I don't know why they're the target but France has been hit by numerous attacks that ISIS have laid claim to. Its not that big of a stretch to think that they could hit the US if they wanted to. Not all attacks have to be the twin towers to get noticed.
That said, there's a reason we call them "terrorists" and not "murderers" (though sometimes both of course.) Their goal isn't to make us dead. Their goal is to make us fear. And on that tack, they've had enormous success in the US and elsewhere.
It only takes one or two coffee shop bombings to terrify us even if the numbers show that we're far more likely to die by drowning in our bathtubs. People are very very bad at statistics and knowing there's a malevolent actor makes us far more afraid than any number of accidents or acts of nature.
To be fair, a lot of republicans would like to subvert the first amendment as well. Freedom of speech is somewhat anathema to politicians (which is why its important!) Maybe not in the same ways or for the same reasons but nonetheless.
When these are gone, all the others are easily denied
First amendment I'd agree with, if only because that would allow the government to silence anyone who raises protest against future rights revocations.
Revoking the second amendment on the other hand would have little consequence for anyone other than gun owners. The US is well past the ability for citizen militias to have any chance of overthrowing their government, no matter how corrupt and the more modern reinterpretation of the second to "defending yourself" has little applicability to national policy either.
Sure you can claim the slippery slope argument, perhaps with some justification, but its not like it would be the first time in history that laws were revoked, even constitutional amendments (the 18th.) Not saying we should revoke amendments all willy-nilly by any means but the first is the only one that would have direct and obvious impact on the ability to uphold the others (well and maybe to a lesser extent the fourth.)
never delete them
Oh quit being so pessimistic.. they'll happily and quickly delete anything that might become an embarrassment to them!
Pretty much by how this case happened: User plays the game for 2 hours. Shuts it off and gets in his car.
Then the phone beeps the battery low while he's driving so he starts screwing around with cables and things are a problem.
Pokemon Go does (essentially) shut down if you're moving too fast. For just this reason. But they can't help you if you start screwing with cables at an unsafe time. This story could have just as easily been "guy hits someone while plugging in his charger after a 4 hour phone call" or any other reason his battery may have been low. But that isn't as click-baity.
If Spotify's rankings are based on #times streamed, especially if that's modulated by time on market, then it should be pretty simple logic to see that #times streamed=0 for exclusive content.
All Spotify would have to do is record the release date as the actual release date rather than the date they were allowed to host it. Then it would look to the algorithm like the song sucked bad enough to have zero views for 6 months. It would probably take a while after being available for that to average out!
But OK you could say that using the "real" release date is still manipulating the data (older songs that were just added to their library obviously couldn't have that metric applied or it would look like 0 times streamed for years or decades!) But even then, the chances that a 6 month old song gets streamed anywhere near as much as the brand new ones is slim, so while the song wouldn't be set back quite as bad in this scenario, its still going to be fighting an uphill battle compared to both songs that have 6 months of history behind them as well as new songs that have fresh listeners.
The "featured playlists" bit I can't guess on. I've never used Spotify so I can't really guess how those playlists are generated and they're likely more focused (ie: take more data points into account) than simple rankings.
He doesn't have to be OK with it. He's free to yell and scream about it all he wants. But Spotify is under no obligation to him and if he screwed them over for 6 months, why should they give a flying fuck what we wants in month 7?
Well probably. I'm assuming by the time month 7 rolls around, his music just falls under some large open license that Spotify has with his publisher. If he managed to get a special contract with Spotify even after screwing them over for 6 months and they're still able to pull that kind of shit well.. he should have gotten a better contract I guess since if they were actually breaking such a contract, the headline would be "Spotify sued for messing with rankings" rather than "people who screwed Spotify cry about their rankings."
Sadly, its not really that great for customers either.
Music (and movies and other media) are not interchangeable in the same way that a bottle of milk is a bottle of milk. Justin Bieber just isn't a suitable replacement for John Lennon (or the other way around depending on your taste.)
So having all of these fragmented "exclusives" markets is just a generally bad situation for everybody. Consumers are stuck either paying multiple times or foregoing some portion of what they'd like. Distributors are barred from increasing their library because someone else beat them to the latest exclusive.
Producers are slightly better off since they tend to have the most control over their content, but they're still somewhat screwed by the fact that a portion of the potential market happens to subscribe to a service that they're not supporting with their exclusive.
Production and distribution really need to stop tying themselves together like that. Its one of those things that seems like a great idea in the short term.. but that only works as long as one distribution chain controls essentially all of the exclusives, and even then it only works for the companies in that chain.
And of course once the first distributor gets an exclusive, all of the others start clamoring to get their own exclusives and suddenly we're in the situation where everybody is worse off but nobody is willing to relinquish their control since just like being the first to fuck things up gives you a leg up, being the first to try and fix the system usually ends up sinking you. Its a classic tragedy of the commons.
Unfortunately there's not much escape from this one. Breaking the stalemate usually involves government intervention. But unlike the common example of a tragedy of the commons -- polluting a lake or something similar -- music just isn't important enough to warrant legislating this kind of crap away (and there's very well-known downsides whenever the government gets involved in anything even when its truly necessary.) Nobody will die from listening to Justin Bieber, much as they may want to so we're basically stuck with things the way they are.
