Other country's police forces don't just charge in, weapons drawn and start shooting people, no matter what the situation.
Hence, there's no real "fun" (if that's why people do it) in SWATting people in other countries. All that will happen is the person you "SWAT" will be investigated, then they'll trace the call back and an unarmed officer will be slapping you in handcuffs for trying to do it.
Seriously, the problem here is training of the person behind the gun. Every country in the world has armed police officers available. They are the ones that respond to armed incidents (or, even, the nearest unarmed officer gets there and assesses what they can before the cavalry arrive). They don't just go shooting people for no reason, and they don't get close enough that they feel at risk from the slightest flinch of the suspect.
Honestly, people in America should watch our equivalent of Cops and see quite how you do things. Literally, guys coming at officers with hammers and you still don't just gun them down. It's not "weakness". It takes a lot bigger man to just stand there, take abuse, risk physical injury and try to calm a guy down than to just pull a trigger "because you were a bit uncomfortable".
These countries are no different to the US in the incidents of nutters. The difference is in how many ordinary people are armed (and in some countries, everybody carries a weapon because they were all compulsarily conscripted), and how they are dealt with.
Seriously... the UK. 70 million people. NOT ONE DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY by shooting in 2012/13/14, despite 6000 armed officers, 10,000 incidents in that year. "Incidents where firearms were discharged"... 3 / 4 / 5.
I would have thought it was clearly than that - please don't keep giving away the stuff we own that we're still selling because it's quite blatantly illegal and we hardly even need to present evidence to prove that in a court of law.
That's ALWAYS been the case. You think this is something new? ROM sites were being shut down every day as far back as the 90's, because THEY ARE ILLEGAL.
All the "abandonware", "well, it's free advertising for their brands" etc. arguments were primitive attempts to justify wholesale copyright infringement.
Note that I do draw a line - there's a difference between a guy who downloads his favourite game for his favourite system that he has in a cupboard still, because it's easier to do that than wire up to a physical ROM cartridge to extract it, and a site offering literally hundreds of thousands of ROMs for every system known to man, none of which they ever owned. But so does Nintendo draw that exact same line.
And they had the nous to realise that these games were still popular and offer them for everything from the Wii up as "Virtual Console" games so people could enjoy the old games again (third-party licensing issues aside, Nintendo can no more distribute someone else's stuff than I can distribute Nintendo's stuff).
Maybe I'm biased against your attitude because not only do I pay for stuff, I don't use things that I don't have a license to. I kind of follow your attitude - "You don't want me to do that... fine, I won't". Except I say that from the point of view of "it's your product and you don't want me to" rather than "I'm going to pretend that I'm a significant investment to you on my own and 'withdraw' the privilege of me playing 90's games that I never paid you for in the first place."
The message is: ROM sites aren't legal, we will sue the people who run them, and get them shut down, especially when you *can* still legally buy those ROMs from us. That's been the same message since 1990-ish. You're 30 years too late on your faux-rage.
I also speak as someone who loves emulation. I have the ROM / TZX / ISO of loads of games. The games I own. The games I still have the discs / systems for. The games I could have made those files for myself. I don't distribute them. I play them for my own nostalgia. I actually own "legal" ROMs too... the ones that StarROMS were selling many years ago, and various software that includes ROMs (some of the Williams classic arcade software from the 90's that includes the full Joust ROMs etc. in an emulator).
And I've also paid for those, or paid for virtual-console titles, etc. too. Because, you know what, if a game is so good that you want to break the law to carry on playing it, maybe it's worth another couple of dollars to the original creators, even if it's 20+ years old, eh? Sure, you may have paid for it back in the day, but if it's that good, it's worth paying a few pennies more to get it again and in a modern, legal format so you can continue to enjoy it, no? And to say "Hey, thanks, Nintendo, these games got me through my childhood and I'm a grown adult now, so I can give you a little bit to say thanks for all those hours of entertainment".
Literally, it's "auto-port-forwarding". Any printer that NEEDS that, you don't want. Not even Google Cloud Print requires that.
WPS is entirely unrelated. UPnP "Discovery" over the local network is entirely unrelated (and not affected by turning off UPnP on the router) - that's the only mention of UPnP that I can find on any of Canon's sites... they are talking about allowing UPnP through the software firewall on a client machine so it can talk over the local network - NOT on the router at all.
A) Do you have UPnP enabled. B) If yes, turn it off.
UPnP is an *UTTERLY UNNECESSARY* service (speaking as an IT Manager, gamer, and someone who hosts gaming servers etc.), that when exposed to the Internet allows ANY local device to forward ANY network port to ANY IP/port combination with NO authentication whatsoever.
Even privileged ports and local ports.
I can literally redirect your port 139 (e.g. CIFS/SMB) to a host on the Internet if I wanted, or open command/control ports and punch holes through your firewall wherever I want.
All this is is a UPnP flaw that allows you to do the same remotely, but literally any device on your local network can already do it without any logs, authentication, or notification that they are doing so (e.g. your ChromeCast / laptop / Amazon Echo / Nest doorbell could be opening up your telnet port and sending it to themselves once every hour, and you'd pretty much never know anything about it).
Turn it off. Watch how nothing changes and all your systems still work as intended.
And, if you absolutely, 100% must host servers on your own connection (not just "play games" but literally host servers with no matchmaking servers present) then you add a single port-forward yourself and job-done.
P.S. No, this does not affect local device discovery, etc. so your Chromecast etc. will still work perfectly fine on your home network anyway.
Case in point: I've never had UPnP turned on on anything, I have 1000 Steam games that play just fine, plus ChromeCasts and all kinds of kit. Not a single problem.
I think if NZ is anything like the UK, it's nothing to do with magstripe liability.
The second "Chip + PIN" (as we called it) came out, the new deals to all merchants basically said "all liability is yours". Whether Chip, NFC or magstripe.
It was literally "if you want our shiny new, you take responsibility for all fraud in your shop". Which is ridiculous and should have been illegal but these card companies are international and it's hard to apply law to them to combat that when they own the industry.
