A link or offer to give out a link via private media on the forums will get you banned permanently. The same goes for any kind of leak-related spoiler information. Further, you risk having your XBox Live account's ability to play Halo 2 crippled as we can and will ban gamertags from access to vital parts of Halo 2's online experience. We are NOT kidding around here. There will be no warning, no appeal, you'll just be gone.
Well, first of all isn't it kinda late (and lame) to pretend that the leak does not exist? If you don't talk about it maybe it didn't happen, right?
Second, I am kinda pissed off at their attitude. Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can talk about and what I cannot talk about? You will ban access to online play? Err, I bought this game in a store, paid money for it, it says "multiplayer" on the box. Not to mention that I have doubts about their technical ability to associate Xbox Live accounts with forum postings.
By the way, note to people with reading comprehension problems: I am not defending those who leaked the game, I am ranting at Bungie's arrogance.
i forgot to mention that we're preparing (high-horse alert!) students for life through a process of "education"... math, literacy, science, etc. Neopets has a different mission: profit. The students' interest is sadly neglected by the makers of neopets.
High horses aside, I am not sure what is the point that you are making. Are you trying to say that all non-educational games are bad? Are you saying that companies with a profit motive should not exist? Or should not be allowed to make good games, only bad ones?
Obviously, Neopets (the company) is not a school. So? A great many things in life are not schools either.
Neopets is insidious because it provides "challenges" that appear to require students' problem-solving abilities. Its more like video-game crack since it combines elements that fascinate both girls and boys, youngters and adults: community-building chats, personal vendettas (you can slam an opponent by name) as well as the usual eye-candy.
Seems to me that you are complaining that Neopets is a well-designed, attactive game with cross-gender and cross-age appeal. That is bad?
Monopoly teaches good money management otherwise you go bankrupt. Neopets is just teaching kids to "PLAY OUR GAMES NOW OR YOUR PET WILL DIE" to help along the addiction.
LOL. If anything, poker teaches much better money management than Monopoly.
Not to mention that the point of games is to entertain, not teach complicated real-life skills...
It isn't about "security" or even "fair use" it's about the ability to cut and paste, save and print someone else's content without their permissions.
Yet another brainwashed zombie...
Go read the copyright law. I DON'T FUCKING NEED "their permissions" to do a great deal of things with copyrighted works. I can LEGALLY cut, paste, save, and print copyrighted content without asking anyone. I can not *redistribute* it, but no one is talking about redistribution here.
If Google sends an image file to my computer, I have full legal rights to cut, paste, save, and print it. Google may try to prevent me, but nothing obligates me to follow their wishes.
Whilst I'm all for breaking DRM that hinders the rights you have to use your content in the way you want - this just looks like breaking DRM to get stuff for free.
Which DRM? I have no DRM installed on my machine. I have agreed to no contracts or EULAs with regard to DRM.
Google sends me some copyrighted information. The copyright law limits what I can do with it (e.g. I cannot republish), but for my own private use I can do pretty much anything I want with it.
That image already exists as a file (or part of a file) on my machine. What Google is doing is trying to prevent me from looking at it in non-approved ways. Well, it can try, but I have no legal or ethical obligations to follow its wishes. If I want to take that image, load it into Photoshop and play with it there, I am completely within my rights.
So, no, I don't see any problems (either legal or ethical) with breaking this pseudo-DRM -- and I am willing to bet it will be breakable very easily -- and using these images however I want within the limits set by the copyright law.
While I agree it would be nice to fix this from a convenience point of view, and a "it's my computer - it'll do what I want" point of view, how is this a security risk? How do I get a trojan, or lose files, because of an inability to copy & paste on a particular page?
I guess denial-of-service attacks do not fall under your classification of security risks... Well, at least you have a unique viewpoint:-)
In any case, we have a demonstrated capability of a web server to alter major behavior characteristics of a program running on my local machine. How exactly do you know the limits of this capability? Can you guarantee that the mechanism used to prevent saving images to disk cannot be used to do something more malicious?
System administrators worldwide have the legal right to read their customers mail but until no profit motive, so they don't do it. All that would change
Boggle. So you think making sysadmins read their users' email is a GOOD thing?
You think 802.11 wardrivers can't be caught? What if information leading to their arrest was worth $50,000 - how many Slashdot readers would be patrolling their neighborhood for wardrivers?
My company rolled out a PGP solution for Outlook. Good, right? Wrong! The policy is to write down your passphrase on a paper, give it to IT, who will then store your passphrase for safekeeping in case you lose it.
!!!
