We haven't yet made virtual sex with computer-controlled characters, as a form of sexual activity, very interesting. People have cybersex all the time, but they tend to do it because there's another person in the other end and who responds in a reasonably human-like manner. Sex games and minigames tend to be rubbish, because... well, if you want porn, you know where to get it easier.
As a result, if you want to make a serious game, game devs have to make sex a part of story - it's much easier for people to make a mental connection with fictional characters that way. And, frankly, if you present sex as part of a story, the sex acts themselves suddenly become a rather irrelevant part of the story. (I've read a few good novels, for example, with great sex scenes - just 2 chapters of lead-up and 2 lines of the dirty parts.)
Simply put: It's easier to make fascinating drama than to come up with some interesting, new and fresh ways to say "and then they had sex". Because it's been done to death. It's hard to think of ways to make sex itself interesting.
That said, I see no reason to shy away from sex in any forms of art. It's entirely possible to put sex in most forms of art tastefully and interestingly enough - video games should be no exception. People just should figure out how to do it interestingly.
And here's the same on a little bit less, um, misanthropic terms:
When people say "let's feed the poor instead of wasting money on X", they usually mean "let's throw money at some short-term solution that we can actually implement while politician Y's term lasts". Now, short-term solutions are important, but you should never forget that they're just that - short-term solutions.
People wave the "let's feed the poor instead of wasting money on X" expression as if that'd solve all of their problems. They want to be the heroes who say how things will be fixed. Sure, nix a space program, and you have money to spare. Can you solve the world hunger? No. You soon realise that despite of those grandiose promises you just said, you're actually applying band-aid. After the money is gone, you notice that you're not any nearer to a lasting solution. And then everyone else will realise that your plan had a few holes in it. Think they'll like it?
Space research is part of the long-term solution to improved standard of living: scientific and engineering research means better technology, better technology means a better standard of living. The sad part is that the results come in decades, not in a few years. Colonising other planets might be even a longer term plan than that, but the rewards could be even higher.
How many Mickey Mouse cartoons have you seen lately...?
Mickey is used as a logo, and in merchandising.... but not as a character ?
Been to Europe lately? Mickey is still a frequently seen character in Disney comics published in Europe - perhaps a tad less popular than Scrooge and Donald etc, but popular nevertheless.
Yeah, I don't agree with Disney that they should keep the stranglehold on their characters, but to suggest that Disney doesn't use these characters is ludicrous. They use Mickey all the time.
where the front page was nothing but a banner and search entry field?
Shiiiiit. Do you remember the bullshit that the competing search engines had on their web pages when Google launched? Useless portal shit as far as eye could see. And when you typed your query, it responded 10 seconds later, and you saw a giant page with dozens and dozens of blinking ads... and buried somewhere in the page was a tiny, tiny comment that said that there were no search results? And every few years, the gave out a press release where they said "yeah, we almost updated our search index this year, but we didn't really feel like doing that?"
Considering that hell, Google is doing pretty damn well.
What he's doing is completely legal. Quite how much money he makes would be interesting to see, anyone buying a 3d package would surely do a small amount of research.
Uh, hello? He's obviously not selling things to people who do "small amount of research". These pages have scammy salesman tactics all over the place. Awesome package creator guy's personal endorsement, quotes from happy random users, obviously bogus slashed prices, available for three days only, so get it now. (* offer may be available perpetually in certain planets.)
It's legal in that it fulfils the requirements of the licenses, but not exactly the most ethical way to distribute software. Customers should know what they're getting. They should know that they're buying a piece of free software that has worthwhile stuff added to it - again, material that may come from many free sources, but you can't download a printed book, now can you? They should be saying "gee, this looks pretty good for a free software package, but no way I'm going to download gigabytes of videos and textures, and that printed manual sounds sweet. Send me one, I'll just download the software and toy with it until the package arrives."
I'm just amazed at how completely oblivious "Chief Security Specialist" Jussi Jaakonaho was during the email correspondence, AND that he was perfectly fine with sharing root passwords via plaintext email.
