There is already too many bad ideas for them to draw on, but don't think the law being totally out of touch with reality will have any effect on them being made, passed, and enforced:{
Google's already freely stipulated that they did something wrong. If they're willing to admit that they broke the law and collected this data, then why would the German government still need this data?
Oh, that's right, only because it's a treasure-trove of never-needed-a-warrant-in-the-first-place data.
An independent auditor is the nearest thing we'll get to fair inspection of this, but they'll just hand that crap over to the government, anyway. Let's face it:
1. This data is most probably completely useless junk. 2. On the off chance that there are little nuggets of valuable information in this data-set, the only way to safeguard the individuals who had their data recorded is to delete every copy of it.
The EU's prevailing belief, that businesses tend towards malfeasance and must be held in check by the government, is a valid one. The founding American belief, that governments tend towards malfeasance and must be held in check by the people, is also valid. Google's trepidation certainly seems more populist than corporatist in this case.
There's a massive difference between wired communication and wireless. If you honestly can't see that (which I truly doubt is the case), you could be in the parliament of an EU member state!
Seriously, security is the answer to security. Making it illegal to detect and record open-air RF is like making it illegal to see things.
1. If you run an unencrypted 802.11 network, expect your data to get pwned. 2. It was an accident of code reuse (seriously, guys, code-reuse accidents happen quite often). 3. If people were just casually using the internet, https saved their stupid little asses from letting their data out in the wild. 4. Why do we trust the German government (or any EU government, for that matter) with this data more than we trust Google? I know that the EU is better about not giving companies a blank check, but let's not forget about the kind of crap that governments pull. This is a surveillance freebie, provided that the illicit persons being surveilled are professional idiots (i.e. had an open network).
Google screwed up, but has the Google-hatred here risen to such a high degree that we're okay with just handing over even accidentally-collected data to the government? I'd at least insist on an independent auditor, to make sure that government abuses of the data didn't take place. With Google's resources, I'd go so far as to take it to the (largely impotent) EU court of human rights.
And we're okay with people needing to prove their innocence? Our rights have been so eroded by the copyright mafia that we'll take a swift kick to the nuts and ask for another.
Funny enough, if you read up on ACTA, this is clearly just the beginning.
I used to carry around all of the keys that I own (Chicago home, San Fran home, my car, wife's car, office, etc).
It's ridiculous. Now I split my keys using a little 3-part/3-ring thing that lets me make the uber-ring if I feel inclined. Keys are broken into groups by city, and keys for rarely-accessed things sit on a rack in the home of the city of use. It's a minor inconvenience to remember to grab an appropriate key once you make a point of splitting them up.
Trust me, you'll get used to it.
For the risk of locking myself out, I keep house-keys at work (prox-card) and spare car keys on a rack at home. I'd have to get mugged and fired ('cause I could always get a security guard to escort me to my office, 24/7) if I were completely without my stuff.
The keys that I need for the city I'm in are, as a result, almost always in my pocket. They're small enough to not be something that I feel that I need to unload, and, as a result, I very rarely can't find my keys. I've honestly considered putting an HID reader at home to make life easier, but partitioning of my keys has kept my tech-seeking brain from obsessing too much.
So, like Bill-Clippy? A Bull pop-up? These things happen. That the rest of the market could go all panicked before knowing the origins of the futures sale and flip out is purely the problem of the idiots who knee-jerk sold off.
This kind of lesson is long overdue. Everybody playing high-frequency trading like this deserves to get burned now and then.
Let's spell this out, as the obviousness of available techniques has clearly eluded you:
- Hold finger on corner edge (or other hot point that is most commonly out of the active area) and use other, second press, to hover. - Don't like the dead-space created by that? Letter-boxing could work, but, given the available interfaces, try swiping one finger from the edge onto an active overlay area and using another to hover. - Long-press. - Multi-touch (since flash is one-touchy), like two fingers to get a pointer in the average of the two points is available.
I mean, it's just not that hard. I've been labeled a troll in my previous post by Apple-lovin' blinder-monkeys, but, seriously, hover is not even close to a show-stopper with flash on a touch platform. I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over its absence, but a bit of intellectual honesty would be appreciated.
Just say "we don't like it." There's no need for fake reasons.
If you can't, given a multi-touch surface and five seconds, come up with at least one decent way to pull off hover, you're either an idiot or a liar. I get the sense (with Steve, at least), that these reasons are carefully-chosen loads of crap to sway the masses. The Apple UI guys have been all about multi-touch and moving actions. Did they run out of steam?
