I went to Facebook to get away from the BS that was all over MySpace. It's funny how things come full circle. All that BS helps Facebook make money. Maybe, luckily for us, Google has other streams of revenue and G+ will be an means to those ends, and not the other way around.
What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.
Your analogies aren't apt at all, and privacy is something that is greatly misunderstood in the age of social networking. There isn't any kind of "right" to privacy, our private information is valuable, it is important to protect our privacy, and it is no one's job but our own to protect ourselves. The sooner we, as a society, understand this, the sooner stories like this will thin out.
You say it is important to snap at the researchers for this. I agree with you there, however I disagree that you imply that only the researchers are in the wrong. It is just as important to let the students in this dataset know "this is what you get for putting this information about yourselves out there," so that they think twice about possibly compromising their private information in the future as well.
"...was alienated by being able to kill female prostitutes in GTA."
Quick heads up: you can kill everyone in GTA III.
"My "needs and wants" are fewer rape jokes and less T&A in the games already produced"
Also, it would be kind of hard to change the games already produced. I'd prefer that you (and game developers in general) focus on making future games better.
"Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?"
If it was good, yes. One of my favorite characters in Street Fighter III: Third Strike is Urien, A muscle bound man in a thong (the other is Makoto, a conservatively dressed woman).
I read a report that the guy who found the phone tried to tell someone who worked at the bar he found a phone & saw who was logged into Facebook on the phone, and that employee couldn't find the phone's owner, so he took the phone home. The next day, the guy who found the phone saw that the data on the phone was gone, care of MobileMe, at which point he went to sell it to the highest bidder.
However, if a password is compromised, the attacker only has a limited amount of time to access the account. If passwords never expired, an attacker will always be able to access the account. Security is always a trade off. I feel like the risk of (potentially) weak passwords is not worth the trade off of an attacker having a potentially unlimited amount of time to work with. Weak passwords can be mitigated with a strong password policy. If your systems are such that if an attacker breaks in once, then you are right, it doesn't matter. But if having access for a longer time means an attacker can do more damage, then why not expire passwords?
It's all about the trade off. There is no one "right" way to do it.
I don't think it's a fantastic idea at all. The whole point of a demo is to give people a taste of the game so they buy it. But you always risk giving them so much they have time to get tired of it. When it's free you can just give them enough to get hooked, but people paying fifteen bucks for a demo are going to expect something a bit more substantial. I think this is going to cost them sales if it does anything.
I think it is fine, if, at the end of the day you can put that $10-15 toward the purchase of the full game and also use the save data from the demo in the full game. I would never replay the first few hours of a game, and I would also never pay for the same content twice.
However, I might pay for a "try before you buy" type of deal where you really do get to try the game, and not just play 5-10 minutes.
Humans... We like to have a piece of paper in our hands, we can easily hand it to a coworker, we can scribble on it to take notes. I know it sounds oldskool, but for many tasks, a piece of paper is just superior.
For a lot of my tasks, electronic records are better because you can attach metadata to documents to more easily search, sort and drive workflow. This then makes my tasks easier, quicker and less error-prone.
I feel like this is more of an issue with people not understanding what metadata is and what it can do for them rather than an issue of people liking paper.
the students and their parents could be prosecuted if they did not participate in an after-school 'education program.'
I love the fucking hypocrisy around sex in USA. Sure, violence and killing people is all okay, but when it's about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
You don't know what the program is about. Regardless of anyone's feelings on sex, letting semi-nude pictures of yourself get transmitted digitally is a bad idea, as is transmitting them, and these teens might not understand that.
I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. If an artist is dead or retired, shouldn't their work be released into the public domain, or should a record label be able to profit in this situation?
While Batman can't match Superman's strength, he makes up for it in cunning.
Re:Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
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· Score: 1
What exactly is twitter doing that couldn't be done with existing blogging sites that have email updates?
