And the day before that. And the day before THAT. And the day be... well, actually, the day before that was some idiot 13 year old GNAA twit. But the day before THAT...
it would be better to subtly taunt them to make complete fools of themselves
This may be what has happened, since after all, this group DID just make complete fools of themselves.
I'm hoping this is what happened
-CBS execs try to decide what shows to put on the air next, cause they're scraping the bottom of the barrel -Out of the blue, this idiot group approaches them and pre-emptively warns that if they were to make a show with an obviously censored word in the title, they'll protest it. -CBS execs find this hilarious (and realize an opportunity for free slashvertising), scramble to find a show that uses a censored word as part of the title -CBS execs realize that the only way to make this even funnier is if they make the show based on, of all things, a twitter feed -Censorship advocates rebel in exactly the braindead way they said they would, execs and the rest of us get a good laugh and hopefully a few more people realize that there's no point in getting offended at words (or symbols standing in for words).
As Justin's dad's most recent quote, probably on this very topic: "They're offended? Fuck, shit, asshole, shitfuck; they're just words...Fine. Shitfuck isn't a word, but you get my point."
Seriously, I object to a show being based on a twitter post, but at least they picked the best one and did the title well. The rest of it might be a trainwreck, but it's off to a great start.
No. It's Executives. They will not find this hilarious, they don't have the brainpower left after years of MBA training and ouroboros-style self wanking.
Here's how this goes down: -Professional Culture Troll group threatens CBS due to Professional Culture Trolls' (aka: Moral Guardians, Professional Christians, what have you) increasing irrelevance in modern society -CBS execs come out of their cocaine fueled haze, realize that someone, somewhere is offended, contact CBS legal team as this is the first they've heard of this show -CBS legal team sees opportunity to look relevant and "fix" the show, blocks show as "culturally insensitive" until changes are made -CBS marketing team sees opportunity to look relevant and "fix" the show, gets involved in rename process and uses it as excuse to "fix" other things -Show delayed for "reinvisioning" -CBS releases "That's Our Pa!", a "retooled" version of "Shit My Dad Says" about a Mr. Magoo type who runs a christian orphanage for sassy minority children in 2011.
So a company that otherwise would grind itself into dust gets to live on thanks to laws that, while conveniencing people, cause them to not realise what scumbags the company really is and thus lack the natural loss of profits that would result from actions like this.
Oh, most gamers know about GW's... stupidities. If not the outright evil way they treat their resellers, then the absolutely asinine pricing, or their release schedule which is currently in the form of "release a new major rules revision every X years, and spend the Y months between then re-releasing the same rulebooks updated for the new major rules revision".
Combine that with Z number of new miniatures that look almost but nothing alike, and iLOTS number of rules changes making older miniatures unusable, and, well.
There's a reason about 2-3 years ago GW only sold like $100k the entire Christmas season, and while almost all the good talent from GW left the company. What they're doing, it's unsustainable.
However, they DO have very powerful, very interesting IP properties -- the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k stories are extremely good, which is why they are farming them out for novels. I half expect to see a Space Hulk or Ultramarines movie someday.
The one I like is how you can't sell Games Workshop games online -- they use the same theory to block that, too. See, Games Workshop sells their own miniatures on their own online store. GW prices are, to be charitable, completely fucking nuts. We're talking $35+ bucks for a single miniature, most armies using hundreds of miniatures. What people were doing were buying bulk orders from GW and GW's resellers, then reselling them online for 40-50% discounts.
Well, can't have that, can we? So GW now prohibits anyone from selling their product for more than 20% off, and prohibits the use of online stores to sell their product. How is that legal? Rule of first sale and the like?
Hell if I know.
I myself have rumbled with the big dumb collective -- their website had a simplistic naming scheme, so I guessed the URL of the Necromunda website (Necromunda is one of GW's "flavor of the year" games, wherein they release a rulebook with slightly tweaked rules, a new miniature set or 3, then promptly stop supporting after the early adopters give up some cash -- see also: Mordheim, Inquisitor, Bloodbowl, Battlefleet Gothic, Epic...) and posted screenshots of the incomplete page. I got a nastygram in my email pretty quickly. They were cordial enough about it, but they still had a "do this now or else" vibe going on.
The local gaming store told me why he didn't like carrying GW products, either -- I was buying a Tyranid Hive Tyrant, and he flat out told me that GW would require he buy 2-4 Hive Tyrants to replace that single one. This is despite my purchase of said Hive Tyrant being the only HT purchase that year. GW requires minimum orders, GW requires minimum shelving space, GW requires X number of GW dedicated gaming tables, the works, in order to work with them instead of a re-reseller. And god forbid if you want to host official GW tournaments -- in order to be an official GW store you basically have to dedicate their entire store to them, and get used to buying the "new release of the week" and swapping it out, even if the existing stuff hasn't sold yet.
Did I mention that GW also runs their own dedicated retail store network -- the "Rogue Traders", which means that even if you ARE dancing to the GW tune, you're still a dirty little competitor, and thus they hate you and want to see you suffer?
