The real harm now is dialog.showModal() and dialog.show().
The in-page pop-ups and overlays are the new window.open(). Popup blocking should start with opt-in only for any dialogs on any sites. Popup blockers worked in the before time, so W3C let abuses back in the back door with the tag and in-standard DRM extensions.
The web is just as captured as it ever was, and now with Net Neutrality being murdered in the public square these abuses are just going to continue.
Since the game plays _just_ _fine_ without a connection to "the servers" (at least on PS/4) because it's not WoW in space, the presence of item 2 on this list tells me that you've never actually played this game. "The Servers" in No Man's Sky are just data repositories for the discoveries you upload, and the chance to download other peoples discoveries if you find anybody else's planet. There's no "instancing" because your machine is the instance.
Meanwhile, I have not seen a single broken promise in the game. I don't know what the munchkin power-gamer types _thought_ they were buying... but what I got was pretty much exactly what I was sold: An exploration and survival sandbox game with a rich story that you have to "discover" (by reading the texts you farm out of ancient monoliths and ruins).
Now I know the people who didn't pay attention to what was being sold are quite disappointed because they were thinking they were getting Destiny "life full of boomstick!" redux. But go find me a single video from the makers that tried to sell that at all. They talked about exploring worlds, mining, crafting, and dodging sentinels.
Is the game flawless? Fuck no. It's essentially impossible to find your way back along your flight path to that one planet that had that one resource that you desperately need, and ibid for finding your way back to an on-planet trade hub. So the mapping and waypointing needs some work. And I can see signs of bigger things that got waylaid (like observatories that talk about locations in distant space that, instead, direct you to far-away points on the planet you are on), but I suspect that that became a question of things simplified in play-testing.
So I agree with the parts of your sentiment that "you pay your money and you take your chance", but I disagree with any part of anybody's complaint if they are bitching about "the servers" and the lack of WoW-in-space behaviors.
I've yet to see a single complaint that really boils down to a broken promise. I've seen a lot of complaining about things that were fully disclosed in the advanced coverage where the complainer took great liberties with their imagination, insisting that what they were promised was not delivered. But those undelivered promises seem to be entirely in their heads.
Minus a couple small things (like every planet has lots of upload points instead of having to find an upload point on just some planets) this is _exactly_ the game Hello Games was hawking. I just don't think the audience was paying attention.
Procedurally generated universe: Check. Of _course_ the universe is therefore limited by the number of procedures and skins available in the download, duh...
Rich Story: Check. You of course have to farm the sources (like monoliths) to extract the story.
Completely customizable personal tool, suit, and ship: Check.
Peace versus War is your choice: Check.
Basically the game was marketed as the opposite of Destiny et al. It's survival and exploration instead of "closet full of boomstick!" : Check.
So I went online and found guides on how to quickly max out your ship, suit, and multitool. In other words guides on how to skip the game content. Skipping game content is boring. Check.
I've seen screenshots of people who've advanced further and faster, including people surrounded by sentinel walkers and whatnot.
I got a great sense of accomplishment when I finally figured out how to properly kit out my ship to take on a swarm of fighters (hint, the cannon is dumb fire but the burst beam is on a tracking turret).
And with a low-slot multi-tool, built poorly, I was _everything's_ bitch. But now I've built up a tool that I barely have to aim to take down large creature in moments. (hint, wide-shot bolt thrower and rail-gun mod then build up all the mining beam distance and focus, then never switch to bolt mode, the mining beam gets an invisible halo of destruction).
I did a free-flight (no pathing) and found myself in a world of hurt, and got back on path.
There are six or eight pathing pips and I've only unlocked one (you get two for free) so I'm assming eventually those other pips mean something.
I've had only one group of crashes on my PS/4 (version 1.4 had a tendency to crash if you opened your inventory in space). Other's have had more crashes. I've hat that same experience on other games, and when it's happened I've done a "rebuild database" on the PS/4 and then reinstalled and the problem went away, so that's more of a platform issue than a stability issue IMHO.
So I've seen a lot of bitching by power gamers and power levelers who then discovered (or didn't figure out) that they should be reading the text in a story game, and no, you _won't_ end up in a one-man super fortress because _duh_, that's not this game.
Quite frankly some times it is boring, which is the nature of exploration, but I've managed to sit down and play for eight hours straight... completely engrossed in the game.
So a bunch of whiners want their money back because they didn't pay attention to the advertisements. Ha Ha, sucks to be stupid. But in terms of being a "bad game"... not so much.
What I regret is that this means that the money won't keep floating in so the company probably won't be able to roll out the next chunk.
TL;DR:: Everything promised has, so far, been present in the game. But if you are a stupid munchkin power gamer, who wants every room to have one monster and one treasure, then you will be sadly disappointed. If you were looking for world of warcraft in space, this is not your game, and its developers never pretended it would be. The people who want their money back are essentially guilty of bad decision making and failure to pay attention to plain-spoken promises.
I know you are correct, but I have decided to hear it as "I could care less (but that wouldn't be worth the effort)".
Alternately: "It might surprise you to know, seeing how little I care, that I could care less than I appear to, but it would take quantum observation to discriminate between how much I care and the theoretical zero point."
So it's wrong but it's not wrong-wrong.
This is hand-in-hand with "It's not 'apathy' per se, I just don't think I care."
They didn't declare the same variable twice. They declared two independent variables with the same purpose to use the same name. If the second one said "d" instead of "c" it wouldn't break the pattern but it _would_ confuse the point that the two ifs create two scopes with no bleeding through.
Your comment seems to miss that point.
The real goal is to create an initializer that is valid for both the "then" and the "else" part but that DOES NOT introduce variables beyond the scope of the liftime of the if. That's why the full comparison text include the outer braces {thing c=stuff(); if (some_status(c)) okay(c); else no_bueno(c); } implies printf("%p",c) error because C is out of scope.