You can send and receive Tweets from your (non-smart) phone without needing a data plan.
That's why Twitter has the character limit (it is the same limit for SMS messages). That's why people started using and continue to use Twitter.
Re:Does anybody know what EXACTLY was leaked?
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you had your Google Profile set up to be public, then people could find the information that is in the Google Profile. Buzz just gave people a link directly to your Google Profile, more or less. What it all comes down to: if you don't want the public to know something, don't post it in a public profile.
If people are actively avoiding Google accounts, why wouldn't they also be actively avoiding accounts on social networking sites? I assume the reason for avoiding Google is that people don't like the fact that stores stores personal data. Name one social networking site that doesn't.
The point being that people who avoid Google probably wouldn't be using Buzz anyway (because they wouldn't want a central database storing the fact that they shared certain content).
Re:might turn out to have been smart
on
Two Scoops of Buzz
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· Score: 1, Insightful
While a lot of people are using this fiasco as evidence that Google's a bunch of techies who don't understand users, I can't really believe that it was totally unforseen and accidental.
At best, I view this as more evidence that Google isn't mature enough to be the 800 Lb gorilla of the Internet.
At worse, I see this as evidence that Google can be just as much as a monopoly threat as Microsoft was on the PC.
At best, Google is making me follow the people I want to - i.e. the people I send e-mail to & chat with regularly anyway.
At worst, I click unfollow and all is right in the world.
I think people don't get the point of social networking. It doesn't work if everything is private. That's neither social nor networking.
Yes, language evolves, but in academia, students are expected to use good style (whether it is MLA, APA or something else). No style find emoticons acceptable yet.
I feel like this is less of a problem with literacy, and more of a problem about not being able to adapt your writing style to fit your audience.
Plus, there's nothing wrong with professors sticking up for today's grammar in the face of change.
Emoticons are simply forms of expressing a particular feeling or intensity, in the same way as an exclamation mark. Is the only difference that exclamation marks are considered acceptable, because they are, in some way, traditional?
Why should one not consider indicating a humorous point by placing a winking face at the end of it, rather than using some other punctuation?
For the same reason you have to cite your references in a certain way, or for the same reason you should spell out numbers ten and below.
In academics, you have to follow a certain style. As a journalist, I had to follow the AP style. Yes, styles and language both change, but this is about knowing your audience and knowing how to communicate with them.
Benjamin Franklin said "Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar." Only now, social media has become part of our daily conversation, so the lines are blurring between what should be formal and informal.
So now the question is "should professional communication be different from the conversational vernacular?"
Threatening to kill someone is illegal in Minnesota, and it is hard to construe a stab to the throat as something other than a threat to kill.
By the letter of the law, this is illegal, and it is the police's job to enforce it. That's what's going on here and I don't see how you can have a problem with that...
If you want to change the laws, that's another situation, but that's not what is going on in this case.
The law mentions "with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person." I didn't see the comment she left in TFA, so how do you know it was just "calling another girl names?" You don't know what the comments were, so don't them off as trivial.
If this girl left threatening comments to someone with criminal intent, and the girl who read the comments honestly believed she would act on them, then does it matter how those comments were communicated? This is outside the scope of free speech.
I'm surprised Marge would do it. It seems out of character for her, especially considering she is a member of Springfield's Citizens' Committee on Moral Hygiene...
With all due respect, you don't know the details of Streetlight Manifesto's record deal (and maybe they don't either). I wouldn't be surprised if they don't own the copyright to their music, but their record label does.
Courts will side with the law no matter silly it is. You just have to hope that these cases get enough attention so that people realize we need to change these laws!
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Facebook to get away from the BS that was all over MySpace. It's funny how things come full circle. All that BS helps Facebook make money. Maybe, luckily for us, Google has other streams of revenue and G+ will be an means to those ends, and not the other way around.
What they did in this case was wrong, and it's a good thing to make a fuss about it and not let people think that privacy is only something that takes place in a doctor's office.
