I own an HTC Vive, and while I really like the VR experience I don't exactly have space to dedicate a room to VR. I can still do standing/sitting games but I can't do roomscale at all. The Rift S actually was an exciting prospect to me because it purportedly had no need for external sensors.. but my IPD is definitely not in that golden "average" spectrum, so I guess I'll be sitting the Rift S out and hoping HTC comes out with something.
The only people who have been using Hangouts are spam bots who use it as a way of getting into people's gmail inboxes without actually sending an email. There's no easy opt-out either.
I don't have exact case names, but I specifically remember that the Obama-era FCC went to court because the telcos sued them claiming the FCC did not have the authority to regulate net neutrality under Title 1 (information services). The telcos won, and the courts told the FCC that if they wanted to mandate net neutrality, they'd have to do it under Title 2 (by regulating ISPs the same as telephone companies).
That was EXACTLY what Tom Wheeler did - he moved ISPs under title 2 and began regulating them as Title 2 Common Carriers, which DID give the FCC the authority to mandate net neutrality because that's what the courts told him he had to do.
I would hope the court would respect stare decisis and tell Ajit Pai that he cannot have it both ways, preferably forcing him to restore the regulation of ISPs under Title 2.
The answer is simple: because in many cases, that's simply no longer viable even if you have the money to do so.
Let's start with the display: most old consoles output in 240p. TVs that supported 240p stopped being made probably 20 years ago. Even if you find one, the chances of it having a good tube and the flyback not breaking down from age are pretty low. Now, you could go out and buy an Open Source Scan Converter or a Framemeister, but both of those only work with component input, which means no NES and no N64 without hardmods. Your only other option is something like a component to HDMI converter, which might work provided your TV is good enough. Otherwise, you probably need a PC capture card. There is no one easy solution to this.
Next, let's hope that the capacitors in the consoles themselves haven't gone bad after 20+ years.. or that the CD drive lasers still work if you're talking a Playstation or Dreamcast, since the lasers go incredibly easily on them. Sure, you could order a Chinese replacement laser and hope your soldering job works or re-cap the console, but good luck with that.
Finally, let's hope that expensive cartridge you bought still works, since you're not going the piracy route and using a flashcart. Bitrot is already potentially setting in, and things like save batteries have to be manually desoldered and replaced.
Even assuming you have all of those things, how much longer do you think they're going to last?
The problem is that Congress won't. One of the main GOP talking points around net neutrality is the idea that any government regulation is going to lead to conservative voices being censored, so they're never going to vote for it or allow it to be voted upon. The Democrats would be more receptive, but it's also not a legislative priority for them - compared to immigration and trying to keep the Affordable Care Act together it barely even registers on their radar. The best solution would be a Democrat-led FCC reinstating the rules and then Congress taking away their authority to change the classification away from Title 2 until such time as Congress can come up with a better resolution.
I live in the northeastern US, and earlier this week we had a series of bad thunderstorms that spawned a few tornadoes. The cell carriers saw fit to send out a mass alert (with alarm) to tell people there was a tornado warning. The problem was that by the time they sent this out (and the fact that they sent this to places an hour or more away from where the actual tornado threat was) most of the threat had expired - but that didn't stop idiots from running to their cars the second they got the alert. The local highway system had something like ten accidents occur in the span of an hour because people were panicked and stupid.
I'd be curious to see how much the surviving currencies are actually trading for, given how most cryptos that aren't Bitcoin or Ethereum trade for under a dollar, with many trading for a fraction of a penny per coin. I somehow doubt that any of the surviving coins have made money for anyone but their creators and those firms that will do pump and dumps on various cryptos and spread the news to their paying clients.
A kid from 1997 taking a time machine to 2017 would most likely be more interested in the time machine than they would be in anything in 2017. Sure, there'd be the initial "Oh my god, they're on the Playstation 4 now? We only just got the first one!" reaction but you know those kids would take that time machine and try to tame a dinosaur or get a flying car.
Realistically, the anti-disparagement law only lasted this long because Obama's administration wanted it to so they could use it against the Redskins. I don't think there are too many people who care about an Asian-American rock group naming themselves "The Slants" - after all, there's really nothing inherently disparaging about the word "slant" unless you're using it as part of a slur ("slant-eyed").
