I don't think you understand what the part you quoted means, or perhaps you missed the "not the exact same thing" part. You feel that the exclusive titles available on the PS3 are worth degrading consumer rights, privacy, giving up root on your machine, accepting that terms of a sale can be change post sale by the corporation but not the buyer, and all the other things that Sony and others have done in the last decade. That's a perfectly fine way to feel, but that was the point he was trying to make, that people value the shinnies more than letting things go further down towards a master/slave business relationship.
While I don't personally feel that Apple is worse than Sony--not in any appreciable way anyhow--they certainly are no better. When I buy a device from a company that has root on that device (as far as I can tell those rights are not remote but I cannot be certain of this) but does not give me root, I find that dirty. Granted, I can acquire root right for myself and I will not be charged with a crime or civilly sued--as they tell me--but the terms I must agree to *after* I buy the device do stipulate that I am in violation of their agreement.
That said, I don't hate them, for that's a strong word, and the value I derive from the product outweighs the dirtiness I feel with supporting that sort of business practice. But I did do the analysis, and since I've "purchased" my device my feelings have drifted towards regret. My next device buying decision is going to have a higher bar of usefulness if I'm going to support "owning" a device under such agreements.
Everything you mentioned is a pretty small proportion of entertainment options one has to choose from. Clearly, you feel that the DRM, wholesale admin rights on your box, draconian restrictions on items you "buy" are a price worthwhile to pay for Spiderman movies. That was exactly the point TheGratefulNet was making, that the shinnies are too enticing to allow for any serious message being sent to Sony et. al. The future will only get worse.
I would certainly hope that physical access to one of their office desktops would not get you access to production live databases.
Also, there's a reason to set a password to begin with. Sometimes you want multiple layers of security. For example, sure you can only log into arbitrary profiles from inside their network, that makes sense, but do you really want everyone on that network to have that ability. Every single employee? What about visitors using their WiFi? What about contracted employees, say cleaners, that see an unlocked desktop session, should they have the ability to log into anyone's profile?
On the other hand, it's Facebook. The site exists so that you can share with the world anything you want about yourself. I don't think there was ever any expectation of privacy. I mean, you are giving up personal information to a corporation whose motive is profit, for whom there is no verification that they do with your data what their policy says they will do. Perhaps you can get some "justice" after the fact if it comes to light that they violated the privacy policy they publish, but you certainly get no rights to audit them. Anyhow, that's not my point, I'm rambling.
My point is: it was still a master password, and having a secure one is still wise. They were (are?) unwise.
Well, those three studies looked at 30k, 30k, 110k passwords. While that's enough to get some interesting patterns, it's not as solid as looking at 32M passwords. One could argue that's what makes this a "unique" look. No, studying users' passwords isn't new, but getting such a large glimpse certainly can be.
While I'm not paranoid, it's a little more involved than that. Forgive me for being too lazy to provide links, but Google will get all this information for you (natch!). Researchers have shown that anonymous data is not really all that anonymous. In a good amount of cases they can narrow down anonymous searches down to a single person by only seeing the searches they are performing. Know that there's a good chance that what you search for can be tied to you brings up my second point. Data that's collected for one purpose rarely gets used only for that one purpose. When you have that data lying around, it's really hard not to be tempted to use it. Most terms of use make it clear that you need not be notified of that use. In fact, private companies have no legal need to tell you anything of what they know about you. You can go to the FBI and ask them what they have on you, but you can't go to Google and ask them what sort of data they have on you, how long they store it, who they sell it to, if they even sell it at all, what they use it for, when they plan on purging it, what their policy is for giving that data out and to whom if asked, etc. The Feds buy Domino's customer data (who called, from what number, when, what address was it delivered to, etc, etc) so they can find people they are looking for, for example.
In summary. 1) It's not quite as anonymous as you would believe and 2) data is easily used for other purposes and you have no right to know for what purpose and by whom.
...if you want to piss your cash away, I'm not going to even try and stop you.
Unless you were speaking literally and not using the common metaphor, you come off as self-righteous in your very post. Judging by the tone, you were making a value judgement on someone else's life choices and extolling how better yours were; to me, that's glaring self-righteousness. I could be wrong though, perhaps you were speaking literally, but then your tone confused me.