That first paragraph.. I have no idea what the fuck you're going on about. That's taking everything I said to an extreme, then pulling out your gun, shooting the extreme and continuing on well past absurd. "Safe for murderers and rapists?" I don't recall ever stating that the police should be disbanded. I'd also like to find out your source for determining that shoot-outs are somehow safer for a woman (never mind any children or bystanders that might be nearby) than just running away and calling the cops like a sane person.
Studies have shows... MILLION TIMES A YEAR
Well for starters, some sources would be good. You're telling me that one in every 350 Americans are having to defend themselves in a way that a) requires a gun as opposed to less lethal options like calling the damned cops and b) would still require a gun if the attacker didn't also have a firearm? That seems a bit of a high statistic to be quoting without references (and preferably ones not sponsored by the NRA since you know, bit of a conflict of interest there.)
People will STILL DIE
Yep. Fact of life. But you can do things to reduce the amount of people who die without resorting to a black and white "if its not zero then we may as well not bother at all" anti-logic.
move on to the next bogeyman -- evil, terrible knives
Yeah, its such a shitty world when we have to only worry about the second most deadly weapon. If only they'd start shooting each other more often then we could stop worrying about knives! That's like saying we shouldn't bother curing cancer because then we'd just be worrying more about heart attacks.
* Figure out what causes violence (socioeconomic factors) and try to address that.
Nobody said we shouldn't do that as well. These things aren't mutually exclusive and in fact are complementary in a lot of ways.
* Get rid of guns.
Yep.
* Other stupid shit
Once again taking logic past the extreme and into the absurd. I don't know why you didn't suggest cutting off peoples' hands to prevent strangulation the way you were going at it.
Re-read that Snopes article and then try to tell me that course is what you would want for America
Yep. I much prefer being mocked for worrying about knives than being legitimately worried about guns.
getting rid of guns will also remove hunting
This is true, and it does remove the possibility of taking ALL guns out of society. But then that possibility doesn't really exist anyway since you still need police and military and other armed personnel.
Once again though, I'm not advocating black and white "get rid of all guns," as I'm well aware that that's unlikely to the point of impossible. I'm advocating reducing the amount of guns. And if you want to be really specific, certain types of guns (especially handguns that are easy to carry and conceal) should have more emphasis on reduction than things like hunting rifles that have actual legitimate uses outside of the vague claim of "self-defense."
Though since you like absurd extremes, there's nothing stopping hunters from picking up a bow and arrow or a spear. We survived for many thousands of years before guns were invented. Not that I'd especially advocate for that but it does indicate that guns aren't as necessary as you want to believe.
rangers are having to shoot elk
Rangers would fall more into the same category as police and military -- people authorized and (presumably) trained to use specific weapons for specific purposes and trusted not to abuse that power. Yes, that trust will occasionally be broken but once again its not about zero its about reduction.
1) Its not about possibility, its about probability. Sure you indeed can go on a spree with a knife, but its a lot less likely. Not in any small part because of:
2) 20 is quite a bit bigger than 3. I have more than 6x the amount of time to realize the situation is shitty and can attempt to flee before defending myself (or not) is even in question. And 20' is already a fairly low estimate depending on the attacker's weapon and skill with said weapon.
3) Way to not read to the end. I explicitly said you need to reduce guns for _everybody_ by making it a slow drain rather than an sudden forced surrender (which yes, the criminals would happily ignore.) Disarming you makes you safer by also disarming your attacker at the same time. It has to be done in a way that affects all people, not just the ones you feel like cherry-picking to "prove" your point.
A good start would be to just significantly limit the sale of new weapons. Criminals' guns break down and go missing just as much as anyone else' and have to be replaced. Lower supply means making that much harder. Black market weapons would have the same lack of supply issue (because there's no significiant production period,) so that's at best a temporary measure for the criminals to fall back to.
Sure its possible that none of them are true, but its likely that they are -- or at least they're closer to true than "ignoring a problem will magically solve it," which seems to be the route the NRA and friends would like to take.
1) Gun deaths aren't worse than knife deaths -- dead is dead. Its just a hell of a lot easier to kill someone with a gun than it is with a knife. This should be fairly obvious. If it wasn't true, then the army would use kitchenware rather than assault rifles.
2) They won't stop being a criminal. They'll stop being a criminal who can kill you from 20+ feet away with little chance of defending yourself.
3) and 4) are fairly interrelated. Basically the logic is that if there's less guns in the world in general, then there will be less guns for criminals to get their hands on. And if the criminals don't have guns to attack honest citizens with, the honest citizens have less need of a gun to defend themselves.
Obviously if you made a law tomorrow that required for the immediate surrender of all firearms, you'd be a bit of a moron. All of the honest weapons would be removed but the criminals by definition don't really care about the law so they'd still have their existing stashes, even if not a single new gun was ever produced.
If such a thing were to be implemented sanely, it would require a fairly extended (years.. possibly even decades) ramp-up to slowly reduce the existing public supply of firearms across the board rather than just suddenly disarming only the honest citizens and leaving the criminals to have a heyday.