There's no wonder Warhammer Online is an utter failure, why their wargames aren't selling anywhere near the levels they used to, the works. GW is, to be frank, toxic as hell to work with, and it is finally catching up to them.
It shows the Judge thought it was bullshit that was a waste of taxpayers money via the court system as well. Time to get some adult supervision at those border posts.
There will never be adult supervision at these border posts, TSA, or anyplace similar.
The reason is simple enough -- the powers that be know that most of these positions are complete wastes of time. They're there to placate the rubes. That's all. If you want in the US, you get in. It's not hard. It will never be hard.
In addition, very powerful, very important people put very stupid children in positions of power at these places, in order to fill up the resumes of these very stupid children before they can become the new generation of very powerful, very important people (the stupid is assumed redundant by this point).
Any form of adult supervision would break both clauses -- an adult would take one look at the extreme waste of money and energy and run screaming (or break down crying), and/or fire or penalize the very stupid children (or, more likely, attempt to and then be smacked down by the aformentioned broken down crying adults who have already given up).
In a perfect society, yes. But these idiots will see low sales and say "SEE? PIRATE'S SAPPIN MAH SALES!" And then they'll use that to justify even more restrictive DRM in future launches.
So... in a totally imperfect society, that game with an even more restrictive DRM will see its sale tanked even more, and they will yell "SEE? EVEN MORE PIRATES'S SAPPIN MAH SALES!"... rinse... repeat... until there is a game no one would buy.
And the company kaput. Killed by "phantom pirates".
We call them "Music Industry Execs who still haven't came down off their latest Cocaine High" instead of "Phantom Pirates", but yeah, you've pretty much got it spot on. It's happened in two major video game industry crashes so far, no reason to think it won't happen again.
If they have the ability to detect these things, why in the world doesn't a little popup appear in the systray or security center saying "Your system appears to have a form of Malicious Software installed. Windows Updates are currently disabled. Please see your Network Administrator."
Seriously, the rogue spyware apps do this all the time, why can't Windows itself do it?
So what you're trying to say is, Turbine chose to get double the gold reward from the quest by gaining 3 evil alignment points? Who wouldn't do that in their shoes?
I know you're trying to be funny, but it's more along the lines of...
Turbine's in dire financial straits. I have no insider information, but it's pretty obvious.
LOTRO is the second most popular US MMO, and it has some great expansions, including the new Moria one that just came out... It's like World of Warcraft only done *right*. But that's not going to last, for the same reason AC and DDO died.
DDO went free after it slowly decayed. It's probably on the downswing from that huge influx right now.
Asheron's Call is functionally dead. It has something like 100 players per server on peak hours. They have pretty much officially given up on it. It broke my heart to see Maggie the Jackcat's page hadn't updated since her in game friend died IRL.
DDO and AC are a wash, really, as far as finances are concerned. DDO is probably generating enough money via micro-transactions to pay for the servers and staff, that's about it. AC is... probably losing money, but they wouldn't dare close it down -- it would harm their brand.
Basically the problem is: Turbine is too nice. They give away monthly expansions instead of selling these in stores. This is the AC model vs the EQ model -- AC has had a monthly update every month since it came out, over 100 of them. EQ has expansions every 6 months. AC had more content and more story than EQ, by far. It wasn't even close. But EQ is a far better success. Why?
Here's the trick that Turbine didn't 'get' -- those expansions keep EQ in the stores. Every 6 months, a new box, a new gold box, and with the advent of steam, every few months a $5 sale on the gold set to get new players in.
AC hasn't been purchasable in stores for 8 years or more. No new players for 8 years, outside of going to the website via word of mouth. And that doesn't work.
What Turbine needs to do is make a new "boxed collection" every 6 months and sell it in stores for $20. That would keep the new players flowing in and might -- MIGHT -- save them.
What I'd really like to see is an Asheron's Call 1.5 -- an AC revamp, maybe with them traveling to the Dereth mainland, with the new LOTRO engine and AC's classic gameplay -- skill based, no jobs, roguelike item randomization, the works. Maybe revamp magic -- it's always been a weak spot of AC, to be honest. Continue the excellent policy of monthly content updates, if only a new dungeon or revamp of an older dungeon -- alongside the story updates, of course.
One of the most depressing events of my life was the ending of Asheron's Call 2. The... community that game had -- and there's no other word for it -- despite years of Microsoft openly sabotaging the game (they disabled in game chat for months and refused to let Turbine fix it) all banded together, and had one last get together and party on top of a giant tree.
It was the most haunting, ethereal music I've ever heard. I'll never forget it. All these players, hanging out alongside the admins, desperately exchanging emails and IMs and phone numbers, trying to work at meeting up again in a new MMO...
There's a reason I can forgive missteps like having a spyware company involved in the advertisements -- Turbine are good people. They deserve more success then they have gotten so far.
And I have no doubt this spyware thing is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of the facts.
