IgNobels are not really a disservice at all. They are a humorous recognition of the very thing you're talking about.
Nobody's discrediting those IgNobels (and, in fact, previous winners with quite high standing in their fields have always taken it with good humour and their science validated).
Bad science won't win an Ig Nobel. It's just unusual applications of good science that will.
So what you're all saying, basically, is a company told you what it "intended" to do and you gave it money on that basis, with no written contractual-type agreement, and then bitch when it didn't happen like that? Sorry, my sympathy lies elsewhere.
And for all those that point out the expense of litigation, I point out that there's nothing to litigate because they HAVEN'T broken legally anything yet. And if they did, of course it costs to sue, but if you're right you'll get it back (and there are people and organisations that will help you). It's not easy or hassle-free, but that's what happens when you pay money for something without a formal record of what you're paying FOR.
And if this is the case, why hasn't OpenPandora been on the front page for the last 3 years? It's promised any number of times to deliver, even asked people for more money "or wait longer", and told everyone that it'll be "Two Months" to the point that it's become a running joke. How is this any "worse"? (It's not, by orders of magnitude, but I still keep seeing OP pop up in comments and articles).
16 "Two Months" later, some of *those* people who ordered an OP in the first few hours still have nothing to show for their money.
Still, I don't see what the fuss is except "We were duped into thinking something was going to be true when it wasn't and handed over money beforehand on the basis it would happen", except I can't imagine most of the people commenting on here paid a dime anyway.
There are a lot more bigger scams in the world than this, it's barely worthy of mention and if *NOBODY* who paid sees fit to actually do anything about it in a court of law (if they even CAN), then I can really say I feel for them at all. Hell, even small claims where you are limited by the award you win but where the company wouldn't bother to hire fancy lawyers to fight it and which was DESIGNED for these sorts of cases.
Fact is, those people paid money upfront - at best - on an informal implied contract. If you're shocked that things don't go your way from that, you probably haven't had much experience of the world at all.
If you think there's a licensing violation, sue their asses off.
If you licensed loosely such that it allows such things, sure it's morally a little dubious but they are doing nothing "wrong".
It's no worse than someone taking Firefox, changing the name and selling it off as something else. If they offer a better product by doing so, then isn't that precisely what the "evolution" of open source code is all about? But they haven't even USED your code (or you have given them permission to use your code in a closed-source way).
It's like saying you're giving your book away for free and then when lots of people download it whining about how it took you a lot of effort to write it.
I don't get the argument here. You licensed liberally, or they re-invented your licensed code. Surely imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I think people are just annoyed that others have worked out a way to make money from something that they have voluntarily given away.
I'm all for open-source. I have contributions in open-source software. I write some of my own (crappy) software too. I'm hardly a nay-sayer here. But if what they did is illegal, sue them. If it's not, well any idiot could have done what they did and made the same money by the same method, including the original authors.
What, exactly, is the problem here apart from feeling hard-done-by on something you explicitly allowed to happen?
Most of the chocolate bars I see nowadays come in foil packets. But I don't doubt there would be some way to "distinguish" the winning bar if you happened to have access to an entire box of them and time enough to experiment.
When I was younger, my brother and I would often have a sort of pseudo-game for those rainy afternoons.
We would draw a simplified piece of terrain on A4 paper, usually just a wobbly line that went up and down (a bit like a Scorched Earth kinda outline, similar to the game we used to play on the Spectrum: Tank Trax).
Then we'd fill it it with various stick figures, with various comedy elements. With two of you, you could work on different bits and then show each other what you'd done and tie it in with the other drawings on there. And because half was mountain, half was sky, there was opportunity for all kinds of things. Some of the things we used to include were:
A "cave" with no entrance/exits in it, and a stick-figure either bored or skeletal within in (how he got there, we never explained), something like a sports car "jumping" off a ramp in the terrain, maybe a little water somewhere collecting in a small valley and "dripping through" or cracking the "rock" below it, a little mine with stick figures pushing carts along rails, etc.
This very much reminds me of those drawings we used to do, on a much larger scale, even down to having odd little characters every now and then and a mine system.
The last five batches of laptops I've bought for my employer, XP is not supported, the BIOS sometimes can't boot XP even (which is only going to get worse with UEFI), BIOS options to boot XP provide detrimental performance degradation and/or limit disk size. I have at least one laptop running around with a SYSLINUX "chain" loader to get into the operating system we want without BIOS problems.
That's not to mention trying to find XP drivers for the hardware - I've found more than a few drivers that just DID NOT EXIST for anything pre-Windows 7 at all (and you can't even force the 2000/XP drivers to install with any amount of INF editing unless you want a LOT of blue-screens all over the palce), let alone the time it takes to hunt them down without the help of the manufacturers (who have no interest in XP drivers any more).
Chipsets, you're normally okay. USB, you can normally do (even USB 3.0), but when you get into graphics (e.g. Optimus on laptops, which you can only force to run on the Intel chip, and only with a lot of fiddling, if the BIOS doesn't support it), sound, bluetooth, etc. it goes from silly to ridiculous with some models. Where drivers exist, you are literally hunting them down by USB/PCI ID's, forcing their install by INF editing and hoping for the best.
"Buy another model" is a certain response but it simply comes out now that it's hard to, for business, and most places won't specify if they are XP-compatible or not even if they are, because they don't want the hassle of compatibility testing and driver hunting.
A batch of touchscreen desktop PC's we recently bought don't even boot into Windows XP ACPI modes and you have to use APM HAL workarounds to even run the installer (and, no, pre-made images don't work either) and that locks you into a non-ACPI HAL on all images that you do NOT want to use (power-button = power-off without safe shutdown and similar). Touchscreen drivers? None for XP whatsoever. I spent WEEKS just getting it that close to working. And don't get me started on how I had to partition the disks to get it to work.
We also have two batches of laptops that can't take full-disk encryption outside of AHCI mode (BIOS hang if a certain bit in the NTFS partition is not physically zero, no updates available, model out of production), and won't run XP in AHCI mode. We had to consign those to the bin and complain to the manufacturer (who basically said "XP? Sorry, mate, not supported. We installed 7 in our testing and it works just fine with Truecrypt").
And the hardware is no more going to waste than if you buy those machines and put XP on them. Hell, to my mind, desktop PC power has been underused for DECADES, and my latest work laptop has 4 cores (HT too, so eight threads in Task Manager), 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1Tb disks, Optimus graphics with some ridiculously powerful nVidia card, and all manner of power going to waste. And it was the cheapest thing that fit my criteria (which merely stated "decent keyboard with numpad, non-AMD graphics).
XP support is dying quickly in hardware. It's nowhere near "just put in an XP disk" any more. Most things you can workaround eventually but the time you waste compared to a£300 desktop PC and a bit of virtualisation? Not worth the hassle.
