What color hat do you get if you have Cocklaphobia (the fear of hats or headgear)? No really, it's actually called Cocklaphobia. I'm so not making this up. What do you mean you're offended?
Will you idiots stop with this "topic-gate" crap already?
I for one am very concerned about the rampant application of the suffixal appellation "gate." This linguistic travesty, henceforth known as "Gategate," must be stopped before it enables anyone with a keyboard to elevate any petty concern to the level of an international scandal. #gategate
Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News
The headline suggests that Fox's news is less opinionated than MSNBC's News.
Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting... with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary.
So we're talking about the type of shows being aired on the channel: "News"* or Opinion, not the slant of the news being presented. It would be more accurate to say "MSNBC Primetime Programming Reformulated to Include Nearly 90% Opinion," but that wouldn't be as provocative and get as many page views.
Fox News has a history of presenting "news" that is so slanted it's the butt of many jokes ("that story is so biased it should be on Fox News... if only it was funny it could be on the Onion"), so I'd argue that Fox's "News" programming counts in the opinion category.
That said, the story is actually about the increased polarization between MSNBC's lineup and Fox's. One would like think that a "news" channel as laughably-biased as Fox would not survive long, because it's not actually providing news. But they're successful because they've found that people want to be told things that seem to reinforce their own perceptions. That keeps them watching. MSNBC is just acknowledging this and reformulating to do the same for the left-leaning audience.
This is a bad thing, even if you're too intelligent to watch either of these channels, because they suck people in and polarize opinions. Then people walk around spreading these polarized opinions by word of mouth like conspiracy theories, and you end up with polarized politicians running the country who have no reason to compromise and get things done because they won't be re-elected if they compromise.
*As a former print journalist, I think all TV "news" is garbage by design. It's Jerry-Springer-esque entertainment disguised as news. It's formulated to tease you with provocative blurbs suggesting they're going to give you some juicy story, after you watch a bunch of other stuff and commercials. When they finally get to the promised story, it typically contains far less information than a print news story would because it takes too much time to do that much talking, and most people would lose interest part-way through.
In other news, the U.S. Postal Service is partnering up with local garbage dumps in an effort to reduce its costs, clear landfill space and bring you fresher junk mail than ever before. While some people will grumble about the security and public health implications of re-delivering old junk mail that has already been thrown out, others have pointed out that they weren't using the service anyway.
Auernheimer was found guilty, and today he was sentenced to 41 months in prison
And how many months in prison were AT&T executives sentenced to for making the email addresses publicly available?
'Following his release from prison, Auernheimer will be subject to three years of supervised release
And who is supervising AT&T to ensure it doesn't do this again?
Auernheimer and co-defendant Daniel Spitler were also ordered to pay $73,000 in restitution to AT&T.
And how much did AT&T have to pay in restitution to the customers who were actually harmed by AT&T's actions in this situation alone?
We need a congressional inquiry into AT&T's practices. AT&T has put itself in a position where it breaks the law, whistleblowers get prison sentences and AT&T makes a $73,000 profit, while the people AT&T harmed in the first place are still harmed (once their email addresses were out there, the genie wasn't going back into the bottle).
AT&T does this stuff all the time. Last year AT&T allowed some third party that sent me a text message to "cram" a recurring charge onto my monthly phone bill, systematically buried the charge to hide it from me (when already looking at my "detailed statement" I had to click on five links just to find out what the service fee was for), made me log into a separate Web site just to cancel the recurring "service," and presented me with an error message saying they could not complete my request when I finally clicked the submit button on the form to cancel the service. When I called them, they gave me all kinds of BS stories to claim that I requested the charge, ranging from "your kids must have gotten your phone and signed you up for the service" to "we have a log file that shows a request for the charge coming from your device" (and then absolutely refused to show me said log or even read it to me over the phone). It wasn't until I indicated I would be writing to my Congressman and that I knew the term for what they were doing ("cramming") that they agreed to reverse the charge. AT&T needs a watchdog.
18 months sounds like an incredibly stupid length, though, given that most mobile phone carrier contracts are 24 months.
