They can use SSNs for ANYTHING, which is what's so scary about having yours stolen. They can open credit cards, take out insurance policies, even look for jobs in your name. Essentially, an SSN is a person's identity.
I could totally see an interesting book about a middle-grade analyst having to change careers because his job gets taken over by a computer. It would start with the analyst, who is pretty much coasting through his career trying to hit retirement, the work so routine that he can do it in his sleep, going into the office one day and seeing a bunch of his friends, people he entered the workforce with, leaving with their personal effects in boxes, their jobs having been taken over by computers. He's still got employment for a while longer, because after all, the company needs someone versed in the old ways while they get the system fully set up and functional.
A few weeks pass, and the analyst watches as the people he used to work with change - some of them get jobs at other, less-advanced firms, becoming the office dinosaur. Others go into full mid-life crises because they realize that their skillset is now completely obsolete, and wind up going nuts like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
The analyst, realizing that he doesn't want to be either of those things, tries to find another way out. He takes some classes, meets some people in the same situation he's in, meets some new people, and tries his hand at any number of careers, finding out that more and more of the job opportunities are being taken over by machines. Eventually, he meets a younger minority girl who starts teaching him how to program, and in a "second coming of age" moment reinvents himself as a computer programmer. By the end, he gets a job at his old firm, this time as a coder working with the automated system who replaced him in his first job.
Geo-blocking is a practice that needs to stop anyway, because it makes no sense. Take Steam as an example.
Up until two or three years ago, there were a good number of people who used proxies to buy content not from their region on Steam - this was particularly important for Germans (who are served the "low violence" version of games by default) and Australians/New Zealanders (who were far overcharged compared to the US/UK and could use a proxy to buy stuff from the US Steam store cheaper than they could in Aus/NZ). There was one problem with this system, though. Most publishers sold games on Steam's Russian store for far cheaper than they did on the US or UK stores - a friend of mine bought a 4-pack of copies of Dead Island (back when that was a new-ish game and the 4-pack was going for upwards of $60 on the US store) from Russia for like $20.
Then, Valve started cracking down on cross-region purchases, making it so that you could still add games from other regions but could not actually play them until your IP was detected as being in one of those regions. The problem was that it was applied so that more expensive regions had fewer restrictions - US-bought games can be played anywhere, as can AUS/NZ ones, but games purchased from Russia or a few other regions can't be played outside of those specific regions. This means that if you're from the US and go on vacation in Russia, you can play Counter-Strike GO while in Russia, but if you're Russian and go on vacation to the US you can't play CS:GO while in the US.
It's a ridiculous double-standard, and a counter to geo-blocking would remove a lot of it.
I guess that begs the question then: If they're putting people on watch lists (and capturing data on them for permanent storage) merely for reading Linux Journal or trying to download Tails, how much taxpayer money are they wasting on server space, bandwidth, personnel, electricity, etc to capture and maintain all of this data on people who are on the list for the sole reason that they tried to read about Linux or encryption?
I just finished reading the article, and here's something I don't get. They mention that for certain "fingerprints", the NSA would automatically exclude users believed to be in one of the "Five Eyes" countries. Yet, for other fingerprints (such as searching for Tails) it would gather data regardless of where the user is located or believed to be located. Why would they apply the "Five Eyes" exemption some but not all of the time?
According to the FCC's ruling, they did it to stop Wi-Fi signals interfering with Doppler radar systems that use the same frequencies. This doesn't sound like Big Telco or Big Cableco are behind it.
I know plenty of competitive game players, mostly from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene. Now, I can understand why real sports are segregated by sex - there are irreconcilable physical differences between men and women in terms of athletic performance in some sports, thus it's simply not fair to have men competing against women. However, I don't get how this would apply to video games, where there is effectively no difference between the sexes. I have, in fact, seen female comp players who completely destroy me (largely because I don't play comp due to my favorite and only class being Engineer).