By your logic, they should allow for apps that duplicate out-of-the-box iPhone functionality, as they'll make their 20% even if you buy another mail app or what have you.
According to the current marketing material, 11 million people play WoW worldwide. Less than 350.000 play Eve. I guess we know which one gets old fast.
I would like to point out a flaw in your argument. The argument you make supports popularity, but not which one gets old fast. To measure which one gets old faster you would have to have retention data for those players that found each game to be to their liking to begin with (i.e. not those that tried a game and quit because they decided it wasn't for them from the get-go). I have yet to see that sort of data, so I can't make an argument one way or another, but I do know current subscriber numbers don't lead to such a conclusion either.
I do have anecdotal evidence based on my friends. All my friends have played both games at least once. Many didn't like EVE, it just wasn't for them. Many also didn't like WoW, it just wasn't for them. But, those that did like EVE in the beginning still have accounts (five years later). None of my friends play WoW anymore (most quite before BC when the MC/BWL/AQ raiding game got stale), they've moved on to Aion or something else. Of course, that's not a strong argument either, but at least it's along the right track (retention) rather than subscriber numbers (popularity).
I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity. "I really hate putting this sharp bamboo splinter under my finger nails, but I'm going to keep doing it." If they found the new random dungeons to be totally soulless--or not their cup of tea for some other reason--they wouldn't be participating.
I'm at 1680x1050... yes, it's a lower resolution, but not as much lower as you might think.
I don't disagree with your point that looking at raw FPS rates to judge how you feel about a game is a bit silly since only the qualitative impression should matter, but you are a bit off on 1680x1050 not being much lower than 2560x1600. There are 232% more pixels in 2560x1600 than there are in 1680x1050 (4,096,000 vs. 1,764,000). That's a lot more pixels; the color of which must be determined.
I used to have a cable modem, now I have a 1.5mb/s DSL line. There are a few differences. I get 10ms pings to anything on the West coast and sub 100ms pings to the east coast. I also get a static IP address, no caps of any sort, someone on the phone in under a minute 24 hours a day, and the ability to put whatever kind of traffic I want in or out on any port. My friends with FiOS laugh at my "pitiful" speeds, but it's latency I care more about, and 1.5mb/s when you actually get that all day long is more than enough to stream Netflix video, download sizable files (sure it might take me 15 minutes to grab what it takes my friend 5, but really, it's not a big difference unless you are downloading terrabytes a month.
Anyhow, I never looked back, and would never leave my ISP.
I think your analogy of a kid with scissors and an exectutive who's running a multi-million dollar business getting salaries that rival small country's GDP is not a fair one. On second thought, maybe it is. None the less, I feel like the exec getting paid millions to run a business he should know how to run should not be rescued in these cases, he should know better.
First off, I agree that it's not that large of a social phenonmenon in context of all of humanity. I'm not sure if you implied that it gets a greater share of media coverage than it should with your "For all the pomp and circumstance about this stupid game among stupid people". You are saying that among the demographic of stupid people (however you want to classify that subjective measure) it gets too much "pomp and circumstance." In any case, you imply that among the stupid people demographic it gets too much mention...that's how I read it anyhow.
Then you go on to say that it's nothing in the context of bigger things. Things like sports. Again, keeping ourselves to the demographic of stupid people if we are to draw any valid comparisions, I must agree that WoW get's less coverage than major American sports in America. Although you mention other's on the planet, let's ignore then since most probably have no idea what MLB stands for. Now, back to your assertion that it gets too much pomp and circumstance, I think it gets a normal preportion. WoW does not have a channel on television devoted to it. Sports do. You assert that more Americans are interested in sports and WoW, and that's probably true (I'm going by instinct I have no numbers on number of people interested in sports...we can't count players since EPSN like things are for viewing and talking about not participating so interest is harder to judge than subscriber numbers, but hey we'll do our best) and yet there MUCH MORE pomp and circumstance when it comes to observing other's play sports.
