What I read: "One of the world's largest companies has need of an allocation unique identifiers for network hardware".
Fuck, they sell 1.7 BILLION coke products every single day (their 2010 annual report, on their website FAQ too).
That means they sell over 1000 products a day for every MAC address they just reserved. They could use them to control the various parts of the fucking production lines via Ethernet and it still wouldn't be enough for their normal, everyday usage of such things. It's certainly no "Internet of things" heap-of-crap headline.
Sorry, you sound like an absolute nut, as does the website you link to. Hell, it even tries to attack some scientists personally through obscure and out-of-context quotes as if that makes you right.
I have no medical knowledge. I don't need any to see what I judge to be a nut. I've seen enough in my own fields to know that people who decide to tell me what's going on in a multi-billion-dollar field full of PhD's as if they know everything that the PhD's don't (without context), tend to be nutters.
I have a girlfriend in genetics. She gets any amount of nutters every day telling her that her field doesn't exist, doesn't do anything useful, is "wrong", is contrary to their religion, etc. that I have to sympathise with her on this one.
Come back when you have ten years of medical school behind you and have proved this all wrong in peer-reviewed journals that we can't adequately debunk. Until then, you're a nut repeating things that other nuts have said to gain attention.
I met a guy on the QE2 once. We were sitting, just socialising as you do on such a beautiful ship, with all kinds of people. We started to play cards. Mid-way through, he tried to tell me that he'd "solved" the three-houses, three-utilities puzzle. (Oh, this was after he told me he invented the card game of Uno). He was utterly serious. He was mortally offended I didn't believe him. He gave me a string of qualifications. Asked him to show me how he did it right there. There was no rush, he had time enough to spout all of this bullshit to me, we were just being friendly. I offered to even publicise it if he could show me his "answer". Strangely, he was unable to produce it, and kept dodging the question. I was genuinely intrigued as to how he'd managed it - I assumed he'd found a hole in the wording of the puzzle used, or some kind of "trick" (e.g. folding the paper, etc.). You know the best kind of thinkers? The guy in the Patch Adams movie, who was a genius, got committed to an institution, and constantly asked how many fingers that they could see when he held three up, and laughing at people who gave the "right" answer... except he was thinking sideways. We have two eyes. That kind of genius is rare, misunderstood, and can create wondrous things. I was genuinely intrigued if this guy was similar.
But no. He hadn't come up with some stroke of genius (real, or interpretative of the data). He just hadn't. He kept on refusing to show anything. Refusing to discuss it. Yet before he'd been so keen to tell me I was wrong. He asked me, quite abruptly, how I knew that he *couldn't* when so obviously he was right and had done it in his head. So I taught him Euler's Formula. He got most offended and never spoke to us again.
You might be able to look. You might even be able to force me to decrypt/open locked boxes.
But you can't just take copies of that data without a legally-binding (on you) assurance that it will remain private.
There is nothing in these laws that says it's illegal for the border guard to copy your laptop, then put your photos of you and your girlfriend on the net for all to see. Nothing.
And other countries have laws too. Laws that mean we can't LET you see some things, even if they are not protected by diplomatic immunity. I cannot reveal to you the passwords of my employer that stores personal data on its clients. It is ILLEGAL for me to do so, no matter what country I happen to be in when I do it (unless its under duress, but that's a DEFENCE, not an automatic exception). So forcing me to give you not only a viewing, but allowing you to copy that data and use it as you will (as I have no assurance that you won't do just that), means I can't give you that opportunity to even POTENTIALLY see that data. UK, Data Protection Act, revised several times since it's inception in 1984 (ironically enough).
In the same way, if you wanted to take photocopies at the border of all papers people are carrying, it would mean I would be unable to take some parts of my work with me. Unless you provided assurances as to the use and scope of the copies you made. It doesn't matter if I'm a teacher, a social worker, a prison officer, or whatever - you're stopping people bringing commercial data into your country that - up until now, and in every other country - we have assurances that you won't do bad things with it.
Nobody cares about you looking. That's your fucking job, if you work in airport security. But the rules of legal evidence need to apply to what you copy and take away. And they don't. In law, or in practice.
Constitutional or not, I wouldn't risk it anyway. Please note, I'm an IT Manager - I have nothing to hide - but the machines I use contain information on how to access other machines at my workplace. Providing access to the data on those machines, sited in the UK, is considered a breach of the Data Protection Act in the UK as they hold personal information. It's even a bit more serious than that, as I work for schools.
As such, case law prevents me even revealing those passwords to anyone without just cause or a court order. The penalties apply to ME, not just my employer. There are even cases where even the POTENTIAL to access the data (i.e. giving someone the password, even if they can't use it without being on the right system, etc.) is considered no different to direct and provable access to the data.
My previous employer prevented staff taking data to France because they have a similar law, but it wasn't anywhere near as serious a threat to our ability to control the data under our protection.
So, sorry, I can't take any electronic equipment holding that information into the US whatsoever. Others may interpret the situation differently, but I'm afraid the only interpretation that matters to me are the courts', and they have spoken many times on such matters and fined people heavily for doing so. I'm sure I could "get away" with it a billion times if I tried, but that's not how I conduct my professional or personal life.
As such, I wouldn't even bother to take a computer across the border in America. And given recent revelations, I don't think it wise to just take some hidden / memorised access credentials to the US and then use them when I'm then to - e.g. set up a blank / hired laptop.
Honestly, this is something I factored in when I was considering emigration many years ago. America pretty much ended up a no-go for me because of the attitude towards foreigners, and their casual approach to data, and their failure to sign many of the same agreements that all EU countries signed up to with regards data usage.
I wouldn't even bother to go there on holiday again - did it once, but now I wouldn't be able to take my laptop or my smartphone with good conscious as both contain encryption and access credentials that although if law-enforcement NEEDED them, I would provide, I do NOT expect law-enforcement to store it longer than necessary, duplicate it, or fail to provide assurances on the security of that data while it's in their possession. That's all you need to do - not even stop collecting the data, just tell me what you can and won't do with it so that I can take that piece of paper to a court (if it ever comes up) and say "Look, here's the assurance I was given when requested to hand over data by law enforcement - not my fault the data got into the wild" - even then, the case law says I'll still get fined but I think I have more of a chance of having the case swing my way under "reasonable efforts" to protect that data.
When you take my phone and laptop away, that cripples my ability to store my documentation (even my flight tickets), research my destinations, book hotels, navigate to places, etc. and I see it as unnecessary. So, basically, even as a place for a quick holiday, it's out of bounds.
And although the places I work for aren't the poorest, they aren't the richest either - so faffing about with blanked laptops is just too much shit to put up with.
Sorry, US. When you treat me like a prisoner, or an alien, with zero human rights, I don't want to be near you - like the bully in the playground. Have fun playing on your own.
All for the sake of a proper receipt, with some assurances that you won't just splurge my (and my employer's) private data onto the net the second I walk out the door...
Bloody thing - used to screw up the IRC channels that you tried to use it in (that was the IRC-based one, right?) by pumping tons of metadata about the comic into the channel.
I've probably been here longer than quite a lot of people.
It's exactly that kind of attitude that puts me off. Especially when, when something does seem newsworthy for here, seemingly the most contrived, error-ridden, broken-linked summary of the situation that assumes everyone knows what every acronym means and exactly what we're talking about (without explanation) is the one that makes it to the front page IF ANY AT ALL.