Also, there were at least two or three female runners at this year's Summer Games Done Quick. One of them did a very skilled race of Octodad against a male player, and was even ahead at one point - until the very end when she failed to get a very RNG-centric glitch to occur (the male player got it on the first try, but they both admitted that getting that glitch to occur is purely random). Another did a 7.5 hour run of Final Fantasy VI and actually out-lasted the male player she was co-opping with (from what I remember, he switched out about 5 or 6 hours in).
What I'm wondering is whether or not the person whose email account was blocked because they received an email from Goldman Sachs has any form of legal recourse against Goldman Sachs.
Actually, I've got a question about that story you linked. XKCD's "What If" blog did a story a few months ago about what would happen if you were to go swimming in a nuclear fuel pool. He came to the conclusion that as long as you stuck to the surface, the radiation levels would be practically non-existent because of how water impedes radiation. The guy in that article swam and drank from a spent fuel pool, but he probably only swam on the surface and was drinking water from the surface.
From your experience (since you imply you worked at Hanford), wouldn't this mean that he was just making a big deal about a risk he wasn't actually taking?
The big reason would be that my mp3 player (I don't have a smartphone and my tablet has been declared 'too big for the gym") can't play FLAC files of that size. My tablet can, and my PC can, but the mp3 player just isn't strong enough to handle it. Really, it's only a problem because I don't have a smartphone.
How long until a clone of Chilling Effects comes around and indexes all of the removals under the "right to be forgotten" law? Google could even link to them the same way they do Chilling Effects for sites that have been de-listed due to DMCA notices.
I actually gave it a try at lunch on my tablet. The home screen on the site told me that it was Wednesday afternoon and gave me five suggestions, the first of which was essentially a "Top 40" list. I'm not into Top 40, so I tried the second one, which was I think "Energetic Songs". It gave me I think five playlist suggestions, two of which were "Twerk at Work" and some other thing related to twerking. The others were pop dance songs.
I wound up trying "Popular Indie", and getting a Jay Z song (apparently A-list rappers are indie now) and then more twerking songs.
So, in summary, this is probably great if your job somehow involves twerking, but I don't know how good it is for people like me.
I'd imagine it's one of those people on any given popular music torrent site that do things like make absurdly large vinyl rips (I've seen vinyl rips in FLAC where each track is upwards of 350MB) using specific hardware that no one's ever heard of and complain about CDs because they were pressed using the Japanese method instead of the German one.
From the article, it's apparently an online radio service, similar to Pandora or Spotify, except instead of using machine-based algorithms to determine what you might like, it uses lists made by "music experts" based on criteria you give it. I hadn't heard of it before the article, but I might take a look when I get home from work.
From the article, it seems like the only ISP that was named in the Snowden leaks as being a target of NSA/GCHQ data collection was Belgacom, a Belgian ISP. I'm not sure how the law works in the UK, but in the US, all of the suits against the NSA so far have failed because the NSA can refuse to provide evidence. The only ISP they have direct evidence for is Belgacom, which does not appear to be a plaintiff in this lawsuit. If GCHQ can withhold evidence, how do they plan to prove that they were targeted?
The only problem I can see with that is an overzealous police officer stopping you in a state with laws that ban cell phones while driving and giving you a ticket under the cell phone ban. While most jurisdictions that have cell phone bans only ban cell phones, some have laws that cover other devices that are not completely hands-free, and I'm sure the police could claim that you were not using the device hands-free, even if there's no actual proof.
From what I understand, the difference between Mayday and Wolf-PAC Is that Wolf-PAC is specifically calling for an Article V Constitutional Convention, while Mayday plans to fund politicians to get campaign finance reform legislation passed without the use of a constitutional amendment. Same basic goal, very different methods.
It's not just software development, but any job. If the employees are happy about how they're being treated, they'll do the best job they can, because they want to stay with the company. If they're not, they're going to do the bare minimum to stay employed while they look for another job at a better company.
