That is an excellent point. The government does have things they want to hide, and properly so. Indeed, for the main example in the article, the huge database of equipment, said knowledge could indeed be used by terrorist opposition. And it could also be analyzed to find fraud in the supply chain, lies by the DOD that have nothing to do with security or operations, and I'm sure many other legitimate issues a free people want to track and correct.
There is no easy, correct answer for many leaked items given their possible dual use/misuse.
All I have to say is I'm glad the US freedom of speech is so iron-clad. Hell, even people angry about the recent overturning of laws against corporate/organizational political advertising would at least agree speech is moving in the correct direction -- towards freedom, and not away from it. Given human history, I'd rather that than give government any censorship permission. I'll happily take my chances.
The paper even acknowledges something like this where they point out basically "the Wiki peeps incorrectly think they are protected ala the Pentagon papers...but countries like Squeedunk try to prosecute them", bailing on the US part of it.
They may be shoddy. They most certainly will be overloaded. I know someone whose municipality gives "free" broadband, and in the evenings, it's next to useless. They still subscribe to the, fortunately, still available private service in order to play games or surf at a decent rate.
Modern, Visual Basic-style basic, with full procedures/function calls, full-length symbol naming, and no line numbers, sure.
Old-school, with line numbers (REN anyone?), 2-letter max variable names, and gotos up the wazoo, no thanks. And the latter's what I "cut my teeth" on, and I'm the best programmer on the planet.
> I always wondered, with the sheer amount of portable devices which charge > over USB nowdays, why not put some manner of standardized charge reporting > into the specs of the next version of USB
You'd be surprised how lax are the implementations to "standards". I've worked with both USB memory sticks for.mp3s and Bluetooth phones, and the code to handle them is a morass of special cases per manufacturer. Not including the version number differences. That's within the same interface version.
Implement "just the spec" and be damned with any mfr. who doesn't work correctly, and suddenly you've lopped off 55% or more of the devices out there. Your client OEM won't be too happy.
And replacing the "normal" quarks with strange ones:
> The paper itself is a mindbending trip through families of particles that are similar to > our familiar protons and neutrons (termed nucleons), but have at least one of their quarks > replaced by a heavier, strange version, resulting in what's termed a hyperon (four of these, > , , , and , have been observed).
Bullshit! Those are marshmallows in Lucky Charms! >:-(
You do realize dragons, in reality, are far more formidable than the lame, stupid bags of hitpoints in various online games, don't you? A godlike genius combined with millenia to hone magical skills nobody this side of 22,000 year old Gandalf can dream of on top of a body that can rip a true ogre in half?
> One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution.
Please show statistics from longitudinal studies of people where this is true. Hint: It's not.
> Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed.
Please show statistics from longitudinal studies of people where this is true. Hint: The "shrinking middle class" is shrinking because almost everybody is moving up, not down.
Calls AT&T, whoever owns MAE East, etc. "This is the President of the United States. Can you shut down this, this, and this? Txbie."
From the viewpoint of a few dudes sitting at a cyber security dashboard app, yeah, it looks bad. From the point of view of someone who can mobilize a thousand people at the core of the Internet backbone, not so much.
I question "take novel action" as well. Sounds like an irrelevancy. You are concerned with the molecule reproducing -- that's the primary problem for life, not adapting or WTH ever.
Everything thereafter is evolution.
That list seems like a throwback to a "lifeforce" animating unliving matter, trying to give a definition to something that is really meaningless, scientifically.
People understand how, say, viruses and seeds work, and don't argue about whether they are "alive" or not. "Alive" just isn't important as a dividing line in biology nowadays.
> This is the same dynamic that killed Asheron's Call 2. The entire gameworld > was set up to be a sanctioned grief-fest.
Thank you. Ultima Online's owners wanted to have their cake and eat it too -- have RPers (heck, just gameplay adventurers) and the griefers. They need the former to have a supply of the latter.
