Wifi sniffing is what you have to do to get Mac Addresses and SSID's for Geolocation, as well as any sort of WiFi related work these days (Thanks, Dumb Bastards who turn off SSID broadcast!). At core, that's all Google was collecting, a basic WiFi sniff. I have to do it all the time if I want to figure out what jerk is invisibly camping the section of spectrum I'm using. And in classic Google fashion, they probably figured they could sort through and filter out the data they needed back at Google Central, rather than doing it in-car.
Honestly, the most shocking thing is the public's ignorance of the technology they use every day.
It seems like the sort of fine that would get on the record that Google was being uncooperative. In the future, the FCC can use this to convince judges of larger fines or stronger enforcement provisions to convince Google to live up to its data release requirements.
One interpretation is that asking for the password is not illegal under current law. Another holds that the Facebook TOS forbidding said situation is enough that in other situations it would be considered hacking, which is illegal.
Though as a nice side note, if the article is correct they were going to fire her for something they thought she posted. Giving up her FB password would have prevented her from being fired, but her refusal to give up the password isn't why she was fired.
If you haven't lived in California, it is littered with signs for "compounds known to the state of California to cause cancer." It's hard to buy a piece of furniture, new car, or just walk into a building, without encountering one of those signs. The waiting room at my grandmother's funeral had two of the signs. We all thought that must be good business for them. It's a longstanding joke with Californians.
Which is not to say that they're incorrect in this case necessarily. It's just that something being labeled as "known to the state of California to cause cancer" doesn't actually increase your risks of getting cancer.
Flash and Unity are also good choices. Unity supports C#, Javascript, or several others natively. Flash's Actionscript is an offshoot of Javascript, albeit an odd one. The physics themselves involved in gravity simulations are very, very simple to model. If only one body is moving (and to work as a game, only one body should be moving), just have the projectile iterate over all of the objects in the gravity list every update. Velocity += ( Distance * Mass * Scalar ) ^2
However, he should realize that no matter the choice of engine, his game is going to look terrible. It will be a black dot on a white background at best. As much effort as he will put into making the coding side of things work, an artist would need to put into making the visuals work. And further, if he hasn't developed a video game before, a full version will be a tremendous amount of work more than he is expecting. The details really get you. How do you handle score updating? How do you reset for new games? Change state between shots? Handling player-side options? Multiple levels? Oh, you want a visual effect on colliding with non-moving gravity wells. How are those visuals triggered? How does the game stay lost-but-not-lost yet? There is just a lot more that goes into game development than people seem to initially estimate.
Besides, you shouldn't deal with graphics until you know if the core is solid and entertaining. Consider this a first iteration, to be gone through as fast as possible. Prove out the fun first, before investing in figuring out the graphics.
I actually made a version of this as an experiment in Unity. The trajectory of the projectile has such sensitive interdependence upon initial conditions (read, chaos), that it wasn't fun to play. Most people have problems with simple parabolas. The multiplicative effects of multiple gravity sources takes it outside the realm of the pleasurable.
If he is going to do it 1: Keep the gravitational sources stable. Otherwise it's just a mess. 2: Give the player some control over the projectile after firing. Even slight amounts of control can make all of the difference.
To be fair, Apple had the Apple trademark pretty clear and in the green WRT computers. Trademarks are only applicable in the realm that the business operates under. Apple Computers only operated in the realm of computers, and Apple Music only operated in the music realm. There was no need for legal resolution until Apple Computers started venturing into the realm of sound / quicktime / etc.
iThing is problematic, in that it is a form of branding that only falls on the edge of trademark law. Hence, branding the iPod as i*** was a dicey choice, but a highly memorable one that has served them well. Cisco's iPhone trademark was admitted to be abandoned, with the duration of abandonment the only thing under question.
I love how the idea that anything running counter to the concepts of mass / length / time dilation happening at high speeds with relative simultaneity is considered insane. Oh, that's demonstrably insane, but Heisenberg and light-speed limitations on information transmittal, THOSE are the new rational. And that's not even getting into quantum effects.
