Education about SCAMS is the only way to avoid it. Otherwise the next scam that's slightly different in nature has you falling for it too.
Companies do not contact you for things like this. Banks do not phone you up and, if they do, you say "Fine, I'll contact customer services in my own good time and resolve the issue" - that way *YOU* phone the bank and thus are sure that it is the bank that you have phoned, and that there is a REAL outstanding problem.
How did Microsoft get the phone number? How dare they demand access to my private machine? If it's "required" then they can damn well come to my door, at their expense, and fix it themselves on my kitchen table while I supervise. You do *NOT* get Toyota phoning up, even if your car is part of a recall, without other things following it that WILL verify the authenticity. Letters. You contacting them and verifying they ARE Toyota, etc.
The magic word is "payment" too. Demand money for something and you better send me an itemised bill. Don't have my address? Oh, shame, seeing as you managed to "discover" my phone number. If I had any business dealings with you, you'd certainly have my address on record and/or would be able to subpoena it if necessary.
My bank don't send me emails asking for my PIN. In fact, they don't send me emails. If I choose to ignore said emails, eventually a letter from them will land on my doorstep if it's *really* important and I can contact customer services myself, or send a recorded delivery letter to their head office. If they ask what took me so long, I tell them that I don't reply to suspected scams and they should know not to contact me that way as per the bank's OWN advice on dealing with scams.
Similarly, my phone company don't ring me about renewing my contract with them. If they do, they will get ignored. If you want to renew a *contract* then I'm going to need to sign something, so send it to me in the post, goodbye. If the person on the end of the phone claiming to be from my phone company doesn't ALREADY have my name, address, the package I'm on, how much I'm paying, the COMPANY they are supposed to be calling from (I had a scammer once demand that he was from "your phone company" and then he couldn't name which company that was even after four guesses), my payment details and everything else they need to know, then they are NOT from my phone company. My car insurance company don't NEED to ask for my details and/or my renewal date. They would already know it. They don't need to phone me up to renew it, they'll send me a letter a few weeks beforehand.
The guy who knocked on my door claiming to be from my electricity company (and holding a device that he "just needed to put on the meter" and a contract that I "just needed to sign") doesn't *need* access to my property without prior agreement, unless he has some sort of police officer with him (and that I would verify even more heavily - the PC who *doesn't* wait outside while you phone the station to verify his identity is the one to shut the door on and call 999 / 911 / 112).
The electricity guy also doesn't *need* to touch anything in my house. Hell, he doesn't *need* to enter my property at all and if he tries, he'll find himself flat on his back. Even a bailiff can't force his way into my property - unless I've invited him in (under UK law, at least) or unless he has a court-officiated warrant and even then he'll have a police officer supervising him. Hell, my LANDLORD can't legally enter my property if I don't give him permission too, without the same sort of backup/documentation, and technically he owns the property. (BTW: Electricity guy turned out to be from a rival electricity firm that *didn't* know who I was with, and was trying to "switch" me to their company - Please everybody avoid EDF Energy. The guy was lucky not to have me reporting him for fraud and numerous other offences.)
Stop being idiots and combating each scam as it comes up. I saw people in IT recommending to "never open any attachment
No. But you have the ultimate power. You can choose *not* to use their services. When parking meters went in on a busy city-centre street near my house (which has ample parking space and lots of traffic movement, but they wanted to get greedy and charge), people STOPPED using the street and parked in perfectly legitimate spaces in side-roads, car parks, etc. The streets emptied, the businesses protested and campaigned and eventually a little "No longer in use" bag appeared on every parking meter.
You *do* have a choice to not support corporations. It's inherent in their design and finances. If you don't buy gig tickets that are protected as such, then they will, eventually, stop being used. Much like nobody bought ID cards (yes, our government were trying to make people pay to identify themselves, on an optional ID measure that wasn't as good as the passport they already had to have), so ID cards were scrapped. Nobody doubt DAB so that's on it's last legs. People stop buying games with DRM so major titles start abandoning it, disabling it, and relaxing it.
I have no problem with a theatre that wants to lock my tickets to my credit card (did it a few weeks ago and, considering I was picking up the tickets the next day for the performance on that night, I actually *liked* that nobody else could just walk up to the counter knowing my name and get my tickets. Sure I could argue with the guy on the front desk / in my seat but it's hassle I don't need), so I don't particular care about them doing so. If I did, I'd stop using them, even if it only took a second to buy a pre-paid credit card, or whatever other measures would allow me to satisfy the rules. The Olympics 2012 is supposed to be Visa-only for payments because they have sponsored it. I don't agree with it, so I won't be buying stuff from it with Visa. Not even if they offer Visa prepaid cards for cash on every stall. Don't want my cash, that's fine, you don't get it.
If people stopped giving money to places that want to screw them over, this problem would have been solved before it started. As it is, I don't mind it at all because I have no intention to ever sell a ticket that I've booked, or buy one for a third party. If I did, I wouldn't want to lumber someone else with the burden of digging out credit cards at the entrance, and I wouldn't buy ones that couldn't be sold on. Problem solved. The people that care should STOP buying things. The people who don't won't ever care.
If the second-hand ticket industry is really that valuable to users, one of two things will happen:
- People will not buy tickets that they can't sell second-hand if they think that it's likely they will need to do so. - People who sell those tickets will raise their prices to compensate for the scarcity.
Given the sheer number of ticket-resellers in London's West End, I can't really think that this is a bad thing. Either the theatres and other gigs will put them out of business, so I won't get harangued and so that 90% of the shops in the area sell something *OTHER* than theatre tickets - but more likely is that they will have to integrate with the theatre ticket-selling systems and thus also issue "paperless tickets" and no-one else will be any the wiser. I'd be surprised if this hasn't already happened.
Additionally, a lot of tickets have always said they are not transferable. My car park doesn't allow me to transfer a ticket but only recently have they cracked down on this by printing your car registration on the ticket itself and fining those that don't match the car. My train ticket isn't transferable. My bus ticket isn't transferable. Most loyalty cards are not transferrable. All airline tickets are not transferable. I don't see how/why a ticket to a theatre or gig should be transferable either - it's up to the company if it is and whether they just write it on there, or whether they emblazon it on your forehead and DNA-check you, I don't really care... you agree to those terms and had an opportunity to say "Actually, no, that's not what I want to buy because it has no resale value". My bet is that those tickets have all held a disclaimer to that effect for the last 50 years and nobody's really bothered to complain until they now start enforcing it.
If you've bought a ticket and can't attend - that's a sad problem for you. There may be good reasons or not. The theatre/gig may negotiate or not. But, hell, if I bought a seat in a restaurant, room in a hotel, etc. and don't turn up, you'll find that they will be chasing me up. I cost them money by abusing their reservation system which could be manipulated to the point that they are put out of business. They may even decide to charge me nonetheless, even if the circumstances are beyond my control. It's at their discretion and you knew the terms when you signed up. If I book an appointment at my doctor and don't turn up, they can theoretically charge me - and I'm in a country that offers free healthcare.
Being able to recoup your money on something you can't attend isn't a right. You made a booking. Stick to it, or pay the cost of the ticket. Just because you can't sell it on to someone else doesn't make it "bad"... the company are most likely doing it for other reasons rather than stopping you selling the ticket on - for a start, they don't make any more or less money if the person who turns up at the gig is the original buyer. Chances are that, overall, second-hand tickets go for on average the same as first-hand - above cost when they are in high demand and below cost if someone get knocked out of the World Cup early. Chances are that touting does NOT make any difference to the finances of a show/gig. But it might be a security issue, or a public-order issue, or just a plain membership issue where you pass on discount tickets to random people who aren't eligible for the discount.
The word "pointless" comes to mind. First, any decent virus that *wants* to can just disable your protection immediately. Literally one line of code. I would be shocked if the virus-libraries that are out there don't already have a set of routines where you just pass it a filename that you *want* to write and it does all the fancy trickery to try to write to that file no matter what (e.g. mount the media, relax permissions, make the current user owner, overwrite the file entry entirely etc.) and then possibly even clean up any "changes" after it's done its job (e.g. restore permissions). Relying on the fact that you haven't seen a virus that knows how to change permissions on a file that stands between you and infection is *stupid*. Viruses, almost by definition, act with full administrator privileges by extremely cleverly executed buffer overruns and other attacks. You really think that a non-permissioned (but permissionable) file can't be accessed/changed automatically by something *TRYING* to write that file by an administrator privilege program written by the same person?
Your "solution" is a temporary, ineffective workaround to stop a single USB device from having its autorun information changed if the "attacker" puts zero effort into it and doesn't use quite obvious and simple code to take account of *any* possible situation that one of it's victims may have (i.e. don't expect everyone to write-protect their autorun.inf, but do expect *every* write access to fail and keep trying different ways to get them to work). Saying that you're then "immune" to all autorun viruses is stretching it a bit. It's only as secure as the fact that the virus respects the disk as an NTFS structure, uses the standard NTFS routines to access it, is running as a user that can't modify the permissions (unlikely by that point) and doesn't bother to just blindly wipe permissions on any file it wants to write to. Also, NTFS USB sticks? Yeah, right. About as popular and readable in random machines as ext4 ones. And to be honest, just making it an ext2-disk with the ext2fs driver probably renders it MORE immune to autorun.inf creation/execution.
The "solution" to this is to not have autorun enabled on your USB drives at all. WHY? What is the purpose? To save you a double-click. That's it. And it opens up arbitrary execution to any device that poses as a USB stick (even my 3G modem has writable USB storage, so I'd have to apply the same principle to this and every other device that I autorun - my phone, my 3g modem, my external hard drive, even ordinary USB devices are coming with "driver" partitions that install the drivers from an autorun partition on the device on first use). Or I could just switch autorun off. If the USB stick is compromised, then it's compromised. No amount of fancy permission-fixing will fix that and it's just as likely that a virus hunts down my JPG's and inserts some payload that crashes certain JPG-reading applications. Or just modifies the MBR so that if I leave it in it will autoboot and silently infect my PC. Or infect anything else executable / readable on the stick. It overwriting my autorun.inf is the LEAST of my worries and much more easily and permanently fixed by a built-in Windows option on a per-PC instead of per-stick basis.
