We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we, really? It's impossible to stop 100% of all piracy and all the current methods are already too far-reaching in my opinion. Besides, one of the things that drives piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault; like e.g. bringing DVD/BluRay movies out in the US only to deliberately wait 3 months before bringing them out in the rest of the world. They need to bring out better service instead of just trying to limit and restrict people more and more and more. Steam is a perfectly good example of this, they've managed to turn plenty of former pirates to legitimate customers simply by offering superior service.
Video games and movies cater to two completely different purposes; movies/films are passive entertainment, you don't need to do anything at all to enjoy it, and there's a clear start and end that both happen with or without you. Games however are atleast semi-active entertainment, you need to do something for start, end and everything in-between to happen. Not to mention that movies/films are the same regardless of how many people are watching them, whereas a game can only have so many players, if you have more people than the game supports or more people than you have gaming appliances the rest of the people will lose out on the experience and it won't anymore be the same for all the participants.
In other words: no, games will never supplant movies/films.
Not going to happen. For one, ARM devices are very slow compared to x86 ones, and they usually do not sport H/W virtualization extensions either, so running even Notepad would be slow. Secondly, there are memory-restrictions; ARM devices usually sport quite little memory. ARM applications are mostly designed with that in mind, whereas x86 applications just use everything they can. Not to mention what running such a virtualization layer would already consume. Thirdly, with all the excess overhead of running x86 applications the battery would see heavy drain. The general populace wouldn't understand why their devices only last for 2 hours so they'd quite quickly associate Windows with poor battery-life. And that's something Microsoft doesn't want to happen.
I can refute that claim with a single word: "Steam."
for other reasons ppl move to tablets and smartphones.
People haven't "moved" to smartphones, they're just upgrading their old ones. And tablets? Those things very rarely replace a PC, they COMPLEMENT them; trying to type anything longer than a Facebook status message on a tablet is an excercise in patience, whereas simply consuming stuff, like e.g. watching YouTube videos, is significantly more comfortable on one. And that's the point: tablets are getting attention because they're good at consuming and they're only replacing PCs on such tasks. It does not mean that either one is dying.
And it's particularly sad to see a country like Finland, traditionally pretty strong on free speech and consumer rights, sink to this level. Of course, the Finnish reputation for has become somewhat tarnished in recent years, with the unfortunate prosecution of Jussi Halla-aho, and the government's increasing deference to the EU and U.S. on intellectual property issues.
Well, atleast the ISp in question is prepared to fight the decision as long as it takes, that's gotta be worth something IMHO. In general ISPs are quite consumer-friendly here and often willing to pursue freedom of speech.
The only way to be reasonably sure of security is by using open source encryption (TrueCrypt, PGP). If you're only using a "black box" system to protect your information, you should expect that governments (and crime syndicates who can bribe individual government employees) will have access to your information.
That would hardly be useful if your typing is recorded or someone has access to your device; they can already read everything there then. PGP et. al. are only useful during transit, not on either endpoint. If the endpoint is compromised then the content is already known.
What's surprising is that anyone with secrets worth protecting doesn't already know this, or hasn't already hired someone competent enough to tell them this.
Similarly to how you place way too much trust in such? As I said, PGP et. al. do not protect you at all if any of the endpoints is compromised, something that is clearly evident in the case of this article: all the endpoints are compromised already.
I wonder what kinds of appliances she comes with, if there is good a good manual along, what to do is she malfunctions or doesn't perform desiredly, and how much it would cost me.
When will we start treating China like we treated Kim, or Hussein, or the Taliban? China isn't just some tin-pot dictatorship: it's well organised and its oppressive influence is global.
Are we really at the stage where we abandon morality to technocracy? Are we all so full of ourselves that we think we will come out of this as the slave-driver rather than the slave?
You could just as well replace 'China' with 'the United States.'
Indeed. The one, single advice I can offer the OP is: be paranoid and NEVER trust any input, even if it comes from within the other computers on your internal network. ALWAYS sanitize input.
That's already something I disagree with. If the original owner of the body wants to do with his or her own body something different than the heirs then the heirs should have no say in that.