Hell, I never worked out on my previous laptop how to enable CIR for Windows XP and it came with a media remote for presentations. No amount of fudging would get any driver to install for it that actually did anything. Windows 7? Driver built into the basic install from what I saw.
Windows 7 has a HUGE advantage in hardware availability. Such that XP is actual at a disadvantage now, a serious one, that's costing IT people a LOT of their time to resolve. There is no guarantee that a machine that works now will even work later (e.g. if you apply full disk encryption, if you change the hard disk, etc.).
People eating? People having access to the Internet? People not being shot? People having a laptop each? People not dying from diarrhoea? People offering lessons on the Internet? People going to school? People going to a school which has Wifi tablets or OLPC's?
I work in education. Computers, and technology, do not make that much of a difference over plain, ordinary education. In fact, in some cases it's quite plainly DETRIMENTAL to the quality of education given (the kids know how to google an image, paste it into word, and print it out but can't do simple sums without a calculator).
Sure, in a good school, with decent funding, and teachers who know how to use it effectively and do so all the time (the last of which is very rare and the only people you ever see demonstrating their results improvements!), IT can make a difference. But it's not that much.
But out in the African deserts, Indian slums or wherever you wish to focus your efforts, it's not going to make a jot of difference. For the price of such junk you could just train a decent teacher who doesn't NEED instant, fingertip access to the works of Shakespeare to teach any subject you want them to. All you're doing is putting a technology burden on charities and people who can't afford to eat.
I don't "get" tech charities at all. In any country. If you want to make a difference, give a kid some manky horrible porridge that will keep him alive this month, or work to get them out of the slums through basic, normal education (i.e. funding a school building and a teacher is MORE than enough to get him going and any IT crap is just getting in the way after that), or give them an injection to make them immune to some killer disease, or support efforts to make their home countries safer from rebels killing and raping them.
Don't give them a hand-me-down gadget that you think is "cool". Just don't. Give them a life, instead.
And, take it from someone who works in schools: Don't donate your old crap to your local school. Hell, don't even encourage them to have "one PC per child" or whatever. It hurts basic education in your average school compared to just employing a slightly better teacher.
I don't really care what I "use" on the desktop so long as I have something that supports the hardware I need, and a desktop that I can work on without needing to retrain.
Thus virtualisation is being taken up by companies. Why? Slap ANYTHING on the machine itself. Virtualise an old version of XP that you KNOW how it works, all its quirks, all the software you use is compatible with, all your users know how to use, and you already have disk images and licenses for.
So you're not selling XP licenses (businesses already have them), but you might sell a Windows license or not depending on how well Windows works for them. Hell, with modern machines you notice precisely zero overhead from virtualisation and it absolutely DOES NOT MATTER what's running the VM.
I imagine VM companies are raking it in at the moment. If they're not, they're not pushing their product's features well enough.
The argument to upgrade "because everyone has it at home" is so ludicrous as to be beyond mention and shows absolutely zero knowledge of what a business is and how to run an efficient one. Nobody serious in business is still using IE6 (or if they are, it's locked down by virtualisation or proxies that don't let it stray to the Internet), but lots of people in business are seriously using XP. Because it works, predictably.
The only reason to change is hardware support, which virtualisation pretty much solves. Hell, hardly anybody dual-boots any more when they want to try Linux - just run it in a free VMWare player or equivalent at full speed and isolated from the rest of the machine.
That said, I got a new laptop recently. It came with Windows 7 (and a Windows 8 upgrade offer). I kept it on there but, hell, it took me a few days to get it how I like it and turn all the crap off and install some freeware to make it useable. And it will take me FOREVER to get used to the explorer windows (which are horrendous). So I slapped my old hard drive into the second drive bay and virtualised XP on it until I feel I can transition smoothly.
I got Windows 7. Made it as close to XP as possible. Then run XP on it to get work done. Sure, my Steam games are running in a 64-bit Windows 7 install, but that's not anywhere indicative of the OS being a choice itself (only that it's "passable"). I also have an Ubuntu VM to test my code against for multi-platform and 32/64 bit issues. And my browser has never been IE, even on Windows 95.
The fact remains: If you offered those businesses a paid-for Windows XP update, they would probably pay it rather than the massive HIT that they will take moving things to newer Windows. Hell, if they're going to have to have Windows 7, it's cheaper to virtualise their old machines and they get a lot more functionality back for doing so (e.g. rollbacks, snapshots, always clean images, etc.)
But compared to my current office suite (which I use personally and professionally and actually have to use so that I can convert documents between formats that my workplace can't open themselves), it doesn't really compare.
$0 for the product, $0 / year for the subscription, can install it on infinite computers for infinite users, on a number of operating systems. Opens all the same files, does all the same stuff. The predecessor to my current software? Microsoft Office 2000. £20 second-hand, £0 after that and lasted MANY years and wrote tens of thousands of pages of documentation (and worked in Crossover Office much nicer than the OO.org of the day) - but still, the licensing was crippling.
Unless you're really USING an office suite (I don't claim to know more than 50% of what Excel *can* do, but then most professionals I know use less than 5% of the capabilities of an office suite anyway), you don't need to use MS Office. It's as simple as that. If you use it that much, and nothing else substitutes for you, then maybe you should have been paying for it all along anyway.
But for almost all home users, they are only knowingly paying for compatibility. They don't understand the product enough to make use of the features, and 99.999% of the documents they open won't use fancy features. Hell, they'll be lucky if they ever see a macro warning outside of work.
My recommendation to the people who seek advice for home software? Install LibreOffice. If it doesn't do what you want, then buy MS Office. But if, in a year's time, you've not hit any barriers, then you probably never will and have saved yourself a year's subscription at worst. I've yet to have one person who followed that advice actually shell out for MS Office (and a lot of them would have been eligible for the Student/Teacher Edition).
And you can install it wherever you like, and give your kids a copy, and they can save in Word format and open it in school just fine. I know - I work in schools and it's only the pillocks who save in old MS formats (Publisher being the worst) that really screw anything up - not the LibreOffice users - and they are usually fixed by, guess what, conversion in LibreOffice (or just not being able to reasonably open them in anything else at all, even newer versions of Publisher)!
To me, $100 a year is extortion for software. I can't name a single bit of subscription software that I have, use, or even would buy (sorry, RENT). SkyDrive? Wow. Who cares about 20Gb of online storage? You can basically get that for free from anyone nowadays if you just look around, and uploading that amount of data will take you a while anyway (creating it will take you much longer). Google give me 15Gb for nothing and I can't even get close to using it up. Skype calls? Wow. What's that? A dollar a month on a subscription package (and MS own them now, so you'd have to take account that it probably costs them a lot less than that)?
