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User: dave1791

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  1. Re:witch hunt on Twitter Fights US Court For WikiLeaks Details · · Score: 1

    The question is one of timing. If Assange was in contact with manning while he was still downloading, then Assange is a spy handler. If Wikileaks was an after the fact drop box, then the only one whom a case can be brought against is Manning. The US DoJ won’t be able to convince UK or Swedish courts to extradite Assange on “we don’t like him”, nor would they be able to convict him in an American court if Wikileaks was a drop box because of the Pentagon papers case.

    Espionage is a different matter, legally speaking.

  2. Re:Another salvo in the war on Twitter Fights US Court For WikiLeaks Details · · Score: 2, Informative

    No actually.

    Subpoenas are an investigative mechanism. Nobody goes to jail (directly) because of a subpoena. It is used to establish the “these are the facts” of a case. It is the traditional legal mechanism to shine light on something.

    From what I’ve read, the US Justice department thinks it is very unlikely that they can mount an effective court case against Assange and Wikileaks over the publication of the leaks. There is too much precedence in the other direction (specifically the Pentagon Papers) to pass muster in an American court. The legal precedent in the US is that if someone gives you classified information and you publish it, that you are not criminally liable; regardless of what the foaming at the mouth commentators would wish to be true. Anyway, neither the UK or Sweden would extradite for such a case. Facing two, high legal hurdles, they’ll want a very strong and airtight case before pushing ahead. What they are likely investigating is whether Manley was in contact with Assange while he was still doing his downloads and if Assange encouraged him; and more importantly, whether it is provable in court. That is an entirely different affair if Assange encouraged the downloads, because it becomes espionage.

    Birgitta Jonsdottir is likely the weak link if that is indeed the case. She is possibly the one who put Manley in contact with Assange. We know that she lacks discretion, having taken Assange as a guest to a function at the American Embassy in Iceland, so it is not surprising that investigators may feel that they can gain relevant information to the case there.

    I find it funny and ironic that self styled openness activists would be up in arms about a subpoena. I take that back. I find it sad and disheartening. I agree with what Assange says in public (e.g. his statements during his TED interview and his op ed in the Sydney Morning Herald), but Wikileaks’ secretiveness reminds me a bit too much of the pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

  3. This could have been predicted years ago... on Why BioWare's Star Wars MMO May Already Be Too Late · · Score: 1

    ...by reading Damian Schubert's blog and his posts on the mud dev2 mailing list.

    He is the lead designer for the combat systems on that MMO and his views are straight up conventional.

  4. Re:Nannystate? on Using Technology To Enforce Good Behavior · · Score: 1

    Ah, but I am personally affected by this. If someone climbs into a car after drinking too much and causes an accident that involves me or a family member, it does affect me. It is what economists call a negative externality. Essentially, someone else is paying a price for your behavior. Along with freedom comes the responsibility not to be a dick to others.

    Or to put it another way:
    “The nanny state does not want me to toss my candy wrapper and empty water bottle out the window. Holding on to them until I find a garbage can restricts my freedom and I object to this on principle.” But wait, we all want that guy to find a garbage can and not make us look at his trash.

    This is different from the state forcing me to wear a seat belt in a car or a helmet while on a motorcycle. In both cases, I’m only victimizing myself by being a dumbass.

  5. Re:Article makes wrong assumption about software. on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names · · Score: 1

    Never ever do business in China? Ever? Can you be certain that strategy won’t change next year? Or even tomorrow? This king of lazy thinking is how we got the Y2K nonsense in the last century. You're not one of those people with an allergy to unicode, are you? ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html )

  6. Re:Not spoofing the MAC and IP addy on Second Life Tries To Backpedal On the GPL · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From the new policy

    You must not circumvent our intended limitations on Second Life features. For example:

          1. You must not circumvent the Second Life permissions system or any features that limit copying, transfer, or use of content within Second Life.
          2. You must not alter content metadata like the Second Life creator name or the Second Life owner name.