Now, I'm sorry I tend to be a bit winded and stream-of-consciousness, but let's get to my real point. It concerns "It's nothing compared to most other aspects of modern entertainment, including most other wildly popular video games."
What widly popular video game has sold enough copies to make 12 million subscribers insignificant?
"Basically, the government fucked up and let these companies get too big to fail while turning a blind eye to their shenanigans."
It was the companies that performed the shenanigans; that's not the government's fault. Bailing them out to save the economy might be the right thing to do, as dubious as some of those claims are, but blaming the government for what companies had done to themselves just smacks of the same sort of attitude that the government is there to protect everyone from themsevles.
It all depends on how you compile it. Once you get it to run on your platform of choice, no file system is actually required to see usage information. The recommended system requirements would be to have a file systems supported by fsck to get maximum use out of fsck.
From my testing traveling down a hill in gear is better economy of fuel. My car takes more fuel to idle than it does to not stall when the engine is being turned by gravity.
The costs would be massive, and in the end, since the potential for hacking the machines exists, but since no citizens have actually ever had access to one, the likelyhood of someone knowing how, and having access to a machine at voting time to actually hack is is extremely slim.
1) Citizens have had access to *all* the machines at some point in their life: those who were part of their creation process. 2) If the report is correct, the likely-hood of someone knowing how to tamper with the machine is 1.
As Mr. Slippery said "If accurate elections aren't worth spending government money on, nothing is." I agree with that. We can then use this major cost as an argument that proprietary voting machines are too costly and perhaps enact some regulation that voting machines must be verifiable. I think we should do that for the sake of democracy, but not everyone will buy that argument. They might buy a "this cost us X millions of dollars to validate because it was proprietary" argument.
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I don't think you understand what the part you quoted means, or perhaps you missed the "not the exact same thing" part. You feel that the exclusive titles available on the PS3 are worth degrading consumer rights, privacy, giving up root on your machine, accepting that terms of a sale can be change post sale by the corporation but not the buyer, and all the other things that Sony and others have done in the last decade. That's a perfectly fine way to feel, but that was the point he was trying to make, that people value the shinnies more than letting things go further down towards a master/slave business relationship.
While I don't personally feel that Apple is worse than Sony--not in any appreciable way anyhow--they certainly are no better. When I buy a device from a company that has root on that device (as far as I can tell those rights are not remote but I cannot be certain of this) but does not give me root, I find that dirty. Granted, I can acquire root right for myself and I will not be charged with a crime or civilly sued--as they tell me--but the terms I must agree to *after* I buy the device do stipulate that I am in violation of their agreement.
That said, I don't hate them, for that's a strong word, and the value I derive from the product outweighs the dirtiness I feel with supporting that sort of business practice. But I did do the analysis, and since I've "purchased" my device my feelings have drifted towards regret. My next device buying decision is going to have a higher bar of usefulness if I'm going to support "owning" a device under such agreements.
Everything you mentioned is a pretty small proportion of entertainment options one has to choose from. Clearly, you feel that the DRM, wholesale admin rights on your box, draconian restrictions on items you "buy" are a price worthwhile to pay for Spiderman movies. That was exactly the point TheGratefulNet was making, that the shinnies are too enticing to allow for any serious message being sent to Sony et. al. The future will only get worse.
The markup for 1 kg sure is steep. 220% the price of a thousand individual grams.
In the case of Iraq, we did not enter as legal guests but made sure to empower a new government that did feel that way.
If she challenged it and they weren't sure they'd life it because that's easier than arguing and has basically no downside.
Okay, I get what the first "it" refers to, Microsoft's claim. How does one then life Microsoft's claim? What does life mean as a verb?
and can easily be extended in length.
Are there passwords that are difficult to extend in legth?
I would certainly hope that physical access to one of their office desktops would not get you access to production live databases.
Also, there's a reason to set a password to begin with. Sometimes you want multiple layers of security. For example, sure you can only log into arbitrary profiles from inside their network, that makes sense, but do you really want everyone on that network to have that ability. Every single employee? What about visitors using their WiFi? What about contracted employees, say cleaners, that see an unlocked desktop session, should they have the ability to log into anyone's profile?
