Jobs converting existing cars (you think several million tons of steel are just going to be melted down overnight?), advising and selling such conversions.
Jobs laying cables to, converting and supplying new "filling" stations.
Jobs recycling old cars that aren't compatible.
Jobs enforcing the new system (i.e. printing stickers, CCTV number-plate recognition, etc.)
Just because it says "jobs" it doesn't mean "permanent, life-long jobs". It also doesn't mean that they won't be replacing older, obsolete jobs. But it *does* create jobs because it creates work to be done and someone, somewhere has to be paid to do it.
Not ignorance - I honestly just don't care enough, having reviewed the evidence thoroughly in the days of "mobile phones will fry your brain", especially as I work in schools where we were deploying Wifi and the parents were protesting against a mobile phone mast being built nearby too.
My initial instinct when I first heard things like this years ago, fresh out of uni, as someone of a scientific mind? They were idiots. My conclusion then, after lots of personal research? They were idiots. My conclusion now? They're still idiots. My conclusion for the forseeable future? Almost certainly still idiots but I bet we do eventually find lots of things that "are affected" but in such minor ways that I'll spend more time worrying about whether I should blow my nose or not.
Science, observed recordings, and centuries of studies tell me that EM radiation in the frequencies and powers observed does nothing to my body that's even close to being measurably, statistically and practically significant or detrimental over the timescales discussed, and considered against any other number of reasonable factors that you could easily remove. The bacteria that live in my shoes pose orders of magnitude greater risk to my health every day.
And I'm not a phone junkie. I get one or two calls a day, about five minutes each, and rarely dial out (I have an office phone and a home phone, why bother using the mobile?). But the mobile stays on me, powered on, all day to fulfil its primary purpose - so I have something on my person that can make a phone call in an emergency. Just turning the damn thing off would be an infinitely better solution for myself (because I only care about outgoing calls) but it's just not worth the effort because the risk is so statistically insignificant. I'd be more worried about the extra weight on my hip, to be honest, and that's such a minor thing compared to my upper body weight.
If I put it anywhere else, I will lose it - I don't have shirt pockets and I'd end up leaving it in there, my trouser (pant) pockets also contain other "take everywhere" essentials - keys, money, cards (the invisible finger-grime on my cards is more a hazard to me, and the keys are a greater risk of causing me injury, especially if I just shove them in my pocket and then sit down). And the risk from the phone is so negligible as to not warrant changing a habit.
Some people REALLY have a problem estimating risk. That's their problem. Personally, my phone stays. Similarly, I see no reason to not live inside a ring-main wired house, as I do. All that electricity pumping around me all day, emitting EM for no reason! If I treat a hip-phone as a significant risk, I have to treat everything with that same risk or more in the same way too, and that would make my life infinitely more complicated to the point that it would be unlivable.
But I have a life. One with infinitely more risks (which are much more significant, likely and detrimental) than what a bit of EM might do to my hipbone over the course of my lifetime. Hell, technically I walk through EM fields dozens of times a day - they're called "Oyster readers" on the London Underground and/or shop theft detectors.
The point is - people who *KNOW* and calculate the risks are telling you that it's really not worth worrying about and hasn't been, for pretty much forever. Thus every scaremongering story about radiation, EM or how we're all going to hell if we don't believe is subject to criticism.
It's probably slightly less "damaging" to have my phone an inch away. But having it where it is is already so "undamaging" that I just don't care. It really makes that little difference that's it not worth worrying about.
Carry my phone in my pocket all the time. Have done for the last 10 years or so.
In the risks I run each day, the usage of a mobile phone comes very near the bottom of the list, near "lifting a piece of paper up while seated at my desk" and "blowing my nose".
It's actually NOT worth my time worrying about, because the worrying would do much more damage to my body than the phone ever would in normal usage.
Personally, until it approaches the risk of myself drinking about a litre of Coke a day (which I've done for years), I'm very unlikely to start worrying. And yes, Coke is incredibly "dangerous" - sugar, acid, calcium-leeching chemicals (in the Diet versions, I believe) and all sorts of problems. But when a sip of Coke is that dangerous, a mobile phone hardly figures in my reckoning.
Can you trace the final connection endpoint (i.e. the part that contacted the observed target as the last link in the chain)? Yes. Even if they fake the IP you *could* in theory do work to discover where that connection originated from. This assumes greatly that the IP you recorded isn't forged, random or nonsense and that you haven't just been "given" a list of IP's from a third-party who didn't do the correct analysis to determine where those IP's are gathered from.
Can you get from an IP to a physical location? Almost certainly. Usually to the campus, home address or business telecoms line that the IP is associated with. But it will be the IP of the other endpoint of the connection, not necessarily the origin of the user's actions. E.g. proxies, hacked routers, etc. And even that can be extraordinarily tricky to arrange over international borders.
Can you trace back through proxies and other hindrances to get to an actual connection origin. Yes. Doubling the work necessary at each stage and if you can force physical access to each of those origins in order to trace back where the source came from.
Can you get from a confirmed IP-packets physical origin to an actual person? Depends. Not automatically, and probably not at all without an admission of guilt or other concrete evidence and almost certainly it would only be "coincidental" rather than anything else (otherwise it would be like arresting everyone who used an Acer laptop because the connection originated from an Acer laptop)
Can you do "hacker-work" to knock on the door of Hacker 1 who lives in an uncooperative country who was trying to hide their tracks (i.e. someone you actually WANT to trace using police resources and raiding datacentres)? Probably not.
Can you do some simple police investigations to get from an abusive IP address to a home address that you can raid for more evidence in a co-operative, or your own, country (i.e. someone stupid enough to do something incredibly illegal and traceable from their home Internet connection)? Yes.
Can you then prove it was them that used that IP? Not without taking their computer and ISP logs and all sorts of other evidence and doing a full "ordinary" investigation.
Can you determine who random user X was who piggybacked on a wifi connection that you *can't* prove the owner used himself but can only trace to that IP? Not without some other evidence (e.g. spotting the car that was sitting outside).
Can you tie an IP address on the general Internet to a single person unequivocally? Not to the standard of any court that I know, no.
Can you tie an IP address on the general Internet to a single person enough to make you suspicious. Usually - yes.
Will it stand up in court? Not without a shit-ton of other evidence that's much more convincing.
Wow. Are you really that easily led? Some guy on TV, radio, in a book or otherwise mentions a brand name to you and it "makes you want" things... MAKES you want?! I watch the shopping channels as entertainment - I've never seen anything quite so funny or as contrived and I've never once even considered buying any of those products. I don't think I've ever bought anything featured in an advert I've seen because of the advert (even if you assume some weird subliminal "X is better" subtext).
If you're buying impulsively, don't blame the adverts. Blame your lack of self-control. If you go shopping, go with a list in mind of the stuff you need. If you buy anything not on that list, it's your own fault. You're an adult. If you can't keep Pepsi out of your shopping basket, how do you expect to apply contraception when you don't want to start a family? I have bought stuff in shops that I hadn't planned but not because it's advertised but because I might see a particularly good deal and will weigh it up in store (including whether I need it, do I actually benefit from "two for the price of one", etc.), but an "impulse" buy? Come on. Strap on a pair. (And to be honest, X amount of impulse buying isn't a bad thing at all - I actually set aside £50 a month deliberately for complete junk - whether that's computer games, bubble-blowers, a turn on an arcade machine, some dry-ice to do kitchen-science experiments with or whatever - I'm 32 but *choose* to throw away £50 on nothing but silly things for my own entertainment)
You don't need to "train" people to ignore advertising. For the majority of us, it's the sensible default state of any adult with decision-making capability. It's like people who "can't" diet - yes you can. Even with medical problems. It's just a case of eating less and getting your doctor to counteract your medical problems (if they even exist).
Only those with zero decision-making skills, zero reasoning skills and zero self-control do what the advertisers tell them. And most of advertising is "brand awareness", not actually making you buy that exact product. Hence you will DEFINITELY have heard of Coca-Cola or McDonald's even if you don't know they produce a Double-Chicken Burger or whatever - and if you're an idiot you'll somehow think they are "better" than, say, Virgin Cola, or Wimpy because you've never heard of those.
My two-year-old knows all the children's TV characters by sight, of course she does. She's in a fact-absorbing time of life and those are clear names given to identifiable characters. So do I. I *want* her to be able to do that because identifying a black-eared mouse as Mickey is no different to identifying that weird-looking bloke as "Dad". But take her in a toy shop, give her free reign and she's INFINITELY more likely to buy something she *hasn't* seen before and is interesting to her(and not because there's a big advert for it - she is surprisingly naturally "immune" to large adverts, in the same way my cat just completely ignores pictures of cats on a calendar) than another Peppa Pig or whatever. I don't mind that she occasionally says "Look, Daddy, Peppa Pig" in the shops - it means her sight, pattern recognition, cognitive skills, recall and vocal talents are intact. But if she wanted something JUST BECAUSE it was Peppa Pig, then as a parent it's up to me to say No. And I would - if she'd EVER done that.