Sorry, but Slashdot is a shadow of its former self, and I used to browse it happily in work (IT-based, obviously) and we'd all learn from it. Now I'd be ashamed to show the front page to someone, even with my author/story filters turned on. It's now just a "this place was cool once, look how cool I am to be hanging out in this old place that was cool once" kind of place for most people.
There's still discussion, and still the occasional interesting article, and dammit I've paid for my account on here, so I still pop back often, but to be honest, I've given it up several times when they've done stupid shit (like the business section, video adverts for a hood with pockets, etc.) and it eventually all died down and so I came back. But each time I go, I go for longer. And each time I go, it's harder to force myself to go back.
To be honest, this is a pretty minor infraction compared to some in the past but it all loses readership.
"This morning, I had the best one-on-one discussion with my mother in years courtesy of her iPhone and Siri; voice recognition is definitely improving."
So, let me just ask, what was hindering this before? If one of you can hear and talk, and the other can read, then surely it's not a huge leap to one of you typing and the other reading? I know it's not a given, but it seems pretty obvious. And, from the deaf person's side, surely nothing is lost? Hell, you could have "talked with" them while chatting to friends at the same time (though that's probably rude if you don't have the focus to do so properly).
I have used text tools and translations to talk to Italian relatives when we're in a pinch and need to communicate. Mime gets you surprisingly far, and you can use keywords and dictionaries, but when the Italian for "spanner" is also the Italian for "key", it gets rather confusing rather quickly.
Speech recognition is inherently difficult and software for it, therefore, is crap. Sure, you can ask Siri to do something simple but she can't transcribe a conversation of any substance at any kind of speed or accuracy. People have been telling me that voice recognition systems could do that for over 20 years now - I'm still to find one and I don't have any speech difficulties or trouble communicating with people of varying accents. In fact, all the people I know that told me how great Dragon was usually found some alternative or quietly dropped their use of it within a year.
Don't expect speech recognition to be any good for a LONG time yet. Especially in a noisy / confusing envrionment. I hate parties partly because my mind tries to capture all audio and cannot discern them all at the same time (I have a pattern-recognising mind - once I'm tuned in, I can even write down strong-accented Italian as it's spoken even though I know little Italian, with few errors, but ask me to listen to two people talk at once and it hurts my head because my brain DOES try to decipher all the mess at the same time).
As such, the biggest boost to the deaf community in decades was text and instant messaging. Hell, I have no idea if half the people I "talk" to on the Internet are deaf or not.
So rather than trying to find some magical automatic tool so you don't have to do anything special to talk to your friend/relative who IS different, why not learn sign-language, use a text-based tool (even just notepad would work!) or just go to some effort to make yourself understood to them?
Fail #1: A port that can be accessed without triggering an alarm. Fail #2: A USB port. Fail #3: Software running that looks at, and allows unsigned executable code to be executed from, a USB storage device without explicit authorisation. Fail #4: No intrusion detection whatsoever to notice that this USB device has been inserted, has had code taken from it, that that code has been made executable and executed, or that that code is running with privilege enough to dispense cash.
I stopped caring at #2, if I'm honest.
You can state for all the world that the ATM's need software updates, etc. but there's just no excuse for a commodity device to be able to run arbitrary code without at least BOTHERING to check the authenticity of the code it runs first and ALERTING someone somewhere that that's what's happening (i.e. alert the branch, alert the central bank, etc.).
There's nothing stopping you issuing your updates over the local banking network, even, if that's what you want to do. Just make sure they are signed, verified, encrypted and secured. Honestly, you can't download a fecking game or movie nowadays without requiring DRM... and this is where DRM, code-signing and all that other stuff we do is supposed to be being used the most.
General purpose computers SHOULD NOT BE USED in security-conscious situations.
If your ATM isn't a SecureBoot machine (at a minimum), with code-signing explicitly required for any and all updates, and ALL WAYS to execute external code disabled, you're just a fecking idiot.
Documentation is like giving someone a dictionary to a foreign language they don't know.
Getting a working driver is like asking them to write the laws of the country in that language, and give a speech to inspire the majority of people who can understand it.
Documentation is ONE PART. It says what the design was supposed to be like.
Then you have errata and variations - when some of the hardware doesn't correspond to the documentation and acts differently.
Then you have examples - where someone shows you how to, e.g. draw a simple triangle using the documented opcodes and all of the boilerplate and set up necessary.
And then you have actual working code. Where you give away, for example, a complete implementation that conforms to a higher, standardised API and issues instructions to the hardware to perform those actions.
Out of all of those, documentation is the easiest thing to do. You can just (for example, just flicked through a PDF from that site) say that instruction X transposes a matrix. No idea of performance, whether that's the recommended way, what it contends with, how it works, whether the Intel drivers use that themselves, whether it's a legacy function, whether it has huge constraints on its use.
Without some code, it's all just fancy tech sheets. Sure, better than nothing, but a long way from actual co-operation. I'm not saying Intel don't co-operate in other areas, but documentation like this? That's the "quick reference" stuff for when your thousands of lines of existing example code don't act like you expect when you tweak them and you look up what that operand is supposed to do and how.
Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.
Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.
This is why I've never been that bothered by documentation releases, or even unmaintained source-drops. Supposedly Broadcom did something similar for the RPi's graphics chips. I think we're still waiting on anything that's not a binary driver there. And we have this sort of stuff for some ancient 3D graphics cards - it's just not as easy as reading it all and then sitting down to write a driver.
Intel, nVidia, ATI: Give us drivers with code that have no reliance on "black box" information/code, and we'll be happy. Until then, it's just lip-service. And you know that. That's why you don't release this kind of stuff for graphics chips, and nor does anyone else. Because you can drop this in someone's lap and years later STILL end up being pestered to the ends of the earth for an open-source driver (or assistance to help write one) because it doesn't exist.
Code is a lot more than writing things to perform a protocol described in the documentation. If only it were that easy.
If you bought your Oyster card pre-2010, it's not a DESFire one. But it still works. Still holds credit. Hasn't been recalled. Hasn't been disabled. I have at least two that we use for visitors from my girlfriend's country, we used them last week. Saying "DESFire cards" are secure is no good if DESFire isn't a requirement of the transport system in question. My Oyster card goes back at least 7-8 years, I believe, and that's because I lost the one I used to use when I was in Uni.
Additionally, NXP are supposed to have been phasing out the original DESFire cards since 2010 - they have been proven insecure - but they just keep revising them (hence your "EV1"). Again, no recall, no disabling of older versions (at least three at the moment?), so saying that the cards are secure is worthless if even 10% of people aren't using them. And guess who those 10% will be? The ones who've been using public transport for longest and most likely have season tickets, more credit, etc.
Hell, DES itself is hardly the epitome of secure any more - which is why newer DESFire cards are actually AES inside.
What you say may be true. But if you can just clone any of the last several years of cards that are NOT as secure as AES, then it's all a waste of time.
Nope. There's always been bollocks on the news. That's kind of why a lot of people totally ignore it.
Fact is, if I don't give a shit if celebrity X slept with celebrity Y, or happens to be gay, then it doesn't matter if the story is true or not... I won't read the story. The people who do hardly care if it's true or not.
But this isn't "new". Most of the stuff you learned at school is absolute tripe. History is extremely revisionist. And most of the stuff that's on the news is so much bollocks that it doesn't matter. Those with a brain will be ignoring it *because* it's on the news, those without one will seek it out to consume it even if it's not on the news. Confirmation bias and all that.