Using the same variable name twice was exemplary of the common closure of scope in the suggestion.
Alos note that the particular example was to bring it into line with the okay=complex_function(); if (!okay) return error; okay=next_complex_function(); if (!okay) return error;
Programmers _suck_ at stringing conditionals and making sure that the whole stop and exit at first error paradigm is met. The above monad can already be done as a number of graceful or degenerate cases.
if all your success states are boolean true, and failure is boolean false then a simple "return co1() && co2() && co3();" series continues until one fails or all succeed. But larger cascades from less boolean series can get "interestingly decorative" depending on how the programmer likes to arrange this sort of thing.
Of course the "Real Answer" is exceptions, but only if you don't then screw that up...
So the solution is a "not bad" attempt to deal with the horror that is "in-band error reporting", a horror that most languages make us blind to due to ubiquity alone.
A dispute is a request to get a charge "investigated". A "chargeback" is an instruction to the bank/credit company take the money back and make it my problem.
Most people don't know that (in the United States) these are completely different things.
If I dispute a charge then the credit card company may contact the vendor and ask them what happened and generally do a resolution where I may, or may not, get a refund. A dispute takes days, weeks, or even months to run its course.
A chargeback tells the credit card company to suck the money back out of the payee's account right now and debit it back to me unconditionally. There is no investigation. There is no delay. Once a chargeback has been issued the credit card issuer is no longer involved in the transaction. They payee may sue the payor or otherwise deal with the financial dispute by legal means. A chargeback is the "nuclear option" for dealing with a credit card transaction that's gone bad.
But understand that a chargeback isn't magic. If you buy something through an intermediary, the credit card bank is taking money from that next step in the chain, from that intermediary. That intermediary may then choose sue you or never do business with you again. So issuing a charge-back to ebay might get you a lifetime ban from ebay or a lawsuit from ebay and leave ebay holding the bag, unable to get the money back from the seller.
I've disputed several charges in my lifetime, but I've only ever once issued a chargeback. A local scaffolding company didn't properly log in the return of the scaffolding I'd rented. So they kept on billing me monthly rent for it. I tried to work it out with them, but they just kept saying they'd be charging me forever unless I showed up with the scaffolding. The individual pieces aren't serialized so it was impossible to coerce an audit to support my claim. I'm a home owner, not a business, so it's not like I could misplace that much stuff.
So I called the credit card company and issued a chargeback. The guy on the phone was all "what charges do you wish to dispute?" and I said "_NO_, I am issuing a chargeback for (amount) and blocking all further charges from (company)." I had to go several rounds and get a manager involved because the phone monkey didn't know what I was talking about. Finally I made it happen. Then I contacted the scaffolding company that I'd charged back everything they'd charged me since the date of the equipment return. With the money back in my hand and the door closed they became way more responsive and we agreed to go our separate ways.
They cold have sued me or whatever, but they would have lost since all of their records were messed up and their procedures were lax at best. So they decided (amount) and whatever equipment they thought I still had wasn't worth going to court.
A full chargeback is the last milestone before a resolution or a law suit, and if you issue (or receive as a business owner) more than a couple a decade you are likely to be dropped by the card company. It would _suck_ for a business to be banned by, say, all of Visa Corp. It wouldn't be fun for a consumer either.
But the full "chargeback" is a guaranteed protection to credit card holders as enshrined by law. The "dispute" is a contract term in your card and/or vendor agreement and subject to civil terms and other sections of law.
Chargebacks exist because the buyer and the seller are the actual involved parties, so either party can say to the payment processors "get out of this dispute completely" but to do that, to get out of the middle, the money must be put back into the hands of the original people.
It's twisty, and you shouldn't ever take legal or financial advice from the internet, but "disputing a charge" and "issuing a chargeback" are _totally_ different things.
The TPM is an _outstanding_ idea, but the implementation is flawed by the fact that the owner of the machine doesn't get the keys. It's not actually a "root kit", it's a self destruct that someone else has the key for.
I would _insist_ every computer I owned had a TPM _if_ I were in control of that TPM so that I could have it validate that my (linux) box has not been tampered with.
The technology is great. The implementation, however, is designed to work against me, the owner. Were it not _obviously_ laid out in a way intended to turn my computer into a gaming console or cable television set-top box, it would be outstanding.
There is absolutely no reason that the "publicized" goals of the TPM couldn't be realized while still allowing me my full rights.
But Microsoft et al wanted to make a copywrite tool instead of a true trustable boot experience. Signing keys are, after all, part of the public key not the private key. So I should be able to initialize my TPM with my own key pair, load microsoft's signing keys into it as I choose along with any other keys for my e.g. Linux boot system etc, and then get the security without the nonsense.
There is some rationality to wanting to protect the computer from it's operator. I've worked in tech support. There's more rationale to wanting to protect a computer from root kits and tampering. I've worked security. But there is no reason that the person who actually paid for the device should be denied access too it.
If I had my way in all things, every computer would have a TPM like device. And a little dongle plug. And it would have an SD card slot that the TPM can directly access. When the slot is occupied with a matched SD card, the computer will only do boot maintenance. When the card is not matched it's just regular storage. If you invoke the reinitialization system, the TPM will secure-erase _everything_ in the box then mint a new matched SD card. So now the machine _won't_ run normally if the boot stack is exposed, but it will run normally if it's not, so the average user is safe (they can't make the "leet" decision to leave the matched card in place and still have a working computer). The extreme tamper-evidence of having the machine blanked means that _nobody_ can sneak in a bios keylogger virtual machine layer without wiping the machine. And the owner would have the option to include-or-not the signing keys from the various sources like Microsoft or the Linux distro of their choice, or even signing their custom boot stack as they see fit.
Nuclear Material in/near Reactors Secure's Itself.
Dry fuel pellets are harmless.
Fuel rods are made by welding dry pellets into steel I-Beams or similar big, heavy, structures.
