It's totally lame that you take retroactive credit for people's work after you buy them out/hire some or all of their developers. Most of the titles that you list yourselves as "creators" of were developed by dev studios that you bought out, and you did nothing even close to "creating" either Counterstrike or Team Fortress (besides hire their devs after they were finished products). And, for the record, Team Fortress and Counterstrike are still to this day better games than the sequels that came out under your name.
I realize fully how many things are remotely controlled. As an IT consultant, I've been in a position where I've lent a helping hand to several of the SCADA technicians when they had trouble and needed hands on-site. In fact, I know full well that the SCADA system running the water I'm drinking right now is not impenetrable, because I've been at one of its terminals. But the other cool thing I get to notice while on the job from all of the water towers I've been to is that there are a good half dozen water service corporations and/or municipalities within 10 miles of where I am sitting. Even if the very worst of your predictions were right and the supplier of the water to the tap a few dozen feet from me had every single piece of equipment and every length of pipe somehow fail at the same time, I could get in the car and be pissing and washing my hands in nice clean water in matter of minutes.
And though I said the system was not impenetrable, an attack from the network would almost require inside knowledge. The SCADA system that I've seen is only linked to the internet via a single purpose box in one spot. And that box is only attached to another secure and firewalled internal network rather than publicly addressable itself. I know less about trying to hijack SCADA over the air, but at that point you would have to have a physical presence in the area.
So the point isn't that damage can't be done. My thought was the sort of apocalyptic scenario that you guys are intimating seems far fetched. It would take an incredible amount of effort to break just this one SCADA system, and possibly either insider knowledge or physical access to boot. And this is just for one water supply company in one podunk rural area. You would have to do that hundreds or thousands of times over to get our entire country's infrastructure to all come crashing down around us. And if you didn't do it all at the same time, as long my area wasn't first, I could just go unplug a single ethernet cable and the water I'm drinking would be completely immune to your antics. (Full disclosure: I would actually call somebody to unplug the cable, as the jack is a good 15 minute drive from here.)
So yes, it would be bad if somebody managed to take down the power grid in LA or New York, and it would be viable if we are not careful about our infrastructure's security. But I'm not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over the idea of hackers blasting our entire infrastructure back to the 19th century.
Really, your attack vector on phones is turning off the AC so that the switches run a little hot and have a few percentage points higher of a failure rate? I'm not sure if that's more or less funny than the concept of an explode button on the scada interface for key pieces of our electric infrastructure.
I'm not saying that somebody can't do damage to us via internet connectivity, but I think you've watching Live Free or Die Hard a few too many times or something.
Are you somehow under the impression that Apple was the first company to either create a device in the slate tablet format or to ship one with a non-desktop OS? How about something like the AT&T's EO 440? I think you can guess by the "Contact us via Compuserv" splash at the beginning that it probably is a couple of years before the iPad was even a twinkle in Steve's eye.
Or are you confused and think that picking the right spot on the timeline of technological advance to bring back an old idea is somehow patentable? Does making money on somebody else's idea now somehow entitle you to that idea?
How many of those are competing products for Apple? It doesn't do any good to get somebody to quit making a product if it isn't one that is cutting into your market share.
Apple actually has products resulting from their patents. Not to mention, they don't troll; they're going after companies they feel actually infringed upon the patent.
Yeah right. They are going after companies in the hopes of eliminating competing products from the market. They "feel" that patents were infringed only insofar as they think they have enough of a case that there is a reasonable chance (not even necessarily a probability) that they can win the case. Even if you only have an outside shot in a given lawsuit, sometimes filing in enough markets for enough reasons is good enough; if they fail in 10 courts and succeed in 1, that's fine as long as the extra market share they get in that one jurisdiction is enough to pay for all of the other lawsuits. They are using the legal system to maximize profits just like a patent troll. The only difference is that the system is designed for their type of behavior and patent trolls are gaming the rules that make up the system.
Even if you buy into the idea that somehow our brain chemistry has changed because of our environments such that we have gotten better at multitasking, it isn't evolution. Evolution would require that the ability to multi-task increased the odds of having viable offspring so that genetic tendencies to increase this ability would be selected for over generations of breeding.
I personally like the other other interpretation where the narrator is an optimist. He hasn't yet gone down the path long enough to really know that it has made any positive difference at all, but he's talking to himself in the last stanza and getting excited about the possibilities of the path he has chosen. Interestingly, this makes the poem itself less optimistic and more contemplative than the more common interpretation.
Really, though, it is hard to claim that everyone misunderstands the poem unless you have a source for the claim that one interpretation is what was intended by the author. In the absence of other evidence, I can't see claiming that one interpretation is the "right" one when the poem itself is so clearly ambiguous (and possibly intentionally so?).
