By the definition they are using, they are referring specifically to video games, so no, playing monopoly only fits that definition if it is played on an electronic device.
I don't think a "gamer" is a game connoisseur. It's more akin to an "eater". If you're eating, then you're at eater. If you're gaming, then you're a gamer.
There is a lot of bigotry in your implied definition. It is akin to suggesting that anyone who is not classically-trained should not be called a musician, even if they spend a lot of time composing or performing music.
It is kind of disappointing to me that so many AAA multiplatform games still pander to the young male demographic. I'm not sure that it is still true for the current generation, but last generation in the US Nintendo really dominated among female gamers (and college aged as well), the PS3 among elderly gamers (those 40+), and the Xbox 360 among young males.
If you look at the games on those systems, it shows that if you offer games that have an appeal to a wider audience, that audience will respond. Not every game has to be some generic shooter. If AAA publishers want the adult and female markets, they have to start putting money behind games where you do something other than shoot people in the face and watch their head explode.
. . . if you're close enough to the epicenter. It is enough to rattle the china. It's all about the inverse square law. There are small Earthquakes in California all the time, but most of them are too far away. California's crust is too fractured to transmit earthquake energy very far.
I woke up to go pee, felt the earth shaking as I was walking to the door, went pee, went back to bed, and I hoped the epicenter was fairly close, because otherwise a lot of people were going to have a bad night.
It was not a big earthquake by any means, but I see it did some real damage near the epicenter up in American Canyon.
I used to do experiments and gather data at that age. I would have loved it if someone would have taught me how to put my coding skills to use at that age by processing image data I gathered with a telescope.
Just because someone is a kid does not mean that they are incapable of learning to use a scientific instrument to do science. You can give a kid a microscope, or a telescope, or a chemistry set, but unless you help her do actual scientific experiments, she's going to miss most of the value.
Taking pretty pictures is nice, but that's not why astronomers put cameras on the end of telescopes. Each photon is a piece of data and that's the real value of a picture. Even a younger elementary school kid is perfectly capable of doing something like deriving the temperature of a star from a photograph if they have a proper astronomical CCD with proper astronomical filters and figuring out what type of star it is. If you treat kids like they are too dumb to do science then that will certainly end up being true.
I guess that all depends on what you mean by astrophotography.
A cheap $5000 DSLR with a telephoto lens is not going to give you good data nor is it going to be useful for most of the objects in the sky, though it might produce some very nice-looking pictures of certain celestial objects.
To do actual science and capture useful pictures of most celestial objects, you need a descent telescope, a good mount, and a professional CCD. A DSLR won't cut it.
But I'm sure under the right conditions you can get some pretty pictures with one of objects like the moon, Jupiter, and even some nearby extragalactic objects.
In my mind, better to learn to do the star-finding first, then get a good telescope, then if you're still interested, get the add-ons like the astronomical cameras and spectroscopes.
You can see Jupiter's moons just fine with even a cheap pair of binoculars. You don't have to hold astronomical binoculars too steady because they are designed for aperture instead of magnification.
I've never really had a problem finding common naked-eye objects with binoculars and keeping them in the frame unless it is something fast-moving like the ISS.
Too many people do not understand this. The binoculars are the best thing you can buy under $100 and they are useful for more than astronomy. Many of them are better than the telescopes Galileo used.
The cheapest descent telescope would be a ground mounted Newtonian. They're big, heavy, and start at around $500. You don't want a cheap scope that you'll grow out of and you don't want an expensive scope when you won't necessarily stick with the hobby.
A good pair of binoculars and a subscription to an amateur astronomy magazine might actually come in under $100 if you look around enough.
It's like buying a Ducati for a kid who hasn't had her training wheels removed. Amateur astronomy involves a lot of time spent in the cold and a lot of prerequisite knowledge. If you don't want to waste money, you should actually make sure that the person is truly interested in astronomy before buying a scope, and you shouldn't go cheap on the scope. Any telescope under $500 is probably not a good investment. I suggest the following.
1) Go to an observatory open night (try universities, colleges, and professional and public observatories) or an amateur astronomy star party with the kids. See what they think about it.
2) Actually go backyard observing with the people in question with the naked eye, if they are interested, buy them astronomical binoculars. A pretty good pair will start at under $100 and, unlike a $100 telescope, will be very portable and useful (even if the kid never really sticks with amateur astronomy).