Hence why we have one celebrity taking websites and papers to court at the moment because he happens to share a real name with a convicted paedophile. I have had friends say it was him, though. They don't care enough to research even when the websites/papers involved are foreign and the news story in my country is about how he's taking them to court for mis-attributing the crime to himself.
If you're stupid enough to live your life by news, then you're going to fall into this. You've expected them (but don't really care about it) to research their facts. You blindly believe them. It doesn't matter if you read the Sunday Sport (where the items revolve around aliens in the Royal Family and Elvis regenerating) or the The Sunday Times (where the items revolve around what business is expect to make $10bn when it floats next week on the basis of zero profit so far). All that changes is the area, the scale, and the reputation.
In the UK, we have had one paper shut down for hacking into celebrities voicemail. People protested and sales dropped. The next week, that paper shut down and the owners opened a new one with the same staff but a different name. Almost immediately everyone bought into it and it replaced the other paper. Nobody CARES enough to actually bother about them being criminal liars.
People do not watch the news to see the truth. They watch the news to have something to gossip about with other people who also watched the news. For centuries, it's been like that, and yet people still think you can judge a person by what *KIND* of newspaper they read.
Sorry to tell you, but the news is EVEN MORE unreliable that my friend's Facebook posts... and today they include someone who's trying to tell me that because the New Year starts with a New Moon this is a) unusual (last happened 19 years ago! Odd, on a 28-day cycle, that it even happens that often, to be honest...), b) important or c) going to make any difference at all. Another has reposted a fake "lucky money" satirical rip-off of those posts that say if you repost it you will find money (and hasn't even noticed that "fungus shoe" isn't actually feng shui).
Yet others are trying to tell me that having 5 Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays in a month is something that only happens every 823 years (er, actually, no - it happens nearly every year).
And I honestly consider these people more reliable than the news. Hell, I consider the "QI" game show more reliable than many popular science outlets, even when it has admitted to having flaws in its answers (and actually contradicts its own answers).
News has always been bollocks. The fact that professional outlets are falling for OTHER'S crap stories is the news here, rather than the crap they make up themselves.
In one school the parents protested the installation of a mobile phone mast 500 metres from the school. They failed. While all the time we were having to remove phones from students and all the staff were wandering around with them strapped to their belts.
Then they protested our "wireless networks" (really a couple of WAP's on a trolley). While more parents complained that we didn't offer free Wifi in the reception area, and that they couldn't connect to the Internet when we had open-days.
People completely misunderstand the technology, and on the other hand also demand the services that technology provides. They also miss the point that, pretty much, vastly more "damage" is done by holding a transmitter with more power per square centimetre to their heads than anything outside the school building could manage.
Pretty much, they had petitions, the petitions were sent off into the consultation process, the mobile phone mast happened anyway, and we were allowed to "put in" the wireless networks that had been in the school for 4+ years beforehand anyway. Then all the moaning disappeared and the parents were happy because we gave them Wifi in reception.
See other posts - you can buy writeable tokens for next-to-nothing from China, and you can figure out the keys inside any such device using utilities available on Google Code and a bog-standard reader.
Our Mifare card access system used to read data off of the latest PayWave-type phones. To our systems it was just a random long number but it uses the same frequencies, protocols, etc. as everything else RFID to power itself/send it.
Caused havoc with our systems when people started buying Galaxy S3's and holding them in their hands while they swiped their entry cards. We wondered what the hell was going on for a long time.
Not true - it's a lot more "offline" than you think.
That's why you have to nominate a station to "collect" your top-up - basically they preload to that station in the morning and then you card gets an instruction that you have X pounds more on it now. The card knows how much you have and works when the system is out (done it many times). That's how the vendor purchases work too - they rely on the card to have an up-to-date record of how much PAYG credit they have.
But, that said, when it is networked - as pointed out - it all gets noticed quite quickly. This is my point - network and keep online as much as possible and don't rely on the CARD to tell you how much money the user has. Use a number on the card to refer to a central database and take a loss on "system down" times rather than "use can clone any card" times (and then keep things up as much as possible).
If you can buy the readers, and someone obviously sells the writers somewhere, you can clone them.
As soon as you then rely on these tokens to hold individual data themselves (with no reference to a central database), then they become valued targets for attack.
If you had these cards hold nothing more than a code number, and wired all the readers to talk home, then the system can't be "scammed" as such - people can have their cards cloned, of course, but you can spot it, you can trace them, arrest them at your convenience, and give the original account holder a new card in the meantime as soon as they report the fraud. But because everything has to talk to a central database, the cards are not so much "cash" as a stolen "credit card" - traceable, and stoppable.
Then, it doesn't matter if you do use something as common as MiFare (a school I used to work in used Mifare entry systems - they weren't expensive or hard to get hold of at all and I used to program my Oyster - London Tube travel - card to open the door for me in the morning if I'd forgotten my ID card). As soon as the readers are that commonplace, the writers will be available even if that means people are building their own and making fake "cards" the size of a Raspberry Pi with some RF circuitry to pretend to be a card. The next step is just a matter of shrinking the device.
MiFare is long-cracked. You can buy the cards for pence each and the readers (direct to USB, etc.) for a pittance. The next step up is no harder than going from magstripe readers and cards up to magstripe writers with the correct magstripe "level" to read/write the banking data on an old magstripe credit card.
Don't put "value" into a chip that can be cloned. Put the value into a central, monitored, system, and provide people only with a codenumber to access it. That codenumber can be cloned still, sure, but then you can watch out for it, notice it, blacklist it, catch people red-handed. And they can't go spending "free money" offline from your system.
This is my biggest bugbear with London's Oyster system. It's just a number for the most part, but they try to store "value" on the cards and let you buy newspapers with them. Now you have an offline, valued, unmonitored, commodity on an easy-to-clone chip.
I fear that in the EU, this would fall foul of Data Protection laws the second a piece of personal information is linkable to a person (so as soon as you know how much *I* earn, or could tell from the data, you have to have my personal permission in order to make that information public).
I think this is a quite reasonable, however - salary information is not something you want published down to the individual. Though I'm not one of those annoying people who dare not even tell their friends how much they earn, I see no reason for anyone else to know what I earn unless I tell them (pretty much - if you work with me and ask me, I will tell you). The people who need to know - my employers, the tax office, anyone with a valid legal reason who can go to a court, etc. - will know anyway. Those who don't, won't.
It's perfectly adequate for a company or organisation to have to tell how much they spend on salaries in total and, in a quick averaging using the number of full time employees, you can work out whether people are being vastly overpaid or failing to comply with minimum-wage obligations. You can't lower the average without cutting the outliers from earning lots more than the average, so there's no way to "hide" a large executive salary among thousands of workers being paid next-to-nothing.
The problem with publishing salary data is really this: I might earn more than you, and do the same job. The reason I might earn more might just be because I negotiated more, or I was more highly desired for the role at the time of employment, or I'm perceived as better skilled/experienced in the role offered - and if I negotiated a better deal, that's my business, not yours. This is why job adverts very rarely state an absolute salary that can never be negotiated on. If you have any sense, you won't sign the contract without at least trying to push it past the middle of the advertised salary range.
