Here's a very recent article from one of the major German newspapers: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir... Please use your preferred translation tool, which you trust.
For those who are too lazy to read for themselves: He's under investigation in Germany as well. His entire financial existence is on the line according to the article.
Sometimes I think people have become a bit too sensitive and quickly to assume everything is meant as an attack.
In my country people make a big deal out of something like nuclear waste transports with protests, roads and rail blockages and nonsense like that. Besides of the clickbaity headline, I think it's an interesting story when someone moves stuff around that's as massive as this and apparently does it well.
Like in most of these cases if it goes to court, they'll be offered significantly reduced sentences in exchange for information that exposes others or even their entire infrastructure. And they usually cave in quickly.
Having spent my childhood in the former Soviet Union (deported) I understand how effective propaganda is. My parents and grand parents still bear a latent distrust against the West, which makes them quick to assume that the USA is to blame for something that's wrong in the world. Even though they know about most of the lies and selective truths that we've been told by now. They know how corrupt state officials or even the occasional neighbour paid to spy on you (yeah they were really great at maintaining their cover that way) lived like kings while the rest of the workers lived in relative poverty, yet they still romanticize with the situation on some level.
Then we moved to Germany where I had to learn about Nazi propaganda techniques and how effective those were in riling up the people for their total war.
Sure, propaganda can be extremely effective, that was never the question. The problem lies with being told what to think, and not how you can think for yourself by rational thinking and weighing pros and cons. With the former you must trust in those who have the power to create and spread propaganda, hope that they only have your best interests in mind.
But well, history taught us that this is often not the case. It tells us that power tends to corrupt, that those who have power don't want to give it up easily and do a lot of things in order to stay in power.
It's not only that there are 'theories' out there that are just nuts. It's that most of them rely on non sequitur like circular logic or arguments from ignorance while riding a thin line of plausibility. For example when there's no evidence for something that doesn't make the absence of evidence evidence of a suppression of evidence. Yeah, yeah, I know that someone is probably going to throw that Carl Sagan quote my way that states "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". I do agree with his statement, but you have to keep in mind that this does not override the principle of burden of proof. You make a claim that something exists and it's your job to prove that it exists, not the job of others to disprove that it exists.
The thing to take away from here is that both state and private institutions will investigate any kind of shit that may give them an advantage if it works, whether it is rooted in hard science of science fiction/fantasy. However, whether or not they are successful proving the concept or furthermore are successful in developing an actual application is an entirely different story. For example NASA is also investigating warp drive technology. They don't make a big secret out of it since it's nothing as scary as possible mind control. That does not mean that you should to plan your next holiday trip to Barnard's Loop quite yet.
That strategy Snowden detailed there has been used for a long time. Take the Cold War for example where you had both the US and the Soviet Union (mostly Russia) using that kind of tactics to control their own people and sow distrust among the enemy. And as far as I can see, this kind of information warfare has never stopped.
So if you want to hear my conspiracy hypothesis here. We don't need something like acoustic or electromagnetic mind control technology. The human need for approval and the way this can be exploited through social media has already proven to be a very effective tool in modifying human behaviour to at least some degree. And the really scary part here is that most people seem do it not only voluntarily but are actually happy to do it (ignoring a correlation between social media use and mental health problems here for the moment). And here you probably also have heard that the Chinese are taking it a even a step further by introducing a social credit system, where the state rates the actions of their citizens.
Ancient remedies can work, sure, why not? But they don't necessarily have to.
Let me use one extreme example like tobacco. Native Americans have been burning and inhaling the smoke for a very long time; they didn't even use any filters as far as I know. So there shouldn't be much wrong with smoking it, right? Well, not quite right in this case. While tobacco might be all natural and has been consumed for a long long time, we still discovered that it isn't as healthy as we initially thought and furthermore discovered that it can actually cause harm to someone's health.
My general point being that these things can be scientifically investigated for a correlation and maybe even a cause and effect relationship with a more refined study. Here we can see that quite a bit of that ancient Chinese medicine can't be backed up by using the scientific method or are at least not replicable. And if you can't replicate the results with independent tests the 'science' is not worth its money.
