Videogame kickstarters have (from experience) more false claims than any other Kickstarter type I've ever seen. For instance, there was one that Retsupurae covered on Youtube yesterday, where a person claiming to be a "former Square-Enix employee" was trying to get people to crowdfund a remake of Chrono Trigger... made entirely in RPG Maker. Apart from the fact that said "former employee" didn't have the rights to Chrono Trigger, it was pretty clear that he had never actually coded anything before. In comparison, there have been several groups attempting to remake the game, all of whom were doing it for free. They were all sent C&D letters and stopped - but this guy didn't have to because his Kickstarter came nowhere close to getting funded.
There was also the guy who tried to make a 3D version of Monster Girl Quest. Compared to the Chrono Trigger guy he was a little better off rights-wise: he didn't own the rights to the real Monster Girl Quest, which hadn't even released its third and final installment when the Kickstarter went up, but MGQ wasn't registered in the United States yet and was only purchaseable through Japanese websites. The developer of MGQ is small enough that I don't think they would have the resources to sue, but they didn't have to - the guy didn't make funding, which was probably for the best, seeing as he featured his family (including his son, who was like five years old when he made the Kickstarter) in a pitch video for a "clean" version of an h-game.
If Kickstarter can't catch basic things like these, where they're clearly an infringement of copyright that could be discovered in a matter of seconds (both of the Kickstarters I mentioned had the names of the games they were stealing from clearly listed in their summaries) there's no way they're going to catch bad science.
The reason the bubble is bursting is no doubt another case of ad overload. It's a cat-and-mouse game that's been going on forever - advertisers flood a given communication medium with advertisements and people find a way around it. TVs have things like the DVR (and earlier the VCR), one of the key selling points of which is being able to record a show and fast-forward through the commercials. There's also the TV culture of using commercials as a time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, or do something else and then come back afterward.
The internet is becoming the same way. First it was pop-up and pop-under ads, which caused all of the mainstream browser developers to implement pop-up blockers as an integrated component of the browser. Sure, they're not 100% effective and many advertisers have tried to find workarounds for it (such as ads embedded into the website layout that cover content unless clicked away) but for the most part, the pop-up is nowhere near as effective as it used to be.
The same thing is happening for banner and flash ads. In the days when Internet Explorer had near-100% market share, it was comparatively difficult to install an ad blocker, as most of them came as third-party programs that had to be installed separately. Now, most of the major browsers (IE still doesn't to the best of my knowledge) have a modding interface that allows for easy installation of things like Adblock.
Advertisers have to learn how to advertise smart, rather than try to be as intrusive as possible.
Hello, Mr. Lessig. I'm not entirely sure what the end-game fundraising goal for the PAC is, but I know that many of the people running for Congress are backed by the ultra-rich. In my state, Connecticut, we had a single Senate candidate (Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment) spend something like $97 million of her own money on two races in 2011 and 2012. That averages to over $45 million per race for a single candidate, though I'm not sure how representative Linda McMahon is of the average candidate for the Senate. However, I believe it's safe to say that no matter how much money the Mayday PAC raises, there will always be a bigger fish, so to speak. This leads to my question, which is:
Assuming the Mayday PAC meets its fundraising goals, how do you plan to have the Mayday PAC's voice heard over the dozens of other PACs run by the "bigger fish" - the ultra-rich who can spend hundreds of millions without batting an eye?
From what I'm reading about these sensors, a lot of the things they track are already tracked by the NOAA, which is funded with federal taxpayer dollars. It might be different if the NOAA was chipping in funding for this (to get a better understanding of local weather patterns or just more accurate readings for the area) but it seems like the City of Chicago is funding this themselves, and there's no word on whether the data will be shared with the NOAA.
Something tells me that the City of Chicago will try to sell the data to one of the services that piggybacks off the NOAA but charges for their analysis - AccuWeather or one of its competitors.
What the author of the article gets wrong is the idea that there can ever be a "free and open" market for bandwidth. The holders of the most bandwidth are always going to be major corporations, because they can pay for the infrastructure necessary to keep them going. Sure, I'd love to have my own backbone connection and the server infrastructure to back it up, but in practice that will never happen unless I take out a bunch of loans and somehow manage to start my own ISP (and not be immediately sued out of existence by Big Telco or Big Cableco). It's a financial issue, not one of net neutrality.