Historically, I've been paid more than my colleagues around me, for the same roles. That's my business. And I've helped some of them earn more by teaching them how to negotiate themselves (my girlfriend got several thousand pounds more a year by the simple precept of coming home with a contract to sign - not signing it there and then - asking me first, and then me telling her not to sign until she had it on paper that the pay was several thousand pounds more. She was scared shitless about doing so, found it very disturbing and "unnatural" for her normal polite self. But they barely said a word, printed out a new contract there-and-then for more money, she signed that instead, hey presto - free money for doing nothing! It's almost as if they EXPECT some people to ask for more...).
Many people are stupid and will just say "Yeah, great, fine" if a reasonable salary is offered at the start and then live with that for the rest of their lives. That's WHY they ask you about the salary right at the end of a good interview - they want to tie you to a number before you leave the room on the basis that you KNOW they want you. There's nothing wrong with taking it, but there's never any harm in negotiating for more either (or even just leaving the question open while you "read through the contract"). The worst that happens is they say "Sorry, but that's the absolute maximum we can pay" (and I've never had that happen when I've asked).
The primary reason to not publish salary data is to stop someone else finding out that they voluntarily elected to do the same job as someone else for less money (or for less money than their predecessors, etc.). That's it. Because when they find out, it creates bitterness and they will demand to earn the same, even though nobody told them that they could earn more if they'd asked.
Throughout my career, I've earned more than my peers. Not by huge factors, but by enough to notice. To the extent that, at one employer, my boss had to call the local government office and get them to create a salary band just for me, and then my boss had to personally sign-off tha
Just had a Christmas party with some 20-somethings where we all played Gauntlet II on the big TV. It was a blast. None of them had ever played it before, but it was about how you play it - not what you're playing.
In the same way that I don't mind loading up a Speccy emulator and then playing some title from Steam and then going back to a DOSBox title from GOG.com and then playing my family at Mario on Wii U, games are very variable and enjoyable across all eras and platforms.
The problem is people who think one is "better" than the other and trying to enforce that opinion on others. Imagine trying to do that with movies - making your kids sit through The Goonies or whatever just because YOU enjoyed it. I bet you can find half-a-dozen people from your school year that also hated such a film. Similarly, people play games that suit them.
This is also why it's so difficult to get someone who "isn't into" games into games... they aren't into it for a reason, or it would have taken their interest years ago. Sure, they might have one particular title that they like, but chances are that even if they like a game, it'll be one you don't like. This is why every year or so, the "how do I get my girlrfriend into games" question pops up on here... show them a couple, if they don't like them, then they don't like them, and chances are that they won't like the same games as you.
Hell, my brother and I were from the era of "the family computer", used to play together all the time (sharing a keyboard!) and are both massive gamers still. Even we don't share the enjoyment of every title we owned - there were lots of games he loved that I can't stand and vice versa.
Don't force your opinions on your kids - let them play what they want (to the normal parenting extents!). And I'm sure if they get into a family tradition of, say, playing Monopoly at Christmas, they'll get into a family tradition of playing some Bomberman when you dig it out and put it on the TV for them all to play. But that's got infinitely more to do with "playing together" as it has the particular game.
You want your kids to play games with you? Do that. Don't worry about what the game is - it can be one of their or one of yours.
You want your kids to learn how to play old games? You might as well try to convince them to put all their MP3's onto cassette.
For once, something based on proper AI (rather than human-generated heuristics).
However - notice it's limitations: Where there is a direct correlation between where you need to be, and where something else is on the screen (basically a 1:1 relationship in Pong, for example), it can cope with going higher or lower as required.
But when you put it into something that has more than a single thing to "learn" (move left/right, avoid bombs, shoot aliens, choose which aliens to shoot, don't shoot your own base, etc.) then the amount of training required goes up exponentially. And thus we could spend centuries of computer time in order to get something that can do as well as a simple heuristic designed by someone who knows the game (not saying heuristics don't have their place!).
"Trained" devices require training relative to some power of the variety of the inputs and the directness of their correlation to the game-arena. And thus, proper AI is really stymied when it comes to learning complex tasks.
But still - this is the sort of thing we should be doing. If it takes an infant two years with the best "computer" in the universe that we know of to learn how to talk, why should we think it will take a machine at even the top-end of the supercomputer scale (which can't have as many "connections" as the average human brain) any less?
If you are in any way a vaguely competent games developer (even an individual) then the difference between DirectX and OpenGL is miniscule.
And if you CHOSE to lock yourself into a Microsoft-only platform (thereby destroying your compatibility with Mac, Linux and many console platforms - apart from XBox, obviously - in one fell stroke) then that's a choice you made that you have to do the work to recover when it comes time to admit your mistake.
And yet targeting OpenGL from day one, it would have all worked, all just as fast, all with the same fancy effects, all for the same effort, on all platforms.
DirectX lock-in is the result of developer stupidity but, fortunately, it's not that hard to drag yourself out of.
I have to say that GDB under Eclipse is actually my preferred tool for debugging. Hell, half the time you can't even see that it's actually using GDB yet it does everything I would want in a debugger.
It's all horses-for-courses but in terms of GDB *itself* (i.e. not a frontend to it), I don't think there's much to improve except keeping up with new binary formats, instructions, etc.
Impact of all those Wikileaks, etc. bullshit? One bloke hiding in an embassy in the UK after skipping bail, nobody really giving a shit until he comes out and faces trial.
Impact of Snowden? News stories the world over, plus demands for change in many places, and outright disgust at what's been going on behind our backs.
Snowden did exactly what he wanted (and, I would say, needed) to. At ENORMOUS personal risk. He'll never really be "safe" again.
Compare and contrast to "dickhead hiding with a UV lamp" Assange, who is going to go to jail for skipping bail and didn't have one tenth of one percent of the impact of Snowden - and is going to go to jail for NOTHING to do with what he leaked, really. Nobody even really cares enough any more, we just want him to fuck off and stop eating up taxpayer's money while he avoids justice.
Bear in mind that I've posted about Turing several times and posted this to my Facebook page for my friends to see when I read it this morning - I cannot *be* more grateful for his work, being a computer scientist who lives in the UK (and doesn't speak German!) - but he plead guilty.
When you plead guilty in court, the court doesn't need to do anything else. Thus it's a pardon - we forgive you committing the crime - not an exoneration - you should never have been charged in the first place.
Although in a few decades, it will appear an abomination - at the time he was charged, it was illegal and he knew it and he pleaded guilty. The problem was really the punishment - castration and, because of the conviction, expulsion from the place of his greatest works.
Same as Oscar Wilde, in a way. It was illegal at the time, he did the same kinds of things, he was convicted in the same way. Nobody's saying "he should have been allowed to ignore the laws laid down at the time" (that's stupid and dangerous), what we're saying is "the laws were wrong and shouldn't have existed in the first place, the punishment was unjustly harsh, and why does being 'convicted' as gay prevent you from working on mathematics for the government?".
But, most importantly, why has it taken so damn long to realise this? If you want to realise what a dark age we're still living in, just look at what's happened in the last 50 years or so, and where we are today in terms of sexual (and sexuality) equality. We like to laugh and point fingers at centuries of human history where stupid things were illegal - and yet in the future we'll still be lumped into the "1900's" where Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were both convicted of having consensual sex with a man in private, and received what amounts to slave labour / castration as punishment. We're literally only 14 years away from being in the "1900's" and future history will see today as no different to then (especially when we STILL have countries saying you can't be gay).
Slashdot Mirror
What I read: "One of the world's largest companies has need of an allocation unique identifiers for network hardware".
Fuck, they sell 1.7 BILLION coke products every single day (their 2010 annual report, on their website FAQ too).