I don't mean to pick on the science behind any of that. But Science long ago left the realm of anything that could be considered judgable based upon common sense. Any normal person from 300 years ago would consider science off its rocker, except for the fact that it's provably true (at least, the provably true parts are). We're firmly in a world where proof and experiments are more important.
Also considering the dead end we've had with strings, it's about time for a major sub-quantum theoretical shakeup.
That is one problem with having basically one of the most expensive scientific instruments in the world: Who do you call to replicate your results? As far as I can tell, CERN basically had to throw a wide net in an attempt to find anyone who somehow had the capability of replicating the experiment, or help with the current one.
Both of those that you list kids could see with parental permission. But more importantly than that, the rating system in Hollywood and the Video Game industries is voluntary. There is no law against kids seeing an R rated film, just a theater owner's agreement. A big part of that is if the rating were given the force of law, it would need to hold up to scrutiny. As it stands, there are a lot of societal standards and other things which don't necessarily hold up to government oversight, and the ratings process is entirely opaque for fear of influence scandals.
So yes, reward retailers who adhere to the ratings standards, be it movies or games. But there are major, obvious constitutionality challenges in giving a voluntary system the force of law.
I use Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, and Android. I have to say, I find that I generally want either one window maximized, 2 windows halved to move data between them, or 3 - 4 windows halved over 2 screens to move data between 2 windows while looking at reference materials. Virtual Desktops are fine, but in practice provide a functionality similar to minimized windows but with an annoying degree of toucheyness.
Of course, for Linux, I pretty much just want a command line and a phone with a browser. So I'm probably not the target market. But I can still understand the goal of moving to just maximized windows, and jumping between them. OS UI got stagnant for about 10 years in there, so I'm happy that they're experimenting with things... even if that means they'll occasionally Ubuntu it.
People are not going to pick up a kiosk. To be fair, they're not going to pick up a tablet either. The only real solution where people actually watch the video, would be to have it up and running on a wall, either VIA TV or projected. If you really needed to be "Web 2.0" ey about it, attach a camera and let people interact with a projection through motion. Or make a tabletop with a touchscreen, and have people interact with it that way.
Or, and I'm sure everyone would hate this option, remove all of the magazines and newspapers from the waiting area, and just have the tablets on long tethers. Though, unless I'm mistaken, the reason the magazines are there is that they make everything go easier for the staff.
As someone who has been in that situation: go talk to your employer. Some will allow you to modify your employment contract to cover the umbrella case of IP outside of work hours. Some will officially sign over rights to you on a particular side project you're working on. Some simply can't do either, as they have iron-clad contracts with other people who require that clause for rights clarity purposes. Some will offer to partner with you on the project, or otherwise compensate you for the idea but have it within their system.
If you're in one of the states where outside work is generally exempt from these contracts (California, for example), then you probably don't need to go to your employer necessarily. But it will help cut off a potentially expensive lawsuit in the future.
And if you're not in one of the states that explicitly grants exemptions, don't just go ahead expecting that you'll win the legal battle.
While it is a far cry to execute a convicted murderer vs a tweeter, the US does clearly have huge racial and socioeconomic bias inherent in the system. Criminals that are poor, black, and of lower IQ greatly disproportionately receive the death penalty over middle-or-upperclass white people of normal intelligence.
The obviousness criteria should be a lot more broadly applied than it currently is. For one, while copyrights allow for similar or identical expressions developed in parallel, patents do not. If you realize that someone can file their taxes * on the internet *, and I realize that someone can file their taxes * on the internet *, it's a first-to-file-take-all situation. If we allowed for independent / clean room developments, the water might be a bit murkier but at least the indefensible patents wouldn't survive a week.
Second, patents should involve some degree of experimentation and possibility of being wrong. If you don't have to think about whether or not the simplified abstract of the patent is right, it's probably obvious. Utilizing a form of magnetics to sort oil from seawater would be a patentable invention under this standard, in that it may or may not work. Some degree of thought went into it. Attempting to patent using an arrow to point the player in the direction of travel would not. Obviously it's going to work, because obviously that's what they're for. If more effort went into the patent's paperwork, than into the idea of what is being patented, the patent shouldn't not be granted.