There's a reason that small shops hate you paying by card and it has nothing to do with the fees, equipment, hassle, etc. It's because if your card later turns out to be stolen, they have to pay for everything they lost and have no comeback. Even if you had the PIN and the transaction was authorised at the time.
So guess where people go when they've stolen a credit card and don't want to be seen on CCTV etc. using it?
Welcome to "why you should have actually voted for things like Obamacare", or even better, a national healthcare system where insurances play no significant part.
I have sat and worked out my pension. If I live to 68, I will be given a pittance so small that it's not worth anything *now* let alone later. There is literally no way to live on what I'll be given.
And I don't own property because it's so incredibly expensive that it's all-but impossible to do so on your own, even though I earn way more than the average worker.
I chose early on in my professional career to therefore ignore anything and everything to do with retirement, saving or anything else. It's just not worth worrying about and, at best, would "take the edge off".
Instead I paid my taxes religiously, worked decent jobs, never had a day unemployed IN MY LIFE. So I may call that back later if I ever need it, via social benefits, like some people do who have done none of those things in their entire life.
Literally, it's just not worth the time thinking about it. I'm going to get nothing for all that. And retirement etc. works only if you have had partner and family for most of your life - then at least you might get a mortgage, own a place, have spare cash enough to save or things to sell later, inheritances coming down to you, children helping you out, etc.
Basically, I'm fucked.
But I will never have to pay for basic healthcare.
Apple sucks. I have never found a single redeeming feature in an Apple product (I manage hundreds, have never owned one personally in my entire life), software, hardware or "design". They are also fucking nasty to do business with (speaking for corporate, and education use).
Microsoft... they're a bit nasty in business but they make decent things. Have you seen how ridiculously easy it is to set up a multi-user network with all kinds of features, replicated storage, hypervisors with failover, etc. etc.? If you think Microsoft "suck", then you've probably only owned their consumer stuff.
Linux... I own a bunch of products. A RPi runs most of my entertainment (RetroPie + tvHeadend + Kodi). I ran a Linux desktop personally for nearly 10 years (while managing Windows networks... no Linux isn't "friendly" enough to do that simply for most places). I didn't suffer at all, and now I run Windows with VMWare (HyperV is good but it's not as good as VMWare for desktop usage), with Windows and Linux VMs inside it.
iOS - sucks. See Apple.
Android - not perfect but more than good enough for a consumer OS (proven by being one of the widest deployed consumer OS's ever). I wouldn't use it for a serious desktop machine, but it's fine for day-to-day-usage.
But, Apple? Honestly? I can't find a single redeeming feature, or even a "first" that's actually down to them.
Current price paid on the energy markets per megawatt-hour: GBP65.36 (Source: https://www.apolloenergy.co.uk... - year ahead electricity price for 2018)
GBP1bn will therefore take 1,000,000,000 / 65.36 =
15,299,877 hours to pay back, at full generative capacity. 15,299,877 hours = 637,495 days = 1,746 years.
So... if this windfarm is able to run at full capacity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, until the year 3764, without any further ongoing costs, then it might just pay back the amount it cost to build.
Last time I commented on an article, it was about a GBP 1bn wind-farm that would take nearly 3000 years to pay itself back at even 100% generation, zero ongoing maintenance, and an ever-increasing pence-per-kwh price.
Just because it's there, doesn't mean that it's in any way sensible.
It says it's rotating. Let's accept that. It said its orbit isn't as you would predict.
It says that this **could** be attributable to solar pressure.
It says that this **could** be because it's (almost certainly) a thin flat shape which acts as a light sail.
It says that we make this kind of thing (and we've launch an awful lot of stuff).
It makes absolutely no analysis of whether such a thing could be naturally occurring (if asteroids collide, you can be sure that just about any shape could fall off the debris and rumble in an odd orbit, and maybe even be bi-coloured - inside and outside colours from the object it breaks off from). It doesn't discuss any alternative in any real consideration.
It then immediately attributes it to alien synthetic advanced hardware such as a lightsail. That's just ludicrous.
It then further goes on to suggest it's actually an alien probe here to listen to us. It's bunk.
It literally says:
"On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object in the Solar System, âOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) was discovered by the PAN-STARRS1 survey"
The paper is dated November 1st. In 13 days these people have looked at the FIRST EVER INTERSTELLAR OBJECT that we've literally only just been able to detect and come to the conclusion that it can only reasonably be part of an alien civilisation's UFO. With no context, alternative, or data beyond orbit and periodicity.
It's bunk. If anything, it's someone's idea of a Halloween joke in their otherwise-serious paper.
Every time Valve CATCHES a cheater, they get paid again.
Every time they miss one, they don't get paid.
It's therefore in their interest to catch as many as they can, as often as they can, and make the barrier to entry high (i.e. you can't just wander into a free game without having made a purchase of tied in a credit card, etc.).
If a cheater persists for any length of time, Valve get NOTHING for all that disruption, except unhappy customers, for all the time it persists, until they remove the offender.
I have no doubt that they'd rather be paid every time someone needs to re-create a Steam account (which they effectively are - non-purchase accounts are very limited in what they can do) than a one-off identity of a gamer who could be banned for life, but it's vastly in their interest to let that same idiot back in and then IMMEDIATELY ban him.
Cheaters don't persist in gaming because they are spending money, however. They persist because they are stealing / hijacking accounts, or are able to join servers without any kind of initial fee being paid. Having a "free-to-play" game is the problem.
Though it doesn't mean "put in full support for every theoretical platform", coding to the exclusion of other platforms was always a silly idea.
The problem was the link between, say, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. An office product shouldn't care about what OS it's running on and now that you can get it on others, it's actually more saleable. But that was to the detriment of Windows, which held the monopoly because "it's the only thing that runs Office" (in effect).