Well, he works for Nokia, so this move was done completely in accordance with the new Microsoft security guidelines. </obviousjoke>
Well, since this system is based on VBS2, I hope they'll just import some Operation Flashpoint mods. You know, for realism. Video game technology is developed in discrete versions and milestones, but new terrorist weaponry/techniques and urban hazards just keep appearing all the time. It's up to the modders to continuously keep the simulations abreast with the new strange things in real world.
Use ARMA?
that seems like it could just about fit your idea from what I understand (I don't own the game personally)
According to the article, this system uses VBS2, which is actually based on the OpFlashpoint/ArmA engine. And I guess it's a good engine for simulations like this. (I haven't played ArmA but I've played OpFlashpoint.)
It's still only a few dollars each way, but Android is only free if you don't include *any* of Google's services on it.
Yeah, but why would Nokia care for Google services when they are already building a bunch of mobile services on their own? Just go for bare-bones Android and port the existing stuff over. Then they would "graciously" bow over to the customer demand and put Google's stuff there if the customers really seem to want it. (Which would happen, like, the following day.)
No! I think they've never seen the worst of the worst: These newfangled video games called "Doom" and "Quake" and "Afterlife". You may not have heard of these games, because the far too liberal-biased (yes, Fox too) lamestream media keeps news about them down. But if you ask your any friendly neighbourhood pastor, family rights activist or conservative blogger, you'll see they know quite a lot about these dangerous new threats to kids.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, it's a glorious day! A moral panic about an upcoming computer game, not ones that were released ~15 years ago.
So is redtube republican porn? I assume there's also a bluetube, with democratic port. (greentube for the green party?)
No, it's got free videos, so it's obviously run by communists. And make no mistake about their commitment to the ideology! The court documents show that all of the models featured on the site have been staunch members of the Communist Party for at least 60 years!
Access to the internet and other forms of communication are one of our arms we have in defense of our liberties. The internet should therefore fall under the protection of the 2nd Amendment. Resist the kill-switch!
Oh, those Americans and their explosive solutions! I keep thinking of the old publication from pirate radio folks called "Radio Is My Bomb". The more nefarious sort of governments might make case that the Internet is exactly like unregulated radio broadcasting (normal people who are talking about stuff that might offend some other people, while playing some music with naughty words and luscious rhythms!), and as such it's not governed by laws guaranteeing free ownership of guns, but rather the laws guaranteeing not-so-free ownership of bombs....the kind of laws that recently put people in Gitmo, see.
OK, seriously, though: here in Finland, we have legislators talking about the "right to broadband". Which isn't exactly a constitutional right, and it just practically means that ISPs must provide fairly priced and affordable broadband Internet connections to every household. But it sure sounds grandiose, doesn't it? The legislators say that the Internet is necessary for people getting through their day-to-day life and using government services, but why can't we just go out and say that it's nowadays starting to be a necessity for communications in general? Why couldn't access to the Internet be a basic human right, in that government shouldn't stop people from doing that? Isn't it high time that the legislators should specifically guarantee freedom of online communications and the right to access global communications infrastructure?
I'm pretty sure the 360 has a similar feature that has been there for a while now...
That's true - modded 360s get banned from XBL over somewhat similar mechanism. And Nintendo seems to release Wii firmware updates that do shit-all except nuke homebrew. (Don't ask me for details, I've never run Wii homebrew. But I've seen damn-a-lot of firmware updates! Oh, the excitement of seeing awesome free updates from Nintendo and not seeing any new features whatsoever!)
why only bash Sony for it? Its not like MS has a history of empowering consumers.
Two reasons: Sony has had history with this stuff. The backlash against them when they tried to put rootkits in their DRM'd *ahem* superficially CD-like audio media products, and how they handled that crisis, was a very sorry cavalcade of sheer idiocy. Reason 2: PS3 has come a really long way down. Originally it was an epic super-console that was supposed to do everything and anything and run Linux. Features have gone, Linux support was scrapped retroactively, and now Sony apparently has shown, very clearly, that they're not cool with homebrew and all tampering will be dealt with. I've stuck here with Nintendo and MS - at least they've been honestly claiming their consoles are closed platforms the whole time. I've gotten exactly what it says in the package.
Ruby is just not ready for the brilliance of the Eclipse Development System. It was too shoddy, too tainted with the foul fumes of scripting languages. Practically reeks of Perl.
But none of this applies to PHP, which NetBeans continues to support?