The real issue here is that the United States will never have bandwidth and speeds equivalent to those seen in parts of Europe and Asia unless we start regulating what the ISPs can sell and how they can sell it. Right now, an ISP can promise a connection that goes "up to" any arbitrary amount of bandwidth and get away with it even if they never deliver speeds anywhere close to the upper limit. This allows them to charge more and more for the same inadequate connection. If we start regulating their advertising and start forcing the ISPs to upgrade infrastructure to remain competitive, that's how we'll get the connection speed other countries do. That, in my mind, is part of what net neutrality is - being able to buy comparable connection speeds for a reasonable price no matter where in the world you are or which ISP you're dealing with.
Here's what I don't understand, which is probably because I wasn't a physics major.
I thought the idea behind the Higgs Boson was this one particle that explained away a lot of different things in physics if you inserted it into the equation, but that no one could actually prove existed - and thus the idea was that if it did exist, physics was validated and if not, they'd be going back to the drawing board.
The way I've always heard it talked about, there was only one Higgs boson that either existed or did not exist - anything different wouldn't be considered a Higgs boson, but a different particle altogether since there was a specific definition as to what constituted a Higgs boson.
Why even bother with the landfills? There are massive garbage patches floating around in the oceans, the vast majority of which are plastics. If you can get a big enough tanker and implement this system on it, you could probably cut the amount of fuel needed even further - the tanker goes into a garbage patch, melts all the plastic down, keeps the oil, and uses some of it to get back to land. It would probably be more effective than loading fleets of trucks.
PAC stands for Political Action Committee. They were created to get around certain aspects of campaign finance law, specifically regarding how much could be donated to a candidate by individuals or companies (restrictions that no longer exist due to Citizens United). The idea was that instead of donating directly to the candidate (and being restricted as to how much you could give) you could donate a much larger amount of money to a PAC, who would then do things like take out ads, pay for infrastructure (campaign headquarters for canvassers, phone banks, get out the vote programs), pay for robocalls, etc. Really, the only restriction is that the PAC has to be controlled by someone who isn't a candidate for office and the candidate can't have any direct control or say in what the PAC does.
Usually, PACs are operated by a special interest group and donate to a wide variety of candidates (ie; the NRA has one and donates to politicians opposing gun control) but they can also be dedicated to one specific candidate.
When the Citizens United decision was handed down, the rules on PACs essentially vanished. The term "SuperPAC" was coined to describe this new state for PACs, which can now take in unlimited amounts of money and have fewer regulations than ever. There is no difference between a PAC and a SuperPAC - they're one and the same thing.
Actually, they do. I recall seeing an interview with the people at NASA behind this project on CBS. They said that the goal would be to mine captured asteroids for two things: valuable metals (they specified platinum, but there are probably plenty of others) and ice. The ice is particularly important because it can be used to obtain hydrogen and oxygen, which most rockets use for fuel. The NASA guy CBS interviewed had a vision of miniature space stations orbiting asteroids that would serve as the space equivalent of gas stations for long-range spaceflights, but who knows how viable that is.
Here's what I don't get. From what I understand, the NSA is not directly answerable to Congress - they're indirectly answerable through their parent agency, the Department of Defense, but they themselves are not answerable to Congress. What's stopping them from outwardly agreeing to Congress's regulations (assuming they pass) but inwardly ignoring them and continuing to do what they've been doing for years?
The real issue here is that we have far too many unanswered questions when it comes to broadband internet. The biggest, of course, is who regulates ISPs and internet as a service (rather than the content on the internet). To this day, we STILL don't know the answer. Plenty of people have tried (and failed) to answer it.
The FCC tried to initially regulate them as a Title I "information service", but that led to a bunch of lawsuits and eventually the Circuit Court of Appeals stepping in and saying that no, they couldn't regulate ISPs (especially in regards to network neutrality) under Title I. Now, years later, there's a debate over whether the FCC should step in and regulate them under Title II - something that the courts said would probably be in line with the legal authority given to the FCC by Congress. To this day, there is still no hard legislation as to who should regulate them, so it may very well be that even if the FCC regulates ISPs under Title II, a lawsuit by the telecos/cablecos could reverse the whole thing.
The same thing is true of the "last mile", where supposedly it's regulated by local government.. but in practice it's ruled by Big Telco/Big Cableco and their constant lawsuits used to wipe out the competition. They can do this because there is no strong legislation preventing them from doing so, and until there is a law that provides immunity to competitors from being sued simply because they want to compete and prevents local government from signing all of the infrastructure away to Big Telco, lawsuits will continue to be the law of the land.