Any special reason you are upset? That'a a perfectly valid way of doing things. Storing bits of paper in a safe is traditional and fairly good method of keeping information secure. Completely immune to network attacks, by the way...;-)
Note that Bruce Schneider, who I think happens to know something about security, freely admits to carrying a list of his passwords written on a piece of paper in his wallet.
But perhaps there is a solution that could kill two bird with one stone: make Linux-systems deliberately incompatible with Windows by supplying them with a legacy-free OpenFirmware-implementation, such as OpenBIOS, which could be optimised specifically for Linux.
LOL. A remarkably retarded idea. Why in the world would I buy hardware which deliberately restricts me to a single operating system?
Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality.
Yes it does. Try doing some some research on how the physical size of the "pixels" (that is, individual light sensors on the CMOS) affects image quality. Ever wonder why large-sensor DSLRs produce images that are much better technically that images from a same-megapixel-count consumer point-and-shoots?
It has to do with the "mental math" that the photographer has to do when he uses lenses.
LOL. When photographers use lenses they look through a viewfinder, not do any sort of mental math.
What bugs me is that 35mm is considered 1, and all other sizes have to be converted. Maybe we need a better standard that could accomidate different sensor / film sizes while using standard nomenclature for lenses.
The reason is that lots of photographers have lots of very expensive optical glass that was made for 35mm film. If you want standard nomenclature for lenses, just use 35mm-equivalent.
For example, Canon's D30/D60/10D/20D all have a 1.6 multiplier. A popular lens for these Canons is 28-135mm zoom. Given the multiplier it becomes a 45-216mm 35mm-equivalent zoom.
Most of our phones just died for no apparent reason (I assume it was due to the rain -- and it rains a lot in GB, believe me).
You know, there is this interesting invention called a "plastic bag". It even comes in a weird variety called a "ziplock". I've heard they can be useful for keeping the electronics dry even when it's raining.:-)
How far would a terrorist, or even a normal murderer or rapist, get in a well-armed society? Especially the kind of society where the people can text-message each other quickly and easily?
LOL. Israel is a very well-armed society. In fact you see people with automatic weapons on the streets all the time and that's normal. Israel is also the country with one of the highest cellphones/capita rate.
Umm... so they shouldn't have any problems with terrorism, right?
The bomb-code was only up for a few hours, and reputedly nobody got nailed, so why is this article in existance, anyway?
Reason 1: To serve as a lesson to other people who might have had similar cute ideas.
Reason 2: To warn people never to use software by that particular developer -- I don't think my data and his ethics mix well.
I mean, with MS you click "I Agree" to a box that says they can modify or delete anything on your PC anyway.
Care to provide a quote? In any case I doubt it would stand up in court. If a piece of software intentionally and maliciously deletes someone's data the author of that software is wide open to civil suits and criminal prosecution.
It's interesting to note how many successful entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants, or first generation children of immigrants.
Well, that's natural. Think about it -- immigrants are the people who were smart enough, active enough, entrepreneurial enough to leave their country and move to the US. Is it really surprising that they tend to do well?
To put things in simplified terms... He doesn't believe in a globalized economy
Umm... no. That would be a stupid thing and Samuelson isn't stupid.
What he actually says is that under certain conditions outsourcing can lead to a net economic loss for the USA. This net economic loss could come about through the US losing its innovation edge as information and know-how spreads around the globe.
Note that this is a very close relative of one of standard arguments against open source: free software, often developed overseas, harm American companies because they don't have any technological edge any more.
IMHO globalization is inevitable. If the US attempts to climb into a dark closet and close the door on the rest of the world, the rest of the world will soon be a richer, freer, and more technologically advanced than the US.
If energy usage requirements for air flight exceed what can be sustainably produced, it's not sustainable
That makes no sense -- you imply a situation where the whole Earth can not sustainably produce enough energy for a single air flight.
What you probably meant to say is that air travel could become very expensive. Possible, of course, though this necessarily means that ALL fast transportation will become expensive. A situation with THAT high energy costs should result in at least a modern version of Dark Ages.
But where, praytell, do you see the laws of economics or physics precluding the collapse of civilization?
Oh, (local) civilizations do collapse, and the whole human (global) civilizaton could collapse easily enough. My only point was just that in such a situation lack of air travel is not likely to be the first concern:-)
The actual Forrester/Meadows model used a more generalized category of "resources", without being so specific as to deal with specific examples-- an approach with the weakness of inspecificity, but the strenght of inevitability.