Or someone who thinks that electric cars are part of the future that we need to transition towards energy independence. Someone who wants to promote the US car industry (Toyota, yadda yadda). People who commute with lots of co-workers, and want a silent platform to talk in.
It's definitely not for everyone. But it's not fair to categorize it as just a rich show-off machine.
The U.S. is also willing to invest heavily in upgrading old avionics, making what "generation" it is in to be relatively irrelevant.
The U.S. keeps investing heavily in upgrading old avionics, mainly because it can't seem to get new fighters off the ground. Or the ones that we do get off the ground, mysteriously choke their pilots. Really, the only bright spot we've had on our recent avionics history are the drones.
The F-16 is older than a lot of the people working on it. That's... kind of embarrassing for us.
To be fair, do the same thing in Office on OSX and open it in Office on Windows. Or use fonts on your computer without extensive font embedding licensing knowledge. Or between versions of Office.
There is a degree of expected compatibility under Office which doesn't seem to hold up under the real world.
The Chinese have nuclear weapons and you don't see the Western World freaking the fuck out about that. Why is that?
Because attempting to attack them wouldn't be profitable or win elections. Not to be too much of a pessimist, but why were we in Iraq again?
Honestly, I do wish we were going in to make the world a safer place. But that hardly ever seems to be the primary motivating factor. And it is pretty clear that we're gearing up for war again.
No it isn't. It isn't a compromise at all. A compromise is where both parties give up a little, to reach an "acceptable" solution, where otherwise there is an intractible situation.
If you don't think this isn't giving any ground, you could complain about it by writing a letter on your 2nd hand used copy of MS Word. Wait, you can't. US courts have ruled that first sale doctorine doesn't apply to computer software. There is also specific exclusions for renting, leasing, or lending software (I.E. all that is banned without explicit copyright holder permission). So yes, If EA wanted to be real jerks, they have the legal ammunition to shut down game rentals and 2nd hand sales. They could be awful about it. They're not. They're looking for a compromise.
Also, I would like to point out to the people who rated this comment +5, that what the commenter is asking for (with the exception of the reduced initial price), is exactly what Amalore is doing. Think of Arkham City. I played through the entire thing, and had a thoroughly good time, without realizing I hadn't downloaded the free Catwoman DLC. If I had bought the game secondhand, I would still have had an enjoyable time. It might have been enjoyable enough that I'd throw a tenner at the makers for the extra content. Amalore is, supposedly, a full and complete experience without the DLC, but that 1st batch of DLC comes free to people who bought the game first hand. Anyone buying the game second hand can pay if they want to try it. Personally, I find the online sports pass far more objectionable.
Now, I personally have problems with DLC in general... It's hard to provide enough value to the player to be worth it, without cutting your own throat. Sales numbers on DLC are generally abysmal on anything but the biggest titles. And they detract attention from what should be the main thrust of your efforts, making more games. And, even though I know how it comes out of separate budgets, which wouldn't have been possible without the additional costs, Day-1 DLC still always feels like a dick move.
But using free DLC to reward first-time payers is a lot more of a compromise than the companies could be using.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit, but don't complain to congress if you find that your scheme isn't viable in a free market. You'll lose money in your attempt to re-write the social contract.
To be fair, he's not complaining to congress. They went and made a free-market scheme. No complaining to congress, no banning used game sales.
In this scheme, part of a real physical game behaves like a downloadable title. I.E. the original makers get paid something for used games, some of the time. Used games then are genuinely different than new games, which they hadn't been on consoles. (PC games have had single-use registration codes for some time now). Thankfully, it doesn't completely cripple used game sales, like on the PC. It's actually a pretty reasonable compromise.
Slashdot Mirror
Wifi sniffing is what you have to do to get Mac Addresses and SSID's for Geolocation, as well as any sort of WiFi related work these days (Thanks, Dumb Bastards who turn off SSID broadcast!). At core, that's all Google was collecting, a basic WiFi sniff. I have to do it all the time if I want to figure out what jerk is invisibly camping the section of spectrum I'm using. And in classic Google fashion, they probably figured they could sort through and filter out the data they needed back at Google Central, rather than doing it in-car.