We need to answer these questions first. Then we can start improving broadband in the United States.
ISPs aren't common carriers only because the FCC saw some of the issues that AT&T's CEO pointed out - Title II isn't perfect for regulating ISPs because of its origins as a means of regulating telephones - and tried to find a way to work around that. Unfortunately, the Circuit Court of Appeals ruined that when they said that the FCC had exactly three choices: Get Congress to give them explicit authorization to regulate net neutrality without classifying ISPs as common carriers, classify ISPs as common carriers under Title II and use that to regulate them, or don't regulate at all.
Title II should still be implemented as a stopgap measure to prevent ISPs from ruining the internet. However, the FCC would probably need to selectively enforce some things which will probably be challenged in court and have a small chance of being won by the ISPs. This is why Congress should give the FCC the explicit authority to regulate ISPs and internet service, so that the ISPs can never hope to get their way again.
The idea that Japan could enrich plutonium and turn it into nuclear weapons, which China is trying to push here, is full of "mights". Their logic is essentially:
- Japan didn't report 640kg of Mixed Oxide Fuel in an offline reactor because they didn't believe they had to. MOX is useless for making nuclear weapons by itself without further processing.
- Plutonium can be extracted from MOX, and Japan is doing this, but they reported all of the plutonium they extracted from MOX to the IAEA.
- Japan has a surplus stock of plutonium that they're not really supposed to have, but this is understandable given that plutonium is probably a pain to move around, and they have plans to use it as fuel in breeder reactors in the future.
- Japan has shown no inclination to produce nuclear weapons outside of a few studies, all of which are well over a decade old and have been known about for years.
- In China's mind, all of these things, which are circumstantial at best, indicate that Japan MIGHT be considering the production of nuclear weapons.
From what it sounds like, Japan could've had nuclear weapons years ago if they really wanted to. China merely doesn't want them to have the capability because it means they'd have a much harder time bullying Japan over things like the Senkaku islands.
If that were the case, this "Europe-v-Facebook" group should have gone after GCHQ, which is in an EU member nation and which is under the jurisdiction of the EU high courts. Heck, they could even make the exact same case: GCHQ collects data on EU citizens on the grounds that if they use any service located outside of the EU it counts as foreign, and sends some of that data to the NSA, who undoubtedly do not have the required EU privacy regulations in place. The EU courts could then regulate GCHQ and other EU intelligence agencies and force them to cease cooperation with the NSA, which would likely be a major blow to their global surveillance plans.
They probably won't do that, because if they did, GCHQ would likely send representatives to the court and fight it, which would cost tons of money and result in a prolonged legal battle even if GCHQ is ultimately in the wrong. It would also result in fewer political points for the group bringing the suit, because GCHQ would no doubt counter with a wave of "Mass surveillance is necessary to keep the citizens of the United Kingdom, and by proxy all of the EU member nations, safe from terrorism. Any attempt to regulate us might result in secrets leaking and allow terrorists to harm EU citizens", and some people are going to agree with that, as misguided as it is.
In contrast, the NSA is an easy target - they won't care because they know full well the EU can do absolutely nothing to stop them directly. They probably wouldn't even acknowledge legitimacy by sending someone to represent them.
There were better ways to do this,but this group picked the route that would help them the most politically rather than potentially bring about reform.
The decision by the Irish DPC not to investigate makes perfect sense - this case is essentially all politics, and nothing more. The finding is inevitably going to be that the existence of the NSA violates European data privacy laws, but there really isn't a whole lot the EU could do about it - they can't tell the US to shut down the NSA, and they can't revoke the ability of non-EU servers to host EU data without effectively creating a second Great Firewall. Nothing can ultimately be done about it, and so the only real result would be this "Europe-v-Facebook" group scoring some political points.
Converting old cabinets to MAME boxes is hardly butchering. Old arcade hardware (late 80s to 2000 or so) is a pain in the ass to own. There are at least five different architectures, none of which are compatible with each other, and you can only fit so many games in one cabinet and have to reboot the whole thing to switch between them, sometimes even having to open the cabinet up and physically switch boards in order to boot to a different game. The hardware is STILL prohibitively expensive to own, with even common boards still going for the hundreds or thousands of dollars. On top of that, some of the architectures had things like built-in planned obsolescence (see: Capcom and CPS1/CPS2) to force arcade owners to buy new hardware, meaning that anything using that architecture is now gone for good.