That means they sell over 1000 products a day for every MAC address they just reserved. They could use them to control the various parts of the fucking production lines via Ethernet and it still wouldn't be enough for their normal, everyday usage of such things. It's certainly no "Internet of things" heap-of-crap headline.
How the hell did this make it onto Slashdot?
Sorry, you sound like an absolute nut, as does the website you link to. Hell, it even tries to attack some scientists personally through obscure and out-of-context quotes as if that makes you right.
I have no medical knowledge. I don't need any to see what I judge to be a nut. I've seen enough in my own fields to know that people who decide to tell me what's going on in a multi-billion-dollar field full of PhD's as if they know everything that the PhD's don't (without context), tend to be nutters.
I have a girlfriend in genetics. She gets any amount of nutters every day telling her that her field doesn't exist, doesn't do anything useful, is "wrong", is contrary to their religion, etc. that I have to sympathise with her on this one.
Come back when you have ten years of medical school behind you and have proved this all wrong in peer-reviewed journals that we can't adequately debunk. Until then, you're a nut repeating things that other nuts have said to gain attention.
I met a guy on the QE2 once. We were sitting, just socialising as you do on such a beautiful ship, with all kinds of people. We started to play cards. Mid-way through, he tried to tell me that he'd "solved" the three-houses, three-utilities puzzle. (Oh, this was after he told me he invented the card game of Uno). He was utterly serious. He was mortally offended I didn't believe him. He gave me a string of qualifications. Asked him to show me how he did it right there. There was no rush, he had time enough to spout all of this bullshit to me, we were just being friendly. I offered to even publicise it if he could show me his "answer". Strangely, he was unable to produce it, and kept dodging the question. I was genuinely intrigued as to how he'd managed it - I assumed he'd found a hole in the wording of the puzzle used, or some kind of "trick" (e.g. folding the paper, etc.). You know the best kind of thinkers? The guy in the Patch Adams movie, who was a genius, got committed to an institution, and constantly asked how many fingers that they could see when he held three up, and laughing at people who gave the "right" answer... except he was thinking sideways. We have two eyes. That kind of genius is rare, misunderstood, and can create wondrous things. I was genuinely intrigued if this guy was similar.
But no. He hadn't come up with some stroke of genius (real, or interpretative of the data). He just hadn't. He kept on refusing to show anything. Refusing to discuss it. Yet before he'd been so keen to tell me I was wrong. He asked me, quite abruptly, how I knew that he *couldn't* when so obviously he was right and had done it in his head. So I taught him Euler's Formula. He got most offended and never spoke to us again.
You might be able to look.
You might even be able to force me to decrypt/open locked boxes.
But you can't just take copies of that data without a legally-binding (on you) assurance that it will remain private.
There is nothing in these laws that says it's illegal for the border guard to copy your laptop, then put your photos of you and your girlfriend on the net for all to see. Nothing.
And other countries have laws too. Laws that mean we can't LET you see some things, even if they are not protected by diplomatic immunity. I cannot reveal to you the passwords of my employer that stores personal data on its clients. It is ILLEGAL for me to do so, no matter what country I happen to be in when I do it (unless its under duress, but that's a DEFENCE, not an automatic exception). So forcing me to give you not only a viewing, but allowing you to copy that data and use it as you will (as I have no assurance that you won't do just that), means I can't give you that opportunity to even POTENTIALLY see that data. UK, Data Protection Act, revised several times since it's inception in 1984 (ironically enough).
In the same way, if you wanted to take photocopies at the border of all papers people are carrying, it would mean I would be unable to take some parts of my work with me. Unless you provided assurances as to the use and scope of the copies you made. It doesn't matter if I'm a teacher, a social worker, a prison officer, or whatever - you're stopping people bringing commercial data into your country that - up until now, and in every other country - we have assurances that you won't do bad things with it.
Nobody cares about you looking. That's your fucking job, if you work in airport security. But the rules of legal evidence need to apply to what you copy and take away. And they don't. In law, or in practice.
Constitutional or not, I wouldn't risk it anyway. Please note, I'm an IT Manager - I have nothing to hide - but the machines I use contain information on how to access other machines at my workplace. Providing access to the data on those machines, sited in the UK, is considered a breach of the Data Protection Act in the UK as they hold personal information. It's even a bit more serious than that, as I work for schools.
As such, case law prevents me even revealing those passwords to anyone without just cause or a court order. The penalties apply to ME, not just my employer. There are even cases where even the POTENTIAL to access the data (i.e. giving someone the password, even if they can't use it without being on the right system, etc.) is considered no different to direct and provable access to the data.
My previous employer prevented staff taking data to France because they have a similar law, but it wasn't anywhere near as serious a threat to our ability to control the data under our protection.
So, sorry, I can't take any electronic equipment holding that information into the US whatsoever. Others may interpret the situation differently, but I'm afraid the only interpretation that matters to me are the courts', and they have spoken many times on such matters and fined people heavily for doing so. I'm sure I could "get away" with it a billion times if I tried, but that's not how I conduct my professional or personal life.
As such, I wouldn't even bother to take a computer across the border in America. And given recent revelations, I don't think it wise to just take some hidden / memorised access credentials to the US and then use them when I'm then to - e.g. set up a blank / hired laptop.
Honestly, this is something I factored in when I was considering emigration many years ago. America pretty much ended up a no-go for me because of the attitude towards foreigners, and their casual approach to data, and their failure to sign many of the same agreements that all EU countries signed up to with regards data usage.
I wouldn't even bother to go there on holiday again - did it once, but now I wouldn't be able to take my laptop or my smartphone with good conscious as both contain encryption and access credentials that although if law-enforcement NEEDED them, I would provide, I do NOT expect law-enforcement to store it longer than necessary, duplicate it, or fail to provide assurances on the security of that data while it's in their possession. That's all you need to do - not even stop collecting the data, just tell me what you can and won't do with it so that I can take that piece of paper to a court (if it ever comes up) and say "Look, here's the assurance I was given when requested to hand over data by law enforcement - not my fault the data got into the wild" - even then, the case law says I'll still get fined but I think I have more of a chance of having the case swing my way under "reasonable efforts" to protect that data.
When you take my phone and laptop away, that cripples my ability to store my documentation (even my flight tickets), research my destinations, book hotels, navigate to places, etc. and I see it as unnecessary. So, basically, even as a place for a quick holiday, it's out of bounds.
And although the places I work for aren't the poorest, they aren't the richest either - so faffing about with blanked laptops is just too much shit to put up with.
Sorry, US. When you treat me like a prisoner, or an alien, with zero human rights, I don't want to be near you - like the bully in the playground. Have fun playing on your own.
All for the sake of a proper receipt, with some assurances that you won't just splurge my (and my employer's) private data onto the net the second I walk out the door...
Yeah, fucking well-travelled, bi-fluent, academics. America should get rid of the lot of them.
Looking at some state's science education programmes, you already have...
Bloody thing - used to screw up the IRC channels that you tried to use it in (that was the IRC-based one, right?) by pumping tons of metadata about the comic into the channel.
Most places banned people using it.
I've probably been here longer than quite a lot of people.
It's exactly that kind of attitude that puts me off. Especially when, when something does seem newsworthy for here, seemingly the most contrived, error-ridden, broken-linked summary of the situation that assumes everyone knows what every acronym means and exactly what we're talking about (without explanation) is the one that makes it to the front page IF ANY AT ALL.