If it works for you, good for you. But software subscription is still the most hideous waste of money I've ever seen. And office suites, along with antivirus packages, are the biggest wastes of money generally. I won't be recommending that people who ask my advice get into an annual renewal for a program they hardly use.
I do pay for software. Lots of it. Hell, I have a folder on my storage areas for "Paid-For Programs" so that I can keep the installs, receipts and keys together and reinstall them when I move machines. The folder is currently several tens of Gigabytes large and the earliest timestamp in it is from the early 90's.
I pay for things that I will get value from and can't get that value any better way. Hell, I still own PaintShop Pro Anniversary Edition - I paid full price for it, and I've yet to have a need that it doesn't fulfil. Sod paying for an upgrade ever year to whatever-manky-interface-they-have-this-year. On an annual subscription just about everything I
I have a laptop that has two drive bays. SSD's won't be replacing the 1TB main hard drive any time soon, the prices for those are more than the laptop is worth.
But a 256Gb is surprisingly affordable and given that my "primary" partition is that size, it would be a cinch to install one, move the data over and even mirror the partitions to a traditional HDD if I needed to.
And the speed difference *would* make a huge difference. It always has done.
The problem is not the speed increase relative to anything else because it blows things out of the water. The problem is cost per Gb, as always in storage. 256Gb now costs about one-third the price of my laptop, or a half-decent graphics card for a PC. That's within the realms of possibility for an upgrade.
SquareTrade did a replacement of my girlfriend's Kindle once. They were very quick and very good about it. But it was £25 for three years on a £100 product with a special screen which I probably couldn't even source, let alone replace myself (guess which bit got broke!).
Other than that? Manufacturer's warranty against defects, national laws about the item being "fit for purpose", and anything else handles itself out of my wallet as and when.
To be honest, if I break something within a year or two, and haven't done something incredibly stupid like throw it on the floor, then I have to question whether I actually WANT another one of those products. If it's that easily broken, would I really want to send it back every year to have the components replaced with the same type that I originally broke? Probably not.
Above that, it's theft and accidental damage ("I was stupid and run over it"). Insuring against them is usually not worth the time and effort compared to just ensuring they don't happen in the first place (i.e. not leaving it in the car, or under the front tyre, etc.).
Insurance is a gamble as to whether you're going to break/lose something or not. Look at your own history. If you're likely to break it, won't be able to repair it yourself, or it's something small, valuable to a thief and easily stolen then maybe the insurance will pay off.
But mathematics suggests that, on average, the cost of any one person replacing/repairing their device through insurance will be more than they would have paid to just buy replacements/repairs as and when something did occur. Or else the insurance company would go bust very, very quickly.
It's not like car insurance where you might have to pay for the guy you crippled for life for 40+ years of specialist assistance. It's an iPhone. That in a couple of years you'll probably sell on anyway.
If you want to make beam / ray weapons take a physics course first.
I can push a plane at hundreds of miles per hour through the air quite "easily" and put some destructive force on the end of it. Hell, you can do similar with a model plane if you really want to test the concept. This is what bullets, missiles and grenades rely on to work, and it's successful.
But to make a beam or ray that has an effect over that same flying-distance of any of the above, I have to overcome the inverse-square law and line-of-sight before I can even hurt someone reliably, let alone use it as a weapon. Hell, I could probably throw a yo-yo or boomerang further than any handheld "directed energy" weapon could beam something, and probably end up with a greater effect to the target. This is why Tasers are literally normal harpoon-style weapons with cables.
Sure, you can buy a laser that will cut through steel, and you can cook your food in a microwave but all of those "ordinary" uses happen at stupidly small distances for a reason. It's actually cheaper and easier to fire MILLIONS of bullets at an incoming missile than it is to set up an energy beam of any significant energy enough to take it down.
It's a complete misunderstanding of simple physics. Of course you *can* do it, but the power required to burn through that much atmosphere and other obstacles and still provide any useful energy at the other end is something that's completely impractical to provide. You will need HUGE power sources, one-shot weapons, or stupidly small distances to manage it.
And then you discover that a simple handgun from off-the-shelf (at least in the US) or some form of propelled warhead is infinitely easier and cheaper and less prone to collateral damage (just how wide do you think that beam will be once it hits the target?).
Save your Star Trek / Star Wars fantasy weapons for space where there is no atmosphere and the inverse-square law might be overcome with a sufficiently powerful power source (i.e. like something that could run a star-ship and provide energy enough to do EVERYTHING without struggling). On Earth, we use propellants and explosives for a reason, even in the top-end of military hardware.
If it runs all Wii games and accepts all Wii peripherals, and puts out "HD" (even if that's just old Wii games and some scaling), it'll sell just so that people can replace their (now-aging) Wii's with it, use all their old stuff still and see a new game or two with even just one of the new controllers come Christmas.
Predicting a flop is a little harsh. It probably won't be as successful as the Wii but if Nintendo make a loss on it, I'll be extremely surprised.
Erm, I did a quick Google as the nearest thing I can find with any reliability is 2008 figures but:
"Nielsen research reveals US ranks third behind Asia and EU in consumer spending on software; 31 percent of Europeans 16-49 in primary regions actively game."
So that's probably why they have the order that they do.
That said, simultaneous release should be a given nowadays. You honestly make no more money from doing it but are likely to increase piracy.
Hyperbole is nice, but this is just trash, Slashdot.
An MP is just a guy who got voted in. Alone, his views and opinions mean nothing. He has to get a vote through Parliament for it to mean anything or have any effect.
"Sir Paul, who was a minister in Sir John Major's government but has been on the backbenches since 1997, has been campaigning for ten years to tighten up laws on indecent material featuring children."
"Backbenches" is an important word. Go look it up. He's basically a nobody, even with the "Sir", and in 10 years still hasn't managed to do anything this way.
Next, he also deliberately and purposefully excludes entire categories of things like, for example, Lolita, etc. for those who just don't read the article. He's not stupid enough to think he can ban possession of half the "I was abused as a child" documentary or classic literary novels out there.
"The MP's latest ten-minute rule bill was given an unopposed first reading by MPs but further progress depends on it being given sufficient parliamentary time."
A ten minute rule bill is one that gets ten minutes of time in debating. That's how far it's got. They gave him ten minutes and then nodded appreciatively and ignored him. Imagine how many other "ten minute bills" have gone before Parliament since they were introduced and NOTHING has happened.
The guy's an idiot. The idea is stupid unless you SEVERELY castrate its power in law (which makes it useless). Nothing has even remotely been "approved", they've just listened and "will respond", like several million petitions through the Number 10 site that got the same treatement.
The only place giving him airtime is Slashdot, really. So people can shout about what colour / wing he is and how stupid "that lot" all are.
Hell, it doesn't translate out of any of the books whatsoever.