Now, is it a different story if the original hardware is intact? Yes. However, unless you want to run only cabinets devoted to a single game, MAME is a far more attractive option.
What is your opinion on today's competitive gaming, where there are corporate sponsors, live streams viewed by thousands, tournaments with prize money in the millions of dollars, and a focus on games made to be played competitively - games like Starcraft 2, Counter-Strike GO, DOTA and its dozens of clones, Street Fighter, and even modern competitive Pac-Man (Championship Edition DX II)? Do you think it is an improvement over the eighties, where perfect-scoring Pac-Man got you some media attention and that was pretty much it?
You're giving ramen a bad name when it really doesn't deserve it. By ITSELF, ramen is crap for nutrition because like most Asian noodles it's made of wheat flour and water and very little else. What very few people outside of Japan understand is that ramen is not like spaghetti - the noodles are not the entire meal, though they are a focus of the meal. Eating the noodles by themselves is like eating slices of bread by themselves.
The point of ramen is that as a food that contains very little besides wheat flour and water, it can go with nearly anything. There are entire restaurants in Japan dedicated to ramen, using it as a base and adding other things to provide nutrition - beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, fish, shrimp. I've seen ramen as a pizza topping, pizza as a ramen topping (see slowbeef's original Let's Play of SNATCHER and the people on SA who tried making "Neo Kobe Pizza"), pizza made of ramen, and pretty much any other combination of Italian-Japanese hybrid cuisine you can think of (though I have yet to see someone attempt a spaghetti-ramen fusion with meatballs and sauce).
So no, ramen is actually a decent option on a budget if you know what you're doing with it.
What I don't get about this is what exactly their mission is. The article mentions that New Horizons is the first probe to reach Pluto and Charon and be able to take pictures, and I understand why that would be important. However, what it doesn't mention is this - do they think Charon has an underground ocean because they've seen the surface cracks already with other methods? Or do they not know that the cracks exist and simply think that it might be like Europa because it has a similar composition? It seems like the real story is that New Horizons is going to be the first probe to reach Pluto, not that Charon might have an underground ocean if it turns out to be something like Europa.
Companies in the USA could use this as supplementary precedent if they ever get involved in a similar court case. International precedent gets used more often than you might think - for instance, I've heard they cited it in the case in Connecticut where they outlawed the death penalty. Part of the argument was that it had been outlawed at one point, but they cited European laws that outlaw the death penalty as well.
I think a lot of that can be attributed to WoW and the advent of mandatory or near-mandatory voicechat to do group content. I can still fondly remember my days of raiding Karazhan in Burning Crusade and having the guild leader complain loudly at the people who moved during Shade of Aran's fire rings. You were required to have Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, and use them constantly. Most modern games use some form of voicechat, and a large subset of those have lazy programmers who use always-on voicechat with no push to talk. That's probably cleared up a good percentage of the people who were actively attempting to imitate females.
I get what you're saying, but in this case it sounds like the Romanians arrested him first for hacking the emails of a member of the European parliament from Romania, probably to keep him leaking any sensitive information he might've seen. In fact, the article states that Lehel had hacked the Bush family emails in 2013 and had publicly taken responsibility for the hack after he leaked the information, and the government didn't care. To me, it sounds like the US Government only got involved because of Colin Powell. Powell was indirectly involved in the hack on the Romanian MP, in that emails between him and the MP were found and leaked. Powell is currently on the board of directors of Salesforce.com, which is an S&P 500 index stock and publicly traded.
If he happened to get any non-public information regarding Powell's company, that could easily cause real monetary damages and would probably constitute wire fraud, which they indicted the hacker on.
The government also said (in the article) that they don't know whether they'll try to extradite him or not. Right now, all they've done is indict him, and as every law professor will tell you, "A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich."
I can actually imagine the government being incompetent enough to try auctioning off dollar bills from a drug raid. It makes me laugh, but not quite as much as the thought of idiots bidding ten dollars for that dollar bill.
Sometimes, you do "have to" load ads. Take any Android-based tablet (Nexus 7) for example.
Google has actively blocked the installation of Flash on Android since at least 4.0. Supposedly, it's a security "fix", but it has the side-effect of forcing people to view YouTube videos in their app. Unlike Firefox Mobile, which can have Adblock Plus installed on it and thus not show YouTube ads, the YT app can't have ads disabled unless you root your device. Since rooting your device requires a complete wipe of all data, most people aren't willing to do it just to get around advertising.