Disclaimer: I know little about the life and works of Robert Frost, so maybe there is other evidence and I just don't know about it.
During prohibition, alcohol use supported organized crime, which generated huge numbers of victims itself. Is that really an argument for restoring prohibition?
You can't really use negative effects that come specifically from outlawing an activity as a reason to ban the activity...
You can not work for them and then go work for some other company that does the same thing for you. If we want to live in the land of make believe, you can also go get a job at Wendy's and not make enough for the government to take any money from you, or you can emigrate. Those are also technically options beyond paying for what the government is doing.
I laugh that somebody still uses terms like "trickle down effect" with a straight face. The rich are getting richer and you're not. The trickle you feel is just them peeing on you.
Except when it is on the back of your labor that your company's C-level execs and VPs of who-knows-what get to fly around in private jets and live in houses that cost more than you'll make in your entire life.
Here's the thing. For domains where I have a solid basis to form an opinion, I am perfectly willing to do deep reading to from my own opinion on the subject. I do not, however, have a solid basis in climatology. I wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to synthesize the raw data available into a working model or even critique somebody else's. The only sane option I have in this (and very many other) fields is to trust those who make it their life work to study the field. Are you really so arrogant as to think you are any different?
In the case of our politicians, usually their fields of expertise extend to business and law. They don't have any basis other than listening to the authorities in the field to even begin having a reasonable opinion on the subject, or any other scientific field of study. If the experts are legitimately conflicted, then they have to make tough decisions, and hopefully do so with the humbleness required to see that they are flying blind. If the experts in the field largely agree, which is more or less true per GP with regard to global warming, then our politicians should be using that as a basis for policy (while still, of course, reasonably hedging their bets in case they are wrong and we find new, more appropriate models as the science advances).
Now, the only way I can get anything like that out of my politicians is if the general populace stops thinking that reading blogs for 30 minutes gives them the required basis to have a meaningful opinion on a subject. It's cool that you are into science and all, but unless you have the skill set required to critically analyze research papers on climatology, there is no "we" that should do anything regarding the research presented. There is only a "they", and the "they" is made up of climatologists working in the field. And do you know what answer "they" have given us? It's that "... the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the 'greenhouse effect'" per the article listed above.
If we keep electing politicians that think they know better just because they agree with our own poorly-informed views, it's eventually going to be the death of us all.
For most sysadmins, those days don't exist. See, the people up the line never like to see people sitting around with nothing to do. So rather than budget time such that your sysadmins with variable workloads try to average out to 40-45 hours a week, people like to make sure on weeks where everything is running smoothly, we hit 40 hours so they are never paying us to "just sit there" (although usually "just sitting there" includes some portion of our pro-active behind the scenes maintenance, as well). Then when the excrement hits the spinning implement near the ceiling, we get work until 4am getting everything back online and then come back to work bright and early the next day because we still have work waiting for us.
There is a decent chance that the sysadmin playing World of Warcraft on his work computer is actually on his lunch break and is tired of leaving for lunch and getting a panicked phone call right after he orders his food. Or he could be the dead weight in his department that is causing his colleagues to be even more miserable, only he is clever enough at putting on a show for his non-technical goon of a manager (and was probably got hired in the first place because he knows the VP of somethingorother) that he can avoid having the axe come down on his head. The ones that are actually keeping your company running very rarely sitting around doing nothing.
1) They do, but the risk is severely depressed.
2) If they get caught and put in jail/executed, then they only kill as many people as they can get away with before they get caught. Without law enforcement, you could well be the 118th victim.
3) Doubtful. Given a lack of law enforcement, my odds of successfully killing you in your home and getting away with it skyrocket no matter how big your arsenal is. Sure, my risk is trivially higher when I am in your home than if you weren't harmed, but nobody presumably has the resources to do anything about it if I finish the job.
4) Good thing there are whole piles of people of dubious morality perfectly willing to harm you and your family. See: any place where there is no law enforcement for an extended period of time and regional warlords get to set up shop and systematically enslave, murder, and rape whomever they choose.
The subset of people who would go a-murdering but decide not to because the cops might catch them is fleetingly small.
You're so full of shit that your eyeballs are floating. The type of world you are advocating has existed innumerable times in history. In any populated area, it lasts very little time before the guy with the biggest bag of money/hugest tracts of land/most loyal followers assumes control. You are going to have a government, whether you like it or not. You might as well try to pick one that isn't a despotic dictator that uses rape as a tool of subjugation.
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It's totally lame that you take retroactive credit for people's work after you buy them out/hire some or all of their developers. Most of the titles that you list yourselves as "creators" of were developed by dev studios that you bought out, and you did nothing even close to "creating" either Counterstrike or Team Fortress (besides hire their devs after they were finished products). And, for the record, Team Fortress and Counterstrike are still to this day better games than the sequels that came out under your name.