Don't let things automatically do stupid shit like auto-update and/or auto-run without you knowing what they're doing. The problem with viruses these days is not the viruses - it's the *stupid* and *ridiculous* attitude to an unknown third-party running arbitrary code on the machine that holds your banking details, etc. "Oh, I got a virus the other day but I think I cleaned it off", people running with viruses without realising for months, if not years, and people thinking that anti-virus does *anything*. Don't half-arse it. If you're smart enough to disable autorun, do that. If you think your USB sticks stand a risk of being infected, wipe them before you put them anywhere else (by inserting into an autorun-disabled or, better, Linux m
And they still got your $150 in service fees (?) and maybe lost one customer out of several million, probably saved even more money by you *not* bothering to complain more / sue their arse - complainers cost a bank a LOT more than anything else.
When my bank did this to me, I arranged a meeting with the local branch manager, telling them I had a lot of investments I wanted to make. After two hours of arguing about the fees and not letting him leave the room, the charges were cut in half (I wasn't disputing the charges, I was disputing the unreasonableness of them and the fact that they had charged me because only my charges had caused me to be charged again). Two hours of a bank manager's time was, I was informed, about 4 or 5 times more than the charges that the bank wanted me to pay.
Next week, I bumped into him in a different branch where he was covering someone else and he ran and hid.
I don't claim to have "won", I got a reasonable middle-ground after much arguing / negotiation - the offer that I should ALWAYS have been offered at first. I was merely educating the bank on how a reasonable settlement with the customer is much more useful than trying to sting them for fees. But now my customer service in that branch is impeccable, even if it's a little tricky to get an appointment:-) (Not that I care - when I enquired about mortgages, their advisor basically laughed when he saw our proposal - strange, because the bank next door rubber-stamped it after barely reading it and now get an awfully large sum of money on a regular, never-missed basis for the last three years).
I *do* claim to have made it not in the bank's interest to pull such tricks in my particular case, that's all. I wouldn't have threatened to remove my account - never threaten, just do it if you feel it's necessary - because that would have cost them a LOT less. I did, however, threaten to queue up in their branch every morning to deposit an enormous bag of pennies and then, each evening, queue up to withdraw those pennies again. Their new policy of a single cashier on the front desk would have held up really well. I also offered to bring a friend who was between jobs to open an account and do the same if they decided that I should be taken to a quiet room for such transactions to allow other customers to use the facilities.
Oh, and I used the in-branch "free customer service" phone (which is right in the middle of the branch) for two hours, complaining loudly at the top of my voice with a quite-reasonable complaint about a very unreasonable, unnecessary bank charge. Hopefully that's cost them enough in bank manager's time, cashier's time, phone calls (even if VoIP to a central call center), bad reputation among anyone who wanders in looking to open an account (or looking for an excuse to close theirs) than not paying the fee or moving my account. My backup plan was going to be to move all my accounts to the bank next-door and keep their account open with the bare minimum of funds necessary to do that. Oh, and to complain regularly, pay in awkward cheques / small change etc. on a regular basis when I went to deposit / withdraw my entire wages at the bank next door.
If you're gonna cause them hassle or cost them business - at least do it properly.
I don't agree with his argument (again, bringing up permanent deprivation of a property when music, sheet music especially, is more of a "license" to play - at least that's what the record companies tell us), but he is *technically* correct that she shouldn't be doing it. However, I find his treatment of a "teenager" obnoxious. He says himself that she's articulate, argues well etc. but for some reason just HAS to insert the "You're only a teenager, I know better" crap into the conversation, and even attacks her spelling/grammar in an email. At first, I was sort-of understanding his side, but by about the third/fourth reply he just starting being the jerk that she accused him of.
Take her response as that of an atypically understanding teenager / consumer of music. She's being quite reasonable at places, quite unreasonable in others, but the overall majority opinion is: your copyright and your way of licensing your music is getting in her way of paying tribute to an artist she adores. Amplify this by the number of people you *didn't* contact (or who only stopped listing your sheet music because they were scared you'd sue the hell out of them). She recognises your genius and wishes to include herself in a small part of that. If you were to have offered, say, a copy of the sheet music posted direct to her in exchange for, say, the dollar price you quoted plus a little for postage, but let her pay in cash posted to you in an envelope, she'd probably have jumped at the chance. Why couldn't you have done that, as a "special" favour... you would have earned your money on that sheet music (chances of you earning anything from library-exchanges after their initial purchase are about zero), you would have satisfied a fan AND you could have done something really nice like sign it with a little anti-sharing note so that she would always have a personalised reminder of why she shouldn't arbitrarily share such things. The library thing is also a bit ridiculous in this day and age - I can name several libraries in my area that have no idea how to order a book they haven't got, let alone sheet-music, even though they are all part of the same borough library-exchange software system. It's quicker to go online onto, say, a trading site and get some sheet music from someone who already has it.
She is *wrong*. She *does* want something for nothing. But you know, in the old days, people sometimes gave the small people that. And, sometimes, people recognise that something they wrote 10, 20, 50 years ago is not going to sustain themselves forever.
The problem I would have with his stance (and I have no interest in copyright-breaches of any nature) is that small theatre productions of his work, especially those performed by teenagers, probably form 0.01% of his revenue stream - and yet he enforces them heavily, discourages use of his own works, provides meaningless and irrelevant copyright analogies and, at the end of the day, is holding a stance that makes *him* appear the enemy to his biggest fans, even if he's not the enemy personally. As someone who's tried to understand copyright licensing for hymns to sign in a school assembly, I know this is an industry-wide problem. Every time their forms dropped on my desk, I felt like I was being interrogated.
It's bad business, if nothing else. If he'd sent her a copy of the sheet music (costing him only a handful of dollars, which judging by his About Me page probably wouldn't be missed), but attached a proviso that at the beginning/end of her performance she was required to drop in an ad for his work (either along the lines of "there are CD's from the composer of one of the show's songs at the back" or "With many, many grateful thanks to the composer Jason Robert Brown for granting us special dispensation to arrange this performance") and he would not have alienated more of his fans than necessary. To be honest, I'm not saying the girl even deserves it, but there was a time when a fan was a fan and you did everything you could to help/encourage that into
The engineering tolerances on that probably mean that any battery movement will cause a short of some kind, especially with cheap batteries. Surely much simpler, cheaper and requiring almost zero extra knowledge would be a Wheatstone bridge on the input part of the circuit. Four diodes (about 1p each even in singular quantities), easily tightly packed, would also do an identical job without requiring any "hardware" changes at all to the standard AA battery compartments that are already pence each.
Factor in the patent price, the new contacts (that won't be mass-produced in the same quantities as the plate-and-spring AA contacts for a long time) and you could save thousands by just putting in a Wheatstone bridge which is already in almost every AC circuit ever made anyway. And, sorry, but is it really that difficult to put batteries in the right way around? And won't this just cause confusion because people won't know "which is the right way" and get all confused? And won't this lead to trouble when only *some* devices are like this and others aren't and hence you then get lazy users blowing up their batteries in "normal" devices.
No wonder MS Research funds are getting cut all the time if this is the crap they come up with.
Your experience is not shared by the majority of CS graduates in the UK - that's the point of this article, and my post. This should worry you more, as someone with a "real" degree, than crafting an attempted scathing reply on a website. Especially if you are from a UK university. Your entire degree just got de-valued internationally, in the same way a degree from a Botswana university may not hold the same weight as one from a US, or German university.
"The only thing a degree **measures**."
Knowledge is the point of my whole post - these students are not taught, not assessed by and do not leave with any significant amount of "knowledge", theoretical or practical. The degree measures are absurd - they do not measure a student's "knowledge" or even ability. They measure "memory" (not the same thing as knowing something - I can't remember the formula for finding the roots of a quadratic equation necessarily but I should damn well know how to derive it), and not much else. Short-term memory at that. They are not proof of ability. This is my point. The CS ***GRADUATES*** that I know - I wouldn't trust them to look at my laptop, much less write a program that my life depended on, or expect them to prove something that was outside the scope of their degree course (i.e. everything vaguely interesting).
"And I doubt you'd have much lucky explaining how gouraud shading works or how 3rd normal form differs from 2nd without looking it up first."
*cough* Memory versus knowledge. Different things. I might not *remember*, but being able to *understand* that is a different thing entirely. This is my point - these people HAVE been taught how to do that. Give them access to the course material again, ask the same questions a year later. See how many of them *know* stuff, even if they have every memory aid in the world.
CS grads, for the majority, in the UK, for the last 10 years AT LEAST, and still today are *not* scientists. They do not have a knowledge of their area, they cannot work out anything that isn't spoon-fed to them, they do not know how to reason, or derive, or analyse, or effectively investigate. Some of them are good at *computing* too (i.e. programming, operating the machine itself). Some of them aren't. But the majority of those people that say they have a *UK* degree in Computer Science do not fit any more than the examination criteria for their courses, temporarily and sparingly enough to pass the exam. It didn't *use* to be like that, and it isn't in the *good* universities. That's not the point of this article - they don't break down by Ox-bridge vs other universities. They are generalising over all UK CS graduates. That's what I did, too.
"I find it impressive that you link to your previous comments each with informed replies detailing the failings of your same rant. Maybe you should reply to any of them?"
I don't get into petty "this-that" arguments. Don't like it, don't read my comments. The "informed replies" basically boiled down to "Degrees are not all equal" and/or "A degree is not to teach practical skills" (which fails to consider that my post agrees with that). I wasn't discussing every degree in the world - I was discussing the UK degree courses I have knowledge of, the UK CS students I have met and know, and the UK university people that I know and their comments/experience of the same thing.
The large spectrum (hopefully) still exists - but again and again the people I speak to about this (CS lecturers, CS students, CS postgrads, CS researchers) say the same thing about UK degrees. And I don't claim *not* to be making sweeping generalisations, or that there are no "real CS" graduates out there. Amplifying my statement of my own experience/opinion to absurdity does not make your opposing experience/opinion valid.
I did a "poor" CS degree, obviously, but that suggests there was choice. Strangely it was from one of the universities that at the time was offering the best CS degrees. I went it intending to get a pure CS degree, came out with a >50% maths degree because the CS was so abysmal. Additionally, the other candidate universities I looked at were no different. No doubt Oxford does do better but that's beside the point - 95% of students in the UK will never get near Oxford yet they will still have a UK degree at the end. In fact, in London most universities are one and the same - part of the University of London (currently 19 separate London universities, they are adding more each year - Brunel is next, I believe, if it isn't already). London is a *big* draw for international degree candidates who then take their degrees elsewhere because it holds weight. When I was at uni, the UoL had a good reputation. Everyone I have spoken to from there recently agrees that's about to go down the pan because of target-chasing, and basically making the courses easy enough to pass so that they attract the foreign students (that are worth a lot more money to them). This is not unique to UoL, or to the UK, or to CS degrees. Brunel suffers from the same problems, for instance.
