It's hard to reduce to absurdity that which is already absurd. Copyright and patent law has been absurd for decades.
Of course, since this article deals with contract law and has nothing to do with either copyrights or patents, the GP may still have a point. Not to mention the implicit subjectivity of "absurd" when you take it out of the mathematical context. To companies who have been making a living off financial "surprise sex" for decades, I'm sure the absurdity is that the end-user should have any rights at all.
"Ford Motor Company licenses the purchaser to operate this automobile ("the car"). This license is non-transferable."
Great, so I can sell the physical media (the car) under first sale doctrine, but the new owner wouldn't be allowed to drive it without violating the EULA.
I know I'm extrapolating to a bit of absurdity, but there's no reason why car companies or anyone else couldn't do this -- they're allowed to throw whatever the hell they want into their legal documents and until its (successfully!) challenged before a judge, its as good as legitimate if they can convince you to accept it. And you can go back to the bus if you refuse to accept it, unless you happen to have enough financial backing that Ford needs to worry about the possibility of an actual court case.
Its up to you whether or not you want to ignore the entire iPhone/iTouch/iPad market. If you don't care about those markets (or are developing free-as-in-beer software and don't really care about ANY markets) well, nobody's FORCING you to write iPhone apps. Or Wii apps, or PS3 apps, or apps for any other specific system -- closed or otherwise. Heck you could completely remove yourself from all restrictions and just not develop anything.
Other people like to get paid for their work though, and ignoring a huge market just because you don't like one company's decision is a pretty tough thing to do (even moreso if the "developer" is large enough that the marketing team and directors aren't also the programmers -- the marketing people don't really give a rat's behind if you'd prefer to use Java instead of ObjC -- you do what you're told or they'll find someone who will).
I'm sure Apple gives some shit about the developers (at least the big ones that they might have large financial incentives to listen to). But your average individual developer? Pretty doubtful. Developers will always create things for markets, and the iPhone/iPod Touch is a huge market. Developers will still develop for a market that size, regardless of how annoying Apple makes it.
Probably about as well as "Someone has figured out how to cheat. The patch will take us anywhere from 3 to 10 days to implement. Until then, we have shut the game down for all players."
That is to say, it wouldn't happen. If the company is being vigilant for cheaters, then hopefully they'll notice any serious cheating before the hacked clients get too wide-spread, and ban the offending accounts as they're discovered so even if the hole isn't fixed right away, the people who are using the hole will be removed from the game promptly.
And of course, the more serious the cheat, the more obvious it will be that you're cheating. So if you find some minor terrain glitch that allows you to bypass the guards when you try to get into the enemy's base, its probably not going to be too serious (the opposing team will just find the new entrance and adjust until it gets patched). If you're using an aimbot and sniping people with perfect precision from across the map, it will be a little more obvious (some -- or maybe even a lot? -- of aimbots actually started intentionally being a little more fuzzy so that the player would have an "I'm just that good.. but see I'm not perfect!" defense when they got banned).
I've attempted this kind of thing before. Its really REALLY hard. The addition or removal of a single call to your RNG function changes the entire thing. That means in order for this to be work with any great deal of reliability, you have to be absolutely 100% certain that you will never ever need to make the game/program more or less random in the future.
It might have worked in the pre-internet age, but in the modern world with online updates/bug fixes, user-generated content and whatever else, controlling your RNG to that degree is a near impossibility if you want your program to remain relevant past the first time a user finds a bug.
Well, not having any data to back this up, I'll say with full/. rigor that there are likely some reasons why the video game industry in particular probably DOES have a slightly higher than average "back in the day" factor:
1- There's a lot of games nowadays that are released purely on their prettiness factor, with no regard to story line. Its like comparing hardcore porn to a NC-17 movie. Sure the porn has more skin and sex, but once you're done with your wank you may as well turn it off.. the movie will have other layers of interest to keep you watching. Of course there are also bad NC-17 movies, but its a pretty rare gem to find a porn with an involving storyline.
2- Video games are a "big market" now. Meaning there's a lot more people willing to risk their time and money in an attempt to get a piece of that market.
3- Perhaps a smaller factor, but internet distribution means that there's also a lot more on the other end of the scale -- people who don't have much financial backing releasing loads of indy games that simply wouldn't have been able to find players in the pre-internet days due to lack of shelf space and marketing power to take some shelf space away from the big names.
Yes, there are good games released today.. probably (on average) as many as there were "back in the day". But I believe the S/N ratio gets skewed not by the number of good games going down, but by the number of available bad games increasing greatly.
I'm also going to suggest that this phenomena has pretty much leveled out by now since its unlikely we're going to see another distribution revolution on the scale of the internet, and 3D graphics is up to a point where improvements are incremental rather than fundamental. The only near-term revolution I can see happening is if stereo displays in the home take off, but even that is a rather minor improvement compared to the shift from 2D to 3D or even the shift from software 3D to hardware 3D.
Of course as I noted at the top, I don't have any real data to back this up, so there may well be a factor or two that I'm unaware of when it comes to predicting the future and (lack of) fundamental changes.. but even so, it would only shift my argument by a few years but not really invalidate it.
For the dense point theory, we have really smart people who have taken a look at the universe as we can see it, they've applied mathematics to "fit" the universe (remember, mathematics only models the universe, they don't define it. And the mathematics themselves can be proven to be correct, even if the application to the model can't be proved). Anyone with enough time and brain power can learn the mathematics, run the experiments, and verify for themselves that yes, the mathematics do indeed match the universe (within some error of measurement).
The sky-man theory doesn't have that property. Short of inventing a time machine and going back 6,000 or whatever years, there is no way anyone living today can verify for themselves that the sky-man literally created the earth in a single day out of nothingness. No amount of logic or reasoning will ever bring you to that conclusion from things that are directly observable today. Or at the very least, there will be some point in your arguments that will amount to a leap of faith that can't be justified other than by simply believing in what you believe.
There's also another point that makes the sky-man theory less scientific (though not necessarily making it less believable). The dense point theory can be DISproven. You might not ever be able to say with 100% certainty "yes this happened", but if you find a hole in general relativity or M-theory or whatever, you CAN say with 100% certainty "no this didn't happen" (or at least if it did, our mathematics are describing it wrongly).
You can never prove that the sky-man didn't exist. In fact its 100% realistic to claim that all scientific knowledge we have these days (GR, evolution, etc) were designed by the sky-man and that all of our "evidence" was actually put in place by the evil-underground-man in a bid to confuse us poor humans and draw us away from the pure belief in the sky-man. There is simply no counter-argument to that. Any counter-argument can ALWAYS be covered up by either the will of the sky-man or the underground-man, depending on whether it supports or disagrees with what you want to believe. I can't say you're wrong (that's the whole point I'm making), but I'm going to have a hard time accepting that sort of "logic" without first believing in it myself (in which case you have no reason to "prove" it to me since I'm already a believer!)
Its actually a contraction of "fluid ounce". Check wikipedia for the various uses of the word. Its related (though not directly -- its through various conversion factors from other odd units) to the volume taken up by a given weight of water.