Highly unlikely. It's fine to say "they own the sandbox," but don't buy into hand-wavy sophistry.
Didn't you watch after-school specials? This is the drug-dealer approach.
1. Get everyone to use your patented tech "for free" as a standard. 2. Jack up licensing once your tech is a "must have" all over the industry. 3. ??? (where each question mark denotes five minutes of laughing until you cry while kissing your fistfuls of money). 4. Actually profit.
Step 2 is likely to happen in 2016 a la this story. It was to be January 1st, 2011, but, surprise, there isn't enough industry adoption to pull that rug out yet. MPEG-LA will keep us on the hook a bit longer before really hitting us.
There are, of course, those out there (like Google with VP6, open-source nutters with Theora) that are doing their best to stop the obvious and, if you have ever licensed MPEG2, repeated abuses of this tactic, but they'll feel like Cassandra while being called Chicken Little.
In the grand Apple balance sheet, yeah, it's a small motivation. Nonetheless, it's an incentive that, combined with a clear adversarial hatred for, well, everyone else, might lead to things like feature restriction. Apple may be getting a bit ahead of themselves on taking the "most hated jerks in the tech industry" crown away from Microsoft before they have 90% market share.
I think, after 2 years in jail, the specifics may not matter so much.
I don't particularly mind giving someone my passwords (provided they have the legal authority to have them) as long as the transfer of that username and password pair is *heavily* documented. At that point, anyone trying to associate information or action with my username has a field of possible suspects. When I quit my last job, my information just stopped working. I didn't have to hand any private data to anyone.
I'm pretty shocked that an IT guy on the jury wouldn't hold to that. As soon as you set up a system, you should have *two* (or more) admins. You fire one, you're still good.
If they didn't intentionally hit the ball at this guy's head, it would seem to be an accident. Considering how many times they'd hit foam balls in the city, it seems that hitting someone in the head would be an improbable outcome (by measurement), even taking criminal negligence off the table. Besides, they're nerf balls. It would take colossal efforts to make a nerf ball anything approximating dangerous.
Just for good measure, I've included the definition of "accident."
accident [ak-si-duhnt] -noun 1.an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap: automobile accidents. 2.Law. such a happening resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person for which compensation or indemnity is legally sought. 3.any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause. 4.chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident. 5.Your birth.
He's clearly looking to protect others. Otherwise, he'd drop it after winning. Instead, he's going after the larger problem.
This is a pretty common problem with the SPD (read the article), and abuse of "obstruction" charges is pretty common all over the US. I mean, listen to the sergeant of these GED-havin' goons talk about charging everyone with "Reckless Endangerment." With nerf balls? Come on. If you are a cop, chances are, you are not a lawyer.
Everyone knows what power-tripping uniformed cops are like (not all, but most), even friends of mine who are detectives and retired sheriffs are aware of the power-tripping Napoleon-complex-havin' jack-holes that gravitate towards being beat cops. You give people shit pay and the opportunity to carry a gun, you get shit cops carrying guns.
Man, this so exemplifies the distorted user perspective of the ease of software development. There is a completely workable workflow here: run update twice, but you want Microsoft to code up a little custom fix (possibly requiring a double-restart) that seems like a triviality, right?
Wrong.
It takes a long time to write, debug, test, and deploy even small software changes. When non-coders (or even coders) talk about how easy it would be for someone else to do something, alarm bells go off. Microsoft is doing a completely reasonable thing. I won't say that it's the "right thing," because that would imply that there is only one good course of action. Still, this approach is completely fair, easy to use, and safe.
Proficiency matters more than years of experience, eventually. I haven't met a single fresh-from-the-mill coder with the architectural chops to lead a project or design major systems (though I know they exist), but I've also worked with plenty of 30-or-40-something senior devs who couldn't find their ass with a flashlight and two hours with Design Patterns (and, no, I don't think that the whole world lives in Design Patterns).
There isn't just one type of good programmer, just as there isn't just one type of bad one. When I was 19 and starting my first job, sure, I wrote terrible code. When I was 22, I architected major systems that were fairly well thought out and are still in use today (I'm 30). My improvement came from having my ass kicked by some truly talented older coders.
Of course, a good dev will look at what they wrote 2-3 years ago and say "who wrote this crap?!" Someone who thinks that any more than a few tiny gems of their prior code would be up to snuff today is a crappy coder.