I know someone who was teaching research students in genetics (at Oxford during various points of her research). The people she taught are supposed to be at the top-end of research in their field, researching diseases, analysing patient's blood samples, looking at causes, cures, treatments, etc. One of them had never set foot inside a lab with 6 years of biology / genetics degree-level education at various universities. They didn't understand what a beaker was, or a pipette, and couldn't work them. Theoretical knowledge is the point of a degree, but if you're doing research that *requires* you to deal with and analyse patient samples and you've never heard of a beaker, a pipette, or how to use either (I'm not joking, my friend moved out of that department to a "real" job in a genetics lab in a working hospital - their first "practical" application of their knowledge - soon after having to deal with students like that) and when the supervisors consider it acceptable and that the senior researchers should "just teach" the supposedly-research-level students how to do things like clean a beaker, or suck up fluid into a pipette MULTIPLE times per student (even those who have been in the labs for years) because they don't understand it (or even English in some cases). These people were working on live-patient samples, bio-hazard materials, and trying to identify the cause of real patient's cancers. They were publishing papers that scientists around the world were using as backing for real medical diagnosis and treatment. They couldn't identify a gene that they were supposed to have been studying for a year, or describe how it works.
I am, technically, a partial CS-grad from a UK university - but I deliberately choose to do Mathematics as the "major" (not a term we use in the UK, but it explains it well enough) because the CS was so dire.
CS degrees in the UK are pretty worthless. I understand the difference between a theoretical subject and a practical one but CS degrees (which should be theoretical and therefore nothing to do with actual computer work) are basically achieved by implementing A*, or a KMP-search, or Quicksort, or Minimax or some other rubbish. Usually in Java. Usually as a "team effort" for at least part of it (one year of an MSc at my old uni is entirely a team-based project). Usually by way of trial and error and having no real concept of what you're doing. I can teach a 15-year-old the same things and although they would struggle immensely with predicate logic and such things, that's because it wouldn't take them 3-4 exclusive years to learn those things.
If you're lucky, the uni students can program in BASIC or Java or Python before they join the course. Some haven't even *touched* a computer before. God help you trying to get them to learn a language they aren't already familiar with. The Compilers and Interpreters course that was part of my degree lost 90% of its students in the first three weeks because it was all theoretical, based on logic, grammar, etc. And that was 10 years ago and, from everything I've seen and heard from PhD students and the like, the situation has worsened in almost all British degrees. A third-year biology student asking a post-grad where the neck is (I shit you not - not a communication failure, they spoke English, understood the word but didn't know where the neck "began and ended"). A CS grad asking what a loop invariant is. MSc's implementing Minimax on the game of draughts (checkers) in Java for a third-year project.
The course content is a waste of time. The only thing a degree measures is whether you can sit in a room for three-four years and learn what is told to you. That does *not* coincide with knowing your subject or being able to do anything practical with it. This is why the degrees, the MCSE's, the A+, the CCNA, mean NOTHING. I only work for places that have already realised this, and specifically hire on *ability*. That doesn't mean I can only do the practical stuff, I know the theory and can apply it and can bore people to death if they get me onto graph theory or coding theory without even trying. Try explaining what spanning-tree algorithms do and why they can be used to avoid network loops... most CS grads can't once they have left their graph theory courses. But CS-grads not only come out with no useful work skills, they come out with zero understanding of the underlying theory either.
Would you like to explain how "open sourcing the whole thing" would help the person who owned the trademark that you infringed, or the artwork that you ripped off, in any way? It's like me saying "Yeah, I copied the whole graphics from Red Alert, but hey... the company hasn't been selling it lately and I was going to give it (and other rights on it) away to thousands of people who haven't paid for Red Alert anyway." Despite what you might read on abandonware sites, this is still a blatant copyright violation. You have *no* right to the imagery (recreated or not, because you admitted yourself you based it off the EGA data files), the name or anything else, so "open-sourcing" it will actually make it MORE illegal (passing off as not only an "official" product, but also then further giving those rights to other people perpetually - you're heading into fraud and all sorts because open source licences tend to state that YOU hold the copyright, when you clearly *don't* to some quite vital pieces of the software, as it was distributed.
You did something stupid, you don't understand copyright/trademark law (certainly not that in jurisdictions other than your own) and you got caught because you advertised it, shamelessly, on places like this. I don't think they'll bother to sue you, you're small-fry to them, but there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't win the case in just one speech.
The relevant rule is ASK FIRST, though, as always. The rights holders may be separated (i.e. one owns the graphics, one owns the name, one owns the historical versions of the software, one owns a certain port, one owns the sound, etc.) and impossible to trace - that doesn't give you the right to use anything at all. "Look and feel" is only relevant to similar but non-identical works, in general. You say yourself that you used the original EGA graphics - even if this meant you printed them out on paper, then traced the same pixels onto graph paper and then "digitised" them to pixel-values in your head, it's still a large, gaping legal hole to fall through. Check out the history on certain typefaces. Otherwise, I could scan in a photo, print it out enlarged on graph paper, hand-digitise it by guessing colour values and if I end up with a pixel-by-pixel identical file claim that it's now "my" copyright / right to distribute and not the original photographer's.
You were using the original works as reference, and your works are virtually pixel-for-pixel identical to the original graphics. You *definitely* infringed on any trademarks/brands/etc on the name Lemmings (would it have been difficult to call it something like "Gophers" or similar?) - that's clear-cut "passing-off" on its own. Someone owns the name. Someone owns the graphics. Someone owns each piece of that software/concept, and you have *no* idea who that was. Sometimes those things revert back to the original artists after a while, sometimes they stay with the company forever, sometimes they got lost in a legal limbo and nobody's quite sure who owns them.
It doesn't give you the right to basically rip them off. I appreciate that the original project was fun, entertaining, a good proof-of-concept, etc. but you went *too* close to the wire - calling the damn thing Lemmings and referring to it as that at all times (to be honest, I assumed you were part of the original development team / some sort of official coder when I first saw the article yesterday, and at least one person who posted a comment on here actually WAS), using substantially identical graphics that by your own admission are derived from the original data files (however that may have happened), and then trying to distribute your work (maybe for a fee, maybe not, I don't know).
All you had to do was call it a "Lemmings-clone", make the graphics yourself (come on - Lemmings was EGA resolution with about 5-10 pixel high graphics - you could do that in MS Paint), and then nobody would have cared. You really have no defence here and I'd be surprised if, now, anyone wants to negotiate with you at all in terms of licensing. If you'd asked *FIRST* they might have. Now they know it's possibly popular, and they have damning evidence against you, they'll be setting their licensing fees for you at the top end of the scale - if you can port Lemmings in 36 hours, they can do it in a lot less and take you to the cleaners too.
I'd say that any terrorist that plans his act of terrorism by filming in a public street and attracting huge attention is probably an idiot. Are they not able to use, say, maps, local knowledge, a quick stroll down the road in question and/or their brain to "plan" something "terrorist-y"?
Terrorists tend, on the whole, not to be very bright. That's why the "shocking" terrorist acts are things like - smuggling a weapon on board an international flight with valid ID, driving a gas-laden car into an airport security barrier, pulling a bomb out of your rucksack on the bus and detonating it, putting a bomb under someone's car, etc.
Thank God we don't have any smart terrorists... the kind who would, say, cause a security alert at an airport in order to have it evacuated and then set off the car-bomb parked outside (away from all the security, checks, police officers with guns, etc.), in the open-air, right where 10,000 people just got evacuated to. Or fly the damn planes themselves and possibly hit something actually critical instead of a block of offices. A single dedicated, smart, evil person could do a damn sight more damage that all the "terrorist" acts put together. Fortunately, they are few and far between.
Terrorist are stroppy teenagers with knives - attention-seeking idiots who don't quite grasp that killing innocent people doesn't get you any closer to having other people see your side of the argument. Unfortunately, the biggest terrorists tend to be large, first-world governments, and they still act in the same way.
Confidentiality is generally something that *two* parties have agreed to (i.e. one party and a confidante). Besides, legal communication is rarely sealed, except on a judge's explicit order, and this is a legal communication to the person who publicised it. You can't sue someone for them choosing to publish their own mail online, unless you have sent them something REALLY secret, obviously not to be disseminated and/or sent accidentally.
Otherwise you get ridiculous situation where someone sends you threatening letters, summons, etc. and then you can't show them to your lawyer.
Because instead of having a Turing-capable, complete independent virtual machine sitting in a browser just to look at a few pictures, I can just have a "link" to a bog-standard video that plays just like the old "embed" tags for a standardised video codec that people can include direct in the browser. Instead of the security nightmare of constant Flash updates, forced toolbar installations, breakage of old Flash sites just because you upgrade to new Flash versions, integration with webcams, microphones and other shit I can just have: a "video" tag that specifies... well.. the URL of a video, that any player *I* choose can integrate with my web browser and play.
It also doesn't slow to a dead crawl just because you load up a couple of sites that have video on them because everything is fighting to run its own code to show a "play" button on top of the video in a fancy 3D, alpha-blended, anti-aliased, sound-effect generated way. Basically, it makes everything simpler, like back in the day when you could just say "embed this MIDI" (although that was a hideous disaster, admittedly) and stops relying on the need for a non-portable, third-party, closed source plugin that spends 90% of its time NOT showing video.
Yeah, would love to know how I'd power this laptop if it wasn't for the fact that the UK import a vast percentage of their electricity from the EU. We're an island, you're never more than 45 miles from the sea, the nearest country is 30 miles away at least, and however you look at it, electricity is generated in Scotland and sold to the EU and generated in the EU and sold to Scotland. We are self-sustaining and actually *export* electricity to the EU (not just France, the Netherlands and Ireland where we already have transfers in place). How do you think they manage that without some huge cables? The only difference between this and ordinary power distribution is that we're running them under the water rather than through the air or ground.
We're even building links to Norway and Iceland. Now go read about our energy usage ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(UK) ) and you'll see that cable losses are a minor percentage of *anything* we transfer (much less than 2.8% of peak power production - depending on the weather). If the Sahara comes online to the EU energy markets, it's not infeasible to suggest that the UK will be using that electricity at times and we're about as far away from the Sahara as you can get and still be in Europe (Iceland would be further out, but that's about it).
If your employer / school is providing you with access, yes, it's damn well up to the employer what they do. Nobody is *making* you use the Internet at work for social purposes. The alternative is for your employer to block ALL internet access entirely at work. They give it to you as a courtesy because it comes "for free" with any business network and the employers like the convenience of being able to use it.