Right TV uses the full HDMI with audio to the TV, with TOSLINK from the TV out down to my amp.
Left TV is hooked up with a DVI-HDMI adapter and uses the standard PC speaker outs.
Of course, its annoying having to manually change the audio when I swap programs from one TV to the other, but I typically like specific programs on one screen or another, so that doesn't bother me TOO much.
It would be awesome if one of the video card manufacturers would add dual HDMI audio (I don't know about nVidia, but ATI only allows one audio output which can be associated with any of the 3 ports.. same as only being able to use 2 video ports at once.) And then have their drivers smart enough to switch the audio from one device to the other depending on the screen that the program is on (of course, then there'd be the question of what to do when the window is split across both screens.. but that's another story!)
By looking at that little thing called "history". This concept of "net neutrality" was the de facto standard for many many years. No one questioned it. Now people are questioning it -- particularly the big ISPs. The technology now exists to remove the inherent neutrality of the net and so lawmakers are looking to make (or block, depending on your stance) laws that will ensure the neutrality we've always had will stay in place.
Unfortunately as is always the case, the antagonists of the story are trying to complicate things. We can break down the net neutrality debate into two broad categories:
1) Protocol-based shaping. That is, voip takes priority over spam. This is generally good. Generally you'd want to bias towards higher priority for unknown protocols (basically anything that isn't standardized is assumed to be important and the creator of those unknown protocols can do their own traffic shaping if its interfering with their connection).
2) Economics-based shaping. This is where Google (or Microsoft or Amazon or $pickyourlargewebsite) pays Comcast $premium to have their traffic classified as high priority. Everything else (spam AND voip) would be classified as low priority.
Of course the people fighting against net neutrality (ISPs, etc) are arguing the first category, but what they really want is the second. Comcast doesn't give a rats ass whether you personally prefer voip or spam -- they just want Google to be ponying up the $premium. But very few people are sympathetic to "We only made a few billion in profit last year we need more of your money!" On the other hand, people are definitely sympathetic to "would you prefer the latest VI4grA spam or would you prefer that Skype call to your grandma?"
I don't know why people still trust big business to do the right thing. The idea that competition and free markets will provide what the consumer wants only works if there's ACTUALLY COMPETITION. Businesses almost by definition only do things that increase their profits. If there is competition then they will do things that are good for the consumer (otherwise we'd spend our money at the competitor's place). However, if they're in a monopoly situation, or a small number of "competitors" that are in collusion (as is the case with most large-scale ISPs), the situation changes. There's no real need to do what the consumer wants because the consumer simply has no other choice. In these situations, benefiting the consumer is only a side-effect of increasing the bottom line. But its just as common (if not moreso) for those side-effects to be detrimental to the consumer.
Easy and can be done sanely. Block incoming ports by default (as is done). Have a page where users can go and open ports for themselves, with a disclaimer about temporary disconnections if your server is discovered to be doing nasty things (heck, even a temporary closing of the troublesome port).
People who care and know what they're doing would have a very easy time of opening their ports, with the resulting consequences if they screw up. People who don't care can go on with their lives as always.
As for botnets.. that's a fairly silly point. Botnet authors are generally smart enough to know how to bind to a different port.. I'd be surprised if they use a static port at all to be honest -- too easy to block in many ways.. picking a random port and then broadcasting it on IRC or somewhere similarly pseudo-anonymous would be far preferable.. most of the bots would already be having to broadcast their IPs anyway given that the vast majority of computers in the world will have dynamic IPs. User-level firewalling (hardware, software, or even just basic hiding behind a NAT) would be a far greater challenge than simply not using port 80. Luckily for the botnets, UPnP came 'round to save them from that hassle! Otherwise they might have had to figure out the default passwords for ALL THREE major router brands and automatically add themselves a port forward!
Don't even have to RTFA, or even the summary.. Just the tagline says specifically that its a patent claim. Whether or not the claim would actually stand up in court is up to a judge should it get that far (never mind international concerns), but everything I've seen so far tells me that Shazam has all the right in the world to at least make the claim.
As far as I know, neither "easy after someone else has thought of it" nor "it didn't take me very long" are terribly good defenses in a patent case. The one you're looking for is "figured it out before someone else has thought of it", which this guy obviously didn't do given that he specifically set out to duplicate the abilities of an existing product. At this point his only defense is to show that his algorithm is sufficiently improved over (or at least different from) Shazam's that it would warrant being called 'innovative' (at least in the US.. I don't know about the EU's rules). Also, being his own code isn't a defense in a patent case (whereas it would be a defense in a copyright case if it could be proven).
Most people only consider one class of "customer" when they make these comments -- those customers that the small company originally had. The small company is by definition, small. The loss of a single customer (especially a larger customer with a lot of licenses) can be a disaster. So they spend a lot of time and money catering to their customers in the form of directed enhancements, timely bug fixes, support staff that know the product (and frequently the OS, other common products, etc that might cause problems with the product). These customers are most certainly going to lose out in terms of support when the small company is no longer small (whether by purchase or just by growing past a threshold). Large companies have a completely different focus on support -- handling the support load efficiently becomes more of a problem than ensuring that every single support issue gets handled appropriately. It turns into a form of the good old 80/20 rule (though I would guess that the numbers aren't 80 and 20).
There is however a second class of customer. This is all of the large company's customers that may not have ever heard of the small company. Assuming that the small company provides a useful service, the large company's customer base will be better off for having it available (and this will typically be the vast majority of the total number of customers, again by the definition of "small" and "large").
Of course, that argument only applies if the small company is actually small in terms of users. The internet has enabled a situation where a financially small company can still be huge in terms of user base, but in these situations there's a good chance that support will actually -improve- under the larger company, simply by the fact that the larger company will (typically) have a larger support staff relative to the total number of users.
And as always, these are "typical" scenarios. I'm aware that there's probably loads of counter-examples.
The company gives you a paycheck because without you (and their other employees of course), they wouldn't be in business very long. They certainly don't pay you because they WANT to. They'd be much happier keeping their money if they could convince you to work for free. Salaries are a huge portion of most companies' costs.
Same with customers. Apple doesn't make iPods because they benefit you. They make iPods because you're willing to buy them (maybe not you specifically, but the more general "you're") and Apple gets money for it. If no one was willing to pay for an iPod, Apple certainly wouldn't continue making them. And flipping the coin, Apple would be quite as happy to sell you a rotten banana peel as they are to sell you an iPod. Apple only "cares" about what you in the sense that you won't give them money for things that you don't want. Caring about the customer is NOT an intrinsic property of a business, its a requirement for that business to be able to make money in a capitalist society where consumers have the option of not buying.
Even monopoly companies have to "care" about their customers in the sense of providing something of utility. A monopoly on rotten banana peels isn't going to generate a lot of income. Even without the option of purchasing from a competitor, the option of not buying at all is still available to consumers.
At least for most products. These arguments break down in the face of "necessary" products such as electricity, running water, food, etc. Now food isn't so bad because you generally have the option of multiple suppliers, and competition keeps things fair. No such competition exists for things like electricity and water (at least in most cities). For those products, you can neither decide to purchase from a competitor nor decide not to purchase at all. As an off-topic rant, this is the reason why I consider "privatizing" these sort of products to be a terribly bad idea -- all of the monopoly power of a public utility with none of the public oversight. Pretty much bad for everyone except the new CEO and whoever he paid off to make it happen.