The first part makes it sound like that traditional Chinese healing mysticism. Although insects are certainly a good source of protein and pretty efficient in converting plant matter into said proteins.
Anyway, I suppose it's better than killing Tigers and other endangered species for their bone(r)s because some old guys can't get a proper erection any more.
As long as you keep your total amount of carbs in check it should be fine. It's some old folk wisdom that you can eat anything (let's not be too pedantic here) if you eat in moderation.
But if you eat a bowl of sugar and starch for breakfast aka cereals, a plate of starch like pasta for lunch, and then puffy slice of sugar and starch like a cake for dinner over a longer period of time, your pancreas might not be able to keep up with it for very long. Add the sedentary lifestyle that seems to become ever so popular and you'll get full blown type 2 diabetes before you turn 50.
It is. This was just the trial that among other things was to provide some evidence on whether or not it helps unemployed people who are seeking a job.
Integral? We were doomed when the first clockworks were built. Maybe before that. Remembering all of human history with accuracy is probably also something that's beyond 90% of humanity.
What is more impressive is an assembly AI that can cope with that. One that can tighten 50 screws slightly differently because they need to be or tweak two pieces so they slot together as
It would be interesting to see them assemble a larger sample of chairs. Maybe 30 and then see how they can cope with the variation there.
How would they deal with missing parts? Something that's, jokes aside, also a real possibility and is more likely to be encountered with a larger sample.
What do you consider to be a cure?
Type 2 diabetes can apparently be solved in a considerable number of cases by exercise, changing your diet, and of course the result of losing body fat. Not long ago there was a study conducted in the UK: http://www.thelancet.com/journ...
But then again the UK has socialized medicine. For them it's more expensive and less profitable to treat a disease over a prolonged time than finding a solution that is of a more permanent nature. At least in the Type 2 case most patients can continue to stay in remission on their own and don't need expensive support from the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm not sure what they are supposed to do about that, since Google is also hosting tons of copyright infringing material on their own google drive. Because you know, you can't really control what kind of encrypted files people upload there and then share the links and passwords with others through any means. I'm not sure how the Apple cloud works, since I've never used it.
So what can be done here? Decrypt and scan all files? Not feasible because it takes too long and costs too much. Ban encryption? Theoretically an option, but do we really want something like this to happen? This list is certainly not exhaustive. If someone finds more ideas, maybe some that make sense, please add them.
Depends on what information we are talking about.
In the beginning you could just not create a Steam community profile. This option was hiding all information except game play time and achievements, which was visible to your friends regardless. This is still true. You'll have to create a Steam profile and set either game details and or playtime to private if you don't want the people on your friendlist to be able to see it.
In the current system your profile information is set to public, like it was before. This information includes your friend list, badges, Steam level, comments and group memberships in addition to customizations that you've made. You have to set this to private or friends only if you don't want to share it with just anyone. Doing so changes all the following settings accordingly.
A child setting of this is game details - which includes what games you own, your wishlist, achievements, playtime and what you are currently playing are set to Friends Only. Before the change this setting did not exist at all and was set by the parent 'profile'. And now there's also a sub setting for this that allows you to keep your total playtime hidden regardless of the parent setting. Since your profile was initially set to public and also published your game details, I suppose Steam Spy used this to collect data. So I suppose this particular part is no longer possible unless you've got their bot on your friend list.
Yes, IF Valve's decision was to comply to the new EU regulation then they missed that particular point either on purpose or by mistake. Maybe they did it for other reasons. Maybe people with EU based IPs will get a different treatment once that regulation goes into effect. We'll have to wait and see unless someone wants to ask them.
Well. I had to edit my profile to make some things private that I wanted to be private but were public to my friends before. Hence a privacy mode does not seem to be the default setting.
I also created a new account for testing purposes just now. I have to click once to set up my profile. Then I go to privacy settings and see that 'My basic details' are set to Public. 'My profile' is set to Public. 'Game details' set to Friend Only. 'Always keep my total playtime private even if users can see my game details.' is not checked. 'Inventory' is set to Friends Only and 'Always keep Steam Gifts private even if users can see my inventory.' is checked.