So long as they *tell* you, so long as you *know* and so long as you agree to the rules of using it, it's no different to using a cafe's wifi, or your neighbours connection, or letting friends use your connection - if you break the rules, expect to have the rules *enforced*. At the end of the day, it's a *private* network for the business's use, not yours. If you are allowed to go on Hotmail or whatever, damn well expect it to be monitored - that doesn't automatically mean they know your Hotmail password and can read your email - but expect to have your activity monitored.
I work in school IT. Many years ago at a school that shall remain anonymous, we put one teacher behind bars because they used the *school* internet connection to download child pornography. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. If we weren't monitoring, we'd never have found him. If we didn't monitor the kids, every 11 year old on the planet would be swamped in pornography and cyber-bullying every free minute they have. In reality, IT really don't give a shit about what sites you go on so long as you don't cause the business/school problems - it's a staff perk that we let them use it for social purposes, not a right. We certainly don't care about the content of your personal emails (business emails is another thing entirely and expect to have every word scrutinised) and most caching software does NOT log content like that.
It's *bollocks* that Scandanavian companies don't do this too. EU laws sometimes require it, business has no choice but to do it or cut all Internet connections in businesses. There is no way to distinguish between "work-related Internet" and "personal Internet" without monitoring it. And there is no way that *any* company can leave itself liable to illegal acts by giving employees a completely unmonitored Internet connection that anonymises their usage. Stop talking crap.
QWERTY doesn't cause RSI. Using a keyboard badly, or the wrong kind of keyboard, causes RSI - as well as carrying on when something hurts.
QWERTY was supposedly designed to slow down typists (though finding *definitive* references to that reasoning is tricky). However, it doesn't mean that it's any more difficult to type on once you've been trained. As always, a 100wpm typist could jam up any typewriter anyway, and even in the computer age QWERTY doesn't slow a professional typist down (The Dvorak stuff is dubious - check any sources for their actual data / reasoning because often it stems from Dvorak-performed research and there is other, independent, research that suggests it's no different to QWERTY once you've used both for a while).
And few other input devices are used by approximately 100's of millions of users yet, and yet dozens if not hundreds of alternate input devices have existed for decades. Sticking one into a product you want to sell as anything other than an option is a REALLY bad idea, commercially speaking. The Wii was a toy used specifically to be general purpose and work well in lots of physical-simulation activities. The keyboard is *still* the best input device in terms of ubiquity, security, speed, accuracy and time-to-learn in a modern "real-world" environment. And for your argument to work, you'd have to do about 10 years of study into the others to determine if they make RSI incidences worse when you use them every day for 8 hours a day. Alternative inputs are fine for occasional use but after a while, they will make anybody tire.
According to the all-knowing Wiki, they've been doing it since 1889. I think Nintendo know how to stay in business. That's the problem really - people think that "big" means "stable". It isn't necessarily true at all, as the latest economic crises have demonstrated. Neither does age make a good company, though, (Woolworths were trading back before Nintendo and yet went bust recently). The question is not even what divisions they serve, or the investment they make - it's how many people want to buy their products. I think Nintendo have *always* had a better grasp of the games market than any other company and they have outlasted EVERYONE, because they understand the market better than anyone. There is barely a person in the US/UK that doesn't recognise and/or hasn't owned a Nintendo device of some kind, and that was true even when I was a kid. Sony, by comparison, are a relative upstart in the gaming arena (company started in the 1950's and is widely spread across dozens of markets, not just the videogaming one - that didn't start until about 1994 with the Playstation). Even SEGA couldn't compete long enough to make a dent, and at one time the gaming market *WAS* Sega and Nintendo.
Nintendo are much more powerful and far richer than you think. Every Wii sold made profit on the hardware, and the games, and the accessories. There's not many companies about today in the video games console market that can say the same thing. Almost every major console or handheld that they've ever produced has been an enormous hit - the only exception that comes to mind is the VirtualBoy which seemed merely badly timed in terms of the technology they had to hand for production. Hell, a crappy game that had been around for decades, was released with the Gameboy and was turned into an overnight success that not much else can touch in comparative terms. Nintendo are no fools. And the markets will release three, four, five new products that will do well enough but not spectacularly. And then Nintendo will reveal something else that nobody thought of / dared release / believed possible.
If anything, I'm slightly disappointed at Nintendo for just jumping on the 3D bandwagon, but it has the taste of "Well, we had this prototype sitting in a dusty cupboard for years and people seem to be on a 3D hype at the moment... see how well you can sell that while we do the real work back here"
"The largest lake entirely within Canada is the Great Bear Lake. None of the Great Lakes are entirely in Canada, so none of them count. The deepest lake in Canada is Lake Manitou, which has an island inside it, and in that island there is a lake. That makes it the largest lake that's in an island that's in a lake in the world."
Though, I would expect people living next door to the US to be used to its "US is the world" attitude by now.
Excuse me... I'm British and I want to sue you in a British court for something that isn't illegal in the US. The fact that you've never set foot in Britain doesn't matter. Get your arse over here within the next three weeks or I'll award me some of your money (which I can't force you to hand over either, and which has never been held in Britain) in your absence.
Does that make more sense to you with the positions reversed?
If you want to sue someone, you have to prove that they are conducting business in an area, that within that area they are breaking the law, and that they know that and can attend your court case. Otherwise, you're just making an *international* arse of yourself. It's a British company, operating in solely British territory, doing something that is perfectly legal in Britain. Why you think they should even ever have responded to the case is beyond me. It's called "jurisdiction" and never has the word applied more.
Otherwise every crankpot will sue every foreign company on trumped-up charges, the companies might never attend the court in question because they would have to travel and/or hire representation, that the offence they are charged with might not even be illegal in their jurisdiction and yet, in their absence, you think that the case should default in your favour.
I hereby sue Microsoft (US) for failing to offer Windows XP N (The EU edition) in their jurisdiction, or the US Customs for breaching the EU data protection laws that they never agree to abide by. If they don't appear in court, I win by default? Pfft.
1) Crap... it might not be something I can do but it's something that any professional driver would find piss easy. There is no challenge except not getting in the way of other drivers. Only Americans seem not to understand this. Please watch a proper rally in the Scottish highlands - with a real course, real obstacles, real skill and (most importantly) some excitement to watching it. F1 is actually WORSE because you can't watch it because everything moves too fast to keep track of (especially if you are watching it in person) and the winners are determined by 0.001 of a second (and kept that way by restrictions on vehicles) and anything considered risky/dangerous/shortcut is not allowed, which is just boring as shit in terms of competition - it's *never* clear who actually is the better driver when a slight tailwind could triple the time difference between two cars.
2) Golf is 99.9% walking. And nobody professional carries their clubs very far. Even then, so what? It's a slow walk in a cut-down forest (perfectly tuned to hit balls from) to hit an almost-weightless ball towards a distant flag, and then half-hour of going to catch the ball up. Yawn.
3) Agreed completely.
However, I have to trump all of the commenters in this post by introducing televised snooker, darts, and bowls (not *bowling*, bowls, on a lawn - it's like a non-ice version of curling). It's gone out of fashion now but until you've spent a Sunday with your granddad watching snooker or darts (and even game shows based around snooker/darts like Pot Black, or Bullseye) you have no idea what a boring sport is.
I think you'll find that's not limited to just South Africa either. In the UK, although we *do* have advert breaks on certain channels for certain things, advertisements over and above the usual pitch-side things tend to cause uproar and stopping for an advert break would probably be grounds for rioting. The US stands out here for doing such things - yes at "half-time" in a "soccer" match there is sometimes / usually an advert break but most of the time from 10 minutes before kick-off (if not a lot earlier) to long after the game is finished is 99%, well, the sport you wanted to watch. That's been like that since the first televised game until today.
Given that people get scholarships for sporting prowess in the US, and that they seem to believe US = "World" (World Series, etc.), it baffles me that they regularly are reported to have ruined sporting coverage. In the last few Olympics they have been criticised for only showing footage of US athletes, or US-centric sports, for instance. And the stop-start nature of many of their sports does give rise to stupid amounts of advertising but it's only encouraged by the populous (given that the *adverts* shown during the big sporting events are eagerly anticipated, and cost the most money to show). Let's be honest - only 17 minutes out of every hour has anything actually *happening* on the field in American Football anyway - it's worse than cricket but thank God it doesn't go on as long.
I would argue, however, that basketball is an almost-zero-contact sport. At least it was last time I checked the rules, maybe they've changed. And if you want a "high-contact" sport, hockey would probably qualify but rugby would then probably be classed as an "extreme" sport because it's basically American Football without the padding. Even with the sports you mentioned - every 15-20 minutes for a *break*? Seriously? What kind of attention span do US athletes have? I think the problem is not just TV networks - it's the nature of US sports (very stop-start-stop-start-break), the attention span of the viewers (apparently minimal), the tradition of things like high-cost adverts that "must be watched", and the fact that viewers *don't* complain about it enough.
This is why other countries point at the US - it's what happens when commercialism takes over from entertainment. They did it to Hollywood (will never forgive such blatant advertising in movies as they've been doing in the last 10 years), they did it to the music business, they did it to sports, they even did it to schools (an idea that the UK are now apparently copying wholesale with their corporate-sponsored-school "academy" program). And the US wonders why it gets a reputation of being involved in everything from wars to sports just to ensure its money supplies. I'm afraid that it's a seed that been sown by the US populous itself - when you get excited about an advert, then that advert will be what you see - and a million copycat ones.
Personally? When TV got boring, I stopped watching it live and now buy pre-recorded content which I know already is good (which I then rip), or watch it on some free service where I complain if there's a single advert on the video (I already ignore static ads on the page anyway). I've actually filed complaints with TV websites for having noisy-flash-adverts - and I wasn't the only one to complain because they were quickly removed. And I'm not alone in such beliefs, which is why most British TV companies are struggling at the moment. "Freeview" gives us hundreds of free digital channels. I've not even seriously looked at it, because it has adverts on most of them (and even entire channels of adverts - a very American invention). Sky's satellite service introduced us to American-style advert breaks and was quickly ditched, though some people still pay a huge monthly fee for the privilege of watching adverts spliced into their favourite programs.
So what's left if you don't want to watch buckets of adverts ruining your programming? You pay a subscription to
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Education about SCAMS is the only way to avoid it. Otherwise the next scam that's slightly different in nature has you falling for it too.