I think you're taking 'controversial' in the wrong context. I doubt that they mean "issues that generate debate" so much as "opinions and facts that we disagree with" (yes, I'm sure it includes facts -- these sort of bans always do). Typically 'controversial opinions' in the second context are generated from the first, and the idea is to just ban one side of the argument so that the readers (TSA employees in this case) will have affirmation of the accepted side and no affirmation of the opposing view. The idea is to steer them towards your way of thinking by simply removing all other thought (of course nothing is preventing any particular employee from thinking up their own opposing viewpoint, but if they try to present it to anyone else it would quickly be pushed under the category of 'controversial opinion' and be banned as well).
The latter sounds like gender-neutralized political-correctness speech for "thou shalt wear a bra and not poke out the eyes of gawkers on cold days".
Well, or preventing girls from running around in short skirts and no panties, which might be great for "slutty secretary" porn and pervy internet videos, but isn't so acceptable in a real life professional environment.
I'm pretty sure letting the citizens keep their money is somewhere around the opposite of promoting the general welfare -- its promoting the welfare only of those who have money to keep. Now in a society where everyone has relatively equal amounts of money, this could be construed as the "general welfare", but I've yet to see any indication that such a society is even possible, never mind existing.
I'm also a little hazy on what you'd consider an "essential service" if health care is among the explicit list of what you consider non-essential. I can't think of anything less beneficial to the general welfare than letting people suffer or die when they could be saved because they don't happen to fall into the upper percentage of folk who can afford a hospital bed.
Things like roads, power and telephone lines, etc.. there's been a huge push over the past two decades to "privatize" these things for the "good" of the people. Basically what this amounts to is trading off government oversight (generally considered bad but necessary) with a monopoly power and _NO_ oversight (ALWAYS considered bad). Its one thing to spout rhetoric about the potential for competition, its quite another for any competitor to come up with several billion dollars to string their own lines (never mind the legal battles over right-of-ways and whatever else that will take time and money.. which the incumbent company will fight tooth and nail to stop on top of all the other hurdles).
Any utility or service that is effectively impossible to duplicate (economically or politically) should always remain in the hands of the government -- at least the people will have theoretical oversight. Of course, the/maintenance/ of such utilities can be contracted out, but the utilities themselves should remain public (and for things like telephone lines, the service itself can even be privatized providing the lines -- the part that can't be practically duplicated in any practical sense -- are maintained publicly.)
It is of course definitely worth arguing which level of government should maintain these things (in the sense of intrastate versus interstate splits.. but it could be broken down further to intra-city vs inter-city, intra-community vs inter-community.. and so on down until you end up with the home owner being responsible for the final leg between his house and the edge of his property if you really want to go that far.. think of a driveway that connects to the street). But its ridiculous to argue that an uncontrolled monopoly power over a shared utility is ever better than government oversight -- its only better for the CEOs and shareholders of the monopolistic company. Maintaining balance over shared resources is the reason governments exist!
For those who didn't RTFA, they were talking in more global terms. They're talking about oil spills that ARE near someone's house, but in a country where those people have basically no recourse (Niger). The government is weak and/or corrupt and the oil companies just run as companies do -- maximize profit and only worry about the expense to others if the cost of a legal battle is high enough. In a country where there's effectively no chance of a legal battle in the first place, the rights of people living around the sites are basically ignored. Do you think BP would bother even pretending to cap that well in the gulf if the US government wasn't forcing them to? The people in Niger are hearing the news of the US' coercion of cleanup efforts and are sitting there amazed that there are places in the world where the government has the power and desire to force BP to deal with the problems they've caused.
Shell is the main company the article focuses on (though BP was also referenced). Rather than doing anything about these spills, Shell just comes up with one excuse after another as to why there are so many. I'm sure they plug them as fast as is economically possible (they don't lose too much product of course) but "economically possible" doesn't necessarily mean "immediate". The oil that's already spilled sounds like it just gets left there a good deal of the time, rather than performing cleanup efforts like you'd see in the US and other more developed countries.
As for their excuses. They mostly amount to terrorism and vandalism. Now that's probably accurate for at least a majority of the cases, but it still doesn't excuse the preventable spills where outside interference is NOT the issue (rusty pipes, etc).
And really, terrorists need to smarten up. If you want to get the attention of these companies, you'd be far better off figuring out how to use one of the valves and block the flow (or better yet, redirect it -- much as a company hates losing money, they REALLY REALLY hate it if someone else is getting that money instead). Simply blowing a hole in the pipe and destroying their own homeland doesn't seem to be working too well if Shell & co are happy to just let the spills go.
Is it because nobody is contacting their representative to say "hang on a minute here..."?
Scenario one: "Somebody" writes in. Some intern scans the first line, tally's off another "crazy money hating whackjob" mark and moves on to the next email/letter. Rinse and repeat until the tally becomes large enough to actually warrant notice.
Scenario two: Bigshot lobbyist with a few million in corporate backing brings some carefully crafted powerpoint slides into the politician's private office, and after the presentation, takes the politician and his family out for a $200 a plate dinner at the ritziest place in town.
Even ignoring the just-barely-this-side-of-a-bribe dinner, who do you think is going to be seen as having the strongest argument? Form letters and petitions are a bit better as they can be written with as much care as those powerpoint slides and then just signed off by concerned parties, but they get written off as a bunch of people who don't care enough to write their own letter, and they still need a good number of signatures before they even get noticed never mind taken seriously.
I'm assuming I'm misreading something here? The article is a little light on details but it sounds like all they're doing is constructing automated unit tests by brute-force running each possible input through an existing correct routine which can then be applied to later modifications of said routine. Which strikes me as remarkably bad in several ways:
- You need to know that the routine is correct in order for the "diagnostic subprogram" to create a correct set of tests. But if you already know its correct, why would you ever need to change it? If your answer is "requirements might change", then you've basically declared that the routine is no longer correct and that immediately implies your diagnostic tests are no longer correct, so any flags they might throw up can't be trusted and are therefore useless.
- Even for a computer, its impossible to test every input. For a single standard 32-bit integer you have 4 billion possibilities. A modern fast computer could probably perform a simple operation 4 billion times in a few hours. Chances are anything complex enough to fit under the article's purposes wouldn't also be considered a "simple operation". Never mind multiple inputs (two 32-bit integers as your input would make the test infeasible even on the fastest modern computer. And a string with no length restrictions can't possibly be fully tested via brute force on any finite system ever, since the number of possible inputs would be infinite). So you start having to come up with input classes (integers greater than 100 shouldn't be valid for a "percentage" for example). But to do that you need to know what that integer means. But short of following some VERY strict variable naming conventions, there's no way to do that. I could call it percent, or iPercent, or iPct, or p, or iDontLikeNamingMyVariables. Or heck I decide that I want tenths of a percent but decide floats aren't worthwhile so now my "percentage" can range from 0..1000 and the routine itself will implicitly divide by 10 (possibly by just plugging a decimal into the correct spot while drawing the number on a display -- no "real" division done). No automated routine can ever fill this in. Even a human would have trouble figuring out what I mean if I name my routine something like "PrintP10(int p)". A human would have to analyze the routine itself to see what its doing with the integer, and then possibly go back and analyze its context to see what the integer means if the routine itself wasn't obvious enough.
