AFAIK, Google checks for sites that serve different content based on the user-agent, and destroys their ranking (if not delisting them altogether). I've never had a problem with the "scroll down" trick, although the only time I tend to find EE pages is from Google.
Okay, mister or missus molecular biologist, I'm assuming you think your (likely opposing) opinion isn't idiotic, so why is the PP wrong?
(Granted, I could come up with a few answers myself, and I'm just some guy who makes web pages, but so far, the PP has made a point, and you've just called a few names and dropped your job description. This helps nothing.)
But what's the point? Is solitude or confinement working to create a positive net gain to society? Is the person leaving reformed? Is there even enough of an immediate connection between crime and punishment that the criminal is deterred from later criminal activity? The problem I see is that those who decry such measures as coddling, and who want tougher punishment, rarely propose anything aside from fewer amenities or more time-- "more of the same"-- without examination of whether "the same" is working, driven by the overwhelming inertia of the penitentiary idea being "the method" for criminal handling.
Personally, I consider it a "judgement call". While invading other sovereign nations opens one up to retaliation, the balance between sovereignty and human rights must be weighed when choosing to breach another nation.
There's really no set formula for this-- for even telling what's "right" or "wrong", and what "wrong enough to intercede" is. It's why international organizations exist, and it is an important reason-- aside from unified military might-- why "rescuing" nations need to have international backing.
A further, more practical consideration is that the winner of a conflict can end up emboldened in their policies, or even re-write history, so an invader had better either have iron-clad, internationally-recognized proof of grievous harm being done, or be assured of enough of a victory to allow them to parade the crimes of the vanquished out to the world.
Make the trial phone home with a hash of the hardware specs on install or run. Invalidate the hash once the trial is up. Yeah, phone-homes are a pain, but I'm only talking about the trial version, here.
You could key the specific installation with a time-based or otherwise random method, and key the save-game or data files to it (you would have something like Maya's solution, where trial-mode saves wouldn't be usable on the purchased version). You could reinstall the game as much as you wanted, but you'd have to start from scratch.
Some places, like Indiana, have counties that don't observe DST, which can give a good indication. Also, I imagine you could look at similar communities across a time-zone line, since that would be a one-hour difference with little actual difference.
That's why I believe that the competition of states (or legal systems in general) is necessary to complement direct democracy.
It's a completely fanciful idea, of course, but I've always wondered what political system would actually win if every nation could have the political system of its choosing (which is to say, similar to now, whatever method can take power), with any laws it could enact, with the single universal restriction that no nation could refuse emigration. That would seem to be the true test of a given political system-- let those who don't like it... leave.
To be honest, I've never looked into such things, nor do I know about the Swiss method, but from the description it sounds like a rather good implementation-- representative by default, but direct democracy readily available as an option if the representatives counter a significant population. I think the key is to require a certain amount of participation, as well as majority, for the popular vote to be legitimate.
The greatest problem I could see with complete direct democracy would be that of every fringe or special-interest groups packing their own particular interest vote, while the majority of the electorate, while they might end up affected by the results, can't handle both their own workaday lives, as well as the responsibility of being-- essentially-- a legislator. Requiring significant interest to call a vote would be key, and some manner of representation would still be required to run any organization which makes any significant number of day-to-day decisions.
They can even "forbid" you to run the game under Wine by 1) making it incompatible with Wine or 2) simply forbidding it in the EULA. How is this any different?
In the first case, it's up to your ingenuity (or that of others) to find out how to get around the problem. In the second case, the task may be equally possible, but it carries legal consequences. Given that first sale rights generally leave use of a paid-for product up to the buyer, license agreements that unilaterally restrict this natural order in the course of a seemingly ordinary transaction can be seen to be unduly inflating the power of the seller, and trampling on the otherwise assumed rights of the buyer. The question raised is whether, when, and what first sale rights (rights to use what you paid for) should be assumed, even in the face of contradictory "agreement" language.