On the other hand, it's Facebook. The site exists so that you can share with the world anything you want about yourself. I don't think there was ever any expectation of privacy. I mean, you are giving up personal information to a corporation whose motive is profit, for whom there is no verification that they do with your data what their policy says they will do. Perhaps you can get some "justice" after the fact if it comes to light that they violated the privacy policy they publish, but you certainly get no rights to audit them. Anyhow, that's not my point, I'm rambling.
My point is: it was still a master password, and having a secure one is still wise. They were (are?) unwise.
Not to people that want to sell useless things teenage girls don't really need to teenage girls.
Well, those three studies looked at 30k, 30k, 110k passwords. While that's enough to get some interesting patterns, it's not as solid as looking at 32M passwords. One could argue that's what makes this a "unique" look. No, studying users' passwords isn't new, but getting such a large glimpse certainly can be.
While I'm not paranoid, it's a little more involved than that. Forgive me for being too lazy to provide links, but Google will get all this information for you (natch!). Researchers have shown that anonymous data is not really all that anonymous. In a good amount of cases they can narrow down anonymous searches down to a single person by only seeing the searches they are performing. Know that there's a good chance that what you search for can be tied to you brings up my second point. Data that's collected for one purpose rarely gets used only for that one purpose. When you have that data lying around, it's really hard not to be tempted to use it. Most terms of use make it clear that you need not be notified of that use. In fact, private companies have no legal need to tell you anything of what they know about you. You can go to the FBI and ask them what they have on you, but you can't go to Google and ask them what sort of data they have on you, how long they store it, who they sell it to, if they even sell it at all, what they use it for, when they plan on purging it, what their policy is for giving that data out and to whom if asked, etc. The Feds buy Domino's customer data (who called, from what number, when, what address was it delivered to, etc, etc) so they can find people they are looking for, for example.
In summary. 1) It's not quite as anonymous as you would believe and 2) data is easily used for other purposes and you have no right to know for what purpose and by whom.
I don't drink, you insensitive clod!
Why does that make me prissy and self-righteous?
...
...if you want to piss your cash away, I'm not going to even try and stop you.
Unless you were speaking literally and not using the common metaphor, you come off as self-righteous in your very post. Judging by the tone, you were making a value judgement on someone else's life choices and extolling how better yours were; to me, that's glaring self-righteousness. I could be wrong though, perhaps you were speaking literally, but then your tone confused me.
By your logic, they should allow for apps that duplicate out-of-the-box iPhone functionality, as they'll make their 20% even if you buy another mail app or what have you.
Only conjured items and *gear* that has the blue 2 hour trade attribute can be traded, not grays or other items.
According to the current marketing material, 11 million people play WoW worldwide. Less than 350.000 play Eve. I guess we know which one gets old fast.
I would like to point out a flaw in your argument. The argument you make supports popularity, but not which one gets old fast. To measure which one gets old faster you would have to have retention data for those players that found each game to be to their liking to begin with (i.e. not those that tried a game and quit because they decided it wasn't for them from the get-go). I have yet to see that sort of data, so I can't make an argument one way or another, but I do know current subscriber numbers don't lead to such a conclusion either.
I do have anecdotal evidence based on my friends. All my friends have played both games at least once. Many didn't like EVE, it just wasn't for them. Many also didn't like WoW, it just wasn't for them. But, those that did like EVE in the beginning still have accounts (five years later). None of my friends play WoW anymore (most quite before BC when the MC/BWL/AQ raiding game got stale), they've moved on to Aion or something else. Of course, that's not a strong argument either, but at least it's along the right track (retention) rather than subscriber numbers (popularity).
I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity. "I really hate putting this sharp bamboo splinter under my finger nails, but I'm going to keep doing it." If they found the new random dungeons to be totally soulless--or not their cup of tea for some other reason--they wouldn't be participating.
I'm at 1680x1050... yes, it's a lower resolution, but not as much lower as you might think.
I don't disagree with your point that looking at raw FPS rates to judge how you feel about a game is a bit silly since only the qualitative impression should matter, but you are a bit off on 1680x1050 not being much lower than 2560x1600. There are 232% more pixels in 2560x1600 than there are in 1680x1050 (4,096,000 vs. 1,764,000). That's a lot more pixels; the color of which must be determined.