Companies do not contact you for things like this. Banks do not phone you up and, if they do, you say "Fine, I'll contact customer services in my own good time and resolve the issue" - that way *YOU* phone the bank and thus are sure that it is the bank that you have phoned, and that there is a REAL outstanding problem.
How did Microsoft get the phone number? How dare they demand access to my private machine? If it's "required" then they can damn well come to my door, at their expense, and fix it themselves on my kitchen table while I supervise. You do *NOT* get Toyota phoning up, even if your car is part of a recall, without other things following it that WILL verify the authenticity. Letters. You contacting them and verifying they ARE Toyota, etc.
The magic word is "payment" too. Demand money for something and you better send me an itemised bill. Don't have my address? Oh, shame, seeing as you managed to "discover" my phone number. If I had any business dealings with you, you'd certainly have my address on record and/or would be able to subpoena it if necessary.
My bank don't send me emails asking for my PIN. In fact, they don't send me emails. If I choose to ignore said emails, eventually a letter from them will land on my doorstep if it's *really* important and I can contact customer services myself, or send a recorded delivery letter to their head office. If they ask what took me so long, I tell them that I don't reply to suspected scams and they should know not to contact me that way as per the bank's OWN advice on dealing with scams.
Similarly, my phone company don't ring me about renewing my contract with them. If they do, they will get ignored. If you want to renew a *contract* then I'm going to need to sign something, so send it to me in the post, goodbye. If the person on the end of the phone claiming to be from my phone company doesn't ALREADY have my name, address, the package I'm on, how much I'm paying, the COMPANY they are supposed to be calling from (I had a scammer once demand that he was from "your phone company" and then he couldn't name which company that was even after four guesses), my payment details and everything else they need to know, then they are NOT from my phone company. My car insurance company don't NEED to ask for my details and/or my renewal date. They would already know it. They don't need to phone me up to renew it, they'll send me a letter a few weeks beforehand.
The guy who knocked on my door claiming to be from my electricity company (and holding a device that he "just needed to put on the meter" and a contract that I "just needed to sign") doesn't *need* access to my property without prior agreement, unless he has some sort of police officer with him (and that I would verify even more heavily - the PC who *doesn't* wait outside while you phone the station to verify his identity is the one to shut the door on and call 999 / 911 / 112).
The electricity guy also doesn't *need* to touch anything in my house. Hell, he doesn't *need* to enter my property at all and if he tries, he'll find himself flat on his back. Even a bailiff can't force his way into my property - unless I've invited him in (under UK law, at least) or unless he has a court-officiated warrant and even then he'll have a police officer supervising him. Hell, my LANDLORD can't legally enter my property if I don't give him permission too, without the same sort of backup/documentation, and technically he owns the property. (BTW: Electricity guy turned out to be from a rival electricity firm that *didn't* know who I was with, and was trying to "switch" me to their company - Please everybody avoid EDF Energy. The guy was lucky not to have me reporting him for fraud and numerous other offences.)
Stop being idiots and combating each scam as it comes up. I saw people in IT recommending to "never open any attachment
No. But you have the ultimate power. You can choose *not* to use their services. When parking meters went in on a busy city-centre street near my house (which has ample parking space and lots of traffic movement, but they wanted to get greedy and charge), people STOPPED using the street and parked in perfectly legitimate spaces in side-roads, car parks, etc. The streets emptied, the businesses protested and campaigned and eventually a little "No longer in use" bag appeared on every parking meter.
You *do* have a choice to not support corporations. It's inherent in their design and finances. If you don't buy gig tickets that are protected as such, then they will, eventually, stop being used. Much like nobody bought ID cards (yes, our government were trying to make people pay to identify themselves, on an optional ID measure that wasn't as good as the passport they already had to have), so ID cards were scrapped. Nobody doubt DAB so that's on it's last legs. People stop buying games with DRM so major titles start abandoning it, disabling it, and relaxing it.
I have no problem with a theatre that wants to lock my tickets to my credit card (did it a few weeks ago and, considering I was picking up the tickets the next day for the performance on that night, I actually *liked* that nobody else could just walk up to the counter knowing my name and get my tickets. Sure I could argue with the guy on the front desk / in my seat but it's hassle I don't need), so I don't particular care about them doing so. If I did, I'd stop using them, even if it only took a second to buy a pre-paid credit card, or whatever other measures would allow me to satisfy the rules. The Olympics 2012 is supposed to be Visa-only for payments because they have sponsored it. I don't agree with it, so I won't be buying stuff from it with Visa. Not even if they offer Visa prepaid cards for cash on every stall. Don't want my cash, that's fine, you don't get it.
If people stopped giving money to places that want to screw them over, this problem would have been solved before it started. As it is, I don't mind it at all because I have no intention to ever sell a ticket that I've booked, or buy one for a third party. If I did, I wouldn't want to lumber someone else with the burden of digging out credit cards at the entrance, and I wouldn't buy ones that couldn't be sold on. Problem solved. The people that care should STOP buying things. The people who don't won't ever care.
If the second-hand ticket industry is really that valuable to users, one of two things will happen:
- People will not buy tickets that they can't sell second-hand if they think that it's likely they will need to do so.
- People who sell those tickets will raise their prices to compensate for the scarcity.
Given the sheer number of ticket-resellers in London's West End, I can't really think that this is a bad thing. Either the theatres and other gigs will put them out of business, so I won't get harangued and so that 90% of the shops in the area sell something *OTHER* than theatre tickets - but more likely is that they will have to integrate with the theatre ticket-selling systems and thus also issue "paperless tickets" and no-one else will be any the wiser. I'd be surprised if this hasn't already happened.
Additionally, a lot of tickets have always said they are not transferable. My car park doesn't allow me to transfer a ticket but only recently have they cracked down on this by printing your car registration on the ticket itself and fining those that don't match the car. My train ticket isn't transferable. My bus ticket isn't transferable. Most loyalty cards are not transferrable. All airline tickets are not transferable. I don't see how/why a ticket to a theatre or gig should be transferable either - it's up to the company if it is and whether they just write it on there, or whether they emblazon it on your forehead and DNA-check you, I don't really care... you agree to those terms and had an opportunity to say "Actually, no, that's not what I want to buy because it has no resale value". My bet is that those tickets have all held a disclaimer to that effect for the last 50 years and nobody's really bothered to complain until they now start enforcing it.
If you've bought a ticket and can't attend - that's a sad problem for you. There may be good reasons or not. The theatre/gig may negotiate or not. But, hell, if I bought a seat in a restaurant, room in a hotel, etc. and don't turn up, you'll find that they will be chasing me up. I cost them money by abusing their reservation system which could be manipulated to the point that they are put out of business. They may even decide to charge me nonetheless, even if the circumstances are beyond my control. It's at their discretion and you knew the terms when you signed up. If I book an appointment at my doctor and don't turn up, they can theoretically charge me - and I'm in a country that offers free healthcare.
Being able to recoup your money on something you can't attend isn't a right. You made a booking. Stick to it, or pay the cost of the ticket. Just because you can't sell it on to someone else doesn't make it "bad"... the company are most likely doing it for other reasons rather than stopping you selling the ticket on - for a start, they don't make any more or less money if the person who turns up at the gig is the original buyer. Chances are that, overall, second-hand tickets go for on average the same as first-hand - above cost when they are in high demand and below cost if someone get knocked out of the World Cup early. Chances are that touting does NOT make any difference to the finances of a show/gig. But it might be a security issue, or a public-order issue, or just a plain membership issue where you pass on discount tickets to random people who aren't eligible for the discount.
The word "pointless" comes to mind. First, any decent virus that *wants* to can just disable your protection immediately. Literally one line of code. I would be shocked if the virus-libraries that are out there don't already have a set of routines where you just pass it a filename that you *want* to write and it does all the fancy trickery to try to write to that file no matter what (e.g. mount the media, relax permissions, make the current user owner, overwrite the file entry entirely etc.) and then possibly even clean up any "changes" after it's done its job (e.g. restore permissions). Relying on the fact that you haven't seen a virus that knows how to change permissions on a file that stands between you and infection is *stupid*. Viruses, almost by definition, act with full administrator privileges by extremely cleverly executed buffer overruns and other attacks. You really think that a non-permissioned (but permissionable) file can't be accessed/changed automatically by something *TRYING* to write that file by an administrator privilege program written by the same person?
Your "solution" is a temporary, ineffective workaround to stop a single USB device from having its autorun information changed if the "attacker" puts zero effort into it and doesn't use quite obvious and simple code to take account of *any* possible situation that one of it's victims may have (i.e. don't expect everyone to write-protect their autorun.inf, but do expect *every* write access to fail and keep trying different ways to get them to work). Saying that you're then "immune" to all autorun viruses is stretching it a bit. It's only as secure as the fact that the virus respects the disk as an NTFS structure, uses the standard NTFS routines to access it, is running as a user that can't modify the permissions (unlikely by that point) and doesn't bother to just blindly wipe permissions on any file it wants to write to. Also, NTFS USB sticks? Yeah, right. About as popular and readable in random machines as ext4 ones. And to be honest, just making it an ext2-disk with the ext2fs driver probably renders it MORE immune to autorun.inf creation/execution.
The "solution" to this is to not have autorun enabled on your USB drives at all. WHY? What is the purpose? To save you a double-click. That's it. And it opens up arbitrary execution to any device that poses as a USB stick (even my 3G modem has writable USB storage, so I'd have to apply the same principle to this and every other device that I autorun - my phone, my 3g modem, my external hard drive, even ordinary USB devices are coming with "driver" partitions that install the drivers from an autorun partition on the device on first use). Or I could just switch autorun off. If the USB stick is compromised, then it's compromised. No amount of fancy permission-fixing will fix that and it's just as likely that a virus hunts down my JPG's and inserts some payload that crashes certain JPG-reading applications. Or just modifies the MBR so that if I leave it in it will autoboot and silently infect my PC. Or infect anything else executable / readable on the stick. It overwriting my autorun.inf is the LEAST of my worries and much more easily and permanently fixed by a built-in Windows option on a per-PC instead of per-stick basis.
Don't let things automatically do stupid shit like auto-update and/or auto-run without you knowing what they're doing.