Honestly, the most shocking thing is the public's ignorance of the technology they use every day.
It seems like the sort of fine that would get on the record that Google was being uncooperative. In the future, the FCC can use this to convince judges of larger fines or stronger enforcement provisions to convince Google to live up to its data release requirements.
Or just photograph it with a phone.
One interpretation is that asking for the password is not illegal under current law. Another holds that the Facebook TOS forbidding said situation is enough that in other situations it would be considered hacking, which is illegal.
Though as a nice side note, if the article is correct they were going to fire her for something they thought she posted. Giving up her FB password would have prevented her from being fired, but her refusal to give up the password isn't why she was fired.
Whoops! Thanks. That will teach me to write off-the-cuff equations while pulling an all nighter.
If you haven't lived in California, it is littered with signs for "compounds known to the state of California to cause cancer." It's hard to buy a piece of furniture, new car, or just walk into a building, without encountering one of those signs. The waiting room at my grandmother's funeral had two of the signs. We all thought that must be good business for them. It's a longstanding joke with Californians.
Which is not to say that they're incorrect in this case necessarily. It's just that something being labeled as "known to the state of California to cause cancer" doesn't actually increase your risks of getting cancer.
Flash and Unity are also good choices. Unity supports C#, Javascript, or several others natively. Flash's Actionscript is an offshoot of Javascript, albeit an odd one. The physics themselves involved in gravity simulations are very, very simple to model. If only one body is moving (and to work as a game, only one body should be moving), just have the projectile iterate over all of the objects in the gravity list every update. Velocity += ( Distance * Mass * Scalar ) ^2
However, he should realize that no matter the choice of engine, his game is going to look terrible. It will be a black dot on a white background at best. As much effort as he will put into making the coding side of things work, an artist would need to put into making the visuals work. And further, if he hasn't developed a video game before, a full version will be a tremendous amount of work more than he is expecting. The details really get you. How do you handle score updating? How do you reset for new games? Change state between shots? Handling player-side options? Multiple levels? Oh, you want a visual effect on colliding with non-moving gravity wells. How are those visuals triggered? How does the game stay lost-but-not-lost yet? There is just a lot more that goes into game development than people seem to initially estimate.
Besides, you shouldn't deal with graphics until you know if the core is solid and entertaining. Consider this a first iteration, to be gone through as fast as possible. Prove out the fun first, before investing in figuring out the graphics.
I actually made a version of this as an experiment in Unity. The trajectory of the projectile has such sensitive interdependence upon initial conditions (read, chaos), that it wasn't fun to play. Most people have problems with simple parabolas. The multiplicative effects of multiple gravity sources takes it outside the realm of the pleasurable.
If he is going to do it 1: Keep the gravitational sources stable. Otherwise it's just a mess. 2: Give the player some control over the projectile after firing. Even slight amounts of control can make all of the difference.
To be fair, Apple had the Apple trademark pretty clear and in the green WRT computers. Trademarks are only applicable in the realm that the business operates under. Apple Computers only operated in the realm of computers, and Apple Music only operated in the music realm. There was no need for legal resolution until Apple Computers started venturing into the realm of sound / quicktime / etc.
iThing is problematic, in that it is a form of branding that only falls on the edge of trademark law. Hence, branding the iPod as i*** was a dicey choice, but a highly memorable one that has served them well. Cisco's iPhone trademark was admitted to be abandoned, with the duration of abandonment the only thing under question.
I love how the idea that anything running counter to the concepts of mass / length / time dilation happening at high speeds with relative simultaneity is considered insane. Oh, that's demonstrably insane, but Heisenberg and light-speed limitations on information transmittal, THOSE are the new rational. And that's not even getting into quantum effects.
I don't mean to pick on the science behind any of that. But Science long ago left the realm of anything that could be considered judgable based upon common sense. Any normal person from 300 years ago would consider science off its rocker, except for the fact that it's provably true (at least, the provably true parts are). We're firmly in a world where proof and experiments are more important.
