UK police still have "truncheons" (batons/night-sticks). In the 90's they abandoned use of US-style batons as they were too heavy and unwieldy. They do not carry guns at all. There are specialist units akin to calling in a SWAT team, etc. but ordinary police don't carry guns.
This is the problem - if you've never been given something, you don't miss it. The second it's "standard-issue" you'll never be able to prize it out of their hands again.
I wonder how you'd react as a copyright holder for someone telling you that you should just give your creation away for free because you haven't updated it in a while, and not pursue any copyright, trademark etc. infringements on it even so.
Some things are not as easy. Specifically, say you sold your software to a publishing house. They, or you, may own the copyright. Just because you can't sell it yourself any more (because of some exclusive contract with the publisher) doesn't mean you have the right to give it away or re-assign the copyright further. And vice versa. Say you die, and your estate holds the copyright... it's not as simple as just saying "give it away". Say the company that produced it owns the copyright but that company no longer exists and the copyright's been sold on to others. You may not have anyone with the right to distribute the game any more, but you may still have a legal obligation to defend the rights to it.
And variants of your scenario already exist. They are tucked into warranties and unofficial support and designs of OBD reader specific to particular models, etc. but they are there.
Nothing everything is as clear-cut as you might like.
Does it? That's a pretty implicit assumption at the end you have there.
And, sorry, but people run from police EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR. Probably thousands of times. Running away is not EVER justification to shoot. The police are the ones who should know that the best. He might be running away because his rival gang member just appeared behind you and you haven't seen him. He might be running away because you threatened him. For all we know, the guy might have asked for his name and badge number and the officer refused to provide, shot him with a taser and then the guy was trying to escape from what someone he may have had genuine cause to believe was just trying to kill him by PRETENDING to be a cop.
Running "towards" something/someone, possibly. But running away, no. You give chase, you don't shoot.
There's a reason that police procedure manuals are HUGE. And why you can get out of actual crimes just by being arrested in an incorrect manner. Because at those critical points you play by the book because you cannot take account of every situation.
And I'm pretty sure that pulling your gun, firing indiscriminately (8 shots is overkill, and at least 2 went out into the ether where they could have harmed the public), etc. is pretty low down on the list of procedures you are expected to follow as a police officer.
Stop being presumptive. I, as much as anyone, agree that stop means stop and *I* would stop - because I think it's a police officer and they asked me to stop. But there are a billion unknowns and there are also factors which easily affect even the simplest assumption that just because someone yells stop you should stop.
If you're a police officer, the vast majority of people you deal with every day will not be happy to see you, not want to do what you ask, and may well be hiding something. That makes it a deadly situation in which you have to be careful, but also means that you have to evaluate risks at all point.
The risk of a guy you've (allegedly) tasered who is running away? That he might get away. There's no record of violence. There's no threat to the officer. There's little threat to the public. And, as you see in the video, your colleague is just down the road anyway with a vehicle in which you can quickly recapture him.
Even drawing your gun (as an armed officer) would be subject to a disciplinary procedure in that instance in some countries. Let alone actually firing it. Let alone shooting to kill. Let along killing. Let alone all the other alleged actions and inconsistencies in statements just afterwards.
As much as you don't like it, a thug, a thief, a murderer, a rapist have pretty much the same rights as you unless a court decides otherwise. Even if the guy was wanted for murder, armed and dangerous - he was running away and had no visible firearm. He wasn't a threat until he pulled something.
It doesn't matter what the majority do. It matters what the police officer in front of you is doing.
Gunning down a person who is running away from them means they are a high-risk to your self, especially if you're filming, especially if you're providing evidence against them, especially if they could perceive you as a threat.
I have absolutely no fear of police in my country. The average man on the street is infinitely more dangerous to me. I have never had a run-in with police that wasn't amicable, friendly, and a few ended in laughter on both sides - even when I could see their reasoning and could be a risk to them. I've never had cause to be arrested. I've only ever seen weapons on the only armed officers I've ever seen in the UK, who work in airports. Those officers scare me and I stay away from them out of some kind of natural self-preservation. I don't have any reason to be a threat to them, but what they perceive as a threat may differ from my intention. I've never spoken to one. I don't find them approachable. I would not ask them directions, or joke, or even greet them as I would an ordinary police officer.
But to film a police officer of any type (armed or not)? That puts me into their scope (sometimes quite literally in the US!). Though in doing that I'm morally sound, it's also adding tension to the situation and if the guy I'm filming *is* corrupt, murderous, etc. or just having a bad day or thinks he saw me have something else in my hands, then that's my reputation/life at risk too. UK people have had their cameras confiscated and even evidence destroyed in the past (the chief police officer did put out a clarification to all their officers that they are NOT allowed to do that, but that just scares me more - they should already know that they are NOT allowd to do that).
I'm not saying I'd film, or wouldn't do it, but it still needs to be recognised as a risk to the person doing it, whatever the situation, and however good the majority of police are.
And, I'm sorry, I would have to think before I did something like film a police officer deliberately, or ask for their number (which identifies them and which they are required to give on demand and which generally means you intend to report them). I'd probably still do it, out of a sense of moral judgement, but millions of people would not. It's not as simple as it being safe in a "safe" country, and the UK where I live is much safer than the US when it comes to dealing with police.
I last visited the US in 2008. I hold a full UK driving licence and have done since about the same time (I didn't drive until late in life). I've held a full UK passport my entire life.
I freely travelled throughout Europe several times in the past few years and my girlfriend and I go to her home in Italy several times a year.
** Neither of us have ever given those biometrics to get the paperwork necessary.**
As I say, the closest is a photograph taken in a standard photo booth that they say is used for "facial recognition". That was necessary for my last driving licence/passport (shared system) and for her UK driving licence (she has an Italian passport - no biometrics).
The EU and the UK are - contrary to popular US belief - nowhere near as 1984 as you think we are. I have driven, on one journey, through six countries and only stopped once to buy a sticker for the car to allow motorway travel (paid in cash, at no point had to present ANY documentation to cross borders or use roads whatsoever).
My brother does not even have the driving licence or passport. He has ABSOLUTELY no photographic or biometric form of identification whatsoever. He opened a bank account with a birth certificate and an employer's letter just recently.
