptions to be profitable.
Sometimes but not always. Free Realms was F2P from the beginning and arguably the likes of Guild Wars are crude F2P games too (i.e. buy expansions for content but free once you do). There is probably a ton of Korean games in the same ilk.
Anyway my experience of LOTRO is that F2P has completely reinvigorated the game (and apparently tripled profits) so it's not always bad for the game or players. The dynamics definitely do change in F2P since the aim is to keep people progressing so you can't make the grind too bad or people are grinding when they should be buying. That too should be seen as a good thing.
I realise if you play an MMO enough to justify a sub then F2P looks pointless, however if you're casual then F2P is definitely the way to go. Play 1 hour a week if you want it doesn't matter. Go on holiday it doesn't matter. It's not like you're wasting money (unless you bought some time limited perk) so you can set your own pace. But LOTRO does offer a monthly sub "VIP" version albeit over the top of the F2P game, so if you want to pay a fixed amount you can.