I doubt it-- it was bound to happen sooner or later. USB 2 supports a wide range of low-bandwidth USB 1 devices, as well as high-bandwidth USB 2 devices. This means fewer ports, and that fits quite well with Apple's design goals of making a wide range of seamless, perfectly smooth products, unblemished by things like ports, holes, or buttons.
Why use full-disk, then? I imagine that having a bootable computer with reasonable apps would be enough to pacify most security personnel. For most cursory inspections, what ain't mounted ain't there.
I don't think I'd agree with permanent mutilation, but I've always thought that things like short-term, intense-pain punishments, public shaming, or other sorts of "short, but intense" forms of punishment should be seriously considered as an option.
The penitentiary idea just seems like a relic surviving on inertia. Putting a person in a particular place and forcing them to stay there just does not seem like an optimal, or even applicable method to control social behavior-- which is supposedly the point of criminal punishment. It seems the penitentiary method does less to punish or reform than it does to waste time and ruin lives. The pinnacle of "tough on crime" seems to be taking away all amenities, but even without amenities, I have to question whether such a long-term, low-intensity level of hardship really makes the significant connection needed to deter action.
People often bring up "cruelty" and "inhumanity" when nearly any punishment besides "stay there" comes into play. If a method of pain infliction (or any other repulsive feeling, I suppose) could be created, however, which was otherwise free of long-term physical effects, took a (relatively) short amount of time, but was capable of reaching the desired level of intrinsic fear/pain/revulsion, then such a system might be, on a whole, a more positive experience for the criminal-- even as an optional alternative-- than imprisonment? Imprisonment has little intrinsic relevance to both crime and deterrence, breeds further crime and criminal association, sucks up the resources of the community, and creates wide fallout in the lives of the imprisoned and their families, by pulling them from their lives, then dropping them back in later at a loss for resources.
I'm not saying we should be solely brutal or cruel-- the mode of thinking is merely a shift in the method of punishment, away from the fundamental "stay here, don't move" idea of penitentiary. The idea could be applied to various degrees and manners depending upon offense, and rehabilitative and assistive steps could still be taken alongside punishment.
Of course, I'm no expert, and this idea may have already been proven infeasible. If the issue has been considered and shot down before, I'd be interested to see. I just think that such an ideological shift in criminal punishment should be considered, studied, and weighed, without the arbitrary brick wall of "inhumanity" or "cruelty" labels.
I use CMSs, because I'm a designer and primarily front-end developer. While I can read and write PHP, as well as a few other languages, I lack the programming theory and education necessary to dive into rolling my own client-ready CMS without taking excess time or making something sub-par in performance and security. I work in a small marketing firm as the lone "web guy", and things just have to get done. For many others, I imagine they're in the similar situation where they want to get a personal or self-run site up, and can't, or don't want to, bother with the back-end mechanics.
That said, I have been looking at frameworks-- CodeIgniter, in particular-- as an addition to my arsenal, as most CMSs seem to come lacking that one specific thing you need to do.
I think you hit on the tough point right there. Virtual property is a snarl-- not just as regards legality, but as regards the nature of what possession and even existence mean-- virtual "property" is both a "property" in the sense of a tangible good and a "property" in it being a mere setting state in some database, and who owns that?
Even traditional IP, though, has more groundedness in its meaning than this sort of property. Even things such as this comment have intrinsic value outside their environment. It is just as valuable in a printout as it is on Slashdot, for instance. "Virtual property" however, doesn't work outside sustained reality it was created in. When the hypothetical MMORPG wishes to close its doors, should it simply email each player an inventory list? A database dump? Screenshots?
It's almost like the collapse of a company or country, with the property being the hyperinflated currency or worthless bonds. Does the company or country owe the bondholders anything beside the paper they're printed on? Derived value be damned, they got what they bought. Does the MMORPG owe the player anything besides screenshots and memories?