When the monopoly was in their favour, they adored it. Now that it's not (i.e. they were shut out from other platforms and beaten by cheaper tools that work everywhere), they are all suddenly "behind" not being part of a monopoly. All it shows is that the courts should have taken harsher action, and faster, because it didn't really hurt Microsoft, but it did hurt the market enormously for a long time.
Steam has had the same kind of realisation but never locked itself into an OS - their slow response is more surprising, they could have support Mac and Linux and even mobile platforms an awfully long time ago, without interfering with their primary money-makers (the games and marketplace store).
Platform-specificity is not a good thing, for consumers or for the businesses that enforce it. If you have a service, you want it accessible to as many potential customers as possible. Anything else is artificial, monopolistic and counter-productive.
Someone please tell Apple. Because I see absolutely no reason that you can't have Mac/iPad services work on a PC/tablet, and work better.
And if MacOS really was SUCH a marvellously better OS, then people would be willing to pay for it, no? (In reality, I don't think it is, and Apple know that, and they know that their hardware is nothing special either - if they stopped the exclusivity and allowed MacOS to run on PC or just sell computers that people can choose the OS they want to run at purchase, they'd see huge losses... cheap PC's would kick their hardware offering's backside, and people would - at best - run MacOS on PC and get more out of it.)
All these platform-lock-ins profit only the businesses that enforce them, and only for short-terms, and to the detriment of the consumers. And it's VERY profitable, as Microsoft and Apple have shown, and yet still they "lose" regularly.
I've never worked out how Apple forcing you to "buy" MacOS on their machines (despite being capable of running other OS quite easily) is any different to what Microsoft did/do. Or what Google are being rebuked for with Android. Same for bundling office apps, things like Pages, Garageband, etc. and services like iTunes.
If your service is really that good, you'll let me use it from the platform of my choice.
Why don't you use GMail.... and access it via IMAP?
Or you can pay any domain host for a domain with email... they start are literally pence normally.
You don't / can't run email servers from home anyway (you'll be on SpamHaus policy blacklist because the ISP almost certainly list all their dynamic IP's there), you need an secure outside machine that's on 24/7 with a fixed IP and not listed as being a "home" connection via SpamHaus PBL/XBL etc. Don't even get me started on sending email, you need to be SPF'd up too, really, and a proper reverse DNS entry.
You can get a VPS for a pittance a month, and a ten minute tutorial on, say, Postfix will set it up for you and include forwarding / copying all email to something like GMail or any other provider if you ever need it in the future should something go wrong.
Personally I do the latter. And I can collect via GMail (via IMAP) or via my server direct (via IMAP), they both get copies of all emails. But if you're that worried, almost certainly whoever you hold domains with will have free email forwarding and free/pittance webmail access too if you want.
It'll never be "simple" because the games aren't made for Linux. But Steam have just released a similar "official" tool that makes Windows Steam games work on Linux and it works for several thousand games.
Whether it works for the ones YOU want, that's another question entirely.
There's a reason you can't pick up a cheap Cessna, and why you have to go through certifications, and why pilots are decrying the use of drones outside of their (heavily restricted) legal limits.
Nobody cares about what happens to your satellite. It's what it crashes into that's important. A rogue / malfunctioning satellite could easily take out anything - and orbits are getting more and more packed every day and just launching 10,000 things up there carelessly will end in disasters that won't just have you go "Oh well, launch another 10,000" but be brought before people with billion-dollar space programs demanding you never be allowed to launch anything ever again.
You've only got to hit something quite unimportant in the same orbit, and you could bankrupt the company overnight. Hit something that you didn't even really "know" was there and you could be looking at militaries (your own, or foreign) breathing down your neck.
Space is a controlled environment. Media stunts like launching cars on joke orbits aren't really compatible with that. We haven't got to the point that we can de-regulate ordinary airspace, so literally the only thing keeping you "safe" up in space from amateur idiots and commercially-produced tat is sheer volume of space. As that narrows, things get more and more stupid and dangerous.
You can't make cars without abiding by manufacturer regulations. You certainly can't build saleable aircraft without a shed-ton more regulation. Just lobbing things up into space isn't a behaviour that will be tolerated for very long once the first mess-up is made.
P.S. It took SpaceX years and dozens and dozens of test landings where they destroyed drone-boats, rockets, broke off their landing legs, abandoned landings to just plunge into the sea etc. before they got a landing that you can coo over. This stuff isn't "easy" and certainly isn't reliable.
Applying the same principle to something that might share an orbit with an component from your rivals that's so expensive that it might cost your company every profit it's ever made (yeah, right) in order to put something equivalent back up there in reparation? That's not "a different mindset". That's "commercial suicide".
"This study is interesting because we now suspect the appendix's purpose is to be a place where gut bacteria can go dormant and wait to re-seed the gut to maintain diversity."
It's been that way for at least 10-20 years, to my knowledge. I'm in no way a medical person, but that's always been the assumption whenever I've asked someone.
The problem here (and the entire problem of the appendix's bad reputation) appears to be that keeping a bunch of bacteria around isn't always the best thing either and things can go wrong. Evolutionarily speaking, sure, they are minor blips that'll be rode out over time. But when an appendix gets infected and bursts, you're gonna spew the nastiest possible bacteria store all over your sterile insides (not just your gut).
And keeping that stuff around give some things / byproducts a chance to creep up to the brain and contribute to Parkinson's by the looks of it.
It's interesting that all this stuff is hinted to be bacterial in origin... maybe people will start to revise their entire "anti-bacterial handwash every two seconds" policies.
Honestly, I've never known people quite so weak in constitution as those people who spend their lives bleaching their environment, sterilising their hands and spraying every surface (large cause of asthma, cleaning chemicals!). And it's not "correlative", it's "causative"... those people aren't bleaching everything BECAUSE they get ill easily, they don't start getting ill a lot until they start doing that as adults and then it affects even unrelated people who live with them too.