Also considering the dead end we've had with strings, it's about time for a major sub-quantum theoretical shakeup.
That is one problem with having basically one of the most expensive scientific instruments in the world: Who do you call to replicate your results? As far as I can tell, CERN basically had to throw a wide net in an attempt to find anyone who somehow had the capability of replicating the experiment, or help with the current one.
Both of those that you list kids could see with parental permission. But more importantly than that, the rating system in Hollywood and the Video Game industries is voluntary. There is no law against kids seeing an R rated film, just a theater owner's agreement. A big part of that is if the rating were given the force of law, it would need to hold up to scrutiny. As it stands, there are a lot of societal standards and other things which don't necessarily hold up to government oversight, and the ratings process is entirely opaque for fear of influence scandals.
So yes, reward retailers who adhere to the ratings standards, be it movies or games. But there are major, obvious constitutionality challenges in giving a voluntary system the force of law.
I use Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, and Android. I have to say, I find that I generally want either one window maximized, 2 windows halved to move data between them, or 3 - 4 windows halved over 2 screens to move data between 2 windows while looking at reference materials. Virtual Desktops are fine, but in practice provide a functionality similar to minimized windows but with an annoying degree of toucheyness.
Of course, for Linux, I pretty much just want a command line and a phone with a browser. So I'm probably not the target market. But I can still understand the goal of moving to just maximized windows, and jumping between them. OS UI got stagnant for about 10 years in there, so I'm happy that they're experimenting with things... even if that means they'll occasionally Ubuntu it.
People are not going to pick up a kiosk. To be fair, they're not going to pick up a tablet either. The only real solution where people actually watch the video, would be to have it up and running on a wall, either VIA TV or projected. If you really needed to be "Web 2.0" ey about it, attach a camera and let people interact with a projection through motion. Or make a tabletop with a touchscreen, and have people interact with it that way.
Or, and I'm sure everyone would hate this option, remove all of the magazines and newspapers from the waiting area, and just have the tablets on long tethers. Though, unless I'm mistaken, the reason the magazines are there is that they make everything go easier for the staff.
As someone who has been in that situation: go talk to your employer. Some will allow you to modify your employment contract to cover the umbrella case of IP outside of work hours. Some will officially sign over rights to you on a particular side project you're working on. Some simply can't do either, as they have iron-clad contracts with other people who require that clause for rights clarity purposes. Some will offer to partner with you on the project, or otherwise compensate you for the idea but have it within their system.
If you're in one of the states where outside work is generally exempt from these contracts (California, for example), then you probably don't need to go to your employer necessarily. But it will help cut off a potentially expensive lawsuit in the future.
And if you're not in one of the states that explicitly grants exemptions, don't just go ahead expecting that you'll win the legal battle.
While it is a far cry to execute a convicted murderer vs a tweeter, the US does clearly have huge racial and socioeconomic bias inherent in the system. Criminals that are poor, black, and of lower IQ greatly disproportionately receive the death penalty over middle-or-upperclass white people of normal intelligence.
You'd have to walk pretty slowly, but:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterseid/romo-the-smartphone-robot
The obviousness criteria should be a lot more broadly applied than it currently is. For one, while copyrights allow for similar or identical expressions developed in parallel, patents do not. If you realize that someone can file their taxes * on the internet *, and I realize that someone can file their taxes * on the internet *, it's a first-to-file-take-all situation. If we allowed for independent / clean room developments, the water might be a bit murkier but at least the indefensible patents wouldn't survive a week.
Second, patents should involve some degree of experimentation and possibility of being wrong. If you don't have to think about whether or not the simplified abstract of the patent is right, it's probably obvious. Utilizing a form of magnetics to sort oil from seawater would be a patentable invention under this standard, in that it may or may not work. Some degree of thought went into it. Attempting to patent using an arrow to point the player in the direction of travel would not. Obviously it's going to work, because obviously that's what they're for. If more effort went into the patent's paperwork, than into the idea of what is being patented, the patent shouldn't not be granted.