Clearly, you have a very curious view of what constitutes elegance. =)
Wait a minute... Microsoft says the boy cheated, mother objects, everyone is outraged, Microsoft sends a Twitter message "he did cheat, we checked", and everyone says "O, that's OK then, carry on". I must be in a parallel universe.
How are you supposed to handle these situations? If you get a statement from the Microsoft rep who's in an actual position to check the situation, it's as trustworthy a statement as you can possibly get in this case. Granted, Twitter isn't probably the best medium for this (a bit more details wouldn't hurt anyone) but there's nothing intrinsically bad about the whole procedure.
And if the kid really did employ actual cheats as opposed to just mad skills, then it's fairly clear that it's ban time, autism or not. The terms of service apply to everyone. If they banned people for having mad skills, then everyone would be in danger of bans.
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks?
Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
Dear citizen of [Insert country here]. Your politicians in [Insert the building name/address/location, as commonly referred to, of the parliament or equivalent body here] are probably doing things just right most of the time, but sometimes, they do incredibly boneheaded things. Wikileaks revealed [Insert new-found nastiness], but if you had been awake, you would have remembered [Insert recent Slashdot headline involving IT legislation banality] which already exposed how rotten things are on general level, didn't it? So don't act surprised - every country has problems that need fixin'. Sincerely, [Insert semi-anonymous pundit pen-name here]
"Synaptic" is not the name of the app store. It's the name of the GUI for APT. And APT isn't the name of the app store either; it stands for Advanced Package Tool.
The real name of the app store? *drum roll* "package repository" that contains the "packages" that make up the "distribution".. Note the conspicuous lack of capitalisation and trademark symbols. Note the fact that no one demands you to use just Debian's (or Ubuntu's, or whoever's) repository; you can add more yourself or even start your own.
"Wolf said that the document format is also full of other surprises. For example, it is reportedly possible to write PDFs which display different content in different operating systems, browsers or PDF readers -- or even depending on a computer's language settings."
Amazing -- totally unbelievable!! This should be wholly forbidden. Who would want to read documentation that knew what system you were running, or what language you could read, and tailored the display to make it more relevant to you? Text files don't let you do these things! Adobe is clearly going too far.
Look, the security problem isn't that the features exist. The security problem is that people are just plain ordinary mortals, and plain ordinary mortals screw things up. Every new option adds another route to failure.
Apple doesn't like to ship too huge manuals. My sister wanted a nice printed GarageBand manual. She sent the PDF manual to my father, who opened it on a computer with an older Windows version of Acrobat Reader that didn't know damn about the language switch thingy. So he ended up getting boundlessly confused when the PDF actually appeared to have zillions of pages in dozens of languages, while the PDF only appeared to have Finnish version when viewed on OS X.
A careless act of "just open the file and press the print button and go have a coffee" could have ended up wasting a lot of paper, because of a nice big fat feature mismatch problem. In Adobe's own damn software. Granted, not an earth-shattering problem, but inexplicable and unexpected behaviour nevertheless. There would have been a lot less puzzled questions if only Apple had shipped separate PDFs for different languages.
Hmm, I wonder how many people have ended up screaming and shouting when someone else printed the wrong language version for them, because they didn't even notice the document has different language versions in them and the computers were set to different locales. I'm sure there's lots of confusion about when a document that's sold as the ultimate solution to print the document the exact same way in every platform on every computer doesn't work as expected.
My provider blocks the standard SMTP port just in case my computer is a SPAM BOT.
To be honest, that's actually a sensible strategy. Around here, it's even a law: ISPs just can't let customers have egress SMTP traffic, it all has to go through the smarthost. SMTP is a broken protocol that should be replaced as soon as we have a sensible alternative (and unluckily, no one has proposed one yet).
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.