3) If they stick with it, get them a subscription to some amateur astronomy magazines like "Sky and Telescope" and "Astronomy".
4) If they're still interested, buy them the best scope you can afford, either a ground-mounted Newtonian (or similar design) on the cheap range (you can actually get a good aperture size (which tends to be the most important measure) for pretty cheap, or if you have the money, go with a Schmidt-Cassegrain (or similar style) telescope with at least an 8" aperture (you might actually be able to find a good one used for well under $1000 if you look hard).
There are a lot of other people and institutions out there with better equipment than you can afford, so no point in breaking the bank until you are sure that a good quality amateur scope is really worth the money, and no point in getting a low end scope when a pair of binoculars will serve you better in the long run.
Exactly the same number of phones in the United States sold with devices that allow the carrier to brick the phone without the legitimate owner's authorization.
I'm not a lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge, merely providing a minor access to pornographic material is not a criminal act in California. There has to be some other malicious intent.
And it is not an analogy. It is a rhetorical technique known as reductio ad absurdum whereby one disproves a line of reasoning by demonstrating that it can lead to false or absurd conclusions.
The new bill does not give carriers any new legal authority to brick phones in the scenarios you describe, so the questions are meaningless. If the carriers currently have the legal authority and the desire to brick the phones they sell to customers, there is nothing stopping them from doing so and this new bill does not change that.
Or to make a better analogy, California passed a bill requiring that all firearms sold in the State be sold with a locking device rendering them unworkable. By the EFF's "reasoning", they would have opposed the bill because the bill does not specify who has access to the locking device and some seller might include remote-controlled locks and give the keys to law enforcement.
Of course, there is no evidence that gun sellers have any interest or intent to install government-controlled locks on California guns, but the bill never specified that they could not do so, so it must be a bad bill that we should oppose because of some fantasy about it leading to widespread government disabling of all guns.
Microsoft exchange has had remote-wiping capabilities going back at least to windows mobile 2003. I don't know necessarily about "bricking" software, but I'm sure there were some devices back then that had passwords which were not cleared by hard resets.
I don't actually see the EFF letter providing any credible argument or evidence to back it up. Their argument basically boils down to: the bill doesn't specifically say that the government cannot use a phone's built-in kill switch so . . . slipper slope logical fallacy.
It is the logical equivalent of saying, "the new funding bill for the middle school library does not specifically disallow the librarian from using the money to purchase hard core pornography for the schoolchildren, so we shouldn't fund the library until the imaginary problem of hard-core pornography on our school library shelves is addressed."
The EFF is making a bad argument. If existing software is working fine like the EFF claims (without any widespread reports of the malicious "bricking" of phones), then why is it wrong to ask carriers to include the software as an option on all phones?
The EFF's argument is completely intellectually dishonest. An honest argument would weigh the very real threat posed every day by cell phone thefts, including the murders, assaults, and life-threatening injuries created by cell phone thefts against the (so-far) largely imaginary threats of big-brother or some malicious hacker exploiting remote shutdown software. But the EFF letter does not do that. It is an argument completely devoid of intellectual merit and honesty as nowhere is an actual cost-benefit analysis made nor a reasonable alternative proffered.
Exactly. The bill does not give the government any more power than they have now. The carriers are the ones responsible for ensuring they sell phones which meet the new guidelines, which they will likely do by installing pre-existing technological solutions that are already available on the market.
Essentially, the bill does not change anything except require that carriers provide phones with capabilities that many have had for a decade.
Why not read the bill or at least read my comments?
The bill does not put the onus on the carrier to have control over the activation process.
Rather, the bill requires the carrier to sell devices which, by default, request that the owner set up a remote kill switch account when the phone is initialized for the first time. Whether the owner actually chooses to use the capability is not up to the carriers or the police.
Furthermore, given the hassles involved, it is likely that carriers will opt to use existing kill software designed for various smartphones which require no actual carrier money to maintain and support rather than opting for a system where the owner has to go through the company themselves to brick and unbrick the phone.
Many phones are already equipped with bricking software and hardware (the same sort of software and hardware that will become mandatory in California next year) and there are no known cases of the authorities getting carriers to "brick" phones of innocent people for some nefarious purpose.