Used (wet) fuel pellets are _fantastically_ _dangerous_ to handle, so much so that they have to kept wet at all times to keep them from roasting everything while they cool.
Back in the seventies my father (nuclear engineer) said he'd love to stage, and televise, a "raid" on a nuclear power facility... The _months_ necessary to get the stuff off the premises (let alone ground up into nuclear dust) would have probably lost its audience. But the "Fast As Possible" "Smallest Crew" version of the raid that the anti-nuke people were putting in movies and scare politics would be thoroughly disproved.
Even if I installed a pebble-bed reactor in your garage (and one _would_ fit), any attempt to turn it into a "dirty bomb" would fatal to the person attempting it. Someone could blow up the pebble-bed itself, but that would move a few of the "pebbles", if any, a short distance. Someone with a radiation counter and a radiation suit could then just go pick them up with tongs.
So the terrorists "want{ed} to build a dirty bomb" is about as likely to lead to that end as my personal desire to own all of Google _and_ Tesla Motors outright as a pure proprietorship.
A public key block would flag a back door very obviously. The data has a unique look. It also has a unique profile of use, in that someone would have to initialize a cipher session or whatever. Even a trivial code review would find a fully encrypted back door.
Hiding the public key block within an obfuscation generator adds a huge block of code instead of data, followed by the same need to invoke the cipher system.
To function as a "back door" the door, by definition, has to be pretty damn simple and innocuous enough to go unnoticed.
So "creating a back door that only you can use" is actually creating a separate front door with all the trappings, which kind of moots the point of sneaking it in.
Back doors are, pretty much by definition, mechanisms that only implement security through obscurity.
Fully secure ingress is way too hard to sneak into place and remain hidden.
Create a master key, keep it to yourself. We won't ask you to give it to us, we promise. We don't care how you do it, we promise. It's only this once, we promise.
But whatever it takes, you go ahead and do it.
As a bonus, you will perform this work using people and equipment you get to pay for all by yourself. I'm sure it will be no burden at all and you should be ready to pay these expenses now because you didn't have the foresight to compromise all your products proactively.
And of course we'll never use this a precedent to force you do to this for all other products you make, and we'll not be forcing all the other companies to do likewise.... we promise.
It's such a simple request... and besides "Teh Terrorestors!"
Sure, the kernel gets the packet. A trivial annoyance. If you put the drop rule in the prerouting table of a linux kernel you should be able to drop the packets before they trigger any alerts.
If you have nftables support in a 4.x kernel you can get the packet dropped long before it can reach any sort of analyzer.
The port scan alert is the complaint, not an incipient load from the packets themselves, so an early filter will stop the annoyance.
If you don't know how to read plain text there's nothing anybody can do to help you. Time will handle you. I'd "lol" you but ignorance is dangerous so your failings are not even funny.
They don't understand that _any_ consultant could help them because the software source is available.
You are exactly correct that is a mind-set problem based in fear.
Business people are often not smart in the ways of "optional thought". They have game-plan mentalities based on team trimumph over all comers. (Next time someone tells you they are majoring in or have a degree in "business" ask them which sport they played in high school. No really, they act stunned and are all "how did you know?" in wonderment.
So they need someone to go to without thought. A vendor under contract is like the special teams in football. It doesn't matter how terrible your field-goal special team is, now is the moment you punt and it's then it's the punters fault we lost. Coach said so.
So business, particularly big business, is about apportioning blame (renamed "responsibility") because it's run like (and usually by) loss-adverse athletic reasoning.
There's a good reason that the entire tech explosion of the last fifty years happened outside of "normal business channels" and is full of geeks. What was done required non-linear thought by the drivers. Those companies all _hired_ MBAs to run the boring balls from legal to HR and back, but the innovation was done far away from the MBA's sight.
That's also why the Carly F.s of the world totally consumed companies like HP and turned them into "also rans" in their own fields. Get enough bankers and business men "on your team" and they'll crush the geeks before they realize they sold off or frightened away all the talent.
Innovation can be a team sport, but only a cooperative team sport like hakey-sack or "the floor is lava". 8-)
Didn't read very closely. I said "selling software" was insupportable but selling experience (e.g. professional expertese) [which is "service"] does work.
I was complaining that a business man who was already in the job of selling service for a zero-markup product (windows) couldn't seem to understand how selling service for a zero-dollar-cost OSS operating system was identical. Said business man was mentally caught on the horns of the word "Free" rather than being open to the fact that its the exact same transaction for his bottom line (but without the licensing compliance hassle and cost).
If you couldn't figure out that the "few" who do understand the model and sell the service _included_ RedHat...
Well your "only an idiot" comment just lays there on your plate like a dead crow waiting to be eaten.
There is zero "per-bit" cost for data transmission. The cost of a circuit is all physical plant. That is, the _actual_ cost is installation and maintenance and right-of-way and rent. All of which are dependent entirely on real wall-clock time. Metering something with a natural maximum capacity and no unit cost is the stupidest model _possible_.
When the various people decided to put a price on the data itself they created a bottomlessly hungry monster. That monster was the total cost of all the peering agreements that _also_ put a price on the data itself and a race between all the providers trying to claim their receptiveness was more valuable than their transmission burden.
So the current market is _boned_ because it isn't driven by any market force except greed.
In a rational world I could sell you an unlimited link to my backbone at a known fixed speed, with the understanding that your effective throughpt and potential delay to any destination is simply not something I can control.
Then the market force would be "Provider X is too congested, I'll switch to provider Y". The cost of the link and the speed of your first/last mile, and your best bet for a good provider with a good backbone would be your selling points.
So the problem with the internet here in 'merica is that it's become a Libertarian Ideal Toll Road... Its clogged up, over priced, full of unmet promises, and barely functional. People are all trying to over-burden "the best" roads because the normal roads have all fallen to shit. The service providers have had to limit the hell out of their points of connection because each one is metered so the mesh has become a set of inter-linked long-armed stars where my transmission of a packet to a business down the block may pass through several of these united states.