I used to have a cable modem, now I have a 1.5mb/s DSL line. There are a few differences. I get 10ms pings to anything on the West coast and sub 100ms pings to the east coast. I also get a static IP address, no caps of any sort, someone on the phone in under a minute 24 hours a day, and the ability to put whatever kind of traffic I want in or out on any port. My friends with FiOS laugh at my "pitiful" speeds, but it's latency I care more about, and 1.5mb/s when you actually get that all day long is more than enough to stream Netflix video, download sizable files (sure it might take me 15 minutes to grab what it takes my friend 5, but really, it's not a big difference unless you are downloading terrabytes a month.
Anyhow, I never looked back, and would never leave my ISP.
I think your analogy of a kid with scissors and an exectutive who's running a multi-million dollar business getting salaries that rival small country's GDP is not a fair one. On second thought, maybe it is. None the less, I feel like the exec getting paid millions to run a business he should know how to run should not be rescued in these cases, he should know better.
First off, I agree that it's not that large of a social phenonmenon in context of all of humanity. I'm not sure if you implied that it gets a greater share of media coverage than it should with your "For all the pomp and circumstance about this stupid game among stupid people". You are saying that among the demographic of stupid people (however you want to classify that subjective measure) it gets too much "pomp and circumstance." In any case, you imply that among the stupid people demographic it gets too much mention...that's how I read it anyhow.
Then you go on to say that it's nothing in the context of bigger things. Things like sports. Again, keeping ourselves to the demographic of stupid people if we are to draw any valid comparisions, I must agree that WoW get's less coverage than major American sports in America. Although you mention other's on the planet, let's ignore then since most probably have no idea what MLB stands for. Now, back to your assertion that it gets too much pomp and circumstance, I think it gets a normal preportion. WoW does not have a channel on television devoted to it. Sports do. You assert that more Americans are interested in sports and WoW, and that's probably true (I'm going by instinct I have no numbers on number of people interested in sports...we can't count players since EPSN like things are for viewing and talking about not participating so interest is harder to judge than subscriber numbers, but hey we'll do our best) and yet there MUCH MORE pomp and circumstance when it comes to observing other's play sports.
Now, I'm sorry I tend to be a bit winded and stream-of-consciousness, but let's get to my real point. It concerns "It's nothing compared to most other aspects of modern entertainment, including most other wildly popular video games."
What widly popular video game has sold enough copies to make 12 million subscribers insignificant?
"Basically, the government fucked up and let these companies get too big to fail while turning a blind eye to their shenanigans."
It was the companies that performed the shenanigans; that's not the government's fault. Bailing them out to save the economy might be the right thing to do, as dubious as some of those claims are, but blaming the government for what companies had done to themselves just smacks of the same sort of attitude that the government is there to protect everyone from themsevles.
It all depends on how you compile it. Once you get it to run on your platform of choice, no file system is actually required to see usage information. The recommended system requirements would be to have a file systems supported by fsck to get maximum use out of fsck.
Perhaps it'd be better to mull over how you didn't proofread your post.
From my testing traveling down a hill in gear is better economy of fuel. My car takes more fuel to idle than it does to not stall when the engine is being turned by gravity.
YMMV, no pun intended.
The costs would be massive, and in the end, since the potential for hacking the machines exists, but since no citizens have actually ever had access to one, the likelyhood of someone knowing how, and having access to a machine at voting time to actually hack is is extremely slim.
1) Citizens have had access to *all* the machines at some point in their life: those who were part of their creation process.
2) If the report is correct, the likely-hood of someone knowing how to tamper with the machine is 1.
As Mr. Slippery said "If accurate elections aren't worth spending government money on, nothing is." I agree with that. We can then use this major cost as an argument that proprietary voting machines are too costly and perhaps enact some regulation that voting machines must be verifiable. I think we should do that for the sake of democracy, but not everyone will buy that argument. They might buy a "this cost us X millions of dollars to validate because it was proprietary" argument.