Sorry to disappoint you, but this is the norm over here in the UK. The last national ID card scheme was SCRAPPED because it was voluntary, so few people signed up and the cards were disabled, the data deleted and the scheme abolished. An official UK government identity scheme.
You can, of course, talk about how many CCTV cameras we have and how free you are. But that's just ignoring simple facts. Hell, I don't even go out of my way to avoid biometrics, but it's entirely optional and voluntary over here. The same throughout the majority of the EU.
We pay tax, I'm 100% legitimately British, my girlfriend is Italian with settlement rights in UK due to EU rules, we exist as normal citizens (natural citizen in my case). And I'll state again - THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL RECORDS OF ANY BIOMETRIC FOR ME. Except possibly one photograph that *I* took in a photo booth.
The same could apply to evolution, to most of cosmology, to archaeology, to Egyptology, how the pyramids were made, to how cells formed, to just about every aspect of science.
It's just sheer ignorance to suggest that it's not worth pursuing.
Science is about looking what's ALREADY out there. Formulating a theory that ties some parts of it together and maybe how it originated. Then testing your theory on other, sometimes unrelated parts of the universe. If they work, great, we have a certain amount of knowledge and ability to predict what might happen next. If they don't, great, we know that we have the wrong idea / made an incorrect correlation somewhere. Both are knowledge you can use to improve your next hypothesis and so get closer to a probable answer.
Without simple bases like these, you can't answer the bigger questions. And suggesting the knowledge is useless because "we'll never know exactly what happened" is like saying that studying an air-crash into the Alps is pointless because "we'll never know exactly what happened"... there's still things to deduce, lessons to learn, knowledge that you can use going forward to improve people's lives.
You're an idiot. And a not particularly forward-thinking one either. Proving that, even only to a certain probability, the Earth, Moon and this object were of the same composition suggests where all of them might have come from. It suggests what to look for. It suggests how planets themselves might form. That suggests how we might find places where planets might be likely to form. That suggests how we look for those places. That suggests what might be interesting areas of the universe.
In the same way that some dickhead can claim that the world just popped into existence 6000 years ago and consider themselves "just as correct" as hundreds of years of scientific study by hundreds of thousands of scholars, you're just as much an idiot to suggest that this knowledge is as worthless as you claim.
And the reason you see so many earth-moon-creation theories (actually hypotheses until they are proven) and papers every month? Because it matters. And because each one - by its disproval - gets us closer to an answer, and builds on the knowledge of the previous, and is an area of intense study by respected scientists. And all that stuff in the news you see about how we've located thousands of planets around foreign stars that we didn't even know were there before, how we've managed to detect Earth-like ones in that, how we might choose candidates to mine in the future? That's all possible because of those papers.
And, even simpler than that, just simple geology here on Earth is improved by that knowledge.
If you don't get that science is merely a way to predict the future using the evidence of the past, you're a fucking moron.
"Passengers must have a biometric passport to use the system."
No different to the UK gates which have the same facility. But nobody is under any obligation to provide biometrics beyond a photo to get a passport. If you don't have a biometric passport (i.e. almost everybody), you have to use the normal channel and not the e-gate.
And I tell you precisely how any people I've ever seen walk through the e-gates at London Stansted, Gatwick or Heathrow (considered the world's busiest airport up until very recently) for the many years they've been in place? About 0.01%. The queues in Stansted border control, in particular, can number several thousand people and STILL barely a handful will go through the e-gates and they do so voluntarily.
Last time I walked through the queue there, someone was trying to get people to use them but acting official and checking if you have an e-passport and getting you to use that queue. I said "No, thanks", and joined the normal queue. By far I was not the only person to do so.
And, to be honest, I've been through Amsterdam several times. I've never needed to pass through an airport. You can drive across the french, dutch and german borders and not even notice you've done so until your phone goes off to tell you what a text message costs in that country.
I guarantee you that they'd barely need to anyway.
To my knowledge, nobody on this planet has an official record of my retina, and not of my fingerprint. Maybe "unofficially", as in they scooped it from something without my consent of knowledge, but I've travelled all over the world and never been required to give either.
I have a current driving licence, a current passport, etc. all the usual gubbins and have not once been required to give either of the above.
I'm sure someone will tell me some rubbish about facial biometrics and the shape of my chin, etc. but I'm not at all convinced on that either and we all know what simple cosmetics can achieve in the cheapest of TV shows.
It's not that biometrics aren't capable of doing this. It's that they AREN'T being deployed. I'm sure if I was an illegal who was getting arrested, etc. that there'd be some record of fingerprints somewhere, but I'm also pretty sure that espionage - as such - isn't hindered in the slighest because they tend to steer clear of entering countries illegally (or visibly), getting caught, and getting arrested. Because, biometrics or not, that's just not a useful thing to be doing, given their remit.
Have you not heard of Guernsey either? It's a British-owned island out in the middle of the sea between England and France and technically in Europe.
Tiny island, population 65,000 and for many years the central hub of almost every EU delivery for Amazon as it was possible to avoid VAT. The money that went through that place was incredible, and hiding behind a historic tax law designed to protect growers of tulips (I believe).
Or Luxembourg? Similar thing, ten times as big (but still a tiny little country), guess how many companies have their EU headquarters there.
By comparison, Singapore is positively huge with 6 million people.
If SSL'ing a site is more than a 10 minute process for you (not including the time to return the cert from the CA after you've sent them the CSR), including anything more than a single restart of the web service (and that doesn't even need to be a full restart with Apache, etc.) then I worry about how you go about it.
SSL sites with existing keys - upgrading the key, or changing the order of allowed cryptography, etc. - that's literally a one-line change (to point to new certificate file, or change the configuration line) and a restart. If the site is visibly down for more than a second or two, I'll be disappointed.
And in terms of CA's, just use the proper ones. If you have need of SSL, then you can spend the annual renewal on a decent CA. It's part of the running costs of having a web presence. Hell, if you're worried, use two different root CAs and if one gets revoked for whatever reason, you can just switch the config to the other.
It's not difficult.
And, you know what? If you have SSL and need SSL then there's a reason it SHOULDN'T be a brainless operation. Because that's just one part of securing the data being transferred.