I have strond doubts about the "inevitability" part. Technological progress results in discontinuities which models have large problems with. Attempts to forecast the future (outside the realm of pure physics) 50+ years ahead generally fail miserably.
resource efficiency can by infinitely improved by advancing technology, which both was done without support from historical data and violates the goddamn second law of thermodynamics.:-)
The resources that humans use do change. Oil became a "resource" relatively recently. At some point it'll stop being a "resource" and will be replaced by something else. For an example of a resource fairly late in this cycle see coal. So, yes, the humanity will abandon certain resources, either because they actually run out or because it found a better replacement (e.g. wood -> coal -> oil -> ? for energy source). Thus exhaustion of some specific resource does not need lead to catastrophic consequences.
It took about 65 days for the pilgrims to go from England to Massechusetts one way. If you still consider that reasonable, no problem.
No, I don't:-) I want to go to Europe (or Japan, or Nepal, or Chile, or...) for a week's vacation or a two-day business trip. Air is the only option.
Also note, the grandparent was noting that this is unsustainable
Yes, so he did (misspelling the word in the process), but I don't really see how one could consider powered air flight "unsustainable". At our current stage of history and technology almost all engines use oil products as energy source but that doesn't have to stay this way.
In a world where there is not enough energy (of any kind) for powered flight the human civilization would collapse anyway.
Find a copy of The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World, ISBN 0960029443 (1974)
Umm... 1974? That was when the enviromentalists were screaming that the dust in the atmoshere would cause a new ice age and we'll all freeze, right? Also weren't we supposed to run out of oil in 15-20 years, out of nickel in 10-15, out of a whole bunch of other metals in about the same time frame..?
Slashdot Mirror
From the official Bungie forums posting:
A link or offer to give out a link via private media on the forums will get you banned permanently. The same goes for any kind of leak-related spoiler information. Further, you risk having your XBox Live account's ability to play Halo 2 crippled as we can and will ban gamertags from access to vital parts of Halo 2's online experience. We are NOT kidding around here. There will be no warning, no appeal, you'll just be gone.
Well, first of all isn't it kinda late (and lame) to pretend that the leak does not exist? If you don't talk about it maybe it didn't happen, right?
Second, I am kinda pissed off at their attitude. Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can talk about and what I cannot talk about? You will ban access to online play? Err, I bought this game in a store, paid money for it, it says "multiplayer" on the box. Not to mention that I have doubts about their technical ability to associate Xbox Live accounts with forum postings.
By the way, note to people with reading comprehension problems: I am not defending those who leaked the game, I am ranting at Bungie's arrogance.
i forgot to mention that we're preparing (high-horse alert!) students for life through a process of "education" ... math, literacy, science, etc. Neopets has a different mission: profit. The students' interest is sadly neglected by the makers of neopets.
High horses aside, I am not sure what is the point that you are making. Are you trying to say that all non-educational games are bad? Are you saying that companies with a profit motive should not exist? Or should not be allowed to make good games, only bad ones?
Obviously, Neopets (the company) is not a school. So? A great many things in life are not schools either.
Neopets is insidious because it provides "challenges" that appear to require students' problem-solving abilities. Its more like video-game crack since it combines elements that fascinate both girls and boys, youngters and adults: community-building chats, personal vendettas (you can slam an opponent by name) as well as the usual eye-candy.
Seems to me that you are complaining that Neopets is a well-designed, attactive game with cross-gender and cross-age appeal. That is bad?
Monopoly teaches good money management otherwise you go bankrupt. Neopets is just teaching kids to "PLAY OUR GAMES NOW OR YOUR PET WILL DIE" to help along the addiction.
LOL. If anything, poker teaches much better money management than Monopoly.
Not to mention that the point of games is to entertain, not teach complicated real-life skills...
With Google becoming a "proper business" now I'm actually quite amazed they're not charging for this. I would.
I guess that's why Google's founders are billionaires by now and you are posting on Slashdot...
Software distributors will control your gizmos, and you won't even be able to turn them off.
:-)
Given that gizmos tend to be small, I think a simple brick would be sufficient to turn them off
In case you don't like such drastic solutions I am yet to see an electronic gizmo that functions without any of its batteries...
It isn't about "security" or even "fair use" it's about the ability to cut and paste, save and print someone else's content without their permissions.
Yet another brainwashed zombie...
Go read the copyright law. I DON'T FUCKING NEED "their permissions" to do a great deal of things with copyrighted works. I can LEGALLY cut, paste, save, and print copyrighted content without asking anyone. I can not *redistribute* it, but no one is talking about redistribution here.
If Google sends an image file to my computer, I have full legal rights to cut, paste, save, and print it. Google may try to prevent me, but nothing obligates me to follow their wishes.
This is a *feature* of nearly all modern ECMAScript browsers: You can specify what happens when someone clicks on your page!
Umm... does redefining what the "Save page as..." menu option does also count as a feature? Or the "Print..." button?