If the costs weren't inflated by the per-bit pricing and predatory nonsense then the connections between networks wold be much more open. People wouldn't be worrying about "who's data is on my network" and most routes would be much more direct. Each provider would see user uptick as a opportunity to shorten their net spans instead of a call to throttle their nets. The best networks would promise not a speed in megabits but shortest transit time off their net. Bulk providers (Goggle and Youtube, vs Netflix, etc) would be invited to make as many close-end and colocated insertion/service points as they could muster.
An "unmetered" internet just works. Ask most of the rest of the world. You pay to connect. You take your chances for throughput. And all the effort and human and monetary expense is spent to get your data to its destination by the best route possible. Then Open Shortest Route does the work so you don't have to.
NOTE: This doesn't hold for "unlimited data storage for free" models. It's _incorrect_ to conflate transit and storage, everything is completely different for storage. That's the difference between being able to use a road and needing to build bigger warehouses.
The core problem isn't that OSS is incomparable with "business", it is only incomparable with the business of "selling software".
OTOH, I spent several hours going round-and-round with my brother inlaw. He runs/owns a company that installs business solutions (computers and software) into other businesses. He was all "I could never make money on open source platforms" using linux as the O.S. because it's free. But he readily admitted that installing Windows had a zero profit margin because of licensing.
There is also the ready admission that having a Windows service contract (again sold a essentially zero markup because of the licenses) doesn't garantee that Microsoft will issue you a patch if you complain about a problem. You are basically just paying up front for the chance to be told to work around a problem or the "opportunity" for an unsupported patch that you'll have to buy again if you upgrade.
Business men have no idea how to deal with OSS because they tend to mimic others and very few have ever done it. The idea of having a line item for zero-dollars that already had zero markup when the line item was non-zero dollars, is mystifying.
So here's this smart guy running a services business, but unable to see how he could charge to service OSS. But companies service OSS all the time.
The true failure, deeper in, is the idea that every incremental correction and modification is precious and must be hoarded and monetized.
And further in still is the complete failure to understand things like the up-front cost of a GPL project base is "disclosure", and that disclosure of those incremental changes is very cheap. Compare embedding linux kernels in things to the up-front and per-unit costs of Wince or VxWorks. Then really _think_ about how non-money-value your fix to that one serial driver really is compared to the item you wan to sell.
Companies tend to forget which businesses they are _not_ in. Selling software is not sustainable, but selling experience (games) and experience (professional expertese) are. So is selling "devices".
So its a problem made up of compounded risk adversity multiplied by inherently unimaginative "business thinking".
I made a comment that included the word "porn" while discussing playback on a Gentoo IRC. I didn't discuss porn, or details of porn, but I got a ban just for using the word "porn". Then when I complained it was "strongly suggested" that I make a personal apology to the offended party. When I refused my "one month ban" was upheld.
But three years later my "one month ban" is still in force.
So the "personally offended" person, being an "important person", got me that treatment.
So at least Go is being up-front about the sort of interpersonal bull that actually rules other "overly correct" projects.
The very first thing I tried to compile under Go's build scheme failed because of headers I don't have for a sub-service I don't need.
It was the "cups connector" for Google cloud print and it wanted libavahi.h even though I don't want or need any of that local network auto configuration stuff.
If the build system can't do what "configure" (autotools) does, or CMake, or CPAN, or any of the other portability systems, then it's not really portable is it.
The government policies didn't "encourage" loaning to such people. They specifically _forbade_ it. The problem was that the deregulation regime didn't provide any "stick" to back up that prohibition. So on one side it offered a financial carrot of massive proportions, the other side just said "it's your duty to not do X and Y and to make sure that you are being good."
The people who bought, paid for, and essentially wrote the legislation, that is the banks, didn't put any "and for every time you fail your duty by doing X and/or Y you will be charged $Z language.
This is called Regulatory Capture, or it's an eventual but certain outcome of regulatory capture. The law was balanced in "intent" and wording, listing things that were good and bad to do and ordering that none of the bad things be done. But it had no teeth to bite bad behavior.
Much as the entire libertarian and "small government republican" agenda, the "we all know what's right so the market will fix it" stuff falls apart in the trenches because without penalty all business and behavior becomes a choice between "do I eat the ice cream now or do I make an ice cream sandwich and then eat that"? If there is no "bad boys get their ice cream taken away" there is no reason expressed by market forces to not be a bad boy.
Example: the theory is "the market isn't going to buy his stuff if he is a bad man polluter of his river" is, in practice, "the people down stream _might_ not buy his stuff because he's polluting their water, but there are lots of people upstream who don't even want to know about the pollution and will buy his stuff."
So the "mortgage lenders" knew that they could make toxic loans and sell them upstream to banks knowing that the government who lived down stream would have to deal with the shit in the financial river eventually. But why would the mortgage broker care, the "free market" already paid him for his product.
"Free Market Capitalism" is the worship of the carpetbagger and the insistance that nobody can escape forever, but if you give everyone a head start thats longer than the statue of limitations, and you don't even make it against the law, nobody is even chasing the crooks.
The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.
Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.
But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.
So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!
So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.
Interesting distinctions. Does Microsoft own the servers directly, or through a subsidiary? Is Microsoft a direct participant in the action or just a third party?
If Microsoft is just a third party then their case is very strong.
Slashdot Mirror
The real harm now is dialog.showModal() and dialog.show().
The in-page pop-ups and overlays are the new window.open(). Popup blocking should start with opt-in only for any dialogs on any sites. Popup blockers worked in the before time, so W3C let abuses back in the back door with the tag and in-standard DRM extensions.
The web is just as captured as it ever was, and now with Net Neutrality being murdered in the public square these abuses are just going to continue.