DA: Hey Legislative Branch, your new law on sex-ed requires teachers to break your old law on sexual misconduct. Please fix. I'd rather not have to charge all the teachers in the state. Legislator: Duh, say what? I don't write no contradictory laws. DA: See you in court!
Wouldn't the newer law supplement the older one? The impression I got was the DA didn't agree with the new law (the quote about it "sexualizing" kids reeks of typical Republican "sexual freedom is bad unless it's us at a strip club with our mistresses" attitude) and was using the older (obsolete) law as a bludgeon to try and prevent the newer law from being used.
I'm liberal, it just seems wikileaks is going out of it's way to make the military look bad and then play itself up.
"Look bad?" Have you SEEN the video? The US Military specifically committed war crimes, atrocities we've had other regimes "changed" for doing.
This is not just some kind of military PR Disaster! This is a major international incident and crime against humanity, and if it were any other country, especially those with brown people in them, every pundit and politician would be running around demanding blood.
Not the webpage, it's the Ads.
on
iPad Jailbroken
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can verify that it doesn't impact Lynx.:) I can also verify that it's a PDF, so it likely impacts Windows and Apple computers.
See this previous discussion on Slashdot. It's not the website, it's the banner ad companies allowing a Russian(?) group of script kiddies to buy ad space and immediately redirect to an infected PDF file. Happens on a LOT of websites, including the base msn.com page occasionally. DeviantArt is a particularly bad offender. I've apparently made a career out of walking ignorant Southern United States women through removing these things over the phone.
Yes, bYOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTEDecause Internet Explorer 8 is so g34 OBJECTS FOUNDreat with privacy and seWARNING YOUR COMPUTER IS SENDING OUT SPAMcurity. It privaUNREGISTERED VERSION $35.59 TO REGISTERtely and seWARNING VISITING THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTERcurely lets any old pTHE FILE SLASHDOT.ORG IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUSrogram install itself on your comXP TOTALLY-REAL-ANTIVIRUS 2011 HAS FOUND PROBLEMSputer, as an admin, no matter what security settREGISTRY CLEANING IN PROGRESS, YO MOMMAings or domain policies you have installed. Chrome doeGIVEUSYOURCREDITCARD.RU.EXE SAYS YOU OWE US MONEY, KEKEKEsn't! In fact, the Pwn2Own guys couldn't even hack Chrome! How disgraceful!
Why use Adobe Reader in the first place? There are alternatives out there which are less embarrassingly insecure. You should be telling your customers to switch from Adobe Reader, if possible.
Oh, there certainly are alternatives.
But my average user is not "technically savvy". To the point that getting them to type in the URL of our website, then find the icon for our service, is very difficult.
It doesn't help that the company I pinch hit for (the stupidity of which inspired the Dilbert comic) has decided to give our service any of 4 different names depending on which website, state, etc you are in, and decided to hide our icon literally off the screen.
No, literally, you have to scroll down and to the right to find it.
My typical call entails taking 10-20 minutes to get a customer to type in a simple URL (domain.com/servicename), explaining that the My Web Search bar is not the address bar, explaining that again, explaining that you can't put a space in our URL, explaining that I wanted them to spell out the word minus instead of typing in -, etc etc.
Oh, and a VERY large number of these people are running IE6. Or are running machines with 128/256 megs of ram and can't run anything else. Or have tried installing IE8 (it thinks it can run on 64 megs of ram and will auto-install) on a WinXP machine with 128 megs of ram and are upset the machine is slow...
Er, sorry, lost myself for a second. I guess what I'm saying is that these people can't even SPELL "PDF", yet alone uninstall Reader and install a different program. And since my metrics -- i.e., the thing keeping me from being fired -- is based on getting customers off the phone as fast as possible...
(Oh, and our parent phone company does NOT want us giving tech advice or suggesting alternatives to programs like Reader, cause "they're not in the toolkit"...)
The guy who writes it has English as a second language. Basically it's asking for permission to do delete rootkits it finds, and warning you that Rootkit removal is an art, not a science, and some OS Loss may occur.
Besides, this is the real Combofix site, not that one:
No, just run Combofix. Then MBAM. It'll fix it. It's a rootkit, which is blocking MBAM and Webroot from seeing it.
That's the most terrifying thing about these things -- they literally install as rootkits, without admin privileges, even on a fully up to date WinVista or Win7 box. UAC, Security Policies, etc do nothing.
I work at a pinch hitter Tier 2 Pay to Play tech support company that is outsourced to by several major ISPs.
I see these damned things all the time. Usually they come with names like XP Antivirus 2010 or "Vista Security Center" or somesuch crap. They almost exclusively look the same, and there are new names that appear every so often -- XP Antivirus 2010 was "Internet Security 2010" not too long ago, for example. I suspect there is a kit that these companies are using to make their products.
They are almost exclusively coming in from banner ads. Specifically they use a Flash ad that, after a few minutes, or upon webpage close, or mouseover, opens an infected PDF file on a random infected server. Google Chrome occasionally catches these domain names, usually they are IP addresses or something similar.