Hint from a random European leftist scumbag: You don't need special legislation for the internet content. If hate crimes are illegal, then they're illegal whether they're online or offline. All you need to do is to regulate the infrastructure itself: you need to have clear, effective, just, and hard-to-abuse rules that govern the terms of cooperation between Internet service providers and the law enforcement. Cops can't stomp on you and you can't hide from cops if there's a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Also, a small hint: don't the newbies these days remember that "killswitches" don't frigging work? Propose one, get laughed at. I can't really remember the specifics, but there was this stupid American law, called CIPA or something, introduced by some fellow called McCain or something like that. It hasn't succeeded eliminating Internet pornography or peoples' access to it, last I checked. Probably because they forgot to apply it to every device on US soil, which sounds to me like it's a little bit infeasible. Also, it failed because the filters just don't work. If there's one thing anyone should be aware of, it's that content and access are two things that are notoriously difficult, even impossible, to police.
no. before GNU, there was "open source" code;-) From Bsd
And even before that, it was pretty much natural state of the software due to several reasons - software wasn't as portable as it is now, software wasn't seen as a "product" (if you wanted to make money off computers, you sold fully built, ready-to-use systems to big customers - remember, people off the street weren't buying computers), and the legislation regarding software copyrightability was murky. Compared to the modern licenses, the early Unix licenses look... complicated. So did the licenses to a lot of other software at the time.
I once managed to transfer some files off my Commodore 64 floppies. Wouldn't be able to do that now, because none of the computers at hand have obsolete printer ports to attach the 1541 interface cable to. And the computers understandably also don't run MS-DOS.
I also had a bunch of PC files from 1990s, which I was able to read (thanks to OpenOffice.org and nice WordPerfect filters available for it), though the formatting wasn't imported picture-perfectly. Some other word processing packages from that era just used plain text, which made imports even easier. The only problem generally was the IBM CP437 character set, which was very easy to convert to Latin-1 or UTF-8.
Image files have fared best: ImageMagick can handle tons of stuff. Though vector formats are a problem - it might not be, if only I had had the foresight to export images to WMF/CGM, which are *a little bit* more readable these days. Probably no luck reading the odd files made with Arts & Letters Composer on Windows 3.0...
Slashdot Mirror
We haven't yet made virtual sex with computer-controlled characters, as a form of sexual activity, very interesting. People have cybersex all the time, but they tend to do it because there's another person in the other end and who responds in a reasonably human-like manner. Sex games and minigames tend to be rubbish, because... well, if you want porn, you know where to get it easier.
As a result, if you want to make a serious game, game devs have to make sex a part of story - it's much easier for people to make a mental connection with fictional characters that way. And, frankly, if you present sex as part of a story, the sex acts themselves suddenly become a rather irrelevant part of the story. (I've read a few good novels, for example, with great sex scenes - just 2 chapters of lead-up and 2 lines of the dirty parts.)
Simply put: It's easier to make fascinating drama than to come up with some interesting, new and fresh ways to say "and then they had sex". Because it's been done to death. It's hard to think of ways to make sex itself interesting.
That said, I see no reason to shy away from sex in any forms of art. It's entirely possible to put sex in most forms of art tastefully and interestingly enough - video games should be no exception. People just should figure out how to do it interestingly.
And here's the same on a little bit less, um, misanthropic terms:
When people say "let's feed the poor instead of wasting money on X", they usually mean "let's throw money at some short-term solution that we can actually implement while politician Y's term lasts". Now, short-term solutions are important, but you should never forget that they're just that - short-term solutions.
People wave the "let's feed the poor instead of wasting money on X" expression as if that'd solve all of their problems. They want to be the heroes who say how things will be fixed. Sure, nix a space program, and you have money to spare. Can you solve the world hunger? No. You soon realise that despite of those grandiose promises you just said, you're actually applying band-aid. After the money is gone, you notice that you're not any nearer to a lasting solution. And then everyone else will realise that your plan had a few holes in it. Think they'll like it?
Space research is part of the long-term solution to improved standard of living: scientific and engineering research means better technology, better technology means a better standard of living. The sad part is that the results come in decades, not in a few years. Colonising other planets might be even a longer term plan than that, but the rewards could be even higher.
How many Mickey Mouse cartoons have you seen lately ...?
Mickey is used as a logo, and in merchandising.... but not as a character ?
Been to Europe lately? Mickey is still a frequently seen character in Disney comics published in Europe - perhaps a tad less popular than Scrooge and Donald etc, but popular nevertheless.
Yeah, I don't agree with Disney that they should keep the stranglehold on their characters, but to suggest that Disney doesn't use these characters is ludicrous. They use Mickey all the time.
where the front page was nothing but a banner and search entry field?