Whilst I'm all for breaking DRM that hinders the rights you have to use your content in the way you want - this just looks like breaking DRM to get stuff for free.
Which DRM? I have no DRM installed on my machine. I have agreed to no contracts or EULAs with regard to DRM.
Google sends me some copyrighted information. The copyright law limits what I can do with it (e.g. I cannot republish), but for my own private use I can do pretty much anything I want with it.
That image already exists as a file (or part of a file) on my machine. What Google is doing is trying to prevent me from looking at it in non-approved ways. Well, it can try, but I have no legal or ethical obligations to follow its wishes. If I want to take that image, load it into Photoshop and play with it there, I am completely within my rights.
So, no, I don't see any problems (either legal or ethical) with breaking this pseudo-DRM -- and I am willing to bet it will be breakable very easily -- and using these images however I want within the limits set by the copyright law.
Guess I just broke it...
First, turn off javascript. then turn on image dimensions. right click on the dimensions for the main image, and click view background image.
That's it to defeat the uber Google DRM? ROTFL...
Couldn't they followed tradition and made it so that holding down the shift key while loading the page disables the DRM..?
While I agree it would be nice to fix this from a convenience point of view, and a "it's my computer - it'll do what I want" point of view, how is this a security risk? How do I get a trojan, or lose files, because of an inability to copy & paste on a particular page?
:-)
I guess denial-of-service attacks do not fall under your classification of security risks... Well, at least you have a unique viewpoint
In any case, we have a demonstrated capability of a web server to alter major behavior characteristics of a program running on my local machine. How exactly do you know the limits of this capability? Can you guarantee that the mechanism used to prevent saving images to disk cannot be used to do something more malicious?
System administrators worldwide have the legal right to read their customers mail but until no profit motive, so they don't do it. All that would change
Boggle. So you think making sysadmins read their users' email is a GOOD thing?
You think 802.11 wardrivers can't be caught? What if information leading to their arrest was worth $50,000 - how many Slashdot readers would be patrolling their neighborhood for wardrivers?
LOL. Wardriving is perfectly legal.
My company rolled out a PGP solution for Outlook. Good, right? Wrong! The policy is to write down your passphrase on a paper, give it to IT, who will then store your passphrase for safekeeping in case you lose it.
;-)
!!!
Any special reason you are upset? That'a a perfectly valid way of doing things. Storing bits of paper in a safe is traditional and fairly good method of keeping information secure. Completely immune to network attacks, by the way...
Note that Bruce Schneider, who I think happens to know something about security, freely admits to carrying a list of his passwords written on a piece of paper in his wallet.
When Corporate America stops sucking on the Microsoft Tit...
So are you saying Linux needs a boob job?
But perhaps there is a solution that could kill two bird with one stone: make Linux-systems deliberately incompatible with Windows by supplying them with a legacy-free OpenFirmware-implementation, such as OpenBIOS, which could be optimised specifically for Linux.
LOL. A remarkably retarded idea. Why in the world would I buy hardware which deliberately restricts me to a single operating system?
Having a 35mm CMOS has nothing to do with the image quality.
Yes it does. Try doing some some research on how the physical size of the "pixels" (that is, individual light sensors on the CMOS) affects image quality. Ever wonder why large-sensor DSLRs produce images that are much better technically that images from a same-megapixel-count consumer point-and-shoots?
It has to do with the "mental math" that the photographer has to do when he uses lenses.
LOL. When photographers use lenses they look through a viewfinder, not do any sort of mental math.
What bugs me is that 35mm is considered 1, and all other sizes have to be converted. Maybe we need a better standard that could accomidate different sensor / film sizes while using standard nomenclature for lenses.
The reason is that lots of photographers have lots of very expensive optical glass that was made for 35mm film. If you want standard nomenclature for lenses, just use 35mm-equivalent.
For example, Canon's D30/D60/10D/20D all have a 1.6 multiplier. A popular lens for these Canons is 28-135mm zoom. Given the multiplier it becomes a 45-216mm 35mm-equivalent zoom.
Most of our phones just died for no apparent reason (I assume it was due to the rain -- and it rains a lot in GB, believe me).
:-)
You know, there is this interesting invention called a "plastic bag". It even comes in a weird variety called a "ziplock". I've heard they can be useful for keeping the electronics dry even when it's raining.
How far would a terrorist, or even a normal murderer or rapist, get in a well-armed society? Especially the kind of society where the people can text-message each other quickly and easily?
LOL. Israel is a very well-armed society. In fact you see people with automatic weapons on the streets all the time and that's normal. Israel is also the country with one of the highest cellphones/capita rate.