Furthermore, there are emotional reasons, which are part of being human, why just about nobody wants to will their body to someone who's going to use it for sex, and why grieving relatives are very upset at necrophilia.
I personally couldn't care less what happens to my corpse after I'm gone. If someone wants to have sex with my corpse then go ahead. I mean, I'm not going to use my corpse myself again anymore. And as my relatives know I rather be remembered that lived, not that I died, and thus a burial with all the usual crap it entails is against what I want.
2) As a practical consideration, you're not going to find anyone who is otherwise a normal person and just wants to have sex with corpses. In the real world, necrophilia is a sign of mental illness, because that's just how human beings are. Normal people don't want to have sex with corpses, even if you don't define "normal people" circularly
What is "normal people"? I mean, a normal person wouldn't beat their spouse either, but that is actually very common. Not to mention how people often stab or shoot their spouses or even throw acid on them, and that is seen as perfectly normal. Or some less extreme examples: a normal person wouldn't just detain someone without any kind of due process just because they happen to dislike that person. Well, that makes for example mister Obama an abnormal person.
My point is that what is defined as "normal" varies wildly, there is no such thing as "normal" that applies to the whole world. It varies based on cultural background, religion, even intelligence, and you don't have the right to tell somebody that they're mentally ill or abnormal just because you happen to view things differently.
I think there is a legitimate objection to contact necrophilia, and that is that a dead body, or body parts, no longer has an active immune system and is therefore very likely breeding little nasties that may not only do the active sexual actor harm, but anyone they come in contact with thereafter.
Aye, but if that's the primary criteria for having it be illegal... well, there are plenty of ways one can get all kinds of infections, even deadly, easily-contracted-and-distributed ones, yet those activies are all legal. Similarly there are plenty of even worse ways of harming oneself yet those activities are again perfectly legal. I'm just arguing that either make them all illegal or make them all legal.
As for the rest, sex and sexually charged activities with teenagers can only legitimately depend upon informed choice/consent, and the fact is, there are many adults who couldn't make an informed choice and/or perform responsibly in a sexual situation, and there are many teenagers who can. The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely. Sex with pre-pubescent teens should be ruled out based on the very real risk of physical damage; I think society owes them protection in that regard, just as we protect the physically immature from other physical harms.
The fact is that children not only mature at wildly different rates, they also are easily swayed and made to agree to things they don't even understand. And the fact that this is so can in worst case ruin the rest of that person's whole life. In two relationships I've been my girlfriend had been abused as a child and I can tell that it really leaves you terribly screwed up, the potential damage just is so great that I do agree with childporn et. al. being illegal, even if I generally oppose censorship.
While I definitely disagree with him about child porn, I may be in the minority if I say I don't have anything against necrophilia. No, I have no interest in corpses myself, I'm disgusted by them, but that shouldn't be the only basis for denying other people that. A corpse is a corpse, simple as that, and a corpse doesn't care anymore what happens to it. Just have it illegal to rob graves or such, but leave the actual act of necrophilia legal for those who have obtain their corpses legally, ie. by e.g. people who like the idea that someone will hump their dead corpse after their gone themselves. People are so strange that there is bound to be people like that, too.
Maybe game developers need to *interleave* the single and multiplayer parts of the game, so proceeding in the single player means performing some tasks in multiplayer to "unlock" progress.
That would mean that you cannot play single-player without Internet connection, something that hasn't worked too well for many a people so far. Not everyone has Internet connection 24/7, some people have very unstable connections, and some just simply cannot have Internet on at any predetermined moment and cannot change that fact themselves.
Since multiplayer is less vulnerable to piracy (depending on architecture, of course), it might provide a DRM-without-DRM effect.
There is nothing about multiplayer code that makes it inherently less vulnerable, it's just that the pirates don't have access to the server binary. You can still just as easily -- or more often even MORE easily -- access the client binary, this is how all those cheats and bots work, you know.