- Even should this somehow prove tractable, many "bugs" are in the design, not the code. Any sort of automated test routine like this can only find code bugs (which pretty much amount to crash bugs and formatting issues.. a really smart routine might be able to parse out printfs/DB access/etc calls and try to do some heuristic checking to see if %s's are being handled right, or SQL queries are being properly escaped to avoid injections, etc.. But heuristics aren't 100%.) On the other hand if I design a system to send a plain text password over an unsecured link, or write it to a directory that happens to be world-visible via the FTP site, again its not something that can be automatically detected (especially the latter -- your program might have been developed on a system that didn't even have internet access never mind a poorly-configured FTP.)
- UI elements tend to be horribly difficult to test automatically. All you can do is inject some mouse clicks and keyboard events and hope that the OS treats them the same as real mouse/keyboard events. Consider injecting events to click a button. They would probably consist of A) move the mouse over the button and B) fire a click event. Chances are the step A) will be invalid -- it will almost certainly consist of a direct positioning (ie: a cursor jump) whereas a real user would have to move the mouse across the screen. And moving the mouse across the screen may well hit some other control that has an OnEnter or OnLeave event trigger that in some way interferes
Mostly right, but forgetting a very key concept -- NoSQL and full RDBMS serve different purposes. If you need high data integrity, then full ACID commitments and whatnot are great -- but you'll pay for it in speed.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you need maximum speed and have the ability to pre-cleanse your data, then then NoSQL is a much better fit to your needs.
Not to mention, "NoSQL" is just a general term covering basically anything that doesn't use an SQL-like command syntax. Hit up the Wikipedia sometime. NoSQL covers a huge variety of technologies spreading from single-server small-end databases designed for quick, easy programming, all the way up to Google and Amazon's back-ends that are designed for huge amounts of read requests and (comparatively) small amounts of writes.
Consider. If your accounting software fails to provides inconsistent numbers to your accountants, you're going to have some trouble. He probably doesn't care if the DB can only handle 1000 queries per second.. If Google takes an extra 30 seconds to update the results for an "OMGPonies!" search, no-one really gives a damn.. as long as it gets there eventually its fine. But they REALLY need it to handle millions of queries per second. Amazon is somewhere in the middle -- their listings don't really need to-the-millisecond updates, but things like the shopping cart does.
Completely different needs take completely different solutions. Someone who says "NoSQL is always a bad solution" is just as wrong as someone who says "NoSQL is always the solution". Just like most situations where you have two or more viable options.
I think you'll find there's a heck of a lot more of an outcry when NFL 2032 doesn't work then when some obscure feature that most people have barely heard about never mind used stops working.
I did actually RTFA (at least up to the point of answering this question, as it was also my main concern) and it turns out this IS tied to your EA sports account (which in turn is tied to your gamertag/psn account).
Of course the obvious workaround if you're the type that re-sells games is just to generate a new gamertag/psn account for each game and write it on the disc before you pass it on. Then whoever picks up the disc will have full access to anything you had. Downsides are of course a) not a great deal of people will be thinking about "someone who buys my copy used X months or years in the future" at the point when they first get their game.. and b) some people actually care about their trophies/achievements/whatever other useless eviagra.
This is going to put EB games out of business though. They already sell their used games for around $5 less than the original (and then try to sell you a $4 "extended warranty").. add another $10 EA tax to that and EB is going to quickly go out of business (or at least, stop taking EA games). Though I'm not sure of course if this applies to all EBs (never mind other resellers like GameStop) or if its just my local one.. but that's pretty harsh! It should be EB gearing up to sue the hell out of EA over this given "having a better business model" and "stealing my customers" is no longer a sign of a healthy competition -- its a sign of civil (possibly even criminal) injustice and must be stopped!
Sure I can. I can buy Windows from HP or Acer or any number of other OEMs. They in turn might have to buy it from Microsoft, but that's pretty irrelevant -- if you want one vendor's product you obviously have to get it from that vendor at some point along the chain. Even Linux requires someone at some point along the chain to download the source from the main dev repository. The only real difference is that the OEM Windows has to come with hardware, while Linux can be downloaded on its own.
What isn't irrelevant is that each of those OEMs are allowed to put Windows on virtually any hardware they can get it to run on reasonably well. When was the last time you saw a (legitimate) Apple OS running on anything but Apple hardware? Sure they sell boxed OSX and you might be able to shoehorn it onto something non-Apple, but they don't sell it that way. This is very very old Apple precedence, and at least one factor in why the original Mac failed so miserably against the far-inferior PCs that were available at the time.
And then the iPhone takes it one step further and in addition to disallowing non-authorized hardware, they're also disallowing non-authorized software as well. There's precedent for this as well though, mostly on gaming consoles.
And now Apple's gone yet another step and is even disallowing non-authorized development tools. As far as I know, there's no precedent for this. I'm sure there's the odd smallish company out there who strong-arms their couple dozen customers, but I've never heard of this on such a high-profile device before (then again I'm not ancient.. my knowledge of these things starts mid 90s so maybe there was stuff before that.. and of course maybe stuff I just missed.. but still). Sure if you want to develop for the PS3 you likely need to get a dev kit, but there's nothing stopping you from porting a LUA or Python interpreter for use with your dev kit and in your games. On the iPod you can't do that now. This is a huge step beyond hardware lockin or even software authorization submissions.
Heck, I'd bet that most if not all RPG-style games (and likely others) use some sort of scripting language internally, whether a roll-their-own or something commonplace like LUA. Are these games now breaking ToS? Does this mean that any future RPG developers will need to hardcode every single timed event and whatnot in their games? Not to mention developers who for whatever reason aren't a fan of C-style languages (though I don't know what support there would have been for those guys before this change either so maybe that's a moot point).
It might be enough though to introduce doubt -- seeing that IP address x.y.z.w is downloading "#SG*$#@" (my poor fake encryptions) doesn't tell you if the file is actually "Avatar (2009).avi" or "Fedora 12.iso". The former would be infringement (unless you managed to actually get rights.. har) whereas the latter is perfectly legal.
With infringement being criminalized means that there should be a much higher standard of proof needed for conviction (at least in theory).
On the other hand, I don't know how much proof (any these days?) is needed to subpoena ISPs and get a search-and-seize warrant.. and of course once they have your computer its pretty much red-handed if you've left any infringing files around that they can find.
And if it turns out you were only downloading 800 copies of various Linux distros well.. they'll have egg on their face, slashdot and maybe a small local newspaper or two might pick up the story but it will otherwise be hushed up. Can severely damage the individuals life and finances, but the organizations doing these copyright witch hunts don't really care as long as they can keep it under the radar of the wider public.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to reduce to absurdity that which is already absurd. Copyright and patent law has been absurd for decades.