Exactly what I mean. I once complained to my attorney about the absurdity of the legal system, how having the best case, legally, is marginally relevant to achieving a reasonable outcome, and his response was:
"The best odds you can get are maybe 70/30 in anything that goes to court. The only thing you can be sure of in a civil case is that, if you go to court, you've already lost."
This one wouldn't be nearly as funny if the legal system here weren't such an enormous train-wreck. It seems that even the most ridiculous of outcomes is possible in the US.
So do you want to explain how 256KB of memory per SPU * six SPUs adds up to 4MB? (hint: it doesn't), or how that finds its way to the 3D hardware for rendering/display. The GS (GPU in the PS2) is a three-memory-bus partitioned texture/display frankenstein, and the PS2 is a system with a lot of quirks. Just ask a console dev who lived through the PS2 about all of the little gotchas of the system, and buy them a beer to help mask the flashbacks.
Even if it were relatively simple to add this support, any work done on it would be from the ground up, as it is not the way that Sony chose to implement backwards compatibility. Fresh QA, fresh dev, etc.
The suggestion that PS2 support is just a software switch is a stupid mistake on George's part, plain and simple, and if PCSX2 is the bar, well, take a look at the compatibility list. It's definitely not ready for prime time.
Anyone who blindly states that anything in software, especially full system emulation, is "very trivial" is either an idiot or a liar.
But this is closing the stable-door after the horses are already let out. Since he's owned the system already, he can work on his own version-spoofing. Pulling linux support just throws a bunch of honest linux junkies into the same pool as game pirates.
Smart honest hackers with the same goals as smart dishonest hackers...
Sony is not only hurting their users' interests. They're hurting their own.
These guys have worked up wave-based pumps for circulating ocean water (to reduce surface temperature, and, thus, storm risk), and UV laser mosquito-killers to reduce malaria risk.
They have very real target applications and very concrete inventions. Sure, they're a patent-filing think-tank of inventors, but they're hardly just rights-purchasing patent trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you there, sadly...
You mean governments, right?
I mean, seriously, the NSA had it easy already. This must have caused more than a few giggles at more than a few government agencies.
Google's already freely stipulated that they did something wrong. If they're willing to admit that they broke the law and collected this data, then why would the German government still need this data?
Oh, that's right, only because it's a treasure-trove of never-needed-a-warrant-in-the-first-place data.
An independent auditor is the nearest thing we'll get to fair inspection of this, but they'll just hand that crap over to the government, anyway. Let's face it:
1. This data is most probably completely useless junk.
2. On the off chance that there are little nuggets of valuable information in this data-set, the only way to safeguard the individuals who had their data recorded is to delete every copy of it.
The EU's prevailing belief, that businesses tend towards malfeasance and must be held in check by the government, is a valid one. The founding American belief, that governments tend towards malfeasance and must be held in check by the people, is also valid. Google's trepidation certainly seems more populist than corporatist in this case.
There's a massive difference between wired communication and wireless. If you honestly can't see that (which I truly doubt is the case), you could be in the parliament of an EU member state!
Seriously, security is the answer to security. Making it illegal to detect and record open-air RF is like making it illegal to see things.
1. If you run an unencrypted 802.11 network, expect your data to get pwned.
2. It was an accident of code reuse (seriously, guys, code-reuse accidents happen quite often).
3. If people were just casually using the internet, https saved their stupid little asses from letting their data out in the wild.
4. Why do we trust the German government (or any EU government, for that matter) with this data more than we trust Google? I know that the EU is better about not giving companies a blank check, but let's not forget about the kind of crap that governments pull. This is a surveillance freebie, provided that the illicit persons being surveilled are professional idiots (i.e. had an open network).
Google screwed up, but has the Google-hatred here risen to such a high degree that we're okay with just handing over even accidentally-collected data to the government? I'd at least insist on an independent auditor, to make sure that government abuses of the data didn't take place. With Google's resources, I'd go so far as to take it to the (largely impotent) EU court of human rights.
And we're okay with people needing to prove their innocence? Our rights have been so eroded by the copyright mafia that we'll take a swift kick to the nuts and ask for another.
Funny enough, if you read up on ACTA, this is clearly just the beginning.
I used to carry around all of the keys that I own (Chicago home, San Fran home, my car, wife's car, office, etc).
It's ridiculous. Now I split my keys using a little 3-part/3-ring thing that lets me make the uber-ring if I feel inclined. Keys are broken into groups by city, and keys for rarely-accessed things sit on a rack in the home of the city of use. It's a minor inconvenience to remember to grab an appropriate key once you make a point of splitting them up.