I've actually managed to breed a child who is *completely immune* to advertising through the sheer appliance of common sense - expose her to it so it's just background noise and the fact that the toy lights up, or sounds funny, or looks cute, or can be carried is more important. Just because it has Peppa Pig on it doesn't mean it's better for her and I weigh up her consumer choices for her until she's old enough. If there's an adult that *can't* do that, then you have much bigger problems because an adult can reason to themselves: "It's just a brand".
To my daughter, a McDonald's is a particular instan
No, but we do know that life expectancy is up and there are a lot more people about. Hence, even a *rise* in cancer-related deaths wouldn't be at all shocking (in fact, I'd expect it).
We also don't know how many people died of sun-related cancer caused by ozone-depletion until we stopped using CFC's. Or, indeed, how many people die each year from petrol fumes. Or how many die from respiratory diseases caused by household sprays.
The facts that there have been 2000 nuclear explosions, many of them deliberately designed to extinguish life even if only then used under controlled situations, and yet still life expectancy is on the up, population is up, cancer incidences still stay steady (which is therefore an IMPROVEMENT) and cancer survival is the highest it's ever been in human history - all this almost certainly means that it's not doing much at all, beyond what the planet throws at us anyway.
The wildlife around Chernobyl is actually thriving since humans left the area, for instance.
I'm infinitely more worried about someone spraying their house with air freshener every two seconds and trying to get my child to wipe her hands with anti-bacterial soap / wipes after every spill than I am about her being exposed to any radiation from even the nuclear power plants in my country. Hell, they're building one just down the coast from me - gotta be better than the smoke and crap AND RADIATION in the output from the nearby coal power plants.
Please don't ever say you want to be a space tourist - even the radiation from a single transatlantic flight is probably hundreds of times more dangerous to you (unless you actually live in a very small area near the plant) than this incident, a space tourist would probably be subjected to hundreds times more than that.
It gets me that on the one hand we can't have nuclear hundreds of miles away powering our cities, and on the other everyone wants to talk about flying through space in a tin can to live on another planet swathed in radiation.
I discount all *reports* of contamination until they are backed up by facts, and put into context.
Eating a banana will give you a not-insignificant amount of radiation. Seriously. Smoking a cigarette is a lot worse. Even *smelling* a barbecue probably isn't good for you. At the moment, the figures stated and comparisons made are *extremely* over-hyped.
As the situation currently stands, in fifty years time I wouldn't even care about walking around Fukushima as part of a tourist trail, right through to the room where they keep the cores. I wouldn't do that in Chernobyl, even if it were possible in a couple of hundred years.
And the reporters who arrived to cover the story and the people who fled the tsunami probably got more radiation exposure from their long-haul flight than they ever will while they this situation extends.
Radiation is a big scary word that people instantly associate with death. It's not true. You are *SITTING* in a bath of radiation right now. Without a suitable measure, measured properly (the problem with this article is that it basically measures water in a swimming pool and one in a kettle and then says they are equal because they measured the depth), put into context (this is a nuclear reactor that was subject to a 30-foot wall of water - as such the radiation that's actually ESCAPED has done less damage than a handful of long-haul flights or X-Rays so far - fucking hell, that's some safety measures there!) and reported accurately and non-sensationally, you're just sucking yourself into dependence on a media outlet's scare-mongering.
I'm pro-nuclear, because pound-for-pound, it's the safest, most efficient, most powerful, easiest and least polluting energy production method in existence. But even *without* that, as someone of a scientific mind just telling me "more radiation than Chernobyl" has so many DOZENS of potential flaws that it's laughable. More radiation where than where, exactly? Measured how? In what form (alpha, beta, gamma)? In what containment? To whom? Over what area? With what duration? With what effect? By what transport?
The fact of the matter is that a handful of people who work in the nuclear reactor have been exposed to a level of radiation slightly above "safe" levels. I think we can easily say that's not surprising at all - this is an emergency. How much above safe? What's that likely to do to them? Are we talking a little above safe in an industry that's heavily regulated (i.e. the equivalent of eating a biscuit that's a day out of date) or are we talking many MILLIONS of times more than the level that will definitely give them cancer? (Hint, it's the lower, and the adverse effects expected from short-term exposure to such radiation are basically zero - there are people working in labs behind lead screens who are subject to more radiation every day - they're called radiographers).
Whereas Chernobyl blew a reactor into open air and they had to abandon hundreds of miles of towns and countryside for, pretty much, thousands of years and it's still above safe levels even kilometres away from it. Yet still people have jobs such as visiting the reactor, putting another concrete shield on it, surveying the territory for intruders, measuring the levels every day and the local wildlife is absolutely THRIVING without human intervention. This isn't even on the same scale are people are panicking about radiation making it to the US, etc. (hell, we only know about Chernobyl because OTHER COUNTRIES hundreds of kilometres away noticed their nuclear worker's badges were showing high radiation from the fallout! Does that mean Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe? Yes. Does that mean that half of Europe are now all dying of cancer or have measurable adverse effects caused by that? No.)
People being moved from the area is sensible, but there are no signs that the thing is about to blow, nor that all those people will die. And there was just a tsunami, you know, so no-one is particularly worried about not being able
Please don't spread crap and tell me I'm going to die because I'm deliberately refusing to "follow orders".
Additionally, don't spam it anonymously (so we can at least block you out if we so wish), and at least have the decency to do less advertising of your church in your post than linking to a "relevant" article - I mean, come on - keyword spamming?
The really *annoying* part of evangelism such as this is that if you'd just posted the link without all the crap attached to it (from the keyword spamming and double-links, to failing to link to your article directly), people would probably be more inclined to read it. For people who are trying to convince others to make huge changes to their life, evangelists are inherently terrible at actually convincing people and have zero knowledge of effective PR.
I work in schools. No school that I know of has a forum unless every word is moderated by staff first. And my brother runs a large Scouting website which has a forum. His disclaimer reads:
All users under the age of 13 must have prior parental consent, as required by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 2000, before registering on this forum. This can be done through the following methods: Digitally Signed E-Mail from the parent or legal guardian Contacting the site administrator (... @...) via mail or fax (e-mail for more information) The parents or guardians of this user have all authority over this account, and can choose to cancel it at any time (via the method chosen to open this account).
Which firmly puts the ball in the court of the person creating the account. It may help to read the relevant legislation but, basically, covering your arse is the best method - don't specifically create things for kids without checking it first, and try not to store any information on kids at all if you can.
If nothing else, think what you will be exposed to if an adult joins the forums and starts talking inappropriately to children (maybe even via private message if you still have that enabled) - you may have done everything you can to prevent it but it's still not something you can control adequately.
No school or large children's organisation that I know of allows kids to talk freely on forums, even with parental consent. If they want to do so on Facebook outside of school, that's up to the parents. Again, most schools just block all social networking sites apart from those that are highly-vetted and moderated (e.g. online school community networks supplied by local boroughs, etc.)
Whether it's law or not, the rule is a certain age, which users click "I agree" to when they sign up. If they lied on that, it doesn't matter what the law says about data protection, their accounts are forfeitable.
And they don't want to have to keep track of a million different laws so a blanket-ban on under-13's is just common sense and saving on administration - like every forum software I've seen in the last ten years says by default or recommends.
Who cares about the law - if you say it's not for kids, even if only for convenience / arse-covering, then it's not for kids. Break that rule, lose your account. Why this is an article at all except for possibly the *number* of accounts they deal with is beyond me.
"DMA Design was founded in 1988 by David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly in Dundee, Scotland."
Given that the last name on this list is the guy who posted it, you might be hard-pushed to keep him to an NDA from the company he founded.
Sometimes, you know, people just put stuff online because they want to and are allowed to. Like sometimes they open-source their engines, or grant distribution permission for their old (emulated) titles, etc. I know if I ran a software company, I'd keep it in the news for a few years by just leaking out details of big-name projects I'd done in the past to keep the name alive and interest there.
Hell, back when Bullfrog were making Syndicate they produced a series of articles for one of the computer magazines that used the Syndicate graphics and showed the code and techniques they'd used to move them around on an isometric grid. Nothing "secret" but they had snippets of actual game code in there and it was for a programming article on, basically, "how to make a game like Syndicate".
Yeah, because NOBODY would put things into the public domain, do them for the love of the thing, or just to make a statement, or to provide a voice for themselves, work thousands of man-hours to build a free operating system that they then give away (and I mean BSD, not Linux, which relies on copyright), create a commercial-quality computer-rendered animated movie and give it away, create an encyclopaedia on every subject, etc.etc.etc.
Copyright isn't "needed". It is helpful. But it's also incredibly overreaching at present.