Windows 10 is only "free" if you had a (recent) prior version of Windows. Sure there will be a few lost sales but the vast majority of people don't "upgrade" their OS until their PC breaks and the new version comes with their new PC.
And in turn they reduce their support costs significantly (they can justify EOLing Win7/8 much sooner if you've been given every incentive to upgrade already.) And of course they can leverage any new "features" in Win10 as an ad platform to generate third party compensation. They probably didn't expect quite as much backlash against Win10s intrusiveness but even with that, I'm guessing they're not hurting too much from the giveaway.
As for Bing and Edge. That's a much more direct and obvious bribe attempt. Microsoft can say whatever it wants, but Bing almost never returns more relevant results than Google. At least in my experience. Even when you're searching through MSDN and other Microsoft-owned sites where you think Bing would have a significant advantage.
Edge might be OK. From a technology standpoint it sounds pretty good (though that's mostly based on MS' own claims so salt required.) Problem is that they didn't bother with any sort of compatibility layer that I can tell, so it completely flips out on a large portion of websites. Occasionally it will even notice that its flipping out and suggest you retry with IE, but that brings up the question of why anyone would bother loading Edge if its just going to direct them to load IE half the time anyway -- may as well just start the one that works in the first place.
Now the users aren't breaking things -- but you are. Why?
This kind of answers itself. The less the customer is able to configure themselves, the less they will be able to cock up their configurations.
And its a lot easier to tell a user "this feature is no longer supported" than it is to try and figure out why having a joystick plugged in starts gives them error 0x37728cf3 in Word, but only when they try to insert a jpg image that's between 283 and 424 pixels wide, which of course doesn't occur on the support staff's own PC even with the exact same model of joystick and driver version.
No its not. You can think whatever you want about other races, religions, sexual orientations, favorite woodwind instrument, or anything else you choose.
What you can't do is express those thoughts in a way where it negatively impacts people, such as refusing to hire someone or yelling obscenities and threats at someone purely because they like the alto sax and you only believe in tenors.
But you're still perfectly free to be as much of an asshole as you want inside your own head.
Yeah, Greenlight is a bit of a sad case. The idea is good -- let gamers vote for the games they like and hopefully prevent developers from sinking a buttload of money into a dud -- but it definitely didn't pan out.
And in retrospect, I'm not sure it really could pan out. It relies on people judging games based purely on hype and pre-release screenshots (that may or may not even still be recognizable in the final game.)
Beyond just Greenlight though, I'm happy that they've been adding a wider range of games to the service. It would definitely be a bonus if the search and suggestion features were updated to handle the extra breadth but generally speaking, I don't mind skipping over a bunch of extra crap if it means finding a gem that I otherwise wouldn't have ever heard of.
I for one look forward to the day when I have to recompile every game I purchase, and spend 3 weeks trying to track down library incompatibilities on half of them.
Oh wait, no I don't. And I'm one of the relatively small percentage of the population who actually could do all of that if I cared enough to bother.
You do realize that "distribution platform" and "DRM" are not the same thing right? Someone like GoG could in theory design and build a front-end client for their games just like Steam has, and not be required to add any more DRM than they already have.
The fact that Steam is the only distribution platform that anyone really recognizes and they happen to use DRM is a fluke of history, not a fundamental necessity.
Personally I like having my entire library in one place with a consistent install/launch/uninstall interface. Sure I'd be happier knowing if my games weren't DRM'd but they keep it well enough hidden that the ease of use of the library more than makes up for it.
I mean I'll be pretty pissed the day Steam packs it in and I lose all my purchases but frankly I've lost or destroyed far more physical media than I have Steam licenses -- and I take reasonably good care of my discs compared to a lot of people I know.
That said, I agree that adding another distribution platform isn't really helping anybody. The main benefit of my Steam library is that its all in one place. If you put your game in another place I'm going to probably ignore it (hello, Origin!)
Same with Netflix in the video world and I can't even be bothered with music anymore since I'd have to use (and pay for) half a dozen services to get all of the songs I like, and none of them play nice with the others so I'm stuck having to choose a subset of what I want to listen to and manually switch entire services if I want to change it up. I use Youtube for my music these days since damned near everything is on there (not necessarily legitimately but such is life..)
Its a bit of a catch-22 though. Multiple platforms (and I include having no platform and all games do whatever the fuck they want) is a pain in everybody's ass, but having a single platform leaves everyone at the mercy of a single master. There's no real answer to that unfortunately. Both extremes suck in their own way and there's not much middle ground between "one" and "more than one."
It appears that this is (so far) a partnership rather than a takeover, so it will likely just be Unity adding hooks to FB's API and little else on their end. Perhaps adding FB's platform language (whatever they use) as an alternative to the C# and whatnot they currently support for scripting.
The FB platform side will likely require a much larger overhaul as they'll need to allow Unity's API functionality without breaking whatever they've currently got setup.