As long as the former were willing to put up with it, UO happily collected the monthly fees. I left after 2 months and came back for a few weeks a year later. Nothing had changed.
I have no problem with PvP-oriented games, but don't try to portray it as also a PvE game, suitable for PvE people. That's simply fraud.
Well, let's get the perps in jail, then, instead of all this "settlement" crap.
Doesn't this school have an American Government class? They tend to be run by libertarian-types who have no problem yapping at length about what the government is permitted to do.
> Bonus: Not only does the class action include the 1,800 students, but all > their family members. > That school district is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
Don't know how class action suit mechanics work, but they could go even further: Anybody who owned any private property it was used on (inside buildings anyway) and any person, relative or otherwise, who was inside at the time. Don't know about a food court, but your out-of-district friend's house, their stepdad, and the guy inside fixing the plumbing.
Good question, would snooty sitting areas in coffee shoppes count?
I'm less concerned about the false positives than this:
"[F]or Microsoft to assert that they have the right to treat ordinary PC-using consumers in this manner -- declaring their systems to be non-genuine and downgrading them at any time -- is rather staggering."
No, staggering is the number of warez installs. They wouldn't bother if it were only a few thousand, or only a few hundred thousand.
It's ironic some people around here only have a problem with Iran's actions because it's not a democracy, rather than because of any freedom of speech, association, or business rights.
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I can imagine being an access provider, with the more bloated, unpatented, public video versions becoming the rule rather than the exception.
On the other hand, it will create demands for even more throughput, which will happen sooner or later anyway...
That is an excellent point. The government does have things they want to hide, and properly so. Indeed, for the main example in the article, the huge database of equipment, said knowledge could indeed be used by terrorist opposition. And it could also be analyzed to find fraud in the supply chain, lies by the DOD that have nothing to do with security or operations, and I'm sure many other legitimate issues a free people want to track and correct.
There is no easy, correct answer for many leaked items given their possible dual use/misuse.
All I have to say is I'm glad the US freedom of speech is so iron-clad. Hell, even people angry about the recent overturning of laws against corporate/organizational political advertising would at least agree speech is moving in the correct direction -- towards freedom, and not away from it. Given human history, I'd rather that than give government any censorship permission. I'll happily take my chances.
The paper even acknowledges something like this where they point out basically "the Wiki peeps incorrectly think they are protected ala the Pentagon papers...but countries like Squeedunk try to prosecute them", bailing on the US part of it.
This is a good point, and I've made it here in various threads through the years.
The issue for some isn't that China censors, but that they do so without democratic approval.
I would prefer to keep such folks well away from any constitution-creating.
They may be shoddy. They most certainly will be overloaded. I know someone whose municipality gives "free" broadband, and in the evenings, it's next to useless. They still subscribe to the, fortunately, still available private service in order to play games or surf at a decent rate.
No "single payer" there, yet.
Modern, Visual Basic-style basic, with full procedures/function calls, full-length symbol naming, and no line numbers, sure.
Old-school, with line numbers (REN anyone?), 2-letter max variable names, and gotos up the wazoo, no thanks. And the latter's what I "cut my teeth" on, and I'm the best programmer on the planet.
Oh, wait. n/m.
Hence the GP's point.
> I always wondered, with the sheer amount of portable devices which charge
> over USB nowdays, why not put some manner of standardized charge reporting
> into the specs of the next version of USB
You'd be surprised how lax are the implementations to "standards". I've worked with both USB memory sticks for .mp3s and Bluetooth phones, and the code to handle them is a morass of special cases per manufacturer. Not including the version number differences. That's within the same interface version.
Implement "just the spec" and be damned with any mfr. who doesn't work correctly, and suddenly you've lopped off 55% or more of the devices out there. Your client OEM won't be too happy.
I don't know, but it can't be too long befor Reed Richards name-drops "nega-strange anti-deuterium" into an upcoming issue.