The problem with viruses these days is not the viruses - it's the *stupid* and *ridiculous* attitude to an unknown third-party running arbitrary code on the machine that holds your banking details, etc. "Oh, I got a virus the other day but I think I cleaned it off", people running with viruses without realising for months, if not years, and people thinking that anti-virus does *anything*. Don't half-arse it. If you're smart enough to disable autorun, do that. If you think your USB sticks stand a risk of being infected, wipe them before you put them anywhere else (by inserting into an autorun-disabled or, better, Linux m
And they still got your $150 in service fees (?) and maybe lost one customer out of several million, probably saved even more money by you *not* bothering to complain more / sue their arse - complainers cost a bank a LOT more than anything else.
When my bank did this to me, I arranged a meeting with the local branch manager, telling them I had a lot of investments I wanted to make. After two hours of arguing about the fees and not letting him leave the room, the charges were cut in half (I wasn't disputing the charges, I was disputing the unreasonableness of them and the fact that they had charged me because only my charges had caused me to be charged again). Two hours of a bank manager's time was, I was informed, about 4 or 5 times more than the charges that the bank wanted me to pay.
Next week, I bumped into him in a different branch where he was covering someone else and he ran and hid.
I don't claim to have "won", I got a reasonable middle-ground after much arguing / negotiation - the offer that I should ALWAYS have been offered at first. I was merely educating the bank on how a reasonable settlement with the customer is much more useful than trying to sting them for fees. But now my customer service in that branch is impeccable, even if it's a little tricky to get an appointment :-) (Not that I care - when I enquired about mortgages, their advisor basically laughed when he saw our proposal - strange, because the bank next door rubber-stamped it after barely reading it and now get an awfully large sum of money on a regular, never-missed basis for the last three years).
I *do* claim to have made it not in the bank's interest to pull such tricks in my particular case, that's all. I wouldn't have threatened to remove my account - never threaten, just do it if you feel it's necessary - because that would have cost them a LOT less. I did, however, threaten to queue up in their branch every morning to deposit an enormous bag of pennies and then, each evening, queue up to withdraw those pennies again. Their new policy of a single cashier on the front desk would have held up really well. I also offered to bring a friend who was between jobs to open an account and do the same if they decided that I should be taken to a quiet room for such transactions to allow other customers to use the facilities.
Oh, and I used the in-branch "free customer service" phone (which is right in the middle of the branch) for two hours, complaining loudly at the top of my voice with a quite-reasonable complaint about a very unreasonable, unnecessary bank charge. Hopefully that's cost them enough in bank manager's time, cashier's time, phone calls (even if VoIP to a central call center), bad reputation among anyone who wanders in looking to open an account (or looking for an excuse to close theirs) than not paying the fee or moving my account. My backup plan was going to be to move all my accounts to the bank next-door and keep their account open with the bare minimum of funds necessary to do that. Oh, and to complain regularly, pay in awkward cheques / small change etc. on a regular basis when I went to deposit / withdraw my entire wages at the bank next door.
If you're gonna cause them hassle or cost them business - at least do it properly.
I don't agree with his argument (again, bringing up permanent deprivation of a property when music, sheet music especially, is more of a "license" to play - at least that's what the record companies tell us), but he is *technically* correct that she shouldn't be doing it. However, I find his treatment of a "teenager" obnoxious. He says himself that she's articulate, argues well etc. but for some reason just HAS to insert the "You're only a teenager, I know better" crap into the conversation, and even attacks her spelling/grammar in an email. At first, I was sort-of understanding his side, but by about the third/fourth reply he just starting being the jerk that she accused him of.
Take her response as that of an atypically understanding teenager / consumer of music. She's being quite reasonable at places, quite unreasonable in others, but the overall majority opinion is: your copyright and your way of licensing your music is getting in her way of paying tribute to an artist she adores. Amplify this by the number of people you *didn't* contact (or who only stopped listing your sheet music because they were scared you'd sue the hell out of them). She recognises your genius and wishes to include herself in a small part of that. If you were to have offered, say, a copy of the sheet music posted direct to her in exchange for, say, the dollar price you quoted plus a little for postage, but let her pay in cash posted to you in an envelope, she'd probably have jumped at the chance. Why couldn't you have done that, as a "special" favour... you would have earned your money on that sheet music (chances of you earning anything from library-exchanges after their initial purchase are about zero), you would have satisfied a fan AND you could have done something really nice like sign it with a little anti-sharing note so that she would always have a personalised reminder of why she shouldn't arbitrarily share such things. The library thing is also a bit ridiculous in this day and age - I can name several libraries in my area that have no idea how to order a book they haven't got, let alone sheet-music, even though they are all part of the same borough library-exchange software system. It's quicker to go online onto, say, a trading site and get some sheet music from someone who already has it.
She is *wrong*. She *does* want something for nothing. But you know, in the old days, people sometimes gave the small people that. And, sometimes, people recognise that something they wrote 10, 20, 50 years ago is not going to sustain themselves forever.
The problem I would have with his stance (and I have no interest in copyright-breaches of any nature) is that small theatre productions of his work, especially those performed by teenagers, probably form 0.01% of his revenue stream - and yet he enforces them heavily, discourages use of his own works, provides meaningless and irrelevant copyright analogies and, at the end of the day, is holding a stance that makes *him* appear the enemy to his biggest fans, even if he's not the enemy personally. As someone who's tried to understand copyright licensing for hymns to sign in a school assembly, I know this is an industry-wide problem. Every time their forms dropped on my desk, I felt like I was being interrogated.
It's bad business, if nothing else. If he'd sent her a copy of the sheet music (costing him only a handful of dollars, which judging by his About Me page probably wouldn't be missed), but attached a proviso that at the beginning/end of her performance she was required to drop in an ad for his work (either along the lines of "there are CD's from the composer of one of the show's songs at the back" or "With many, many grateful thanks to the composer Jason Robert Brown for granting us special dispensation to arrange this performance") and he would not have alienated more of his fans than necessary. To be honest, I'm not saying the girl even deserves it, but there was a time when a fan was a fan and you did everything you could to help/encourage that into
The engineering tolerances on that probably mean that any battery movement will cause a short of some kind, especially with cheap batteries. Surely much simpler, cheaper and requiring almost zero extra knowledge would be a Wheatstone bridge on the input part of the circuit. Four diodes (about 1p each even in singular quantities), easily tightly packed, would also do an identical job without requiring any "hardware" changes at all to the standard AA battery compartments that are already pence each.
Factor in the patent price, the new contacts (that won't be mass-produced in the same quantities as the plate-and-spring AA contacts for a long time) and you could save thousands by just putting in a Wheatstone bridge which is already in almost every AC circuit ever made anyway. And, sorry, but is it really that difficult to put batteries in the right way around? And won't this just cause confusion because people won't know "which is the right way" and get all confused? And won't this lead to trouble when only *some* devices are like this and others aren't and hence you then get lazy users blowing up their batteries in "normal" devices.
No wonder MS Research funds are getting cut all the time if this is the crap they come up with.
Your experience is not shared by the majority of CS graduates in the UK - that's the point of this article, and my post. This should worry you more, as someone with a "real" degree, than crafting an attempted scathing reply on a website. Especially if you are from a UK university. Your entire degree just got de-valued internationally, in the same way a degree from a Botswana university may not hold the same weight as one from a US, or German university.
"The only thing a degree **measures**."
Knowledge is the point of my whole post - these students are not taught, not assessed by and do not leave with any significant amount of "knowledge", theoretical or practical. The degree measures are absurd - they do not measure a student's "knowledge" or even ability. They measure "memory" (not the same thing as knowing something - I can't remember the formula for finding the roots of a quadratic equation necessarily but I should damn well know how to derive it), and not much else. Short-term memory at that. They are not proof of ability. This is my point. The CS ***GRADUATES*** that I know - I wouldn't trust them to look at my laptop, much less write a program that my life depended on, or expect them to prove something that was outside the scope of their degree course (i.e. everything vaguely interesting).
"And I doubt you'd have much lucky explaining how gouraud shading works or how 3rd normal form differs from 2nd without looking it up first."
*cough* Memory versus knowledge. Different things. I might not *remember*, but being able to *understand* that is a different thing entirely. This is my point - these people HAVE been taught how to do that. Give them access to the course material again, ask the same questions a year later. See how many of them *know* stuff, even if they have every memory aid in the world.
CS grads, for the majority, in the UK, for the last 10 years AT LEAST, and still today are *not* scientists. They do not have a knowledge of their area, they cannot work out anything that isn't spoon-fed to them, they do not know how to reason, or derive, or analyse, or effectively investigate. Some of them are good at *computing* too (i.e. programming, operating the machine itself). Some of them aren't. But the majority of those people that say they have a *UK* degree in Computer Science do not fit any more than the examination criteria for their courses, temporarily and sparingly enough to pass the exam. It didn't *use* to be like that, and it isn't in the *good* universities. That's not the point of this article - they don't break down by Ox-bridge vs other universities. They are generalising over all UK CS graduates. That's what I did, too.
"I find it impressive that you link to your previous comments each with informed replies detailing the failings of your same rant. Maybe you should reply to any of them?"
I don't get into petty "this-that" arguments. Don't like it, don't read my comments. The "informed replies" basically boiled down to "Degrees are not all equal" and/or "A degree is not to teach practical skills" (which fails to consider that my post agrees with that). I wasn't discussing every degree in the world - I was discussing the UK degree courses I have knowledge of, the UK CS students I have met and know, and the UK university people that I know and their comments/experience of the same thing.
The large spectrum (hopefully) still exists - but again and again the people I speak to about this (CS lecturers, CS students, CS postgrads, CS researchers) say the same thing about UK degrees. And I don't claim *not* to be making sweeping generalisations, or that there are no "real CS" graduates out there. Amplifying my statement of my own experience/opinion to absurdity does not make your opposing experience/opinion valid.
I did a "poor" CS degree, obviously, but that suggests there was choice. Strangely it was from one of the universities that at the time was offering the best CS degrees. I went it intending to get a pure CS degree, came out with a >50% maths degree because the CS was so abysmal. Additionally, the other candidate universities I looked at were no different. No doubt Oxford does do better but that's beside the point - 95% of students in the UK will never get near Oxford yet they will still have a UK degree at the end. In fact, in London most universities are one and the same - part of the University of London (currently 19 separate London universities, they are adding more each year - Brunel is next, I believe, if it isn't already). London is a *big* draw for international degree candidates who then take their degrees elsewhere because it holds weight. When I was at uni, the UoL had a good reputation. Everyone I have spoken to from there recently agrees that's about to go down the pan because of target-chasing, and basically making the courses easy enough to pass so that they attract the foreign students (that are worth a lot more money to them). This is not unique to UoL, or to the UK, or to CS degrees. Brunel suffers from the same problems, for instance.