You're a being made up mostly of other living things. Those living things are always in combat with the same living things. Your white blood cells etc. are fighting with your own body (e.g. dead cells, cancerous cells, etc.) all day long every day. Your gut is literally attacking and consuming the food you eat and stopping it attacking your body (you only need to leave some food out in a sealed box for a few days to realise what's already in the food). And your appendix is basically bacteria central to call in reserves when your gut starts losing the battle (i.e. you're ill).
* Google, Microsoft, etc. will tell me outright that they are GDPR compliant, and did the same for DPA.
Apple make some good noises, but they have ZERO official confirmation of that. They have a "tool" so you can download your data and inspect it. But that's not compliance, it's just a single solitary feature that you happen to need.
Their own website only ever says "working towards". You cannot get a statement out of them to say they are GDPR compliant. And that's because things like iCloud are - as featured in a Register article once - just AWS, Azure and Google cloud instances couple with their own servers. They have zero idea - or care - where your data ends up.
I work in a school that had 1:1 (i.e. individual pupil) iPads.
We ditched them all this year, after four years of my warning against them.
Apple have ZERO interest in education. None whatsoever. They don't even comply with some basic UK law (i.e. a proper complaints process, provision of a head office address, DPA and now GDPR compliance, etc.... these things are all an uphill battle and you can NEVER get a actual statement saying they're compliant*). We stopped doing business with them not because of the kit, or the expense, or the lack of proper manageability or the technical side (which were my objections), but because they have no interest in education customers and don't have a complaints process and have zero interest in helping us resolve problems which stem from their services and their kit.
People think we get "educational discounts" on it... they aren't worth the effort. People think we can "talk to Apple education department"... there isn't one... literally they didn't exist for the four years we tried (but there is now some semblance of education products, so maybe they have one, but they didn't last year). Support consisted of taking things to an Apple store or phoning them up and going through the "little old grannies" support line who have no idea about managing them en-masse ("Can I have the serial number of the iPad?"... "Actually 400+ of them are affected by the same issue"... "Okay, can you give me their serial numbers..." "Are you fucking kidding me?")
There are apps on the app-store, rating "suitable for all", which are sold as "bypass your school proxy" which pipe all web access through a proxy server. Yet Google Chrome is rated 18 for allowing you to go on websites. And I complained, and Apple *couldn't give a shit*. They literally responded that it's "up to the app creator to set an appropriate age on them". Bang... all the app / parental controls are worthless because you can't limit to just the suitable apps.
After I was able to document and present my history of contact with Apple to my bosses, it was instantly decided that we cannot do business with them. They lost every device we have on-site that's Apple and they were all replaced with cheaper alternatives that are easier to manage and which have responsive companies behind them (Chromebooks, and Google for Education have a WONDERFUL support response, for instance).
Sorry, but Apple have NEVER cared about education in the modern era. The only schools in my country that champion them big are secretly Apple shops that get free service and specialised support in order to promote the brand... but they don't actually care about anyone else.
Honestly, I've NEVER done business with a worse company than Apple, and I've threatened many companies with court action. Apple honestly have never cared one jot about their education customers. I've never used them personally, so I couldn't comment on personal support. Maybe that's good, who knows?
To the point that I filed a formal written complaint to their head office, and they refused to even acknowledge the complaint in writing, the guy who phoned who was the *Irish* "Head of Written Complaints" refused to give me his name, confirm anything in writing, or literally do anything but refer to their support line, who did the same as ever and bounced me around Singaporean, German and American call-centers, with no passing of context of the call in between, and no progress after hours of bouncing around with quite-a-simple problem. There was no follow-up. There was no diagnosis. There was nobody even CAPABLE of answering the question. And that was their only response to a formal written complaint about how bad their support had been to a customer buying hundreds of their devices.
Honestly, I would never have done business with them personally at any point in my life. I certainly wouldn't now. And from a business point of view I will actively reject anything from them. I will never work in another school that uses them as anything other than non-critical touch-toys for tiny kids.
Well, I thought I'd better check my initial reaction, just because it was knee-jerk and I don't keep up with prices.
I literally googled "$799 i3 8Gb Intel HD" and got a bunch of things (so literally, whatever junk people are pushing, not even the best value thing at that price-range).
Turns out I can get a laptop for that price that out-specs the low-end Mac Mini. Or I can spend half and out-spec it on everything but the SSD (1Tb HD instead)... and still get a laptop. If you go desktops, hell, I can go down to a third of that price and still win. And almost always along the way, putting a few dollars more in (which I have PLENTY of scope to do given that I'm spending 1/2 to 1/3rd the price) and you can get a Geforce card, and easily beat out the SSD no problem at all.
Given that a Mac Mini needs a monitor...and a "4K" one if you believe the nonsense....this is possibly the most laughable thing I've seen since... the Mac Mini that is sitting on my desk that was a "server" for many years because nobody realised that it wasn't actually turned on and doing anything (it was supposed to be managing a suite of Macs but they've been under LDAP even since I started this job).
Even that Mac Mini is headed straight for the bin, but I'm sure I can con a few hundred out of some Apple fanatic for something that is basically outclassed by a Raspberry Pi nowadays.
If only you could run it in a sandboxed environment so that, despite being "malware" as you claim, you can still safely use it without advertising anything about your machine and/or granting it access to anything that you don't want it to touch.
Like... say... chrooting it into a steam-games-only folder, and whacking permissions around it so it can't do anything interesting and runs as a limited user?
Or are you saying "I disagree with having to use Steam", in which case your comment is really badly worded as it suggests you're quite happy to run it on other OS that don't offer that kind of functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't interview a dead suspect... you have no idea of his motivation, whether you have the full story, etc.
The US is one of the few countries that thinks that's a good thing.
With police-firearm-incidents rates something like double that of South Africa, it's not really surprising.
Other country's police forces don't just charge in, weapons drawn and start shooting people, no matter what the situation.
Hence, there's no real "fun" (if that's why people do it) in SWATting people in other countries. All that will happen is the person you "SWAT" will be investigated, then they'll trace the call back and an unarmed officer will be slapping you in handcuffs for trying to do it.