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Videogame kickstarters have (from experience) more false claims than any other Kickstarter type I've ever seen. For instance, there was one that Retsupurae covered on Youtube yesterday, where a person claiming to be a "former Square-Enix employee" was trying to get people to crowdfund a remake of Chrono Trigger... made entirely in RPG Maker. Apart from the fact that said "former employee" didn't have the rights to Chrono Trigger, it was pretty clear that he had never actually coded anything before. In comparison, there have been several groups attempting to remake the game, all of whom were doing it for free. They were all sent C&D letters and stopped - but this guy didn't have to because his Kickstarter came nowhere close to getting funded.
There was also the guy who tried to make a 3D version of Monster Girl Quest. Compared to the Chrono Trigger guy he was a little better off rights-wise: he didn't own the rights to the real Monster Girl Quest, which hadn't even released its third and final installment when the Kickstarter went up, but MGQ wasn't registered in the United States yet and was only purchaseable through Japanese websites. The developer of MGQ is small enough that I don't think they would have the resources to sue, but they didn't have to - the guy didn't make funding, which was probably for the best, seeing as he featured his family (including his son, who was like five years old when he made the Kickstarter) in a pitch video for a "clean" version of an h-game.
If Kickstarter can't catch basic things like these, where they're clearly an infringement of copyright that could be discovered in a matter of seconds (both of the Kickstarters I mentioned had the names of the games they were stealing from clearly listed in their summaries) there's no way they're going to catch bad science.
The reason the bubble is bursting is no doubt another case of ad overload. It's a cat-and-mouse game that's been going on forever - advertisers flood a given communication medium with advertisements and people find a way around it. TVs have things like the DVR (and earlier the VCR), one of the key selling points of which is being able to record a show and fast-forward through the commercials. There's also the TV culture of using commercials as a time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, or do something else and then come back afterward.
The internet is becoming the same way. First it was pop-up and pop-under ads, which caused all of the mainstream browser developers to implement pop-up blockers as an integrated component of the browser. Sure, they're not 100% effective and many advertisers have tried to find workarounds for it (such as ads embedded into the website layout that cover content unless clicked away) but for the most part, the pop-up is nowhere near as effective as it used to be.
The same thing is happening for banner and flash ads. In the days when Internet Explorer had near-100% market share, it was comparatively difficult to install an ad blocker, as most of them came as third-party programs that had to be installed separately. Now, most of the major browsers (IE still doesn't to the best of my knowledge) have a modding interface that allows for easy installation of things like Adblock.
Advertisers have to learn how to advertise smart, rather than try to be as intrusive as possible.
Underwater Penis sounds like the name of a metal band.
Hello, Mr. Lessig. I'm not entirely sure what the end-game fundraising goal for the PAC is, but I know that many of the people running for Congress are backed by the ultra-rich. In my state, Connecticut, we had a single Senate candidate (Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment) spend something like $97 million of her own money on two races in 2011 and 2012. That averages to over $45 million per race for a single candidate, though I'm not sure how representative Linda McMahon is of the average candidate for the Senate. However, I believe it's safe to say that no matter how much money the Mayday PAC raises, there will always be a bigger fish, so to speak. This leads to my question, which is:
Assuming the Mayday PAC meets its fundraising goals, how do you plan to have the Mayday PAC's voice heard over the dozens of other PACs run by the "bigger fish" - the ultra-rich who can spend hundreds of millions without batting an eye?
From what I'm reading about these sensors, a lot of the things they track are already tracked by the NOAA, which is funded with federal taxpayer dollars. It might be different if the NOAA was chipping in funding for this (to get a better understanding of local weather patterns or just more accurate readings for the area) but it seems like the City of Chicago is funding this themselves, and there's no word on whether the data will be shared with the NOAA.
Something tells me that the City of Chicago will try to sell the data to one of the services that piggybacks off the NOAA but charges for their analysis - AccuWeather or one of its competitors.
What the author of the article gets wrong is the idea that there can ever be a "free and open" market for bandwidth. The holders of the most bandwidth are always going to be major corporations, because they can pay for the infrastructure necessary to keep them going. Sure, I'd love to have my own backbone connection and the server infrastructure to back it up, but in practice that will never happen unless I take out a bunch of loans and somehow manage to start my own ISP (and not be immediately sued out of existence by Big Telco or Big Cableco). It's a financial issue, not one of net neutrality.