A proper way for the game-runner might be to frame the issue in terms of "upgrades to the account" as opposed to "property". In-game property, in the greater framework of the real world, is more akin to an enhancement to a service than a physical good. In such a framework, such "upgrades" are sustained at the will and whim of the dependent service provider.
It's not that difficult. You just need a secure wireless network tunnel-- get a grounded conducting metal tube-- something like a flexible aluminum dryer vent pipe with a ground strap might work-- and run it in a straight line from the access point to the client machine.
IIRC, though, you lower your security by repeatedly encrypting the same password with known salts. It's kind of a "narrowing down" effect-- you allow quicker finding and verification of a sure answer by giving more clues.
A simplification would be: "I'm thinking of a number. The number mod 4 is 1. The number mod 5 is 4. The number mod 6 is 3." With the first answer, the secret number could be any of a wide selection, but after every subsequent equation with different input data, the secret number can be narrowed down.
[This is where someone else who knows something about crypto chimes in... I just know this because I'd seen someone else getting called out on this misconception.]
I'd say that's true, but to use that idea to bemoan the state of readers is a off-base and disingenuous.
While a properly educated person may have the ability to read and understand grammar at a certain high grade-level, and many such people may exist in the target demographic for a certain publication, using high-level, complex writing structures does not necessarily make the work better or more suitable. An article need not be grammatically complex to engage complex ideas, and often it can be worse. Writing that is optimized for information transmission will naturally tend toward the lowest "grade level" needed to sufficiently convey the information. There's no need to write news articles in the form of convoluted legaleze just to prove that the readership is smart.
Placing a target complexity on written work ensures that the ideas will be expressed in the most accessible form, as ornate description is not the goal of print media-- information transmission is.
Slashdot Mirror
Attack of the ol' "Insightful instead of funny, 'cause funny mods gain no karma", perhaps
AFAIK, Google checks for sites that serve different content based on the user-agent, and destroys their ranking (if not delisting them altogether). I've never had a problem with the "scroll down" trick, although the only time I tend to find EE pages is from Google.
Okay, mister or missus molecular biologist, I'm assuming you think your (likely opposing) opinion isn't idiotic, so why is the PP wrong?
(Granted, I could come up with a few answers myself, and I'm just some guy who makes web pages, but so far, the PP has made a point, and you've just called a few names and dropped your job description. This helps nothing.)
But what's the point? Is solitude or confinement working to create a positive net gain to society? Is the person leaving reformed? Is there even enough of an immediate connection between crime and punishment that the criminal is deterred from later criminal activity? The problem I see is that those who decry such measures as coddling, and who want tougher punishment, rarely propose anything aside from fewer amenities or more time-- "more of the same"-- without examination of whether "the same" is working, driven by the overwhelming inertia of the penitentiary idea being "the method" for criminal handling.
Personally, I consider it a "judgement call". While invading other sovereign nations opens one up to retaliation, the balance between sovereignty and human rights must be weighed when choosing to breach another nation.
There's really no set formula for this-- for even telling what's "right" or "wrong", and what "wrong enough to intercede" is. It's why international organizations exist, and it is an important reason-- aside from unified military might-- why "rescuing" nations need to have international backing.
A further, more practical consideration is that the winner of a conflict can end up emboldened in their policies, or even re-write history, so an invader had better either have iron-clad, internationally-recognized proof of grievous harm being done, or be assured of enough of a victory to allow them to parade the crimes of the vanquished out to the world.
Just off the top of my head...
Make the trial phone home with a hash of the hardware specs on install or run. Invalidate the hash once the trial is up. Yeah, phone-homes are a pain, but I'm only talking about the trial version, here.
You could key the specific installation with a time-based or otherwise random method, and key the save-game or data files to it (you would have something like Maya's solution, where trial-mode saves wouldn't be usable on the purchased version). You could reinstall the game as much as you wanted, but you'd have to start from scratch.
I'm gonna say "yes" on all the above.