I think the 'Game details' and 'Inventory' setting are the only ones that's changed to being not public by default.
Too bad they used the opt-out privacy approach then.
For example I've got plenty of friends on Steam that never created a Steam community profile. They simply never touched that feature and I can still see their game details when visiting the store pages of the games in question through Steam. Also, in your own privacy settings you have to tick a checkbox that says: Always keep my total playtime private even if users can see my game details. Instead of something like "keep my total playtime playtime public if users that are eligible to see my game details".
Yes, it's an improvement, but it's a bit lacking since the option isn't on by default as it appears. I think you only get that option if you create a Steam profile first.
Most of my friends don't have Steam profiles, because that seems to be the most reasonable idea if you don't want other people to see your information, right? But of course that does not stop Valve from collecting data on your Steam usage since you can see their play times when you visit the store page of an individual game. From there I can look into their stats and see what achievements they've gotten at what time and so forth. It may not be the most efficient way to gather data for an individual user, but when automatism comes into play that's not an obstacle any more.
Of course it has nothing to do with the current facebook fiasco that Valve decided to be more open to these requests that must have existed since the very day the launched Steam. I remember quite a bit of pushback from people concerned with privacy and DRM proliferation in the early 2000's, who rejected Steam and all the other platforms after it for a long time. But in the end most of them caved in due to Steam's popularity. I'm one of them. And still I try to get the few games that I play in these times on alternatives like GOG if possible.
Nothing is wrong with that. It's the initial state when a discovery is made, but usually doesn't last that long before hypotheses come up. In this case some of the articles that I've read mention some of the hypotheses. But the overuse of the particular phrase has given it some negative connotation. That's the unfortunate part.
Unfortunately "baffles scientists" is a phrase I've come associate with people who use it as a strawman, because there's actually plenty of hypotheses out there. And if they present any of them it's a usually one of the more if not most ridiculous sounding ones. Then they proceed with a false dichotomy by presenting 'maybe it's aliens' with more reasonable sounding arguments than the alleged, opposing position has to offer.
If I remember correctly, even the first Battlefield game had at least some simplistic ballistic simulation, which made it different from your old school first person shooters. What you describe may work for games like Quake or even the newest iteration of Counter Strike, where distances are a lot more predicable and you don't have ballistic simulation. In those 'old school games' you usually also can fire from your hip and have the first shot hit exactly where your augmented reality cross-hairs point towards, because you know, the projectile (actually hitscan) doesn't come out of the gun's barrel and converges with the cross-hairs at a certain distance, it comes out of your virtual eyes.
But in games that try to be at least a bit more realistic in certain aspects it usually don't works that reliably. The same applies to close quarters because of all the different stances a player may be in that require you to adjust your aim. Take ArmA 3 as an example, where the size of all player is also the same. Perhaps try it with the ACE3 mod. There you get a lot of factors in the ballistics simulation - obviously gravity, bullet mass, and muzzle velocity; dynamic wind which has somewhat realistic fluid dynamics; air pressure; temperature; humidity; Coriolis and Eötvös effect.
I beg to differ on the "would never say face-to-face to someone". It may be a pseudo-anonymous thing in the following example as well, but it that doesn't stop it from going as far as a face-to-face situation. Just think about actual, physical violence among sports fans of opposing teams.
Here I can talk from personal experience since I've attended soccer matches in the past and was greeted by some more radical fans of opposing teams and their flying cobblestones as we made our way to the train station. Fortunately police in riot gear was already nearby since they expected this to happen.
All I can say from observation is that people can get very emotional and riled up about any kind of shit. And when you're in a community that doesn't discourage but even fosters aggressive behaviour, things can get out of hand quickly. This is where the communities of very competitive video games may get problematic since a lot of these games only focus on very limited aspects of player interaction.
I do agree that this would be a case where behaviour is altered. But think back to the example with sports fans. Is it the games themselves that make fans alter their behaviour or rather social interactions with other consumers, perhaps opposing consumers? Probably a combination of both. But in my eyes the multi-player or multi-fan part seems to be a crucial factor in this.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a very recent article from one of the major German newspapers: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wir... Please use your preferred translation tool, which you trust.