And replacing the "normal" quarks with strange ones:
> The paper itself is a mindbending trip through families of particles that are similar to
> our familiar protons and neutrons (termed nucleons), but have at least one of their quarks
> replaced by a heavier, strange version, resulting in what's termed a hyperon (four of these,
> , , , and , have been observed).
Bullshit! Those are marshmallows in Lucky Charms! >:-(
Or, more accurately, he wins as many hours on the Internet as he wants.
You do realize dragons, in reality, are far more formidable than the lame, stupid bags of hitpoints in various online games, don't you? A godlike genius combined with millenia to hone magical skills nobody this side of 22,000 year old Gandalf can dream of on top of a body that can rip a true ogre in half?
> One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution.
Please show statistics from longitudinal studies of people where this is true. Hint: It's not.
> Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed.
Please show statistics from longitudinal studies of people where this is true. Hint: The "shrinking middle class" is shrinking because almost everybody is moving up, not down.
> "The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're
> professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."
With all due respect, Robert Redford raised the average age quite a bit. :-/
To the OP, umm, no.
Calls AT&T, whoever owns MAE East, etc. "This is the President of the United States. Can you shut down this, this, and this? Txbie."
From the viewpoint of a few dudes sitting at a cyber security dashboard app, yeah, it looks bad. From the point of view of someone who can mobilize a thousand people at the core of the Internet backbone, not so much.
Does duplicating DNA rip the hydrogen from water as a supply of hydrogen?
I would have thought it came from whatever long-chain hydrocarbons were being busted apart in innumerable reactions.
There you go again applying logic and statistics to an emotional argument! >:-(
Tuscon Electric Power also went almost bankrupt. Take it from a former stockholder.
Nuclear power plant (corporations) can stupidly over-borrow and whatnot with the best of 'em.
I question "take novel action" as well. Sounds like an irrelevancy. You are concerned with the molecule reproducing -- that's the primary problem for life, not adapting or WTH ever.
Everything thereafter is evolution.
That list seems like a throwback to a "lifeforce" animating unliving matter, trying to give a definition to something that is really meaningless, scientifically.
People understand how, say, viruses and seeds work, and don't argue about whether they are "alive" or not. "Alive" just isn't important as a dividing line in biology nowadays.
> This is the same dynamic that killed Asheron's Call 2. The entire gameworld
> was set up to be a sanctioned grief-fest.
Thank you. Ultima Online's owners wanted to have their cake and eat it too -- have RPers (heck, just gameplay adventurers) and the griefers. They need the former to have a supply of the latter.
As long as the former were willing to put up with it, UO happily collected the monthly fees. I left after 2 months and came back for a few weeks a year later. Nothing had changed.
I have no problem with PvP-oriented games, but don't try to portray it as also a PvE game, suitable for PvE people. That's simply fraud.
Well, boring is in the eye of the beholder.
At some future date:
Dev: 12:00 midnight. Time to go live!
Producer: Hit it!
Dev: Ahh, first logins already!
Producer: [12:01] What's that there? A giant Lego penis? WTF!
Well, let's get the perps in jail, then, instead of all this "settlement" crap.
Doesn't this school have an American Government class? They tend to be run by libertarian-types who have no problem yapping at length about what the government is permitted to do.
> Bonus: Not only does the class action include the 1,800 students, but all
> their family members.
> That school district is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
Don't know how class action suit mechanics work, but they could go even further: Anybody who owned any private property it was used on (inside buildings anyway) and any person, relative or otherwise, who was inside at the time. Don't know about a food court, but your out-of-district friend's house, their stepdad, and the guy inside fixing the plumbing.
Good question, would snooty sitting areas in coffee shoppes count?
If it was covered only at home, that they react at all is sufficient evidence.
I'm less concerned about the false positives than this:
No, staggering is the number of warez installs. They wouldn't bother if it were only a few thousand, or only a few hundred thousand.
It's ironic some people around here only have a problem with Iran's actions because it's not a democracy, rather than because of any freedom of speech, association, or business rights.