Seriously, the problem here is training of the person behind the gun. Every country in the world has armed police officers available. They are the ones that respond to armed incidents (or, even, the nearest unarmed officer gets there and assesses what they can before the cavalry arrive). They don't just go shooting people for no reason, and they don't get close enough that they feel at risk from the slightest flinch of the suspect.
Honestly, people in America should watch our equivalent of Cops and see quite how you do things. Literally, guys coming at officers with hammers and you still don't just gun them down. It's not "weakness". It takes a lot bigger man to just stand there, take abuse, risk physical injury and try to calm a guy down than to just pull a trigger "because you were a bit uncomfortable".
Death by policeman is rare outside the US.
Seriously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These countries are no different to the US in the incidents of nutters. The difference is in how many ordinary people are armed (and in some countries, everybody carries a weapon because they were all compulsarily conscripted), and how they are dealt with.
Seriously... the UK. 70 million people. NOT ONE DEATH OR SERIOUS INJURY by shooting in 2012/13/14, despite 6000 armed officers, 10,000 incidents in that year. "Incidents where firearms were discharged"... 3 / 4 / 5.
I would have thought it was clearly than that - please don't keep giving away the stuff we own that we're still selling because it's quite blatantly illegal and we hardly even need to present evidence to prove that in a court of law.
That's ALWAYS been the case. You think this is something new? ROM sites were being shut down every day as far back as the 90's, because THEY ARE ILLEGAL.
All the "abandonware", "well, it's free advertising for their brands" etc. arguments were primitive attempts to justify wholesale copyright infringement.
Note that I do draw a line - there's a difference between a guy who downloads his favourite game for his favourite system that he has in a cupboard still, because it's easier to do that than wire up to a physical ROM cartridge to extract it, and a site offering literally hundreds of thousands of ROMs for every system known to man, none of which they ever owned. But so does Nintendo draw that exact same line.
And they had the nous to realise that these games were still popular and offer them for everything from the Wii up as "Virtual Console" games so people could enjoy the old games again (third-party licensing issues aside, Nintendo can no more distribute someone else's stuff than I can distribute Nintendo's stuff).
Maybe I'm biased against your attitude because not only do I pay for stuff, I don't use things that I don't have a license to. I kind of follow your attitude - "You don't want me to do that... fine, I won't". Except I say that from the point of view of "it's your product and you don't want me to" rather than "I'm going to pretend that I'm a significant investment to you on my own and 'withdraw' the privilege of me playing 90's games that I never paid you for in the first place."
The message is: ROM sites aren't legal, we will sue the people who run them, and get them shut down, especially when you *can* still legally buy those ROMs from us. That's been the same message since 1990-ish. You're 30 years too late on your faux-rage.
I also speak as someone who loves emulation. I have the ROM / TZX / ISO of loads of games. The games I own. The games I still have the discs / systems for. The games I could have made those files for myself. I don't distribute them. I play them for my own nostalgia. I actually own "legal" ROMs too... the ones that StarROMS were selling many years ago, and various software that includes ROMs (some of the Williams classic arcade software from the 90's that includes the full Joust ROMs etc. in an emulator).
And I've also paid for those, or paid for virtual-console titles, etc. too. Because, you know what, if a game is so good that you want to break the law to carry on playing it, maybe it's worth another couple of dollars to the original creators, even if it's 20+ years old, eh? Sure, you may have paid for it back in the day, but if it's that good, it's worth paying a few pennies more to get it again and in a modern, legal format so you can continue to enjoy it, no? And to say "Hey, thanks, Nintendo, these games got me through my childhood and I'm a grown adult now, so I can give you a little bit to say thanks for all those hours of entertainment".
No.
They don't.
And if they do, stop buying them.
But they don't.
Literally, it's "auto-port-forwarding". Any printer that NEEDS that, you don't want. Not even Google Cloud Print requires that.
WPS is entirely unrelated.
UPnP "Discovery" over the local network is entirely unrelated (and not affected by turning off UPnP on the router) - that's the only mention of UPnP that I can find on any of Canon's sites... they are talking about allowing UPnP through the software firewall on a client machine so it can talk over the local network - NOT on the router at all.
A) Do you have UPnP enabled.
B) If yes, turn it off.
UPnP is an *UTTERLY UNNECESSARY* service (speaking as an IT Manager, gamer, and someone who hosts gaming servers etc.), that when exposed to the Internet allows ANY local device to forward ANY network port to ANY IP/port combination with NO authentication whatsoever.
Even privileged ports and local ports.
I can literally redirect your port 139 (e.g. CIFS/SMB) to a host on the Internet if I wanted, or open command/control ports and punch holes through your firewall wherever I want.
All this is is a UPnP flaw that allows you to do the same remotely, but literally any device on your local network can already do it without any logs, authentication, or notification that they are doing so (e.g. your ChromeCast / laptop / Amazon Echo / Nest doorbell could be opening up your telnet port and sending it to themselves once every hour, and you'd pretty much never know anything about it).
Turn it off. Watch how nothing changes and all your systems still work as intended.
And, if you absolutely, 100% must host servers on your own connection (not just "play games" but literally host servers with no matchmaking servers present) then you add a single port-forward yourself and job-done.
P.S. No, this does not affect local device discovery, etc. so your Chromecast etc. will still work perfectly fine on your home network anyway.
Case in point: I've never had UPnP turned on on anything, I have 1000 Steam games that play just fine, plus ChromeCasts and all kinds of kit. Not a single problem.
I think if NZ is anything like the UK, it's nothing to do with magstripe liability.
The second "Chip + PIN" (as we called it) came out, the new deals to all merchants basically said "all liability is yours". Whether Chip, NFC or magstripe.
It was literally "if you want our shiny new, you take responsibility for all fraud in your shop". Which is ridiculous and should have been illegal but these card companies are international and it's hard to apply law to them to combat that when they own the industry.