I think it's more that consoles caught up with the arcades. The last arcade I went to was maybe five years ago, while on vacation in Virginia. Most of the games there were console ports - they had a Soul Calibur 2 machine at a time when Soul Calibur 3 was already out on consoles, the ever-present DDR machines (also ported to PSX/PS2), a couple of Street Fighter machines (available at the time on XBLA and PSN in HD remake form) and that was about it.
Meanwhile, most of the old arcade games (CPS/NeoGeo) were ported to other consoles. Metal Slug has been ported to just about everything (from memory, original Xbox, PS2, PS3, X360, DS, PSP, Wii, PC). So has King of Fighters, Street Fighter (SF4 Super Turbo Hyper HD Remake Arcade Tournament Edition Ultimax: Capcom Wants More Money Edition or whatever it is they're up to these days is on Steam now, and SF2 and Third Strike were ported to the 360/PS3), and the old D&D arcade games.
The only stuff that really hasn't been ported is some of the older beat-em-ups from non-mainstream companies and a couple of the SNK fighters (SvC Chaos, Garou: Mark of the Wolf, Art of Fighting, etc), but most of those emulate without a hitch. I think the only games I'd actually want that aren't ported are Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and MvC 3, both of which are highly unlikely to be ported again since Disney bought Marvel.
It seems like no matter what Obama says, he continues to appoint lobbyists with clear conflicts of interest to important positions rather than actually think about his choices. First it was Tom Wheeler at the FCC, and now a lobbyist and executive for Big Pharma in charge of patents. What causes him to keep doing this?
No, see, they'll follow the roll-out of the smart benches with the roll-out of Smart Bums, who for a nominal fee can tell you the weather, give you information about wind speed and direction with their natural stench, and even data on light levels (if it's dark, they'll be there, if not they won't).
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They can use SSNs for ANYTHING, which is what's so scary about having yours stolen. They can open credit cards, take out insurance policies, even look for jobs in your name. Essentially, an SSN is a person's identity.
(Disclaimer: I am not a fiction writer)
I could totally see an interesting book about a middle-grade analyst having to change careers because his job gets taken over by a computer. It would start with the analyst, who is pretty much coasting through his career trying to hit retirement, the work so routine that he can do it in his sleep, going into the office one day and seeing a bunch of his friends, people he entered the workforce with, leaving with their personal effects in boxes, their jobs having been taken over by computers. He's still got employment for a while longer, because after all, the company needs someone versed in the old ways while they get the system fully set up and functional.
A few weeks pass, and the analyst watches as the people he used to work with change - some of them get jobs at other, less-advanced firms, becoming the office dinosaur. Others go into full mid-life crises because they realize that their skillset is now completely obsolete, and wind up going nuts like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
The analyst, realizing that he doesn't want to be either of those things, tries to find another way out. He takes some classes, meets some people in the same situation he's in, meets some new people, and tries his hand at any number of careers, finding out that more and more of the job opportunities are being taken over by machines. Eventually, he meets a younger minority girl who starts teaching him how to program, and in a "second coming of age" moment reinvents himself as a computer programmer. By the end, he gets a job at his old firm, this time as a coder working with the automated system who replaced him in his first job.
I've seen worse movie plots.
Geo-blocking is a practice that needs to stop anyway, because it makes no sense. Take Steam as an example.
Up until two or three years ago, there were a good number of people who used proxies to buy content not from their region on Steam - this was particularly important for Germans (who are served the "low violence" version of games by default) and Australians/New Zealanders (who were far overcharged compared to the US/UK and could use a proxy to buy stuff from the US Steam store cheaper than they could in Aus/NZ). There was one problem with this system, though. Most publishers sold games on Steam's Russian store for far cheaper than they did on the US or UK stores - a friend of mine bought a 4-pack of copies of Dead Island (back when that was a new-ish game and the 4-pack was going for upwards of $60 on the US store) from Russia for like $20.