Shiiiiit. Do you remember the bullshit that the competing search engines had on their web pages when Google launched? Useless portal shit as far as eye could see. And when you typed your query, it responded 10 seconds later, and you saw a giant page with dozens and dozens of blinking ads... and buried somewhere in the page was a tiny, tiny comment that said that there were no search results? And every few years, the gave out a press release where they said "yeah, we almost updated our search index this year, but we didn't really feel like doing that?"
Considering that hell, Google is doing pretty damn well.
What he's doing is completely legal. Quite how much money he makes would be interesting to see, anyone buying a 3d package would surely do a small amount of research.
Uh, hello? He's obviously not selling things to people who do "small amount of research". These pages have scammy salesman tactics all over the place. Awesome package creator guy's personal endorsement, quotes from happy random users, obviously bogus slashed prices, available for three days only, so get it now. (* offer may be available perpetually in certain planets.)
It's legal in that it fulfils the requirements of the licenses, but not exactly the most ethical way to distribute software. Customers should know what they're getting. They should know that they're buying a piece of free software that has worthwhile stuff added to it - again, material that may come from many free sources, but you can't download a printed book, now can you? They should be saying "gee, this looks pretty good for a free software package, but no way I'm going to download gigabytes of videos and textures, and that printed manual sounds sweet. Send me one, I'll just download the software and toy with it until the package arrives."
I'm just amazed at how completely oblivious "Chief Security Specialist" Jussi Jaakonaho was during the email correspondence, AND that he was perfectly fine with sharing root passwords via plaintext email.
Well, he works for Nokia, so this move was done completely in accordance with the new Microsoft security guidelines. </obviousjoke>
Well, since this system is based on VBS2, I hope they'll just import some Operation Flashpoint mods. You know, for realism. Video game technology is developed in discrete versions and milestones, but new terrorist weaponry/techniques and urban hazards just keep appearing all the time. It's up to the modders to continuously keep the simulations abreast with the new strange things in real world.
Use ARMA? that seems like it could just about fit your idea from what I understand (I don't own the game personally)
According to the article, this system uses VBS2, which is actually based on the OpFlashpoint/ArmA engine. And I guess it's a good engine for simulations like this. (I haven't played ArmA but I've played OpFlashpoint.)
It's still only a few dollars each way, but Android is only free if you don't include *any* of Google's services on it.
Yeah, but why would Nokia care for Google services when they are already building a bunch of mobile services on their own? Just go for bare-bones Android and port the existing stuff over. Then they would "graciously" bow over to the customer demand and put Google's stuff there if the customers really seem to want it. (Which would happen, like, the following day.)
"they asked whether Bulletstorm, an upcoming M-rated shooter from Epic Games, is the worst game in the world."
They obviously have never played the Leisure Suite Larry franchise.
No! I think they've never seen the worst of the worst: These newfangled video games called "Doom" and "Quake" and "Afterlife". You may not have heard of these games, because the far too liberal-biased (yes, Fox too) lamestream media keeps news about them down. But if you ask your any friendly neighbourhood pastor, family rights activist or conservative blogger, you'll see they know quite a lot about these dangerous new threats to kids.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, it's a glorious day! A moral panic about an upcoming computer game, not ones that were released ~15 years ago.
So is redtube republican porn? I assume there's also a bluetube, with democratic port. (greentube for the green party?)
No, it's got free videos, so it's obviously run by communists. And make no mistake about their commitment to the ideology! The court documents show that all of the models featured on the site have been staunch members of the Communist Party for at least 60 years!
(...and the joke is probably just as old...)
Access to the internet and other forms of communication are one of our arms we have in defense of our liberties. The internet should therefore fall under the protection of the 2nd Amendment. Resist the kill-switch!
Oh, those Americans and their explosive solutions! I keep thinking of the old publication from pirate radio folks called "Radio Is My Bomb". The more nefarious sort of governments might make case that the Internet is exactly like unregulated radio broadcasting (normal people who are talking about stuff that might offend some other people, while playing some music with naughty words and luscious rhythms!), and as such it's not governed by laws guaranteeing free ownership of guns, but rather the laws guaranteeing not-so-free ownership of bombs. ...the kind of laws that recently put people in Gitmo, see.