Of course, since this article deals with contract law and has nothing to do with either copyrights or patents, the GP may still have a point. Not to mention the implicit subjectivity of "absurd" when you take it out of the mathematical context. To companies who have been making a living off financial "surprise sex" for decades, I'm sure the absurdity is that the end-user should have any rights at all.
Or anything else.
"Ford Motor Company licenses the purchaser to operate this automobile ("the car"). This license is non-transferable."
Great, so I can sell the physical media (the car) under first sale doctrine, but the new owner wouldn't be allowed to drive it without violating the EULA.
I know I'm extrapolating to a bit of absurdity, but there's no reason why car companies or anyone else couldn't do this -- they're allowed to throw whatever the hell they want into their legal documents and until its (successfully!) challenged before a judge, its as good as legitimate if they can convince you to accept it. And you can go back to the bus if you refuse to accept it, unless you happen to have enough financial backing that Ford needs to worry about the possibility of an actual court case.
And no one's stopping you from doing just that.
Its up to you whether or not you want to ignore the entire iPhone/iTouch/iPad market. If you don't care about those markets (or are developing free-as-in-beer software and don't really care about ANY markets) well, nobody's FORCING you to write iPhone apps. Or Wii apps, or PS3 apps, or apps for any other specific system -- closed or otherwise. Heck you could completely remove yourself from all restrictions and just not develop anything.
Other people like to get paid for their work though, and ignoring a huge market just because you don't like one company's decision is a pretty tough thing to do (even moreso if the "developer" is large enough that the marketing team and directors aren't also the programmers -- the marketing people don't really give a rat's behind if you'd prefer to use Java instead of ObjC -- you do what you're told or they'll find someone who will).
I'm sure Apple gives some shit about the developers (at least the big ones that they might have large financial incentives to listen to). But your average individual developer? Pretty doubtful. Developers will always create things for markets, and the iPhone/iPod Touch is a huge market. Developers will still develop for a market that size, regardless of how annoying Apple makes it.
Probably about as well as "Someone has figured out how to cheat. The patch will take us anywhere from 3 to 10 days to implement. Until then, we have shut the game down for all players."
That is to say, it wouldn't happen. If the company is being vigilant for cheaters, then hopefully they'll notice any serious cheating before the hacked clients get too wide-spread, and ban the offending accounts as they're discovered so even if the hole isn't fixed right away, the people who are using the hole will be removed from the game promptly.
And of course, the more serious the cheat, the more obvious it will be that you're cheating. So if you find some minor terrain glitch that allows you to bypass the guards when you try to get into the enemy's base, its probably not going to be too serious (the opposing team will just find the new entrance and adjust until it gets patched). If you're using an aimbot and sniping people with perfect precision from across the map, it will be a little more obvious (some -- or maybe even a lot? -- of aimbots actually started intentionally being a little more fuzzy so that the player would have an "I'm just that good.. but see I'm not perfect!" defense when they got banned).
I've attempted this kind of thing before. Its really REALLY hard. The addition or removal of a single call to your RNG function changes the entire thing. That means in order for this to be work with any great deal of reliability, you have to be absolutely 100% certain that you will never ever need to make the game/program more or less random in the future.
It might have worked in the pre-internet age, but in the modern world with online updates/bug fixes, user-generated content and whatever else, controlling your RNG to that degree is a near impossibility if you want your program to remain relevant past the first time a user finds a bug.
Well, not having any data to back this up, I'll say with full /. rigor that there are likely some reasons why the video game industry in particular probably DOES have a slightly higher than average "back in the day" factor:
1- There's a lot of games nowadays that are released purely on their prettiness factor, with no regard to story line. Its like comparing hardcore porn to a NC-17 movie. Sure the porn has more skin and sex, but once you're done with your wank you may as well turn it off.. the movie will have other layers of interest to keep you watching. Of course there are also bad NC-17 movies, but its a pretty rare gem to find a porn with an involving storyline.
2- Video games are a "big market" now. Meaning there's a lot more people willing to risk their time and money in an attempt to get a piece of that market.
3- Perhaps a smaller factor, but internet distribution means that there's also a lot more on the other end of the scale -- people who don't have much financial backing releasing loads of indy games that simply wouldn't have been able to find players in the pre-internet days due to lack of shelf space and marketing power to take some shelf space away from the big names.
Yes, there are good games released today.. probably (on average) as many as there were "back in the day". But I believe the S/N ratio gets skewed not by the number of good games going down, but by the number of available bad games increasing greatly.
I'm also going to suggest that this phenomena has pretty much leveled out by now since its unlikely we're going to see another distribution revolution on the scale of the internet, and 3D graphics is up to a point where improvements are incremental rather than fundamental. The only near-term revolution I can see happening is if stereo displays in the home take off, but even that is a rather minor improvement compared to the shift from 2D to 3D or even the shift from software 3D to hardware 3D.
Of course as I noted at the top, I don't have any real data to back this up, so there may well be a factor or two that I'm unaware of when it comes to predicting the future and (lack of) fundamental changes.. but even so, it would only shift my argument by a few years but not really invalidate it.
For the dense point theory, we have really smart people who have taken a look at the universe as we can see it, they've applied mathematics to "fit" the universe (remember, mathematics only models the universe, they don't define it. And the mathematics themselves can be proven to be correct, even if the application to the model can't be proved). Anyone with enough time and brain power can learn the mathematics, run the experiments, and verify for themselves that yes, the mathematics do indeed match the universe (within some error of measurement).
The sky-man theory doesn't have that property. Short of inventing a time machine and going back 6,000 or whatever years, there is no way anyone living today can verify for themselves that the sky-man literally created the earth in a single day out of nothingness. No amount of logic or reasoning will ever bring you to that conclusion from things that are directly observable today. Or at the very least, there will be some point in your arguments that will amount to a leap of faith that can't be justified other than by simply believing in what you believe.
There's also another point that makes the sky-man theory less scientific (though not necessarily making it less believable). The dense point theory can be DISproven. You might not ever be able to say with 100% certainty "yes this happened", but if you find a hole in general relativity or M-theory or whatever, you CAN say with 100% certainty "no this didn't happen" (or at least if it did, our mathematics are describing it wrongly).
You can never prove that the sky-man didn't exist. In fact its 100% realistic to claim that all scientific knowledge we have these days (GR, evolution, etc) were designed by the sky-man and that all of our "evidence" was actually put in place by the evil-underground-man in a bid to confuse us poor humans and draw us away from the pure belief in the sky-man. There is simply no counter-argument to that. Any counter-argument can ALWAYS be covered up by either the will of the sky-man or the underground-man, depending on whether it supports or disagrees with what you want to believe. I can't say you're wrong (that's the whole point I'm making), but I'm going to have a hard time accepting that sort of "logic" without first believing in it myself (in which case you have no reason to "prove" it to me since I'm already a believer!)
Its actually a contraction of "fluid ounce". Check wikipedia for the various uses of the word. Its related (though not directly -- its through various conversion factors from other odd units) to the volume taken up by a given weight of water.