Flashblock is NOT foolproof (although it does help), as occasionally they just have the ad banner on an infected server that auto-redirects you to a PDF file immediately.
They are occasionally Java files instead, but almost exclusively they are PDF files.
They're actually getting very creative in their infections. XP AV 2010, for example, sets itself up as the handler for EXE files -- in order to remove it, you have to install Malwarebytes and rename the mbam.exe file as 1.com or something similar. You can also dive into the registry to fix the EXE thing, except if the program is running it will just break it again immediately. Either windows does not have support for hijacking the.COM support in Windows XP/Vista/7, or these viruses just aren't thinking to try yet. Once they do, then our options drop to "OS Reinstall", as you can literally not run anything.
Some of these programs install themselves in such a way that if you attempt to load Safe Mode, your OS will intentionally BSOD. Or, in at least one infection, the screen filled with ASCII smiley faces and didn't continue.
Combofix will also remove most of these, and usually with "Security Center" or "XP AV 2010" we give up and run Combofix immediately.
The solution to prevent future infections isn't to move to Firefox or Chrome -- these infect those just as easily, although Chrome seems to just crash it's Flash plugin instead. In order to fix these, you have to update Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF, and Sun Java to the latest versions. PDF is the most important, but not the only one. Better browsers won't work. Antimalware programs won't work. The only way to fix it is to patch the holes.
and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption.
And your answer to this is something like XviD which is far worse at bitstream corruption? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"Blah blah, Xvid which is far worse at technobabble". AVI+XVid works. Most of the time MKV+x264 doesn't. Xvid subs appear, any corruption is fixed after the next keyframe, and the audio syncs up properly. 264 doesn't, it fails on all those counts at random.
That's the long and the short of it. One works and is reliable. The other is not.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Oh yes, it's just soooo simple. Sure, if you ignore all the complex things that go into actually building a audio/video codec with good compression efficiency. Is this ignoring the fact that it took codecs like DivX, XviD, x264 years and years to reach their current states of quality and efficiency?
I believe in the bazaar model -- with enough eyes, EVERYTHING is a simple problem.
Simply put, we as a community could make something better than x264. Compression, decompression aside, the fact that it'd be free software would make it better -- eventually.
Open video bitstream formats, like Theora, are simply not capable of being better than H.264 (yet). The best bet in that regard is Dirac by the BBC, but even that does not fare too well against H.264 as encoded by x264.
However, open video formats simply do not need to be better than the proprietary formats, they simply need to be "good-enough" and be ubiquitous on the web, and pretty soon all browsers (except IE, probably) will support them out of the box. Wikipedia going with theora is a good move in that direction.
Except H.264 isn't better. It's slow, unwieldy, CPU intensive, and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption. There's a reason I avoid the H264 files on animesuki nowadays and go for the (technically lower quality) XVID files -- at least XVID works.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Not everyone in the world is stuck in a backwards third world in denial shithole.
Hey, our infrastructure might be falling apart, our education system is an intentionally inadequate rote memorization nightmare, and we recently had a bloodless coup by the corporations (which wasn't reported on much, cause our news all comes from corporations), but at least we have McDonalds and Cable TV!
Do they honestly expect us to believe they just happened to be looking at this boy in his home at the exact moment he happened to eat his candy, or were they watching him to see if he did anything?
If the latter, what gives them the right to watch students outside of school property for infractions? They're not police officers, and even if they somehow made the argument that they were... I'd love to see the warrant they had for this.
At the very least, these people need to lose their jobs. There may also need to be some legal action taken. Perhaps a law specifically prohibiting this sort of thing in the future -- since you know there are little dictator wannabe school administrators out there who think the only bad thing about this story is the school had to stop.
I often end up teaching teens. The are so just as stupid as the average adult. Even more so when it comes to computers outside facebook. Were the hell do you think average adults comes from?
The US Public School System, which encourages rote memorization over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
Except the students had seen the cameras come on often enough that they knew how to recognize the symptoms and cover the things with a post it note.
Kids are nowhere near as stupid as the average adult -- including the average school administrator -- thinks. DOUBLY so with technology.
There's a reason the FBI is involved at this point. We need to know just who had access to this system, when it was in use, what policies where in places for access, and how often these policies were ignored.
Yes, we have the school administration's word. Unfortunately, we cannot take them at their word, cause we now know for a fact that they are not trustworthy.
I think you'd find the powers that be phrase it differently. For instance argue that gratification from cartoons leads to or encourages real world abuse.
I don't think there's ever been a study done proving such a link.
It would be an interesting study, no doubt, but it sounds like there's a chance that it would go against "accepted wisdom," which means said study would never be done, or would simply be ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
I read about this yesterday.
I read this first post yesterday.
And the day before that. And the day before THAT. And the day be... well, actually, the day before that was some idiot 13 year old GNAA twit. But the day before THAT...
data only plans? can't believe that
Yeah, that would be too awesome. I'd love an iPhone with a iPad-like Data plan, but it won't happen.
All of its storage is flash memory soldered to the logic board. There is no way to remove the storage.