Some places, like Indiana, have counties that don't observe DST, which can give a good indication. Also, I imagine you could look at similar communities across a time-zone line, since that would be a one-hour difference with little actual difference.
That's why I believe that the competition of states (or legal systems in general) is necessary to complement direct democracy.
It's a completely fanciful idea, of course, but I've always wondered what political system would actually win if every nation could have the political system of its choosing (which is to say, similar to now, whatever method can take power), with any laws it could enact, with the single universal restriction that no nation could refuse emigration. That would seem to be the true test of a given political system-- let those who don't like it... leave.
To be honest, I've never looked into such things, nor do I know about the Swiss method, but from the description it sounds like a rather good implementation-- representative by default, but direct democracy readily available as an option if the representatives counter a significant population. I think the key is to require a certain amount of participation, as well as majority, for the popular vote to be legitimate.
The greatest problem I could see with complete direct democracy would be that of every fringe or special-interest groups packing their own particular interest vote, while the majority of the electorate, while they might end up affected by the results, can't handle both their own workaday lives, as well as the responsibility of being-- essentially-- a legislator. Requiring significant interest to call a vote would be key, and some manner of representation would still be required to run any organization which makes any significant number of day-to-day decisions.
Ahh, but then who... err... simulates the simulators?
From the above:
It should be, as long as you don't mis-represent the source and don't sell more than you have.
They can even "forbid" you to run the game under Wine by 1) making it incompatible with Wine or 2) simply forbidding it in the EULA. How is this any different?
In the first case, it's up to your ingenuity (or that of others) to find out how to get around the problem. In the second case, the task may be equally possible, but it carries legal consequences. Given that first sale rights generally leave use of a paid-for product up to the buyer, license agreements that unilaterally restrict this natural order in the course of a seemingly ordinary transaction can be seen to be unduly inflating the power of the seller, and trampling on the otherwise assumed rights of the buyer. The question raised is whether, when, and what first sale rights (rights to use what you paid for) should be assumed, even in the face of contradictory "agreement" language.
I doubt it-- it was bound to happen sooner or later. USB 2 supports a wide range of low-bandwidth USB 1 devices, as well as high-bandwidth USB 2 devices. This means fewer ports, and that fits quite well with Apple's design goals of making a wide range of seamless, perfectly smooth products, unblemished by things like ports, holes, or buttons.
That's not really the fault of USB-- that's the fault of the device not communicating via a sufficiently generic protocol atop USB.
What about PC Cards (CardBus)?
Why use full-disk, then? I imagine that having a bootable computer with reasonable apps would be enough to pacify most security personnel. For most cursory inspections, what ain't mounted ain't there.
I don't think I'd agree with permanent mutilation, but I've always thought that things like short-term, intense-pain punishments, public shaming, or other sorts of "short, but intense" forms of punishment should be seriously considered as an option.
The penitentiary idea just seems like a relic surviving on inertia. Putting a person in a particular place and forcing them to stay there just does not seem like an optimal, or even applicable method to control social behavior-- which is supposedly the point of criminal punishment. It seems the penitentiary method does less to punish or reform than it does to waste time and ruin lives. The pinnacle of "tough on crime" seems to be taking away all amenities, but even without amenities, I have to question whether such a long-term, low-intensity level of hardship really makes the significant connection needed to deter action.
People often bring up "cruelty" and "inhumanity" when nearly any punishment besides "stay there" comes into play. If a method of pain infliction (or any other repulsive feeling, I suppose) could be created, however, which was otherwise free of long-term physical effects, took a (relatively) short amount of time, but was capable of reaching the desired level of intrinsic fear/pain/revulsion, then such a system might be, on a whole, a more positive experience for the criminal-- even as an optional alternative-- than imprisonment? Imprisonment has little intrinsic relevance to both crime and deterrence, breeds further crime and criminal association, sucks up the resources of the community, and creates wide fallout in the lives of the imprisoned and their families, by pulling them from their lives, then dropping them back in later at a loss for resources.