But I'd be quite sad if this new game had hats, much less constant promotional tie-ins with other games.
My guess is that you should get ready to bawl like a little girl.
Congratulations. I normally feel safe reading /. at work, but your comment made me laugh out loud.
But 80% of the population all thinks that they will be in the top 1% someday, so that has to be worth something!
Sure, if the person who bought it promptly turned around and offered to return it to me at no charge!
I realize fully how many things are remotely controlled. As an IT consultant, I've been in a position where I've lent a helping hand to several of the SCADA technicians when they had trouble and needed hands on-site. In fact, I know full well that the SCADA system running the water I'm drinking right now is not impenetrable, because I've been at one of its terminals. But the other cool thing I get to notice while on the job from all of the water towers I've been to is that there are a good half dozen water service corporations and/or municipalities within 10 miles of where I am sitting. Even if the very worst of your predictions were right and the supplier of the water to the tap a few dozen feet from me had every single piece of equipment and every length of pipe somehow fail at the same time, I could get in the car and be pissing and washing my hands in nice clean water in matter of minutes.
And though I said the system was not impenetrable, an attack from the network would almost require inside knowledge. The SCADA system that I've seen is only linked to the internet via a single purpose box in one spot. And that box is only attached to another secure and firewalled internal network rather than publicly addressable itself. I know less about trying to hijack SCADA over the air, but at that point you would have to have a physical presence in the area.
So the point isn't that damage can't be done. My thought was the sort of apocalyptic scenario that you guys are intimating seems far fetched. It would take an incredible amount of effort to break just this one SCADA system, and possibly either insider knowledge or physical access to boot. And this is just for one water supply company in one podunk rural area. You would have to do that hundreds or thousands of times over to get our entire country's infrastructure to all come crashing down around us. And if you didn't do it all at the same time, as long my area wasn't first, I could just go unplug a single ethernet cable and the water I'm drinking would be completely immune to your antics. (Full disclosure: I would actually call somebody to unplug the cable, as the jack is a good 15 minute drive from here.)
So yes, it would be bad if somebody managed to take down the power grid in LA or New York, and it would be viable if we are not careful about our infrastructure's security. But I'm not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over the idea of hackers blasting our entire infrastructure back to the 19th century.
Really, your attack vector on phones is turning off the AC so that the switches run a little hot and have a few percentage points higher of a failure rate? I'm not sure if that's more or less funny than the concept of an explode button on the scada interface for key pieces of our electric infrastructure.
I'm not saying that somebody can't do damage to us via internet connectivity, but I think you've watching Live Free or Die Hard a few too many times or something.
I think you misread his post. He didn't compare China's fleet to a dingy.
Are you somehow under the impression that Apple was the first company to either create a device in the slate tablet format or to ship one with a non-desktop OS? How about something like the AT&T's EO 440? I think you can guess by the "Contact us via Compuserv" splash at the beginning that it probably is a couple of years before the iPad was even a twinkle in Steve's eye.
Or are you confused and think that picking the right spot on the timeline of technological advance to bring back an old idea is somehow patentable? Does making money on somebody else's idea now somehow entitle you to that idea?
How many of those are competing products for Apple? It doesn't do any good to get somebody to quit making a product if it isn't one that is cutting into your market share.
Only if you forget to hide inside of it.
Apple actually has products resulting from their patents. Not to mention, they don't troll; they're going after companies they feel actually infringed upon the patent.
Yeah right. They are going after companies in the hopes of eliminating competing products from the market. They "feel" that patents were infringed only insofar as they think they have enough of a case that there is a reasonable chance (not even necessarily a probability) that they can win the case. Even if you only have an outside shot in a given lawsuit, sometimes filing in enough markets for enough reasons is good enough; if they fail in 10 courts and succeed in 1, that's fine as long as the extra market share they get in that one jurisdiction is enough to pay for all of the other lawsuits. They are using the legal system to maximize profits just like a patent troll. The only difference is that the system is designed for their type of behavior and patent trolls are gaming the rules that make up the system.
Even if you buy into the idea that somehow our brain chemistry has changed because of our environments such that we have gotten better at multitasking, it isn't evolution. Evolution would require that the ability to multi-task increased the odds of having viable offspring so that genetic tendencies to increase this ability would be selected for over generations of breeding.
I personally like the other other interpretation where the narrator is an optimist. He hasn't yet gone down the path long enough to really know that it has made any positive difference at all, but he's talking to himself in the last stanza and getting excited about the possibilities of the path he has chosen. Interestingly, this makes the poem itself less optimistic and more contemplative than the more common interpretation.