For now, this probably won't adversely affect Unity much if at all. You can just ignore the FB hooks and go on with development as usual. Of course if it turns into a buyout at some point then things become a little more questionable, though their hands would still be somewhat tied as they'd be facing huge numbers of lawsuits if they broke compatibility with existing projects. It would likely still spell the end of non-FB Unity games eventually but it would (probably) be a slow die-off rather than an immediate slaughter.
Because the value of privacy isn't really visible while the value of social interactions is immediate and obvious (well, at least for a large majority of people.)
FB has made a name for themselves by being regularly and overtly evil about things, but its not like their competitors are much better. Money has to come from somewhere and since nobody's willing to pay with cash for much of anything on the internet, they pay with personal data instead. Sure some are worse than others but at the end of the day, its the way things are and it will take a lot more than preaching to the choir on a (vaguely) technical forum site to change it.
You need to update your definition of "gamer." Casual games like Farmville, Angry Birds, Candy Crush and so on are huge and make up a rather significant portion of the overall games market these days. You're free to not like those type of games (and I'm with you there) but denying the size and impact of the casual market is something that stopped being reasonable about 3-4 years ago.
Nobody wants ads in their games though.. or anywhere else for that matter, regardless of how hardcore they are. But at the end of the day, somebody's got to pay to keep churning these things out and between ads, microtransactions and upfront payment well.. ok I'd prefer to just pay once and be done with it.
But I also recognize that 20 years ago when I couldn't afford to drop $40-60 on a whim, I would have probably been quite happy to find games I could "pay" for by ignoring a few ads rather than spending cash I didn't have.
Rapists have used that excuse because they bought a couple of drinks so sex was "implied."
That's not even close to the same thing. In the case of the website, the agreement exists and the implicit part is assuming you've read it (in which case its explicit.) Which is why every single one of those things contains some text similar to "by using this service you agree to our terms" along with "and if you disagree, you're free to uninstall/not use it."
The sex equivalent would be buying the girl a drink and then before you hand it to her stating "if you drink this, you are contractually obligated to sleep with me." At that point, drinking it DOES imply agreement because it was stated as such. I mean in this case you'd probably want witnesses because that sounds like a pretty implausible story, but its still wholly different from you just making the assumption with no knowledge on her part (in fact in that case, she'd be more like the Web Watcher's victim than the user.)
As for the party being reasonably aware.. I would say that that almost certainly would hold up by now. If there's anybody out there who at this point isn't reasonably aware that every website, software package or other digital service on the planet doesn't come with a EULA that you're implicitly agreeing to when you use the product, then they need to have their head checked and catch up to the 21st century. Fucking Panago has a EULA just to order a pizza. You might be able to fight specific claims if they're super unusual or punitive but claiming ignorance of a EULA in general is a bit disingenuous and likely won't get you very far.
And for the most part, EULAs seem to at least not get dismissed outright as being non-binding and get to go through the full dispute proceedings like any other contract.
Email security is a nightmare to be sure, but not really for the reasons you specified.
Sure its beneficial to have the link encrypted but MITM attacks are, for the vast majority of us at least, not a significant day-to-day concern. 99.999% of all people aren't important enough to be spied upon by anyone who would have access to the companies storing and transmitting your email.
The biggest issue with email security, by far, is dumbasses who click on things they shouldn't. And that will be a problem regardless of how well your transport layer is protected.
Not suggesting you shouldn't bother protecting the transport layer of course as best you can.. just don't rely on secure transport to be an end to all woes.
As for IMs. I personally like them (though they can definitely be distracting.. can't just shut them off in case there's something important but there's also a shitload of trivial things that go through, especially in group chats.) They can't replace email and telephone though because the very thing that makes those two the most annoying -- unsolicited messages -- are also necessary in a lot of situations (your company's sales@ address for example.)
IMs also tend to be somewhat more difficult to review later than email. Though that's mostly a UI limitation. There's no reason that has to be the case just that IM providers (at least the most well known ones) are more focused on trying to up-sell you voice chats or social network integration or whatever other shit they actually make their money from rather than improving the basic IM experience. I'm sure there's niche clients that are much better for things like that but that's only helpful if you can dictate their usage to your team/company.
Disagreement with you, Yoda has. As do the many, many people for whom English is a second language as many languages are not SVO and its not their normal way of thinking of the world. It may be easier than rocket science, but its not necessarily easy in general.
Not to mention how much more verbose everything would have to be in order to maintain strict grammatical sentences all the time. There's a reason why we don't do that.
I do enjoy how you used "Subject, verb, object" as a fragment in a complaint about people using sentence fragments though. That deserves a bonus point or two.
You want to annoy my 16-year old? Call on the phone.
I'm 38 and phone calls annoy me too. Doubly so when you expect me to remember the conversation 2 weeks from now. If you'd sent an email I could have at least looked it up again.
Which I covered in my final sentence -- if they really want to plant something on you, they can just do it with physical evidence and not have to worry about breaking into your phone and convincing you to give up your password and whatever else, and with a hell of a lot less risk that there will be a log created that they don't notice or forget to clean up that would catch them out.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why they're the target but France has been hit by numerous attacks that ISIS have laid claim to. Its not that big of a stretch to think that they could hit the US if they wanted to. Not all attacks have to be the twin towers to get noticed.