And, to be honest, in many countries in the world copyright exists only on paper. You can just walk up to a market trader and get a piece of software that costs thousands for next to nothing and entire industries are run on that software later on without bothering to legitimise it.
I'd love to see the same. For the opposite reason. I think the world would tick along perfectly, with slightly less mega-rich popstars and movie moguls (not to mention middle-men), and a lot more stuff that people can read, view and access without worrying about the licensing. It would be like giving everyone access to the British Library and telling them to read whatever they wanted. There might be less multi-million dollar heaps of shit in the cinema and a few more educated and enlightened people about.
Seems a bit pointless to document what they have there.
It's a *very* rough outline of a game, almost like saying "It's going to be like Game X but possibly better!". The only details are things like the pixel-size of a block and the map size in blocks which seem a bit odd to document that early - surely something you'd leave until later when you know how the engine reacts.
It looks like they already knew what they were working towards and this was just a formal document that doesn't lock down very much or actually describe what choices were made or why. Although there are a few "surprises" like they envisaged a school crossing with children on it (yeah, that would go down well when you can run them all over), or various race modes, or being able to control external cars with a mouse, and having a 2D-SimCity-like view for slow computers, none of that really comes to fruition and was obviously rejected almost immediately after this document was written.
About the only interesting thing is the timeline (which kinda leaves a lot of games in the modern era in the dust), really.
Come on. The game is nearly 20 years old now. And there were tons of games in that kind of era. Surely *one* of them must have some interesting documentation available somewhere. This just reads like: "We're already writing this game but management wants us to follow this formal process - let's just make stuff up and pretend we were aiming for this design already".
Only affects you if you think that you have to have a game on release day.
A lot of people, myself included, won't TOUCH a new game for at least a couple of weeks. Bugs, DRM, overloaded servers, patches, updates, problems. No thanks. I spend enough of my time fixing things like that without having to subject myself to it voluntarily for a piece of entertainment.
(On Steam last Christmas, I bought about 100 games. It cost me about £100. The ones that I checked and reviewed I ended up loving. The cruft that I got for free actually had some worthwhile bits. The stuff that I bought "on a whim" because it looked nice but was "new" and unreviewed I almost universally regretted even if it only cost a few pounds)
And in the end, the only people hurt are the companies that do that. If a game is crap and you stagger release, the last people to get it will already know it's crap and not bother. But if you'd had a simultaneous release, you could have got a LOT more sales before people found out. Unscrupulous, yes, but good business sense. If the game was good, it'll get pirated before people have the opportunity to buy and they might well complete the game before it's available for sale and hence never end up buying it.
I can slightly understand staggering if the game is going to put a huge burden on your servers but if you're releasing such a game without using continent-specific servers anyway, then you're wasting your time.
The only people it really hurts are idiots that buy things they have no idea about on day one in order to stay "fashionable" in their gaming tastes, and the companies that stagger releases deliberately. No loss to myself on either count, there, really.
Rule #1: Don't pay for anything you can't try, play a demo of, get a full refund for, or test for a long time before you deploy.
I own the David Attenborough Life Collection. It's 24 DVDs. Even assuming they are the single-layer type, that would be:
112.8 Gb. Roughly.
Now say I own, say, several boxsets of comedies, series, documentaries, a few dozen movies, maybe even a couple of dozen free promotional DVD's with full-feature films on them that are given out when the film stops selling.
Now, *NOT* including anything I've recorded from TV / Movie channels for my own consumption, not including any home videos, not including ANY Blu-Rays, etc. I can *EASILY* fill terabytes of data without even blinking an eyelid.
Hey, I could probably fill a terabyte or two with DVD images of cartoons (proper children's cartoons) and stuff I watched when I was younger (I have the complete set of Dangermouse, Batfink, etc.) and that's hardly something I go out and buy every day and keep buying. A terabyte, or even half a dozen terabytes, is NOTHING. It's just when you have to copy it all into a single place, like this guy is doing, that it appears to be a lot.
It's just that he's obsessively backing it up and/or converting it to free formats so that he can just browse from a media library, like the ones he desires, so it's all on one hard disk (or more likely RAID). It's not "abnormal". It's nowhere near "evidence of piracy". It's just a media collection stored on disk instead of the original DVD's.
"He explicitly says that for there to be a derivative work, it would take a substantial amount of code. So, you can't just take a substantial portion of a GPL'd program's (either an application of a library) *interface* and release it under an arbitrary license."
No, he says it would take a substantial amount of CODE. Meaning actual bodies of functions (he says so in the same line).
A header file, by convention, contains no code. It has interface definitions (X expects an integer), it has data structures (A user account consists of alphabetical username and password and a numerical ID), and it has definitions (Pi is 3.141592). It does not and should never contain any substantial amount of code (or, really, lots of macro tricks). Everyone routinely distributes header files to closed-source DLL's, libraries etc. because it's not copyrightable and allows people to use those libraries (it is, in fact, necessary). But the header file is likely NOT covered by copyright at all (even if it says it is) because the information therein is not expressive (i.e. there are tools that can extract a "header" file you can use from a binary, it's just not as useful).
What he's saying is that:
long print_squared(int x);
is not copyrightable. And almost every court in the land (including the SCO debacle) confirms that. It's not copyrightable because it's not expressive - it's merely fact and convention and interface. In the same way, a quadratic formula is not copyrightable but a book "Solving quadratics" or even a short except might well be copyrightable (and most probably is).
The interface, as specified in a header file, is uncopyrightable on its own (though that doesn't stop people putting notices on it, it just doesn't mean they are "true"). The *body* - in programming terms - of a function (or the programmer's expression of his particular way of performing a certain procedure) is copyrightable, the *definition* or *prototype* is not.
Otherwise every piece of software in the world is either a) infringing or b) GPL by extension (e.g. I use the SDL header in a closed-source program to know what functions to call and what parameters they expect - it doesn't mean that the SDL code is included except in a self-contained "closed" DLL or that the SDL licence applies to my entire program).
And Google specifically said - they took a header file (which is 99.9% uncopyrightable - see SCO vs IBM etc.) and extracted JUST the function prototypes (so no question of macros, stray function bodies, etc. playing a part) and used that list of uncopyrightable "X does Y" to enable interfacing to a piece of code that was ENTIRELY under another licence. You can take ALL of the function prototypes in that way if you want. But you can't take a SINGLE LINE of function body without risking using copyrightable (and therefore copyright) material.
Header files have one purpose - to provide the facts necessary to describe the *interface* to a set of code without needing the code present. Because they are facts, non-expressive and necessary for interoperability, they are uncopyrightable. If the GPL covered them, an awful lot of commercial games are in for a shock because they almost certainly used or include the SDL header, or the Allegro header, or any one of a million and one headers (including "windows.h"!) and thus become subject to the licensing terms on it. The SDL header even re-states the LGPL licence, for instance.
Attempting to sue over header files and/or data derived from header files will end in humiliation. That said, certain parts of certain header files that contain macro code could easily be copyrightable. But that's no relevant - Google stripped out anything that wasn't a function prototype, from what they said.
"Being locked out of our own legally purchased devices is NOT normal."
Ever tried to access the air-bag controller on your car? Ever flashed your ECU and then expect the manufacturer to cover the consequences? Ever bought software that was reliant on a hardware dongle? Ever bought a large dedicated device (like a specialist microscope) that comes with some ancient MacOS version on the controller PC that you can never touch or upgrade without voiding the whole setup? What about trying to make a replacement RF car door opener for your car? Or tap into the security systems to code your own keys? Or break the radio's security code so you can install it in a car other than your own?
There are a million devices and parts of devices you can't play with. The difference is that you VOLUNTARILY bought the device with the knowledge that you couldn't play with those things (or in the case of modded ECU's etc. that you would never receive support for them and may be locked out). Hell, some high-end cars have tyres that "talk to" the car so they know exactly when you fitted a third-party component so they can void your warranty.
Don't buy crap that does this if you don't want crap that does this. No "There's nothing else" or "it's an industry-standard" or whatever excuses - STOP BUYING IT. Then you have no cause to moan and manufacturers have cause to stop doing it.
Chances are that even if you and everyone you know stopped buying it, nothing will happen either. But at least you wouldn't be party to the stuff that you are complaining about, and thus become a hypocrite.
If you bought a device and it's "faulty" in this way, take it through the courts and see how far you get. If you *don't* fall down at the very first hurdle ("You accepted the purchase agreement and paid for it") I'll be very surprised, but then you'll have YEARS of fighting to get to the point where the court agrees with you (e.g. PS3 OtherOS removal class action). And to get a precedent-setting case where manufacturers stop doing it, you would need huge proportions of the purchasers fighting for it. And, yes, you would need to be a purchaser.
Or you could just not buy that crap and buy something that works how you want, not how you imagine it should.