Except with a soldering iron. And I imagine it's fairly standard flash memory at that.
Or am I missing something? Would doing that wipe the flash?
it would be better to subtly taunt them to make complete fools of themselves
This may be what has happened, since after all, this group DID just make complete fools of themselves.
I'm hoping this is what happened
-CBS execs try to decide what shows to put on the air next, cause they're scraping the bottom of the barrel
-Out of the blue, this idiot group approaches them and pre-emptively warns that if they were to make a show with an obviously censored word in the title, they'll protest it.
-CBS execs find this hilarious (and realize an opportunity for free slashvertising), scramble to find a show that uses a censored word as part of the title
-CBS execs realize that the only way to make this even funnier is if they make the show based on, of all things, a twitter feed
-Censorship advocates rebel in exactly the braindead way they said they would, execs and the rest of us get a good laugh and hopefully a few more people realize that there's no point in getting offended at words (or symbols standing in for words).
As Justin's dad's most recent quote, probably on this very topic: "They're offended? Fuck, shit, asshole, shitfuck; they're just words...Fine. Shitfuck isn't a word, but you get my point."
Seriously, I object to a show being based on a twitter post, but at least they picked the best one and did the title well. The rest of it might be a trainwreck, but it's off to a great start.
No. It's Executives. They will not find this hilarious, they don't have the brainpower left after years of MBA training and ouroboros-style self wanking.
Here's how this goes down:
-Professional Culture Troll group threatens CBS due to Professional Culture Trolls' (aka: Moral Guardians, Professional Christians, what have you) increasing irrelevance in modern society
-CBS execs come out of their cocaine fueled haze, realize that someone, somewhere is offended, contact CBS legal team as this is the first they've heard of this show
-CBS legal team sees opportunity to look relevant and "fix" the show, blocks show as "culturally insensitive" until changes are made
-CBS marketing team sees opportunity to look relevant and "fix" the show, gets involved in rename process and uses it as excuse to "fix" other things
-Show delayed for "reinvisioning"
-CBS releases "That's Our Pa!", a "retooled" version of "Shit My Dad Says" about a Mr. Magoo type who runs a christian orphanage for sassy minority children in 2011.
So a company that otherwise would grind itself into dust gets to live on thanks to laws that, while conveniencing people, cause them to not realise what scumbags the company really is and thus lack the natural loss of profits that would result from actions like this.
Oh, most gamers know about GW's... stupidities. If not the outright evil way they treat their resellers, then the absolutely asinine pricing, or their release schedule which is currently in the form of "release a new major rules revision every X years, and spend the Y months between then re-releasing the same rulebooks updated for the new major rules revision".
Combine that with Z number of new miniatures that look almost but nothing alike, and iLOTS number of rules changes making older miniatures unusable, and, well.
There's a reason about 2-3 years ago GW only sold like $100k the entire Christmas season, and while almost all the good talent from GW left the company. What they're doing, it's unsustainable.
However, they DO have very powerful, very interesting IP properties -- the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k stories are extremely good, which is why they are farming them out for novels. I half expect to see a Space Hulk or Ultramarines movie someday.
This is pretty typical GW stupidities.
The one I like is how you can't sell Games Workshop games online -- they use the same theory to block that, too. See, Games Workshop sells their own miniatures on their own online store. GW prices are, to be charitable, completely fucking nuts. We're talking $35+ bucks for a single miniature, most armies using hundreds of miniatures. What people were doing were buying bulk orders from GW and GW's resellers, then reselling them online for 40-50% discounts.
Well, can't have that, can we? So GW now prohibits anyone from selling their product for more than 20% off, and prohibits the use of online stores to sell their product. How is that legal? Rule of first sale and the like?
Hell if I know.
I myself have rumbled with the big dumb collective -- their website had a simplistic naming scheme, so I guessed the URL of the Necromunda website (Necromunda is one of GW's "flavor of the year" games, wherein they release a rulebook with slightly tweaked rules, a new miniature set or 3, then promptly stop supporting after the early adopters give up some cash -- see also: Mordheim, Inquisitor, Bloodbowl, Battlefleet Gothic, Epic...) and posted screenshots of the incomplete page. I got a nastygram in my email pretty quickly. They were cordial enough about it, but they still had a "do this now or else" vibe going on.
The local gaming store told me why he didn't like carrying GW products, either -- I was buying a Tyranid Hive Tyrant, and he flat out told me that GW would require he buy 2-4 Hive Tyrants to replace that single one. This is despite my purchase of said Hive Tyrant being the only HT purchase that year. GW requires minimum orders, GW requires minimum shelving space, GW requires X number of GW dedicated gaming tables, the works, in order to work with them instead of a re-reseller. And god forbid if you want to host official GW tournaments -- in order to be an official GW store you basically have to dedicate their entire store to them, and get used to buying the "new release of the week" and swapping it out, even if the existing stuff hasn't sold yet.