Then, Valve started cracking down on cross-region purchases, making it so that you could still add games from other regions but could not actually play them until your IP was detected as being in one of those regions. The problem was that it was applied so that more expensive regions had fewer restrictions - US-bought games can be played anywhere, as can AUS/NZ ones, but games purchased from Russia or a few other regions can't be played outside of those specific regions. This means that if you're from the US and go on vacation in Russia, you can play Counter-Strike GO while in Russia, but if you're Russian and go on vacation to the US you can't play CS:GO while in the US.
It's a ridiculous double-standard, and a counter to geo-blocking would remove a lot of it.
I guess that begs the question then: If they're putting people on watch lists (and capturing data on them for permanent storage) merely for reading Linux Journal or trying to download Tails, how much taxpayer money are they wasting on server space, bandwidth, personnel, electricity, etc to capture and maintain all of this data on people who are on the list for the sole reason that they tried to read about Linux or encryption?
I just finished reading the article, and here's something I don't get. They mention that for certain "fingerprints", the NSA would automatically exclude users believed to be in one of the "Five Eyes" countries. Yet, for other fingerprints (such as searching for Tails) it would gather data regardless of where the user is located or believed to be located. Why would they apply the "Five Eyes" exemption some but not all of the time?
According to the FCC's ruling, they did it to stop Wi-Fi signals interfering with Doppler radar systems that use the same frequencies. This doesn't sound like Big Telco or Big Cableco are behind it.
I know plenty of competitive game players, mostly from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene. Now, I can understand why real sports are segregated by sex - there are irreconcilable physical differences between men and women in terms of athletic performance in some sports, thus it's simply not fair to have men competing against women. However, I don't get how this would apply to video games, where there is effectively no difference between the sexes. I have, in fact, seen female comp players who completely destroy me (largely because I don't play comp due to my favorite and only class being Engineer).
Also, there were at least two or three female runners at this year's Summer Games Done Quick. One of them did a very skilled race of Octodad against a male player, and was even ahead at one point - until the very end when she failed to get a very RNG-centric glitch to occur (the male player got it on the first try, but they both admitted that getting that glitch to occur is purely random). Another did a 7.5 hour run of Final Fantasy VI and actually out-lasted the male player she was co-opping with (from what I remember, he switched out about 5 or 6 hours in).
What I'm wondering is whether or not the person whose email account was blocked because they received an email from Goldman Sachs has any form of legal recourse against Goldman Sachs.
Actually, I've got a question about that story you linked. XKCD's "What If" blog did a story a few months ago about what would happen if you were to go swimming in a nuclear fuel pool. He came to the conclusion that as long as you stuck to the surface, the radiation levels would be practically non-existent because of how water impedes radiation. The guy in that article swam and drank from a spent fuel pool, but he probably only swam on the surface and was drinking water from the surface.
From your experience (since you imply you worked at Hanford), wouldn't this mean that he was just making a big deal about a risk he wasn't actually taking?
If you look at the photos of him a year and four years after, it looks like he started turning into Frankenstein's monster.
It's not even that. The military is getting their budget cut the same as every other government agency. A more accurate statement would be:
"Still, I guess there are budget hawks who need to get re-elected, so something had to give."
The big reason would be that my mp3 player (I don't have a smartphone and my tablet has been declared 'too big for the gym") can't play FLAC files of that size. My tablet can, and my PC can, but the mp3 player just isn't strong enough to handle it. Really, it's only a problem because I don't have a smartphone.
How long until a clone of Chilling Effects comes around and indexes all of the removals under the "right to be forgotten" law? Google could even link to them the same way they do Chilling Effects for sites that have been de-listed due to DMCA notices.
I actually gave it a try at lunch on my tablet. The home screen on the site told me that it was Wednesday afternoon and gave me five suggestions, the first of which was essentially a "Top 40" list. I'm not into Top 40, so I tried the second one, which was I think "Energetic Songs". It gave me I think five playlist suggestions, two of which were "Twerk at Work" and some other thing related to twerking. The others were pop dance songs.