I do network admin and I only do SSL once a year or even less when the certificates expire. I'm often at a different employer by the time certificate renewal comes up and have to familiarise myself with software I've never used before and never put SSL certs into before. It's not that difficult a process at all.
And your "solution" is exactly what happens already. The reason you get SSL errors if you just enable SSL is because the default cert isn't signed or is only local but it's (usually) there. To get it signed you make a CSR, upload it to your CA, and they send you back a certificate that you plug into. And then the browser decides the quality of that cert and trust chain.
Sorry, mate, but if this is too difficult for you, you shouldn't BE setting up SSL sites. It sounds like you're doing it just to shut user's browsers up when they whinge. That's the EASY part of the process of making sure you're securely handling whatever data they are sending your way.
That pages loads iframes etc. from the local network.
Say, the router configuration page. Let's say certain models of router fail to adequately validate credentials before they apply setting changes you request, etc. and that you can request those settings change via HTTP POST/GET methods.
Yes, some of this SHOULD generate security warnings. But it doesn't always. And that's the problem.
People have had their home routers "hacked" by visiting a webpage which changed their home router DNS settings to a malicious provider. The attackers don't need to do anything on your home network, as such, because you do it for them. XSS vulnerabilities like this have existed for years and no browser has entirely eradicated them.
What makes you think that other devices aren't just as insecure? It takes one default-open hole, one well-known credential, one hidden admin interface on your local network for something as simple as a web page load to cause havoc.
And the point of lots of these devices is to be bale to talk in/out of your network with ease. They only need to send a single UPnP request to pop a port-forward to themselves and you'd barely be able to tell (one of the reasons many people disable UPnP, but I've been on dozens of home networks that have it on by default). And once they are exposed to the world, they become a front-line device on your network.
Consider your home NAS, which might well have port-forwards for it's home-cloud features? Or things like ChromeCast that allow 3rd party browser extensions to stream video (encoded in normal formats and subject to the normal overflows) direct to the ChromeCast over your network. Once you start getting into more and more obscure, never-touched, never-monitored devices, your attack surface is growing all the time.
Every single time something wants to cross the boundary between "sheltered device" and "available to the Internet", you have to see what it's doing or you'll run into this.
This is the whole problem with things like UPnP, default "ALLOW ALL OUT" rules, etc. Devices want to talk out, and they'll punch holes to do it, and you don't have to be a genius here - connect their capabilities to find out what COULD happen.
The Chromecast dongle has your wifi password in it. It has access to your network. It has access to your Google account. It has access to the HDMI port of your TV (which may include Ethernet?). Three of those are DANGEROUS (the fourth probably isn't but a lot of people have said similar things and been wrong).
Now consider that it doesn't even need to be be Google that's malicious / incompetent to be a problem. Oh, look, all Chrome browsers on your local net can discover Chromecasts. And send data. Data encoded in complicated codecs which I've often seen in Changelogs because they allow overflows. Oh, look, third-party apps in Chrome are allowed to jump onto the Chromecast too.
Join the dots. Unless you have security against those steps in the chain, there's nothing stopping the mere presence of a Chromecast dongle on your network being a vulnerability. They cost £30 so I doubt they could have a massively-overarching security audit that covers them for years in the future.
Now apply that to your Nest equipment. To the apps on your phone (that game can read from SD card, allow in-app purchases, send text messages to your friends, whatever.... join the dots on ALL that it can do and see what could potentially happen!). To the junk that you plug into the network or wireless. It's a nightmare. And as soon as you break the line and let those things talk out (or be port-forwarded to) you have an Internet-facing vulnerability that amplifies everything a thousand-fold.
This isn't shocking, unless you've been blind to the potential for the fifty years.
Making things go boom isn't terrorism, but it's treated as such. Reading books about how things could be made to go boom isn't terrorism. Intent is behind terrorism more than any amount of relevant knowledge.
Every driver, however, has a terrorist tool at their hands. You can buy bottles of gas for a pittance. You can't stop the tools because the tools are so damn simple and cheap and basically include every compact source of energy we have and use (I'm waiting for the first electric battery / supercapacitor terrorist, but the energy density is probably still too low to do anything but blow your own head off).
Terrorism is designed to invite terror. To make you fear the people doing it.
By doing what we're doing as a planet now - making terror so terrifying and then beaming it into every home - we're basically playing right into their hands. One guy, with one simple device can make the news worldwide. Even if it's a complete botch (I'll say "shoe bomber", you tell me if you've heard of him, now tell me why you now have to take shoes off in airport security when you NEVER used to have to).
Want to defeat terrorism? Stop giving a shit about them.
The UK was dealing with terrorists willing to bomb cities and bring down planes since the 70's (and a lot further back than that because we were arseholes). We learned how to deal with them - ignore them. Don't stop catching them, but just make their efforts have so little impact that - in this case - they give up the terrorism and become politicians.
IRA bombings in the UK (and London especially) only invited comments like "Fuck, I'll be late for work now" or "Does anyone know which buses are still running?" Stop terrorism being terrifying and you're just some pillock who blew himself up.
It's the same with historical "terrorism". We're all scared of Nazi's and Naziist groups. Want to destroy them overnight? Change the international symbol for toilet to a swastika, and label it a "Nazi". "Where's the Nazi, I need a shit?" Instantly destroys the power in the word and the association it has.
But, no, places like France and Germany continue - over FIFTY YEARS LATER - to ban Nazi-related items. It's a Streisand effect. The best part of my walking-tour of Berlin I did a few years ago - they stop outside a building with a car park. They tell you that's where Hitler's bunker was. You're so fucking terrifying, your legacy is under a car park, mate.
People don't know how to deal with terrorists because they are far too self-centered. "What if *I* was blown up?" Fuck that, what if we allow people to get infamy so easily just because they tried to blow other people up? What if we make terrorism so terrifying they are instantly heroes for our enemies and we cower in fear of them? What if we spend billions on a international manhunt for one man in the public eye proving that MILLIONS of people are scared of one man who did nothing noteworthy himself but orchestrated others? What if we live in a world where terrorists get on the news and science doesn't? Fuck THAT.
Terrorists are cocks. And we're pandering to their media whims, like fucking dickheads. Want to see a proper reaction to terrorism?
I never owned a NES, but even I know just about everything in that article, just from downloading an emulator once (anyone remember Nesticle?).