Besides, it would only mean some more extra work for pirates, it wouldn't be impossible to circumvent. If the client already has all the maps, textures and all needed for play then pirates could just either monitor network traffic between client and server and implement a fake server, or they could just disable those checks altogether. And if the client downloads maps/textures/etc. from the server as needed, the pirates would just implement a fake client that downloaded all those, implement the afore-mentioned fake server and add the downloadable maps/textures/etc. to that.
So yeah, it would perhaps slow pirates down a little in the beginning, but it wouldn't stop them. And again, it would hurt legitimate customers EVEN more.
Generally, when someone speaks of the "acceptable" forms of cheating, they mean "the forms of cheating I use"....
Indeed, that's why I posed the question, I want him to formulate proper arguments for why one form of cheating is good while another form of cheating isn't. I mean, it IS still cheating, it wouldn't be called cheating if it was acceptable and within granted limits, so it's kind of an oxymoron in and of itself.
And I'm pleased to see that someone managed to start justifying cheating within a handful of posts. When I read online gaming forums discussing cheating, it generally takes not more than six comments to find someone justifying cheating....
I personally am strongly against cheating; I do not befriend anyone who does that, when I lead a guild in WoW I actively kicked people from the guild whom I caught from such behaviour and reported them to GMs and so on. I just simply find cheating extremely detestable.
The acceptable kind, which serves to spare the user the expense of unnecessary tedium. They include using a bot to automate grinding in WoW and unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future.
Why is it "acceptable" then? I atleast do not find it acceptable to use a bot to do anything like that, it still gives you an edge over those people who stay completely honest.
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You're mixing things: the video plays at full speed, it's the window below it that has 8 fps. Ie. It's as it should be.
We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we, really? It's impossible to stop 100% of all piracy and all the current methods are already too far-reaching in my opinion. Besides, one of the things that drives piracy is the entertainment industry's own fault; like e.g. bringing DVD/BluRay movies out in the US only to deliberately wait 3 months before bringing them out in the rest of the world. They need to bring out better service instead of just trying to limit and restrict people more and more and more. Steam is a perfectly good example of this, they've managed to turn plenty of former pirates to legitimate customers simply by offering superior service.
It's just a matter of time, really.
Video games and movies cater to two completely different purposes; movies/films are passive entertainment, you don't need to do anything at all to enjoy it, and there's a clear start and end that both happen with or without you. Games however are atleast semi-active entertainment, you need to do something for start, end and everything in-between to happen. Not to mention that movies/films are the same regardless of how many people are watching them, whereas a game can only have so many players, if you have more people than the game supports or more people than you have gaming appliances the rest of the people will lose out on the experience and it won't anymore be the same for all the participants.
In other words: no, games will never supplant movies/films.
Not going to happen. For one, ARM devices are very slow compared to x86 ones, and they usually do not sport H/W virtualization extensions either, so running even Notepad would be slow. Secondly, there are memory-restrictions; ARM devices usually sport quite little memory. ARM applications are mostly designed with that in mind, whereas x86 applications just use everything they can. Not to mention what running such a virtualization layer would already consume. Thirdly, with all the excess overhead of running x86 applications the battery would see heavy drain. The general populace wouldn't understand why their devices only last for 2 hours so they'd quite quickly associate Windows with poor battery-life. And that's something Microsoft doesn't want to happen.
Reality disagrees with Mr Dell.
Nope, it disagrees with you.
Gamers moved to consoles
I can refute that claim with a single word: "Steam."
for other reasons ppl move to tablets and smartphones.
People haven't "moved" to smartphones, they're just upgrading their old ones. And tablets? Those things very rarely replace a PC, they COMPLEMENT them; trying to type anything longer than a Facebook status message on a tablet is an excercise in patience, whereas simply consuming stuff, like e.g. watching YouTube videos, is significantly more comfortable on one. And that's the point: tablets are getting attention because they're good at consuming and they're only replacing PCs on such tasks. It does not mean that either one is dying.
And it's particularly sad to see a country like Finland, traditionally pretty strong on free speech and consumer rights, sink to this level. Of course, the Finnish reputation for has become somewhat tarnished in recent years, with the unfortunate prosecution of Jussi Halla-aho, and the government's increasing deference to the EU and U.S. on intellectual property issues.
