An easy improvised weapon for defenders on a plane would be the seat belt. Most are easy to detach and have a nice heavy piece of metal on the end to swing around.
Clearly Microsoft / Treyarch / Activision are free to set their own terms and conditions on the service, which might include banning logos which are obscene, offensive etc. So if you do a swastika and they say its banned then you're best to take them at their word.
I don't own COD: Black Ops so I don't know how you customize your logo. But assuming you can draw pretty much anything you like, you only have to look at various ways neo nazis get around this ban to think this is all a futile effort. They substitute the swastika for something with a similar radial symmetry and colour scheme. I can imagine the hilarity that will ensue when someone uses the Isle of Man logo and gets banned for their troubles.
You can have both sides play the good guys, but each of them seeing the other side as the bad guys. Americans Army did that or so I heard, I haven't played it myself.
That might be possible if both sides were identically equipped on symmetric style maps. It doesn't make much sense if you want to deck out one side with different weaponry than the other. E.g. Battlefield Vietnam has different weapons and vehicles depending on the side you're on.
Really, if they don't want to risk offending anyone they should stick with imaginary wars between alien races or something. The minute they try creating history, the least they can do is get the protagonists right and tell the critics to go to hell.
I am deeply surprised that EA caved in to the hollering that their game contained Taliban fighters. So fucking what? In a multiplayer match game, some people have to play the enemy. That's the case regardless of the game being set in WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever.
They should have stuck to their guns and left things the way they were. Or mocked the whole thing by including unlockable enemy skins - marshmallow men, hippies, Nazis etc. to highlight how ridiculous the "controversy" was.
Of course it inhibits piracy or they wouldn't do it. Of course if a publisher is going to use DRM (or copy protection), you can easily shoot yourself in the foot by going overboard on it.
As for DRM games selling like crazy, I expect in most cases that's due to some of the things I mentioned previously. The classic example would be Stardock games where there is substantial after sales support which are strong incentives to buy the game at retail.
Ok, so all those people still think they can change human nature using laws and papers...
I doubt that's their plan at all. I expect if you broke down pirates by category that maybe 10-20% of downloaders of any particular game could be incentivized / threatened into purchasing the legit copy. Carrot and stick so to speak. So while you'll not change human nature, you can certainly persuade more people to buy the game than who would do so otherwise.
Games should be released DRM free, publishers should be free to utilize what means have been approved to protect their work. At least that's how it would work in my perfect world....
They should be, but then people go and freely distribute the game with wild abandon. DRM'd games get pirated too of course, but the purpose of the DRM is inhibit the pirated game in the first days, weeks of release as much as possible. Even if it inhibits piracy by a few days or by 20%, that may still pay for the DRM and justify itself financially. Perhaps the devs could release a patch to disable the DRM later, as happened with The Witcher.
I think DRM free would work for a lot of games, but only where the game is largely online or is followed up by substantial after sales content, fixes, support, events etc. for people who've actually bought the game. I also think that a timelocked version of the game, or demo which can be converted to the full title would do much to convert potential pirates into actual customers.
The P2P waters could also be muddied substantially by distributing broken versions of the game. Release a 10Gb download that appears to be legit but the installer spews out some cryptic message. Then watch the support boards fill up with complaints about the error message, wait a week or so and then laugh them off the board.
Java is a verbose language and many changes are not about implementing the kitchen sink but trying to make it terser and more expressive. For example most getters and setters are boiler plate, so why not some simple annotation / keyword which generates them at compile time and tags them for runtime inspection? What about partial classes so visual editors generate code into one file and devs can put hand written code in another file? What about closures for single method interfaces to remove reams of boilerplate? What about auto variables that infer their type automatically? What about something akin to the using keyword in.NET so we can safely release system resources without a mess of nested try / catch blocks (which very little code does properly) ?
None of these things would actually affect the byte code but they would make the language more tolerable, less verbose. Some of these things are making their way into Java 7 / 8 (e.g. project coin work fixes language issues including resource management) which is good, but frankly the pace of development sucks. The process is so glacial that it has disappeared up its own arse and done several loops by now.
It's not a case that it will dominate, it already does. Twice as many android handsets are sold vs its nearest competitor and the gulf is only likely to widen over the long term. The same will probably happen for tablets too.