For those who are too lazy to read for themselves: He's under investigation in Germany as well. His entire financial existence is on the line according to the article.
Sometimes I think people have become a bit too sensitive and quickly to assume everything is meant as an attack.
In my country people make a big deal out of something like nuclear waste transports with protests, roads and rail blockages and nonsense like that. Besides of the clickbaity headline, I think it's an interesting story when someone moves stuff around that's as massive as this and apparently does it well.
Like in most of these cases if it goes to court, they'll be offered significantly reduced sentences in exchange for information that exposes others or even their entire infrastructure. And they usually cave in quickly.
Having spent my childhood in the former Soviet Union (deported) I understand how effective propaganda is. My parents and grand parents still bear a latent distrust against the West, which makes them quick to assume that the USA is to blame for something that's wrong in the world. Even though they know about most of the lies and selective truths that we've been told by now. They know how corrupt state officials or even the occasional neighbour paid to spy on you (yeah they were really great at maintaining their cover that way) lived like kings while the rest of the workers lived in relative poverty, yet they still romanticize with the situation on some level.
Then we moved to Germany where I had to learn about Nazi propaganda techniques and how effective those were in riling up the people for their total war.
Sure, propaganda can be extremely effective, that was never the question. The problem lies with being told what to think, and not how you can think for yourself by rational thinking and weighing pros and cons. With the former you must trust in those who have the power to create and spread propaganda, hope that they only have your best interests in mind.
But well, history taught us that this is often not the case. It tells us that power tends to corrupt, that those who have power don't want to give it up easily and do a lot of things in order to stay in power.
It's not only that there are 'theories' out there that are just nuts. It's that most of them rely on non sequitur like circular logic or arguments from ignorance while riding a thin line of plausibility. For example when there's no evidence for something that doesn't make the absence of evidence evidence of a suppression of evidence.
Yeah, yeah, I know that someone is probably going to throw that Carl Sagan quote my way that states "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". I do agree with his statement, but you have to keep in mind that this does not override the principle of burden of proof. You make a claim that something exists and it's your job to prove that it exists, not the job of others to disprove that it exists.
The thing to take away from here is that both state and private institutions will investigate any kind of shit that may give them an advantage if it works, whether it is rooted in hard science of science fiction/fantasy. However, whether or not they are successful proving the concept or furthermore are successful in developing an actual application is an entirely different story.
For example NASA is also investigating warp drive technology. They don't make a big secret out of it since it's nothing as scary as possible mind control. That does not mean that you should to plan your next holiday trip to Barnard's Loop quite yet.
That strategy Snowden detailed there has been used for a long time. Take the Cold War for example where you had both the US and the Soviet Union (mostly Russia) using that kind of tactics to control their own people and sow distrust among the enemy. And as far as I can see, this kind of information warfare has never stopped.
So if you want to hear my conspiracy hypothesis here. We don't need something like acoustic or electromagnetic mind control technology. The human need for approval and the way this can be exploited through social media has already proven to be a very effective tool in modifying human behaviour to at least some degree. And the really scary part here is that most people seem do it not only voluntarily but are actually happy to do it (ignoring a correlation between social media use and mental health problems here for the moment). And here you probably also have heard that the Chinese are taking it a even a step further by introducing a social credit system, where the state rates the actions of their citizens.
Ancient remedies can work, sure, why not? But they don't necessarily have to.
Let me use one extreme example like tobacco. Native Americans have been burning and inhaling the smoke for a very long time; they didn't even use any filters as far as I know. So there shouldn't be much wrong with smoking it, right? Well, not quite right in this case. While tobacco might be all natural and has been consumed for a long long time, we still discovered that it isn't as healthy as we initially thought and furthermore discovered that it can actually cause harm to someone's health.
My general point being that these things can be scientifically investigated for a correlation and maybe even a cause and effect relationship with a more refined study. Here we can see that quite a bit of that ancient Chinese medicine can't be backed up by using the scientific method or are at least not replicable. And if you can't replicate the results with independent tests the 'science' is not worth its money.
The first part makes it sound like that traditional Chinese healing mysticism. Although insects are certainly a good source of protein and pretty efficient in converting plant matter into said proteins.