Or someone who thinks that electric cars are part of the future that we need to transition towards energy independence. Someone who wants to promote the US car industry (Toyota, yadda yadda). People who commute with lots of co-workers, and want a silent platform to talk in.
It's definitely not for everyone. But it's not fair to categorize it as just a rich show-off machine.
While reasonably rare, iPhone viruses and malware do exist in the wild.
http://techfragments.com/news/982/Software/Apple_iPhone_Virus_Spreads_By_SMS_Messages.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/iphone-virus-botnet-bank-details,9136.html
http://www.mactrast.com/2010/07/iphone-virus-discovered-be-vigilant-and-seek-advice/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3573755?start=0&tstart=0
The U.S. is also willing to invest heavily in upgrading old avionics, making what "generation" it is in to be relatively irrelevant.
The U.S. keeps investing heavily in upgrading old avionics, mainly because it can't seem to get new fighters off the ground. Or the ones that we do get off the ground, mysteriously choke their pilots. Really, the only bright spot we've had on our recent avionics history are the drones.
The F-16 is older than a lot of the people working on it. That's... kind of embarrassing for us.
To be fair, do the same thing in Office on OSX and open it in Office on Windows. Or use fonts on your computer without extensive font embedding licensing knowledge. Or between versions of Office.
There is a degree of expected compatibility under Office which doesn't seem to hold up under the real world.
The Chinese have nuclear weapons and you don't see the Western World freaking the fuck out about that. Why is that?
Because attempting to attack them wouldn't be profitable or win elections. Not to be too much of a pessimist, but why were we in Iraq again?
Honestly, I do wish we were going in to make the world a safer place. But that hardly ever seems to be the primary motivating factor. And it is pretty clear that we're gearing up for war again.
No it isn't. It isn't a compromise at all. A compromise is where both parties give up a little, to reach an "acceptable" solution, where otherwise there is an intractible situation.
If you don't think this isn't giving any ground, you could complain about it by writing a letter on your 2nd hand used copy of MS Word. Wait, you can't. US courts have ruled that first sale doctorine doesn't apply to computer software. There is also specific exclusions for renting, leasing, or lending software (I.E. all that is banned without explicit copyright holder permission). So yes, If EA wanted to be real jerks, they have the legal ammunition to shut down game rentals and 2nd hand sales. They could be awful about it. They're not. They're looking for a compromise.
Also, I would like to point out to the people who rated this comment +5, that what the commenter is asking for (with the exception of the reduced initial price), is exactly what Amalore is doing. Think of Arkham City. I played through the entire thing, and had a thoroughly good time, without realizing I hadn't downloaded the free Catwoman DLC. If I had bought the game secondhand, I would still have had an enjoyable time. It might have been enjoyable enough that I'd throw a tenner at the makers for the extra content. Amalore is, supposedly, a full and complete experience without the DLC, but that 1st batch of DLC comes free to people who bought the game first hand. Anyone buying the game second hand can pay if they want to try it. Personally, I find the online sports pass far more objectionable.
Now, I personally have problems with DLC in general... It's hard to provide enough value to the player to be worth it, without cutting your own throat. Sales numbers on DLC are generally abysmal on anything but the biggest titles. And they detract attention from what should be the main thrust of your efforts, making more games. And, even though I know how it comes out of separate budgets, which wouldn't have been possible without the additional costs, Day-1 DLC still always feels like a dick move.
But using free DLC to reward first-time payers is a lot more of a compromise than the companies could be using.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit, but don't complain to congress if you find that your scheme isn't viable in a free market. You'll lose money in your attempt to re-write the social contract.
To be fair, he's not complaining to congress. They went and made a free-market scheme. No complaining to congress, no banning used game sales.
In this scheme, part of a real physical game behaves like a downloadable title. I.E. the original makers get paid something for used games, some of the time. Used games then are genuinely different than new games, which they hadn't been on consoles. (PC games have had single-use registration codes for some time now). Thankfully, it doesn't completely cripple used game sales, like on the PC. It's actually a pretty reasonable compromise.