OK, seriously, though: here in Finland, we have legislators talking about the "right to broadband". Which isn't exactly a constitutional right, and it just practically means that ISPs must provide fairly priced and affordable broadband Internet connections to every household. But it sure sounds grandiose, doesn't it? The legislators say that the Internet is necessary for people getting through their day-to-day life and using government services, but why can't we just go out and say that it's nowadays starting to be a necessity for communications in general? Why couldn't access to the Internet be a basic human right, in that government shouldn't stop people from doing that? Isn't it high time that the legislators should specifically guarantee freedom of online communications and the right to access global communications infrastructure?
I'm pretty sure the 360 has a similar feature that has been there for a while now...
That's true - modded 360s get banned from XBL over somewhat similar mechanism. And Nintendo seems to release Wii firmware updates that do shit-all except nuke homebrew. (Don't ask me for details, I've never run Wii homebrew. But I've seen damn-a-lot of firmware updates! Oh, the excitement of seeing awesome free updates from Nintendo and not seeing any new features whatsoever!)
why only bash Sony for it? Its not like MS has a history of empowering consumers.
Two reasons: Sony has had history with this stuff. The backlash against them when they tried to put rootkits in their DRM'd *ahem* superficially CD-like audio media products, and how they handled that crisis, was a very sorry cavalcade of sheer idiocy. Reason 2: PS3 has come a really long way down. Originally it was an epic super-console that was supposed to do everything and anything and run Linux. Features have gone, Linux support was scrapped retroactively, and now Sony apparently has shown, very clearly, that they're not cool with homebrew and all tampering will be dealt with. I've stuck here with Nintendo and MS - at least they've been honestly claiming their consoles are closed platforms the whole time. I've gotten exactly what it says in the package.
Ruby is just not ready for the brilliance of the Eclipse Development System. It was too shoddy, too tainted with the foul fumes of scripting languages. Practically reeks of Perl.
But none of this applies to PHP, which NetBeans continues to support?
Clearly, you have a very curious view of what constitutes elegance. =)
Wait a minute... Microsoft says the boy cheated, mother objects, everyone is outraged, Microsoft sends a Twitter message "he did cheat, we checked", and everyone says "O, that's OK then, carry on". I must be in a parallel universe.
How are you supposed to handle these situations? If you get a statement from the Microsoft rep who's in an actual position to check the situation, it's as trustworthy a statement as you can possibly get in this case. Granted, Twitter isn't probably the best medium for this (a bit more details wouldn't hurt anyone) but there's nothing intrinsically bad about the whole procedure.
And if the kid really did employ actual cheats as opposed to just mad skills, then it's fairly clear that it's ban time, autism or not. The terms of service apply to everyone. If they banned people for having mad skills, then everyone would be in danger of bans.
Not for long. Norway has oil.
Oh damn! I think you're onto something here.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!!!!1!1!!!!!
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks? Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
Yeah, and why buy MS Office when data forensic tools can get much more information out of Office documents than Office itself? Not the first time this has bitten people in the butt.
Dear citizen of [Insert country here]. Your politicians in [Insert the building name/address/location, as commonly referred to, of the parliament or equivalent body here] are probably doing things just right most of the time, but sometimes, they do incredibly boneheaded things. Wikileaks revealed [Insert new-found nastiness], but if you had been awake, you would have remembered [Insert recent Slashdot headline involving IT legislation banality] which already exposed how rotten things are on general level, didn't it? So don't act surprised - every country has problems that need fixin'. Sincerely, [Insert semi-anonymous pundit pen-name here]
You could give your store a name that makes no sense.
"Synaptic" is not the name of the app store. It's the name of the GUI for APT. And APT isn't the name of the app store either; it stands for Advanced Package Tool.
The real name of the app store? *drum roll* "package repository" that contains the "packages" that make up the "distribution".. Note the conspicuous lack of capitalisation and trademark symbols. Note the fact that no one demands you to use just Debian's (or Ubuntu's, or whoever's) repository; you can add more yourself or even start your own.
You're not an Xbox owner, then?