    These hit right to the core of Linden's Business model and are something that SL content creators have been screaming about. If people make things in SL and sell them to each other, Linden makes money. If people stop bothering (at least professionally, leaving only the amateurs) because of copying, then this trade does not happen and Linden makes no money (and ultimately has to shut down).

  7. Not spoofing the MAC and IP addy on Second Life Tries To Backpedal On the GPL · · Score: 1

    >'You must not mask IP or MAC addresses' (reported to the server),

    Any bets that this has been driven by griefers more than anything else?

  8. Re:UO wasn't that much fun really on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And there were not many other choices in 1998. If you wanted to play online and were not interested in being a wolf, then you had to be a sheep. Now you have 10^7 other choices and the only people who really miss pre-trammel UO are the killers. It is no accident that Shadowbane, which was built to cater to exactly those people, failed in the market and Darkfall will never be anything more than a niche. I predict that it will fail in the long term because a world that only appeals to wolves will force most of them to be sheep (there can only ever be a few wolves, even if everyone aspires to be one) and they won't stay.

  9. Re:the way i see it on Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? · · Score: 1

    Reverse engineered gray shards are a FAR cry from what would happen if WoW were open sourced. If you could create your own WoW shard, would you play on any of Blizzards? Sure they lose people to gray shards now, but they would lose a lot more if they open sourced it. MMO are fundamentally a service business and open sourcing your MMO is essentiaslly saying, "feel free to skip using our service". Where exactly does Blizzard gain here? I know where players and those advocating that it be open sourced gain, but where does Blizzard gain?

    The only way it might work is if the servers were still closed source, but the content was OSS ( with a restrictive license such as GPL) and modifiable and you essentially rented a server from the company. If you want your own highly customized world, then you can create one and pay the rental fee on the company's cloud. Richard Bartle advocated exactly this on a Terra Nova thread yesterday and I think it has merit.

  10. Re:on positive side on Switzerland Pursues Violent Games Ban · · Score: 1

    And with it a tyranny of the majority. Too much lawmaking by referendum and you get nonsense like the minaret ban and California's budget problems.

  11. Re:I have sat next to these guys. on Southwest Declares Kevin Smith Too Fat To Fly · · Score: 1

    Dieting is silly for the reason you pointed out. Your body will go into starvation mode and you’ll somehow manage to put on pounds while eating 1500 calories a day.

    I’m trying to lose 25 pounds to get back into lean shape and end the slow trend towards porkerism that I was on. My tactic run 25-30 miles a week, do strength training and go cold turkey on the sweets. Cutting the sweets is not really about dieting, so much as not snacking to make up the shortfall. By running and doing the strength training, I’m kicking my burn rates up over 3000 calories a day and my body is not exactly in starvation mode. I’ve only lost 5 pounds so far in the past 2-3 weeks, but my waist size is melting like butter in a frying pan.

    It’s all very simple and requires no special willpower. It only requires that you plan your life around 5-6 hours of sports per week.

  12. Re:news flash on How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Win32 was there from the start on NT; in 3.1 (The first version of NT was called 3.1 because that was also the version number of the then current Windows)

  13. Re:Half a game? on Pirates as a Marketplace · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They learned this from the MMO model. Piracy is a non-issue for online games. So be prepared for a future with microtranscations in your single player FPS.

  14. Why don't we see more OSS MMO contributors? on The Struggle For Private Game Servers · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seriously, for all of the "corporate bashing" in this thread; either complaining about subscription models or justifying reverse engineering, why is it that open source MMO projects don’t thrive? I remember when Ryzom was up for sale and a former community manager launched a very public campaign to raise funds to open source it. There was a lot of buzz. After it fell through, at least two OSS MMO projects sprung up from it; one game project which died within a week and another framework project which has one active developer (me) three years later. At least four other framework and game projects (Planeshift, WorldForge, Open NEL, Peragro Tempus) also tried to recruit among that populace. Of them, three are limping along with 1-3 active developers with only Planeshift having an active development community.