Where's the "technical" information? The fact that memory mappers exist for the platform, or that it was sprite/palette based graphics is hardly some massive insight to anyone starting down the route of writing an emulator for something of that era.
At least if Steam does go down, hacks exist to run the Steam games outside of Steam. And you can download the compressed files of Steam games at any time, as a Steam owner, and use the backup facility.
With OnLive, you don't even have access to your own configuration or saved games, except through their systems.
You licensed use of several games for a maximum period of three years (go read what "lifetime" access was for a game you purchased).
Probably the most you'd ever get back would be a part of the purchase price proportional to the time you've had them (i.e. if you had access to the games for a year maybe you'd get a 2/3rds refund - after you brought in the lawyers).
One of the reasons that systems like OnLive weren't a good idea for consumers.
I tried OnLive because they gave a "full" game at the time without paying a penny. Mainly to see whether it was worth buying properly. When I read the terms and conditions of the "full" game, I realised I'd have to buy it somewhere else anyway as the game could disappear in a few years and I'd have no recourse, so instead I used OnLive purely as a demo and actually bought the game elsewhere.
The reason they had to fork is because the format is SO binary and tied into the old legacy codebase that - even masquerading behind an XML front - there's no illusion of portability whatsoever.
They were forced to document it, by the EU, and all they did was describe every hack, binary fudge and kludge that went into it so that it was almost impossible to make a compatible format.
When you're talking Office on Mac, it's not a question of just adding Mac UI code and incorporating another platform into the build process. It's replicating all those stupid bit-wise assumptions made throughout the format. It's like WMF used to be - literally just a description of the Windows GDI commands required to replicate the object on the screen (which is why WMFs were capable of containing executable code!). That's pretty much the best analogue to something like MS's "open" XML formats.
I'm not surprised that the Mac versions are staggered by several years and not entirely compatible. That's how long it takes to emulate the Windows-specific fudges in the format.
What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?
0.10p / KWh. (excluding VAT at 5%) = 0.148c / KWh (at current exchange rates). Call it 0.16c in reality, rounding up etc.
And that's just the lowest priced ones (because that's a price comparison site), on average, not including VAT, not including service charges, and tied into long contracts to get that etc.
And we have little solar alternative (the UK isn't great at producing sun, though we do have some).
And of course providers are charging fees for solar users - if you want to push back to the grid, it's horrible to do so for solar as it's so variable and in the wrong "format" for grid energy.
To quote your link - "We're supposed to encourage conservation but it must be cost-effective."
Consider yourself lucky that you have a viable alternative at all.
In anything, I've never seen so much of Liam Neeson since Star Wars.
Ewan has dialled back but I'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with Star Wars and to do with his theatre and TV career instead.
And that's fucking SIR Ewan McGregor and SIR Liam Neeson. For services to drama. They were fucking knighted for it. You don't get much higher than that.
I consider use of profanity not to be an indicator of any of the following:
Laziness Lack of intelligence Lack of articulation Lack of class.
Because you can go out of your way to swear. You can swear and make a fool of yourself. And you can swear in sublimely perfect diction. In fact, some of the best writing and insults I've ever witnessed are exactly the latter. Call it the Stephen Fry syndrome.
The indicator is: Is is JUST swearing and no content? Have I used expletives to bulk up an sentence otherwise devoid of meaning or insight? Or have I used them as a superlative that's informal, on an wildly informal forum, for exaggerated or comic effect?
People who don't swear scare the shit out of me. Honestly. I've met a handful in my life and even the most prim and proper of ladies working in the most exclusive of establishments will resort to a curse in the right circumstances or if they feel the company is suitably informal and won't be offended.
Those that don't swear use it as a personal crusade against the others, but it's such an easy target (precisely because everyone does it) that it means nothing and is usually a form of oneupmanship. "Look at me, I don't swear, aren't I perfect?" While I guarantee you that the upper-classes swear like troopers (most of them have served in the military and therefore are probably among the worst!). Prince Philip has a reputation for it, for fuck's sake.
For reference, I work in an exclusive private school during the day. I am in an environment where it's impossible to swear because of the age of the children (hell, I get told off if I call them "students" rather than "pupils"!) and the prestige of the school. I guarantee you, to a man, every member of staff right up to the very top will eff and blind in the staffroom. No matter their background, no matter their upbringing and no matter their outward appearance. All are highly educated. Most are privately-educated themselves. Hell, the groundsman is a former pupil from 50 years ago that has a diction I can only emulate in jest. And you've never heard swearing such as that present in the staffroom, I assure you, and not aimed at anything (or anyone) in particular but used as superlative.
Swearing is not some class-bound element of society, nor tied to the lack of an appropriate vocabulary except in the most extreme examples. It's a superlative, usually with plosive sounds which actually "feel" better than any more moderate alternative.
"Gosh darn it" strips the sentence of every harsh syllable. "God damn it!" doesn't.
The harsher the plosives and "k" sounds, the worst the swearword, for a reason - it "sounds" better. Did you know that swearing while holding your hand in freezing ice-cold water (or any pain experiment) actually increases your pain response? Mock-swearing doesn't. Your brain is able to tell the difference and is MORE satisfied and distracted if you're allowed to swear properly. It's a confirmed, physical, biological, neurological effect. Google Stephen Fry again if you need to witness it, along with Brian Blessed.
Similarly, almost all swearing is tension relief coupled with plosives for superlative effect, and in some cultures (I'm British) is seen as a natural part of expression and even bonding. If I don't swear in front of you eventually, I'm being incredibly formal or harsh - and therefore impersonal. I'd be hard pressed to feel comfortable in an adult's presence that I couldn't swear in front of. Sure, we all do the gentle introduction rather than going straight for the c-word in front of a stranger but it's honestly nothing of import.
Slashdot Mirror
And come full-circle.
It works elsewhere just as you describe.
UK police still have "truncheons" (batons/night-sticks). In the 90's they abandoned use of US-style batons as they were too heavy and unwieldy. They do not carry guns at all. There are specialist units akin to calling in a SWAT team, etc. but ordinary police don't carry guns.
This is the problem - if you've never been given something, you don't miss it. The second it's "standard-issue" you'll never be able to prize it out of their hands again.