I know someone who was teaching research students in genetics (at Oxford during various points of her research). The people she taught are supposed to be at the top-end of research in their field, researching diseases, analysing patient's blood samples, looking at causes, cures, treatments, etc. One of them had never set foot inside a lab with 6 years of biology / genetics degree-level education at various universities. They didn't understand what a beaker was, or a pipette, and couldn't work them. Theoretical knowledge is the point of a degree, but if you're doing research that *requires* you to deal with and analyse patient samples and you've never heard of a beaker, a pipette, or how to use either (I'm not joking, my friend moved out of that department to a "real" job in a genetics lab in a working hospital - their first "practical" application of their knowledge - soon after having to deal with students like that) and when the supervisors consider it acceptable and that the senior researchers should "just teach" the supposedly-research-level students how to do things like clean a beaker, or suck up fluid into a pipette MULTIPLE times per student (even those who have been in the labs for years) because they don't understand it (or even English in some cases). These people were working on live-patient samples, bio-hazard materials, and trying to identify the cause of real patient's cancers. They were publishing papers that scientists around the world were using as backing for real medical diagnosis and treatment. They couldn't identify a gene that they were supposed to have been studying for a year, or describe how it works.
CS
I am, technically, a partial CS-grad from a UK university - but I deliberately choose to do Mathematics as the "major" (not a term we use in the UK, but it explains it well enough) because the CS was so dire.
Look at some of my previous comments on the subject: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1679538&cid=32509558 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1679538&cid=32508448
CS degrees in the UK are pretty worthless. I understand the difference between a theoretical subject and a practical one but CS degrees (which should be theoretical and therefore nothing to do with actual computer work) are basically achieved by implementing A*, or a KMP-search, or Quicksort, or Minimax or some other rubbish. Usually in Java. Usually as a "team effort" for at least part of it (one year of an MSc at my old uni is entirely a team-based project). Usually by way of trial and error and having no real concept of what you're doing. I can teach a 15-year-old the same things and although they would struggle immensely with predicate logic and such things, that's because it wouldn't take them 3-4 exclusive years to learn those things.
If you're lucky, the uni students can program in BASIC or Java or Python before they join the course. Some haven't even *touched* a computer before. God help you trying to get them to learn a language they aren't already familiar with. The Compilers and Interpreters course that was part of my degree lost 90% of its students in the first three weeks because it was all theoretical, based on logic, grammar, etc. And that was 10 years ago and, from everything I've seen and heard from PhD students and the like, the situation has worsened in almost all British degrees. A third-year biology student asking a post-grad where the neck is (I shit you not - not a communication failure, they spoke English, understood the word but didn't know where the neck "began and ended"). A CS grad asking what a loop invariant is. MSc's implementing Minimax on the game of draughts (checkers) in Java for a third-year project.
The course content is a waste of time. The only thing a degree measures is whether you can sit in a room for three-four years and learn what is told to you. That does *not* coincide with knowing your subject or being able to do anything practical with it. This is why the degrees, the MCSE's, the A+, the CCNA, mean NOTHING. I only work for places that have already realised this, and specifically hire on *ability*. That doesn't mean I can only do the practical stuff, I know the theory and can apply it and can bore people to death if they get me onto graph theory or coding theory without even trying. Try explaining what spanning-tree algorithms do and why they can be used to avoid network loops... most CS grads can't once they have left their graph theory courses. But CS-grads not only come out with no useful work skills, they come out with zero understanding of the underlying theory either.
Would you like to explain how "open sourcing the whole thing" would help the person who owned the trademark that you infringed, or the artwork that you ripped off, in any way? It's like me saying "Yeah, I copied the whole graphics from Red Alert, but hey... the company hasn't been selling it lately and I was going to give it (and other rights on it) away to thousands of people who haven't paid for Red Alert anyway." Despite what you might read on abandonware sites, this is still a blatant copyright violation. You have *no* right to the imagery (recreated or not, because you admitted yourself you based it off the EGA data files), the name or anything else, so "open-sourcing" it will actually make it MORE illegal (passing off as not only an "official" product, but also then further giving those rights to other people perpetually - you're heading into fraud and all sorts because open source licences tend to state that YOU hold the copyright, when you clearly *don't* to some quite vital pieces of the software, as it was distributed.
You did something stupid, you don't understand copyright/trademark law (certainly not that in jurisdictions other than your own) and you got caught because you advertised it, shamelessly, on places like this. I don't think they'll bother to sue you, you're small-fry to them, but there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't win the case in just one speech.
The relevant rule is ASK FIRST, though, as always. The rights holders may be separated (i.e. one owns the graphics, one owns the name, one owns the historical versions of the software, one owns a certain port, one owns the sound, etc.) and impossible to trace - that doesn't give you the right to use anything at all. "Look and feel" is only relevant to similar but non-identical works, in general. You say yourself that you used the original EGA graphics - even if this meant you printed them out on paper, then traced the same pixels onto graph paper and then "digitised" them to pixel-values in your head, it's still a large, gaping legal hole to fall through. Check out the history on certain typefaces. Otherwise, I could scan in a photo, print it out enlarged on graph paper, hand-digitise it by guessing colour values and if I end up with a pixel-by-pixel identical file claim that it's now "my" copyright / right to distribute and not the original photographer's.
You were using the original works as reference, and your works are virtually pixel-for-pixel identical to the original graphics. You *definitely* infringed on any trademarks/brands/etc on the name Lemmings (would it have been difficult to call it something like "Gophers" or similar?) - that's clear-cut "passing-off" on its own. Someone owns the name. Someone owns the graphics. Someone owns each piece of that software/concept, and you have *no* idea who that was. Sometimes those things revert back to the original artists after a while, sometimes they stay with the company forever, sometimes they got lost in a legal limbo and nobody's quite sure who owns them.
It doesn't give you the right to basically rip them off. I appreciate that the original project was fun, entertaining, a good proof-of-concept, etc. but you went *too* close to the wire - calling the damn thing Lemmings and referring to it as that at all times (to be honest, I assumed you were part of the original development team / some sort of official coder when I first saw the article yesterday, and at least one person who posted a comment on here actually WAS), using substantially identical graphics that by your own admission are derived from the original data files (however that may have happened), and then trying to distribute your work (maybe for a fee, maybe not, I don't know).
All you had to do was call it a "Lemmings-clone", make the graphics yourself (come on - Lemmings was EGA resolution with about 5-10 pixel high graphics - you could do that in MS Paint), and then nobody would have cared. You really have no defence here and I'd be surprised if, now, anyone wants to negotiate with you at all in terms of licensing. If you'd asked *FIRST* they might have. Now they know it's possibly popular, and they have damning evidence against you, they'll be setting their licensing fees for you at the top end of the scale - if you can port Lemmings in 36 hours, they can do it in a lot less and take you to the cleaners too.
I'd say that any terrorist that plans his act of terrorism by filming in a public street and attracting huge attention is probably an idiot. Are they not able to use, say, maps, local knowledge, a quick stroll down the road in question and/or their brain to "plan" something "terrorist-y"?
Terrorists tend, on the whole, not to be very bright. That's why the "shocking" terrorist acts are things like - smuggling a weapon on board an international flight with valid ID, driving a gas-laden car into an airport security barrier, pulling a bomb out of your rucksack on the bus and detonating it, putting a bomb under someone's car, etc.
Thank God we don't have any smart terrorists... the kind who would, say, cause a security alert at an airport in order to have it evacuated and then set off the car-bomb parked outside (away from all the security, checks, police officers with guns, etc.), in the open-air, right where 10,000 people just got evacuated to. Or fly the damn planes themselves and possibly hit something actually critical instead of a block of offices. A single dedicated, smart, evil person could do a damn sight more damage that all the "terrorist" acts put together. Fortunately, they are few and far between.
Terrorist are stroppy teenagers with knives - attention-seeking idiots who don't quite grasp that killing innocent people doesn't get you any closer to having other people see your side of the argument. Unfortunately, the biggest terrorists tend to be large, first-world governments, and they still act in the same way.
Confidentiality is generally something that *two* parties have agreed to (i.e. one party and a confidante). Besides, legal communication is rarely sealed, except on a judge's explicit order, and this is a legal communication to the person who publicised it. You can't sue someone for them choosing to publish their own mail online, unless you have sent them something REALLY secret, obviously not to be disseminated and/or sent accidentally.
Otherwise you get ridiculous situation where someone sends you threatening letters, summons, etc. and then you can't show them to your lawyer.
Because instead of having a Turing-capable, complete independent virtual machine sitting in a browser just to look at a few pictures, I can just have a "link" to a bog-standard video that plays just like the old "embed" tags for a standardised video codec that people can include direct in the browser. Instead of the security nightmare of constant Flash updates, forced toolbar installations, breakage of old Flash sites just because you upgrade to new Flash versions, integration with webcams, microphones and other shit I can just have: a "video" tag that specifies... well.. the URL of a video, that any player *I* choose can integrate with my web browser and play.
It also doesn't slow to a dead crawl just because you load up a couple of sites that have video on them because everything is fighting to run its own code to show a "play" button on top of the video in a fancy 3D, alpha-blended, anti-aliased, sound-effect generated way. Basically, it makes everything simpler, like back in the day when you could just say "embed this MIDI" (although that was a hideous disaster, admittedly) and stops relying on the need for a non-portable, third-party, closed source plugin that spends 90% of its time NOT showing video.
And probably more energy to superconduct several kilometres of underwater cable than the Sahara could generate.
Oh. P.S. Why would you bother to cool an underwater cable?
Yeah, would love to know how I'd power this laptop if it wasn't for the fact that the UK import a vast percentage of their electricity from the EU. We're an island, you're never more than 45 miles from the sea, the nearest country is 30 miles away at least, and however you look at it, electricity is generated in Scotland and sold to the EU and generated in the EU and sold to Scotland. We are self-sustaining and actually *export* electricity to the EU (not just France, the Netherlands and Ireland where we already have transfers in place). How do you think they manage that without some huge cables? The only difference between this and ordinary power distribution is that we're running them under the water rather than through the air or ground.
We're even building links to Norway and Iceland. Now go read about our energy usage ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(UK) ) and you'll see that cable losses are a minor percentage of *anything* we transfer (much less than 2.8% of peak power production - depending on the weather). If the Sahara comes online to the EU energy markets, it's not infeasible to suggest that the UK will be using that electricity at times and we're about as far away from the Sahara as you can get and still be in Europe (Iceland would be further out, but that's about it).