If you're really that paranoid, just choose not to activate the bricking software on a new phone, but you'll just be encouraging more smartphone theft by opting out.
Actually, there are plenty of rules if you actually look at the text of the bill.
The police have no ability to use the kill switch per the California bill. The bill requires the user to be able to initiate the process and does not require the cell phone companies to be capable of initiating the process themselves.
All the bill requires is that as soon as the phone registers on any network operating in California, the remote-kill initiated by the user must be sent and effected and that the kill switch be an essential and hardened part of the phone that the cellular phone cannot operate without (such as built into the chip itself, the way video game console manufacturers build in encrypted firmware that cannot easily be cracked or altered without physically removing the chip).
The fear of the police "remote bricking" phones seems, at this point, to be completely unfounded.
If the phone automatically syncs over GSM then it would have synced by the time the police go through the proper procedure to get the carrier to shut down the phone. The police would have better luck just grabbing the phone and turning it off or shoving it into a metal box.
Except that if the police actually want to "brick" a phone, they'll use a literal brick. They'll snatch the phone off the person (gathering evidence for their investigation) and the video or the phone will mysteriously disappear.
The cops are not going to have some "bricking gun" they can point at protesters to delete video. Heck, if the video is on an SD card (like it should be if you're not an Apple fan), you can probably just swallow the card discreetly and retrieve it later.
If you have a prepaid phone that you used cash for, the government has no idea who owns the phone in the first place.
Also, it is doubtful that the time frame for bricking phones is all that precise. There will likely be some formal process done through the carriers that takes some time to go through. All that bricking a phone would do is tip off the suspect that the government is on to them.
The government needs to "brick" phones to protect classified information in the same way that Superman needs to throw bricks to win a street fight, which is to say, not at all.
The government has a myriad of resources at its disposal to deal with security leaks, the most obvious being simply sending someone to take you into custody. Bricking phones of suspects would do very little other than possibly tip them off that they are in trouble with the authorities.
Slashdot Mirror
When you break down their statistics, women are putting as much of their free time and their money (more or less) into games as men.
And anecdotes are worth bupkis. This is hard, scientific industry data.
By the definition they are using, they are referring specifically to video games, so no, playing monopoly only fits that definition if it is played on an electronic device.
I don't think a "gamer" is a game connoisseur. It's more akin to an "eater". If you're eating, then you're at eater. If you're gaming, then you're a gamer.
There is a lot of bigotry in your implied definition. It is akin to suggesting that anyone who is not classically-trained should not be called a musician, even if they spend a lot of time composing or performing music.
". . . blah, blah, blah."
It is kind of disappointing to me that so many AAA multiplatform games still pander to the young male demographic. I'm not sure that it is still true for the current generation, but last generation in the US Nintendo really dominated among female gamers (and college aged as well), the PS3 among elderly gamers (those 40+), and the Xbox 360 among young males.
If you look at the games on those systems, it shows that if you offer games that have an appeal to a wider audience, that audience will respond. Not every game has to be some generic shooter. If AAA publishers want the adult and female markets, they have to start putting money behind games where you do something other than shoot people in the face and watch their head explode.
. . . if you're close enough to the epicenter. It is enough to rattle the china. It's all about the inverse square law. There are small Earthquakes in California all the time, but most of them are too far away. California's crust is too fractured to transmit earthquake energy very far.
I woke up to go pee, felt the earth shaking as I was walking to the door, went pee, went back to bed, and I hoped the epicenter was fairly close, because otherwise a lot of people were going to have a bad night.
It was not a big earthquake by any means, but I see it did some real damage near the epicenter up in American Canyon.
I used to do experiments and gather data at that age. I would have loved it if someone would have taught me how to put my coding skills to use at that age by processing image data I gathered with a telescope.
Just because someone is a kid does not mean that they are incapable of learning to use a scientific instrument to do science. You can give a kid a microscope, or a telescope, or a chemistry set, but unless you help her do actual scientific experiments, she's going to miss most of the value.
Taking pretty pictures is nice, but that's not why astronomers put cameras on the end of telescopes. Each photon is a piece of data and that's the real value of a picture. Even a younger elementary school kid is perfectly capable of doing something like deriving the temperature of a star from a photograph if they have a proper astronomical CCD with proper astronomical filters and figuring out what type of star it is. If you treat kids like they are too dumb to do science then that will certainly end up being true.