That's true, but my experience has been that they let you upgrade "early" after 21 months. In the U.S., the carrier and vendors want the thought bubble over your head to look like this:
Months 1-6: I have a shiny new phone!
Months 7-12: I have a dirty/cracked new phone!
Months 13-18: I have a dirty/cracked/scuffed phone that's been rooted by the Chinese/Russians but it's been patched so it's all good!
Months 19-21: This phone used to be cool, but now it send all my friends spearphishing emails, the battery life sucks, it can't display modern Web sites and it's not supported anymore! I need a new phone, but I can't get out of my contract. Need a new phone... need a new phone...
Months 22-24: I can upgrade early?!! Sweet! I'm getting a good deal here! Getting out of my old contract early and getting a new phone for next to nothing! What a coincidence that they offered this great deal just when I really needed it!
They don't want you to get here (which is where I've been for the last 9 months):
Month 25-infinity: No more contract, and my phone still works just fine, so I can get my phone unlocked, hop carriers all I want and shop around for the best rates!
Windows Phone 7.5 still works fine. Windows Phone 8.0 works even better (more features). I don't know anybody with a Windows Phone (myself included) that feels that they have gotten "burnt" from the product.
If your hand has been on the stove since Windows Phone 7.5, you've probably just damaged all your nerve endings so badly that you no longer feel your fingers burning. Do not confuse the absence of a burning sensation with a conclusion that you're not being burned. This is not meant to be a troll against MS, as this can happen in many different situations.
Suggested Tests for Burning
Try your other hand.
Get some fresh air, then check for the oh-so-familiar "fried pussy cat" you smell when your cat chews on a wire.
Get a second opinion from someone whose hand is not on the stove ("say, does the stove feel warm to you?").
Pull the 9-volt out of your RC car remote and put it back in your smoke detector.
I think the AC just patted GirlInTraining on the head on behalf of the People's Liberation Army and called her a "good girl"... and something about tycoons and seeing things through colored glass...
Today Obama called the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to congratulate him on his confirmation as head of state and chairman of the people's republic central military commission (he was already General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and chairman of the Party Central Military Commission). In that call, Obama made a point of addressing cyberattacks as one of the most prominent issues in their relationship.
It's no accident that two days earlier NSA Chief Keith Alexander "disclosed" to the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. has offensive cyberwarfare capabilities, not just defensive capabilities.
I find it hard to believe that this is new information to the members of the Committee. The U.S. has had and used offensive cyberwarfare capabilities for years, even decades. The Internet itself arose from a DARPA project. The "disclosure" is a well-timed veiled threat meant to add teeth to Obama's diplomatic "congratulatory phone call" on his Chinese counterpart's first official day, in much the same way that China just used its congratulatory message to new Pope Francis on his first full day in office to warn him not to "meddle" in its affairs and that it hopes their relationship could be improved by cutting ties with Taiwan.
Neither one of these statements change anything. China knows the U.S. has had offensive capabilities for years, and will probably not alter its stance on cyberattacks. The Vatican knows China wants to appoint its own bishops who answer to the Party rather than the Pope, and it will probably not issue a statement saying that "God has decided that the Chinese Communist Party shall be his hand and mouthpiece for 12 million Chinese Catholics."
If anything, Obama is pleading with the new president to tone down the attacks and choose some less-conspicuous targets so he doesn't have to publicly come out against China. And the Chinese are pleading with the new Pope to tone down any statements he may make about China so they don't have to make his bishops disappear (Francis knows what it's like to live in a country where people are "disappeared" for political reasons, as in Argentina's "Dirty War" of the 1970s).
I'm waiting for the NRA to use this in its lobbying, pointing out that it's easier for a dolphin in the Ukraine to legally acquire a gun than for a human in the U.S. They may take it a step further and claim that there is an ever-growing need for assault weapons at the beach now that foreign countries are arming their wildlife and setting them free in the ocean.
So you're proposing a "Bill of Rights" to prevent game publishers from playing games with gamers?
As a group, gamers have no rights. As human beings, citizens, purchasers, and other titles, they have lots of rights they're not exercising. Don't complain about your need for new rights when you're not using the ones you have, or you water down your argument and start a rights race in which the corporations will say they need more rights because the gamers just got more rights.