That's funny, because I got a Passport login ages ago too, and didn't actually need it for anything until 2 years ago when I got a 360... =)
"Wolf said that the document format is also full of other surprises. For example, it is reportedly possible to write PDFs which display different content in different operating systems, browsers or PDF readers -- or even depending on a computer's language settings."
Amazing -- totally unbelievable!! This should be wholly forbidden. Who would want to read documentation that knew what system you were running, or what language you could read, and tailored the display to make it more relevant to you? Text files don't let you do these things! Adobe is clearly going too far.
Look, the security problem isn't that the features exist. The security problem is that people are just plain ordinary mortals, and plain ordinary mortals screw things up. Every new option adds another route to failure.
Apple doesn't like to ship too huge manuals. My sister wanted a nice printed GarageBand manual. She sent the PDF manual to my father, who opened it on a computer with an older Windows version of Acrobat Reader that didn't know damn about the language switch thingy. So he ended up getting boundlessly confused when the PDF actually appeared to have zillions of pages in dozens of languages, while the PDF only appeared to have Finnish version when viewed on OS X.
A careless act of "just open the file and press the print button and go have a coffee" could have ended up wasting a lot of paper, because of a nice big fat feature mismatch problem. In Adobe's own damn software. Granted, not an earth-shattering problem, but inexplicable and unexpected behaviour nevertheless. There would have been a lot less puzzled questions if only Apple had shipped separate PDFs for different languages.
Hmm, I wonder how many people have ended up screaming and shouting when someone else printed the wrong language version for them, because they didn't even notice the document has different language versions in them and the computers were set to different locales. I'm sure there's lots of confusion about when a document that's sold as the ultimate solution to print the document the exact same way in every platform on every computer doesn't work as expected.
My provider blocks the standard SMTP port just in case my computer is a SPAM BOT.
To be honest, that's actually a sensible strategy. Around here, it's even a law: ISPs just can't let customers have egress SMTP traffic, it all has to go through the smarthost. SMTP is a broken protocol that should be replaced as soon as we have a sensible alternative (and unluckily, no one has proposed one yet).
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.
Hint from a random European leftist scumbag: You don't need special legislation for the internet content. If hate crimes are illegal, then they're illegal whether they're online or offline. All you need to do is to regulate the infrastructure itself: you need to have clear, effective, just, and hard-to-abuse rules that govern the terms of cooperation between Internet service providers and the law enforcement. Cops can't stomp on you and you can't hide from cops if there's a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Also, a small hint: don't the newbies these days remember that "killswitches" don't frigging work? Propose one, get laughed at. I can't really remember the specifics, but there was this stupid American law, called CIPA or something, introduced by some fellow called McCain or something like that. It hasn't succeeded eliminating Internet pornography or peoples' access to it, last I checked. Probably because they forgot to apply it to every device on US soil, which sounds to me like it's a little bit infeasible. Also, it failed because the filters just don't work. If there's one thing anyone should be aware of, it's that content and access are two things that are notoriously difficult, even impossible, to police.
no. before GNU, there was "open source" code ;-) From Bsd
And even before that, it was pretty much natural state of the software due to several reasons - software wasn't as portable as it is now, software wasn't seen as a "product" (if you wanted to make money off computers, you sold fully built, ready-to-use systems to big customers - remember, people off the street weren't buying computers), and the legislation regarding software copyrightability was murky. Compared to the modern licenses, the early Unix licenses look... complicated. So did the licenses to a lot of other software at the time.
I once managed to transfer some files off my Commodore 64 floppies. Wouldn't be able to do that now, because none of the computers at hand have obsolete printer ports to attach the 1541 interface cable to. And the computers understandably also don't run MS-DOS.
I also had a bunch of PC files from 1990s, which I was able to read (thanks to OpenOffice.org and nice WordPerfect filters available for it), though the formatting wasn't imported picture-perfectly. Some other word processing packages from that era just used plain text, which made imports even easier. The only problem generally was the IBM CP437 character set, which was very easy to convert to Latin-1 or UTF-8.
Image files have fared best: ImageMagick can handle tons of stuff. Though vector formats are a problem - it might not be, if only I had had the foresight to export images to WMF/CGM, which are *a little bit* more readable these days. Probably no luck reading the odd files made with Arts & Letters Composer on Windows 3.0...