Well, atleast the ISp in question is prepared to fight the decision as long as it takes, that's gotta be worth something IMHO. In general ISPs are quite consumer-friendly here and often willing to pursue freedom of speech.
The only way to be reasonably sure of security is by using open source encryption (TrueCrypt, PGP). If you're only using a "black box" system to protect your information, you should expect that governments (and crime syndicates who can bribe individual government employees) will have access to your information.
That would hardly be useful if your typing is recorded or someone has access to your device; they can already read everything there then. PGP et. al. are only useful during transit, not on either endpoint. If the endpoint is compromised then the content is already known.
What's surprising is that anyone with secrets worth protecting doesn't already know this, or hasn't already hired someone competent enough to tell them this.
Similarly to how you place way too much trust in such? As I said, PGP et. al. do not protect you at all if any of the endpoints is compromised, something that is clearly evident in the case of this article: all the endpoints are compromised already.
Heh. I know, I hear about that quite often! ...and I hear I am a god damn perv, too.
I wonder what kinds of appliances she comes with, if there is good a good manual along, what to do is she malfunctions or doesn't perform desiredly, and how much it would cost me.
I couldn't help but imagine some raw, hardcore porn filling the whole ceiling. Now THAT would be a sight, even if productivity dropped to negative!
I'd actually prefer the snow girl myself!
When will we start treating China like we treated Kim, or Hussein, or the Taliban? China isn't just some tin-pot dictatorship: it's well organised and its oppressive influence is global.
Are we really at the stage where we abandon morality to technocracy? Are we all so full of ourselves that we think we will come out of this as the slave-driver rather than the slave?
You could just as well replace 'China' with 'the United States.'
Ugh, the arrogance.
Indeed. The one, single advice I can offer the OP is: be paranoid and NEVER trust any input, even if it comes from within the other computers on your internal network. ALWAYS sanitize input.
1) The corpse belongs to the heirs.
That's already something I disagree with. If the original owner of the body wants to do with his or her own body something different than the heirs then the heirs should have no say in that.
Furthermore, there are emotional reasons, which are part of being human, why just about nobody wants to will their body to someone who's going to use it for sex, and why grieving relatives are very upset at necrophilia.
I personally couldn't care less what happens to my corpse after I'm gone. If someone wants to have sex with my corpse then go ahead. I mean, I'm not going to use my corpse myself again anymore. And as my relatives know I rather be remembered that lived, not that I died, and thus a burial with all the usual crap it entails
is against what I want.
2) As a practical consideration, you're not going to find anyone who is otherwise a normal person and just wants to have sex with corpses. In the real world, necrophilia is a sign of mental illness, because that's just how human beings are. Normal people don't want to have sex with corpses, even if you don't define "normal people" circularly
What is "normal people"? I mean, a normal person wouldn't beat their spouse either, but that is actually very common. Not to mention how people often stab or shoot their spouses or even throw acid on them, and that is seen as perfectly normal. Or some less extreme examples: a normal person wouldn't just detain someone without any kind of due process just because they happen to dislike that person. Well, that makes for example mister Obama an abnormal person.
My point is that what is defined as "normal" varies wildly, there is no such thing as "normal" that applies to the whole world. It varies based on cultural background, religion, even intelligence, and you don't have the right to tell somebody that they're mentally ill or abnormal just because you happen to view things differently.
Meh, I fail at quoting properly.
I think there is a legitimate objection to contact necrophilia, and that is that a dead body, or body parts, no longer has an active immune system and is therefore very likely breeding little nasties that may not only do the active sexual actor harm, but anyone they come in contact with thereafter.
Aye, but if that's the primary criteria for having it be illegal... well, there are plenty of ways one can get all kinds of infections, even deadly, easily-contracted-and-distributed ones, yet those activies are all legal. Similarly there are plenty of even worse ways of harming oneself yet those activities are again perfectly legal. I'm just arguing that either make them all illegal or make them all legal.