Did I mention that GW also runs their own dedicated retail store network -- the "Rogue Traders", which means that even if you ARE dancing to the GW tune, you're still a dirty little competitor, and thus they hate you and want to see you suffer?
There's no wonder Warhammer Online is an utter failure, why their wargames aren't selling anywhere near the levels they used to, the works. GW is, to be frank, toxic as hell to work with, and it is finally catching up to them.
It shows the Judge thought it was bullshit that was a waste of taxpayers money via the court system as well.
Time to get some adult supervision at those border posts.
There will never be adult supervision at these border posts, TSA, or anyplace similar.
The reason is simple enough -- the powers that be know that most of these positions are complete wastes of time. They're there to placate the rubes. That's all. If you want in the US, you get in. It's not hard. It will never be hard.
In addition, very powerful, very important people put very stupid children in positions of power at these places, in order to fill up the resumes of these very stupid children before they can become the new generation of very powerful, very important people (the stupid is assumed redundant by this point).
Any form of adult supervision would break both clauses -- an adult would take one look at the extreme waste of money and energy and run screaming (or break down crying), and/or fire or penalize the very stupid children (or, more likely, attempt to and then be smacked down by the aformentioned broken down crying adults who have already given up).
In a perfect society, yes. But these idiots will see low sales and say "SEE? PIRATE'S SAPPIN MAH SALES!" And then they'll use that to justify even more restrictive DRM in future launches.
So ... in a totally imperfect society, that game with an even more restrictive DRM will see its sale tanked even more, and they will yell "SEE? EVEN MORE PIRATES'S SAPPIN MAH SALES!" ... rinse ... repeat ... until there is a game no one would buy.
And the company kaput. Killed by "phantom pirates".
We call them "Music Industry Execs who still haven't came down off their latest Cocaine High" instead of "Phantom Pirates", but yeah, you've pretty much got it spot on. It's happened in two major video game industry crashes so far, no reason to think it won't happen again.
If they have the ability to detect these things, why in the world doesn't a little popup appear in the systray or security center saying "Your system appears to have a form of Malicious Software installed. Windows Updates are currently disabled. Please see your Network Administrator."
Seriously, the rogue spyware apps do this all the time, why can't Windows itself do it?
So what you're trying to say is, Turbine chose to get double the gold reward from the quest by gaining 3 evil alignment points? Who wouldn't do that in their shoes?
I know you're trying to be funny, but it's more along the lines of...
Turbine's in dire financial straits. I have no insider information, but it's pretty obvious.
LOTRO is the second most popular US MMO, and it has some great expansions, including the new Moria one that just came out... It's like World of Warcraft only done *right*. But that's not going to last, for the same reason AC and DDO died.
DDO went free after it slowly decayed. It's probably on the downswing from that huge influx right now.
Asheron's Call is functionally dead. It has something like 100 players per server on peak hours. They have pretty much officially given up on it. It broke my heart to see Maggie the Jackcat's page hadn't updated since her in game friend died IRL.
DDO and AC are a wash, really, as far as finances are concerned. DDO is probably generating enough money via micro-transactions to pay for the servers and staff, that's about it. AC is... probably losing money, but they wouldn't dare close it down -- it would harm their brand.
Basically the problem is: Turbine is too nice. They give away monthly expansions instead of selling these in stores. This is the AC model vs the EQ model -- AC has had a monthly update every month since it came out, over 100 of them. EQ has expansions every 6 months. AC had more content and more story than EQ, by far. It wasn't even close. But EQ is a far better success. Why?
Here's the trick that Turbine didn't 'get' -- those expansions keep EQ in the stores. Every 6 months, a new box, a new gold box, and with the advent of steam, every few months a $5 sale on the gold set to get new players in.
AC hasn't been purchasable in stores for 8 years or more. No new players for 8 years, outside of going to the website via word of mouth. And that doesn't work.
What Turbine needs to do is make a new "boxed collection" every 6 months and sell it in stores for $20. That would keep the new players flowing in and might -- MIGHT -- save them.
What I'd really like to see is an Asheron's Call 1.5 -- an AC revamp, maybe with them traveling to the Dereth mainland, with the new LOTRO engine and AC's classic gameplay -- skill based, no jobs, roguelike item randomization, the works. Maybe revamp magic -- it's always been a weak spot of AC, to be honest. Continue the excellent policy of monthly content updates, if only a new dungeon or revamp of an older dungeon -- alongside the story updates, of course.
One of the most depressing events of my life was the ending of Asheron's Call 2. The... community that game had -- and there's no other word for it -- despite years of Microsoft openly sabotaging the game (they disabled in game chat for months and refused to let Turbine fix it) all banded together, and had one last get together and party on top of a giant tree.
It was the most haunting, ethereal music I've ever heard. I'll never forget it. All these players, hanging out alongside the admins, desperately exchanging emails and IMs and phone numbers, trying to work at meeting up again in a new MMO...
There's a reason I can forgive missteps like having a spyware company involved in the advertisements -- Turbine are good people. They deserve more success then they have gotten so far.
And I have no doubt this spyware thing is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of the facts.