There's a reason that small shops hate you paying by card and it has nothing to do with the fees, equipment, hassle, etc. It's because if your card later turns out to be stolen, they have to pay for everything they lost and have no comeback. Even if you had the PIN and the transaction was authorised at the time.
So guess where people go when they've stolen a credit card and don't want to be seen on CCTV etc. using it?
Welcome to "why you should have actually voted for things like Obamacare", or even better, a national healthcare system where insurances play no significant part.
I have sat and worked out my pension. If I live to 68, I will be given a pittance so small that it's not worth anything *now* let alone later. There is literally no way to live on what I'll be given.
And I don't own property because it's so incredibly expensive that it's all-but impossible to do so on your own, even though I earn way more than the average worker.
I chose early on in my professional career to therefore ignore anything and everything to do with retirement, saving or anything else. It's just not worth worrying about and, at best, would "take the edge off".
Instead I paid my taxes religiously, worked decent jobs, never had a day unemployed IN MY LIFE. So I may call that back later if I ever need it, via social benefits, like some people do who have done none of those things in their entire life.
Literally, it's just not worth the time thinking about it. I'm going to get nothing for all that. And retirement etc. works only if you have had partner and family for most of your life - then at least you might get a mortgage, own a place, have spare cash enough to save or things to sell later, inheritances coming down to you, children helping you out, etc.
Basically, I'm fucked.
But I will never have to pay for basic healthcare.
Apple sucks. I have never found a single redeeming feature in an Apple product (I manage hundreds, have never owned one personally in my entire life), software, hardware or "design". They are also fucking nasty to do business with (speaking for corporate, and education use).
Microsoft... they're a bit nasty in business but they make decent things. Have you seen how ridiculously easy it is to set up a multi-user network with all kinds of features, replicated storage, hypervisors with failover, etc. etc.? If you think Microsoft "suck", then you've probably only owned their consumer stuff.
Linux... I own a bunch of products. A RPi runs most of my entertainment (RetroPie + tvHeadend + Kodi). I ran a Linux desktop personally for nearly 10 years (while managing Windows networks... no Linux isn't "friendly" enough to do that simply for most places). I didn't suffer at all, and now I run Windows with VMWare (HyperV is good but it's not as good as VMWare for desktop usage), with Windows and Linux VMs inside it.
iOS - sucks. See Apple.
Android - not perfect but more than good enough for a consumer OS (proven by being one of the widest deployed consumer OS's ever). I wouldn't use it for a serious desktop machine, but it's fine for day-to-day-usage.
But, Apple? Honestly? I can't find a single redeeming feature, or even a "first" that's actually down to them.
Found it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-...
And my comment:
A GBP1bn wind-farm.
"It can generate 659 megawatts"
Current price paid on the energy markets per megawatt-hour: GBP65.36
(Source: https://www.apolloenergy.co.uk... - year ahead electricity price for 2018)
GBP1bn will therefore take 1,000,000,000 / 65.36 =
15,299,877 hours to pay back, at full generative capacity.
15,299,877 hours = 637,495 days = 1,746 years.
So... if this windfarm is able to run at full capacity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, until the year 3764, without any further ongoing costs, then it might just pay back the amount it cost to build.
Last time I commented on an article, it was about a GBP 1bn wind-farm that would take nearly 3000 years to pay itself back at even 100% generation, zero ongoing maintenance, and an ever-increasing pence-per-kwh price.
Just because it's there, doesn't mean that it's in any way sensible.
It's on arxiv. It's almost certainly trash.
It says it's rotating. Let's accept that. It said its orbit isn't as you would predict.
It says that this **could** be attributable to solar pressure.
It says that this **could** be because it's (almost certainly) a thin flat shape which acts as a light sail.
It says that we make this kind of thing (and we've launch an awful lot of stuff).
It makes absolutely no analysis of whether such a thing could be naturally occurring (if asteroids collide, you can be sure that just about any shape could fall off the debris and rumble in an odd orbit, and maybe even be bi-coloured - inside and outside colours from the object it breaks off from). It doesn't discuss any alternative in any real consideration.
It then immediately attributes it to alien synthetic advanced hardware such as a lightsail. That's just ludicrous.
It then further goes on to suggest it's actually an alien probe here to listen to us. It's bunk.
It literally says:
"On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object in the Solar
System, âOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) was discovered by the
PAN-STARRS1 survey"
The paper is dated November 1st. In 13 days these people have looked at the FIRST EVER INTERSTELLAR OBJECT that we've literally only just been able to detect and come to the conclusion that it can only reasonably be part of an alien civilisation's UFO. With no context, alternative, or data beyond orbit and periodicity.
It's bunk. If anything, it's someone's idea of a Halloween joke in their otherwise-serious paper.
Your argument is flawed.
Every time Valve CATCHES a cheater, they get paid again.
Every time they miss one, they don't get paid.
It's therefore in their interest to catch as many as they can, as often as they can, and make the barrier to entry high (i.e. you can't just wander into a free game without having made a purchase of tied in a credit card, etc.).
If a cheater persists for any length of time, Valve get NOTHING for all that disruption, except unhappy customers, for all the time it persists, until they remove the offender.
I have no doubt that they'd rather be paid every time someone needs to re-create a Steam account (which they effectively are - non-purchase accounts are very limited in what they can do) than a one-off identity of a gamer who could be banned for life, but it's vastly in their interest to let that same idiot back in and then IMMEDIATELY ban him.
Cheaters don't persist in gaming because they are spending money, however. They persist because they are stealing / hijacking accounts, or are able to join servers without any kind of initial fee being paid. Having a "free-to-play" game is the problem.
Precisely.
Though it doesn't mean "put in full support for every theoretical platform", coding to the exclusion of other platforms was always a silly idea.
The problem was the link between, say, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. An office product shouldn't care about what OS it's running on and now that you can get it on others, it's actually more saleable. But that was to the detriment of Windows, which held the monopoly because "it's the only thing that runs Office" (in effect).