Anyway, I suppose it's better than killing Tigers and other endangered species for their bone(r)s because some old guys can't get a proper erection any more.
As long as you keep your total amount of carbs in check it should be fine. It's some old folk wisdom that you can eat anything (let's not be too pedantic here) if you eat in moderation.
But if you eat a bowl of sugar and starch for breakfast aka cereals, a plate of starch like pasta for lunch, and then puffy slice of sugar and starch like a cake for dinner over a longer period of time, your pancreas might not be able to keep up with it for very long. Add the sedentary lifestyle that seems to become ever so popular and you'll get full blown type 2 diabetes before you turn 50.
It is. This was just the trial that among other things was to provide some evidence on whether or not it helps unemployed people who are seeking a job.
Integral? We were doomed when the first clockworks were built. Maybe before that. Remembering all of human history with accuracy is probably also something that's beyond 90% of humanity.
What is more impressive is an assembly AI that can cope with that. One that can tighten 50 screws slightly differently because they need to be or tweak two pieces so they slot together as
It would be interesting to see them assemble a larger sample of chairs. Maybe 30 and then see how they can cope with the variation there.
How would they deal with missing parts? Something that's, jokes aside, also a real possibility and is more likely to be encountered with a larger sample.
Yeah, it was pretty dumb of T-Mobile to do this and getting caught. They knew the rules in the US and that punitive damages can be quite high.
What do you consider to be a cure?
Type 2 diabetes can apparently be solved in a considerable number of cases by exercise, changing your diet, and of course the result of losing body fat. Not long ago there was a study conducted in the UK: http://www.thelancet.com/journ... But then again the UK has socialized medicine. For them it's more expensive and less profitable to treat a disease over a prolonged time than finding a solution that is of a more permanent nature. At least in the Type 2 case most patients can continue to stay in remission on their own and don't need expensive support from the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm not sure what they are supposed to do about that, since Google is also hosting tons of copyright infringing material on their own google drive. Because you know, you can't really control what kind of encrypted files people upload there and then share the links and passwords with others through any means. I'm not sure how the Apple cloud works, since I've never used it.
So what can be done here? Decrypt and scan all files? Not feasible because it takes too long and costs too much. Ban encryption? Theoretically an option, but do we really want something like this to happen? This list is certainly not exhaustive. If someone finds more ideas, maybe some that make sense, please add them.
Depends on what information we are talking about.
In the beginning you could just not create a Steam community profile. This option was hiding all information except game play time and achievements, which was visible to your friends regardless. This is still true. You'll have to create a Steam profile and set either game details and or playtime to private if you don't want the people on your friendlist to be able to see it.
In the current system your profile information is set to public, like it was before. This information includes your friend list, badges, Steam level, comments and group memberships in addition to customizations that you've made. You have to set this to private or friends only if you don't want to share it with just anyone. Doing so changes all the following settings accordingly.
A child setting of this is game details - which includes what games you own, your wishlist, achievements, playtime and what you are currently playing are set to Friends Only. Before the change this setting did not exist at all and was set by the parent 'profile'. And now there's also a sub setting for this that allows you to keep your total playtime hidden regardless of the parent setting. Since your profile was initially set to public and also published your game details, I suppose Steam Spy used this to collect data. So I suppose this particular part is no longer possible unless you've got their bot on your friend list.
Yes, IF Valve's decision was to comply to the new EU regulation then they missed that particular point either on purpose or by mistake. Maybe they did it for other reasons. Maybe people with EU based IPs will get a different treatment once that regulation goes into effect. We'll have to wait and see unless someone wants to ask them.
Well. I had to edit my profile to make some things private that I wanted to be private but were public to my friends before. Hence a privacy mode does not seem to be the default setting.
I also created a new account for testing purposes just now. I have to click once to set up my profile. Then I go to privacy settings and see that 'My basic details' are set to Public. 'My profile' is set to Public. 'Game details' set to Friend Only. 'Always keep my total playtime private even if users can see my game details.' is not checked. 'Inventory' is set to Friends Only and 'Always keep Steam Gifts private even if users can see my inventory.' is checked.