Sorry, but Slashdot is a shadow of its former self, and I used to browse it happily in work (IT-based, obviously) and we'd all learn from it. Now I'd be ashamed to show the front page to someone, even with my author/story filters turned on. It's now just a "this place was cool once, look how cool I am to be hanging out in this old place that was cool once" kind of place for most people.
There's still discussion, and still the occasional interesting article, and dammit I've paid for my account on here, so I still pop back often, but to be honest, I've given it up several times when they've done stupid shit (like the business section, video adverts for a hood with pockets, etc.) and it eventually all died down and so I came back. But each time I go, I go for longer. And each time I go, it's harder to force myself to go back.
To be honest, this is a pretty minor infraction compared to some in the past but it all loses readership.
"This morning, I had the best one-on-one discussion with my mother in years courtesy of her iPhone and Siri; voice recognition is definitely improving."
So, let me just ask, what was hindering this before? If one of you can hear and talk, and the other can read, then surely it's not a huge leap to one of you typing and the other reading? I know it's not a given, but it seems pretty obvious. And, from the deaf person's side, surely nothing is lost? Hell, you could have "talked with" them while chatting to friends at the same time (though that's probably rude if you don't have the focus to do so properly).
I have used text tools and translations to talk to Italian relatives when we're in a pinch and need to communicate. Mime gets you surprisingly far, and you can use keywords and dictionaries, but when the Italian for "spanner" is also the Italian for "key", it gets rather confusing rather quickly.
Speech recognition is inherently difficult and software for it, therefore, is crap. Sure, you can ask Siri to do something simple but she can't transcribe a conversation of any substance at any kind of speed or accuracy. People have been telling me that voice recognition systems could do that for over 20 years now - I'm still to find one and I don't have any speech difficulties or trouble communicating with people of varying accents. In fact, all the people I know that told me how great Dragon was usually found some alternative or quietly dropped their use of it within a year.
Don't expect speech recognition to be any good for a LONG time yet. Especially in a noisy / confusing envrionment. I hate parties partly because my mind tries to capture all audio and cannot discern them all at the same time (I have a pattern-recognising mind - once I'm tuned in, I can even write down strong-accented Italian as it's spoken even though I know little Italian, with few errors, but ask me to listen to two people talk at once and it hurts my head because my brain DOES try to decipher all the mess at the same time).
As such, the biggest boost to the deaf community in decades was text and instant messaging. Hell, I have no idea if half the people I "talk" to on the Internet are deaf or not.
So rather than trying to find some magical automatic tool so you don't have to do anything special to talk to your friend/relative who IS different, why not learn sign-language, use a text-based tool (even just notepad would work!) or just go to some effort to make yourself understood to them?
Fail #1: A port that can be accessed without triggering an alarm.
Fail #2: A USB port.
Fail #3: Software running that looks at, and allows unsigned executable code to be executed from, a USB storage device without explicit authorisation.
Fail #4: No intrusion detection whatsoever to notice that this USB device has been inserted, has had code taken from it, that that code has been made executable and executed, or that that code is running with privilege enough to dispense cash.
I stopped caring at #2, if I'm honest.
You can state for all the world that the ATM's need software updates, etc. but there's just no excuse for a commodity device to be able to run arbitrary code without at least BOTHERING to check the authenticity of the code it runs first and ALERTING someone somewhere that that's what's happening (i.e. alert the branch, alert the central bank, etc.).
There's nothing stopping you issuing your updates over the local banking network, even, if that's what you want to do. Just make sure they are signed, verified, encrypted and secured. Honestly, you can't download a fecking game or movie nowadays without requiring DRM... and this is where DRM, code-signing and all that other stuff we do is supposed to be being used the most.
General purpose computers SHOULD NOT BE USED in security-conscious situations.
If your ATM isn't a SecureBoot machine (at a minimum), with code-signing explicitly required for any and all updates, and ALL WAYS to execute external code disabled, you're just a fecking idiot.
To cite a simple TL;DR analogy:
Documentation is like giving someone a dictionary to a foreign language they don't know.
Getting a working driver is like asking them to write the laws of the country in that language, and give a speech to inspire the majority of people who can understand it.
Documentation is ONE PART. It says what the design was supposed to be like.
Then you have errata and variations - when some of the hardware doesn't correspond to the documentation and acts differently.
Then you have examples - where someone shows you how to, e.g. draw a simple triangle using the documented opcodes and all of the boilerplate and set up necessary.
And then you have actual working code. Where you give away, for example, a complete implementation that conforms to a higher, standardised API and issues instructions to the hardware to perform those actions.
Out of all of those, documentation is the easiest thing to do. You can just (for example, just flicked through a PDF from that site) say that instruction X transposes a matrix. No idea of performance, whether that's the recommended way, what it contends with, how it works, whether the Intel drivers use that themselves, whether it's a legacy function, whether it has huge constraints on its use.
Without some code, it's all just fancy tech sheets. Sure, better than nothing, but a long way from actual co-operation. I'm not saying Intel don't co-operate in other areas, but documentation like this? That's the "quick reference" stuff for when your thousands of lines of existing example code don't act like you expect when you tweak them and you look up what that operand is supposed to do and how.
Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.
Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.
This is why I've never been that bothered by documentation releases, or even unmaintained source-drops. Supposedly Broadcom did something similar for the RPi's graphics chips. I think we're still waiting on anything that's not a binary driver there. And we have this sort of stuff for some ancient 3D graphics cards - it's just not as easy as reading it all and then sitting down to write a driver.
Intel, nVidia, ATI: Give us drivers with code that have no reliance on "black box" information/code, and we'll be happy. Until then, it's just lip-service. And you know that. That's why you don't release this kind of stuff for graphics chips, and nor does anyone else. Because you can drop this in someone's lap and years later STILL end up being pestered to the ends of the earth for an open-source driver (or assistance to help write one) because it doesn't exist.
Code is a lot more than writing things to perform a protocol described in the documentation. If only it were that easy.
If you bought your Oyster card pre-2010, it's not a DESFire one. But it still works. Still holds credit. Hasn't been recalled. Hasn't been disabled. I have at least two that we use for visitors from my girlfriend's country, we used them last week. Saying "DESFire cards" are secure is no good if DESFire isn't a requirement of the transport system in question. My Oyster card goes back at least 7-8 years, I believe, and that's because I lost the one I used to use when I was in Uni.
Additionally, NXP are supposed to have been phasing out the original DESFire cards since 2010 - they have been proven insecure - but they just keep revising them (hence your "EV1"). Again, no recall, no disabling of older versions (at least three at the moment?), so saying that the cards are secure is worthless if even 10% of people aren't using them. And guess who those 10% will be? The ones who've been using public transport for longest and most likely have season tickets, more credit, etc.
Hell, DES itself is hardly the epitome of secure any more - which is why newer DESFire cards are actually AES inside.
What you say may be true. But if you can just clone any of the last several years of cards that are NOT as secure as AES, then it's all a waste of time.
Nope. There's always been bollocks on the news. That's kind of why a lot of people totally ignore it.
Fact is, if I don't give a shit if celebrity X slept with celebrity Y, or happens to be gay, then it doesn't matter if the story is true or not... I won't read the story. The people who do hardly care if it's true or not.
But this isn't "new". Most of the stuff you learned at school is absolute tripe. History is extremely revisionist. And most of the stuff that's on the news is so much bollocks that it doesn't matter. Those with a brain will be ignoring it *because* it's on the news, those without one will seek it out to consume it even if it's not on the news. Confirmation bias and all that.