Because no virus in the world would disable automatic updates once it had infected a machine via a method that had not yet been detected and patched in a monthly update.
And automatic updates do not save you for the MONTH before that tool is updated. By which time, you're already dead.
And automatic updates, especially around SP time, is a good way to end up with several machines that are dead or in a bluescreen loop (has been every since 95 and 7 SP1 is still doing the same).
And automatic updates do NOT save you from having to have some tool run over every byte of your disk on a regular basis to determine if it matches a list of "known" hostile software.
Automatic updates are one, tiny, little tool that help prevent programs that are already executing on the PC from exploiting flaws that give them, say, administrator access. It does NOT stop people running those programs in the first place, or those programs from getting way more privileges than they should anyway, or those programs being able to spread even without admin access.
Auto-updates are one part, that can be as easily disabled as any user can easily disable them. Relying on anything that has to "scan" a machine to know if you're okay or not is not a security policy. It's an intrusion detection policy.
Anything that relies on a monthly update and then a full byte-wise scan of your disk / processes / RAM is the PC equivalent of the Red Dwarf Quarantine episode:
Cat: So what's the news? Kryten: Well, if I could just beg your indulgence for a few seconds more, sir, the old 345 takes a little time to warm up. Still, it out-performs the 346 in 8 out of 9 bench tests. A small wonder, then, that it secured "Psi-scan of the Year, Best Budget Model" three years running. Now here are the results. And we're going to... LIVE! Lister: (Sighs) We're a real Mickey Mouse operation aren't we?
Don't give them the option to click Yes to incredibly stupid things like "Run this program every time I start my computer, with no easy way to monitor it or stop it from loading" (the latest one I've seen is viruses that replace the user's shell value in the registry - somewhere not listed in startup lists - and then re-execute explorer).
Or "Allow this program to spam the hell out of everyone with no controls on what they are doing on the Internet on SMTP ports and whatever it likes, as much as it likes, with no easy way of knowing what's accessing the Internet from my PC"
Or "Allow this program to hide itself in the filesystem once it's loaded by overriding certain function hooks" - even if you ARE admin.
And if the user DOES click Yes, make it easy to remove that privilege later, i.e. don't have antivirus controls which are basically stuck because they CAN'T remove a file with that particular permissioning, or sometimes can't even see it in the filesystem, or can't remove it because when they do the process just recreates it immediately, or has two processes watching and respawning each other which can't be killed simultaneously.
The problem is Windows security is NOT people running in an account with the ability to install programs. It's the OS not providing a way to recover from bad decisions and separating "user" and "admin" too much. Most users *are* admins of their machines and need to install, remove, manage stuff. But they do NOT need the ability to install a filesystem hook except once in a blue moon. And anything they install should NOT affect other users at all. "User" needs to become a lot more powerful, and a lot more isolated from other users, while still requiring admin rights (and then make it truly impossible to execute things as admin without logging on as that directly - and make the "admin" account USELESS for day-to-day-use, no browser or shortcut access should do the trick).
And this is why MS decided LAST WEEK to turn off Autorun in XP by default. Duh. The setting that ANYONE with a brain has had switched off since day one (i.e. ten YEARS ago). That was a bad decision all along, even if it "helped" users (doesn't help anyone I know, because they click "Remember this" the first time and then never see the dialog again and then wonder why their DVD's only ever open in Media Player rather than PowerDVD, etc.)
MS are supposed to have dozens of usability and interface guys. I've yet to see a single convincing example of this - most of their stuff is just useless eye-candy that people can't grasp without being shown by someone who knows.
When I buy a PC, in comes in a box. When I buy a laptop, it comes in a box. When I *BUILD* a PC, I have to cobble a handful of components together according to their compatibility tables (the more general rule of which is "if it fits in the hole, it'll do") and thus it won't make any difference anyway.
If a PC already has integrated motherboard sound, integrated motherboard Ethernet, integrated motherboard USB, integrated motherboard RAID, etc. then for the most part you won't *care* how the layout is arranged. I probably could not point out a sound chip on a modern motherboard anymore - it's hidden away inside the whole chipset. It's not even vaguely interesting to know, certainly no more than those people who brag about their CPU using the latest "X number of microns" process (if you mean it does X, that's worth telling - but don't assume that just because you bothered to memorise a completely useless connection to the number of microns used in the process for that particular manufacturer that that somehow makes you superior).
People who want to upgrade cards will buy a computer with upgradeable cards (and they already disable the on-board graphics, so there's nothing to stop you doing the same when the "on-board" graphics are even more "on-board"). It's not like you're de-soldering the graphics chips and putting new ones in their place nowadays.
People who really don't care and just want a PC to a certain spec (the majority of PC buyers, even in big business) will just buy something that could have either CPU and GPU or the combined article. They won't know or care until it comes to upgrade time and most likely they *won't* be touching motherboard, CPU, GPU, or things like sound when upgrading - even RAM is a bit pointless because there's *ALWAYS* a restriction on where the upgrades can go and it's usually cheaper just to buy a new machine to that spec than to try to upgrade an old one.
With laptops, especially, I can't really say that I give a shit where the chip that runs my graphics happens to be. I do have a "gaming" laptop but all I care about is what model number (for downloading the driver) and what it can do (for choosing which games to buy and run on it). I don't even know if this one I'm typing on uses a CPU-GPU combination already, because I rarely open a laptop and if I have a problem serious enough to do so, it's time to get a new laptop just to be safe anyway. And the components that die first are the bits you *don't* worry about until they break - the USB ports, the rear connectors, and the screen. And when they break on a laptop - hey, price of new motherboard = price new laptop with better specs. The only upgrade on a laptop worth doing is RAM and they always expose the RAM ports.
With desktops, you might be able to upgrade CPU and GPU in one hit by changing an integrated package but I don't think in over 25 years of PC computing and managing school networks that I have *ever* upgraded a CPU on an existing motherboard. I've reapplied heat-transfer compound, I've added a *NEW* GPU into an otherwise empty slot and disabled internal graphics (so nothing changes there) but I've never upgraded what's there already.
Who cares? And if it means we can do things like speed up CPU->GPU memory transfers, put all the heat-making components in one place, supply smaller and "faster" thin clients and have assured compatibility, even better. Who knows, it might even lead to better documentation of the graphics chipsets inside the normal processor documentation!
Low-spec hardware is low-spec if it's integrated or not. But as to *where* the GPU lies? Who cares? My laptop could be an empty box for all I know, with one huge lump of plastic and silicon tucked into a corner somewhere and the case balanced with lead weights. I don't know and don't really care. So long as it gets the performance that I bought it for, it'll do.
"It's not really Microsoft's problem, but they still help to solve it."
Wiki says: The Rustock botnet (founded around 2006) is a botnet that consists of an estimated 150,000 computers running Microsoft Windows.
It could be suggested that, at some level, it *IS* a Microsoft problem, in the same way that it would be Nintendo's problem if everyone's Wii suddenly started joining a botnet. Yeah, partly the user and partly the malware author, but also quite a bit the OS insecurity too.
No coating of any kind has ever worked on anything I've bought. I'm very careful with everything but coatings just don't last if you use the item often enough to get it dirty, need to clean it, etc. There is no such thing as a "permanent coating" when it comes to glass and plastic that are flexible enough, or under such force, that they move.
Glass-fogging is also not a major problem except in a closed environment (e.g. a camera lens). You carry a tissue. Low-tech but it means your glasses cost less than 1/2 of what the "coated" ones cost for the 2 seconds of inconvenience maybe one or twice a day only during winter.
However, glass-fogging is pretty easy to solve. Heat the surface. It doesn't need to be hot-to-the-touch, just as warm as the hottest air around it. This is how car demisters work and nobody whinges about them "wearing off" or "needing a reapplication", etc. It only takes a minute for them to clear the screen at best and then you don't need them for a long while after. The only reason it takes a minute is because you have to clear a huge area.
You can buy heated gloves. You can buy heated vests. You can buy heated socks. You can buy heated hats. They are cheap, warm things up nicely, and run off AAA's. If "fogging" is such a problem in these sports/activities/uses, why not replicate the greatest, most prevalent, most effective solution known to man - the demister or "warm the surface up a bit". Anything else seems liable to just causing little puddles at the bottom of your windscreen, in your glasses / cameras etc. because the water has to go somewhere - at least if you evaporate it, it's likely to escape.
Motorcycle visors - more than enough room and tech to warm them up a bit. Ski Goggles - same. Camera lenses - same (in fact, some do just that already). Car windscreens - gosh, wonder what we can do there.
Slashdot Mirror
CCTV ANPR systems, I should think.
Or tag-systems like almost every European motorway has.
Or, failing that, just shut down the petrol stations and tax it to infinity.
Jobs converting existing cars (you think several million tons of steel are just going to be melted down overnight?), advising and selling such conversions.