Trust me, you'll get used to it.
For the risk of locking myself out, I keep house-keys at work (prox-card) and spare car keys on a rack at home. I'd have to get mugged and fired ('cause I could always get a security guard to escort me to my office, 24/7) if I were completely without my stuff.
The keys that I need for the city I'm in are, as a result, almost always in my pocket. They're small enough to not be something that I feel that I need to unload, and, as a result, I very rarely can't find my keys. I've honestly considered putting an HID reader at home to make life easier, but partitioning of my keys has kept my tech-seeking brain from obsessing too much.
So, like Bill-Clippy? A Bull pop-up? These things happen. That the rest of the market could go all panicked before knowing the origins of the futures sale and flip out is purely the problem of the idiots who knee-jerk sold off.
This kind of lesson is long overdue. Everybody playing high-frequency trading like this deserves to get burned now and then.
Not state, come up with, astute reader.
Sheesh.
Let's spell this out, as the obviousness of available techniques has clearly eluded you:
- Hold finger on corner edge (or other hot point that is most commonly out of the active area) and use other, second press, to hover.
- Don't like the dead-space created by that? Letter-boxing could work, but, given the available interfaces, try swiping one finger from the edge onto an active overlay area and using another to hover.
- Long-press.
- Multi-touch (since flash is one-touchy), like two fingers to get a pointer in the average of the two points is available.
I mean, it's just not that hard. I've been labeled a troll in my previous post by Apple-lovin' blinder-monkeys, but, seriously, hover is not even close to a show-stopper with flash on a touch platform. I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over its absence, but a bit of intellectual honesty would be appreciated.
Just say "we don't like it." There's no need for fake reasons.
If you can't, given a multi-touch surface and five seconds, come up with at least one decent way to pull off hover, you're either an idiot or a liar. I get the sense (with Steve, at least), that these reasons are carefully-chosen loads of crap to sway the masses. The Apple UI guys have been all about multi-touch and moving actions. Did they run out of steam?
Highly unlikely. It's fine to say "they own the sandbox," but don't buy into hand-wavy sophistry.
Didn't you watch after-school specials? This is the drug-dealer approach.
1. Get everyone to use your patented tech "for free" as a standard.
2. Jack up licensing once your tech is a "must have" all over the industry.
3. ??? (where each question mark denotes five minutes of laughing until you cry while kissing your fistfuls of money).
4. Actually profit.
Step 2 is likely to happen in 2016 a la this story. It was to be January 1st, 2011, but, surprise, there isn't enough industry adoption to pull that rug out yet. MPEG-LA will keep us on the hook a bit longer before really hitting us.
There are, of course, those out there (like Google with VP6, open-source nutters with Theora) that are doing their best to stop the obvious and, if you have ever licensed MPEG2, repeated abuses of this tactic, but they'll feel like Cassandra while being called Chicken Little.
In the grand Apple balance sheet, yeah, it's a small motivation. Nonetheless, it's an incentive that, combined with a clear adversarial hatred for, well, everyone else, might lead to things like feature restriction. Apple may be getting a bit ahead of themselves on taking the "most hated jerks in the tech industry" crown away from Microsoft before they have 90% market share.
I think, after 2 years in jail, the specifics may not matter so much.
I don't particularly mind giving someone my passwords (provided they have the legal authority to have them) as long as the transfer of that username and password pair is *heavily* documented. At that point, anyone trying to associate information or action with my username has a field of possible suspects. When I quit my last job, my information just stopped working. I didn't have to hand any private data to anyone.
I'm pretty shocked that an IT guy on the jury wouldn't hold to that. As soon as you set up a system, you should have *two* (or more) admins. You fire one, you're still good.
If they didn't intentionally hit the ball at this guy's head, it would seem to be an accident. Considering how many times they'd hit foam balls in the city, it seems that hitting someone in the head would be an improbable outcome (by measurement), even taking criminal negligence off the table. Besides, they're nerf balls. It would take colossal efforts to make a nerf ball anything approximating dangerous.
Just for good measure, I've included the definition of "accident."
accident [ak-si-duhnt]
-noun
1.an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap: automobile accidents.
2.Law. such a happening resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person for which compensation or indemnity is legally sought.
3.any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause.
4.chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident.
5.Your birth.