He should have switched the big monkey at the top with the poor little oil drum at the bottom while he was at it, to reflect the full scope of societal changes that have occurred since the release of Donkey Kong.
In this new version, the girl fights to stop Big Oil at the top from throwing barrels at the cute little monkey at the bottom, while the guy just stands there watching the game. When she gets to the top, she's not rescuing Mario, she's stopping Big Oil from harming cute animals. Mario just happens to come out of his comatose state when she enters the room and feels compelled to feign excitement for her quest.
In college I had a roommate who felt very strongly that depressed people should not give in to pressure to take Prozac. So I "hacked" (I think I used ResEdit or something... nothing fancy) a Pong clone to replace the ball with a green/yellow Prozac capsule. That way he could "fight the good fight" by trying to deflect the Prozac in response to my repeated attempts to stuff it down his side of the screen. This made him a much more animated opponent in Pong, and I told him this only proved that Prozac does improve people's behavior. Which upped the ante as the game continued, in much the same way that Tetris starts throwing bricks at you with more attitude the further you get into the game.
Puts a new twist on grandpa's: "Has anyone seen my teeth?"
"Relax, grandpa, they're right here in these mice kidneys. Just try to remember not to soak the mice in Efferdent overnight. This one's still foaming at the mouth."
The propsal to ban pornography already passed in 1997, according to the first link in the summary.
Pornography is the "canary in the coal mine" for Internet rights (freedom of expression, right to privacy, international commerce, et al). If/when conditions change in a way that becomes hazardous to those rights, pornography will die first. And when it does, it's a sign that those rights are in danger.
Interestingly enough, after 75 years of regular use Britain banned the use of canaries in coal mines in 1986 because it had digital tools that could detect the threat of carbon monoxide. However, we have yet to devise a comparable "digital tool" that can detect threats to Internet rights, despite thousands of years of regular use. Therefore, regardless of an individual's personal feelings about pornography, it must stay because there are more important things at stake.
The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received...
A star rating on Amazon is one of the best ways to gauge a game's reception? On the contrary, I'd say the fact that 20 people rated a game that lacks basic functionality as worthy of five stars is an indication that the star system is ineffective and fails to tell you much of anything. Were those 20 people rating the graphics of the splash screen? We're they rating what they imagined the game would be like once they could save? Were they purists who believe saves are a form of cheating, and they welcome this new, more-realistic gameplay?
Actual discussion of what is good and bad is and always will be the best way to gauge a product's reception.
Does this possibly indicate future microtransactions in game?
Yes.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the discussion above (maybe I missed it somewhere), but EA's CFO announced that all of its games would include microtransactions from now on.
Requiring an online tether would be a logical way to add or take away features in the future through microtransactions. Requiring your save file to be in the cloud would also prevent people from hacking around it. The launch problems won't stop this – EA will chalk it up to a server glitch, fix it and move on – because they see too much money sitting on the table. They watched the rise of Zynga, who made money on the most senseless games through addictive microtransactions, and said "we want a piece of that pie."
They simply failed to notice when my response to their CFO's announcement was: "20-year customer of EA to stop buying all future games." Not that I expected them to notice. It would take a lot more people than we have on Slashdot to wake them up, because for every person here who understands that microtransactions are a method for making you pay repeatedly for something you already bought, there are 10,000 average Joes out there who think microtransactions make the game better.
...no police force would accept a description of someone as "aged between 45 and 75 — that's the gap between Daniel Craig and Jack Nicholson."
It's easy enough to program the wall to tell the difference between them. Daniel Craig is the one who is perpetually adjacent to a 20-something female who has an elevated heart rate and increased respiration. Jack Nicholson is the one beating the glass wall with a golf club.
There is only one reason Google+ and Facebook want real names: advertisers pay more when you know the names of the people you are delivering the ads to.
Minority Report: "Hey John Anderton, you could use a Guiness right about now!"
Slashdot Mirror
Without the Chucky-esque Johnny.
Does it still try to run you over and then explode if you don't pay your fare? Because that was really the killer feature in Johnny Cab.