I use both!
Right TV uses the full HDMI with audio to the TV, with TOSLINK from the TV out down to my amp.
Left TV is hooked up with a DVI-HDMI adapter and uses the standard PC speaker outs.
Of course, its annoying having to manually change the audio when I swap programs from one TV to the other, but I typically like specific programs on one screen or another, so that doesn't bother me TOO much.
It would be awesome if one of the video card manufacturers would add dual HDMI audio (I don't know about nVidia, but ATI only allows one audio output which can be associated with any of the 3 ports.. same as only being able to use 2 video ports at once.) And then have their drivers smart enough to switch the audio from one device to the other depending on the screen that the program is on (of course, then there'd be the question of what to do when the window is split across both screens.. but that's another story!)
By looking at that little thing called "history". This concept of "net neutrality" was the de facto standard for many many years. No one questioned it. Now people are questioning it -- particularly the big ISPs. The technology now exists to remove the inherent neutrality of the net and so lawmakers are looking to make (or block, depending on your stance) laws that will ensure the neutrality we've always had will stay in place.
Unfortunately as is always the case, the antagonists of the story are trying to complicate things. We can break down the net neutrality debate into two broad categories:
1) Protocol-based shaping. That is, voip takes priority over spam. This is generally good. Generally you'd want to bias towards higher priority for unknown protocols (basically anything that isn't standardized is assumed to be important and the creator of those unknown protocols can do their own traffic shaping if its interfering with their connection).
2) Economics-based shaping. This is where Google (or Microsoft or Amazon or $pickyourlargewebsite) pays Comcast $premium to have their traffic classified as high priority. Everything else (spam AND voip) would be classified as low priority.
Of course the people fighting against net neutrality (ISPs, etc) are arguing the first category, but what they really want is the second. Comcast doesn't give a rats ass whether you personally prefer voip or spam -- they just want Google to be ponying up the $premium. But very few people are sympathetic to "We only made a few billion in profit last year we need more of your money!" On the other hand, people are definitely sympathetic to "would you prefer the latest VI4grA spam or would you prefer that Skype call to your grandma?"
I don't know why people still trust big business to do the right thing. The idea that competition and free markets will provide what the consumer wants only works if there's ACTUALLY COMPETITION. Businesses almost by definition only do things that increase their profits. If there is competition then they will do things that are good for the consumer (otherwise we'd spend our money at the competitor's place). However, if they're in a monopoly situation, or a small number of "competitors" that are in collusion (as is the case with most large-scale ISPs), the situation changes. There's no real need to do what the consumer wants because the consumer simply has no other choice. In these situations, benefiting the consumer is only a side-effect of increasing the bottom line. But its just as common (if not moreso) for those side-effects to be detrimental to the consumer.
Easy and can be done sanely. Block incoming ports by default (as is done). Have a page where users can go and open ports for themselves, with a disclaimer about temporary disconnections if your server is discovered to be doing nasty things (heck, even a temporary closing of the troublesome port).
People who care and know what they're doing would have a very easy time of opening their ports, with the resulting consequences if they screw up. People who don't care can go on with their lives as always.
As for botnets.. that's a fairly silly point. Botnet authors are generally smart enough to know how to bind to a different port.. I'd be surprised if they use a static port at all to be honest -- too easy to block in many ways.. picking a random port and then broadcasting it on IRC or somewhere similarly pseudo-anonymous would be far preferable.. most of the bots would already be having to broadcast their IPs anyway given that the vast majority of computers in the world will have dynamic IPs. User-level firewalling (hardware, software, or even just basic hiding behind a NAT) would be a far greater challenge than simply not using port 80. Luckily for the botnets, UPnP came 'round to save them from that hassle! Otherwise they might have had to figure out the default passwords for ALL THREE major router brands and automatically add themselves a port forward!
Don't even have to RTFA, or even the summary.. Just the tagline says specifically that its a patent claim. Whether or not the claim would actually stand up in court is up to a judge should it get that far (never mind international concerns), but everything I've seen so far tells me that Shazam has all the right in the world to at least make the claim.
As far as I know, neither "easy after someone else has thought of it" nor "it didn't take me very long" are terribly good defenses in a patent case. The one you're looking for is "figured it out before someone else has thought of it", which this guy obviously didn't do given that he specifically set out to duplicate the abilities of an existing product. At this point his only defense is to show that his algorithm is sufficiently improved over (or at least different from) Shazam's that it would warrant being called 'innovative' (at least in the US.. I don't know about the EU's rules). Also, being his own code isn't a defense in a patent case (whereas it would be a defense in a copyright case if it could be proven).
Most people only consider one class of "customer" when they make these comments -- those customers that the small company originally had. The small company is by definition, small. The loss of a single customer (especially a larger customer with a lot of licenses) can be a disaster. So they spend a lot of time and money catering to their customers in the form of directed enhancements, timely bug fixes, support staff that know the product (and frequently the OS, other common products, etc that might cause problems with the product). These customers are most certainly going to lose out in terms of support when the small company is no longer small (whether by purchase or just by growing past a threshold). Large companies have a completely different focus on support -- handling the support load efficiently becomes more of a problem than ensuring that every single support issue gets handled appropriately. It turns into a form of the good old 80/20 rule (though I would guess that the numbers aren't 80 and 20).
There is however a second class of customer. This is all of the large company's customers that may not have ever heard of the small company. Assuming that the small company provides a useful service, the large company's customer base will be better off for having it available (and this will typically be the vast majority of the total number of customers, again by the definition of "small" and "large").
Of course, that argument only applies if the small company is actually small in terms of users. The internet has enabled a situation where a financially small company can still be huge in terms of user base, but in these situations there's a good chance that support will actually -improve- under the larger company, simply by the fact that the larger company will (typically) have a larger support staff relative to the total number of users.
And as always, these are "typical" scenarios. I'm aware that there's probably loads of counter-examples.
The company gives you a paycheck because without you (and their other employees of course), they wouldn't be in business very long.
They certainly don't pay you because they WANT to. They'd be much happier keeping their money if they could convince you to work for free. Salaries are a huge portion of most companies' costs.
Same with customers. Apple doesn't make iPods because they benefit you. They make iPods because you're willing to buy them (maybe not you specifically, but the more general "you're") and Apple gets money for it. If no one was willing to pay for an iPod, Apple certainly wouldn't continue making them. And flipping the coin, Apple would be quite as happy to sell you a rotten banana peel as they are to sell you an iPod. Apple only "cares" about what you in the sense that you won't give them money for things that you don't want. Caring about the customer is NOT an intrinsic property of a business, its a requirement for that business to be able to make money in a capitalist society where consumers have the option of not buying.
Even monopoly companies have to "care" about their customers in the sense of providing something of utility. A monopoly on rotten banana peels isn't going to generate a lot of income. Even without the option of purchasing from a competitor, the option of not buying at all is still available to consumers.