I think the 'Game details' and 'Inventory' setting are the only ones that's changed to being not public by default.
Too bad they used the opt-out privacy approach then.
For example I've got plenty of friends on Steam that never created a Steam community profile. They simply never touched that feature and I can still see their game details when visiting the store pages of the games in question through Steam. Also, in your own privacy settings you have to tick a checkbox that says: Always keep my total playtime private even if users can see my game details. Instead of something like "keep my total playtime playtime public if users that are eligible to see my game details".
Yes, it's an improvement, but it's a bit lacking since the option isn't on by default as it appears. I think you only get that option if you create a Steam profile first.
Most of my friends don't have Steam profiles, because that seems to be the most reasonable idea if you don't want other people to see your information, right?
But of course that does not stop Valve from collecting data on your Steam usage since you can see their play times when you visit the store page of an individual game. From there I can look into their stats and see what achievements they've gotten at what time and so forth. It may not be the most efficient way to gather data for an individual user, but when automatism comes into play that's not an obstacle any more.
Of course it has nothing to do with the current facebook fiasco that Valve decided to be more open to these requests that must have existed since the very day the launched Steam.
I remember quite a bit of pushback from people concerned with privacy and DRM proliferation in the early 2000's, who rejected Steam and all the other platforms after it for a long time. But in the end most of them caved in due to Steam's popularity. I'm one of them. And still I try to get the few games that I play in these times on alternatives like GOG if possible.
Nothing is wrong with that. It's the initial state when a discovery is made, but usually doesn't last that long before hypotheses come up. In this case some of the articles that I've read mention some of the hypotheses. But the overuse of the particular phrase has given it some negative connotation. That's the unfortunate part.
Unfortunately "baffles scientists" is a phrase I've come associate with people who use it as a strawman, because there's actually plenty of hypotheses out there. And if they present any of them it's a usually one of the more if not most ridiculous sounding ones. Then they proceed with a false dichotomy by presenting 'maybe it's aliens' with more reasonable sounding arguments than the alleged, opposing position has to offer.
If I remember correctly, even the first Battlefield game had at least some simplistic ballistic simulation, which made it different from your old school first person shooters. What you describe may work for games like Quake or even the newest iteration of Counter Strike, where distances are a lot more predicable and you don't have ballistic simulation. In those 'old school games' you usually also can fire from your hip and have the first shot hit exactly where your augmented reality cross-hairs point towards, because you know, the projectile (actually hitscan) doesn't come out of the gun's barrel and converges with the cross-hairs at a certain distance, it comes out of your virtual eyes.
But in games that try to be at least a bit more realistic in certain aspects it usually don't works that reliably. The same applies to close quarters because of all the different stances a player may be in that require you to adjust your aim. Take ArmA 3 as an example, where the size of all player is also the same. Perhaps try it with the ACE3 mod. There you get a lot of factors in the ballistics simulation - obviously gravity, bullet mass, and muzzle velocity; dynamic wind which has somewhat realistic fluid dynamics; air pressure; temperature; humidity; Coriolis and Eötvös effect.
Why is this even newsworthy? It only shows that he was as much human as the majority of us.
I beg to differ on the "would never say face-to-face to someone". It may be a pseudo-anonymous thing in the following example as well, but it that doesn't stop it from going as far as a face-to-face situation. Just think about actual, physical violence among sports fans of opposing teams.
Here I can talk from personal experience since I've attended soccer matches in the past and was greeted by some more radical fans of opposing teams and their flying cobblestones as we made our way to the train station. Fortunately police in riot gear was already nearby since they expected this to happen.
All I can say from observation is that people can get very emotional and riled up about any kind of shit. And when you're in a community that doesn't discourage but even fosters aggressive behaviour, things can get out of hand quickly. This is where the communities of very competitive video games may get problematic since a lot of these games only focus on very limited aspects of player interaction.
I do agree that this would be a case where behaviour is altered. But think back to the example with sports fans. Is it the games themselves that make fans alter their behaviour or rather social interactions with other consumers, perhaps opposing consumers? Probably a combination of both. But in my eyes the multi-player or multi-fan part seems to be a crucial factor in this.