As for the rest, sex and sexually charged activities with teenagers can only legitimately depend upon informed choice/consent, and the fact is, there are many adults who couldn't make an informed choice and/or perform responsibly in a sexual situation, and there are many teenagers who can. The "line in the sand" drawn by a specific age will do the wrong thing in a very large number of situations, and consequently represents very bad law. IMHO, it's just a placeholder for society's inability to face the issue squarely. Sex with pre-pubescent teens should be ruled out based on the very real risk of physical damage; I think society owes them protection in that regard, just as we protect the physically immature from other physical harms.
The fact is that children not only mature at wildly different rates, they also are easily swayed and made to agree to things they don't even understand. And the fact that this is so can in worst case ruin the rest of that person's whole life. In two relationships I've been my girlfriend had been abused as a child and I can tell that it really leaves you terribly screwed up, the potential damage just is so great that I do agree with childporn et. al. being illegal, even if I generally oppose censorship.
Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia and "voluntary pedophilia" should be legal, including possession of child pornography.
While I definitely disagree with him about child porn, I may be in the minority if I say I don't have anything against necrophilia. No, I have no interest in corpses myself, I'm disgusted by them, but that shouldn't be the only basis for denying other people that. A corpse is a corpse, simple as that, and a corpse doesn't care anymore what happens to it. Just have it illegal to rob graves or such, but leave the actual act of necrophilia legal for those who have obtain their corpses legally, ie. by e.g. people who like the idea that someone will hump their dead corpse after their gone themselves. People are so strange that there is bound to be people like that, too.
Maybe game developers need to *interleave* the single and multiplayer parts of the game, so proceeding in the single player means performing some tasks in multiplayer to "unlock" progress.
That would mean that you cannot play single-player without Internet connection, something that hasn't worked too well for many a people so far. Not everyone has Internet connection 24/7, some people have very unstable connections, and some just simply cannot have Internet on at any predetermined moment and cannot change that fact themselves.
Since multiplayer is less vulnerable to piracy (depending on architecture, of course), it might provide a DRM-without-DRM effect.
There is nothing about multiplayer code that makes it inherently less vulnerable, it's just that the pirates don't have access to the server binary. You can still just as easily -- or more often even MORE easily -- access the client binary, this is how all those cheats and bots work, you know.
Besides, it would only mean some more extra work for pirates, it wouldn't be impossible to circumvent. If the client already has all the maps, textures and all needed for play then pirates could just either monitor network traffic between client and server and implement a fake server, or they could just disable those checks altogether. And if the client downloads maps/textures/etc. from the server as needed, the pirates would just implement a fake client that downloaded all those, implement the afore-mentioned fake server and add the downloadable maps/textures/etc. to that.
So yeah, it would perhaps slow pirates down a little in the beginning, but it wouldn't stop them. And again, it would hurt legitimate customers EVEN more.
It's now possible to make a native client of MAME...which...already was native... uhhh, hmm.
That's like driving a needlessly weighty, large, gas-guzzling device just for the sake of being able to wave imaginary penis around.
Oh, wait, now I get it.
US cars are hardly inelegant or antiquated - they just weren't built with austerity, but built with pride.
Aye, I suppose it's a matter of taste: some people value their lives, others like driving around in four-wheeled coffins and call that pride.. ;)
Generally, when someone speaks of the "acceptable" forms of cheating, they mean "the forms of cheating I use"....
Indeed, that's why I posed the question, I want him to formulate proper arguments for why one form of cheating is good while another form of cheating isn't. I mean, it IS still cheating, it wouldn't be called cheating if it was acceptable and within granted limits, so it's kind of an oxymoron in and of itself.
And I'm pleased to see that someone managed to start justifying cheating within a handful of posts. When I read online gaming forums discussing cheating, it generally takes not more than six comments to find someone justifying cheating....
I personally am strongly against cheating; I do not befriend anyone who does that, when I lead a guild in WoW I actively kicked people from the guild whom I caught from such behaviour and reported them to GMs and so on. I just simply find cheating extremely detestable.
The acceptable kind, which serves to spare the user the expense of unnecessary tedium. They include using a bot to automate grinding in WoW and unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future.
Why is it "acceptable" then? I atleast do not find it acceptable to use a bot to do anything like that, it still gives you an edge over those people who stay completely honest.