DA: Hey Legislative Branch, your new law on sex-ed requires teachers to break your old law on sexual misconduct. Please fix. I'd rather not have to charge all the teachers in the state.
Legislator: Duh, say what? I don't write no contradictory laws.
DA: See you in court!
Wouldn't the newer law supplement the older one? The impression I got was the DA didn't agree with the new law (the quote about it "sexualizing" kids reeks of typical Republican "sexual freedom is bad unless it's us at a strip club with our mistresses" attitude) and was using the older (obsolete) law as a bludgeon to try and prevent the newer law from being used.
I'm liberal, it just seems wikileaks is going out of it's way to make the military look bad and then play itself up.
"Look bad?" Have you SEEN the video? The US Military specifically committed war crimes, atrocities we've had other regimes "changed" for doing.
This is not just some kind of military PR Disaster! This is a major international incident and crime against humanity, and if it were any other country, especially those with brown people in them, every pundit and politician would be running around demanding blood.
I can verify that it doesn't impact Lynx. :) I can also verify that it's a PDF, so it likely impacts Windows and Apple computers.
See this previous discussion on Slashdot. It's not the website, it's the banner ad companies allowing a Russian(?) group of script kiddies to buy ad space and immediately redirect to an infected PDF file. Happens on a LOT of websites, including the base msn.com page occasionally. DeviantArt is a particularly bad offender. I've apparently made a career out of walking ignorant Southern United States women through removing these things over the phone.
(Yes, it's my own personal hell, why do you ask?)
Yes, bYOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTEDecause Internet Explorer 8 is so g34 OBJECTS FOUNDreat with privacy and seWARNING YOUR COMPUTER IS SENDING OUT SPAMcurity. It privaUNREGISTERED VERSION $35.59 TO REGISTERtely and seWARNING VISITING THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTERcurely lets any old pTHE FILE SLASHDOT.ORG IS INFECTED WITH A VIRUSrogram install itself on your comXP TOTALLY-REAL-ANTIVIRUS 2011 HAS FOUND PROBLEMSputer, as an admin, no matter what security settREGISTRY CLEANING IN PROGRESS, YO MOMMAings or domain policies you have installed. Chrome doeGIVEUSYOURCREDITCARD.RU.EXE SAYS YOU OWE US MONEY, KEKEKEsn't! In fact, the Pwn2Own guys couldn't even hack Chrome! How disgraceful!
Why use Adobe Reader in the first place? There are alternatives out there which are less embarrassingly insecure. You should be telling your customers to switch from Adobe Reader, if possible.
Oh, there certainly are alternatives.
But my average user is not "technically savvy". To the point that getting them to type in the URL of our website, then find the icon for our service, is very difficult.
It doesn't help that the company I pinch hit for (the stupidity of which inspired the Dilbert comic) has decided to give our service any of 4 different names depending on which website, state, etc you are in, and decided to hide our icon literally off the screen.
No, literally, you have to scroll down and to the right to find it.
My typical call entails taking 10-20 minutes to get a customer to type in a simple URL (domain.com/servicename), explaining that the My Web Search bar is not the address bar, explaining that again, explaining that you can't put a space in our URL, explaining that I wanted them to spell out the word minus instead of typing in -, etc etc.
Oh, and a VERY large number of these people are running IE6. Or are running machines with 128/256 megs of ram and can't run anything else. Or have tried installing IE8 (it thinks it can run on 64 megs of ram and will auto-install) on a WinXP machine with 128 megs of ram and are upset the machine is slow...
Er, sorry, lost myself for a second. I guess what I'm saying is that these people can't even SPELL "PDF", yet alone uninstall Reader and install a different program. And since my metrics -- i.e., the thing keeping me from being fired -- is based on getting customers off the phone as fast as possible...
(Oh, and our parent phone company does NOT want us giving tech advice or suggesting alternatives to programs like Reader, cause "they're not in the toolkit"...)
That last one might give me pause....
The guy who writes it has English as a second language. Basically it's asking for permission to do delete rootkits it finds, and warning you that Rootkit removal is an art, not a science, and some OS Loss may occur.
Besides, this is the real Combofix site, not that one:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix
No, just run Combofix. Then MBAM. It'll fix it. It's a rootkit, which is blocking MBAM and Webroot from seeing it.
That's the most terrifying thing about these things -- they literally install as rootkits, without admin privileges, even on a fully up to date WinVista or Win7 box. UAC, Security Policies, etc do nothing.
It's no wonder Google got hacked by China.
I work at a pinch hitter Tier 2 Pay to Play tech support company that is outsourced to by several major ISPs.
I see these damned things all the time. Usually they come with names like XP Antivirus 2010 or "Vista Security Center" or somesuch crap. They almost exclusively look the same, and there are new names that appear every so often -- XP Antivirus 2010 was "Internet Security 2010" not too long ago, for example. I suspect there is a kit that these companies are using to make their products.