I wonder how you'd react as a copyright holder for someone telling you that you should just give your creation away for free because you haven't updated it in a while, and not pursue any copyright, trademark etc. infringements on it even so.
Some things are not as easy. Specifically, say you sold your software to a publishing house. They, or you, may own the copyright. Just because you can't sell it yourself any more (because of some exclusive contract with the publisher) doesn't mean you have the right to give it away or re-assign the copyright further. And vice versa. Say you die, and your estate holds the copyright... it's not as simple as just saying "give it away". Say the company that produced it owns the copyright but that company no longer exists and the copyright's been sold on to others. You may not have anyone with the right to distribute the game any more, but you may still have a legal obligation to defend the rights to it.
And variants of your scenario already exist. They are tucked into warranties and unofficial support and designs of OBD reader specific to particular models, etc. but they are there.
Nothing everything is as clear-cut as you might like.
"Stop means stop and get on the damn ground."
Does it? That's a pretty implicit assumption at the end you have there.
And, sorry, but people run from police EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR. Probably thousands of times. Running away is not EVER justification to shoot. The police are the ones who should know that the best. He might be running away because his rival gang member just appeared behind you and you haven't seen him. He might be running away because you threatened him. For all we know, the guy might have asked for his name and badge number and the officer refused to provide, shot him with a taser and then the guy was trying to escape from what someone he may have had genuine cause to believe was just trying to kill him by PRETENDING to be a cop.
Running "towards" something/someone, possibly. But running away, no. You give chase, you don't shoot.
There's a reason that police procedure manuals are HUGE. And why you can get out of actual crimes just by being arrested in an incorrect manner. Because at those critical points you play by the book because you cannot take account of every situation.
And I'm pretty sure that pulling your gun, firing indiscriminately (8 shots is overkill, and at least 2 went out into the ether where they could have harmed the public), etc. is pretty low down on the list of procedures you are expected to follow as a police officer.
Stop being presumptive. I, as much as anyone, agree that stop means stop and *I* would stop - because I think it's a police officer and they asked me to stop. But there are a billion unknowns and there are also factors which easily affect even the simplest assumption that just because someone yells stop you should stop.
If you're a police officer, the vast majority of people you deal with every day will not be happy to see you, not want to do what you ask, and may well be hiding something. That makes it a deadly situation in which you have to be careful, but also means that you have to evaluate risks at all point.
The risk of a guy you've (allegedly) tasered who is running away? That he might get away. There's no record of violence. There's no threat to the officer. There's little threat to the public. And, as you see in the video, your colleague is just down the road anyway with a vehicle in which you can quickly recapture him.
Even drawing your gun (as an armed officer) would be subject to a disciplinary procedure in that instance in some countries. Let alone actually firing it. Let alone shooting to kill. Let along killing. Let alone all the other alleged actions and inconsistencies in statements just afterwards.
As much as you don't like it, a thug, a thief, a murderer, a rapist have pretty much the same rights as you unless a court decides otherwise. Even if the guy was wanted for murder, armed and dangerous - he was running away and had no visible firearm. He wasn't a threat until he pulled something.
It doesn't matter what the majority do. It matters what the police officer in front of you is doing.
Gunning down a person who is running away from them means they are a high-risk to your self, especially if you're filming, especially if you're providing evidence against them, especially if they could perceive you as a threat.
I have absolutely no fear of police in my country. The average man on the street is infinitely more dangerous to me. I have never had a run-in with police that wasn't amicable, friendly, and a few ended in laughter on both sides - even when I could see their reasoning and could be a risk to them. I've never had cause to be arrested. I've only ever seen weapons on the only armed officers I've ever seen in the UK, who work in airports. Those officers scare me and I stay away from them out of some kind of natural self-preservation. I don't have any reason to be a threat to them, but what they perceive as a threat may differ from my intention. I've never spoken to one. I don't find them approachable. I would not ask them directions, or joke, or even greet them as I would an ordinary police officer.
But to film a police officer of any type (armed or not)? That puts me into their scope (sometimes quite literally in the US!). Though in doing that I'm morally sound, it's also adding tension to the situation and if the guy I'm filming *is* corrupt, murderous, etc. or just having a bad day or thinks he saw me have something else in my hands, then that's my reputation/life at risk too. UK people have had their cameras confiscated and even evidence destroyed in the past (the chief police officer did put out a clarification to all their officers that they are NOT allowed to do that, but that just scares me more - they should already know that they are NOT allowd to do that).
I'm not saying I'd film, or wouldn't do it, but it still needs to be recognised as a risk to the person doing it, whatever the situation, and however good the majority of police are.
And, I'm sorry, I would have to think before I did something like film a police officer deliberately, or ask for their number (which identifies them and which they are required to give on demand and which generally means you intend to report them). I'd probably still do it, out of a sense of moral judgement, but millions of people would not. It's not as simple as it being safe in a "safe" country, and the UK where I live is much safer than the US when it comes to dealing with police.
I last visited the US in 2008.
I hold a full UK driving licence and have done since about the same time (I didn't drive until late in life).
I've held a full UK passport my entire life.
I freely travelled throughout Europe several times in the past few years and my girlfriend and I go to her home in Italy several times a year.
** Neither of us have ever given those biometrics to get the paperwork necessary.**
As I say, the closest is a photograph taken in a standard photo booth that they say is used for "facial recognition". That was necessary for my last driving licence/passport (shared system) and for her UK driving licence (she has an Italian passport - no biometrics).
The EU and the UK are - contrary to popular US belief - nowhere near as 1984 as you think we are. I have driven, on one journey, through six countries and only stopped once to buy a sticker for the car to allow motorway travel (paid in cash, at no point had to present ANY documentation to cross borders or use roads whatsoever).
My brother does not even have the driving licence or passport. He has ABSOLUTELY no photographic or biometric form of identification whatsoever. He opened a bank account with a birth certificate and an employer's letter just recently.
Sorry to disappoint you, but this is the norm over here in the UK. The last national ID card scheme was SCRAPPED because it was voluntary, so few people signed up and the cards were disabled, the data deleted and the scheme abolished. An official UK government identity scheme.