This is really a case of the government trying to screw over the little guy because of a broader policy agenda (namely forcing the Redskins to change their name).
Here's what I'm wondering: clearly, all of the 13 participants in this study had consumed lemonade of some variety before. The summary states, however, that the researchers wish to use this to allow people who are allergic to a food to experience it. So my question is this:
Say you take a group of people who have never tasted something before due to an allergy or other medical condition. You tell them that what they're drinking is the thing they've never tasted. How do they know it would even still work?
It's a problem for collectors who are paying anywhere from $100 to $700 for certain cartridges, and expecting to get original hardware and not a Chinese-made reproduction.
Reproductions usually go for a fraction of the price of the real thing - you can get a repro of Hagane (SNES) for $20 US when the real ones go for $700. The problem is when repro sellers start charging $700 for a Hagane repro and someone buys it thinking it's the real thing.
The jewelry analogy would be like buying a diamond ring for $3000 only to find out that the diamond is artificial.
If you look up pretty much any old videogame from a cartridge-based system on eBay, you're more likely than not to find at least one seller selling reproduction cartridges at full price, with no warning that they are reproductions. Often, there's no easy way to tell the difference short of opening up the cartridge and comparing it to a known real one. This is especially bad for games that go for a high price, such as Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64 or Earthbound on the SNES.
Asgardia "will offer an independent platform free from the constraint of a land-based country's laws. It will become a place it in orbit which is truly 'no man's land.'"
This sounds like it's one male stand-in for Ayn Rand away from being Rapture in space. Alternatively, it's one SHODAN away from being System Shock 2.
The thing is, even if a removable battery doesn't cut down on fire incidents, it would have made the phones a lot easier to ship back to the manufacturer. Rather than go through all these hoops with fire-resistant boxes and ground-only shipping, they could simply have told people "Keep the phone powered off and bring it to an electronics recycler or an authorized seller to have the battery taken out and the phone shipped back to Samsung".
I can easily see UPS and Fedex refusing to ship the returned phones, since if it's a problem with the battery deforming most of the phones are going to be more dangerous crammed into the back of a cargo truck with a million other packages (all of which UPS/Fedex are liable for) than they would be anywhere else. If the phones could be shipped without the batteries inside, this problem wouldn't exist.
Instead, Samsung now has a very costly problem on their hands. They have to find a shipper willing to ship the phones (potentially making them more dangerous) and then recycle them without having anyone catch on fire.
The problem there is that the group behind it would probably be liable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - all it would take is a few calls from the managers at the IoT device companies to the FBI and the security group behind it would be arrested and probably jailed for violating it. The CFAA is so wide-reaching that even something as simple as hacking into the devices to display a simple "This device is vulnerable and could be used at any time as part of a botnet to DDoS websites" could be punished by prison time.
The real problem is that a lot of the IoT companies have no reason to make their systems secure - there's no pressure on their end if someone pwns all of their devices and uses them in a botnet. There are reports of IoT devices that use hardcoded usernames and passwords expecting the owner to take steps (such as blocking off access to the device except by SSH) that most people are not going to have the technical knowledge to do. The only real answer is to regulate IoT devices and their manufacturers, but even that would be difficult given that many of them are headquartered in China.
With Snowden, he has told Terrorists how to hide from western detection and has allowed ISIS to attack Europe.
The problem there is that none of the information leaked by Snowden told any terrorist groups anything they didn't already know - most terror groups were using physical couriers or other non-electronic methods to communicate with each other because they knew that the US government can track cell phones and the internet. They'd been doing it since long before anyone knew who Edward Snowden was, and I doubt they changed much since. If anything, the Snowden leaks proved that the NSA's programs were far more effective for spying on civilians than they ever were for fighting terrorism.
As I understand it, the recall effot on the Note 7 has been for the cell service providers to tell their customers to return their phones to the store they bought them from, and then exchange it for a new Note 7 without the problem battery in it. How do they plan on telling ones that have undergone the recall (and thus are safe) from those that haven't, even months later when the recall is "over"?
The problem here is that within 24 hours of release, Hello Games was putting out all kinds of statements about how they were going to fix all of the issues people were having and how the "servers" were "down" due to the massive amount of simultaneous players the game had on release. It's not unreasonable to assume on that basis that there WAS a multiplayer mode and that it merely wasn't working because of server capacity issues.