They are almost exclusively coming in from banner ads. Specifically they use a Flash ad that, after a few minutes, or upon webpage close, or mouseover, opens an infected PDF file on a random infected server. Google Chrome occasionally catches these domain names, usually they are IP addresses or something similar.
Flashblock is NOT foolproof (although it does help), as occasionally they just have the ad banner on an infected server that auto-redirects you to a PDF file immediately.
They are occasionally Java files instead, but almost exclusively they are PDF files.
They're actually getting very creative in their infections. XP AV 2010, for example, sets itself up as the handler for EXE files -- in order to remove it, you have to install Malwarebytes and rename the mbam.exe file as 1.com or something similar. You can also dive into the registry to fix the EXE thing, except if the program is running it will just break it again immediately. Either windows does not have support for hijacking the .COM support in Windows XP/Vista/7, or these viruses just aren't thinking to try yet. Once they do, then our options drop to "OS Reinstall", as you can literally not run anything.
Some of these programs install themselves in such a way that if you attempt to load Safe Mode, your OS will intentionally BSOD. Or, in at least one infection, the screen filled with ASCII smiley faces and didn't continue.
Combofix will also remove most of these, and usually with "Security Center" or "XP AV 2010" we give up and run Combofix immediately.
The solution to prevent future infections isn't to move to Firefox or Chrome -- these infect those just as easily, although Chrome seems to just crash it's Flash plugin instead. In order to fix these, you have to update Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF, and Sun Java to the latest versions. PDF is the most important, but not the only one. Better browsers won't work. Antimalware programs won't work. The only way to fix it is to patch the holes.
and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption.
And your answer to this is something like XviD which is far worse at bitstream corruption? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"Blah blah, Xvid which is far worse at technobabble". AVI+XVid works. Most of the time MKV+x264 doesn't. Xvid subs appear, any corruption is fixed after the next keyframe, and the audio syncs up properly. 264 doesn't, it fails on all those counts at random.
That's the long and the short of it. One works and is reliable. The other is not.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Oh yes, it's just soooo simple. Sure, if you ignore all the complex things that go into actually building a audio/video codec with good compression efficiency. Is this ignoring the fact that it took codecs like DivX, XviD, x264 years and years to reach their current states of quality and efficiency?
I believe in the bazaar model -- with enough eyes, EVERYTHING is a simple problem.
Simply put, we as a community could make something better than x264. Compression, decompression aside, the fact that it'd be free software would make it better -- eventually.
Open video bitstream formats, like Theora, are simply not capable of being better than H.264 (yet). The best bet in that regard is Dirac by the BBC, but even that does not fare too well against H.264 as encoded by x264.
However, open video formats simply do not need to be better than the proprietary formats, they simply need to be "good-enough" and be ubiquitous on the web, and pretty soon all browsers (except IE, probably) will support them out of the box. Wikipedia going with theora is a good move in that direction.
Except H.264 isn't better. It's slow, unwieldy, CPU intensive, and tends to fall over and shit itself with even the tiniest bit of corruption. There's a reason I avoid the H264 files on animesuki nowadays and go for the (technically lower quality) XVID files -- at least XVID works.
This is a moot point anyway. It's just compression, how hard could it be? Lets get a sourceforge project going to make something better.
Not everyone in the world is stuck in a backwards third world in denial shithole.
Hey, our infrastructure might be falling apart, our education system is an intentionally inadequate rote memorization nightmare, and we recently had a bloodless coup by the corporations (which wasn't reported on much, cause our news all comes from corporations), but at least we have McDonalds and Cable TV!
AMERICA, FUCK YEA!
Do they honestly expect us to believe they just happened to be looking at this boy in his home at the exact moment he happened to eat his candy, or were they watching him to see if he did anything?
If the latter, what gives them the right to watch students outside of school property for infractions? They're not police officers, and even if they somehow made the argument that they were... I'd love to see the warrant they had for this.
At the very least, these people need to lose their jobs. There may also need to be some legal action taken. Perhaps a law specifically prohibiting this sort of thing in the future -- since you know there are little dictator wannabe school administrators out there who think the only bad thing about this story is the school had to stop.
I often end up teaching teens. The are so just as stupid as the average adult. Even more so when it comes to computers outside facebook. Were the hell do you think average adults comes from?
The US Public School System, which encourages rote memorization over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
Except the students had seen the cameras come on often enough that they knew how to recognize the symptoms and cover the things with a post it note.
Kids are nowhere near as stupid as the average adult -- including the average school administrator -- thinks. DOUBLY so with technology.
There's a reason the FBI is involved at this point. We need to know just who had access to this system, when it was in use, what policies where in places for access, and how often these policies were ignored.
Yes, we have the school administration's word. Unfortunately, we cannot take them at their word, cause we now know for a fact that they are not trustworthy.
I think you'd find the powers that be phrase it differently. For instance argue that gratification from cartoons leads to or encourages real world abuse.
I don't think there's ever been a study done proving such a link.
It would be an interesting study, no doubt, but it sounds like there's a chance that it would go against "accepted wisdom," which means said study would never be done, or would simply be ignored.