Discworld plays, board games, video games (yes, Discworld I and II were NOT "Discworld", just Simon-the-Sorceror style cash-ins), etc. 99% of the Discworld merchandise is absolute tat. Hell, even the endless calendars, "science books", and everything else are a waste of space.
I don't blame Pratchett and/or his agent for cashing in - far from it, I'd do the same. But it remains true that every adaptation outside of the books just can't do them justice.
Hell, I cringed through the first 10 minutes of the TV adaptations we had over in the UK "starring" David Jason, etc. Ick. I had to switch it off.
Some series you can do justice too (whether they have or not is another matter) - Lord of The Rings you can do quite well (though I don't like the current versions, there's sure to be a remake in 10 years time with even more "extra footage"), most sci-fi authors you can do quite well. But comedy literature is a tough one to crack and it won't translate to the screen properly at all.
All it *will* do is put people off trying to read the books because they've seen the (crappy) TV/movie versions.
In one book, Death has a scythe that's so sharp it slices his sentences in half when he speaks. Vimes is an ugly, fat, old alcoholic copper that kicks arse (okay, they NEARLY managed that in a lot of 80's cop shows). Unseen University is technically invisible (or not, depending on which part of which book you read). There are pages of explanations spread across 20+ books about how some of the elements of the world came about (e.g. klacks, other dimensions, Angua, Dibbler, etc.). How the hell do you translate that to a movie or even a play?
They should stop trying. At best you can attempt an amateur play or an audiobook reading. At worst, everything else you put out ruins the books even more.
Some would say that those who hedged their bets on HTML5 in the first place, especially from so early on, were the dumb ones and not the naysayers.
To be honest - I don't see much advantage as a user (the last time I touched HTML seriously was just after CSS became popular, so I don't really speak as a developer here). Take Facebook for example - what do I get from all the fancy code that adorns those pages and slows down my browser (design decisions like Timeline aside)? I get little buttons to hide posts I don't like (that disappear inline) and some tagging technology that's easily replicated.
Betting the shop on what HTML5 does feature in something like Facebook, and especially on browser compatibility which has been notoriously underwhelming with most HTML/CSS technologies, is quite a dumb technical and business decision. That he recognises this now is sensible, but it's not worthy of much praise.
All native apps do is take away the unknown of what browser the user is using and what it supports. It's not like they've made apps that somehow magically integrate into Facebook, it's just the same code and a known platform to target (and I bet it isn't even as simple as that and they have problems with them all the time because one can do X that the others can't). So they've ended up hiring a native code writer or dozens for each platform to make a "Facebook browser" rather than a native app - same thing, different angle. And saved nothing in the process. The app could have just done all the donkey work itself and just talked to Facebook via a very basic API of any kind.
It's not a case of betting on the wrong technology. It's a case of not seeing that he did so a LOT earlier. "I'm going to assume that everyone has a mostly HTML5 compliant browser and program with that assumption" is quite a ridiculous thing to ever say - even today - and then base a huge business on that complete guess.
Let's assume the Windows thing is true for a second.
I've just said Windows. Can I be sued for trademark infringement? No.
Windows is shit.
Now can I? No.
Windows is the biggest turd I've ever seen in my life.
Now can I? No.
But the person who infringes on the trademark - they can. This isn't about enforcing a trademark. It's about suing people for mentioning two words together, even when they've been told it's the name of a product (and if that IS a problem, then you need to sue the product manufacturer, not the reviewer who - at best - might want to put a correction/clarification up at most).
The parties being sued did not choose that name or use it to sell items themselves. Someone else did that. That someone else is HarperCollins - the ONLY people he has a basis to sue at all.
As others have pointed out, "Carnival of Souls", even if trademarkable, is a pretty generic name and has been in use for FAR, FAR longer. Hell, I'm sure I've played at least one computer game where that was the name of a level, for instance.
It's like me trademarking "Emotional Rollercoaster" and then trying to enforce it. If he had a case, it's only against HarperCollins. And if he had a case, it would be expensive and difficult to win and would make him a lot of money from them playing off his established trademark.
I doubt he has a case. He has to enforce the trademark. But he does not have to enforce third-party reviews of the trademark (hell, that just adds to evidence of damages if anything else). But the second you sue HarperCollins, the first thing they will have done is work out if he had a case. Chances are that he just doesn't.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that real spies would be likely to have a plausible explanation for what they are doing and sometimes get caught.
There might be "James Bonds" running around that are infallible and undetectable, but the majority of "spies" would actually be cannon fodder - send enough of them and eventually a few would get caught. And then, of course, they have to protest their innocence (never admit to being a spy if you don't want to spend your WHOLE LIFE in prison, if you're that lucky - the rules don't apply in the same way to such people), have a plausible back-story, etc. etc. etc.
Just because you're a "spy" doesn't mean you're not in a group of plane-spotters that plan a trip to Greece. Hell, sounds like a perfect persona to assume to me.
That said, they are a little harsh for what is basically a totally pointless exercise. If someone really cared about knowing the layout of a military base, there are myriad easier ways to find out, or they could just plan for "not knowing" and thus just make an operation that takes account of that fact. And, if you are a spy, you would be visibly taking visible photos of it even if only to provide better plausibility than a video camera transmitting to a remote storage or a hidden camera of some kind.
I know someone who delivers beer to military establishments in London. It's not hard to get through the front-door and past armed guards, even with someone "new" working alongside you who you don't really know, especially when you are carrying their beer. Hell, once they were stopped for the usual checks, and then when they were asked to explain what they were carrying were in immense detail (while troops scanned the underside of the delivery truck, etc.) it was mentioned that the checks were fine but they just delay the people inside getting their beer and who would explain it to them? Literally, checks stopped, truck waved through.
If you want this sort of information, it's easy to get, so its pointless to push so hard on potentially innocent people. And, hell, if a spy taking a photo of your plane / base is enough to worry you, maybe you should lay them out or design them a bit better or plan your military on the enemy knowing the layout. But, that said, a spy would look like anyone else and probably have a pretty plausible explanation and happily do only a few years in prison if caught compared to the alternative of revealing themselves as spies.
Ouch. That's gotta hurt. I think there's a case for even places like the EU commission there, if people are unknowingly distributing other's data.
That said, I don't really care because I've never touched WoW. But, yeah, I can see the problem. 4 years of IP -> client records, plus things like date-time stamps. If nothing else, that's a whole host of web-crawling to link people to IP's, accounts.
You kind of expect it in pre-release reviews or betas or something but in the full client and in every screenshot? Bit nasty.
Slashdot Mirror
IgNobels are not really a disservice at all. They are a humorous recognition of the very thing you're talking about.
Nobody's discrediting those IgNobels (and, in fact, previous winners with quite high standing in their fields have always taken it with good humour and their science validated).
Bad science won't win an Ig Nobel. It's just unusual applications of good science that will.