Jobs laying cables to, converting and supplying new "filling" stations.
Jobs recycling old cars that aren't compatible.
Jobs enforcing the new system (i.e. printing stickers, CCTV number-plate recognition, etc.)
Just because it says "jobs" it doesn't mean "permanent, life-long jobs". It also doesn't mean that they won't be replacing older, obsolete jobs. But it *does* create jobs because it creates work to be done and someone, somewhere has to be paid to do it.
Except the UK said "No", basically.
But then, that's nothing new. Anyone who thinks that the UK is part of the EU in anything other than writing probably should visit here sometime.
Not ignorance - I honestly just don't care enough, having reviewed the evidence thoroughly in the days of "mobile phones will fry your brain", especially as I work in schools where we were deploying Wifi and the parents were protesting against a mobile phone mast being built nearby too.
My initial instinct when I first heard things like this years ago, fresh out of uni, as someone of a scientific mind? They were idiots. My conclusion then, after lots of personal research? They were idiots. My conclusion now? They're still idiots. My conclusion for the forseeable future? Almost certainly still idiots but I bet we do eventually find lots of things that "are affected" but in such minor ways that I'll spend more time worrying about whether I should blow my nose or not.
Science, observed recordings, and centuries of studies tell me that EM radiation in the frequencies and powers observed does nothing to my body that's even close to being measurably, statistically and practically significant or detrimental over the timescales discussed, and considered against any other number of reasonable factors that you could easily remove. The bacteria that live in my shoes pose orders of magnitude greater risk to my health every day.
And I'm not a phone junkie. I get one or two calls a day, about five minutes each, and rarely dial out (I have an office phone and a home phone, why bother using the mobile?). But the mobile stays on me, powered on, all day to fulfil its primary purpose - so I have something on my person that can make a phone call in an emergency. Just turning the damn thing off would be an infinitely better solution for myself (because I only care about outgoing calls) but it's just not worth the effort because the risk is so statistically insignificant. I'd be more worried about the extra weight on my hip, to be honest, and that's such a minor thing compared to my upper body weight.
If I put it anywhere else, I will lose it - I don't have shirt pockets and I'd end up leaving it in there, my trouser (pant) pockets also contain other "take everywhere" essentials - keys, money, cards (the invisible finger-grime on my cards is more a hazard to me, and the keys are a greater risk of causing me injury, especially if I just shove them in my pocket and then sit down). And the risk from the phone is so negligible as to not warrant changing a habit.
Some people REALLY have a problem estimating risk. That's their problem. Personally, my phone stays. Similarly, I see no reason to not live inside a ring-main wired house, as I do. All that electricity pumping around me all day, emitting EM for no reason! If I treat a hip-phone as a significant risk, I have to treat everything with that same risk or more in the same way too, and that would make my life infinitely more complicated to the point that it would be unlivable.
But I have a life. One with infinitely more risks (which are much more significant, likely and detrimental) than what a bit of EM might do to my hipbone over the course of my lifetime. Hell, technically I walk through EM fields dozens of times a day - they're called "Oyster readers" on the London Underground and/or shop theft detectors.
The point is - people who *KNOW* and calculate the risks are telling you that it's really not worth worrying about and hasn't been, for pretty much forever. Thus every scaremongering story about radiation, EM or how we're all going to hell if we don't believe is subject to criticism.
It's probably slightly less "damaging" to have my phone an inch away. But having it where it is is already so "undamaging" that I just don't care. It really makes that little difference that's it not worth worrying about.
Carry my phone in my pocket all the time. Have done for the last 10 years or so.
In the risks I run each day, the usage of a mobile phone comes very near the bottom of the list, near "lifting a piece of paper up while seated at my desk" and "blowing my nose".
It's actually NOT worth my time worrying about, because the worrying would do much more damage to my body than the phone ever would in normal usage.
Personally, until it approaches the risk of myself drinking about a litre of Coke a day (which I've done for years), I'm very unlikely to start worrying. And yes, Coke is incredibly "dangerous" - sugar, acid, calcium-leeching chemicals (in the Diet versions, I believe) and all sorts of problems. But when a sip of Coke is that dangerous, a mobile phone hardly figures in my reckoning.
Can you trace the final connection endpoint (i.e. the part that contacted the observed target as the last link in the chain)? Yes. Even if they fake the IP you *could* in theory do work to discover where that connection originated from. This assumes greatly that the IP you recorded isn't forged, random or nonsense and that you haven't just been "given" a list of IP's from a third-party who didn't do the correct analysis to determine where those IP's are gathered from.
Can you get from an IP to a physical location? Almost certainly. Usually to the campus, home address or business telecoms line that the IP is associated with. But it will be the IP of the other endpoint of the connection, not necessarily the origin of the user's actions. E.g. proxies, hacked routers, etc. And even that can be extraordinarily tricky to arrange over international borders.
Can you trace back through proxies and other hindrances to get to an actual connection origin. Yes. Doubling the work necessary at each stage and if you can force physical access to each of those origins in order to trace back where the source came from.
Can you get from a confirmed IP-packets physical origin to an actual person? Depends. Not automatically, and probably not at all without an admission of guilt or other concrete evidence and almost certainly it would only be "coincidental" rather than anything else (otherwise it would be like arresting everyone who used an Acer laptop because the connection originated from an Acer laptop)
Can you do "hacker-work" to knock on the door of Hacker 1 who lives in an uncooperative country who was trying to hide their tracks (i.e. someone you actually WANT to trace using police resources and raiding datacentres)? Probably not.
Can you do some simple police investigations to get from an abusive IP address to a home address that you can raid for more evidence in a co-operative, or your own, country (i.e. someone stupid enough to do something incredibly illegal and traceable from their home Internet connection)? Yes.
Can you then prove it was them that used that IP? Not without taking their computer and ISP logs and all sorts of other evidence and doing a full "ordinary" investigation.
Can you determine who random user X was who piggybacked on a wifi connection that you *can't* prove the owner used himself but can only trace to that IP? Not without some other evidence (e.g. spotting the car that was sitting outside).
Can you tie an IP address on the general Internet to a single person unequivocally? Not to the standard of any court that I know, no.
Can you tie an IP address on the general Internet to a single person enough to make you suspicious. Usually - yes.
Will it stand up in court? Not without a shit-ton of other evidence that's much more convincing.
Wow. Are you really that easily led? Some guy on TV, radio, in a book or otherwise mentions a brand name to you and it "makes you want" things... MAKES you want?! I watch the shopping channels as entertainment - I've never seen anything quite so funny or as contrived and I've never once even considered buying any of those products. I don't think I've ever bought anything featured in an advert I've seen because of the advert (even if you assume some weird subliminal "X is better" subtext).
If you're buying impulsively, don't blame the adverts. Blame your lack of self-control. If you go shopping, go with a list in mind of the stuff you need. If you buy anything not on that list, it's your own fault. You're an adult. If you can't keep Pepsi out of your shopping basket, how do you expect to apply contraception when you don't want to start a family? I have bought stuff in shops that I hadn't planned but not because it's advertised but because I might see a particularly good deal and will weigh it up in store (including whether I need it, do I actually benefit from "two for the price of one", etc.), but an "impulse" buy? Come on. Strap on a pair. (And to be honest, X amount of impulse buying isn't a bad thing at all - I actually set aside £50 a month deliberately for complete junk - whether that's computer games, bubble-blowers, a turn on an arcade machine, some dry-ice to do kitchen-science experiments with or whatever - I'm 32 but *choose* to throw away £50 on nothing but silly things for my own entertainment)
You don't need to "train" people to ignore advertising. For the majority of us, it's the sensible default state of any adult with decision-making capability. It's like people who "can't" diet - yes you can. Even with medical problems. It's just a case of eating less and getting your doctor to counteract your medical problems (if they even exist).
Only those with zero decision-making skills, zero reasoning skills and zero self-control do what the advertisers tell them. And most of advertising is "brand awareness", not actually making you buy that exact product. Hence you will DEFINITELY have heard of Coca-Cola or McDonald's even if you don't know they produce a Double-Chicken Burger or whatever - and if you're an idiot you'll somehow think they are "better" than, say, Virgin Cola, or Wimpy because you've never heard of those.
My two-year-old knows all the children's TV characters by sight, of course she does. She's in a fact-absorbing time of life and those are clear names given to identifiable characters. So do I. I *want* her to be able to do that because identifying a black-eared mouse as Mickey is no different to identifying that weird-looking bloke as "Dad". But take her in a toy shop, give her free reign and she's INFINITELY more likely to buy something she *hasn't* seen before and is interesting to her(and not because there's a big advert for it - she is surprisingly naturally "immune" to large adverts, in the same way my cat just completely ignores pictures of cats on a calendar) than another Peppa Pig or whatever. I don't mind that she occasionally says "Look, Daddy, Peppa Pig" in the shops - it means her sight, pattern recognition, cognitive skills, recall and vocal talents are intact. But if she wanted something JUST BECAUSE it was Peppa Pig, then as a parent it's up to me to say No. And I would - if she'd EVER done that.