Since the game plays _just_ _fine_ without a connection to "the servers" (at least on PS/4) because it's not WoW in space, the presence of item 2 on this list tells me that you've never actually played this game. "The Servers" in No Man's Sky are just data repositories for the discoveries you upload, and the chance to download other peoples discoveries if you find anybody else's planet. There's no "instancing" because your machine is the instance.
Meanwhile, I have not seen a single broken promise in the game. I don't know what the munchkin power-gamer types _thought_ they were buying... but what I got was pretty much exactly what I was sold: An exploration and survival sandbox game with a rich story that you have to "discover" (by reading the texts you farm out of ancient monoliths and ruins).
Now I know the people who didn't pay attention to what was being sold are quite disappointed because they were thinking they were getting Destiny "life full of boomstick!" redux. But go find me a single video from the makers that tried to sell that at all. They talked about exploring worlds, mining, crafting, and dodging sentinels.
Is the game flawless? Fuck no. It's essentially impossible to find your way back along your flight path to that one planet that had that one resource that you desperately need, and ibid for finding your way back to an on-planet trade hub. So the mapping and waypointing needs some work. And I can see signs of bigger things that got waylaid (like observatories that talk about locations in distant space that, instead, direct you to far-away points on the planet you are on), but I suspect that that became a question of things simplified in play-testing.
So I agree with the parts of your sentiment that "you pay your money and you take your chance", but I disagree with any part of anybody's complaint if they are bitching about "the servers" and the lack of WoW-in-space behaviors.
I've yet to see a single complaint that really boils down to a broken promise. I've seen a lot of complaining about things that were fully disclosed in the advanced coverage where the complainer took great liberties with their imagination, insisting that what they were promised was not delivered. But those undelivered promises seem to be entirely in their heads.
Minus a couple small things (like every planet has lots of upload points instead of having to find an upload point on just some planets) this is _exactly_ the game Hello Games was hawking. I just don't think the audience was paying attention.
Procedurally generated universe: Check. Of _course_ the universe is therefore limited by the number of procedures and skins available in the download, duh...
Rich Story: Check. You of course have to farm the sources (like monoliths) to extract the story.
Completely customizable personal tool, suit, and ship: Check.
Peace versus War is your choice: Check.
Basically the game was marketed as the opposite of Destiny et al. It's survival and exploration instead of "closet full of boomstick!" : Check.
So I went online and found guides on how to quickly max out your ship, suit, and multitool. In other words guides on how to skip the game content. Skipping game content is boring. Check.
I've seen screenshots of people who've advanced further and faster, including people surrounded by sentinel walkers and whatnot.
I got a great sense of accomplishment when I finally figured out how to properly kit out my ship to take on a swarm of fighters (hint, the cannon is dumb fire but the burst beam is on a tracking turret).
And with a low-slot multi-tool, built poorly, I was _everything's_ bitch. But now I've built up a tool that I barely have to aim to take down large creature in moments. (hint, wide-shot bolt thrower and rail-gun mod then build up all the mining beam distance and focus, then never switch to bolt mode, the mining beam gets an invisible halo of destruction).
I did a free-flight (no pathing) and found myself in a world of hurt, and got back on path.
There are six or eight pathing pips and I've only unlocked one (you get two for free) so I'm assming eventually those other pips mean something.
I've had only one group of crashes on my PS/4 (version 1.4 had a tendency to crash if you opened your inventory in space). Other's have had more crashes. I've hat that same experience on other games, and when it's happened I've done a "rebuild database" on the PS/4 and then reinstalled and the problem went away, so that's more of a platform issue than a stability issue IMHO.
So I've seen a lot of bitching by power gamers and power levelers who then discovered (or didn't figure out) that they should be reading the text in a story game, and no, you _won't_ end up in a one-man super fortress because _duh_, that's not this game.
Quite frankly some times it is boring, which is the nature of exploration, but I've managed to sit down and play for eight hours straight... completely engrossed in the game.
So a bunch of whiners want their money back because they didn't pay attention to the advertisements. Ha Ha, sucks to be stupid. But in terms of being a "bad game"... not so much.
What I regret is that this means that the money won't keep floating in so the company probably won't be able to roll out the next chunk.
TL;DR :: Everything promised has, so far, been present in the game. But if you are a stupid munchkin power gamer, who wants every room to have one monster and one treasure, then you will be sadly disappointed. If you were looking for world of warcraft in space, this is not your game, and its developers never pretended it would be. The people who want their money back are essentially guilty of bad decision making and failure to pay attention to plain-spoken promises.
I know you are correct, but I have decided to hear it as "I could care less (but that wouldn't be worth the effort)".
Alternately: "It might surprise you to know, seeing how little I care, that I could care less than I appear to, but it would take quantum observation to discriminate between how much I care and the theoretical zero point."
So it's wrong but it's not wrong-wrong.
This is hand-in-hand with "It's not 'apathy' per se, I just don't think I care."
In english the ironic is normative. 8-)
They didn't declare the same variable twice. They declared two independent variables with the same purpose to use the same name. If the second one said "d" instead of "c" it wouldn't break the pattern but it _would_ confuse the point that the two ifs create two scopes with no bleeding through.
Your comment seems to miss that point.
The real goal is to create an initializer that is valid for both the "then" and the "else" part but that DOES NOT introduce variables beyond the scope of the liftime of the if. That's why the full comparison text include the outer braces {thing c=stuff(); if (some_status(c)) okay(c); else no_bueno(c); } implies printf("%p",c) error because C is out of scope.
Using the same variable name twice was exemplary of the common closure of scope in the suggestion.