I'm not saying we should be solely brutal or cruel-- the mode of thinking is merely a shift in the method of punishment, away from the fundamental "stay here, don't move" idea of penitentiary. The idea could be applied to various degrees and manners depending upon offense, and rehabilitative and assistive steps could still be taken alongside punishment.
Of course, I'm no expert, and this idea may have already been proven infeasible. If the issue has been considered and shot down before, I'd be interested to see. I just think that such an ideological shift in criminal punishment should be considered, studied, and weighed, without the arbitrary brick wall of "inhumanity" or "cruelty" labels.
I use CMSs, because I'm a designer and primarily front-end developer. While I can read and write PHP, as well as a few other languages, I lack the programming theory and education necessary to dive into rolling my own client-ready CMS without taking excess time or making something sub-par in performance and security. I work in a small marketing firm as the lone "web guy", and things just have to get done. For many others, I imagine they're in the similar situation where they want to get a personal or self-run site up, and can't, or don't want to, bother with the back-end mechanics.
That said, I have been looking at frameworks-- CodeIgniter, in particular-- as an addition to my arsenal, as most CMSs seem to come lacking that one specific thing you need to do.
I think you hit on the tough point right there. Virtual property is a snarl-- not just as regards legality, but as regards the nature of what possession and even existence mean-- virtual "property" is both a "property" in the sense of a tangible good and a "property" in it being a mere setting state in some database, and who owns that?
Even traditional IP, though, has more groundedness in its meaning than this sort of property. Even things such as this comment have intrinsic value outside their environment. It is just as valuable in a printout as it is on Slashdot, for instance. "Virtual property" however, doesn't work outside sustained reality it was created in. When the hypothetical MMORPG wishes to close its doors, should it simply email each player an inventory list? A database dump? Screenshots?
It's almost like the collapse of a company or country, with the property being the hyperinflated currency or worthless bonds. Does the company or country owe the bondholders anything beside the paper they're printed on? Derived value be damned, they got what they bought. Does the MMORPG owe the player anything besides screenshots and memories?
A proper way for the game-runner might be to frame the issue in terms of "upgrades to the account" as opposed to "property". In-game property, in the greater framework of the real world, is more akin to an enhancement to a service than a physical good. In such a framework, such "upgrades" are sustained at the will and whim of the dependent service provider.
So... you get it cheap, on demand, and DRM free, and you complain that it's not old enough?
It's not that difficult. You just need a secure wireless network tunnel-- get a grounded conducting metal tube-- something like a flexible aluminum dryer vent pipe with a ground strap might work-- and run it in a straight line from the access point to the client machine.
IIRC, though, you lower your security by repeatedly encrypting the same password with known salts. It's kind of a "narrowing down" effect-- you allow quicker finding and verification of a sure answer by giving more clues.
A simplification would be: "I'm thinking of a number. The number mod 4 is 1. The number mod 5 is 4. The number mod 6 is 3." With the first answer, the secret number could be any of a wide selection, but after every subsequent equation with different input data, the secret number can be narrowed down.
[This is where someone else who knows something about crypto chimes in... I just know this because I'd seen someone else getting called out on this misconception.]
I'd say that's true, but to use that idea to bemoan the state of readers is a off-base and disingenuous.
While a properly educated person may have the ability to read and understand grammar at a certain high grade-level, and many such people may exist in the target demographic for a certain publication, using high-level, complex writing structures does not necessarily make the work better or more suitable. An article need not be grammatically complex to engage complex ideas, and often it can be worse. Writing that is optimized for information transmission will naturally tend toward the lowest "grade level" needed to sufficiently convey the information. There's no need to write news articles in the form of convoluted legaleze just to prove that the readership is smart.
Placing a target complexity on written work ensures that the ideas will be expressed in the most accessible form, as ornate description is not the goal of print media-- information transmission is.