I've actually managed to breed a child who is *completely immune* to advertising through the sheer appliance of common sense - expose her to it so it's just background noise and the fact that the toy lights up, or sounds funny, or looks cute, or can be carried is more important. Just because it has Peppa Pig on it doesn't mean it's better for her and I weigh up her consumer choices for her until she's old enough. If there's an adult that *can't* do that, then you have much bigger problems because an adult can reason to themselves: "It's just a brand".
To my daughter, a McDonald's is a particular instan
No, but we do know that life expectancy is up and there are a lot more people about. Hence, even a *rise* in cancer-related deaths wouldn't be at all shocking (in fact, I'd expect it).
We also don't know how many people died of sun-related cancer caused by ozone-depletion until we stopped using CFC's. Or, indeed, how many people die each year from petrol fumes. Or how many die from respiratory diseases caused by household sprays.
The facts that there have been 2000 nuclear explosions, many of them deliberately designed to extinguish life even if only then used under controlled situations, and yet still life expectancy is on the up, population is up, cancer incidences still stay steady (which is therefore an IMPROVEMENT) and cancer survival is the highest it's ever been in human history - all this almost certainly means that it's not doing much at all, beyond what the planet throws at us anyway.
The wildlife around Chernobyl is actually thriving since humans left the area, for instance.
I'm infinitely more worried about someone spraying their house with air freshener every two seconds and trying to get my child to wipe her hands with anti-bacterial soap / wipes after every spill than I am about her being exposed to any radiation from even the nuclear power plants in my country. Hell, they're building one just down the coast from me - gotta be better than the smoke and crap AND RADIATION in the output from the nearby coal power plants.
Please don't ever say you want to be a space tourist - even the radiation from a single transatlantic flight is probably hundreds of times more dangerous to you (unless you actually live in a very small area near the plant) than this incident, a space tourist would probably be subjected to hundreds times more than that.
It gets me that on the one hand we can't have nuclear hundreds of miles away powering our cities, and on the other everyone wants to talk about flying through space in a tin can to live on another planet swathed in radiation.
I discount all *reports* of contamination until they are backed up by facts, and put into context.
Eating a banana will give you a not-insignificant amount of radiation. Seriously. Smoking a cigarette is a lot worse. Even *smelling* a barbecue probably isn't good for you. At the moment, the figures stated and comparisons made are *extremely* over-hyped.
As the situation currently stands, in fifty years time I wouldn't even care about walking around Fukushima as part of a tourist trail, right through to the room where they keep the cores. I wouldn't do that in Chernobyl, even if it were possible in a couple of hundred years.
And the reporters who arrived to cover the story and the people who fled the tsunami probably got more radiation exposure from their long-haul flight than they ever will while they this situation extends.
Radiation is a big scary word that people instantly associate with death. It's not true. You are *SITTING* in a bath of radiation right now. Without a suitable measure, measured properly (the problem with this article is that it basically measures water in a swimming pool and one in a kettle and then says they are equal because they measured the depth), put into context (this is a nuclear reactor that was subject to a 30-foot wall of water - as such the radiation that's actually ESCAPED has done less damage than a handful of long-haul flights or X-Rays so far - fucking hell, that's some safety measures there!) and reported accurately and non-sensationally, you're just sucking yourself into dependence on a media outlet's scare-mongering.
I'm pro-nuclear, because pound-for-pound, it's the safest, most efficient, most powerful, easiest and least polluting energy production method in existence. But even *without* that, as someone of a scientific mind just telling me "more radiation than Chernobyl" has so many DOZENS of potential flaws that it's laughable. More radiation where than where, exactly? Measured how? In what form (alpha, beta, gamma)? In what containment? To whom? Over what area? With what duration? With what effect? By what transport?
The fact of the matter is that a handful of people who work in the nuclear reactor have been exposed to a level of radiation slightly above "safe" levels. I think we can easily say that's not surprising at all - this is an emergency. How much above safe? What's that likely to do to them? Are we talking a little above safe in an industry that's heavily regulated (i.e. the equivalent of eating a biscuit that's a day out of date) or are we talking many MILLIONS of times more than the level that will definitely give them cancer? (Hint, it's the lower, and the adverse effects expected from short-term exposure to such radiation are basically zero - there are people working in labs behind lead screens who are subject to more radiation every day - they're called radiographers).
Whereas Chernobyl blew a reactor into open air and they had to abandon hundreds of miles of towns and countryside for, pretty much, thousands of years and it's still above safe levels even kilometres away from it. Yet still people have jobs such as visiting the reactor, putting another concrete shield on it, surveying the territory for intruders, measuring the levels every day and the local wildlife is absolutely THRIVING without human intervention. This isn't even on the same scale are people are panicking about radiation making it to the US, etc. (hell, we only know about Chernobyl because OTHER COUNTRIES hundreds of kilometres away noticed their nuclear worker's badges were showing high radiation from the fallout! Does that mean Chernobyl irradiated half of Europe? Yes. Does that mean that half of Europe are now all dying of cancer or have measurable adverse effects caused by that? No.)
People being moved from the area is sensible, but there are no signs that the thing is about to blow, nor that all those people will die. And there was just a tsunami, you know, so no-one is particularly worried about not being able
Please don't spread crap and tell me I'm going to die because I'm deliberately refusing to "follow orders".
Additionally, don't spam it anonymously (so we can at least block you out if we so wish), and at least have the decency to do less advertising of your church in your post than linking to a "relevant" article - I mean, come on - keyword spamming?
The really *annoying* part of evangelism such as this is that if you'd just posted the link without all the crap attached to it (from the keyword spamming and double-links, to failing to link to your article directly), people would probably be more inclined to read it. For people who are trying to convince others to make huge changes to their life, evangelists are inherently terrible at actually convincing people and have zero knowledge of effective PR.
I work in schools. No school that I know of has a forum unless every word is moderated by staff first. And my brother runs a large Scouting website which has a forum. His disclaimer reads:
All users under the age of 13 must have prior parental consent, as required by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 2000, before registering on this forum. This can be done through the following methods: ... @ ...) via mail or fax (e-mail for more information)
Digitally Signed E-Mail from the parent or legal guardian
Contacting the site administrator (
The parents or guardians of this user have all authority over this account, and can choose to cancel it at any time (via the method chosen to open this account).
Which firmly puts the ball in the court of the person creating the account. It may help to read the relevant legislation but, basically, covering your arse is the best method - don't specifically create things for kids without checking it first, and try not to store any information on kids at all if you can.
If nothing else, think what you will be exposed to if an adult joins the forums and starts talking inappropriately to children (maybe even via private message if you still have that enabled) - you may have done everything you can to prevent it but it's still not something you can control adequately.
No school or large children's organisation that I know of allows kids to talk freely on forums, even with parental consent. If they want to do so on Facebook outside of school, that's up to the parents. Again, most schools just block all social networking sites apart from those that are highly-vetted and moderated (e.g. online school community networks supplied by local boroughs, etc.)
Whether it's law or not, the rule is a certain age, which users click "I agree" to when they sign up. If they lied on that, it doesn't matter what the law says about data protection, their accounts are forfeitable.
And they don't want to have to keep track of a million different laws so a blanket-ban on under-13's is just common sense and saving on administration - like every forum software I've seen in the last ten years says by default or recommends.
Who cares about the law - if you say it's not for kids, even if only for convenience / arse-covering, then it's not for kids. Break that rule, lose your account. Why this is an article at all except for possibly the *number* of accounts they deal with is beyond me.
"DMA Design was founded in 1988 by David Jones, Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly in Dundee, Scotland."
Given that the last name on this list is the guy who posted it, you might be hard-pushed to keep him to an NDA from the company he founded.
Sometimes, you know, people just put stuff online because they want to and are allowed to. Like sometimes they open-source their engines, or grant distribution permission for their old (emulated) titles, etc. I know if I ran a software company, I'd keep it in the news for a few years by just leaking out details of big-name projects I'd done in the past to keep the name alive and interest there.
Hell, back when Bullfrog were making Syndicate they produced a series of articles for one of the computer magazines that used the Syndicate graphics and showed the code and techniques they'd used to move them around on an isometric grid. Nothing "secret" but they had snippets of actual game code in there and it was for a programming article on, basically, "how to make a game like Syndicate".
Yeah, because NOBODY would put things into the public domain, do them for the love of the thing, or just to make a statement, or to provide a voice for themselves, work thousands of man-hours to build a free operating system that they then give away (and I mean BSD, not Linux, which relies on copyright), create a commercial-quality computer-rendered animated movie and give it away, create an encyclopaedia on every subject, etc.etc.etc.