So what you're all saying, basically, is a company told you what it "intended" to do and you gave it money on that basis, with no written contractual-type agreement, and then bitch when it didn't happen like that? Sorry, my sympathy lies elsewhere.
And for all those that point out the expense of litigation, I point out that there's nothing to litigate because they HAVEN'T broken legally anything yet. And if they did, of course it costs to sue, but if you're right you'll get it back (and there are people and organisations that will help you). It's not easy or hassle-free, but that's what happens when you pay money for something without a formal record of what you're paying FOR.
And if this is the case, why hasn't OpenPandora been on the front page for the last 3 years? It's promised any number of times to deliver, even asked people for more money "or wait longer", and told everyone that it'll be "Two Months" to the point that it's become a running joke. How is this any "worse"? (It's not, by orders of magnitude, but I still keep seeing OP pop up in comments and articles).
16 "Two Months" later, some of *those* people who ordered an OP in the first few hours still have nothing to show for their money.
Still, I don't see what the fuss is except "We were duped into thinking something was going to be true when it wasn't and handed over money beforehand on the basis it would happen", except I can't imagine most of the people commenting on here paid a dime anyway.
There are a lot more bigger scams in the world than this, it's barely worthy of mention and if *NOBODY* who paid sees fit to actually do anything about it in a court of law (if they even CAN), then I can really say I feel for them at all. Hell, even small claims where you are limited by the award you win but where the company wouldn't bother to hire fancy lawyers to fight it and which was DESIGNED for these sorts of cases.
Fact is, those people paid money upfront - at best - on an informal implied contract. If you're shocked that things don't go your way from that, you probably haven't had much experience of the world at all.
The people moaning are interesting to watch.
If you think there's a licensing violation, sue their asses off.
If you licensed loosely such that it allows such things, sure it's morally a little dubious but they are doing nothing "wrong".
It's no worse than someone taking Firefox, changing the name and selling it off as something else. If they offer a better product by doing so, then isn't that precisely what the "evolution" of open source code is all about? But they haven't even USED your code (or you have given them permission to use your code in a closed-source way).
It's like saying you're giving your book away for free and then when lots of people download it whining about how it took you a lot of effort to write it.
I don't get the argument here. You licensed liberally, or they re-invented your licensed code. Surely imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I think people are just annoyed that others have worked out a way to make money from something that they have voluntarily given away.
I'm all for open-source. I have contributions in open-source software. I write some of my own (crappy) software too. I'm hardly a nay-sayer here. But if what they did is illegal, sue them. If it's not, well any idiot could have done what they did and made the same money by the same method, including the original authors.
What, exactly, is the problem here apart from feeling hard-done-by on something you explicitly allowed to happen?
Most of the chocolate bars I see nowadays come in foil packets. But I don't doubt there would be some way to "distinguish" the winning bar if you happened to have access to an entire box of them and time enough to experiment.
When I was younger, my brother and I would often have a sort of pseudo-game for those rainy afternoons.
We would draw a simplified piece of terrain on A4 paper, usually just a wobbly line that went up and down (a bit like a Scorched Earth kinda outline, similar to the game we used to play on the Spectrum: Tank Trax).
Then we'd fill it it with various stick figures, with various comedy elements. With two of you, you could work on different bits and then show each other what you'd done and tie it in with the other drawings on there. And because half was mountain, half was sky, there was opportunity for all kinds of things. Some of the things we used to include were:
A "cave" with no entrance/exits in it, and a stick-figure either bored or skeletal within in (how he got there, we never explained), something like a sports car "jumping" off a ramp in the terrain, maybe a little water somewhere collecting in a small valley and "dripping through" or cracking the "rock" below it, a little mine with stick figures pushing carts along rails, etc.
This very much reminds me of those drawings we used to do, on a much larger scale, even down to having odd little characters every now and then and a mine system.
No need. I would never run such a critical operation on a Windows XP computer, hell any Windows computer whatsoever.
If it played any part, it would be in passing off such data in a non-critical way to some microcontroller that would do the real work.
The last five batches of laptops I've bought for my employer, XP is not supported, the BIOS sometimes can't boot XP even (which is only going to get worse with UEFI), BIOS options to boot XP provide detrimental performance degradation and/or limit disk size. I have at least one laptop running around with a SYSLINUX "chain" loader to get into the operating system we want without BIOS problems.
That's not to mention trying to find XP drivers for the hardware - I've found more than a few drivers that just DID NOT EXIST for anything pre-Windows 7 at all (and you can't even force the 2000/XP drivers to install with any amount of INF editing unless you want a LOT of blue-screens all over the palce), let alone the time it takes to hunt them down without the help of the manufacturers (who have no interest in XP drivers any more).
Chipsets, you're normally okay. USB, you can normally do (even USB 3.0), but when you get into graphics (e.g. Optimus on laptops, which you can only force to run on the Intel chip, and only with a lot of fiddling, if the BIOS doesn't support it), sound, bluetooth, etc. it goes from silly to ridiculous with some models. Where drivers exist, you are literally hunting them down by USB/PCI ID's, forcing their install by INF editing and hoping for the best.
"Buy another model" is a certain response but it simply comes out now that it's hard to, for business, and most places won't specify if they are XP-compatible or not even if they are, because they don't want the hassle of compatibility testing and driver hunting.
A batch of touchscreen desktop PC's we recently bought don't even boot into Windows XP ACPI modes and you have to use APM HAL workarounds to even run the installer (and, no, pre-made images don't work either) and that locks you into a non-ACPI HAL on all images that you do NOT want to use (power-button = power-off without safe shutdown and similar). Touchscreen drivers? None for XP whatsoever. I spent WEEKS just getting it that close to working. And don't get me started on how I had to partition the disks to get it to work.
We also have two batches of laptops that can't take full-disk encryption outside of AHCI mode (BIOS hang if a certain bit in the NTFS partition is not physically zero, no updates available, model out of production), and won't run XP in AHCI mode. We had to consign those to the bin and complain to the manufacturer (who basically said "XP? Sorry, mate, not supported. We installed 7 in our testing and it works just fine with Truecrypt").
And the hardware is no more going to waste than if you buy those machines and put XP on them. Hell, to my mind, desktop PC power has been underused for DECADES, and my latest work laptop has 4 cores (HT too, so eight threads in Task Manager), 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1Tb disks, Optimus graphics with some ridiculously powerful nVidia card, and all manner of power going to waste. And it was the cheapest thing that fit my criteria (which merely stated "decent keyboard with numpad, non-AMD graphics).
XP support is dying quickly in hardware. It's nowhere near "just put in an XP disk" any more. Most things you can workaround eventually but the time you waste compared to a£300 desktop PC and a bit of virtualisation? Not worth the hassle.
Hell, I never worked out on my previous laptop how to enable CIR for Windows XP and it came with a media remote for presentations. No amount of fudging would get any driver to install for it that actually did anything. Windows 7? Driver built into the basic install from what I saw.