Really, though, it is hard to claim that everyone misunderstands the poem unless you have a source for the claim that one interpretation is what was intended by the author. In the absence of other evidence, I can't see claiming that one interpretation is the "right" one when the poem itself is so clearly ambiguous (and possibly intentionally so?).
Disclaimer: I know little about the life and works of Robert Frost, so maybe there is other evidence and I just don't know about it.
Bloody peasant...
During prohibition, alcohol use supported organized crime, which generated huge numbers of victims itself. Is that really an argument for restoring prohibition?
You can't really use negative effects that come specifically from outlawing an activity as a reason to ban the activity...
You can not work for them and then go work for some other company that does the same thing for you. If we want to live in the land of make believe, you can also go get a job at Wendy's and not make enough for the government to take any money from you, or you can emigrate. Those are also technically options beyond paying for what the government is doing.
I laugh that somebody still uses terms like "trickle down effect" with a straight face. The rich are getting richer and you're not. The trickle you feel is just them peeing on you.
Except when it is on the back of your labor that your company's C-level execs and VPs of who-knows-what get to fly around in private jets and live in houses that cost more than you'll make in your entire life.
Here's the thing. For domains where I have a solid basis to form an opinion, I am perfectly willing to do deep reading to from my own opinion on the subject. I do not, however, have a solid basis in climatology. I wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to synthesize the raw data available into a working model or even critique somebody else's. The only sane option I have in this (and very many other) fields is to trust those who make it their life work to study the field. Are you really so arrogant as to think you are any different?
In the case of our politicians, usually their fields of expertise extend to business and law. They don't have any basis other than listening to the authorities in the field to even begin having a reasonable opinion on the subject, or any other scientific field of study. If the experts are legitimately conflicted, then they have to make tough decisions, and hopefully do so with the humbleness required to see that they are flying blind. If the experts in the field largely agree, which is more or less true per GP with regard to global warming, then our politicians should be using that as a basis for policy (while still, of course, reasonably hedging their bets in case they are wrong and we find new, more appropriate models as the science advances).
Now, the only way I can get anything like that out of my politicians is if the general populace stops thinking that reading blogs for 30 minutes gives them the required basis to have a meaningful opinion on a subject. It's cool that you are into science and all, but unless you have the skill set required to critically analyze research papers on climatology, there is no "we" that should do anything regarding the research presented. There is only a "they", and the "they" is made up of climatologists working in the field. And do you know what answer "they" have given us? It's that "... the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the 'greenhouse effect'" per the article listed above.
If we keep electing politicians that think they know better just because they agree with our own poorly-informed views, it's eventually going to be the death of us all.
Because private industry has fucking none of those.
Your comment has made me smile.
For most sysadmins, those days don't exist. See, the people up the line never like to see people sitting around with nothing to do. So rather than budget time such that your sysadmins with variable workloads try to average out to 40-45 hours a week, people like to make sure on weeks where everything is running smoothly, we hit 40 hours so they are never paying us to "just sit there" (although usually "just sitting there" includes some portion of our pro-active behind the scenes maintenance, as well). Then when the excrement hits the spinning implement near the ceiling, we get work until 4am getting everything back online and then come back to work bright and early the next day because we still have work waiting for us.
There is a decent chance that the sysadmin playing World of Warcraft on his work computer is actually on his lunch break and is tired of leaving for lunch and getting a panicked phone call right after he orders his food. Or he could be the dead weight in his department that is causing his colleagues to be even more miserable, only he is clever enough at putting on a show for his non-technical goon of a manager (and was probably got hired in the first place because he knows the VP of somethingorother) that he can avoid having the axe come down on his head. The ones that are actually keeping your company running very rarely sitting around doing nothing.
2) If they get caught and put in jail/executed, then they only kill as many people as they can get away with before they get caught. Without law enforcement, you could well be the 118th victim.
3) Doubtful. Given a lack of law enforcement, my odds of successfully killing you in your home and getting away with it skyrocket no matter how big your arsenal is. Sure, my risk is trivially higher when I am in your home than if you weren't harmed, but nobody presumably has the resources to do anything about it if I finish the job.
4) Good thing there are whole piles of people of dubious morality perfectly willing to harm you and your family. See: any place where there is no law enforcement for an extended period of time and regional warlords get to set up shop and systematically enslave, murder, and rape whomever they choose.
The subset of people who would go a-murdering but decide not to because the cops might catch them is fleetingly small.
You're so full of shit that your eyeballs are floating. The type of world you are advocating has existed innumerable times in history. In any populated area, it lasts very little time before the guy with the biggest bag of money/hugest tracts of land/most loyal followers assumes control. You are going to have a government, whether you like it or not. You might as well try to pick one that isn't a despotic dictator that uses rape as a tool of subjugation.
And the implied threat of government violence is what keeps people from creeping into your home and murdering you while you sleep. What's your point?