The real issue here is that the United States will never have bandwidth and speeds equivalent to those seen in parts of Europe and Asia unless we start regulating what the ISPs can sell and how they can sell it. Right now, an ISP can promise a connection that goes "up to" any arbitrary amount of bandwidth and get away with it even if they never deliver speeds anywhere close to the upper limit. This allows them to charge more and more for the same inadequate connection. If we start regulating their advertising and start forcing the ISPs to upgrade infrastructure to remain competitive, that's how we'll get the connection speed other countries do. That, in my mind, is part of what net neutrality is - being able to buy comparable connection speeds for a reasonable price no matter where in the world you are or which ISP you're dealing with.
Here's what I don't understand, which is probably because I wasn't a physics major.
I thought the idea behind the Higgs Boson was this one particle that explained away a lot of different things in physics if you inserted it into the equation, but that no one could actually prove existed - and thus the idea was that if it did exist, physics was validated and if not, they'd be going back to the drawing board.
The way I've always heard it talked about, there was only one Higgs boson that either existed or did not exist - anything different wouldn't be considered a Higgs boson, but a different particle altogether since there was a specific definition as to what constituted a Higgs boson.
So, how can there be more than one Higgs boson?
Why even bother with the landfills? There are massive garbage patches floating around in the oceans, the vast majority of which are plastics. If you can get a big enough tanker and implement this system on it, you could probably cut the amount of fuel needed even further - the tanker goes into a garbage patch, melts all the plastic down, keeps the oil, and uses some of it to get back to land. It would probably be more effective than loading fleets of trucks.
PAC stands for Political Action Committee. They were created to get around certain aspects of campaign finance law, specifically regarding how much could be donated to a candidate by individuals or companies (restrictions that no longer exist due to Citizens United). The idea was that instead of donating directly to the candidate (and being restricted as to how much you could give) you could donate a much larger amount of money to a PAC, who would then do things like take out ads, pay for infrastructure (campaign headquarters for canvassers, phone banks, get out the vote programs), pay for robocalls, etc. Really, the only restriction is that the PAC has to be controlled by someone who isn't a candidate for office and the candidate can't have any direct control or say in what the PAC does.
Usually, PACs are operated by a special interest group and donate to a wide variety of candidates (ie; the NRA has one and donates to politicians opposing gun control) but they can also be dedicated to one specific candidate.
When the Citizens United decision was handed down, the rules on PACs essentially vanished. The term "SuperPAC" was coined to describe this new state for PACs, which can now take in unlimited amounts of money and have fewer regulations than ever. There is no difference between a PAC and a SuperPAC - they're one and the same thing.
Actually, they do. I recall seeing an interview with the people at NASA behind this project on CBS. They said that the goal would be to mine captured asteroids for two things: valuable metals (they specified platinum, but there are probably plenty of others) and ice. The ice is particularly important because it can be used to obtain hydrogen and oxygen, which most rockets use for fuel. The NASA guy CBS interviewed had a vision of miniature space stations orbiting asteroids that would serve as the space equivalent of gas stations for long-range spaceflights, but who knows how viable that is.
Here's what I don't get. From what I understand, the NSA is not directly answerable to Congress - they're indirectly answerable through their parent agency, the Department of Defense, but they themselves are not answerable to Congress. What's stopping them from outwardly agreeing to Congress's regulations (assuming they pass) but inwardly ignoring them and continuing to do what they've been doing for years?
The real issue here is that we have far too many unanswered questions when it comes to broadband internet. The biggest, of course, is who regulates ISPs and internet as a service (rather than the content on the internet). To this day, we STILL don't know the answer. Plenty of people have tried (and failed) to answer it.
The FCC tried to initially regulate them as a Title I "information service", but that led to a bunch of lawsuits and eventually the Circuit Court of Appeals stepping in and saying that no, they couldn't regulate ISPs (especially in regards to network neutrality) under Title I. Now, years later, there's a debate over whether the FCC should step in and regulate them under Title II - something that the courts said would probably be in line with the legal authority given to the FCC by Congress. To this day, there is still no hard legislation as to who should regulate them, so it may very well be that even if the FCC regulates ISPs under Title II, a lawsuit by the telecos/cablecos could reverse the whole thing.
The same thing is true of the "last mile", where supposedly it's regulated by local government.. but in practice it's ruled by Big Telco/Big Cableco and their constant lawsuits used to wipe out the competition. They can do this because there is no strong legislation preventing them from doing so, and until there is a law that provides immunity to competitors from being sued simply because they want to compete and prevents local government from signing all of the infrastructure away to Big Telco, lawsuits will continue to be the law of the land.