That said, there's a reason we call them "terrorists" and not "murderers" (though sometimes both of course.) Their goal isn't to make us dead. Their goal is to make us fear. And on that tack, they've had enormous success in the US and elsewhere.
It only takes one or two coffee shop bombings to terrify us even if the numbers show that we're far more likely to die by drowning in our bathtubs. People are very very bad at statistics and knowing there's a malevolent actor makes us far more afraid than any number of accidents or acts of nature.
they would also subvert the First Amendment
To be fair, a lot of republicans would like to subvert the first amendment as well. Freedom of speech is somewhat anathema to politicians (which is why its important!) Maybe not in the same ways or for the same reasons but nonetheless.
When these are gone, all the others are easily denied
First amendment I'd agree with, if only because that would allow the government to silence anyone who raises protest against future rights revocations.
Revoking the second amendment on the other hand would have little consequence for anyone other than gun owners. The US is well past the ability for citizen militias to have any chance of overthrowing their government, no matter how corrupt and the more modern reinterpretation of the second to "defending yourself" has little applicability to national policy either.
Sure you can claim the slippery slope argument, perhaps with some justification, but its not like it would be the first time in history that laws were revoked, even constitutional amendments (the 18th.) Not saying we should revoke amendments all willy-nilly by any means but the first is the only one that would have direct and obvious impact on the ability to uphold the others (well and maybe to a lesser extent the fourth.)
never delete them
Oh quit being so pessimistic.. they'll happily and quickly delete anything that might become an embarrassment to them!
Pretty much by how this case happened: User plays the game for 2 hours. Shuts it off and gets in his car.
Then the phone beeps the battery low while he's driving so he starts screwing around with cables and things are a problem.
Pokemon Go does (essentially) shut down if you're moving too fast. For just this reason. But they can't help you if you start screwing with cables at an unsafe time. This story could have just as easily been "guy hits someone while plugging in his charger after a 4 hour phone call" or any other reason his battery may have been low. But that isn't as click-baity.
If Spotify's rankings are based on #times streamed, especially if that's modulated by time on market, then it should be pretty simple logic to see that #times streamed=0 for exclusive content.
All Spotify would have to do is record the release date as the actual release date rather than the date they were allowed to host it. Then it would look to the algorithm like the song sucked bad enough to have zero views for 6 months. It would probably take a while after being available for that to average out!
But OK you could say that using the "real" release date is still manipulating the data (older songs that were just added to their library obviously couldn't have that metric applied or it would look like 0 times streamed for years or decades!) But even then, the chances that a 6 month old song gets streamed anywhere near as much as the brand new ones is slim, so while the song wouldn't be set back quite as bad in this scenario, its still going to be fighting an uphill battle compared to both songs that have 6 months of history behind them as well as new songs that have fresh listeners.
The "featured playlists" bit I can't guess on. I've never used Spotify so I can't really guess how those playlists are generated and they're likely more focused (ie: take more data points into account) than simple rankings.
He doesn't have to be OK with it. He's free to yell and scream about it all he wants. But Spotify is under no obligation to him and if he screwed them over for 6 months, why should they give a flying fuck what we wants in month 7?
Well probably. I'm assuming by the time month 7 rolls around, his music just falls under some large open license that Spotify has with his publisher. If he managed to get a special contract with Spotify even after screwing them over for 6 months and they're still able to pull that kind of shit well.. he should have gotten a better contract I guess since if they were actually breaking such a contract, the headline would be "Spotify sued for messing with rankings" rather than "people who screwed Spotify cry about their rankings."
Sadly, its not really that great for customers either.
Music (and movies and other media) are not interchangeable in the same way that a bottle of milk is a bottle of milk. Justin Bieber just isn't a suitable replacement for John Lennon (or the other way around depending on your taste.)
So having all of these fragmented "exclusives" markets is just a generally bad situation for everybody. Consumers are stuck either paying multiple times or foregoing some portion of what they'd like. Distributors are barred from increasing their library because someone else beat them to the latest exclusive.
Producers are slightly better off since they tend to have the most control over their content, but they're still somewhat screwed by the fact that a portion of the potential market happens to subscribe to a service that they're not supporting with their exclusive.
Production and distribution really need to stop tying themselves together like that. Its one of those things that seems like a great idea in the short term.. but that only works as long as one distribution chain controls essentially all of the exclusives, and even then it only works for the companies in that chain.
And of course once the first distributor gets an exclusive, all of the others start clamoring to get their own exclusives and suddenly we're in the situation where everybody is worse off but nobody is willing to relinquish their control since just like being the first to fuck things up gives you a leg up, being the first to try and fix the system usually ends up sinking you. Its a classic tragedy of the commons.
Unfortunately there's not much escape from this one. Breaking the stalemate usually involves government intervention. But unlike the common example of a tragedy of the commons -- polluting a lake or something similar -- music just isn't important enough to warrant legislating this kind of crap away (and there's very well-known downsides whenever the government gets involved in anything even when its truly necessary.) Nobody will die from listening to Justin Bieber, much as they may want to so we're basically stuck with things the way they are.