Alos note that the particular example was to bring it into line with the okay=complex_function(); if (!okay) return error; okay=next_complex_function(); if (!okay) return error;
Programmers _suck_ at stringing conditionals and making sure that the whole stop and exit at first error paradigm is met. The above monad can already be done as a number of graceful or degenerate cases.
if all your success states are boolean true, and failure is boolean false then a simple "return co1() && co2() && co3();" series continues until one fails or all succeed. But larger cascades from less boolean series can get "interestingly decorative" depending on how the programmer likes to arrange this sort of thing.
Of course the "Real Answer" is exceptions, but only if you don't then screw that up...
So the solution is a "not bad" attempt to deal with the horror that is "in-band error reporting", a horror that most languages make us blind to due to ubiquity alone.
A dispute is a request to get a charge "investigated". A "chargeback" is an instruction to the bank/credit company take the money back and make it my problem.
Most people don't know that (in the United States) these are completely different things.
If I dispute a charge then the credit card company may contact the vendor and ask them what happened and generally do a resolution where I may, or may not, get a refund. A dispute takes days, weeks, or even months to run its course.
A chargeback tells the credit card company to suck the money back out of the payee's account right now and debit it back to me unconditionally. There is no investigation. There is no delay. Once a chargeback has been issued the credit card issuer is no longer involved in the transaction. They payee may sue the payor or otherwise deal with the financial dispute by legal means. A chargeback is the "nuclear option" for dealing with a credit card transaction that's gone bad.
But understand that a chargeback isn't magic. If you buy something through an intermediary, the credit card bank is taking money from that next step in the chain, from that intermediary. That intermediary may then choose sue you or never do business with you again. So issuing a charge-back to ebay might get you a lifetime ban from ebay or a lawsuit from ebay and leave ebay holding the bag, unable to get the money back from the seller.
I've disputed several charges in my lifetime, but I've only ever once issued a chargeback. A local scaffolding company didn't properly log in the return of the scaffolding I'd rented. So they kept on billing me monthly rent for it. I tried to work it out with them, but they just kept saying they'd be charging me forever unless I showed up with the scaffolding. The individual pieces aren't serialized so it was impossible to coerce an audit to support my claim. I'm a home owner, not a business, so it's not like I could misplace that much stuff.
So I called the credit card company and issued a chargeback. The guy on the phone was all "what charges do you wish to dispute?" and I said "_NO_, I am issuing a chargeback for (amount) and blocking all further charges from (company)." I had to go several rounds and get a manager involved because the phone monkey didn't know what I was talking about. Finally I made it happen. Then I contacted the scaffolding company that I'd charged back everything they'd charged me since the date of the equipment return. With the money back in my hand and the door closed they became way more responsive and we agreed to go our separate ways.
They cold have sued me or whatever, but they would have lost since all of their records were messed up and their procedures were lax at best. So they decided (amount) and whatever equipment they thought I still had wasn't worth going to court.
A full chargeback is the last milestone before a resolution or a law suit, and if you issue (or receive as a business owner) more than a couple a decade you are likely to be dropped by the card company. It would _suck_ for a business to be banned by, say, all of Visa Corp. It wouldn't be fun for a consumer either.
But the full "chargeback" is a guaranteed protection to credit card holders as enshrined by law. The "dispute" is a contract term in your card and/or vendor agreement and subject to civil terms and other sections of law.
Chargebacks exist because the buyer and the seller are the actual involved parties, so either party can say to the payment processors "get out of this dispute completely" but to do that, to get out of the middle, the money must be put back into the hands of the original people.
It's twisty, and you shouldn't ever take legal or financial advice from the internet, but "disputing a charge" and "issuing a chargeback" are _totally_ different things.
The TPM is an _outstanding_ idea, but the implementation is flawed by the fact that the owner of the machine doesn't get the keys. It's not actually a "root kit", it's a self destruct that someone else has the key for.
I would _insist_ every computer I owned had a TPM _if_ I were in control of that TPM so that I could have it validate that my (linux) box has not been tampered with.
The technology is great. The implementation, however, is designed to work against me, the owner. Were it not _obviously_ laid out in a way intended to turn my computer into a gaming console or cable television set-top box, it would be outstanding.
There is absolutely no reason that the "publicized" goals of the TPM couldn't be realized while still allowing me my full rights.
But Microsoft et al wanted to make a copywrite tool instead of a true trustable boot experience. Signing keys are, after all, part of the public key not the private key. So I should be able to initialize my TPM with my own key pair, load microsoft's signing keys into it as I choose along with any other keys for my e.g. Linux boot system etc, and then get the security without the nonsense.
There is some rationality to wanting to protect the computer from it's operator. I've worked in tech support. There's more rationale to wanting to protect a computer from root kits and tampering. I've worked security. But there is no reason that the person who actually paid for the device should be denied access too it.
If I had my way in all things, every computer would have a TPM like device. And a little dongle plug. And it would have an SD card slot that the TPM can directly access. When the slot is occupied with a matched SD card, the computer will only do boot maintenance. When the card is not matched it's just regular storage. If you invoke the reinitialization system, the TPM will secure-erase _everything_ in the box then mint a new matched SD card. So now the machine _won't_ run normally if the boot stack is exposed, but it will run normally if it's not, so the average user is safe (they can't make the "leet" decision to leave the matched card in place and still have a working computer). The extreme tamper-evidence of having the machine blanked means that _nobody_ can sneak in a bios keylogger virtual machine layer without wiping the machine. And the owner would have the option to include-or-not the signing keys from the various sources like Microsoft or the Linux distro of their choice, or even signing their custom boot stack as they see fit.
Was a photo also found of a someone making a gun shape with their fingers and holding a note making no demands?
Long polls? I don't think you realize how long the polls would have to be.
You are also mistaking the buildings these things are in for simple, flimsy structures into which one can simply drill a hole and drop a cable.
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Nuclear Material in/near Reactors Secure's Itself.
Dry fuel pellets are harmless.
Fuel rods are made by welding dry pellets into steel I-Beams or similar big, heavy, structures.