At one time Linux was the only thing you could buy a netbook with. Windows Vista was so bloated it simply wouldn't run on a netbook. Sadly for Linux, it didn't capitalize on this opportunity when it mattered and now Windows 7 works perfectly well on lower powered machines. So Linux is a rarity and I don't see that situation changing any time soon.
A better idea, a non removable waterproof collar with 8 cameras in it capturing a 360 degree view around him.
And I'm sure an arabic guying wearing what looks like an explosive suicide collar will be an instant hit wherever he goes. On plus side think of all the 360 degree photos he will have of police cordons, helicopters and SWAT vans to put up on his site. Assuming he lives long enough to put them up.
That depends. If some idiot is wantonly causing damage to Wiki's service and they are hiding behind a proxy of an ISP, what recourse do they have?
In the first instance they rely on Verizon to act responsibly according to its own laid down policy which it should be enforcing, failing that they they either block the whole domain and / or call in the lawyers. Given Wikipedia is in the middle of a funding drive, it hardly seems sensible to call in the lawyers everytime some asshole hides behind a proxy to disrupt them.
Blocking the domain from edits and prominently putting a message to shame Verizon into enforcing their AUP. Verizon most likely has logs on their proxy and could likely identify the culprit given a few sample urls and the times they were hit.
Personally I think this sort of thing is avoidable if prominent websites and prominent ISP maintained some expedited means of communications - either a mailing list, phone number, point of contact etc. It's in nobody's interest to escalate or prolong the pain when the fault lays with some antisocial asshole. Boot him and streamline the process for when the next one inevitably appears.
Personally I agree with AC on Netbeans... it is a pile of crap.
I use Eclipse everyday and there is no doubt it is more powerful. But it's also a bitch to get it working properly with Maven, Subversion and other things. It requiresplugins, and even messing around with JVM settings in eclipse.ini in the case of m2eclipse. While Netbeans has it's own areas of crapiness, there is no doubt that out of the box it is a more get up and go than Eclipse. It also has a decent form editor for Swing which actually works properly.
OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be.
Much of the bloat is uncessary. For example OpenOffice drags in chunks of Mozilla/NSPR to supply LDAP functionality. It can drag in 2, 3 or 4 different scripting runtimes with their own heap / GC overheads. There is a lot could be done to improve it's bloat without significantly impacting on its functionality just by rationalizing some of this stuff. For example, make one scripting language core, and the other's optional.
"We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he told investors, suggesting that the Kinect offered business opportunities that weren't possible "in a controller-based world."
Microsoft would be skinned alive if they did that. It's disconcerting enough when a Kinect / PSEye game takes a picture of you. Now imagine it sends that picture off to a remote server for analysis with or without the person's consent. For all MS know, people are standing there naked, or having sex, or their 2 year old kid is running around with no clothes, or people otherwise candidly enjoying the privacy of their own homes.
If ever the tech appeared Microsoft would be rightly hauled over the coals. Lawsuits would follow, the EU would get involved, and basically it would turn into a hellish nightmare of litigation.
So no its not likely to ever happen. Chalk it up to an extremely ill chosen example of what it could do, not what it will do. Even so, the capability to monitor or record is implied by all these devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony and MS have some way of enabling at least audio recording for dealing with complaints of griefing, harassment etc.
They shouldn't. That's what makes this such a non-story. The problem is that there are a lot of people ("editors" they call themselves, until they get to level 2 and become an "admin") who take Wikipedia waaay too seriously. Take this gem from TFA:
It's called a meritocracy and of course Verizon should care if they care for their own reputation.
My biggest problem with Wikipedia is the direct source of stories like this. It's become a little pool and everyone is trying to be the biggest fish, for two reasons: First, that way they can create their own little kingdom of articles which they've "adopted", bullying people into a consensus which matches their own ideals/agenda.
Actually the direct source was the Slashdot submitter so blame them for making the issue more prominent. As for the admins it seems to me in this case they're doing what one would expect of an admin - attempting to have a discussion of how keep the site running and figuring ways to exclude a specific vandal hiding behind a proxy shared by millions.
Because a ban on Verizon would make front page news and seriously damage their reputation. It would be better for everyone (except the troll) if they helped identify and remove this jerk from their system. I'm sure their AUP would give them ample justification for doing it.
I suggest it would be a time to introduce stringent environment controls that China would struggle to match compared to more eco-conscious Western countries. Even if China eventually implement them, it would still have a net benefit for the environment.