A reasonable player seeing the statements that Hello Games made could easily have been fooled into thinking "Oh, there IS a multiplayer functionality in the game, but it's down and needs a fix before it works", played past the Steam refund limit (2 weeks/2 hours played) only to find out after they'd already gone past the threshold that there was no multiplayer and never was.
It would be one thing if the developers had said, unambiguously, "There is no multiplayer or online functionality at all in No Man's Sky, please do not buy the game if this is what you're looking for", but when they were making statements like "The servers are down because so many of you are logged in at once!" post-release, it creates a grey area.
The reason they're so eager to give refunds is likely to avoid false advertising lawsuits. Even on release, many of the collector's edition boxes had a sticker over the ESRB/CERO rating. Why? Because even after the game went gold, the ESRB and CERO both believed that the game had online multiplayer. The sticker had a replacement ESRB/CERO rating that was different because the ESRB and CERO now understood that there was no online content whatsoever.
At the same time, there are also "online features" in the game which don't appear to actually do anything. People were reporting earlier this week that the game doesn't save any of the names you give to planets or creatures - once you've named enough stuff, the older stuff starts getting deleted. I don't know if anyone's been over the game with a network mapper to see if it's sending out packets of any sort, but I'd guess not.
The companies are probably giving refunds so late because they don't want a class-action lawsuit on their hands. I'm sure a class-action attorney could find plenty of people who bought the game on the reasonable belief (given the interviews the lead developer did with various media outlets) that the game had multiplayer.
The problem with that statement is that extreme weather events (both hot and cold) are a symptom of climate change. In the last five years in the Northeastern US, we've had more extreme weather events than in any of the years prior - from heat wave records that seem to get broken year after year to absurdly high (30+ inch) single-storm snowfall totals and snowstorms happening earlier than they should. It's not just the Northeast, either. Look at California and their record-breaking temperatures and record drought.
That's not to say extreme weather didn't happen before the last five or six years, but there was less of it before. An increase in climate change means an increase in extreme weather events, and that's exactly what the data shows.
One thing the summary doesn't mention is that the reporter who was detained is probably non-white: her name is Maria Abi-Habib and she covers the middle east for the Wall Street Journal. In the Facebook post, she says she goes by Maria Theresa. She's apparently non-muslim, but probably looks close enough to a middle easterner that racial profiling kicked in.
As someone who has some experience with CCTV DVRs, all of the DVRs I've worked with are the same: fanless computers with cases so thick they're practically mil-spec that get set up once and then immediately locked up in a room (to which only a handful of people on-site are allowed to have a key). The DVRs themselves are on an intranet with the cameras that has no outside internet access. The process works because no one can hack the network without physically being present in the building (at which point they'd be seen by security and likely arrested once the police are called) or launching a military-style assault on the room with the DVRs inside (at which point the company has far bigger problems than CCTV was designed to solve).
So, why are these even connected to the internet at all, especially if they're commercial DVRs?
It's not just accusations of rigging, it's outright proof. In late 2014/early 2015, there was a site called Sweetstakes (which is still up) that was meant for TF2 gambling. The way it worked is that people put their items into a "pool", with higher valued items giving people a higher chance to win. The problem was that there was one guy with tens of thousands of dollars in items and a bunch of stooges who would hand this guy their items so that he had a higher chance of winning (on the promise that he'd pay them back later, which he never did).
The scammer would find people gambling high-value items and then use his massive stockpile to essentially guarantee himself a win - giving himself and the site owners a huge amount of profit. The site owners KNEW what this guy was doing and did absolutely nothing to stop it because they get a 5% cut of each pool regardless of who wins. There were also allegations that they had rigged the system to ensure the scammer kept winning (and thus kept getting them more money).
It was only after a couple of trading sites found out about (and subsequently banned) the scammer after his stooges complained about not getting their cut that the Sweetstakes site admins did anything about it.
I'm sure Valve knew about Sweetstakes and about the scandal - but they were content to let it go and keep taking their cut from people making in-game purchases to fund their gambling habits.