He's clearly looking to protect others. Otherwise, he'd drop it after winning. Instead, he's going after the larger problem.
This is a pretty common problem with the SPD (read the article), and abuse of "obstruction" charges is pretty common all over the US. I mean, listen to the sergeant of these GED-havin' goons talk about charging everyone with "Reckless Endangerment." With nerf balls? Come on. If you are a cop, chances are, you are not a lawyer.
Everyone knows what power-tripping uniformed cops are like (not all, but most), even friends of mine who are detectives and retired sheriffs are aware of the power-tripping Napoleon-complex-havin' jack-holes that gravitate towards being beat cops. You give people shit pay and the opportunity to carry a gun, you get shit cops carrying guns.
Seriously, moron.
There is no legal requirement to identify yourself on demand in the state of Washington.
There are 24 states with stop-and-identify statutes. Washington is not one of them.
Man, this so exemplifies the distorted user perspective of the ease of software development. There is a completely workable workflow here: run update twice, but you want Microsoft to code up a little custom fix (possibly requiring a double-restart) that seems like a triviality, right?
Wrong.
It takes a long time to write, debug, test, and deploy even small software changes. When non-coders (or even coders) talk about how easy it would be for someone else to do something, alarm bells go off. Microsoft is doing a completely reasonable thing. I won't say that it's the "right thing," because that would imply that there is only one good course of action. Still, this approach is completely fair, easy to use, and safe.
That is the single greatest example of taking a quote out of context that I've seen in a long time.
Removing the ", eventually" removes the entire point of the statement.
That was the sarcasm train, clearly passing you by.
Proficiency matters more than years of experience, eventually. I haven't met a single fresh-from-the-mill coder with the architectural chops to lead a project or design major systems (though I know they exist), but I've also worked with plenty of 30-or-40-something senior devs who couldn't find their ass with a flashlight and two hours with Design Patterns (and, no, I don't think that the whole world lives in Design Patterns).
There isn't just one type of good programmer, just as there isn't just one type of bad one. When I was 19 and starting my first job, sure, I wrote terrible code. When I was 22, I architected major systems that were fairly well thought out and are still in use today (I'm 30). My improvement came from having my ass kicked by some truly talented older coders.
Of course, a good dev will look at what they wrote 2-3 years ago and say "who wrote this crap?!" Someone who thinks that any more than a few tiny gems of their prior code would be up to snuff today is a crappy coder.
Exactly what I mean. I once complained to my attorney about the absurdity of the legal system, how having the best case, legally, is marginally relevant to achieving a reasonable outcome, and his response was:
"The best odds you can get are maybe 70/30 in anything that goes to court. The only thing you can be sure of in a civil case is that, if you go to court, you've already lost."
This one wouldn't be nearly as funny if the legal system here weren't such an enormous train-wreck. It seems that even the most ridiculous of outcomes is possible in the US.
So do you want to explain how 256KB of memory per SPU * six SPUs adds up to 4MB? (hint: it doesn't), or how that finds its way to the 3D hardware for rendering/display. The GS (GPU in the PS2) is a three-memory-bus partitioned texture/display frankenstein, and the PS2 is a system with a lot of quirks. Just ask a console dev who lived through the PS2 about all of the little gotchas of the system, and buy them a beer to help mask the flashbacks.
Even if it were relatively simple to add this support, any work done on it would be from the ground up, as it is not the way that Sony chose to implement backwards compatibility. Fresh QA, fresh dev, etc.
The suggestion that PS2 support is just a software switch is a stupid mistake on George's part, plain and simple, and if PCSX2 is the bar, well, take a look at the compatibility list. It's definitely not ready for prime time.
Anyone who blindly states that anything in software, especially full system emulation, is "very trivial" is either an idiot or a liar.
I'd hardly call feature-removal a patch. If there were a vulnerability in playing games, would removing game support count as patching?
But this is closing the stable-door after the horses are already let out. Since he's owned the system already, he can work on his own version-spoofing. Pulling linux support just throws a bunch of honest linux junkies into the same pool as game pirates.
Smart honest hackers with the same goals as smart dishonest hackers...
Sony is not only hurting their users' interests. They're hurting their own.
These guys have worked up wave-based pumps for circulating ocean water (to reduce surface temperature, and, thus, storm risk), and UV laser mosquito-killers to reduce malaria risk.
They have very real target applications and very concrete inventions. Sure, they're a patent-filing think-tank of inventors, but they're hardly just rights-purchasing patent trolls.
The original story is a troll.