Umm... so they shouldn't have any problems with terrorism, right?
(For the first time in my /. life I will be posting Anonymously, soon I'll be buying my tinfoil hat...)
[insert evil laughter here]
Your IP address has been logged and associated with that post.
I suggest learning about the differences between pseudonymity and real anonymity. More useful that tinfoil hats, IMHO...
The bomb-code was only up for a few hours, and reputedly nobody got nailed, so why is this article in existance, anyway?
Reason 1: To serve as a lesson to other people who might have had similar cute ideas.
Reason 2: To warn people never to use software by that particular developer -- I don't think my data and his ethics mix well.
I mean, with MS you click "I Agree" to a box that says they can modify or delete anything on your PC anyway.
Care to provide a quote? In any case I doubt it would stand up in court. If a piece of software intentionally and maliciously deletes someone's data the author of that software is wide open to civil suits and criminal prosecution.
It's interesting to note how many successful entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants, or first generation children of immigrants.
Well, that's natural. Think about it -- immigrants are the people who were smart enough, active enough, entrepreneurial enough to leave their country and move to the US. Is it really surprising that they tend to do well?
I'm comforted by the fact that one day, maybe soon, the whole house of cards that is the "global economy" will come crashing down.
Which event, if it ever happens, is likely to lead to poverty and starvation for billions of people. I am glad you'll be comforted by it.
Perhaps then no one will profit when a tree is cut down
Perhaps then you'd better start learning how to live without such things as books or toilet paper right now...
To put things in simplified terms... He doesn't believe in a globalized economy
Umm... no. That would be a stupid thing and Samuelson isn't stupid.
What he actually says is that under certain conditions outsourcing can lead to a net economic loss for the USA. This net economic loss could come about through the US losing its innovation edge as information and know-how spreads around the globe.
Note that this is a very close relative of one of standard arguments against open source: free software, often developed overseas, harm American companies because they don't have any technological edge any more.
IMHO globalization is inevitable. If the US attempts to climb into a dark closet and close the door on the rest of the world, the rest of the world will soon be a richer, freer, and more technologically advanced than the US.
If energy usage requirements for air flight exceed what can be sustainably produced, it's not sustainable
:-)
:-)
That makes no sense -- you imply a situation where the whole Earth can not sustainably produce enough energy for a single air flight.
What you probably meant to say is that air travel could become very expensive. Possible, of course, though this necessarily means that ALL fast transportation will become expensive. A situation with THAT high energy costs should result in at least a modern version of Dark Ages.
But where, praytell, do you see the laws of economics or physics precluding the collapse of civilization?
Oh, (local) civilizations do collapse, and the whole human (global) civilizaton could collapse easily enough. My only point was just that in such a situation lack of air travel is not likely to be the first concern
The actual Forrester/Meadows model used a more generalized category of "resources", without being so specific as to deal with specific examples-- an approach with the weakness of inspecificity, but the strenght of inevitability.
I have strond doubts about the "inevitability" part. Technological progress results in discontinuities which models have large problems with. Attempts to forecast the future (outside the realm of pure physics) 50+ years ahead generally fail miserably.
resource efficiency can by infinitely improved by advancing technology, which both was done without support from historical data and violates the goddamn second law of thermodynamics.
The resources that humans use do change. Oil became a "resource" relatively recently. At some point it'll stop being a "resource" and will be replaced by something else. For an example of a resource fairly late in this cycle see coal. So, yes, the humanity will abandon certain resources, either because they actually run out or because it found a better replacement (e.g. wood -> coal -> oil -> ? for energy source). Thus exhaustion of some specific resource does not need lead to catastrophic consequences.
[need to run, will talk about the model later]
It took about 65 days for the pilgrims to go from England to Massechusetts one way. If you still consider that reasonable, no problem.
:-) I want to go to Europe (or Japan, or Nepal, or Chile, or...) for a week's vacation or a two-day business trip. Air is the only option.
No, I don't
Also note, the grandparent was noting that this is unsustainable
Yes, so he did (misspelling the word in the process), but I don't really see how one could consider powered air flight "unsustainable". At our current stage of history and technology almost all engines use oil products as energy source but that doesn't have to stay this way.
In a world where there is not enough energy (of any kind) for powered flight the human civilization would collapse anyway.
Find a copy of The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World, ISBN 0960029443 (1974)
Umm... 1974? That was when the enviromentalists were screaming that the dust in the atmoshere would cause a new ice age and we'll all freeze, right? Also weren't we supposed to run out of oil in 15-20 years, out of nickel in 10-15, out of a whole bunch of other metals in about the same time frame..?
Sorry, not credible.