We need to answer these questions first. Then we can start improving broadband in the United States.
ISPs aren't common carriers only because the FCC saw some of the issues that AT&T's CEO pointed out - Title II isn't perfect for regulating ISPs because of its origins as a means of regulating telephones - and tried to find a way to work around that. Unfortunately, the Circuit Court of Appeals ruined that when they said that the FCC had exactly three choices: Get Congress to give them explicit authorization to regulate net neutrality without classifying ISPs as common carriers, classify ISPs as common carriers under Title II and use that to regulate them, or don't regulate at all.
Title II should still be implemented as a stopgap measure to prevent ISPs from ruining the internet. However, the FCC would probably need to selectively enforce some things which will probably be challenged in court and have a small chance of being won by the ISPs. This is why Congress should give the FCC the explicit authority to regulate ISPs and internet service, so that the ISPs can never hope to get their way again.
The idea that Japan could enrich plutonium and turn it into nuclear weapons, which China is trying to push here, is full of "mights". Their logic is essentially:
- Japan didn't report 640kg of Mixed Oxide Fuel in an offline reactor because they didn't believe they had to. MOX is useless for making nuclear weapons by itself without further processing.
- Plutonium can be extracted from MOX, and Japan is doing this, but they reported all of the plutonium they extracted from MOX to the IAEA.
- Japan has a surplus stock of plutonium that they're not really supposed to have, but this is understandable given that plutonium is probably a pain to move around, and they have plans to use it as fuel in breeder reactors in the future.
- Japan has shown no inclination to produce nuclear weapons outside of a few studies, all of which are well over a decade old and have been known about for years.
- In China's mind, all of these things, which are circumstantial at best, indicate that Japan MIGHT be considering the production of nuclear weapons.
From what it sounds like, Japan could've had nuclear weapons years ago if they really wanted to. China merely doesn't want them to have the capability because it means they'd have a much harder time bullying Japan over things like the Senkaku islands.
If that were the case, this "Europe-v-Facebook" group should have gone after GCHQ, which is in an EU member nation and which is under the jurisdiction of the EU high courts. Heck, they could even make the exact same case: GCHQ collects data on EU citizens on the grounds that if they use any service located outside of the EU it counts as foreign, and sends some of that data to the NSA, who undoubtedly do not have the required EU privacy regulations in place. The EU courts could then regulate GCHQ and other EU intelligence agencies and force them to cease cooperation with the NSA, which would likely be a major blow to their global surveillance plans.
They probably won't do that, because if they did, GCHQ would likely send representatives to the court and fight it, which would cost tons of money and result in a prolonged legal battle even if GCHQ is ultimately in the wrong. It would also result in fewer political points for the group bringing the suit, because GCHQ would no doubt counter with a wave of "Mass surveillance is necessary to keep the citizens of the United Kingdom, and by proxy all of the EU member nations, safe from terrorism. Any attempt to regulate us might result in secrets leaking and allow terrorists to harm EU citizens", and some people are going to agree with that, as misguided as it is.
In contrast, the NSA is an easy target - they won't care because they know full well the EU can do absolutely nothing to stop them directly. They probably wouldn't even acknowledge legitimacy by sending someone to represent them.
There were better ways to do this ,but this group picked the route that would help them the most politically rather than potentially bring about reform.
The decision by the Irish DPC not to investigate makes perfect sense - this case is essentially all politics, and nothing more. The finding is inevitably going to be that the existence of the NSA violates European data privacy laws, but there really isn't a whole lot the EU could do about it - they can't tell the US to shut down the NSA, and they can't revoke the ability of non-EU servers to host EU data without effectively creating a second Great Firewall. Nothing can ultimately be done about it, and so the only real result would be this "Europe-v-Facebook" group scoring some political points.
Converting old cabinets to MAME boxes is hardly butchering. Old arcade hardware (late 80s to 2000 or so) is a pain in the ass to own. There are at least five different architectures, none of which are compatible with each other, and you can only fit so many games in one cabinet and have to reboot the whole thing to switch between them, sometimes even having to open the cabinet up and physically switch boards in order to boot to a different game. The hardware is STILL prohibitively expensive to own, with even common boards still going for the hundreds or thousands of dollars. On top of that, some of the architectures had things like built-in planned obsolescence (see: Capcom and CPS1/CPS2) to force arcade owners to buy new hardware, meaning that anything using that architecture is now gone for good.