Hence why we have one celebrity taking websites and papers to court at the moment because he happens to share a real name with a convicted paedophile. I have had friends say it was him, though. They don't care enough to research even when the websites/papers involved are foreign and the news story in my country is about how he's taking them to court for mis-attributing the crime to himself.
If you're stupid enough to live your life by news, then you're going to fall into this. You've expected them (but don't really care about it) to research their facts. You blindly believe them. It doesn't matter if you read the Sunday Sport (where the items revolve around aliens in the Royal Family and Elvis regenerating) or the The Sunday Times (where the items revolve around what business is expect to make $10bn when it floats next week on the basis of zero profit so far). All that changes is the area, the scale, and the reputation.
In the UK, we have had one paper shut down for hacking into celebrities voicemail. People protested and sales dropped. The next week, that paper shut down and the owners opened a new one with the same staff but a different name. Almost immediately everyone bought into it and it replaced the other paper. Nobody CARES enough to actually bother about them being criminal liars.
People do not watch the news to see the truth. They watch the news to have something to gossip about with other people who also watched the news. For centuries, it's been like that, and yet people still think you can judge a person by what *KIND* of newspaper they read.
Sorry to tell you, but the news is EVEN MORE unreliable that my friend's Facebook posts... and today they include someone who's trying to tell me that because the New Year starts with a New Moon this is a) unusual (last happened 19 years ago! Odd, on a 28-day cycle, that it even happens that often, to be honest...), b) important or c) going to make any difference at all. Another has reposted a fake "lucky money" satirical rip-off of those posts that say if you repost it you will find money (and hasn't even noticed that "fungus shoe" isn't actually feng shui).
Yet others are trying to tell me that having 5 Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays in a month is something that only happens every 823 years (er, actually, no - it happens nearly every year).
And I honestly consider these people more reliable than the news. Hell, I consider the "QI" game show more reliable than many popular science outlets, even when it has admitted to having flaws in its answers (and actually contradicts its own answers).
News has always been bollocks. The fact that professional outlets are falling for OTHER'S crap stories is the news here, rather than the crap they make up themselves.
I work in schools.
In one school the parents protested the installation of a mobile phone mast 500 metres from the school. They failed. While all the time we were having to remove phones from students and all the staff were wandering around with them strapped to their belts.
Then they protested our "wireless networks" (really a couple of WAP's on a trolley). While more parents complained that we didn't offer free Wifi in the reception area, and that they couldn't connect to the Internet when we had open-days.
People completely misunderstand the technology, and on the other hand also demand the services that technology provides. They also miss the point that, pretty much, vastly more "damage" is done by holding a transmitter with more power per square centimetre to their heads than anything outside the school building could manage.
Pretty much, they had petitions, the petitions were sent off into the consultation process, the mobile phone mast happened anyway, and we were allowed to "put in" the wireless networks that had been in the school for 4+ years beforehand anyway. Then all the moaning disappeared and the parents were happy because we gave them Wifi in reception.
See other posts - you can buy writeable tokens for next-to-nothing from China, and you can figure out the keys inside any such device using utilities available on Google Code and a bog-standard reader.
Our Mifare card access system used to read data off of the latest PayWave-type phones. To our systems it was just a random long number but it uses the same frequencies, protocols, etc. as everything else RFID to power itself/send it.
Caused havoc with our systems when people started buying Galaxy S3's and holding them in their hands while they swiped their entry cards. We wondered what the hell was going on for a long time.
Not true - it's a lot more "offline" than you think.
That's why you have to nominate a station to "collect" your top-up - basically they preload to that station in the morning and then you card gets an instruction that you have X pounds more on it now. The card knows how much you have and works when the system is out (done it many times). That's how the vendor purchases work too - they rely on the card to have an up-to-date record of how much PAYG credit they have.
But, that said, when it is networked - as pointed out - it all gets noticed quite quickly. This is my point - network and keep online as much as possible and don't rely on the CARD to tell you how much money the user has. Use a number on the card to refer to a central database and take a loss on "system down" times rather than "use can clone any card" times (and then keep things up as much as possible).
Like everything:
If you can buy the readers, and someone obviously sells the writers somewhere, you can clone them.
As soon as you then rely on these tokens to hold individual data themselves (with no reference to a central database), then they become valued targets for attack.
If you had these cards hold nothing more than a code number, and wired all the readers to talk home, then the system can't be "scammed" as such - people can have their cards cloned, of course, but you can spot it, you can trace them, arrest them at your convenience, and give the original account holder a new card in the meantime as soon as they report the fraud. But because everything has to talk to a central database, the cards are not so much "cash" as a stolen "credit card" - traceable, and stoppable.
Then, it doesn't matter if you do use something as common as MiFare (a school I used to work in used Mifare entry systems - they weren't expensive or hard to get hold of at all and I used to program my Oyster - London Tube travel - card to open the door for me in the morning if I'd forgotten my ID card). As soon as the readers are that commonplace, the writers will be available even if that means people are building their own and making fake "cards" the size of a Raspberry Pi with some RF circuitry to pretend to be a card. The next step is just a matter of shrinking the device.
MiFare is long-cracked. You can buy the cards for pence each and the readers (direct to USB, etc.) for a pittance. The next step up is no harder than going from magstripe readers and cards up to magstripe writers with the correct magstripe "level" to read/write the banking data on an old magstripe credit card.
Don't put "value" into a chip that can be cloned. Put the value into a central, monitored, system, and provide people only with a codenumber to access it. That codenumber can be cloned still, sure, but then you can watch out for it, notice it, blacklist it, catch people red-handed. And they can't go spending "free money" offline from your system.
This is my biggest bugbear with London's Oyster system. It's just a number for the most part, but they try to store "value" on the cards and let you buy newspapers with them. Now you have an offline, valued, unmonitored, commodity on an easy-to-clone chip.
I fear that in the EU, this would fall foul of Data Protection laws the second a piece of personal information is linkable to a person (so as soon as you know how much *I* earn, or could tell from the data, you have to have my personal permission in order to make that information public).
I think this is a quite reasonable, however - salary information is not something you want published down to the individual. Though I'm not one of those annoying people who dare not even tell their friends how much they earn, I see no reason for anyone else to know what I earn unless I tell them (pretty much - if you work with me and ask me, I will tell you). The people who need to know - my employers, the tax office, anyone with a valid legal reason who can go to a court, etc. - will know anyway. Those who don't, won't.
It's perfectly adequate for a company or organisation to have to tell how much they spend on salaries in total and, in a quick averaging using the number of full time employees, you can work out whether people are being vastly overpaid or failing to comply with minimum-wage obligations. You can't lower the average without cutting the outliers from earning lots more than the average, so there's no way to "hide" a large executive salary among thousands of workers being paid next-to-nothing.
The problem with publishing salary data is really this: I might earn more than you, and do the same job. The reason I might earn more might just be because I negotiated more, or I was more highly desired for the role at the time of employment, or I'm perceived as better skilled/experienced in the role offered - and if I negotiated a better deal, that's my business, not yours. This is why job adverts very rarely state an absolute salary that can never be negotiated on. If you have any sense, you won't sign the contract without at least trying to push it past the middle of the advertised salary range.