That, and it doesn't even surprise me in the slightest that MS is going to require you to buy an SD card from THEM. At twice the price I'm sure, "for the added quality" of course. They're doing you a favor don't you see?
I think it's more likely that removable storage is yet another "feature" of Windows Phone 7 that hasn't been implemented properly yet. Older versions of WinCE support removable storage so clearly there is no technical issue.
IMO it got put on the long finger to save the additional time in development & QA coping with users removing cards during file operations, global media added / removed events, the headaches associated with DRM, encrypted data, volume management and so forth. Perhaps as an aide to some manufacturers the first incarnation of Windows Phone 7 can mount a logical volume that spans the internal / external storage but obviously removing the card after that is not a good idea.
Note that Android has supported removable storage for a long while, but principally by ignoring issues like DRM - storage was for files, music & vids, not apps. Android 2.2 allows apps to install some files on SD storage (if the manifest permits it), but only for support files & data, not the executable itself. It does so by creating an encrypted file which is mounted via a loopback device.
I imagine MS would have to do something similar, or mandate that all Windows Phones must have a large internal capacity to negate the need to store apps on external storage.
I think what Linux allowed was a way for Sony to separate hackers into two piles - the pirates and the homebrewers. That was probably their original intent (as well as potential tax breaks). So removing Linux has been bad from that perspective.
However I don't think they had much choice but to remove it. Someone had found a way to break the hypervisor which would have left the whole platform open to piracy. For example, someone might craft an OtherOS which broken out of the hypervisor, bootstrapped the real OS and patched it to remove copy protections or to obtain keys. Given the billions of revenue for them and their partners at stake, it was a no-brainer what course of action they chose.
I've been struggling with this. I want to buy a PS3 just to play GT5. Although I'd probably never install Linux on it, it was a douchebag move to remove that feature.
Sony was protecting its platform from an exploit and very real possibility it would have enabled software piracy. If that meant pissing off a few nerds using a niche feature, then so be it.
If Oracle can't or won't pull their fingers out of their arses then someone will fork it and slowly but surely it will carry on its merry way even if its called something else for legal reasons. Sun / Oracle have pissed off enough people that I can see this really happening.
I've read through all the comments to this article and I haven't seen anyone yet suggest that the councillor was perfectly serious,
It's not up to the police to determine he was serious or not. The police investigate, the police act upon complaints. It's up to the crown prosecution service given the available evidence to decide whether he should go before the beak. Chances are he'll get let off with a warning.
As long as "the full extent of the law" is to require the speaker to live with the the guilt and shame of having said something which inadvertently led to someone's death, I agree with you.
And what if they feel no guilt? What if they are inciting people to murder or commit illegal acts because the speaker wants them to do it?
Well the evidence is that Windows Phone 7 doesn't support more than 1 running 3rd party app at a time. No smart phone OS would do this unless there was a technical issue underlying it.
It certainly isn't for the lame and laughable "it uses too much CPU" excuse which iPhone apologists used to bandy around even when Android disproved that point. The kernel could suspend the process, or the CF runtime could even "freeze the world" (as happens in some GC schemes) if that were a concern.
No, it's clearly some underlying technical deficiency in the runtime. I suggested some potential reasons although only Microsoft know for sure. It's too bad the source code isn't available to verify.
I expect the issue will be resolved eventually but there is no doubt that there is a problem or we wouldn't even be arguing the point.
Slashdot Mirror
An easy improvised weapon for defenders on a plane would be the seat belt. Most are easy to detach and have a nice heavy piece of metal on the end to swing around.
Clearly Microsoft / Treyarch / Activision are free to set their own terms and conditions on the service, which might include banning logos which are obscene, offensive etc. So if you do a swastika and they say its banned then you're best to take them at their word. I don't own COD: Black Ops so I don't know how you customize your logo. But assuming you can draw pretty much anything you like, you only have to look at various ways neo nazis get around this ban to think this is all a futile effort. They substitute the swastika for something with a similar radial symmetry and colour scheme. I can imagine the hilarity that will ensue when someone uses the Isle of Man logo and gets banned for their troubles.
That might be possible if both sides were identically equipped on symmetric style maps. It doesn't make much sense if you want to deck out one side with different weaponry than the other. E.g. Battlefield Vietnam has different weapons and vehicles depending on the side you're on.