    So why are people not clamoring to work on OSS MMO frameworks so that communities can run OSS worlds?

  15. Re:Legality on The Struggle For Private Game Servers · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why bother with reverse engineering a commercial game server and putting your work at risk in the first place? Why not instead contribute to one of the real OSS MMO projects, such as Worldforge, Open NEL or Planeshift?

  16. Re:we need more alternatives on The Struggle For Private Game Servers · · Score: 2, Informative

    The only reason this is an issue is because the priority is money, rather than having fun.

    Company wants to make money, news at 11.

  17. Re:The poor corporate victim on The Struggle For Private Game Servers · · Score: 4, Informative

    The principle is simple. You pay them 50 cents a day and they let you spend as many hours on their servers as you want. It is win-win for everyone until you bring an unwarranted sense of entitlement to the table. It's not food or medicine that Blizzard sells, its freaking entertainment. You CAN go without it and going without it would probably actually be good for you. If you don't like their terms, go elsewhere.

  18. Re:Do *not* optimize for readability (do a tradeof on Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language · · Score: 1

    If you can make the code 1% more readable (pick your measure) at the cost of making it take twice as long to write, is that worth it?

    If you can make the code 1% less readable and simultaneously make it twice as fast to write, is that worth it?

    Agreed.

    Now flip those numbers around. If you can make your code twice as readable (and maintainable) with 1% extra effort, is it not worth it? What if python's len() was ln() insread? As it it, the first few times I wanted to get the length of a list in python, I tried length(). The language sometimes uses full length English words and sometimes not. Compare "str"with "unicode".

  19. Re:I prefer brevity support on Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language · · Score: 1

    I can read code that says "format" faster than code that says "fmt" because I don't need to devote any thought processes to determining that "fmt" probably means "format". Have you ever read a forum post by a teenager writing in sms style? It makes you want to stab your eyes out. It is much faster to type that way on a handset and I've seen them make exactly the same argument for using it when they have a full size keyboard; that it is faster to type that way. Unfortunately, it is an order of magnitude slower to read.

    I also have a second negative view about overly concise code; it promotes buggyness. In code that I have maintained over the years, I've noticed that more bugs (and harder to fix bugs) show up in the super concise and unreadable code than in highly readable code. Also, fixing these bugs is more likely to introduce regressions.

  20. Re:So What? We use "Lie Detectors". on Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector · · Score: 1

    Lie detectors ARE completely retarded. An honest person who is nervous about the detector will fare badly, while a sociopath can lie away all day and never get noticed.

    The only thing they are useful for is a as a physiological tool to put the person being interrogated at a disadvantage.

  21. Re:further proof evolution is false on Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally) · · Score: 1

    gah... birthers, not birther's

  22. Re:further proof evolution is false on Fossil Primate Ardipithecus Ramidus Described (Finally) · · Score: 1

    Perhaps because they don't want to duplicate The Guardian's CIF; where the debate more resembles an American townhall meeting with birther's present than debate.

    Though trolling CiF can be fun...

  23. Re:Great idea on Twitter Developing Location-Based API · · Score: 1

    What I'm looking for is "ah-ha, this is the necessity that was the mother of this invention." And I'm not finding it, at all. It really just seems to be a way for Twitter to pander to the exhibitionist tendencies of some of its users. You know, the ones who think that making every moment of their personal life a public event is somehow desirable for them and/or somehow interesting for others.

    I think you arrived at your ah-ha right there.

  24. Re:News at 11 on Strong Passwords Not As Good As You Think · · Score: 1

    That was my late father's favorite password. He and about 40 gazillion other people.

  25. Re:ribbons on Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010 · · Score: 1

    Reverse the chronology and you have my opinion of the robbon. HATED it at first, but now really like it. It acts as a one click filter for the toolbars. Yes, a good memory map to where you have the toolbars positioned means one click for everything, but are they all in the same position in all of your office apps? How often do you use other PCs?