When the monopoly was in their favour, they adored it. Now that it's not (i.e. they were shut out from other platforms and beaten by cheaper tools that work everywhere), they are all suddenly "behind" not being part of a monopoly. All it shows is that the courts should have taken harsher action, and faster, because it didn't really hurt Microsoft, but it did hurt the market enormously for a long time.
Steam has had the same kind of realisation but never locked itself into an OS - their slow response is more surprising, they could have support Mac and Linux and even mobile platforms an awfully long time ago, without interfering with their primary money-makers (the games and marketplace store).
Platform-specificity is not a good thing, for consumers or for the businesses that enforce it. If you have a service, you want it accessible to as many potential customers as possible. Anything else is artificial, monopolistic and counter-productive.
Someone please tell Apple. Because I see absolutely no reason that you can't have Mac/iPad services work on a PC/tablet, and work better.
And if MacOS really was SUCH a marvellously better OS, then people would be willing to pay for it, no? (In reality, I don't think it is, and Apple know that, and they know that their hardware is nothing special either - if they stopped the exclusivity and allowed MacOS to run on PC or just sell computers that people can choose the OS they want to run at purchase, they'd see huge losses... cheap PC's would kick their hardware offering's backside, and people would - at best - run MacOS on PC and get more out of it.)
All these platform-lock-ins profit only the businesses that enforce them, and only for short-terms, and to the detriment of the consumers. And it's VERY profitable, as Microsoft and Apple have shown, and yet still they "lose" regularly.
I've never worked out how Apple forcing you to "buy" MacOS on their machines (despite being capable of running other OS quite easily) is any different to what Microsoft did/do. Or what Google are being rebuked for with Android. Same for bundling office apps, things like Pages, Garageband, etc. and services like iTunes.
If your service is really that good, you'll let me use it from the platform of my choice.
99.5% of people have Javascript enabled in their browser.
The rest are almost certainly running selective blockers (i.e. block Javascript on particular sites), etc.
They aren't going to lose any significant number of everyday users at all. In fact, I'll be amazed if they see any significant user movement at all.
Why don't you use GMail.... and access it via IMAP?
Or you can pay any domain host for a domain with email... they start are literally pence normally.
You don't / can't run email servers from home anyway (you'll be on SpamHaus policy blacklist because the ISP almost certainly list all their dynamic IP's there), you need an secure outside machine that's on 24/7 with a fixed IP and not listed as being a "home" connection via SpamHaus PBL/XBL etc. Don't even get me started on sending email, you need to be SPF'd up too, really, and a proper reverse DNS entry.
You can get a VPS for a pittance a month, and a ten minute tutorial on, say, Postfix will set it up for you and include forwarding / copying all email to something like GMail or any other provider if you ever need it in the future should something go wrong.
Personally I do the latter. And I can collect via GMail (via IMAP) or via my server direct (via IMAP), they both get copies of all emails. But if you're that worried, almost certainly whoever you hold domains with will have free email forwarding and free/pittance webmail access too if you want.
2012 hardware, and a 12 inch screen?
Yeah, I don't think you understand what they're selling.
Never tried it (don't touch that game) but:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to...
It'll never be "simple" because the games aren't made for Linux. But Steam have just released a similar "official" tool that makes Windows Steam games work on Linux and it works for several thousand games.
Whether it works for the ones YOU want, that's another question entirely.
There's a reason you can't pick up a cheap Cessna, and why you have to go through certifications, and why pilots are decrying the use of drones outside of their (heavily restricted) legal limits.
Nobody cares about what happens to your satellite. It's what it crashes into that's important. A rogue / malfunctioning satellite could easily take out anything - and orbits are getting more and more packed every day and just launching 10,000 things up there carelessly will end in disasters that won't just have you go "Oh well, launch another 10,000" but be brought before people with billion-dollar space programs demanding you never be allowed to launch anything ever again.
You've only got to hit something quite unimportant in the same orbit, and you could bankrupt the company overnight. Hit something that you didn't even really "know" was there and you could be looking at militaries (your own, or foreign) breathing down your neck.
Space is a controlled environment. Media stunts like launching cars on joke orbits aren't really compatible with that. We haven't got to the point that we can de-regulate ordinary airspace, so literally the only thing keeping you "safe" up in space from amateur idiots and commercially-produced tat is sheer volume of space. As that narrows, things get more and more stupid and dangerous.
You can't make cars without abiding by manufacturer regulations. You certainly can't build saleable aircraft without a shed-ton more regulation. Just lobbing things up into space isn't a behaviour that will be tolerated for very long once the first mess-up is made.
P.S. It took SpaceX years and dozens and dozens of test landings where they destroyed drone-boats, rockets, broke off their landing legs, abandoned landings to just plunge into the sea etc. before they got a landing that you can coo over. This stuff isn't "easy" and certainly isn't reliable.
Applying the same principle to something that might share an orbit with an component from your rivals that's so expensive that it might cost your company every profit it's ever made (yeah, right) in order to put something equivalent back up there in reparation? That's not "a different mindset". That's "commercial suicide".
Literally: first hit on Google, 2007:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
"This study is interesting because we now suspect the appendix's purpose is to be a place where gut bacteria can go dormant and wait to re-seed the gut to maintain diversity."
It's been that way for at least 10-20 years, to my knowledge. I'm in no way a medical person, but that's always been the assumption whenever I've asked someone.
The problem here (and the entire problem of the appendix's bad reputation) appears to be that keeping a bunch of bacteria around isn't always the best thing either and things can go wrong. Evolutionarily speaking, sure, they are minor blips that'll be rode out over time. But when an appendix gets infected and bursts, you're gonna spew the nastiest possible bacteria store all over your sterile insides (not just your gut).
And keeping that stuff around give some things / byproducts a chance to creep up to the brain and contribute to Parkinson's by the looks of it.
It's interesting that all this stuff is hinted to be bacterial in origin... maybe people will start to revise their entire "anti-bacterial handwash every two seconds" policies.