Used (wet) fuel pellets are _fantastically_ _dangerous_ to handle, so much so that they have to kept wet at all times to keep them from roasting everything while they cool.
Back in the seventies my father (nuclear engineer) said he'd love to stage, and televise, a "raid" on a nuclear power facility... The _months_ necessary to get the stuff off the premises (let alone ground up into nuclear dust) would have probably lost its audience. But the "Fast As Possible" "Smallest Crew" version of the raid that the anti-nuke people were putting in movies and scare politics would be thoroughly disproved.
Even if I installed a pebble-bed reactor in your garage (and one _would_ fit), any attempt to turn it into a "dirty bomb" would fatal to the person attempting it. Someone could blow up the pebble-bed itself, but that would move a few of the "pebbles", if any, a short distance. Someone with a radiation counter and a radiation suit could then just go pick them up with tongs.
So the terrorists "want{ed} to build a dirty bomb" is about as likely to lead to that end as my personal desire to own all of Google _and_ Tesla Motors outright as a pure proprietorship.
A public key block would flag a back door very obviously. The data has a unique look. It also has a unique profile of use, in that someone would have to initialize a cipher session or whatever. Even a trivial code review would find a fully encrypted back door.
Hiding the public key block within an obfuscation generator adds a huge block of code instead of data, followed by the same need to invoke the cipher system.
To function as a "back door" the door, by definition, has to be pretty damn simple and innocuous enough to go unnoticed.
So "creating a back door that only you can use" is actually creating a separate front door with all the trappings, which kind of moots the point of sneaking it in.
Back doors are, pretty much by definition, mechanisms that only implement security through obscurity.
Fully secure ingress is way too hard to sneak into place and remain hidden.
Create a master key, keep it to yourself. We won't ask you to give it to us, we promise. We don't care how you do it, we promise. It's only this once, we promise.
But whatever it takes, you go ahead and do it.
As a bonus, you will perform this work using people and equipment you get to pay for all by yourself. I'm sure it will be no burden at all and you should be ready to pay these expenses now because you didn't have the foresight to compromise all your products proactively.
And of course we'll never use this a precedent to force you do to this for all other products you make, and we'll not be forcing all the other companies to do likewise. ... we promise.
It's such a simple request... and besides "Teh Terrorestors!"
Sure, the kernel gets the packet. A trivial annoyance. If you put the drop rule in the prerouting table of a linux kernel you should be able to drop the packets before they trigger any alerts.
If you have nftables support in a 4.x kernel you can get the packet dropped long before it can reach any sort of analyzer.
The port scan alert is the complaint, not an incipient load from the packets themselves, so an early filter will stop the annoyance.
If you don't know how to read plain text there's nothing anybody can do to help you. Time will handle you. I'd "lol" you but ignorance is dangerous so your failings are not even funny.
They don't understand that _any_ consultant could help them because the software source is available.
You are exactly correct that is a mind-set problem based in fear.
Business people are often not smart in the ways of "optional thought". They have game-plan mentalities based on team trimumph over all comers. (Next time someone tells you they are majoring in or have a degree in "business" ask them which sport they played in high school. No really, they act stunned and are all "how did you know?" in wonderment.
So they need someone to go to without thought. A vendor under contract is like the special teams in football. It doesn't matter how terrible your field-goal special team is, now is the moment you punt and it's then it's the punters fault we lost. Coach said so.
So business, particularly big business, is about apportioning blame (renamed "responsibility") because it's run like (and usually by) loss-adverse athletic reasoning.
There's a good reason that the entire tech explosion of the last fifty years happened outside of "normal business channels" and is full of geeks. What was done required non-linear thought by the drivers. Those companies all _hired_ MBAs to run the boring balls from legal to HR and back, but the innovation was done far away from the MBA's sight.
That's also why the Carly F.s of the world totally consumed companies like HP and turned them into "also rans" in their own fields. Get enough bankers and business men "on your team" and they'll crush the geeks before they realize they sold off or frightened away all the talent.
Innovation can be a team sport, but only a cooperative team sport like hakey-sack or "the floor is lava". 8-)
Didn't read very closely. I said "selling software" was insupportable but selling experience (e.g. professional expertese) [which is "service"] does work.
I was complaining that a business man who was already in the job of selling service for a zero-markup product (windows) couldn't seem to understand how selling service for a zero-dollar-cost OSS operating system was identical. Said business man was mentally caught on the horns of the word "Free" rather than being open to the fact that its the exact same transaction for his bottom line (but without the licensing compliance hassle and cost).
If you couldn't figure out that the "few" who do understand the model and sell the service _included_ RedHat...
Well your "only an idiot" comment just lays there on your plate like a dead crow waiting to be eaten.
There is zero "per-bit" cost for data transmission. The cost of a circuit is all physical plant. That is, the _actual_ cost is installation and maintenance and right-of-way and rent. All of which are dependent entirely on real wall-clock time. Metering something with a natural maximum capacity and no unit cost is the stupidest model _possible_.
When the various people decided to put a price on the data itself they created a bottomlessly hungry monster. That monster was the total cost of all the peering agreements that _also_ put a price on the data itself and a race between all the providers trying to claim their receptiveness was more valuable than their transmission burden.
So the current market is _boned_ because it isn't driven by any market force except greed.
In a rational world I could sell you an unlimited link to my backbone at a known fixed speed, with the understanding that your effective throughpt and potential delay to any destination is simply not something I can control.
Then the market force would be "Provider X is too congested, I'll switch to provider Y". The cost of the link and the speed of your first/last mile, and your best bet for a good provider with a good backbone would be your selling points.
So the problem with the internet here in 'merica is that it's become a Libertarian Ideal Toll Road... Its clogged up, over priced, full of unmet promises, and barely functional. People are all trying to over-burden "the best" roads because the normal roads have all fallen to shit. The service providers have had to limit the hell out of their points of connection because each one is metered so the mesh has become a set of inter-linked long-armed stars where my transmission of a packet to a business down the block may pass through several of these united states.