I guess that all depends on what you mean by astrophotography.
A cheap $5000 DSLR with a telephoto lens is not going to give you good data nor is it going to be useful for most of the objects in the sky, though it might produce some very nice-looking pictures of certain celestial objects.
To do actual science and capture useful pictures of most celestial objects, you need a descent telescope, a good mount, and a professional CCD. A DSLR won't cut it.
But I'm sure under the right conditions you can get some pretty pictures with one of objects like the moon, Jupiter, and even some nearby extragalactic objects.
In my mind, better to learn to do the star-finding first, then get a good telescope, then if you're still interested, get the add-ons like the astronomical cameras and spectroscopes.
You can see Jupiter's moons just fine with even a cheap pair of binoculars. You don't have to hold astronomical binoculars too steady because they are designed for aperture instead of magnification.
I've never really had a problem finding common naked-eye objects with binoculars and keeping them in the frame unless it is something fast-moving like the ISS.
Too many people do not understand this. The binoculars are the best thing you can buy under $100 and they are useful for more than astronomy. Many of them are better than the telescopes Galileo used.
The cheapest descent telescope would be a ground mounted Newtonian. They're big, heavy, and start at around $500. You don't want a cheap scope that you'll grow out of and you don't want an expensive scope when you won't necessarily stick with the hobby.
A good pair of binoculars and a subscription to an amateur astronomy magazine might actually come in under $100 if you look around enough.
It's like buying a Ducati for a kid who hasn't had her training wheels removed. Amateur astronomy involves a lot of time spent in the cold and a lot of prerequisite knowledge. If you don't want to waste money, you should actually make sure that the person is truly interested in astronomy before buying a scope, and you shouldn't go cheap on the scope. Any telescope under $500 is probably not a good investment. I suggest the following.
1) Go to an observatory open night (try universities, colleges, and professional and public observatories) or an amateur astronomy star party with the kids. See what they think about it.
2) Actually go backyard observing with the people in question with the naked eye, if they are interested, buy them astronomical binoculars. A pretty good pair will start at under $100 and, unlike a $100 telescope, will be very portable and useful (even if the kid never really sticks with amateur astronomy).
3) If they stick with it, get them a subscription to some amateur astronomy magazines like "Sky and Telescope" and "Astronomy".
4) If they're still interested, buy them the best scope you can afford, either a ground-mounted Newtonian (or similar design) on the cheap range (you can actually get a good aperture size (which tends to be the most important measure) for pretty cheap, or if you have the money, go with a Schmidt-Cassegrain (or similar style) telescope with at least an 8" aperture (you might actually be able to find a good one used for well under $1000 if you look hard).
There are a lot of other people and institutions out there with better equipment than you can afford, so no point in breaking the bank until you are sure that a good quality amateur scope is really worth the money, and no point in getting a low end scope when a pair of binoculars will serve you better in the long run.
Exactly the same number of phones in the United States sold with devices that allow the carrier to brick the phone without the legitimate owner's authorization.
I'm not a lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge, merely providing a minor access to pornographic material is not a criminal act in California. There has to be some other malicious intent.
And it is not an analogy. It is a rhetorical technique known as reductio ad absurdum whereby one disproves a line of reasoning by demonstrating that it can lead to false or absurd conclusions.
The new bill does not give carriers any new legal authority to brick phones in the scenarios you describe, so the questions are meaningless. If the carriers currently have the legal authority and the desire to brick the phones they sell to customers, there is nothing stopping them from doing so and this new bill does not change that.
Or to make a better analogy, California passed a bill requiring that all firearms sold in the State be sold with a locking device rendering them unworkable. By the EFF's "reasoning", they would have opposed the bill because the bill does not specify who has access to the locking device and some seller might include remote-controlled locks and give the keys to law enforcement.
Of course, there is no evidence that gun sellers have any interest or intent to install government-controlled locks on California guns, but the bill never specified that they could not do so, so it must be a bad bill that we should oppose because of some fantasy about it leading to widespread government disabling of all guns.
Microsoft exchange has had remote-wiping capabilities going back at least to windows mobile 2003. I don't know necessarily about "bricking" software, but I'm sure there were some devices back then that had passwords which were not cleared by hard resets.