Windows 7 has a HUGE advantage in hardware availability. Such that XP is actual at a disadvantage now, a serious one, that's costing IT people a LOT of their time to resolve. There is no guarantee that a machine that works now will even work later (e.g. if you apply full disk encryption, if you change the hard disk, etc.).
What's more important:
People eating? People having access to the Internet?
People not being shot? People having a laptop each?
People not dying from diarrhoea? People offering lessons on the Internet?
People going to school? People going to a school which has Wifi tablets or OLPC's?
I work in education. Computers, and technology, do not make that much of a difference over plain, ordinary education. In fact, in some cases it's quite plainly DETRIMENTAL to the quality of education given (the kids know how to google an image, paste it into word, and print it out but can't do simple sums without a calculator).
Sure, in a good school, with decent funding, and teachers who know how to use it effectively and do so all the time (the last of which is very rare and the only people you ever see demonstrating their results improvements!), IT can make a difference. But it's not that much.
But out in the African deserts, Indian slums or wherever you wish to focus your efforts, it's not going to make a jot of difference. For the price of such junk you could just train a decent teacher who doesn't NEED instant, fingertip access to the works of Shakespeare to teach any subject you want them to. All you're doing is putting a technology burden on charities and people who can't afford to eat.
I don't "get" tech charities at all. In any country. If you want to make a difference, give a kid some manky horrible porridge that will keep him alive this month, or work to get them out of the slums through basic, normal education (i.e. funding a school building and a teacher is MORE than enough to get him going and any IT crap is just getting in the way after that), or give them an injection to make them immune to some killer disease, or support efforts to make their home countries safer from rebels killing and raping them.
Don't give them a hand-me-down gadget that you think is "cool". Just don't. Give them a life, instead.
And, take it from someone who works in schools: Don't donate your old crap to your local school. Hell, don't even encourage them to have "one PC per child" or whatever. It hurts basic education in your average school compared to just employing a slightly better teacher.
Virtualisation.
I don't really care what I "use" on the desktop so long as I have something that supports the hardware I need, and a desktop that I can work on without needing to retrain.
Thus virtualisation is being taken up by companies. Why? Slap ANYTHING on the machine itself. Virtualise an old version of XP that you KNOW how it works, all its quirks, all the software you use is compatible with, all your users know how to use, and you already have disk images and licenses for.
So you're not selling XP licenses (businesses already have them), but you might sell a Windows license or not depending on how well Windows works for them. Hell, with modern machines you notice precisely zero overhead from virtualisation and it absolutely DOES NOT MATTER what's running the VM.
I imagine VM companies are raking it in at the moment. If they're not, they're not pushing their product's features well enough.
The argument to upgrade "because everyone has it at home" is so ludicrous as to be beyond mention and shows absolutely zero knowledge of what a business is and how to run an efficient one. Nobody serious in business is still using IE6 (or if they are, it's locked down by virtualisation or proxies that don't let it stray to the Internet), but lots of people in business are seriously using XP. Because it works, predictably.
The only reason to change is hardware support, which virtualisation pretty much solves. Hell, hardly anybody dual-boots any more when they want to try Linux - just run it in a free VMWare player or equivalent at full speed and isolated from the rest of the machine.
That said, I got a new laptop recently. It came with Windows 7 (and a Windows 8 upgrade offer). I kept it on there but, hell, it took me a few days to get it how I like it and turn all the crap off and install some freeware to make it useable. And it will take me FOREVER to get used to the explorer windows (which are horrendous). So I slapped my old hard drive into the second drive bay and virtualised XP on it until I feel I can transition smoothly.
I got Windows 7. Made it as close to XP as possible. Then run XP on it to get work done. Sure, my Steam games are running in a 64-bit Windows 7 install, but that's not anywhere indicative of the OS being a choice itself (only that it's "passable"). I also have an Ubuntu VM to test my code against for multi-platform and 32/64 bit issues. And my browser has never been IE, even on Windows 95.
The fact remains: If you offered those businesses a paid-for Windows XP update, they would probably pay it rather than the massive HIT that they will take moving things to newer Windows. Hell, if they're going to have to have Windows 7, it's cheaper to virtualise their old machines and they get a lot more functionality back for doing so (e.g. rollbacks, snapshots, always clean images, etc.)
It's a good deal, if that's what you want.
But compared to my current office suite (which I use personally and professionally and actually have to use so that I can convert documents between formats that my workplace can't open themselves), it doesn't really compare.
$0 for the product, $0 / year for the subscription, can install it on infinite computers for infinite users, on a number of operating systems. Opens all the same files, does all the same stuff. The predecessor to my current software? Microsoft Office 2000. £20 second-hand, £0 after that and lasted MANY years and wrote tens of thousands of pages of documentation (and worked in Crossover Office much nicer than the OO.org of the day) - but still, the licensing was crippling.
Unless you're really USING an office suite (I don't claim to know more than 50% of what Excel *can* do, but then most professionals I know use less than 5% of the capabilities of an office suite anyway), you don't need to use MS Office. It's as simple as that. If you use it that much, and nothing else substitutes for you, then maybe you should have been paying for it all along anyway.
But for almost all home users, they are only knowingly paying for compatibility. They don't understand the product enough to make use of the features, and 99.999% of the documents they open won't use fancy features. Hell, they'll be lucky if they ever see a macro warning outside of work.
My recommendation to the people who seek advice for home software? Install LibreOffice. If it doesn't do what you want, then buy MS Office. But if, in a year's time, you've not hit any barriers, then you probably never will and have saved yourself a year's subscription at worst. I've yet to have one person who followed that advice actually shell out for MS Office (and a lot of them would have been eligible for the Student/Teacher Edition).
And you can install it wherever you like, and give your kids a copy, and they can save in Word format and open it in school just fine. I know - I work in schools and it's only the pillocks who save in old MS formats (Publisher being the worst) that really screw anything up - not the LibreOffice users - and they are usually fixed by, guess what, conversion in LibreOffice (or just not being able to reasonably open them in anything else at all, even newer versions of Publisher)!
To me, $100 a year is extortion for software. I can't name a single bit of subscription software that I have, use, or even would buy (sorry, RENT). SkyDrive? Wow. Who cares about 20Gb of online storage? You can basically get that for free from anyone nowadays if you just look around, and uploading that amount of data will take you a while anyway (creating it will take you much longer). Google give me 15Gb for nothing and I can't even get close to using it up. Skype calls? Wow. What's that? A dollar a month on a subscription package (and MS own them now, so you'd have to take account that it probably costs them a lot less than that)?
If it works for you, good for you. But software subscription is still the most hideous waste of money I've ever seen. And office suites, along with antivirus packages, are the biggest wastes of money generally. I won't be recommending that people who ask my advice get into an annual renewal for a program they hardly use.