That first paragraph.. I have no idea what the fuck you're going on about. That's taking everything I said to an extreme, then pulling out your gun, shooting the extreme and continuing on well past absurd. "Safe for murderers and rapists?" I don't recall ever stating that the police should be disbanded. I'd also like to find out your source for determining that shoot-outs are somehow safer for a woman (never mind any children or bystanders that might be nearby) than just running away and calling the cops like a sane person.
Studies have shows ... MILLION TIMES A YEAR
Well for starters, some sources would be good. You're telling me that one in every 350 Americans are having to defend themselves in a way that a) requires a gun as opposed to less lethal options like calling the damned cops and b) would still require a gun if the attacker didn't also have a firearm? That seems a bit of a high statistic to be quoting without references (and preferably ones not sponsored by the NRA since you know, bit of a conflict of interest there.)
People will STILL DIE
Yep. Fact of life. But you can do things to reduce the amount of people who die without resorting to a black and white "if its not zero then we may as well not bother at all" anti-logic.
move on to the next bogeyman -- evil, terrible knives
Yeah, its such a shitty world when we have to only worry about the second most deadly weapon. If only they'd start shooting each other more often then we could stop worrying about knives! That's like saying we shouldn't bother curing cancer because then we'd just be worrying more about heart attacks.
* Figure out what causes violence (socioeconomic factors) and try to address that.
Nobody said we shouldn't do that as well. These things aren't mutually exclusive and in fact are complementary in a lot of ways.
* Get rid of guns.
Yep.
* Other stupid shit
Once again taking logic past the extreme and into the absurd. I don't know why you didn't suggest cutting off peoples' hands to prevent strangulation the way you were going at it.
Re-read that Snopes article and then try to tell me that course is what you would want for America
Yep. I much prefer being mocked for worrying about knives than being legitimately worried about guns.
getting rid of guns will also remove hunting
This is true, and it does remove the possibility of taking ALL guns out of society. But then that possibility doesn't really exist anyway since you still need police and military and other armed personnel.
Once again though, I'm not advocating black and white "get rid of all guns," as I'm well aware that that's unlikely to the point of impossible. I'm advocating reducing the amount of guns. And if you want to be really specific, certain types of guns (especially handguns that are easy to carry and conceal) should have more emphasis on reduction than things like hunting rifles that have actual legitimate uses outside of the vague claim of "self-defense."
Though since you like absurd extremes, there's nothing stopping hunters from picking up a bow and arrow or a spear. We survived for many thousands of years before guns were invented. Not that I'd especially advocate for that but it does indicate that guns aren't as necessary as you want to believe.
rangers are having to shoot elk
Rangers would fall more into the same category as police and military -- people authorized and (presumably) trained to use specific weapons for specific purposes and trusted not to abuse that power. Yes, that trust will occasionally be broken but once again its not about zero its about reduction.
1) Its not about possibility, its about probability. Sure you indeed can go on a spree with a knife, but its a lot less likely. Not in any small part because of:
2) 20 is quite a bit bigger than 3. I have more than 6x the amount of time to realize the situation is shitty and can attempt to flee before defending myself (or not) is even in question. And 20' is already a fairly low estimate depending on the attacker's weapon and skill with said weapon.
3) Way to not read to the end. I explicitly said you need to reduce guns for _everybody_ by making it a slow drain rather than an sudden forced surrender (which yes, the criminals would happily ignore.) Disarming you makes you safer by also disarming your attacker at the same time. It has to be done in a way that affects all people, not just the ones you feel like cherry-picking to "prove" your point.
A good start would be to just significantly limit the sale of new weapons. Criminals' guns break down and go missing just as much as anyone else' and have to be replaced. Lower supply means making that much harder. Black market weapons would have the same lack of supply issue (because there's no significiant production period,) so that's at best a temporary measure for the criminals to fall back to.
Sure its possible that none of them are true, but its likely that they are -- or at least they're closer to true than "ignoring a problem will magically solve it," which seems to be the route the NRA and friends would like to take.
1) Gun deaths aren't worse than knife deaths -- dead is dead. Its just a hell of a lot easier to kill someone with a gun than it is with a knife. This should be fairly obvious. If it wasn't true, then the army would use kitchenware rather than assault rifles.
2) They won't stop being a criminal. They'll stop being a criminal who can kill you from 20+ feet away with little chance of defending yourself.
3) and 4) are fairly interrelated. Basically the logic is that if there's less guns in the world in general, then there will be less guns for criminals to get their hands on. And if the criminals don't have guns to attack honest citizens with, the honest citizens have less need of a gun to defend themselves.
Obviously if you made a law tomorrow that required for the immediate surrender of all firearms, you'd be a bit of a moron. All of the honest weapons would be removed but the criminals by definition don't really care about the law so they'd still have their existing stashes, even if not a single new gun was ever produced.
If such a thing were to be implemented sanely, it would require a fairly extended (years.. possibly even decades) ramp-up to slowly reduce the existing public supply of firearms across the board rather than just suddenly disarming only the honest citizens and leaving the criminals to have a heyday.