Slashdot Mirror
I own an HTC Vive, and while I really like the VR experience I don't exactly have space to dedicate a room to VR. I can still do standing/sitting games but I can't do roomscale at all. The Rift S actually was an exciting prospect to me because it purportedly had no need for external sensors.. but my IPD is definitely not in that golden "average" spectrum, so I guess I'll be sitting the Rift S out and hoping HTC comes out with something.
The only people who have been using Hangouts are spam bots who use it as a way of getting into people's gmail inboxes without actually sending an email. There's no easy opt-out either.
I don't have exact case names, but I specifically remember that the Obama-era FCC went to court because the telcos sued them claiming the FCC did not have the authority to regulate net neutrality under Title 1 (information services). The telcos won, and the courts told the FCC that if they wanted to mandate net neutrality, they'd have to do it under Title 2 (by regulating ISPs the same as telephone companies).
That was EXACTLY what Tom Wheeler did - he moved ISPs under title 2 and began regulating them as Title 2 Common Carriers, which DID give the FCC the authority to mandate net neutrality because that's what the courts told him he had to do.
I would hope the court would respect stare decisis and tell Ajit Pai that he cannot have it both ways, preferably forcing him to restore the regulation of ISPs under Title 2.
The answer is simple: because in many cases, that's simply no longer viable even if you have the money to do so.
Let's start with the display: most old consoles output in 240p. TVs that supported 240p stopped being made probably 20 years ago. Even if you find one, the chances of it having a good tube and the flyback not breaking down from age are pretty low. Now, you could go out and buy an Open Source Scan Converter or a Framemeister, but both of those only work with component input, which means no NES and no N64 without hardmods. Your only other option is something like a component to HDMI converter, which might work provided your TV is good enough. Otherwise, you probably need a PC capture card. There is no one easy solution to this.
Next, let's hope that the capacitors in the consoles themselves haven't gone bad after 20+ years.. or that the CD drive lasers still work if you're talking a Playstation or Dreamcast, since the lasers go incredibly easily on them. Sure, you could order a Chinese replacement laser and hope your soldering job works or re-cap the console, but good luck with that.
Finally, let's hope that expensive cartridge you bought still works, since you're not going the piracy route and using a flashcart. Bitrot is already potentially setting in, and things like save batteries have to be manually desoldered and replaced.
Even assuming you have all of those things, how much longer do you think they're going to last?
The problem is that Congress won't. One of the main GOP talking points around net neutrality is the idea that any government regulation is going to lead to conservative voices being censored, so they're never going to vote for it or allow it to be voted upon. The Democrats would be more receptive, but it's also not a legislative priority for them - compared to immigration and trying to keep the Affordable Care Act together it barely even registers on their radar. The best solution would be a Democrat-led FCC reinstating the rules and then Congress taking away their authority to change the classification away from Title 2 until such time as Congress can come up with a better resolution.
I live in the northeastern US, and earlier this week we had a series of bad thunderstorms that spawned a few tornadoes. The cell carriers saw fit to send out a mass alert (with alarm) to tell people there was a tornado warning. The problem was that by the time they sent this out (and the fact that they sent this to places an hour or more away from where the actual tornado threat was) most of the threat had expired - but that didn't stop idiots from running to their cars the second they got the alert. The local highway system had something like ten accidents occur in the span of an hour because people were panicked and stupid.
I'd be curious to see how much the surviving currencies are actually trading for, given how most cryptos that aren't Bitcoin or Ethereum trade for under a dollar, with many trading for a fraction of a penny per coin. I somehow doubt that any of the surviving coins have made money for anyone but their creators and those firms that will do pump and dumps on various cryptos and spread the news to their paying clients.
A kid from 1997 taking a time machine to 2017 would most likely be more interested in the time machine than they would be in anything in 2017. Sure, there'd be the initial "Oh my god, they're on the Playstation 4 now? We only just got the first one!" reaction but you know those kids would take that time machine and try to tame a dinosaur or get a flying car.
Hans Reiser was totally framed. Everyone knows that ReiserFS causes your computer to come alive while you are sleeping and murder your wife.
Realistically, the anti-disparagement law only lasted this long because Obama's administration wanted it to so they could use it against the Redskins. I don't think there are too many people who care about an Asian-American rock group naming themselves "The Slants" - after all, there's really nothing inherently disparaging about the word "slant" unless you're using it as part of a slur ("slant-eyed").