Really, if they don't want to risk offending anyone they should stick with imaginary wars between alien races or something. The minute they try creating history, the least they can do is get the protagonists right and tell the critics to go to hell.
I am deeply surprised that EA caved in to the hollering that their game contained Taliban fighters. So fucking what? In a multiplayer match game, some people have to play the enemy. That's the case regardless of the game being set in WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever. They should have stuck to their guns and left things the way they were. Or mocked the whole thing by including unlockable enemy skins - marshmallow men, hippies, Nazis etc. to highlight how ridiculous the "controversy" was.
As for DRM games selling like crazy, I expect in most cases that's due to some of the things I mentioned previously. The classic example would be Stardock games where there is substantial after sales support which are strong incentives to buy the game at retail.
I doubt that's their plan at all. I expect if you broke down pirates by category that maybe 10-20% of downloaders of any particular game could be incentivized / threatened into purchasing the legit copy. Carrot and stick so to speak. So while you'll not change human nature, you can certainly persuade more people to buy the game than who would do so otherwise.
They should be, but then people go and freely distribute the game with wild abandon. DRM'd games get pirated too of course, but the purpose of the DRM is inhibit the pirated game in the first days, weeks of release as much as possible. Even if it inhibits piracy by a few days or by 20%, that may still pay for the DRM and justify itself financially. Perhaps the devs could release a patch to disable the DRM later, as happened with The Witcher.
I think DRM free would work for a lot of games, but only where the game is largely online or is followed up by substantial after sales content, fixes, support, events etc. for people who've actually bought the game. I also think that a timelocked version of the game, or demo which can be converted to the full title would do much to convert potential pirates into actual customers.
The P2P waters could also be muddied substantially by distributing broken versions of the game. Release a 10Gb download that appears to be legit but the installer spews out some cryptic message. Then watch the support boards fill up with complaints about the error message, wait a week or so and then laugh them off the board.
None of these things would actually affect the byte code but they would make the language more tolerable, less verbose. Some of these things are making their way into Java 7 / 8 (e.g. project coin work fixes language issues including resource management) which is good, but frankly the pace of development sucks. The process is so glacial that it has disappeared up its own arse and done several loops by now.
It's not a case that it will dominate, it already does. Twice as many android handsets are sold vs its nearest competitor and the gulf is only likely to widen over the long term. The same will probably happen for tablets too.
At one time Linux was the only thing you could buy a netbook with. Windows Vista was so bloated it simply wouldn't run on a netbook. Sadly for Linux, it didn't capitalize on this opportunity when it mattered and now Windows 7 works perfectly well on lower powered machines. So Linux is a rarity and I don't see that situation changing any time soon.
And I'm sure an arabic guying wearing what looks like an explosive suicide collar will be an instant hit wherever he goes. On plus side think of all the 360 degree photos he will have of police cordons, helicopters and SWAT vans to put up on his site. Assuming he lives long enough to put them up.
In the first instance they rely on Verizon to act responsibly according to its own laid down policy which it should be enforcing, failing that they they either block the whole domain and / or call in the lawyers. Given Wikipedia is in the middle of a funding drive, it hardly seems sensible to call in the lawyers everytime some asshole hides behind a proxy to disrupt them.
Blocking the domain from edits and prominently putting a message to shame Verizon into enforcing their AUP. Verizon most likely has logs on their proxy and could likely identify the culprit given a few sample urls and the times they were hit.
Personally I think this sort of thing is avoidable if prominent websites and prominent ISP maintained some expedited means of communications - either a mailing list, phone number, point of contact etc. It's in nobody's interest to escalate or prolong the pain when the fault lays with some antisocial asshole. Boot him and streamline the process for when the next one inevitably appears.
I use Eclipse everyday and there is no doubt it is more powerful. But it's also a bitch to get it working properly with Maven, Subversion and other things. It requiresplugins, and even messing around with JVM settings in eclipse.ini in the case of m2eclipse. While Netbeans has it's own areas of crapiness, there is no doubt that out of the box it is a more get up and go than Eclipse. It also has a decent form editor for Swing which actually works properly.
OpenOffice is bloated but it is supposed to be.
Much of the bloat is uncessary. For example OpenOffice drags in chunks of Mozilla/NSPR to supply LDAP functionality. It can drag in 2, 3 or 4 different scripting runtimes with their own heap / GC overheads. There is a lot could be done to improve it's bloat without significantly impacting on its functionality just by rationalizing some of this stuff. For example, make one scripting language core, and the other's optional.