Depends on what you define as their "products."
Windows 10 is only "free" if you had a (recent) prior version of Windows. Sure there will be a few lost sales but the vast majority of people don't "upgrade" their OS until their PC breaks and the new version comes with their new PC.
And in turn they reduce their support costs significantly (they can justify EOLing Win7/8 much sooner if you've been given every incentive to upgrade already.) And of course they can leverage any new "features" in Win10 as an ad platform to generate third party compensation. They probably didn't expect quite as much backlash against Win10s intrusiveness but even with that, I'm guessing they're not hurting too much from the giveaway.
As for Bing and Edge. That's a much more direct and obvious bribe attempt. Microsoft can say whatever it wants, but Bing almost never returns more relevant results than Google. At least in my experience. Even when you're searching through MSDN and other Microsoft-owned sites where you think Bing would have a significant advantage.
Edge might be OK. From a technology standpoint it sounds pretty good (though that's mostly based on MS' own claims so salt required.) Problem is that they didn't bother with any sort of compatibility layer that I can tell, so it completely flips out on a large portion of websites. Occasionally it will even notice that its flipping out and suggest you retry with IE, but that brings up the question of why anyone would bother loading Edge if its just going to direct them to load IE half the time anyway -- may as well just start the one that works in the first place.
Pfft this is Slashdot. Even the editors can't be bothered to RTFA.
Now the users aren't breaking things -- but you are. Why?
This kind of answers itself. The less the customer is able to configure themselves, the less they will be able to cock up their configurations.
And its a lot easier to tell a user "this feature is no longer supported" than it is to try and figure out why having a joystick plugged in starts gives them error 0x37728cf3 in Word, but only when they try to insert a jpg image that's between 283 and 424 pixels wide, which of course doesn't occur on the support staff's own PC even with the exact same model of joystick and driver version.
Wow. I had not even heard of that. Thank you for pointing it out!
Racism is now a thought crime.
No its not. You can think whatever you want about other races, religions, sexual orientations, favorite woodwind instrument, or anything else you choose.
What you can't do is express those thoughts in a way where it negatively impacts people, such as refusing to hire someone or yelling obscenities and threats at someone purely because they like the alto sax and you only believe in tenors.
But you're still perfectly free to be as much of an asshole as you want inside your own head.
Yeah, Greenlight is a bit of a sad case. The idea is good -- let gamers vote for the games they like and hopefully prevent developers from sinking a buttload of money into a dud -- but it definitely didn't pan out.
And in retrospect, I'm not sure it really could pan out. It relies on people judging games based purely on hype and pre-release screenshots (that may or may not even still be recognizable in the final game.)
Beyond just Greenlight though, I'm happy that they've been adding a wider range of games to the service. It would definitely be a bonus if the search and suggestion features were updated to handle the extra breadth but generally speaking, I don't mind skipping over a bunch of extra crap if it means finding a gem that I otherwise wouldn't have ever heard of.
I for one look forward to the day when I have to recompile every game I purchase, and spend 3 weeks trying to track down library incompatibilities on half of them.
Oh wait, no I don't. And I'm one of the relatively small percentage of the population who actually could do all of that if I cared enough to bother.
You do realize that "distribution platform" and "DRM" are not the same thing right? Someone like GoG could in theory design and build a front-end client for their games just like Steam has, and not be required to add any more DRM than they already have.
The fact that Steam is the only distribution platform that anyone really recognizes and they happen to use DRM is a fluke of history, not a fundamental necessity.
Personally I like having my entire library in one place with a consistent install/launch/uninstall interface. Sure I'd be happier knowing if my games weren't DRM'd but they keep it well enough hidden that the ease of use of the library more than makes up for it.
I mean I'll be pretty pissed the day Steam packs it in and I lose all my purchases but frankly I've lost or destroyed far more physical media than I have Steam licenses -- and I take reasonably good care of my discs compared to a lot of people I know.
That said, I agree that adding another distribution platform isn't really helping anybody. The main benefit of my Steam library is that its all in one place. If you put your game in another place I'm going to probably ignore it (hello, Origin!)
Same with Netflix in the video world and I can't even be bothered with music anymore since I'd have to use (and pay for) half a dozen services to get all of the songs I like, and none of them play nice with the others so I'm stuck having to choose a subset of what I want to listen to and manually switch entire services if I want to change it up. I use Youtube for my music these days since damned near everything is on there (not necessarily legitimately but such is life..)
Its a bit of a catch-22 though. Multiple platforms (and I include having no platform and all games do whatever the fuck they want) is a pain in everybody's ass, but having a single platform leaves everyone at the mercy of a single master. There's no real answer to that unfortunately. Both extremes suck in their own way and there's not much middle ground between "one" and "more than one."
It appears that this is (so far) a partnership rather than a takeover, so it will likely just be Unity adding hooks to FB's API and little else on their end. Perhaps adding FB's platform language (whatever they use) as an alternative to the C# and whatnot they currently support for scripting.
The FB platform side will likely require a much larger overhaul as they'll need to allow Unity's API functionality without breaking whatever they've currently got setup.