Copyright isn't "needed". It is helpful. But it's also incredibly overreaching at present.
And, to be honest, in many countries in the world copyright exists only on paper. You can just walk up to a market trader and get a piece of software that costs thousands for next to nothing and entire industries are run on that software later on without bothering to legitimise it.
I'd love to see the same. For the opposite reason. I think the world would tick along perfectly, with slightly less mega-rich popstars and movie moguls (not to mention middle-men), and a lot more stuff that people can read, view and access without worrying about the licensing. It would be like giving everyone access to the British Library and telling them to read whatever they wanted. There might be less multi-million dollar heaps of shit in the cinema and a few more educated and enlightened people about.
Seems a bit pointless to document what they have there.
It's a *very* rough outline of a game, almost like saying "It's going to be like Game X but possibly better!". The only details are things like the pixel-size of a block and the map size in blocks which seem a bit odd to document that early - surely something you'd leave until later when you know how the engine reacts.
It looks like they already knew what they were working towards and this was just a formal document that doesn't lock down very much or actually describe what choices were made or why. Although there are a few "surprises" like they envisaged a school crossing with children on it (yeah, that would go down well when you can run them all over), or various race modes, or being able to control external cars with a mouse, and having a 2D-SimCity-like view for slow computers, none of that really comes to fruition and was obviously rejected almost immediately after this document was written.
About the only interesting thing is the timeline (which kinda leaves a lot of games in the modern era in the dust), really.
Come on. The game is nearly 20 years old now. And there were tons of games in that kind of era. Surely *one* of them must have some interesting documentation available somewhere. This just reads like: "We're already writing this game but management wants us to follow this formal process - let's just make stuff up and pretend we were aiming for this design already".
Only affects you if you think that you have to have a game on release day.
A lot of people, myself included, won't TOUCH a new game for at least a couple of weeks. Bugs, DRM, overloaded servers, patches, updates, problems. No thanks. I spend enough of my time fixing things like that without having to subject myself to it voluntarily for a piece of entertainment.
(On Steam last Christmas, I bought about 100 games. It cost me about £100. The ones that I checked and reviewed I ended up loving. The cruft that I got for free actually had some worthwhile bits. The stuff that I bought "on a whim" because it looked nice but was "new" and unreviewed I almost universally regretted even if it only cost a few pounds)
And in the end, the only people hurt are the companies that do that. If a game is crap and you stagger release, the last people to get it will already know it's crap and not bother. But if you'd had a simultaneous release, you could have got a LOT more sales before people found out. Unscrupulous, yes, but good business sense. If the game was good, it'll get pirated before people have the opportunity to buy and they might well complete the game before it's available for sale and hence never end up buying it.
I can slightly understand staggering if the game is going to put a huge burden on your servers but if you're releasing such a game without using continent-specific servers anyway, then you're wasting your time.
The only people it really hurts are idiots that buy things they have no idea about on day one in order to stay "fashionable" in their gaming tastes, and the companies that stagger releases deliberately. No loss to myself on either count, there, really.
Rule #1: Don't pay for anything you can't try, play a demo of, get a full refund for, or test for a long time before you deploy.
I own the David Attenborough Life Collection. It's 24 DVDs. Even assuming they are the single-layer type, that would be:
112.8 Gb. Roughly.
Now say I own, say, several boxsets of comedies, series, documentaries, a few dozen movies, maybe even a couple of dozen free promotional DVD's with full-feature films on them that are given out when the film stops selling.
Now, *NOT* including anything I've recorded from TV / Movie channels for my own consumption, not including any home videos, not including ANY Blu-Rays, etc. I can *EASILY* fill terabytes of data without even blinking an eyelid.
Hey, I could probably fill a terabyte or two with DVD images of cartoons (proper children's cartoons) and stuff I watched when I was younger (I have the complete set of Dangermouse, Batfink, etc.) and that's hardly something I go out and buy every day and keep buying. A terabyte, or even half a dozen terabytes, is NOTHING. It's just when you have to copy it all into a single place, like this guy is doing, that it appears to be a lot.
It's just that he's obsessively backing it up and/or converting it to free formats so that he can just browse from a media library, like the ones he desires, so it's all on one hard disk (or more likely RAID). It's not "abnormal". It's nowhere near "evidence of piracy". It's just a media collection stored on disk instead of the original DVD's.
"He explicitly says that for there to be a derivative work, it would take a substantial amount of code. So, you can't just take a substantial portion of a GPL'd program's (either an application of a library) *interface* and release it under an arbitrary license."
No, he says it would take a substantial amount of CODE. Meaning actual bodies of functions (he says so in the same line).
A header file, by convention, contains no code. It has interface definitions (X expects an integer), it has data structures (A user account consists of alphabetical username and password and a numerical ID), and it has definitions (Pi is 3.141592). It does not and should never contain any substantial amount of code (or, really, lots of macro tricks). Everyone routinely distributes header files to closed-source DLL's, libraries etc. because it's not copyrightable and allows people to use those libraries (it is, in fact, necessary). But the header file is likely NOT covered by copyright at all (even if it says it is) because the information therein is not expressive (i.e. there are tools that can extract a "header" file you can use from a binary, it's just not as useful).
What he's saying is that:
long print_squared(int x);
is not copyrightable. And almost every court in the land (including the SCO debacle) confirms that. It's not copyrightable because it's not expressive - it's merely fact and convention and interface. In the same way, a quadratic formula is not copyrightable but a book "Solving quadratics" or even a short except might well be copyrightable (and most probably is).
The interface, as specified in a header file, is uncopyrightable on its own (though that doesn't stop people putting notices on it, it just doesn't mean they are "true"). The *body* - in programming terms - of a function (or the programmer's expression of his particular way of performing a certain procedure) is copyrightable, the *definition* or *prototype* is not.
Otherwise every piece of software in the world is either a) infringing or b) GPL by extension (e.g. I use the SDL header in a closed-source program to know what functions to call and what parameters they expect - it doesn't mean that the SDL code is included except in a self-contained "closed" DLL or that the SDL licence applies to my entire program).
And Google specifically said - they took a header file (which is 99.9% uncopyrightable - see SCO vs IBM etc.) and extracted JUST the function prototypes (so no question of macros, stray function bodies, etc. playing a part) and used that list of uncopyrightable "X does Y" to enable interfacing to a piece of code that was ENTIRELY under another licence. You can take ALL of the function prototypes in that way if you want. But you can't take a SINGLE LINE of function body without risking using copyrightable (and therefore copyright) material.
Header files have one purpose - to provide the facts necessary to describe the *interface* to a set of code without needing the code present. Because they are facts, non-expressive and necessary for interoperability, they are uncopyrightable. If the GPL covered them, an awful lot of commercial games are in for a shock because they almost certainly used or include the SDL header, or the Allegro header, or any one of a million and one headers (including "windows.h"!) and thus become subject to the licensing terms on it. The SDL header even re-states the LGPL licence, for instance.
Attempting to sue over header files and/or data derived from header files will end in humiliation. That said, certain parts of certain header files that contain macro code could easily be copyrightable. But that's no relevant - Google stripped out anything that wasn't a function prototype, from what they said.
"Being locked out of our own legally purchased devices is NOT normal."
Ever tried to access the air-bag controller on your car? Ever flashed your ECU and then expect the manufacturer to cover the consequences? Ever bought software that was reliant on a hardware dongle? Ever bought a large dedicated device (like a specialist microscope) that comes with some ancient MacOS version on the controller PC that you can never touch or upgrade without voiding the whole setup? What about trying to make a replacement RF car door opener for your car? Or tap into the security systems to code your own keys? Or break the radio's security code so you can install it in a car other than your own?
There are a million devices and parts of devices you can't play with. The difference is that you VOLUNTARILY bought the device with the knowledge that you couldn't play with those things (or in the case of modded ECU's etc. that you would never receive support for them and may be locked out). Hell, some high-end cars have tyres that "talk to" the car so they know exactly when you fitted a third-party component so they can void your warranty.
Don't buy crap that does this if you don't want crap that does this. No "There's nothing else" or "it's an industry-standard" or whatever excuses - STOP BUYING IT. Then you have no cause to moan and manufacturers have cause to stop doing it.
Chances are that even if you and everyone you know stopped buying it, nothing will happen either. But at least you wouldn't be party to the stuff that you are complaining about, and thus become a hypocrite.
If you bought a device and it's "faulty" in this way, take it through the courts and see how far you get. If you *don't* fall down at the very first hurdle ("You accepted the purchase agreement and paid for it") I'll be very surprised, but then you'll have YEARS of fighting to get to the point where the court agrees with you (e.g. PS3 OtherOS removal class action). And to get a precedent-setting case where manufacturers stop doing it, you would need huge proportions of the purchasers fighting for it. And, yes, you would need to be a purchaser.