I do pay for software. Lots of it. Hell, I have a folder on my storage areas for "Paid-For Programs" so that I can keep the installs, receipts and keys together and reinstall them when I move machines. The folder is currently several tens of Gigabytes large and the earliest timestamp in it is from the early 90's.
I pay for things that I will get value from and can't get that value any better way. Hell, I still own PaintShop Pro Anniversary Edition - I paid full price for it, and I've yet to have a need that it doesn't fulfil. Sod paying for an upgrade ever year to whatever-manky-interface-they-have-this-year. On an annual subscription just about everything I
I have a laptop that has two drive bays. SSD's won't be replacing the 1TB main hard drive any time soon, the prices for those are more than the laptop is worth.
But a 256Gb is surprisingly affordable and given that my "primary" partition is that size, it would be a cinch to install one, move the data over and even mirror the partitions to a traditional HDD if I needed to.
And the speed difference *would* make a huge difference. It always has done.
The problem is not the speed increase relative to anything else because it blows things out of the water. The problem is cost per Gb, as always in storage. 256Gb now costs about one-third the price of my laptop, or a half-decent graphics card for a PC. That's within the realms of possibility for an upgrade.
You decided to link to explanations of touch-tones and buffer overflows? On Slashdot? Really?
And yet the article basically parrots the summary with no more information.
I have to agree.
SquareTrade did a replacement of my girlfriend's Kindle once. They were very quick and very good about it. But it was £25 for three years on a £100 product with a special screen which I probably couldn't even source, let alone replace myself (guess which bit got broke!).
Other than that? Manufacturer's warranty against defects, national laws about the item being "fit for purpose", and anything else handles itself out of my wallet as and when.
To be honest, if I break something within a year or two, and haven't done something incredibly stupid like throw it on the floor, then I have to question whether I actually WANT another one of those products. If it's that easily broken, would I really want to send it back every year to have the components replaced with the same type that I originally broke? Probably not.
Above that, it's theft and accidental damage ("I was stupid and run over it"). Insuring against them is usually not worth the time and effort compared to just ensuring they don't happen in the first place (i.e. not leaving it in the car, or under the front tyre, etc.).
Insurance is a gamble as to whether you're going to break/lose something or not. Look at your own history. If you're likely to break it, won't be able to repair it yourself, or it's something small, valuable to a thief and easily stolen then maybe the insurance will pay off.
But mathematics suggests that, on average, the cost of any one person replacing/repairing their device through insurance will be more than they would have paid to just buy replacements/repairs as and when something did occur. Or else the insurance company would go bust very, very quickly.
It's not like car insurance where you might have to pay for the guy you crippled for life for 40+ years of specialist assistance. It's an iPhone. That in a couple of years you'll probably sell on anyway.
If you want to make beam / ray weapons take a physics course first.
I can push a plane at hundreds of miles per hour through the air quite "easily" and put some destructive force on the end of it. Hell, you can do similar with a model plane if you really want to test the concept. This is what bullets, missiles and grenades rely on to work, and it's successful.
But to make a beam or ray that has an effect over that same flying-distance of any of the above, I have to overcome the inverse-square law and line-of-sight before I can even hurt someone reliably, let alone use it as a weapon. Hell, I could probably throw a yo-yo or boomerang further than any handheld "directed energy" weapon could beam something, and probably end up with a greater effect to the target. This is why Tasers are literally normal harpoon-style weapons with cables.
Sure, you can buy a laser that will cut through steel, and you can cook your food in a microwave but all of those "ordinary" uses happen at stupidly small distances for a reason. It's actually cheaper and easier to fire MILLIONS of bullets at an incoming missile than it is to set up an energy beam of any significant energy enough to take it down.
It's a complete misunderstanding of simple physics. Of course you *can* do it, but the power required to burn through that much atmosphere and other obstacles and still provide any useful energy at the other end is something that's completely impractical to provide. You will need HUGE power sources, one-shot weapons, or stupidly small distances to manage it.
And then you discover that a simple handgun from off-the-shelf (at least in the US) or some form of propelled warhead is infinitely easier and cheaper and less prone to collateral damage (just how wide do you think that beam will be once it hits the target?).
Save your Star Trek / Star Wars fantasy weapons for space where there is no atmosphere and the inverse-square law might be overcome with a sufficiently powerful power source (i.e. like something that could run a star-ship and provide energy enough to do EVERYTHING without struggling). On Earth, we use propellants and explosives for a reason, even in the top-end of military hardware.
If it runs all Wii games and accepts all Wii peripherals, and puts out "HD" (even if that's just old Wii games and some scaling), it'll sell just so that people can replace their (now-aging) Wii's with it, use all their old stuff still and see a new game or two with even just one of the new controllers come Christmas.
Predicting a flop is a little harsh. It probably won't be as successful as the Wii but if Nintendo make a loss on it, I'll be extremely surprised.
Erm, I did a quick Google as the nearest thing I can find with any reliability is 2008 figures but:
"Nielsen research reveals US ranks third behind Asia and EU in consumer spending on software; 31 percent of Europeans 16-49 in primary regions actively game."
So that's probably why they have the order that they do.
That said, simultaneous release should be a given nowadays. You honestly make no more money from doing it but are likely to increase piracy.
Only if they're stupid enough to execute code formed from non-executable input.
Sigh.
Hyperbole is nice, but this is just trash, Slashdot.
An MP is just a guy who got voted in. Alone, his views and opinions mean nothing. He has to get a vote through Parliament for it to mean anything or have any effect.
"Sir Paul, who was a minister in Sir John Major's government but has been on the backbenches since 1997, has been campaigning for ten years to tighten up laws on indecent material featuring children."
"Backbenches" is an important word. Go look it up. He's basically a nobody, even with the "Sir", and in 10 years still hasn't managed to do anything this way.
Next, he also deliberately and purposefully excludes entire categories of things like, for example, Lolita, etc. for those who just don't read the article. He's not stupid enough to think he can ban possession of half the "I was abused as a child" documentary or classic literary novels out there.
"The MP's latest ten-minute rule bill was given an unopposed first reading by MPs but further progress depends on it being given sufficient parliamentary time."
A ten minute rule bill is one that gets ten minutes of time in debating. That's how far it's got. They gave him ten minutes and then nodded appreciatively and ignored him. Imagine how many other "ten minute bills" have gone before Parliament since they were introduced and NOTHING has happened.
The guy's an idiot. The idea is stupid unless you SEVERELY castrate its power in law (which makes it useless). Nothing has even remotely been "approved", they've just listened and "will respond", like several million petitions through the Number 10 site that got the same treatement.
The only place giving him airtime is Slashdot, really. So people can shout about what colour / wing he is and how stupid "that lot" all are.