For now, this probably won't adversely affect Unity much if at all. You can just ignore the FB hooks and go on with development as usual. Of course if it turns into a buyout at some point then things become a little more questionable, though their hands would still be somewhat tied as they'd be facing huge numbers of lawsuits if they broke compatibility with existing projects. It would likely still spell the end of non-FB Unity games eventually but it would (probably) be a slow die-off rather than an immediate slaughter.
Because the value of privacy isn't really visible while the value of social interactions is immediate and obvious (well, at least for a large majority of people.)
FB has made a name for themselves by being regularly and overtly evil about things, but its not like their competitors are much better. Money has to come from somewhere and since nobody's willing to pay with cash for much of anything on the internet, they pay with personal data instead. Sure some are worse than others but at the end of the day, its the way things are and it will take a lot more than preaching to the choir on a (vaguely) technical forum site to change it.
You need to update your definition of "gamer." Casual games like Farmville, Angry Birds, Candy Crush and so on are huge and make up a rather significant portion of the overall games market these days. You're free to not like those type of games (and I'm with you there) but denying the size and impact of the casual market is something that stopped being reasonable about 3-4 years ago.
Nobody wants ads in their games though.. or anywhere else for that matter, regardless of how hardcore they are. But at the end of the day, somebody's got to pay to keep churning these things out and between ads, microtransactions and upfront payment well.. ok I'd prefer to just pay once and be done with it.
But I also recognize that 20 years ago when I couldn't afford to drop $40-60 on a whim, I would have probably been quite happy to find games I could "pay" for by ignoring a few ads rather than spending cash I didn't have.
Rapists have used that excuse because they bought a couple of drinks so sex was "implied."
That's not even close to the same thing. In the case of the website, the agreement exists and the implicit part is assuming you've read it (in which case its explicit.) Which is why every single one of those things contains some text similar to "by using this service you agree to our terms" along with "and if you disagree, you're free to uninstall/not use it."
The sex equivalent would be buying the girl a drink and then before you hand it to her stating "if you drink this, you are contractually obligated to sleep with me." At that point, drinking it DOES imply agreement because it was stated as such. I mean in this case you'd probably want witnesses because that sounds like a pretty implausible story, but its still wholly different from you just making the assumption with no knowledge on her part (in fact in that case, she'd be more like the Web Watcher's victim than the user.)
As for the party being reasonably aware.. I would say that that almost certainly would hold up by now. If there's anybody out there who at this point isn't reasonably aware that every website, software package or other digital service on the planet doesn't come with a EULA that you're implicitly agreeing to when you use the product, then they need to have their head checked and catch up to the 21st century. Fucking Panago has a EULA just to order a pizza. You might be able to fight specific claims if they're super unusual or punitive but claiming ignorance of a EULA in general is a bit disingenuous and likely won't get you very far.
And for the most part, EULAs seem to at least not get dismissed outright as being non-binding and get to go through the full dispute proceedings like any other contract.
Email security is a nightmare to be sure, but not really for the reasons you specified.
Sure its beneficial to have the link encrypted but MITM attacks are, for the vast majority of us at least, not a significant day-to-day concern. 99.999% of all people aren't important enough to be spied upon by anyone who would have access to the companies storing and transmitting your email.
The biggest issue with email security, by far, is dumbasses who click on things they shouldn't. And that will be a problem regardless of how well your transport layer is protected.
Not suggesting you shouldn't bother protecting the transport layer of course as best you can.. just don't rely on secure transport to be an end to all woes.
As for IMs. I personally like them (though they can definitely be distracting.. can't just shut them off in case there's something important but there's also a shitload of trivial things that go through, especially in group chats.) They can't replace email and telephone though because the very thing that makes those two the most annoying -- unsolicited messages -- are also necessary in a lot of situations (your company's sales@ address for example.)
IMs also tend to be somewhat more difficult to review later than email. Though that's mostly a UI limitation. There's no reason that has to be the case just that IM providers (at least the most well known ones) are more focused on trying to up-sell you voice chats or social network integration or whatever other shit they actually make their money from rather than improving the basic IM experience. I'm sure there's niche clients that are much better for things like that but that's only helpful if you can dictate their usage to your team/company.
Disagreement with you, Yoda has. As do the many, many people for whom English is a second language as many languages are not SVO and its not their normal way of thinking of the world. It may be easier than rocket science, but its not necessarily easy in general.
Not to mention how much more verbose everything would have to be in order to maintain strict grammatical sentences all the time. There's a reason why we don't do that.
I do enjoy how you used "Subject, verb, object" as a fragment in a complaint about people using sentence fragments though. That deserves a bonus point or two.
You want to annoy my 16-year old? Call on the phone.
I'm 38 and phone calls annoy me too. Doubly so when you expect me to remember the conversation 2 weeks from now. If you'd sent an email I could have at least looked it up again.
Which I covered in my final sentence -- if they really want to plant something on you, they can just do it with physical evidence and not have to worry about breaking into your phone and convincing you to give up your password and whatever else, and with a hell of a lot less risk that there will be a log created that they don't notice or forget to clean up that would catch them out.