Your analogies aren't apt at all, and privacy is something that is greatly misunderstood in the age of social networking. There isn't any kind of "right" to privacy, our private information is valuable, it is important to protect our privacy, and it is no one's job but our own to protect ourselves. The sooner we, as a society, understand this, the sooner stories like this will thin out.
You say it is important to snap at the researchers for this. I agree with you there, however I disagree that you imply that only the researchers are in the wrong. It is just as important to let the students in this dataset know "this is what you get for putting this information about yourselves out there," so that they think twice about possibly compromising their private information in the future as well.
"...was alienated by being able to kill female prostitutes in GTA."
Quick heads up: you can kill everyone in GTA III.
"My "needs and wants" are fewer rape jokes and less T&A in the games already produced"
Also, it would be kind of hard to change the games already produced. I'd prefer that you (and game developers in general) focus on making future games better.
"Would you play completely through a game that had half naked men and only men that were half naked in it?" If it was good, yes. One of my favorite characters in Street Fighter III: Third Strike is Urien, A muscle bound man in a thong (the other is Makoto, a conservatively dressed woman).
Implying that they don't watch together...
Where did you hear this from?
I read a report that the guy who found the phone tried to tell someone who worked at the bar he found a phone & saw who was logged into Facebook on the phone, and that employee couldn't find the phone's owner, so he took the phone home. The next day, the guy who found the phone saw that the data on the phone was gone, care of MobileMe, at which point he went to sell it to the highest bidder.
However, if a password is compromised, the attacker only has a limited amount of time to access the account. If passwords never expired, an attacker will always be able to access the account. Security is always a trade off. I feel like the risk of (potentially) weak passwords is not worth the trade off of an attacker having a potentially unlimited amount of time to work with. Weak passwords can be mitigated with a strong password policy. If your systems are such that if an attacker breaks in once, then you are right, it doesn't matter. But if having access for a longer time means an attacker can do more damage, then why not expire passwords?
It's all about the trade off. There is no one "right" way to do it.
or LL Cool J...
I don't think it's a fantastic idea at all. The whole point of a demo is to give people a taste of the game so they buy it. But you always risk giving them so much they have time to get tired of it. When it's free you can just give them enough to get hooked, but people paying fifteen bucks for a demo are going to expect something a bit more substantial. I think this is going to cost them sales if it does anything.
I think it is fine, if, at the end of the day you can put that $10-15 toward the purchase of the full game and also use the save data from the demo in the full game. I would never replay the first few hours of a game, and I would also never pay for the same content twice.
However, I might pay for a "try before you buy" type of deal where you really do get to try the game, and not just play 5-10 minutes.
Humans... We like to have a piece of paper in our hands, we can easily hand it to a coworker, we can scribble on it to take notes. I know it sounds oldskool, but for many tasks, a piece of paper is just superior.
For a lot of my tasks, electronic records are better because you can attach metadata to documents to more easily search, sort and drive workflow. This then makes my tasks easier, quicker and less error-prone.
I feel like this is more of an issue with people not understanding what metadata is and what it can do for them rather than an issue of people liking paper.
the students and their parents could be prosecuted if they did not participate in an after-school 'education program.'
I love the fucking hypocrisy around sex in USA. Sure, violence and killing people is all okay, but when it's about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
You don't know what the program is about. Regardless of anyone's feelings on sex, letting semi-nude pictures of yourself get transmitted digitally is a bad idea, as is transmitting them, and these teens might not understand that.
I'm all for giving credit where credit is due. If an artist is dead or retired, shouldn't their work be released into the public domain, or should a record label be able to profit in this situation?
You'd probably like The Dark Knight Returns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_Returns
While Batman can't match Superman's strength, he makes up for it in cunning.
What exactly is twitter doing that couldn't be done with existing blogging sites that have email updates?