If the costs weren't inflated by the per-bit pricing and predatory nonsense then the connections between networks wold be much more open. People wouldn't be worrying about "who's data is on my network" and most routes would be much more direct. Each provider would see user uptick as a opportunity to shorten their net spans instead of a call to throttle their nets. The best networks would promise not a speed in megabits but shortest transit time off their net. Bulk providers (Goggle and Youtube, vs Netflix, etc) would be invited to make as many close-end and colocated insertion/service points as they could muster.
An "unmetered" internet just works. Ask most of the rest of the world. You pay to connect. You take your chances for throughput. And all the effort and human and monetary expense is spent to get your data to its destination by the best route possible. Then Open Shortest Route does the work so you don't have to.
NOTE: This doesn't hold for "unlimited data storage for free" models. It's _incorrect_ to conflate transit and storage, everything is completely different for storage. That's the difference between being able to use a road and needing to build bigger warehouses.
Android: Control of market share (the software is given away for free)
Google: Control of advertising revenue (the software is given away for free)
Tesla: Sells cars and batteries, (software updates are free).
Most of the Internet: pay for services.
Kinda making my point.
The core problem isn't that OSS is incomparable with "business", it is only incomparable with the business of "selling software".
OTOH, I spent several hours going round-and-round with my brother inlaw. He runs/owns a company that installs business solutions (computers and software) into other businesses. He was all "I could never make money on open source platforms" using linux as the O.S. because it's free. But he readily admitted that installing Windows had a zero profit margin because of licensing.
There is also the ready admission that having a Windows service contract (again sold a essentially zero markup because of the licenses) doesn't garantee that Microsoft will issue you a patch if you complain about a problem. You are basically just paying up front for the chance to be told to work around a problem or the "opportunity" for an unsupported patch that you'll have to buy again if you upgrade.
Business men have no idea how to deal with OSS because they tend to mimic others and very few have ever done it. The idea of having a line item for zero-dollars that already had zero markup when the line item was non-zero dollars, is mystifying.
So here's this smart guy running a services business, but unable to see how he could charge to service OSS. But companies service OSS all the time.
The true failure, deeper in, is the idea that every incremental correction and modification is precious and must be hoarded and monetized.
And further in still is the complete failure to understand things like the up-front cost of a GPL project base is "disclosure", and that disclosure of those incremental changes is very cheap. Compare embedding linux kernels in things to the up-front and per-unit costs of Wince or VxWorks. Then really _think_ about how non-money-value your fix to that one serial driver really is compared to the item you wan to sell.
Companies tend to forget which businesses they are _not_ in. Selling software is not sustainable, but selling experience (games) and experience (professional expertese) are. So is selling "devices".
So its a problem made up of compounded risk adversity multiplied by inherently unimaginative "business thinking".
I made a comment that included the word "porn" while discussing playback on a Gentoo IRC. I didn't discuss porn, or details of porn, but I got a ban just for using the word "porn". Then when I complained it was "strongly suggested" that I make a personal apology to the offended party. When I refused my "one month ban" was upheld.
But three years later my "one month ban" is still in force.
So the "personally offended" person, being an "important person", got me that treatment.
So at least Go is being up-front about the sort of interpersonal bull that actually rules other "overly correct" projects.
I call it "being exclusively inclusive".
The very first thing I tried to compile under Go's build scheme failed because of headers I don't have for a sub-service I don't need.
It was the "cups connector" for Google cloud print and it wanted libavahi.h even though I don't want or need any of that local network auto configuration stuff.
If the build system can't do what "configure" (autotools) does, or CMake, or CPAN, or any of the other portability systems, then it's not really portable is it.
Go? It went right to bit-bucket for now.
The government policies didn't "encourage" loaning to such people. They specifically _forbade_ it. The problem was that the deregulation regime didn't provide any "stick" to back up that prohibition. So on one side it offered a financial carrot of massive proportions, the other side just said "it's your duty to not do X and Y and to make sure that you are being good."
The people who bought, paid for, and essentially wrote the legislation, that is the banks, didn't put any "and for every time you fail your duty by doing X and/or Y you will be charged $Z language.
This is called Regulatory Capture, or it's an eventual but certain outcome of regulatory capture. The law was balanced in "intent" and wording, listing things that were good and bad to do and ordering that none of the bad things be done. But it had no teeth to bite bad behavior.
Much as the entire libertarian and "small government republican" agenda, the "we all know what's right so the market will fix it" stuff falls apart in the trenches because without penalty all business and behavior becomes a choice between "do I eat the ice cream now or do I make an ice cream sandwich and then eat that"? If there is no "bad boys get their ice cream taken away" there is no reason expressed by market forces to not be a bad boy.
Example: the theory is "the market isn't going to buy his stuff if he is a bad man polluter of his river" is, in practice, "the people down stream _might_ not buy his stuff because he's polluting their water, but there are lots of people upstream who don't even want to know about the pollution and will buy his stuff."
So the "mortgage lenders" knew that they could make toxic loans and sell them upstream to banks knowing that the government who lived down stream would have to deal with the shit in the financial river eventually. But why would the mortgage broker care, the "free market" already paid him for his product.
"Free Market Capitalism" is the worship of the carpetbagger and the insistance that nobody can escape forever, but if you give everyone a head start thats longer than the statue of limitations, and you don't even make it against the law, nobody is even chasing the crooks.
Don't tell the NeoCons, they'll have all the bees rounded up and put in jail because getting buzzed is immoral if nobody is paying for it.
The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.
Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.
But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.
So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!
So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.
Interesting distinctions. Does Microsoft own the servers directly, or through a subsidiary? Is Microsoft a direct participant in the action or just a third party?
If Microsoft is just a third party then their case is very strong.