You can, of course, talk about how many CCTV cameras we have and how free you are. But that's just ignoring simple facts. Hell, I don't even go out of my way to avoid biometrics, but it's entirely optional and voluntary over here. The same throughout the majority of the EU.
We pay tax, I'm 100% legitimately British, my girlfriend is Italian with settlement rights in UK due to EU rules, we exist as normal citizens (natural citizen in my case). And I'll state again - THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL RECORDS OF ANY BIOMETRIC FOR ME. Except possibly one photograph that *I* took in a photo booth.
The same could apply to evolution, to most of cosmology, to archaeology, to Egyptology, how the pyramids were made, to how cells formed, to just about every aspect of science.
It's just sheer ignorance to suggest that it's not worth pursuing.
Science is about looking what's ALREADY out there. Formulating a theory that ties some parts of it together and maybe how it originated.
Then testing your theory on other, sometimes unrelated parts of the universe. If they work, great, we have a certain amount of knowledge and ability to predict what might happen next. If they don't, great, we know that we have the wrong idea / made an incorrect correlation somewhere. Both are knowledge you can use to improve your next hypothesis and so get closer to a probable answer.
Without simple bases like these, you can't answer the bigger questions. And suggesting the knowledge is useless because "we'll never know exactly what happened" is like saying that studying an air-crash into the Alps is pointless because "we'll never know exactly what happened"... there's still things to deduce, lessons to learn, knowledge that you can use going forward to improve people's lives.
You're an idiot. And a not particularly forward-thinking one either. Proving that, even only to a certain probability, the Earth, Moon and this object were of the same composition suggests where all of them might have come from. It suggests what to look for. It suggests how planets themselves might form. That suggests how we might find places where planets might be likely to form. That suggests how we look for those places. That suggests what might be interesting areas of the universe.
In the same way that some dickhead can claim that the world just popped into existence 6000 years ago and consider themselves "just as correct" as hundreds of years of scientific study by hundreds of thousands of scholars, you're just as much an idiot to suggest that this knowledge is as worthless as you claim.
And the reason you see so many earth-moon-creation theories (actually hypotheses until they are proven) and papers every month? Because it matters. And because each one - by its disproval - gets us closer to an answer, and builds on the knowledge of the previous, and is an area of intense study by respected scientists. And all that stuff in the news you see about how we've located thousands of planets around foreign stars that we didn't even know were there before, how we've managed to detect Earth-like ones in that, how we might choose candidates to mine in the future? That's all possible because of those papers.
And, even simpler than that, just simple geology here on Earth is improved by that knowledge.
If you don't get that science is merely a way to predict the future using the evidence of the past, you're a fucking moron.
"Passengers must have a biometric passport to use the system."
No different to the UK gates which have the same facility. But nobody is under any obligation to provide biometrics beyond a photo to get a passport. If you don't have a biometric passport (i.e. almost everybody), you have to use the normal channel and not the e-gate.
And I tell you precisely how any people I've ever seen walk through the e-gates at London Stansted, Gatwick or Heathrow (considered the world's busiest airport up until very recently) for the many years they've been in place? About 0.01%. The queues in Stansted border control, in particular, can number several thousand people and STILL barely a handful will go through the e-gates and they do so voluntarily.
Last time I walked through the queue there, someone was trying to get people to use them but acting official and checking if you have an e-passport and getting you to use that queue. I said "No, thanks", and joined the normal queue. By far I was not the only person to do so.
And, to be honest, I've been through Amsterdam several times. I've never needed to pass through an airport. You can drive across the french, dutch and german borders and not even notice you've done so until your phone goes off to tell you what a text message costs in that country.
I guarantee you that they'd barely need to anyway.
To my knowledge, nobody on this planet has an official record of my retina, and not of my fingerprint. Maybe "unofficially", as in they scooped it from something without my consent of knowledge, but I've travelled all over the world and never been required to give either.
I have a current driving licence, a current passport, etc. all the usual gubbins and have not once been required to give either of the above.
I'm sure someone will tell me some rubbish about facial biometrics and the shape of my chin, etc. but I'm not at all convinced on that either and we all know what simple cosmetics can achieve in the cheapest of TV shows.
It's not that biometrics aren't capable of doing this. It's that they AREN'T being deployed. I'm sure if I was an illegal who was getting arrested, etc. that there'd be some record of fingerprints somewhere, but I'm also pretty sure that espionage - as such - isn't hindered in the slighest because they tend to steer clear of entering countries illegally (or visibly), getting caught, and getting arrested. Because, biometrics or not, that's just not a useful thing to be doing, given their remit.
Have you not heard of Guernsey either? It's a British-owned island out in the middle of the sea between England and France and technically in Europe.
Tiny island, population 65,000 and for many years the central hub of almost every EU delivery for Amazon as it was possible to avoid VAT. The money that went through that place was incredible, and hiding behind a historic tax law designed to protect growers of tulips (I believe).
Or Luxembourg? Similar thing, ten times as big (but still a tiny little country), guess how many companies have their EU headquarters there.
By comparison, Singapore is positively huge with 6 million people.
If SSL'ing a site is more than a 10 minute process for you (not including the time to return the cert from the CA after you've sent them the CSR), including anything more than a single restart of the web service (and that doesn't even need to be a full restart with Apache, etc.) then I worry about how you go about it.
SSL sites with existing keys - upgrading the key, or changing the order of allowed cryptography, etc. - that's literally a one-line change (to point to new certificate file, or change the configuration line) and a restart. If the site is visibly down for more than a second or two, I'll be disappointed.
And in terms of CA's, just use the proper ones. If you have need of SSL, then you can spend the annual renewal on a decent CA. It's part of the running costs of having a web presence. Hell, if you're worried, use two different root CAs and if one gets revoked for whatever reason, you can just switch the config to the other.
It's not difficult.
And, you know what? If you have SSL and need SSL then there's a reason it SHOULDN'T be a brainless operation. Because that's just one part of securing the data being transferred.
I do network admin and I only do SSL once a year or even less when the certificates expire. I'm often at a different employer by the time certificate renewal comes up and have to familiarise myself with software I've never used before and never put SSL certs into before. It's not that difficult a process at all.
And your "solution" is exactly what happens already. The reason you get SSL errors if you just enable SSL is because the default cert isn't signed or is only local but it's (usually) there. To get it signed you make a CSR, upload it to your CA, and they send you back a certificate that you plug into. And then the browser decides the quality of that cert and trust chain.