At least for most products. These arguments break down in the face of "necessary" products such as electricity, running water, food, etc. Now food isn't so bad because you generally have the option of multiple suppliers, and competition keeps things fair. No such competition exists for things like electricity and water (at least in most cities). For those products, you can neither decide to purchase from a competitor nor decide not to purchase at all. As an off-topic rant, this is the reason why I consider "privatizing" these sort of products to be a terribly bad idea -- all of the monopoly power of a public utility with none of the public oversight. Pretty much bad for everyone except the new CEO and whoever he paid off to make it happen.
I think you're taking 'controversial' in the wrong context. I doubt that they mean "issues that generate debate" so much as "opinions and facts that we disagree with" (yes, I'm sure it includes facts -- these sort of bans always do). Typically 'controversial opinions' in the second context are generated from the first, and the idea is to just ban one side of the argument so that the readers (TSA employees in this case) will have affirmation of the accepted side and no affirmation of the opposing view. The idea is to steer them towards your way of thinking by simply removing all other thought (of course nothing is preventing any particular employee from thinking up their own opposing viewpoint, but if they try to present it to anyone else it would quickly be pushed under the category of 'controversial opinion' and be banned as well).
The latter sounds like gender-neutralized political-correctness speech for "thou shalt wear a bra and not poke out the eyes of gawkers on cold days".
Well, or preventing girls from running around in short skirts and no panties, which might be great for "slutty secretary" porn and pervy internet videos, but isn't so acceptable in a real life professional environment.
I'm pretty sure letting the citizens keep their money is somewhere around the opposite of promoting the general welfare -- its promoting the welfare only of those who have money to keep. Now in a society where everyone has relatively equal amounts of money, this could be construed as the "general welfare", but I've yet to see any indication that such a society is even possible, never mind existing.
I'm also a little hazy on what you'd consider an "essential service" if health care is among the explicit list of what you consider non-essential. I can't think of anything less beneficial to the general welfare than letting people suffer or die when they could be saved because they don't happen to fall into the upper percentage of folk who can afford a hospital bed.
Things like roads, power and telephone lines, etc.. there's been a huge push over the past two decades to "privatize" these things for the "good" of the people. Basically what this amounts to is trading off government oversight (generally considered bad but necessary) with a monopoly power and _NO_ oversight (ALWAYS considered bad). Its one thing to spout rhetoric about the potential for competition, its quite another for any competitor to come up with several billion dollars to string their own lines (never mind the legal battles over right-of-ways and whatever else that will take time and money.. which the incumbent company will fight tooth and nail to stop on top of all the other hurdles).
Any utility or service that is effectively impossible to duplicate (economically or politically) should always remain in the hands of the government -- at least the people will have theoretical oversight. Of course, the /maintenance/ of such utilities can be contracted out, but the utilities themselves should remain public (and for things like telephone lines, the service itself can even be privatized providing the lines -- the part that can't be practically duplicated in any practical sense -- are maintained publicly.)
It is of course definitely worth arguing which level of government should maintain these things (in the sense of intrastate versus interstate splits.. but it could be broken down further to intra-city vs inter-city, intra-community vs inter-community.. and so on down until you end up with the home owner being responsible for the final leg between his house and the edge of his property if you really want to go that far.. think of a driveway that connects to the street). But its ridiculous to argue that an uncontrolled monopoly power over a shared utility is ever better than government oversight -- its only better for the CEOs and shareholders of the monopolistic company. Maintaining balance over shared resources is the reason governments exist!
For those who didn't RTFA, they were talking in more global terms. They're talking about oil spills that ARE near someone's house, but in a country where those people have basically no recourse (Niger). The government is weak and/or corrupt and the oil companies just run as companies do -- maximize profit and only worry about the expense to others if the cost of a legal battle is high enough. In a country where there's effectively no chance of a legal battle in the first place, the rights of people living around the sites are basically ignored. Do you think BP would bother even pretending to cap that well in the gulf if the US government wasn't forcing them to? The people in Niger are hearing the news of the US' coercion of cleanup efforts and are sitting there amazed that there are places in the world where the government has the power and desire to force BP to deal with the problems they've caused.
Shell is the main company the article focuses on (though BP was also referenced). Rather than doing anything about these spills, Shell just comes up with one excuse after another as to why there are so many. I'm sure they plug them as fast as is economically possible (they don't lose too much product of course) but "economically possible" doesn't necessarily mean "immediate". The oil that's already spilled sounds like it just gets left there a good deal of the time, rather than performing cleanup efforts like you'd see in the US and other more developed countries.
As for their excuses. They mostly amount to terrorism and vandalism. Now that's probably accurate for at least a majority of the cases, but it still doesn't excuse the preventable spills where outside interference is NOT the issue (rusty pipes, etc).
And really, terrorists need to smarten up. If you want to get the attention of these companies, you'd be far better off figuring out how to use one of the valves and block the flow (or better yet, redirect it -- much as a company hates losing money, they REALLY REALLY hate it if someone else is getting that money instead). Simply blowing a hole in the pipe and destroying their own homeland doesn't seem to be working too well if Shell & co are happy to just let the spills go.
Scenario one: "Somebody" writes in. Some intern scans the first line, tally's off another "crazy money hating whackjob" mark and moves on to the next email/letter. Rinse and repeat until the tally becomes large enough to actually warrant notice.
Scenario two: Bigshot lobbyist with a few million in corporate backing brings some carefully crafted powerpoint slides into the politician's private office, and after the presentation, takes the politician and his family out for a $200 a plate dinner at the ritziest place in town.
Even ignoring the just-barely-this-side-of-a-bribe dinner, who do you think is going to be seen as having the strongest argument? Form letters and petitions are a bit better as they can be written with as much care as those powerpoint slides and then just signed off by concerned parties, but they get written off as a bunch of people who don't care enough to write their own letter, and they still need a good number of signatures before they even get noticed never mind taken seriously.
I'm assuming I'm misreading something here? The article is a little light on details but it sounds like all they're doing is constructing automated unit tests by brute-force running each possible input through an existing correct routine which can then be applied to later modifications of said routine. Which strikes me as remarkably bad in several ways:
- You need to know that the routine is correct in order for the "diagnostic subprogram" to create a correct set of tests. But if you already know its correct, why would you ever need to change it? If your answer is "requirements might change", then you've basically declared that the routine is no longer correct and that immediately implies your diagnostic tests are no longer correct, so any flags they might throw up can't be trusted and are therefore useless.
- Even for a computer, its impossible to test every input. For a single standard 32-bit integer you have 4 billion possibilities. A modern fast computer could probably perform a simple operation 4 billion times in a few hours. Chances are anything complex enough to fit under the article's purposes wouldn't also be considered a "simple operation". Never mind multiple inputs (two 32-bit integers as your input would make the test infeasible even on the fastest modern computer. And a string with no length restrictions can't possibly be fully tested via brute force on any finite system ever, since the number of possible inputs would be infinite). So you start having to come up with input classes (integers greater than 100 shouldn't be valid for a "percentage" for example). But to do that you need to know what that integer means. But short of following some VERY strict variable naming conventions, there's no way to do that. I could call it percent, or iPercent, or iPct, or p, or iDontLikeNamingMyVariables. Or heck I decide that I want tenths of a percent but decide floats aren't worthwhile so now my "percentage" can range from 0..1000 and the routine itself will implicitly divide by 10 (possibly by just plugging a decimal into the correct spot while drawing the number on a display -- no "real" division done). No automated routine can ever fill this in. Even a human would have trouble figuring out what I mean if I name my routine something like "PrintP10(int p)". A human would have to analyze the routine itself to see what its doing with the integer, and then possibly go back and analyze its context to see what the integer means if the routine itself wasn't obvious enough.