This is really a case of the government trying to screw over the little guy because of a broader policy agenda (namely forcing the Redskins to change their name).
Here's what I'm wondering: clearly, all of the 13 participants in this study had consumed lemonade of some variety before. The summary states, however, that the researchers wish to use this to allow people who are allergic to a food to experience it. So my question is this:
Say you take a group of people who have never tasted something before due to an allergy or other medical condition. You tell them that what they're drinking is the thing they've never tasted. How do they know it would even still work?
It's a problem for collectors who are paying anywhere from $100 to $700 for certain cartridges, and expecting to get original hardware and not a Chinese-made reproduction.
Reproductions usually go for a fraction of the price of the real thing - you can get a repro of Hagane (SNES) for $20 US when the real ones go for $700. The problem is when repro sellers start charging $700 for a Hagane repro and someone buys it thinking it's the real thing.
The jewelry analogy would be like buying a diamond ring for $3000 only to find out that the diamond is artificial.
If you look up pretty much any old videogame from a cartridge-based system on eBay, you're more likely than not to find at least one seller selling reproduction cartridges at full price, with no warning that they are reproductions. Often, there's no easy way to tell the difference short of opening up the cartridge and comparing it to a known real one. This is especially bad for games that go for a high price, such as Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64 or Earthbound on the SNES.
Asgardia "will offer an independent platform free from the constraint of a land-based country's laws. It will become a place it in orbit which is truly 'no man's land.'"
This sounds like it's one male stand-in for Ayn Rand away from being Rapture in space. Alternatively, it's one SHODAN away from being System Shock 2.
The thing is, even if a removable battery doesn't cut down on fire incidents, it would have made the phones a lot easier to ship back to the manufacturer. Rather than go through all these hoops with fire-resistant boxes and ground-only shipping, they could simply have told people "Keep the phone powered off and bring it to an electronics recycler or an authorized seller to have the battery taken out and the phone shipped back to Samsung".
I can easily see UPS and Fedex refusing to ship the returned phones, since if it's a problem with the battery deforming most of the phones are going to be more dangerous crammed into the back of a cargo truck with a million other packages (all of which UPS/Fedex are liable for) than they would be anywhere else. If the phones could be shipped without the batteries inside, this problem wouldn't exist.
Instead, Samsung now has a very costly problem on their hands. They have to find a shipper willing to ship the phones (potentially making them more dangerous) and then recycle them without having anyone catch on fire.
The problem there is that the group behind it would probably be liable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - all it would take is a few calls from the managers at the IoT device companies to the FBI and the security group behind it would be arrested and probably jailed for violating it. The CFAA is so wide-reaching that even something as simple as hacking into the devices to display a simple "This device is vulnerable and could be used at any time as part of a botnet to DDoS websites" could be punished by prison time.
The real problem is that a lot of the IoT companies have no reason to make their systems secure - there's no pressure on their end if someone pwns all of their devices and uses them in a botnet. There are reports of IoT devices that use hardcoded usernames and passwords expecting the owner to take steps (such as blocking off access to the device except by SSH) that most people are not going to have the technical knowledge to do. The only real answer is to regulate IoT devices and their manufacturers, but even that would be difficult given that many of them are headquartered in China.
While no one was looking, 4 Chinese engineers stole 400 cakes. That's as many as 40 tens, and that's terrible.
With Snowden, he has told Terrorists how to hide from western detection and has allowed ISIS to attack Europe.
The problem there is that none of the information leaked by Snowden told any terrorist groups anything they didn't already know - most terror groups were using physical couriers or other non-electronic methods to communicate with each other because they knew that the US government can track cell phones and the internet. They'd been doing it since long before anyone knew who Edward Snowden was, and I doubt they changed much since. If anything, the Snowden leaks proved that the NSA's programs were far more effective for spying on civilians than they ever were for fighting terrorism.
As I understand it, the recall effot on the Note 7 has been for the cell service providers to tell their customers to return their phones to the store they bought them from, and then exchange it for a new Note 7 without the problem battery in it. How do they plan on telling ones that have undergone the recall (and thus are safe) from those that haven't, even months later when the recall is "over"?