Honestly, I've never known people quite so weak in constitution as those people who spend their lives bleaching their environment, sterilising their hands and spraying every surface (large cause of asthma, cleaning chemicals!). And it's not "correlative", it's "causative"... those people aren't bleaching everything BECAUSE they get ill easily, they don't start getting ill a lot until they start doing that as adults and then it affects even unrelated people who live with them too.
You're a being made up mostly of other living things. Those living things are always in combat with the same living things. Your white blood cells etc. are fighting with your own body (e.g. dead cells, cancerous cells, etc.) all day long every day. Your gut is literally attacking and consuming the food you eat and stopping it attacking your body (you only need to leave some food out in a sealed box for a few days to realise what's already in the food). And your appendix is basically bacteria central to call in reserves when your gut starts losing the battle (i.e. you're ill).
* Google, Microsoft, etc. will tell me outright that they are GDPR compliant, and did the same for DPA.
Apple make some good noises, but they have ZERO official confirmation of that. They have a "tool" so you can download your data and inspect it. But that's not compliance, it's just a single solitary feature that you happen to need.
Their own website only ever says "working towards". You cannot get a statement out of them to say they are GDPR compliant. And that's because things like iCloud are - as featured in a Register article once - just AWS, Azure and Google cloud instances couple with their own servers. They have zero idea - or care - where your data ends up.
I work in a school that had 1:1 (i.e. individual pupil) iPads.
We ditched them all this year, after four years of my warning against them.
Apple have ZERO interest in education. None whatsoever. They don't even comply with some basic UK law (i.e. a proper complaints process, provision of a head office address, DPA and now GDPR compliance, etc.... these things are all an uphill battle and you can NEVER get a actual statement saying they're compliant*). We stopped doing business with them not because of the kit, or the expense, or the lack of proper manageability or the technical side (which were my objections), but because they have no interest in education customers and don't have a complaints process and have zero interest in helping us resolve problems which stem from their services and their kit.
People think we get "educational discounts" on it... they aren't worth the effort. People think we can "talk to Apple education department"... there isn't one... literally they didn't exist for the four years we tried (but there is now some semblance of education products, so maybe they have one, but they didn't last year). Support consisted of taking things to an Apple store or phoning them up and going through the "little old grannies" support line who have no idea about managing them en-masse ("Can I have the serial number of the iPad?"... "Actually 400+ of them are affected by the same issue"... "Okay, can you give me their serial numbers..." "Are you fucking kidding me?")
There are apps on the app-store, rating "suitable for all", which are sold as "bypass your school proxy" which pipe all web access through a proxy server. Yet Google Chrome is rated 18 for allowing you to go on websites. And I complained, and Apple *couldn't give a shit*. They literally responded that it's "up to the app creator to set an appropriate age on them". Bang... all the app / parental controls are worthless because you can't limit to just the suitable apps.
After I was able to document and present my history of contact with Apple to my bosses, it was instantly decided that we cannot do business with them. They lost every device we have on-site that's Apple and they were all replaced with cheaper alternatives that are easier to manage and which have responsive companies behind them (Chromebooks, and Google for Education have a WONDERFUL support response, for instance).
Sorry, but Apple have NEVER cared about education in the modern era. The only schools in my country that champion them big are secretly Apple shops that get free service and specialised support in order to promote the brand... but they don't actually care about anyone else.
Honestly, I've NEVER done business with a worse company than Apple, and I've threatened many companies with court action. Apple honestly have never cared one jot about their education customers. I've never used them personally, so I couldn't comment on personal support. Maybe that's good, who knows?
To the point that I filed a formal written complaint to their head office, and they refused to even acknowledge the complaint in writing, the guy who phoned who was the *Irish* "Head of Written Complaints" refused to give me his name, confirm anything in writing, or literally do anything but refer to their support line, who did the same as ever and bounced me around Singaporean, German and American call-centers, with no passing of context of the call in between, and no progress after hours of bouncing around with quite-a-simple problem. There was no follow-up. There was no diagnosis. There was nobody even CAPABLE of answering the question. And that was their only response to a formal written complaint about how bad their support had been to a customer buying hundreds of their devices.
Honestly, I would never have done business with them personally at any point in my life. I certainly wouldn't now. And from a business point of view I will actively reject anything from them. I will never work in another school that uses them as anything other than non-critical touch-toys for tiny kids.
Well, I thought I'd better check my initial reaction, just because it was knee-jerk and I don't keep up with prices.
I literally googled "$799 i3 8Gb Intel HD" and got a bunch of things (so literally, whatever junk people are pushing, not even the best value thing at that price-range).
Turns out I can get a laptop for that price that out-specs the low-end Mac Mini. Or I can spend half and out-spec it on everything but the SSD (1Tb HD instead)... and still get a laptop. If you go desktops, hell, I can go down to a third of that price and still win. And almost always along the way, putting a few dollars more in (which I have PLENTY of scope to do given that I'm spending 1/2 to 1/3rd the price) and you can get a Geforce card, and easily beat out the SSD no problem at all.
Given that a Mac Mini needs a monitor...and a "4K" one if you believe the nonsense....this is possibly the most laughable thing I've seen since... the Mac Mini that is sitting on my desk that was a "server" for many years because nobody realised that it wasn't actually turned on and doing anything (it was supposed to be managing a suite of Macs but they've been under LDAP even since I started this job).
Even that Mac Mini is headed straight for the bin, but I'm sure I can con a few hundred out of some Apple fanatic for something that is basically outclassed by a Raspberry Pi nowadays.
$799 for an i3 with 8GB and Intel HD graphics.
Ahhhhahahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahaha....
Gosh.
If only you could run it in a sandboxed environment so that, despite being "malware" as you claim, you can still safely use it without advertising anything about your machine and/or granting it access to anything that you don't want it to touch.
Like... say... chrooting it into a steam-games-only folder, and whacking permissions around it so it can't do anything interesting and runs as a limited user?
Or are you saying "I disagree with having to use Steam", in which case your comment is really badly worded as it suggests you're quite happy to run it on other OS that don't offer that kind of functionality.