This $215 video production cost $60,000 because the guy playing Spock forgot to itemize his deductive reasoning.
The video is a public service reminder to itemize your deductions or get stuck paying the bill for stuff like this.
10,000 Adrias with Google Glasses? Wouldn't that be a Beowulf Cluster in She-eeps clothing?
What color hat do you get if you have Cocklaphobia (the fear of hats or headgear)? No really, it's actually called Cocklaphobia. I'm so not making this up. What do you mean you're offended?
Will you idiots stop with this "topic-gate" crap already?
I for one am very concerned about the rampant application of the suffixal appellation "gate." This linguistic travesty, henceforth known as "Gategate," must be stopped before it enables anyone with a keyboard to elevate any petty concern to the level of an international scandal.
#gategate
Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News
The headline suggests that Fox's news is less opinionated than MSNBC's News.
Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting... with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary.
So we're talking about the type of shows being aired on the channel: "News"* or Opinion, not the slant of the news being presented. It would be more accurate to say "MSNBC Primetime Programming Reformulated to Include Nearly 90% Opinion," but that wouldn't be as provocative and get as many page views.
Fox News has a history of presenting "news" that is so slanted it's the butt of many jokes ("that story is so biased it should be on Fox News... if only it was funny it could be on the Onion"), so I'd argue that Fox's "News" programming counts in the opinion category.
That said, the story is actually about the increased polarization between MSNBC's lineup and Fox's. One would like think that a "news" channel as laughably-biased as Fox would not survive long, because it's not actually providing news. But they're successful because they've found that people want to be told things that seem to reinforce their own perceptions. That keeps them watching. MSNBC is just acknowledging this and reformulating to do the same for the left-leaning audience.
This is a bad thing, even if you're too intelligent to watch either of these channels, because they suck people in and polarize opinions. Then people walk around spreading these polarized opinions by word of mouth like conspiracy theories, and you end up with polarized politicians running the country who have no reason to compromise and get things done because they won't be re-elected if they compromise.
*As a former print journalist, I think all TV "news" is garbage by design. It's Jerry-Springer-esque entertainment disguised as news. It's formulated to tease you with provocative blurbs suggesting they're going to give you some juicy story, after you watch a bunch of other stuff and commercials. When they finally get to the promised story, it typically contains far less information than a print news story would because it takes too much time to do that much talking, and most people would lose interest part-way through.
You can't wait for the lazy editor app? What exactly did you think Slashdot was? I'm surprised Dice isn't suing this kid for infringement.
In other news, the U.S. Postal Service is partnering up with local garbage dumps in an effort to reduce its costs, clear landfill space and bring you fresher junk mail than ever before. While some people will grumble about the security and public health implications of re-delivering old junk mail that has already been thrown out, others have pointed out that they weren't using the service anyway.
Auernheimer was found guilty, and today he was sentenced to 41 months in prison
And how many months in prison were AT&T executives sentenced to for making the email addresses publicly available?
'Following his release from prison, Auernheimer will be subject to three years of supervised release
And who is supervising AT&T to ensure it doesn't do this again?
Auernheimer and co-defendant Daniel Spitler were also ordered to pay $73,000 in restitution to AT&T.
And how much did AT&T have to pay in restitution to the customers who were actually harmed by AT&T's actions in this situation alone?
We need a congressional inquiry into AT&T's practices. AT&T has put itself in a position where it breaks the law, whistleblowers get prison sentences and AT&T makes a $73,000 profit, while the people AT&T harmed in the first place are still harmed (once their email addresses were out there, the genie wasn't going back into the bottle).
AT&T does this stuff all the time. Last year AT&T allowed some third party that sent me a text message to "cram" a recurring charge onto my monthly phone bill, systematically buried the charge to hide it from me (when already looking at my "detailed statement" I had to click on five links just to find out what the service fee was for), made me log into a separate Web site just to cancel the recurring "service," and presented me with an error message saying they could not complete my request when I finally clicked the submit button on the form to cancel the service. When I called them, they gave me all kinds of BS stories to claim that I requested the charge, ranging from "your kids must have gotten your phone and signed you up for the service" to "we have a log file that shows a request for the charge coming from your device" (and then absolutely refused to show me said log or even read it to me over the phone). It wasn't until I indicated I would be writing to my Congressman and that I knew the term for what they were doing ("cramming") that they agreed to reverse the charge. AT&T needs a watchdog.