The problem here is that within 24 hours of release, Hello Games was putting out all kinds of statements about how they were going to fix all of the issues people were having and how the "servers" were "down" due to the massive amount of simultaneous players the game had on release. It's not unreasonable to assume on that basis that there WAS a multiplayer mode and that it merely wasn't working because of server capacity issues.
A reasonable player seeing the statements that Hello Games made could easily have been fooled into thinking "Oh, there IS a multiplayer functionality in the game, but it's down and needs a fix before it works", played past the Steam refund limit (2 weeks/2 hours played) only to find out after they'd already gone past the threshold that there was no multiplayer and never was.
It would be one thing if the developers had said, unambiguously, "There is no multiplayer or online functionality at all in No Man's Sky, please do not buy the game if this is what you're looking for", but when they were making statements like "The servers are down because so many of you are logged in at once!" post-release, it creates a grey area.
The reason they're so eager to give refunds is likely to avoid false advertising lawsuits. Even on release, many of the collector's edition boxes had a sticker over the ESRB/CERO rating. Why? Because even after the game went gold, the ESRB and CERO both believed that the game had online multiplayer. The sticker had a replacement ESRB/CERO rating that was different because the ESRB and CERO now understood that there was no online content whatsoever.
At the same time, there are also "online features" in the game which don't appear to actually do anything. People were reporting earlier this week that the game doesn't save any of the names you give to planets or creatures - once you've named enough stuff, the older stuff starts getting deleted. I don't know if anyone's been over the game with a network mapper to see if it's sending out packets of any sort, but I'd guess not.
The companies are probably giving refunds so late because they don't want a class-action lawsuit on their hands. I'm sure a class-action attorney could find plenty of people who bought the game on the reasonable belief (given the interviews the lead developer did with various media outlets) that the game had multiplayer.
The problem with that statement is that extreme weather events (both hot and cold) are a symptom of climate change. In the last five years in the Northeastern US, we've had more extreme weather events than in any of the years prior - from heat wave records that seem to get broken year after year to absurdly high (30+ inch) single-storm snowfall totals and snowstorms happening earlier than they should. It's not just the Northeast, either. Look at California and their record-breaking temperatures and record drought.
That's not to say extreme weather didn't happen before the last five or six years, but there was less of it before. An increase in climate change means an increase in extreme weather events, and that's exactly what the data shows.
One thing the summary doesn't mention is that the reporter who was detained is probably non-white: her name is Maria Abi-Habib and she covers the middle east for the Wall Street Journal. In the Facebook post, she says she goes by Maria Theresa. She's apparently non-muslim, but probably looks close enough to a middle easterner that racial profiling kicked in.
As someone who has some experience with CCTV DVRs, all of the DVRs I've worked with are the same: fanless computers with cases so thick they're practically mil-spec that get set up once and then immediately locked up in a room (to which only a handful of people on-site are allowed to have a key). The DVRs themselves are on an intranet with the cameras that has no outside internet access. The process works because no one can hack the network without physically being present in the building (at which point they'd be seen by security and likely arrested once the police are called) or launching a military-style assault on the room with the DVRs inside (at which point the company has far bigger problems than CCTV was designed to solve).
So, why are these even connected to the internet at all, especially if they're commercial DVRs?
It's not just accusations of rigging, it's outright proof. In late 2014/early 2015, there was a site called Sweetstakes (which is still up) that was meant for TF2 gambling. The way it worked is that people put their items into a "pool", with higher valued items giving people a higher chance to win. The problem was that there was one guy with tens of thousands of dollars in items and a bunch of stooges who would hand this guy their items so that he had a higher chance of winning (on the promise that he'd pay them back later, which he never did).
The scammer would find people gambling high-value items and then use his massive stockpile to essentially guarantee himself a win - giving himself and the site owners a huge amount of profit. The site owners KNEW what this guy was doing and did absolutely nothing to stop it because they get a 5% cut of each pool regardless of who wins. There were also allegations that they had rigged the system to ensure the scammer kept winning (and thus kept getting them more money).
It was only after a couple of trading sites found out about (and subsequently banned) the scammer after his stooges complained about not getting their cut that the Sweetstakes site admins did anything about it.
I'm sure Valve knew about Sweetstakes and about the scandal - but they were content to let it go and keep taking their cut from people making in-game purchases to fund their gambling habits.