Historically, I've been paid more than my colleagues around me, for the same roles. That's my business. And I've helped some of them earn more by teaching them how to negotiate themselves (my girlfriend got several thousand pounds more a year by the simple precept of coming home with a contract to sign - not signing it there and then - asking me first, and then me telling her not to sign until she had it on paper that the pay was several thousand pounds more. She was scared shitless about doing so, found it very disturbing and "unnatural" for her normal polite self. But they barely said a word, printed out a new contract there-and-then for more money, she signed that instead, hey presto - free money for doing nothing! It's almost as if they EXPECT some people to ask for more...).
Many people are stupid and will just say "Yeah, great, fine" if a reasonable salary is offered at the start and then live with that for the rest of their lives. That's WHY they ask you about the salary right at the end of a good interview - they want to tie you to a number before you leave the room on the basis that you KNOW they want you. There's nothing wrong with taking it, but there's never any harm in negotiating for more either (or even just leaving the question open while you "read through the contract"). The worst that happens is they say "Sorry, but that's the absolute maximum we can pay" (and I've never had that happen when I've asked).
The primary reason to not publish salary data is to stop someone else finding out that they voluntarily elected to do the same job as someone else for less money (or for less money than their predecessors, etc.). That's it. Because when they find out, it creates bitterness and they will demand to earn the same, even though nobody told them that they could earn more if they'd asked.
Throughout my career, I've earned more than my peers. Not by huge factors, but by enough to notice. To the extent that, at one employer, my boss had to call the local government office and get them to create a salary band just for me, and then my boss had to personally sign-off tha
Games are games.
Just had a Christmas party with some 20-somethings where we all played Gauntlet II on the big TV. It was a blast. None of them had ever played it before, but it was about how you play it - not what you're playing.
In the same way that I don't mind loading up a Speccy emulator and then playing some title from Steam and then going back to a DOSBox title from GOG.com and then playing my family at Mario on Wii U, games are very variable and enjoyable across all eras and platforms.
The problem is people who think one is "better" than the other and trying to enforce that opinion on others. Imagine trying to do that with movies - making your kids sit through The Goonies or whatever just because YOU enjoyed it. I bet you can find half-a-dozen people from your school year that also hated such a film. Similarly, people play games that suit them.
This is also why it's so difficult to get someone who "isn't into" games into games... they aren't into it for a reason, or it would have taken their interest years ago. Sure, they might have one particular title that they like, but chances are that even if they like a game, it'll be one you don't like. This is why every year or so, the "how do I get my girlrfriend into games" question pops up on here... show them a couple, if they don't like them, then they don't like them, and chances are that they won't like the same games as you.
Hell, my brother and I were from the era of "the family computer", used to play together all the time (sharing a keyboard!) and are both massive gamers still. Even we don't share the enjoyment of every title we owned - there were lots of games he loved that I can't stand and vice versa.
Don't force your opinions on your kids - let them play what they want (to the normal parenting extents!). And I'm sure if they get into a family tradition of, say, playing Monopoly at Christmas, they'll get into a family tradition of playing some Bomberman when you dig it out and put it on the TV for them all to play. But that's got infinitely more to do with "playing together" as it has the particular game.
You want your kids to play games with you? Do that. Don't worry about what the game is - it can be one of their or one of yours.
You want your kids to learn how to play old games? You might as well try to convince them to put all their MP3's onto cassette.
For once, something based on proper AI (rather than human-generated heuristics).
However - notice it's limitations: Where there is a direct correlation between where you need to be, and where something else is on the screen (basically a 1:1 relationship in Pong, for example), it can cope with going higher or lower as required.
But when you put it into something that has more than a single thing to "learn" (move left/right, avoid bombs, shoot aliens, choose which aliens to shoot, don't shoot your own base, etc.) then the amount of training required goes up exponentially. And thus we could spend centuries of computer time in order to get something that can do as well as a simple heuristic designed by someone who knows the game (not saying heuristics don't have their place!).
"Trained" devices require training relative to some power of the variety of the inputs and the directness of their correlation to the game-arena. And thus, proper AI is really stymied when it comes to learning complex tasks.
But still - this is the sort of thing we should be doing. If it takes an infant two years with the best "computer" in the universe that we know of to learn how to talk, why should we think it will take a machine at even the top-end of the supercomputer scale (which can't have as many "connections" as the average human brain) any less?
If you are in any way a vaguely competent games developer (even an individual) then the difference between DirectX and OpenGL is miniscule.
And if you CHOSE to lock yourself into a Microsoft-only platform (thereby destroying your compatibility with Mac, Linux and many console platforms - apart from XBox, obviously - in one fell stroke) then that's a choice you made that you have to do the work to recover when it comes time to admit your mistake.
And yet targeting OpenGL from day one, it would have all worked, all just as fast, all with the same fancy effects, all for the same effort, on all platforms.
DirectX lock-in is the result of developer stupidity but, fortunately, it's not that hard to drag yourself out of.
I have to say that GDB under Eclipse is actually my preferred tool for debugging. Hell, half the time you can't even see that it's actually using GDB yet it does everything I would want in a debugger.
It's all horses-for-courses but in terms of GDB *itself* (i.e. not a frontend to it), I don't think there's much to improve except keeping up with new binary formats, instructions, etc.
I'm afraid I have to agree.
Impact of all those Wikileaks, etc. bullshit? One bloke hiding in an embassy in the UK after skipping bail, nobody really giving a shit until he comes out and faces trial.
Impact of Snowden? News stories the world over, plus demands for change in many places, and outright disgust at what's been going on behind our backs.
Snowden did exactly what he wanted (and, I would say, needed) to. At ENORMOUS personal risk. He'll never really be "safe" again.
Compare and contrast to "dickhead hiding with a UV lamp" Assange, who is going to go to jail for skipping bail and didn't have one tenth of one percent of the impact of Snowden - and is going to go to jail for NOTHING to do with what he leaked, really. Nobody even really cares enough any more, we just want him to fuck off and stop eating up taxpayer's money while he avoids justice.
He pleaded guilty.
Bear in mind that I've posted about Turing several times and posted this to my Facebook page for my friends to see when I read it this morning - I cannot *be* more grateful for his work, being a computer scientist who lives in the UK (and doesn't speak German!) - but he plead guilty.
When you plead guilty in court, the court doesn't need to do anything else. Thus it's a pardon - we forgive you committing the crime - not an exoneration - you should never have been charged in the first place.
Although in a few decades, it will appear an abomination - at the time he was charged, it was illegal and he knew it and he pleaded guilty. The problem was really the punishment - castration and, because of the conviction, expulsion from the place of his greatest works.
Same as Oscar Wilde, in a way. It was illegal at the time, he did the same kinds of things, he was convicted in the same way. Nobody's saying "he should have been allowed to ignore the laws laid down at the time" (that's stupid and dangerous), what we're saying is "the laws were wrong and shouldn't have existed in the first place, the punishment was unjustly harsh, and why does being 'convicted' as gay prevent you from working on mathematics for the government?".
But, most importantly, why has it taken so damn long to realise this? If you want to realise what a dark age we're still living in, just look at what's happened in the last 50 years or so, and where we are today in terms of sexual (and sexuality) equality. We like to laugh and point fingers at centuries of human history where stupid things were illegal - and yet in the future we'll still be lumped into the "1900's" where Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were both convicted of having consensual sex with a man in private, and received what amounts to slave labour / castration as punishment. We're literally only 14 years away from being in the "1900's" and future history will see today as no different to then (especially when we STILL have countries saying you can't be gay).