18 months sounds like an incredibly stupid length, though, given that most mobile phone carrier contracts are 24 months.
That's true, but my experience has been that they let you upgrade "early" after 21 months. In the U.S., the carrier and vendors want the thought bubble over your head to look like this:
They don't want you to get here (which is where I've been for the last 9 months):
Windows Phone 7.5 still works fine. Windows Phone 8.0 works even better (more features). I don't know anybody with a Windows Phone (myself included) that feels that they have gotten "burnt" from the product.
If your hand has been on the stove since Windows Phone 7.5, you've probably just damaged all your nerve endings so badly that you no longer feel your fingers burning. Do not confuse the absence of a burning sensation with a conclusion that you're not being burned. This is not meant to be a troll against MS, as this can happen in many different situations.
Suggested Tests for Burning
Try your other hand.
Get some fresh air, then check for the oh-so-familiar "fried pussy cat" you smell when your cat chews on a wire.
Get a second opinion from someone whose hand is not on the stove ("say, does the stove feel warm to you?").
Pull the 9-volt out of your RC car remote and put it back in your smoke detector.
I think the AC just patted GirlInTraining on the head on behalf of the People's Liberation Army and called her a "good girl" ... and something about tycoons and seeing things through colored glass...
Today Obama called the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to congratulate him on his confirmation as head of state and chairman of the people's republic central military commission (he was already General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and chairman of the Party Central Military Commission). In that call, Obama made a point of addressing cyberattacks as one of the most prominent issues in their relationship.
It's no accident that two days earlier NSA Chief Keith Alexander "disclosed" to the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. has offensive cyberwarfare capabilities, not just defensive capabilities.
I find it hard to believe that this is new information to the members of the Committee. The U.S. has had and used offensive cyberwarfare capabilities for years, even decades. The Internet itself arose from a DARPA project. The "disclosure" is a well-timed veiled threat meant to add teeth to Obama's diplomatic "congratulatory phone call" on his Chinese counterpart's first official day, in much the same way that China just used its congratulatory message to new Pope Francis on his first full day in office to warn him not to "meddle" in its affairs and that it hopes their relationship could be improved by cutting ties with Taiwan.
Neither one of these statements change anything. China knows the U.S. has had offensive capabilities for years, and will probably not alter its stance on cyberattacks. The Vatican knows China wants to appoint its own bishops who answer to the Party rather than the Pope, and it will probably not issue a statement saying that "God has decided that the Chinese Communist Party shall be his hand and mouthpiece for 12 million Chinese Catholics."
If anything, Obama is pleading with the new president to tone down the attacks and choose some less-conspicuous targets so he doesn't have to publicly come out against China. And the Chinese are pleading with the new Pope to tone down any statements he may make about China so they don't have to make his bishops disappear (Francis knows what it's like to live in a country where people are "disappeared" for political reasons, as in Argentina's "Dirty War" of the 1970s).
joshua is the logon no password needed.
We replaced the "joshua" account with the "mrpotatohead" account 30 years ago after some idiot filmmaker exposed all our back doors.
No, Facebook bought it, hollowed it out and is planning to use it for additional office space, like they did with Sun's old Menlo Park space.
I'm waiting for the NRA to use this in its lobbying, pointing out that it's easier for a dolphin in the Ukraine to legally acquire a gun than for a human in the U.S. They may take it a step further and claim that there is an ever-growing need for assault weapons at the beach now that foreign countries are arming their wildlife and setting them free in the ocean.
So you're proposing a "Bill of Rights" to prevent game publishers from playing games with gamers?
As a group, gamers have no rights. As human beings, citizens, purchasers, and other titles, they have lots of rights they're not exercising. Don't complain about your need for new rights when you're not using the ones you have, or you water down your argument and start a rights race in which the corporations will say they need more rights because the gamers just got more rights.