- Even should this somehow prove tractable, many "bugs" are in the design, not the code. Any sort of automated test routine like this can only find code bugs (which pretty much amount to crash bugs and formatting issues.. a really smart routine might be able to parse out printfs/DB access/etc calls and try to do some heuristic checking to see if %s's are being handled right, or SQL queries are being properly escaped to avoid injections, etc.. But heuristics aren't 100%.) On the other hand if I design a system to send a plain text password over an unsecured link, or write it to a directory that happens to be world-visible via the FTP site, again its not something that can be automatically detected (especially the latter -- your program might have been developed on a system that didn't even have internet access never mind a poorly-configured FTP.)
- UI elements tend to be horribly difficult to test automatically. All you can do is inject some mouse clicks and keyboard events and hope that the OS treats them the same as real mouse/keyboard events. Consider injecting events to click a button. They would probably consist of A) move the mouse over the button and B) fire a click event. Chances are the step A) will be invalid -- it will almost certainly consist of a direct positioning (ie: a cursor jump) whereas a real user would have to move the mouse across the screen. And moving the mouse across the screen may well hit some other control that has an OnEnter or OnLeave event trigger that in some way interferes
Mostly right, but forgetting a very key concept -- NoSQL and full RDBMS serve different purposes. If you need high data integrity, then full ACID commitments and whatnot are great -- but you'll pay for it in speed.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you need maximum speed and have the ability to pre-cleanse your data, then then NoSQL is a much better fit to your needs.
Not to mention, "NoSQL" is just a general term covering basically anything that doesn't use an SQL-like command syntax. Hit up the Wikipedia sometime. NoSQL covers a huge variety of technologies spreading from single-server small-end databases designed for quick, easy programming, all the way up to Google and Amazon's back-ends that are designed for huge amounts of read requests and (comparatively) small amounts of writes.
Consider. If your accounting software fails to provides inconsistent numbers to your accountants, you're going to have some trouble. He probably doesn't care if the DB can only handle 1000 queries per second.. If Google takes an extra 30 seconds to update the results for an "OMGPonies!" search, no-one really gives a damn.. as long as it gets there eventually its fine. But they REALLY need it to handle millions of queries per second. Amazon is somewhere in the middle -- their listings don't really need to-the-millisecond updates, but things like the shopping cart does.
Completely different needs take completely different solutions. Someone who says "NoSQL is always a bad solution" is just as wrong as someone who says "NoSQL is always the solution". Just like most situations where you have two or more viable options.
I think you'll find there's a heck of a lot more of an outcry when NFL 2032 doesn't work then when some obscure feature that most people have barely heard about never mind used stops working.
I did actually RTFA (at least up to the point of answering this question, as it was also my main concern) and it turns out this IS tied to your EA sports account (which in turn is tied to your gamertag/psn account).
Of course the obvious workaround if you're the type that re-sells games is just to generate a new gamertag/psn account for each game and write it on the disc before you pass it on. Then whoever picks up the disc will have full access to anything you had.
Downsides are of course a) not a great deal of people will be thinking about "someone who buys my copy used X months or years in the future" at the point when they first get their game.. and b) some people actually care about their trophies/achievements/whatever other useless eviagra.
This is going to put EB games out of business though. They already sell their used games for around $5 less than the original (and then try to sell you a $4 "extended warranty").. add another $10 EA tax to that and EB is going to quickly go out of business (or at least, stop taking EA games). Though I'm not sure of course if this applies to all EBs (never mind other resellers like GameStop) or if its just my local one.. but that's pretty harsh! It should be EB gearing up to sue the hell out of EA over this given "having a better business model" and "stealing my customers" is no longer a sign of a healthy competition -- its a sign of civil (possibly even criminal) injustice and must be stopped!
You can't buy windows from anyone but Microsoft.
Sure I can. I can buy Windows from HP or Acer or any number of other OEMs. They in turn might have to buy it from Microsoft, but that's pretty irrelevant -- if you want one vendor's product you obviously have to get it from that vendor at some point along the chain. Even Linux requires someone at some point along the chain to download the source from the main dev repository. The only real difference is that the OEM Windows has to come with hardware, while Linux can be downloaded on its own.
What isn't irrelevant is that each of those OEMs are allowed to put Windows on virtually any hardware they can get it to run on reasonably well. When was the last time you saw a (legitimate) Apple OS running on anything but Apple hardware? Sure they sell boxed OSX and you might be able to shoehorn it onto something non-Apple, but they don't sell it that way. This is very very old Apple precedence, and at least one factor in why the original Mac failed so miserably against the far-inferior PCs that were available at the time.
And then the iPhone takes it one step further and in addition to disallowing non-authorized hardware, they're also disallowing non-authorized software as well. There's precedent for this as well though, mostly on gaming consoles.
And now Apple's gone yet another step and is even disallowing non-authorized development tools. As far as I know, there's no precedent for this. I'm sure there's the odd smallish company out there who strong-arms their couple dozen customers, but I've never heard of this on such a high-profile device before (then again I'm not ancient.. my knowledge of these things starts mid 90s so maybe there was stuff before that.. and of course maybe stuff I just missed.. but still). Sure if you want to develop for the PS3 you likely need to get a dev kit, but there's nothing stopping you from porting a LUA or Python interpreter for use with your dev kit and in your games. On the iPod you can't do that now. This is a huge step beyond hardware lockin or even software authorization submissions.
Heck, I'd bet that most if not all RPG-style games (and likely others) use some sort of scripting language internally, whether a roll-their-own or something commonplace like LUA. Are these games now breaking ToS? Does this mean that any future RPG developers will need to hardcode every single timed event and whatnot in their games? Not to mention developers who for whatever reason aren't a fan of C-style languages (though I don't know what support there would have been for those guys before this change either so maybe that's a moot point).
It might be enough though to introduce doubt -- seeing that IP address x.y.z.w is downloading "#SG*$#@" (my poor fake encryptions) doesn't tell you if the file is actually "Avatar (2009).avi" or "Fedora 12.iso". The former would be infringement (unless you managed to actually get rights.. har) whereas the latter is perfectly legal.
With infringement being criminalized means that there should be a much higher standard of proof needed for conviction (at least in theory).
On the other hand, I don't know how much proof (any these days?) is needed to subpoena ISPs and get a search-and-seize warrant.. and of course once they have your computer its pretty much red-handed if you've left any infringing files around that they can find.
And if it turns out you were only downloading 800 copies of various Linux distros well.. they'll have egg on their face, slashdot and maybe a small local newspaper or two might pick up the story but it will otherwise be hushed up. Can severely damage the individuals life and finances, but the organizations doing these copyright witch hunts don't really care as long as they can keep it under the radar of the wider public.