Sorry, mate, but if this is too difficult for you, you shouldn't BE setting up SSL sites. It sounds like you're doing it just to shut user's browsers up when they whinge. That's the EASY part of the process of making sure you're securely handling whatever data they are sending your way.
Visit a web page.
That pages loads iframes etc. from the local network.
Say, the router configuration page. Let's say certain models of router fail to adequately validate credentials before they apply setting changes you request, etc. and that you can request those settings change via HTTP POST/GET methods.
Yes, some of this SHOULD generate security warnings. But it doesn't always. And that's the problem.
People have had their home routers "hacked" by visiting a webpage which changed their home router DNS settings to a malicious provider. The attackers don't need to do anything on your home network, as such, because you do it for them. XSS vulnerabilities like this have existed for years and no browser has entirely eradicated them.
What makes you think that other devices aren't just as insecure? It takes one default-open hole, one well-known credential, one hidden admin interface on your local network for something as simple as a web page load to cause havoc.
And the point of lots of these devices is to be bale to talk in/out of your network with ease. They only need to send a single UPnP request to pop a port-forward to themselves and you'd barely be able to tell (one of the reasons many people disable UPnP, but I've been on dozens of home networks that have it on by default). And once they are exposed to the world, they become a front-line device on your network.
Consider your home NAS, which might well have port-forwards for it's home-cloud features? Or things like ChromeCast that allow 3rd party browser extensions to stream video (encoded in normal formats and subject to the normal overflows) direct to the ChromeCast over your network. Once you start getting into more and more obscure, never-touched, never-monitored devices, your attack surface is growing all the time.
Every single time something wants to cross the boundary between "sheltered device" and "available to the Internet", you have to see what it's doing or you'll run into this.
This is the whole problem with things like UPnP, default "ALLOW ALL OUT" rules, etc. Devices want to talk out, and they'll punch holes to do it, and you don't have to be a genius here - connect their capabilities to find out what COULD happen.
The Chromecast dongle has your wifi password in it. It has access to your network. It has access to your Google account. It has access to the HDMI port of your TV (which may include Ethernet?). Three of those are DANGEROUS (the fourth probably isn't but a lot of people have said similar things and been wrong).
Now consider that it doesn't even need to be be Google that's malicious / incompetent to be a problem. Oh, look, all Chrome browsers on your local net can discover Chromecasts. And send data. Data encoded in complicated codecs which I've often seen in Changelogs because they allow overflows. Oh, look, third-party apps in Chrome are allowed to jump onto the Chromecast too.
Join the dots. Unless you have security against those steps in the chain, there's nothing stopping the mere presence of a Chromecast dongle on your network being a vulnerability. They cost £30 so I doubt they could have a massively-overarching security audit that covers them for years in the future.
Now apply that to your Nest equipment. To the apps on your phone (that game can read from SD card, allow in-app purchases, send text messages to your friends, whatever.... join the dots on ALL that it can do and see what could potentially happen!). To the junk that you plug into the network or wireless. It's a nightmare. And as soon as you break the line and let those things talk out (or be port-forwarded to) you have an Internet-facing vulnerability that amplifies everything a thousand-fold.
This isn't shocking, unless you've been blind to the potential for the fifty years.
Making things go boom isn't terrorism, but it's treated as such. Reading books about how things could be made to go boom isn't terrorism. Intent is behind terrorism more than any amount of relevant knowledge.
Every driver, however, has a terrorist tool at their hands. You can buy bottles of gas for a pittance. You can't stop the tools because the tools are so damn simple and cheap and basically include every compact source of energy we have and use (I'm waiting for the first electric battery / supercapacitor terrorist, but the energy density is probably still too low to do anything but blow your own head off).
Terrorism is designed to invite terror. To make you fear the people doing it.
By doing what we're doing as a planet now - making terror so terrifying and then beaming it into every home - we're basically playing right into their hands. One guy, with one simple device can make the news worldwide. Even if it's a complete botch (I'll say "shoe bomber", you tell me if you've heard of him, now tell me why you now have to take shoes off in airport security when you NEVER used to have to).
Want to defeat terrorism? Stop giving a shit about them.
The UK was dealing with terrorists willing to bomb cities and bring down planes since the 70's (and a lot further back than that because we were arseholes). We learned how to deal with them - ignore them. Don't stop catching them, but just make their efforts have so little impact that - in this case - they give up the terrorism and become politicians.
IRA bombings in the UK (and London especially) only invited comments like "Fuck, I'll be late for work now" or "Does anyone know which buses are still running?" Stop terrorism being terrifying and you're just some pillock who blew himself up.
It's the same with historical "terrorism". We're all scared of Nazi's and Naziist groups. Want to destroy them overnight? Change the international symbol for toilet to a swastika, and label it a "Nazi". "Where's the Nazi, I need a shit?" Instantly destroys the power in the word and the association it has.
But, no, places like France and Germany continue - over FIFTY YEARS LATER - to ban Nazi-related items. It's a Streisand effect. The best part of my walking-tour of Berlin I did a few years ago - they stop outside a building with a car park. They tell you that's where Hitler's bunker was. You're so fucking terrifying, your legacy is under a car park, mate.
People don't know how to deal with terrorists because they are far too self-centered. "What if *I* was blown up?" Fuck that, what if we allow people to get infamy so easily just because they tried to blow other people up? What if we make terrorism so terrifying they are instantly heroes for our enemies and we cower in fear of them? What if we spend billions on a international manhunt for one man in the public eye proving that MILLIONS of people are scared of one man who did nothing noteworthy himself but orchestrated others? What if we live in a world where terrorists get on the news and science doesn't? Fuck THAT.
Terrorists are cocks. And we're pandering to their media whims, like fucking dickheads. Want to see a proper reaction to terrorism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You beat terrorists by removing the terror. Then they have nothing left.
I never owned a NES, but even I know just about everything in that article, just from downloading an emulator once (anyone remember Nesticle?).
Where's the "technical" information? The fact that memory mappers exist for the platform, or that it was sprite/palette based graphics is hardly some massive insight to anyone starting down the route of writing an emulator for something of that era.