He should have switched the big monkey at the top with the poor little oil drum at the bottom while he was at it, to reflect the full scope of societal changes that have occurred since the release of Donkey Kong.
In this new version, the girl fights to stop Big Oil at the top from throwing barrels at the cute little monkey at the bottom, while the guy just stands there watching the game. When she gets to the top, she's not rescuing Mario, she's stopping Big Oil from harming cute animals. Mario just happens to come out of his comatose state when she enters the room and feels compelled to feign excitement for her quest.
In college I had a roommate who felt very strongly that depressed people should not give in to pressure to take Prozac. So I "hacked" (I think I used ResEdit or something... nothing fancy) a Pong clone to replace the ball with a green/yellow Prozac capsule. That way he could "fight the good fight" by trying to deflect the Prozac in response to my repeated attempts to stuff it down his side of the screen. This made him a much more animated opponent in Pong, and I told him this only proved that Prozac does improve people's behavior. Which upped the ante as the game continued, in much the same way that Tetris starts throwing bricks at you with more attitude the further you get into the game.
Puts a new twist on grandpa's: "Has anyone seen my teeth?"
"Relax, grandpa, they're right here in these mice kidneys. Just try to remember not to soak the mice in Efferdent overnight. This one's still foaming at the mouth."
The propsal to ban pornography already passed in 1997, according to the first link in the summary.
Pornography is the "canary in the coal mine" for Internet rights (freedom of expression, right to privacy, international commerce, et al). If/when conditions change in a way that becomes hazardous to those rights, pornography will die first. And when it does, it's a sign that those rights are in danger.
Interestingly enough, after 75 years of regular use Britain banned the use of canaries in coal mines in 1986 because it had digital tools that could detect the threat of carbon monoxide. However, we have yet to devise a comparable "digital tool" that can detect threats to Internet rights, despite thousands of years of regular use. Therefore, regardless of an individual's personal feelings about pornography, it must stay because there are more important things at stake.
The game has at time of writing received 833 reviews on Amazon, and has an average rating of just one star. That's because 740 of those are one star reviews. Only 20 people gave it 5 stars. There's few better ways to gauge how a game has been received...
A star rating on Amazon is one of the best ways to gauge a game's reception? On the contrary, I'd say the fact that 20 people rated a game that lacks basic functionality as worthy of five stars is an indication that the star system is ineffective and fails to tell you much of anything. Were those 20 people rating the graphics of the splash screen? We're they rating what they imagined the game would be like once they could save? Were they purists who believe saves are a form of cheating, and they welcome this new, more-realistic gameplay?
Actual discussion of what is good and bad is and always will be the best way to gauge a product's reception.
Does this possibly indicate future microtransactions in game?
Yes.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the discussion above (maybe I missed it somewhere), but EA's CFO announced that all of its games would include microtransactions from now on.
Requiring an online tether would be a logical way to add or take away features in the future through microtransactions. Requiring your save file to be in the cloud would also prevent people from hacking around it. The launch problems won't stop this – EA will chalk it up to a server glitch, fix it and move on – because they see too much money sitting on the table. They watched the rise of Zynga, who made money on the most senseless games through addictive microtransactions, and said "we want a piece of that pie."
They simply failed to notice when my response to their CFO's announcement was: "20-year customer of EA to stop buying all future games." Not that I expected them to notice. It would take a lot more people than we have on Slashdot to wake them up, because for every person here who understands that microtransactions are a method for making you pay repeatedly for something you already bought, there are 10,000 average Joes out there who think microtransactions make the game better.
...no police force would accept a description of someone as "aged between 45 and 75 — that's the gap between Daniel Craig and Jack Nicholson."
It's easy enough to program the wall to tell the difference between them. Daniel Craig is the one who is perpetually adjacent to a 20-something female who has an elevated heart rate and increased respiration. Jack Nicholson is the one beating the glass wall with a golf club.
Or, alternatively, after they enslave us and teach us that we should trust robots more than we trust each other.
So probably never. But maybe. In the Twilight Zone...
There is only one reason Google+ and Facebook want real names: advertisers pay more when you know the names of the people you are delivering the ads to.
Minority Report: "Hey John Anderton, you could use a Guiness right about now!"