Microsoft would be skinned alive if they did that. It's disconcerting enough when a Kinect / PSEye game takes a picture of you. Now imagine it sends that picture off to a remote server for analysis with or without the person's consent. For all MS know, people are standing there naked, or having sex, or their 2 year old kid is running around with no clothes, or people otherwise candidly enjoying the privacy of their own homes.
If ever the tech appeared Microsoft would be rightly hauled over the coals. Lawsuits would follow, the EU would get involved, and basically it would turn into a hellish nightmare of litigation.
So no its not likely to ever happen. Chalk it up to an extremely ill chosen example of what it could do, not what it will do. Even so, the capability to monitor or record is implied by all these devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony and MS have some way of enabling at least audio recording for dealing with complaints of griefing, harassment etc.
It's called a meritocracy and of course Verizon should care if they care for their own reputation.
My biggest problem with Wikipedia is the direct source of stories like this. It's become a little pool and everyone is trying to be the biggest fish, for two reasons: First, that way they can create their own little kingdom of articles which they've "adopted", bullying people into a consensus which matches their own ideals/agenda.
Actually the direct source was the Slashdot submitter so blame them for making the issue more prominent. As for the admins it seems to me in this case they're doing what one would expect of an admin - attempting to have a discussion of how keep the site running and figuring ways to exclude a specific vandal hiding behind a proxy shared by millions.
Because a ban on Verizon would make front page news and seriously damage their reputation. It would be better for everyone (except the troll) if they helped identify and remove this jerk from their system. I'm sure their AUP would give them ample justification for doing it.
So the moral of the story is don't troll websites that the admins of your network are likely to frequent. Check in advance.
I suggest it would be a time to introduce stringent environment controls that China would struggle to match compared to more eco-conscious Western countries. Even if China eventually implement them, it would still have a net benefit for the environment.
I think it's more likely that removable storage is yet another "feature" of Windows Phone 7 that hasn't been implemented properly yet. Older versions of WinCE support removable storage so clearly there is no technical issue.
IMO it got put on the long finger to save the additional time in development & QA coping with users removing cards during file operations, global media added / removed events, the headaches associated with DRM, encrypted data, volume management and so forth. Perhaps as an aide to some manufacturers the first incarnation of Windows Phone 7 can mount a logical volume that spans the internal / external storage but obviously removing the card after that is not a good idea.
Note that Android has supported removable storage for a long while, but principally by ignoring issues like DRM - storage was for files, music & vids, not apps. Android 2.2 allows apps to install some files on SD storage (if the manifest permits it), but only for support files & data, not the executable itself. It does so by creating an encrypted file which is mounted via a loopback device.
I imagine MS would have to do something similar, or mandate that all Windows Phones must have a large internal capacity to negate the need to store apps on external storage.
However I don't think they had much choice but to remove it. Someone had found a way to break the hypervisor which would have left the whole platform open to piracy. For example, someone might craft an OtherOS which broken out of the hypervisor, bootstrapped the real OS and patched it to remove copy protections or to obtain keys. Given the billions of revenue for them and their partners at stake, it was a no-brainer what course of action they chose.
Sony was protecting its platform from an exploit and very real possibility it would have enabled software piracy. If that meant pissing off a few nerds using a niche feature, then so be it.
If Oracle can't or won't pull their fingers out of their arses then someone will fork it and slowly but surely it will carry on its merry way even if its called something else for legal reasons. Sun / Oracle have pissed off enough people that I can see this really happening.
It's not up to the police to determine he was serious or not. The police investigate, the police act upon complaints. It's up to the crown prosecution service given the available evidence to decide whether he should go before the beak. Chances are he'll get let off with a warning.
And what if they feel no guilt? What if they are inciting people to murder or commit illegal acts because the speaker wants them to do it?
It certainly isn't for the lame and laughable "it uses too much CPU" excuse which iPhone apologists used to bandy around even when Android disproved that point. The kernel could suspend the process, or the CF runtime could even "freeze the world" (as happens in some GC schemes) if that were a concern.
No, it's clearly some underlying technical deficiency in the runtime. I suggested some potential reasons although only Microsoft know for sure. It's too bad the source code isn't available to verify.
I expect the issue will be resolved eventually but there is no doubt that there is a problem or we wouldn't even be arguing the point.