I don't actually see the EFF letter providing any credible argument or evidence to back it up. Their argument basically boils down to: the bill doesn't specifically say that the government cannot use a phone's built-in kill switch so . . . slipper slope logical fallacy.
It is the logical equivalent of saying, "the new funding bill for the middle school library does not specifically disallow the librarian from using the money to purchase hard core pornography for the schoolchildren, so we shouldn't fund the library until the imaginary problem of hard-core pornography on our school library shelves is addressed."
The EFF is making a bad argument. If existing software is working fine like the EFF claims (without any widespread reports of the malicious "bricking" of phones), then why is it wrong to ask carriers to include the software as an option on all phones?
The EFF's argument is completely intellectually dishonest. An honest argument would weigh the very real threat posed every day by cell phone thefts, including the murders, assaults, and life-threatening injuries created by cell phone thefts against the (so-far) largely imaginary threats of big-brother or some malicious hacker exploiting remote shutdown software. But the EFF letter does not do that. It is an argument completely devoid of intellectual merit and honesty as nowhere is an actual cost-benefit analysis made nor a reasonable alternative proffered.
Exactly. The bill does not give the government any more power than they have now. The carriers are the ones responsible for ensuring they sell phones which meet the new guidelines, which they will likely do by installing pre-existing technological solutions that are already available on the market.
Essentially, the bill does not change anything except require that carriers provide phones with capabilities that many have had for a decade.
Why not read the bill or at least read my comments?
The bill does not put the onus on the carrier to have control over the activation process.
Rather, the bill requires the carrier to sell devices which, by default, request that the owner set up a remote kill switch account when the phone is initialized for the first time. Whether the owner actually chooses to use the capability is not up to the carriers or the police.
Furthermore, given the hassles involved, it is likely that carriers will opt to use existing kill software designed for various smartphones which require no actual carrier money to maintain and support rather than opting for a system where the owner has to go through the company themselves to brick and unbrick the phone.
Many phones are already equipped with bricking software and hardware (the same sort of software and hardware that will become mandatory in California next year) and there are no known cases of the authorities getting carriers to "brick" phones of innocent people for some nefarious purpose.
If you're really that paranoid, just choose not to activate the bricking software on a new phone, but you'll just be encouraging more smartphone theft by opting out.
Actually, there are plenty of rules if you actually look at the text of the bill.
The police have no ability to use the kill switch per the California bill. The bill requires the user to be able to initiate the process and does not require the cell phone companies to be capable of initiating the process themselves.
All the bill requires is that as soon as the phone registers on any network operating in California, the remote-kill initiated by the user must be sent and effected and that the kill switch be an essential and hardened part of the phone that the cellular phone cannot operate without (such as built into the chip itself, the way video game console manufacturers build in encrypted firmware that cannot easily be cracked or altered without physically removing the chip).
The fear of the police "remote bricking" phones seems, at this point, to be completely unfounded.
. . . and your supervisor calls you on your cell to ask if you can come into work, they need to reimburse you?
If the phone automatically syncs over GSM then it would have synced by the time the police go through the proper procedure to get the carrier to shut down the phone. The police would have better luck just grabbing the phone and turning it off or shoving it into a metal box.
The government can already get emergency court orders to shut down towers if that is what they want to do.
What the government will actually do is what the people will allow. You should be more worried about the people than the government.
Except that if the police actually want to "brick" a phone, they'll use a literal brick. They'll snatch the phone off the person (gathering evidence for their investigation) and the video or the phone will mysteriously disappear.
The cops are not going to have some "bricking gun" they can point at protesters to delete video. Heck, if the video is on an SD card (like it should be if you're not an Apple fan), you can probably just swallow the card discreetly and retrieve it later.
. . . if you're that paranoid.
If you have a prepaid phone that you used cash for, the government has no idea who owns the phone in the first place.
Also, it is doubtful that the time frame for bricking phones is all that precise. There will likely be some formal process done through the carriers that takes some time to go through. All that bricking a phone would do is tip off the suspect that the government is on to them.
The government needs to "brick" phones to protect classified information in the same way that Superman needs to throw bricks to win a street fight, which is to say, not at all.
The government has a myriad of resources at its disposal to deal with security leaks, the most obvious being simply sending someone to take you into custody. Bricking phones of suspects would do very little other than possibly tip them off that they are in trouble with the authorities.