You can send and receive Tweets from your (non-smart) phone without needing a data plan.
That's why Twitter has the character limit (it is the same limit for SMS messages). That's why people started using and continue to use Twitter.
If you had your Google Profile set up to be public, then people could find the information that is in the Google Profile. Buzz just gave people a link directly to your Google Profile, more or less. What it all comes down to: if you don't want the public to know something, don't post it in a public profile.
If people are actively avoiding Google accounts, why wouldn't they also be actively avoiding accounts on social networking sites? I assume the reason for avoiding Google is that people don't like the fact that stores stores personal data. Name one social networking site that doesn't.
The point being that people who avoid Google probably wouldn't be using Buzz anyway (because they wouldn't want a central database storing the fact that they shared certain content).
At best, I view this as more evidence that Google isn't mature enough to be the 800 Lb gorilla of the Internet.
At worse, I see this as evidence that Google can be just as much as a monopoly threat as Microsoft was on the PC.
At best, Google is making me follow the people I want to - i.e. the people I send e-mail to & chat with regularly anyway.
At worst, I click unfollow and all is right in the world.
I think people don't get the point of social networking. It doesn't work if everything is private. That's neither social nor networking.
Yes, language evolves, but in academia, students are expected to use good style (whether it is MLA, APA or something else). No style find emoticons acceptable yet.
I feel like this is less of a problem with literacy, and more of a problem about not being able to adapt your writing style to fit your audience.
Plus, there's nothing wrong with professors sticking up for today's grammar in the face of change.
Emoticons are simply forms of expressing a particular feeling or intensity, in the same way as an exclamation mark. Is the only difference that exclamation marks are considered acceptable, because they are, in some way, traditional?
Why should one not consider indicating a humorous point by placing a winking face at the end of it, rather than using some other punctuation?
For the same reason you have to cite your references in a certain way, or for the same reason you should spell out numbers ten and below.
In academics, you have to follow a certain style. As a journalist, I had to follow the AP style. Yes, styles and language both change, but this is about knowing your audience and knowing how to communicate with them.
Benjamin Franklin said "Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar." Only now, social media has become part of our daily conversation, so the lines are blurring between what should be formal and informal.
So now the question is "should professional communication be different from the conversational vernacular?"
I don't think anybody would be complaining if Apple had a nice, tidy app store, but still let people run arbitrary code on their stuff.
People are going to complain when that arbitrary code breaks their iPad in some way.
Different methods of delivering software have their own sets of pros and cons.
Threatening to kill someone is illegal in Minnesota, and it is hard to construe a stab to the throat as something other than a threat to kill.
By the letter of the law, this is illegal, and it is the police's job to enforce it. That's what's going on here and I don't see how you can have a problem with that...
If you want to change the laws, that's another situation, but that's not what is going on in this case.
Well, i feel threatened by my openly gay professor, based on comments on his personal page that he was gay.
If there dosen't have to be any merit to my feelings of "threat", will the school ban him without thinking about it?
No, because being gay is not a crime, while stabbing someone in the throat is.
The law mentions "with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person." I didn't see the comment she left in TFA, so how do you know it was just "calling another girl names?" You don't know what the comments were, so don't them off as trivial.
If this girl left threatening comments to someone with criminal intent, and the girl who read the comments honestly believed she would act on them, then does it matter how those comments were communicated? This is outside the scope of free speech.
When I saw this video, I immediately thought of this article: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/01/evidence_of_apples_tablet_like_input_interface_reappears.html
I'm surprised Marge would do it. It seems out of character for her, especially considering she is a member of Springfield's Citizens' Committee on Moral Hygiene...
With all due respect, you don't know the details of Streetlight Manifesto's record deal (and maybe they don't either). I wouldn't be surprised if they don't own the copyright to their music, but their record label does.
Courts will side with the law no matter silly it is. You just have to hope that these cases get enough attention so that people realize we need to change these laws!