At least if Steam does go down, hacks exist to run the Steam games outside of Steam. And you can download the compressed files of Steam games at any time, as a Steam owner, and use the backup facility.
With OnLive, you don't even have access to your own configuration or saved games, except through their systems.
Nope.
You licensed use of several games for a maximum period of three years (go read what "lifetime" access was for a game you purchased).
Probably the most you'd ever get back would be a part of the purchase price proportional to the time you've had them (i.e. if you had access to the games for a year maybe you'd get a 2/3rds refund - after you brought in the lawyers).
One of the reasons that systems like OnLive weren't a good idea for consumers.
I tried OnLive because they gave a "full" game at the time without paying a penny. Mainly to see whether it was worth buying properly. When I read the terms and conditions of the "full" game, I realised I'd have to buy it somewhere else anyway as the game could disappear in a few years and I'd have no recourse, so instead I used OnLive purely as a demo and actually bought the game elsewhere.
"Fix your shit once-and-for-all and we might deal with you again."
That's not really an endorsement, any way you look at it.
Also a k-sound. With a harsh-ending 't' too.
Have you seen OOXML?
The reason they had to fork is because the format is SO binary and tied into the old legacy codebase that - even masquerading behind an XML front - there's no illusion of portability whatsoever.
They were forced to document it, by the EU, and all they did was describe every hack, binary fudge and kludge that went into it so that it was almost impossible to make a compatible format.
When you're talking Office on Mac, it's not a question of just adding Mac UI code and incorporating another platform into the build process. It's replicating all those stupid bit-wise assumptions made throughout the format. It's like WMF used to be - literally just a description of the Windows GDI commands required to replicate the object on the screen (which is why WMFs were capable of containing executable code!). That's pretty much the best analogue to something like MS's "open" XML formats.
I'm not surprised that the Mac versions are staggered by several years and not entirely compatible. That's how long it takes to emulate the Windows-specific fudges in the format.
What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?
That's my cue.
Now to stop reading for over 24 hours while all the poor April Fool's junk slams the front page over and over.
It's now an annual ritual. See you at the weekend, guys.
Boo hoo.
http://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_...
0.10p / KWh. (excluding VAT at 5%) = 0.148c / KWh (at current exchange rates). Call it 0.16c in reality, rounding up etc.
And that's just the lowest priced ones (because that's a price comparison site), on average, not including VAT, not including service charges, and tied into long contracts to get that etc.
And we have little solar alternative (the UK isn't great at producing sun, though we do have some).
And of course providers are charging fees for solar users - if you want to push back to the grid, it's horrible to do so for solar as it's so variable and in the wrong "format" for grid energy.
To quote your link - "We're supposed to encourage conservation but it must be cost-effective."
Consider yourself lucky that you have a viable alternative at all.
5%, in one of the sunniest states there is.
Seriously, guys, that's just pathetic. And that's considered newsworthy?
Wow. Talk about picking the wrong forum.
Unless you're interested in starving geeks, love, you've come to the wrong place.
In anything, I've never seen so much of Liam Neeson since Star Wars.
Ewan has dialled back but I'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with Star Wars and to do with his theatre and TV career instead.
And that's fucking SIR Ewan McGregor and SIR Liam Neeson. For services to drama. They were fucking knighted for it. You don't get much higher than that.
I consider use of profanity not to be an indicator of any of the following:
Laziness
Lack of intelligence
Lack of articulation
Lack of class.
Because you can go out of your way to swear. You can swear and make a fool of yourself. And you can swear in sublimely perfect diction. In fact, some of the best writing and insults I've ever witnessed are exactly the latter. Call it the Stephen Fry syndrome.
The indicator is: Is is JUST swearing and no content? Have I used expletives to bulk up an sentence otherwise devoid of meaning or insight? Or have I used them as a superlative that's informal, on an wildly informal forum, for exaggerated or comic effect?
People who don't swear scare the shit out of me. Honestly. I've met a handful in my life and even the most prim and proper of ladies working in the most exclusive of establishments will resort to a curse in the right circumstances or if they feel the company is suitably informal and won't be offended.
Those that don't swear use it as a personal crusade against the others, but it's such an easy target (precisely because everyone does it) that it means nothing and is usually a form of oneupmanship. "Look at me, I don't swear, aren't I perfect?" While I guarantee you that the upper-classes swear like troopers (most of them have served in the military and therefore are probably among the worst!). Prince Philip has a reputation for it, for fuck's sake.
For reference, I work in an exclusive private school during the day. I am in an environment where it's impossible to swear because of the age of the children (hell, I get told off if I call them "students" rather than "pupils"!) and the prestige of the school. I guarantee you, to a man, every member of staff right up to the very top will eff and blind in the staffroom. No matter their background, no matter their upbringing and no matter their outward appearance. All are highly educated. Most are privately-educated themselves. Hell, the groundsman is a former pupil from 50 years ago that has a diction I can only emulate in jest. And you've never heard swearing such as that present in the staffroom, I assure you, and not aimed at anything (or anyone) in particular but used as superlative.
Swearing is not some class-bound element of society, nor tied to the lack of an appropriate vocabulary except in the most extreme examples. It's a superlative, usually with plosive sounds which actually "feel" better than any more moderate alternative.
"Gosh darn it" strips the sentence of every harsh syllable.
"God damn it!" doesn't.
The harsher the plosives and "k" sounds, the worst the swearword, for a reason - it "sounds" better. Did you know that swearing while holding your hand in freezing ice-cold water (or any pain experiment) actually increases your pain response? Mock-swearing doesn't. Your brain is able to tell the difference and is MORE satisfied and distracted if you're allowed to swear properly. It's a confirmed, physical, biological, neurological effect. Google Stephen Fry again if you need to witness it, along with Brian Blessed.
Similarly, almost all swearing is tension relief coupled with plosives for superlative effect, and in some cultures (I'm British) is seen as a natural part of expression and even bonding. If I don't swear in front of you eventually, I'm being incredibly formal or harsh - and therefore impersonal. I'd be hard pressed to feel comfortable in an adult's presence that I couldn't swear in front of. Sure, we all do the gentle introduction rather than going straight for the c-word in front of a stranger but it's honestly nothing of import.
So, to summarise, you're fucking wrong.