Now, is it a different story if the original hardware is intact? Yes. However, unless you want to run only cabinets devoted to a single game, MAME is a far more attractive option.
What is your opinion on today's competitive gaming, where there are corporate sponsors, live streams viewed by thousands, tournaments with prize money in the millions of dollars, and a focus on games made to be played competitively - games like Starcraft 2, Counter-Strike GO, DOTA and its dozens of clones, Street Fighter, and even modern competitive Pac-Man (Championship Edition DX II)? Do you think it is an improvement over the eighties, where perfect-scoring Pac-Man got you some media attention and that was pretty much it?
You're giving ramen a bad name when it really doesn't deserve it. By ITSELF, ramen is crap for nutrition because like most Asian noodles it's made of wheat flour and water and very little else. What very few people outside of Japan understand is that ramen is not like spaghetti - the noodles are not the entire meal, though they are a focus of the meal. Eating the noodles by themselves is like eating slices of bread by themselves.
The point of ramen is that as a food that contains very little besides wheat flour and water, it can go with nearly anything. There are entire restaurants in Japan dedicated to ramen, using it as a base and adding other things to provide nutrition - beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, fish, shrimp. I've seen ramen as a pizza topping, pizza as a ramen topping (see slowbeef's original Let's Play of SNATCHER and the people on SA who tried making "Neo Kobe Pizza"), pizza made of ramen, and pretty much any other combination of Italian-Japanese hybrid cuisine you can think of (though I have yet to see someone attempt a spaghetti-ramen fusion with meatballs and sauce).
So no, ramen is actually a decent option on a budget if you know what you're doing with it.
What I don't get about this is what exactly their mission is. The article mentions that New Horizons is the first probe to reach Pluto and Charon and be able to take pictures, and I understand why that would be important. However, what it doesn't mention is this - do they think Charon has an underground ocean because they've seen the surface cracks already with other methods? Or do they not know that the cracks exist and simply think that it might be like Europa because it has a similar composition? It seems like the real story is that New Horizons is going to be the first probe to reach Pluto, not that Charon might have an underground ocean if it turns out to be something like Europa.
Companies in the USA could use this as supplementary precedent if they ever get involved in a similar court case. International precedent gets used more often than you might think - for instance, I've heard they cited it in the case in Connecticut where they outlawed the death penalty. Part of the argument was that it had been outlawed at one point, but they cited European laws that outlaw the death penalty as well.
I think a lot of that can be attributed to WoW and the advent of mandatory or near-mandatory voicechat to do group content. I can still fondly remember my days of raiding Karazhan in Burning Crusade and having the guild leader complain loudly at the people who moved during Shade of Aran's fire rings. You were required to have Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, and use them constantly. Most modern games use some form of voicechat, and a large subset of those have lazy programmers who use always-on voicechat with no push to talk. That's probably cleared up a good percentage of the people who were actively attempting to imitate females.
I get what you're saying, but in this case it sounds like the Romanians arrested him first for hacking the emails of a member of the European parliament from Romania, probably to keep him leaking any sensitive information he might've seen. In fact, the article states that Lehel had hacked the Bush family emails in 2013 and had publicly taken responsibility for the hack after he leaked the information, and the government didn't care. To me, it sounds like the US Government only got involved because of Colin Powell. Powell was indirectly involved in the hack on the Romanian MP, in that emails between him and the MP were found and leaked. Powell is currently on the board of directors of Salesforce.com, which is an S&P 500 index stock and publicly traded.
If he happened to get any non-public information regarding Powell's company, that could easily cause real monetary damages and would probably constitute wire fraud, which they indicted the hacker on.
The government also said (in the article) that they don't know whether they'll try to extradite him or not. Right now, all they've done is indict him, and as every law professor will tell you, "A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich."
I can actually imagine the government being incompetent enough to try auctioning off dollar bills from a drug raid. It makes me laugh, but not quite as much as the thought of idiots bidding ten dollars for that dollar bill.
Sometimes, you do "have to" load ads. Take any Android-based tablet (Nexus 7) for example.
Google has actively blocked the installation of Flash on Android since at least 4.0. Supposedly, it's a security "fix", but it has the side-effect of forcing people to view YouTube videos in their app. Unlike Firefox Mobile, which can have Adblock Plus installed on it and thus not show YouTube ads, the YT app can't have ads disabled unless you root your device. Since rooting your device requires a complete wipe of all data, most people aren't willing to do it just to get around advertising.