If your employer / school is providing you with access, yes, it's damn well up to the employer what they do. Nobody is *making* you use the Internet at work for social purposes. The alternative is for your employer to block ALL internet access entirely at work. They give it to you as a courtesy because it comes "for free" with any business network and the employers like the convenience of being able to use it.
So long as they *tell* you, so long as you *know* and so long as you agree to the rules of using it, it's no different to using a cafe's wifi, or your neighbours connection, or letting friends use your connection - if you break the rules, expect to have the rules *enforced*. At the end of the day, it's a *private* network for the business's use, not yours. If you are allowed to go on Hotmail or whatever, damn well expect it to be monitored - that doesn't automatically mean they know your Hotmail password and can read your email - but expect to have your activity monitored.
I work in school IT. Many years ago at a school that shall remain anonymous, we put one teacher behind bars because they used the *school* internet connection to download child pornography. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. If we weren't monitoring, we'd never have found him. If we didn't monitor the kids, every 11 year old on the planet would be swamped in pornography and cyber-bullying every free minute they have. In reality, IT really don't give a shit about what sites you go on so long as you don't cause the business/school problems - it's a staff perk that we let them use it for social purposes, not a right. We certainly don't care about the content of your personal emails (business emails is another thing entirely and expect to have every word scrutinised) and most caching software does NOT log content like that.
It's *bollocks* that Scandanavian companies don't do this too. EU laws sometimes require it, business has no choice but to do it or cut all Internet connections in businesses. There is no way to distinguish between "work-related Internet" and "personal Internet" without monitoring it. And there is no way that *any* company can leave itself liable to illegal acts by giving employees a completely unmonitored Internet connection that anonymises their usage. Stop talking crap.
QWERTY doesn't cause RSI. Using a keyboard badly, or the wrong kind of keyboard, causes RSI - as well as carrying on when something hurts.
QWERTY was supposedly designed to slow down typists (though finding *definitive* references to that reasoning is tricky). However, it doesn't mean that it's any more difficult to type on once you've been trained. As always, a 100wpm typist could jam up any typewriter anyway, and even in the computer age QWERTY doesn't slow a professional typist down (The Dvorak stuff is dubious - check any sources for their actual data / reasoning because often it stems from Dvorak-performed research and there is other, independent, research that suggests it's no different to QWERTY once you've used both for a while).
And few other input devices are used by approximately 100's of millions of users yet, and yet dozens if not hundreds of alternate input devices have existed for decades. Sticking one into a product you want to sell as anything other than an option is a REALLY bad idea, commercially speaking. The Wii was a toy used specifically to be general purpose and work well in lots of physical-simulation activities. The keyboard is *still* the best input device in terms of ubiquity, security, speed, accuracy and time-to-learn in a modern "real-world" environment. And for your argument to work, you'd have to do about 10 years of study into the others to determine if they make RSI incidences worse when you use them every day for 8 hours a day. Alternative inputs are fine for occasional use but after a while, they will make anybody tire.
According to the all-knowing Wiki, they've been doing it since 1889. I think Nintendo know how to stay in business. That's the problem really - people think that "big" means "stable". It isn't necessarily true at all, as the latest economic crises have demonstrated. Neither does age make a good company, though, (Woolworths were trading back before Nintendo and yet went bust recently). The question is not even what divisions they serve, or the investment they make - it's how many people want to buy their products. I think Nintendo have *always* had a better grasp of the games market than any other company and they have outlasted EVERYONE, because they understand the market better than anyone. There is barely a person in the US/UK that doesn't recognise and/or hasn't owned a Nintendo device of some kind, and that was true even when I was a kid. Sony, by comparison, are a relative upstart in the gaming arena (company started in the 1950's and is widely spread across dozens of markets, not just the videogaming one - that didn't start until about 1994 with the Playstation). Even SEGA couldn't compete long enough to make a dent, and at one time the gaming market *WAS* Sega and Nintendo.
Nintendo are much more powerful and far richer than you think. Every Wii sold made profit on the hardware, and the games, and the accessories. There's not many companies about today in the video games console market that can say the same thing. Almost every major console or handheld that they've ever produced has been an enormous hit - the only exception that comes to mind is the VirtualBoy which seemed merely badly timed in terms of the technology they had to hand for production. Hell, a crappy game that had been around for decades, was released with the Gameboy and was turned into an overnight success that not much else can touch in comparative terms. Nintendo are no fools. And the markets will release three, four, five new products that will do well enough but not spectacularly. And then Nintendo will reveal something else that nobody thought of / dared release / believed possible.
If anything, I'm slightly disappointed at Nintendo for just jumping on the 3D bandwagon, but it has the taste of "Well, we had this prototype sitting in a dusty cupboard for years and people seem to be on a 3D hype at the moment... see how well you can sell that while we do the real work back here"
"The largest lake entirely within Canada is the Great Bear Lake. None of the Great Lakes are entirely in Canada, so none of them count. The deepest lake in Canada is Lake Manitou, which has an island inside it, and in that island there is a lake. That makes it the largest lake that's in an island that's in a lake in the world."
Though, I would expect people living next door to the US to be used to its "US is the world" attitude by now.
Excuse me... I'm British and I want to sue you in a British court for something that isn't illegal in the US. The fact that you've never set foot in Britain doesn't matter. Get your arse over here within the next three weeks or I'll award me some of your money (which I can't force you to hand over either, and which has never been held in Britain) in your absence.
Does that make more sense to you with the positions reversed?
If you want to sue someone, you have to prove that they are conducting business in an area, that within that area they are breaking the law, and that they know that and can attend your court case. Otherwise, you're just making an *international* arse of yourself. It's a British company, operating in solely British territory, doing something that is perfectly legal in Britain. Why you think they should even ever have responded to the case is beyond me. It's called "jurisdiction" and never has the word applied more.
Otherwise every crankpot will sue every foreign company on trumped-up charges, the companies might never attend the court in question because they would have to travel and/or hire representation, that the offence they are charged with might not even be illegal in their jurisdiction and yet, in their absence, you think that the case should default in your favour.
I hereby sue Microsoft (US) for failing to offer Windows XP N (The EU edition) in their jurisdiction, or the US Customs for breaching the EU data protection laws that they never agree to abide by. If they don't appear in court, I win by default? Pfft.
1) Crap... it might not be something I can do but it's something that any professional driver would find piss easy. There is no challenge except not getting in the way of other drivers. Only Americans seem not to understand this. Please watch a proper rally in the Scottish highlands - with a real course, real obstacles, real skill and (most importantly) some excitement to watching it. F1 is actually WORSE because you can't watch it because everything moves too fast to keep track of (especially if you are watching it in person) and the winners are determined by 0.001 of a second (and kept that way by restrictions on vehicles) and anything considered risky/dangerous/shortcut is not allowed, which is just boring as shit in terms of competition - it's *never* clear who actually is the better driver when a slight tailwind could triple the time difference between two cars.
2) Golf is 99.9% walking. And nobody professional carries their clubs very far. Even then, so what? It's a slow walk in a cut-down forest (perfectly tuned to hit balls from) to hit an almost-weightless ball towards a distant flag, and then half-hour of going to catch the ball up. Yawn.
3) Agreed completely.
However, I have to trump all of the commenters in this post by introducing televised snooker, darts, and bowls (not *bowling*, bowls, on a lawn - it's like a non-ice version of curling). It's gone out of fashion now but until you've spent a Sunday with your granddad watching snooker or darts (and even game shows based around snooker/darts like Pot Black, or Bullseye) you have no idea what a boring sport is.
I think you'll find that's not limited to just South Africa either. In the UK, although we *do* have advert breaks on certain channels for certain things, advertisements over and above the usual pitch-side things tend to cause uproar and stopping for an advert break would probably be grounds for rioting. The US stands out here for doing such things - yes at "half-time" in a "soccer" match there is sometimes / usually an advert break but most of the time from 10 minutes before kick-off (if not a lot earlier) to long after the game is finished is 99%, well, the sport you wanted to watch. That's been like that since the first televised game until today.
Given that people get scholarships for sporting prowess in the US, and that they seem to believe US = "World" (World Series, etc.), it baffles me that they regularly are reported to have ruined sporting coverage. In the last few Olympics they have been criticised for only showing footage of US athletes, or US-centric sports, for instance. And the stop-start nature of many of their sports does give rise to stupid amounts of advertising but it's only encouraged by the populous (given that the *adverts* shown during the big sporting events are eagerly anticipated, and cost the most money to show). Let's be honest - only 17 minutes out of every hour has anything actually *happening* on the field in American Football anyway - it's worse than cricket but thank God it doesn't go on as long.
I would argue, however, that basketball is an almost-zero-contact sport. At least it was last time I checked the rules, maybe they've changed. And if you want a "high-contact" sport, hockey would probably qualify but rugby would then probably be classed as an "extreme" sport because it's basically American Football without the padding. Even with the sports you mentioned - every 15-20 minutes for a *break*? Seriously? What kind of attention span do US athletes have? I think the problem is not just TV networks - it's the nature of US sports (very stop-start-stop-start-break), the attention span of the viewers (apparently minimal), the tradition of things like high-cost adverts that "must be watched", and the fact that viewers *don't* complain about it enough.
This is why other countries point at the US - it's what happens when commercialism takes over from entertainment. They did it to Hollywood (will never forgive such blatant advertising in movies as they've been doing in the last 10 years), they did it to the music business, they did it to sports, they even did it to schools (an idea that the UK are now apparently copying wholesale with their corporate-sponsored-school "academy" program). And the US wonders why it gets a reputation of being involved in everything from wars to sports just to ensure its money supplies. I'm afraid that it's a seed that been sown by the US populous itself - when you get excited about an advert, then that advert will be what you see - and a million copycat ones.
Personally? When TV got boring, I stopped watching it live and now buy pre-recorded content which I know already is good (which I then rip), or watch it on some free service where I complain if there's a single advert on the video (I already ignore static ads on the page anyway). I've actually filed complaints with TV websites for having noisy-flash-adverts - and I wasn't the only one to complain because they were quickly removed. And I'm not alone in such beliefs, which is why most British TV companies are struggling at the moment. "Freeview" gives us hundreds of free digital channels. I've not even seriously looked at it, because it has adverts on most of them (and even entire channels of adverts - a very American invention). Sky's satellite service introduced us to American-style advert breaks and was quickly ditched, though some people still pay a huge monthly fee for the privilege of watching adverts spliced into their favourite programs.
So what's left if you don't want to watch buckets of adverts ruining your programming? You pay a subscription to