Hell, it doesn't translate out of any of the books whatsoever.
Discworld plays, board games, video games (yes, Discworld I and II were NOT "Discworld", just Simon-the-Sorceror style cash-ins), etc. 99% of the Discworld merchandise is absolute tat. Hell, even the endless calendars, "science books", and everything else are a waste of space.
I don't blame Pratchett and/or his agent for cashing in - far from it, I'd do the same. But it remains true that every adaptation outside of the books just can't do them justice.
Hell, I cringed through the first 10 minutes of the TV adaptations we had over in the UK "starring" David Jason, etc. Ick. I had to switch it off.
Some series you can do justice too (whether they have or not is another matter) - Lord of The Rings you can do quite well (though I don't like the current versions, there's sure to be a remake in 10 years time with even more "extra footage"), most sci-fi authors you can do quite well. But comedy literature is a tough one to crack and it won't translate to the screen properly at all.
All it *will* do is put people off trying to read the books because they've seen the (crappy) TV/movie versions.
In one book, Death has a scythe that's so sharp it slices his sentences in half when he speaks. Vimes is an ugly, fat, old alcoholic copper that kicks arse (okay, they NEARLY managed that in a lot of 80's cop shows). Unseen University is technically invisible (or not, depending on which part of which book you read). There are pages of explanations spread across 20+ books about how some of the elements of the world came about (e.g. klacks, other dimensions, Angua, Dibbler, etc.). How the hell do you translate that to a movie or even a play?
They should stop trying. At best you can attempt an amateur play or an audiobook reading. At worst, everything else you put out ruins the books even more.
Nothing to do with their Android app once wiping out your phone contact's email addresses and replacing them with @facebook.com equivalents?
People use the web version not because it's more convenient but because it's safer and you KNOW what it has access to.
Some would say that those who hedged their bets on HTML5 in the first place, especially from so early on, were the dumb ones and not the naysayers.
To be honest - I don't see much advantage as a user (the last time I touched HTML seriously was just after CSS became popular, so I don't really speak as a developer here). Take Facebook for example - what do I get from all the fancy code that adorns those pages and slows down my browser (design decisions like Timeline aside)? I get little buttons to hide posts I don't like (that disappear inline) and some tagging technology that's easily replicated.
Betting the shop on what HTML5 does feature in something like Facebook, and especially on browser compatibility which has been notoriously underwhelming with most HTML/CSS technologies, is quite a dumb technical and business decision. That he recognises this now is sensible, but it's not worthy of much praise.
All native apps do is take away the unknown of what browser the user is using and what it supports. It's not like they've made apps that somehow magically integrate into Facebook, it's just the same code and a known platform to target (and I bet it isn't even as simple as that and they have problems with them all the time because one can do X that the others can't). So they've ended up hiring a native code writer or dozens for each platform to make a "Facebook browser" rather than a native app - same thing, different angle. And saved nothing in the process. The app could have just done all the donkey work itself and just talked to Facebook via a very basic API of any kind.
It's not a case of betting on the wrong technology. It's a case of not seeing that he did so a LOT earlier. "I'm going to assume that everyone has a mostly HTML5 compliant browser and program with that assumption" is quite a ridiculous thing to ever say - even today - and then base a huge business on that complete guess.
Let's assume the Windows thing is true for a second.
I've just said Windows. Can I be sued for trademark infringement? No.
Windows is shit.
Now can I? No.
Windows is the biggest turd I've ever seen in my life.
Now can I? No.
But the person who infringes on the trademark - they can. This isn't about enforcing a trademark. It's about suing people for mentioning two words together, even when they've been told it's the name of a product (and if that IS a problem, then you need to sue the product manufacturer, not the reviewer who - at best - might want to put a correction/clarification up at most).
The parties being sued did not choose that name or use it to sell items themselves. Someone else did that. That someone else is HarperCollins - the ONLY people he has a basis to sue at all.
As others have pointed out, "Carnival of Souls", even if trademarkable, is a pretty generic name and has been in use for FAR, FAR longer. Hell, I'm sure I've played at least one computer game where that was the name of a level, for instance.
It's like me trademarking "Emotional Rollercoaster" and then trying to enforce it. If he had a case, it's only against HarperCollins. And if he had a case, it would be expensive and difficult to win and would make him a lot of money from them playing off his established trademark.
I doubt he has a case. He has to enforce the trademark. But he does not have to enforce third-party reviews of the trademark (hell, that just adds to evidence of damages if anything else). But the second you sue HarperCollins, the first thing they will have done is work out if he had a case. Chances are that he just doesn't.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that real spies would be likely to have a plausible explanation for what they are doing and sometimes get caught.
There might be "James Bonds" running around that are infallible and undetectable, but the majority of "spies" would actually be cannon fodder - send enough of them and eventually a few would get caught. And then, of course, they have to protest their innocence (never admit to being a spy if you don't want to spend your WHOLE LIFE in prison, if you're that lucky - the rules don't apply in the same way to such people), have a plausible back-story, etc. etc. etc.
Just because you're a "spy" doesn't mean you're not in a group of plane-spotters that plan a trip to Greece. Hell, sounds like a perfect persona to assume to me.
That said, they are a little harsh for what is basically a totally pointless exercise. If someone really cared about knowing the layout of a military base, there are myriad easier ways to find out, or they could just plan for "not knowing" and thus just make an operation that takes account of that fact. And, if you are a spy, you would be visibly taking visible photos of it even if only to provide better plausibility than a video camera transmitting to a remote storage or a hidden camera of some kind.
I know someone who delivers beer to military establishments in London. It's not hard to get through the front-door and past armed guards, even with someone "new" working alongside you who you don't really know, especially when you are carrying their beer. Hell, once they were stopped for the usual checks, and then when they were asked to explain what they were carrying were in immense detail (while troops scanned the underside of the delivery truck, etc.) it was mentioned that the checks were fine but they just delay the people inside getting their beer and who would explain it to them? Literally, checks stopped, truck waved through.
If you want this sort of information, it's easy to get, so its pointless to push so hard on potentially innocent people. And, hell, if a spy taking a photo of your plane / base is enough to worry you, maybe you should lay them out or design them a bit better or plan your military on the enemy knowing the layout. But, that said, a spy would look like anyone else and probably have a pretty plausible explanation and happily do only a few years in prison if caught compared to the alternative of revealing themselves as spies.
Ouch. That's gotta hurt. I think there's a case for even places like the EU commission there, if people are unknowingly distributing other's data.
That said, I don't really care because I've never touched WoW. But, yeah, I can see the problem. 4 years of IP -> client records, plus things like date-time stamps. If nothing else, that's a whole host of web-crawling to link people to IP's, accounts.
You kind of expect it in pre-release reviews or betas or something but in the full client and in every screenshot? Bit nasty.
More interesting - what other games do that?