I wound up trying "Popular Indie", and getting a Jay Z song (apparently A-list rappers are indie now) and then more twerking songs.
So, in summary, this is probably great if your job somehow involves twerking, but I don't know how good it is for people like me.
I'd imagine it's one of those people on any given popular music torrent site that do things like make absurdly large vinyl rips (I've seen vinyl rips in FLAC where each track is upwards of 350MB) using specific hardware that no one's ever heard of and complain about CDs because they were pressed using the Japanese method instead of the German one.
From the article, it's apparently an online radio service, similar to Pandora or Spotify, except instead of using machine-based algorithms to determine what you might like, it uses lists made by "music experts" based on criteria you give it. I hadn't heard of it before the article, but I might take a look when I get home from work.
From the article, it seems like the only ISP that was named in the Snowden leaks as being a target of NSA/GCHQ data collection was Belgacom, a Belgian ISP. I'm not sure how the law works in the UK, but in the US, all of the suits against the NSA so far have failed because the NSA can refuse to provide evidence. The only ISP they have direct evidence for is Belgacom, which does not appear to be a plaintiff in this lawsuit. If GCHQ can withhold evidence, how do they plan to prove that they were targeted?
The staff called his management style "Command & Conquer". He stripped people of their uniform on the floor and fired them on the spot.
Did he do this with the ion cannon, or the tactical nuclear strike?
The only problem I can see with that is an overzealous police officer stopping you in a state with laws that ban cell phones while driving and giving you a ticket under the cell phone ban. While most jurisdictions that have cell phone bans only ban cell phones, some have laws that cover other devices that are not completely hands-free, and I'm sure the police could claim that you were not using the device hands-free, even if there's no actual proof.
From what I understand, the difference between Mayday and Wolf-PAC Is that Wolf-PAC is specifically calling for an Article V Constitutional Convention, while Mayday plans to fund politicians to get campaign finance reform legislation passed without the use of a constitutional amendment. Same basic goal, very different methods.
It's not just software development, but any job. If the employees are happy about how they're being treated, they'll do the best job they can, because they want to stay with the company. If they're not, they're going to do the bare minimum to stay employed while they look for another job at a better company.
Ported to PC, I meant.
I think it's more that consoles caught up with the arcades. The last arcade I went to was maybe five years ago, while on vacation in Virginia. Most of the games there were console ports - they had a Soul Calibur 2 machine at a time when Soul Calibur 3 was already out on consoles, the ever-present DDR machines (also ported to PSX/PS2), a couple of Street Fighter machines (available at the time on XBLA and PSN in HD remake form) and that was about it.
Meanwhile, most of the old arcade games (CPS/NeoGeo) were ported to other consoles. Metal Slug has been ported to just about everything (from memory, original Xbox, PS2, PS3, X360, DS, PSP, Wii, PC). So has King of Fighters, Street Fighter (SF4 Super Turbo Hyper HD Remake Arcade Tournament Edition Ultimax: Capcom Wants More Money Edition or whatever it is they're up to these days is on Steam now, and SF2 and Third Strike were ported to the 360/PS3), and the old D&D arcade games.
The only stuff that really hasn't been ported is some of the older beat-em-ups from non-mainstream companies and a couple of the SNK fighters (SvC Chaos, Garou: Mark of the Wolf, Art of Fighting, etc), but most of those emulate without a hitch. I think the only games I'd actually want that aren't ported are Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and MvC 3, both of which are highly unlikely to be ported again since Disney bought Marvel.
It seems like no matter what Obama says, he continues to appoint lobbyists with clear conflicts of interest to important positions rather than actually think about his choices. First it was Tom Wheeler at the FCC, and now a lobbyist and executive for Big Pharma in charge of patents. What causes him to keep doing this?
No, see, they'll follow the roll-out of the smart benches with the roll-out of Smart Bums, who for a nominal fee can tell you the weather, give you information about wind speed and direction with their natural stench, and even data on light levels (if it's dark, they'll be there, if not they won't).