Or you could just not buy that crap and buy something that works how you want, not how you imagine it should.
Because no virus in the world would disable automatic updates once it had infected a machine via a method that had not yet been detected and patched in a monthly update.
And automatic updates do not save you for the MONTH before that tool is updated. By which time, you're already dead.
And automatic updates, especially around SP time, is a good way to end up with several machines that are dead or in a bluescreen loop (has been every since 95 and 7 SP1 is still doing the same).
And automatic updates do NOT save you from having to have some tool run over every byte of your disk on a regular basis to determine if it matches a list of "known" hostile software.
Automatic updates are one, tiny, little tool that help prevent programs that are already executing on the PC from exploiting flaws that give them, say, administrator access. It does NOT stop people running those programs in the first place, or those programs from getting way more privileges than they should anyway, or those programs being able to spread even without admin access.
Auto-updates are one part, that can be as easily disabled as any user can easily disable them. Relying on anything that has to "scan" a machine to know if you're okay or not is not a security policy. It's an intrusion detection policy.
Anything that relies on a monthly update and then a full byte-wise scan of your disk / processes / RAM is the PC equivalent of the Red Dwarf Quarantine episode:
Cat: So what's the news?
Kryten: Well, if I could just beg your indulgence for a few seconds more, sir, the old 345 takes a little time to warm up. Still, it out-performs the 346 in 8 out of 9 bench tests. A small wonder, then, that it secured "Psi-scan of the Year, Best Budget Model" three years running. Now here are the results. And we're going to... LIVE!
Lister: (Sighs) We're a real Mickey Mouse operation aren't we?
Don't give them the option to click Yes to incredibly stupid things like "Run this program every time I start my computer, with no easy way to monitor it or stop it from loading" (the latest one I've seen is viruses that replace the user's shell value in the registry - somewhere not listed in startup lists - and then re-execute explorer).
Or "Allow this program to spam the hell out of everyone with no controls on what they are doing on the Internet on SMTP ports and whatever it likes, as much as it likes, with no easy way of knowing what's accessing the Internet from my PC"
Or "Allow this program to hide itself in the filesystem once it's loaded by overriding certain function hooks" - even if you ARE admin.
And if the user DOES click Yes, make it easy to remove that privilege later, i.e. don't have antivirus controls which are basically stuck because they CAN'T remove a file with that particular permissioning, or sometimes can't even see it in the filesystem, or can't remove it because when they do the process just recreates it immediately, or has two processes watching and respawning each other which can't be killed simultaneously.
The problem is Windows security is NOT people running in an account with the ability to install programs. It's the OS not providing a way to recover from bad decisions and separating "user" and "admin" too much. Most users *are* admins of their machines and need to install, remove, manage stuff. But they do NOT need the ability to install a filesystem hook except once in a blue moon. And anything they install should NOT affect other users at all. "User" needs to become a lot more powerful, and a lot more isolated from other users, while still requiring admin rights (and then make it truly impossible to execute things as admin without logging on as that directly - and make the "admin" account USELESS for day-to-day-use, no browser or shortcut access should do the trick).
And this is why MS decided LAST WEEK to turn off Autorun in XP by default. Duh. The setting that ANYONE with a brain has had switched off since day one (i.e. ten YEARS ago). That was a bad decision all along, even if it "helped" users (doesn't help anyone I know, because they click "Remember this" the first time and then never see the dialog again and then wonder why their DVD's only ever open in Media Player rather than PowerDVD, etc.)
MS are supposed to have dozens of usability and interface guys. I've yet to see a single convincing example of this - most of their stuff is just useless eye-candy that people can't grasp without being shown by someone who knows.
More importantly - who cares?
When I buy a PC, in comes in a box. When I buy a laptop, it comes in a box. When I *BUILD* a PC, I have to cobble a handful of components together according to their compatibility tables (the more general rule of which is "if it fits in the hole, it'll do") and thus it won't make any difference anyway.
If a PC already has integrated motherboard sound, integrated motherboard Ethernet, integrated motherboard USB, integrated motherboard RAID, etc. then for the most part you won't *care* how the layout is arranged. I probably could not point out a sound chip on a modern motherboard anymore - it's hidden away inside the whole chipset. It's not even vaguely interesting to know, certainly no more than those people who brag about their CPU using the latest "X number of microns" process (if you mean it does X, that's worth telling - but don't assume that just because you bothered to memorise a completely useless connection to the number of microns used in the process for that particular manufacturer that that somehow makes you superior).
People who want to upgrade cards will buy a computer with upgradeable cards (and they already disable the on-board graphics, so there's nothing to stop you doing the same when the "on-board" graphics are even more "on-board"). It's not like you're de-soldering the graphics chips and putting new ones in their place nowadays.
People who really don't care and just want a PC to a certain spec (the majority of PC buyers, even in big business) will just buy something that could have either CPU and GPU or the combined article. They won't know or care until it comes to upgrade time and most likely they *won't* be touching motherboard, CPU, GPU, or things like sound when upgrading - even RAM is a bit pointless because there's *ALWAYS* a restriction on where the upgrades can go and it's usually cheaper just to buy a new machine to that spec than to try to upgrade an old one.
With laptops, especially, I can't really say that I give a shit where the chip that runs my graphics happens to be. I do have a "gaming" laptop but all I care about is what model number (for downloading the driver) and what it can do (for choosing which games to buy and run on it). I don't even know if this one I'm typing on uses a CPU-GPU combination already, because I rarely open a laptop and if I have a problem serious enough to do so, it's time to get a new laptop just to be safe anyway. And the components that die first are the bits you *don't* worry about until they break - the USB ports, the rear connectors, and the screen. And when they break on a laptop - hey, price of new motherboard = price new laptop with better specs. The only upgrade on a laptop worth doing is RAM and they always expose the RAM ports.
With desktops, you might be able to upgrade CPU and GPU in one hit by changing an integrated package but I don't think in over 25 years of PC computing and managing school networks that I have *ever* upgraded a CPU on an existing motherboard. I've reapplied heat-transfer compound, I've added a *NEW* GPU into an otherwise empty slot and disabled internal graphics (so nothing changes there) but I've never upgraded what's there already.
Who cares? And if it means we can do things like speed up CPU->GPU memory transfers, put all the heat-making components in one place, supply smaller and "faster" thin clients and have assured compatibility, even better. Who knows, it might even lead to better documentation of the graphics chipsets inside the normal processor documentation!
Low-spec hardware is low-spec if it's integrated or not. But as to *where* the GPU lies? Who cares? My laptop could be an empty box for all I know, with one huge lump of plastic and silicon tucked into a corner somewhere and the case balanced with lead weights. I don't know and don't really care. So long as it gets the performance that I bought it for, it'll do.
"It's not really Microsoft's problem, but they still help to solve it."
Wiki says: The Rustock botnet (founded around 2006) is a botnet that consists of an estimated 150,000 computers running Microsoft Windows.
It could be suggested that, at some level, it *IS* a Microsoft problem, in the same way that it would be Nintendo's problem if everyone's Wii suddenly started joining a botnet. Yeah, partly the user and partly the malware author, but also quite a bit the OS insecurity too.
Whereas your post was the height of eloquence and supremely succinct. I actually prefer the OP. At least it's *worth* reading.
No coating of any kind has ever worked on anything I've bought. I'm very careful with everything but coatings just don't last if you use the item often enough to get it dirty, need to clean it, etc. There is no such thing as a "permanent coating" when it comes to glass and plastic that are flexible enough, or under such force, that they move.
Glass-fogging is also not a major problem except in a closed environment (e.g. a camera lens). You carry a tissue. Low-tech but it means your glasses cost less than 1/2 of what the "coated" ones cost for the 2 seconds of inconvenience maybe one or twice a day only during winter.
However, glass-fogging is pretty easy to solve. Heat the surface. It doesn't need to be hot-to-the-touch, just as warm as the hottest air around it. This is how car demisters work and nobody whinges about them "wearing off" or "needing a reapplication", etc. It only takes a minute for them to clear the screen at best and then you don't need them for a long while after. The only reason it takes a minute is because you have to clear a huge area.
You can buy heated gloves. You can buy heated vests. You can buy heated socks. You can buy heated hats. They are cheap, warm things up nicely, and run off AAA's. If "fogging" is such a problem in these sports/activities/uses, why not replicate the greatest, most prevalent, most effective solution known to man - the demister or "warm the surface up a bit". Anything else seems liable to just causing little puddles at the bottom of your windscreen, in your glasses / cameras etc. because the water has to go somewhere - at least if you evaporate it, it's likely to escape.
Motorcycle visors - more than enough room and tech to warm them up a bit. Ski Goggles - same. Camera lenses - same (in fact, some do just that already). Car windscreens - gosh, wonder what we can do there.