1) Advertise unrestricted Internet service and not deliver it?
I seriously doubt that a judge would consider any Comcast advertising I've seen as an example of Comcast advertising "unrestricted" Internet service. "unlimited" could easily be argued to mean an unlimited amount of traffic, and there would've got a point. Unrestricted is a different thing, and I've never seen any Comcast advertising where they claimed that there are no restrictions on your use of their service.
2) Forge and otherwise misrepresent end user's data?
It depends on what the exact legal status of an "interstate information service" is. If it's determined to be the same as if someone allowed you to connect your laptop to a corporate network where there is Internet access, then Comcast would have an awful lot of power to do damn near whatever they want on their network. From wht I've seen, Comcast seems to be taking this position, and the FCC in specifically absolving them of being regulated as a common carrier seems to be taking this position as well.
According to this document at the FCC's website, cable modem service is not subject to common carrier regulation. While I'm no lawyer, and my knowledge of what exactly the regulations surrounding a "interstate information service" are, if any exist, but a lot of the posts here seem to be assuming that they are a common carrier like most other Internet service is, and that's just not the case.
I end up doing it a couple times a year, and only because I live on the east coast, and my fiancee is doing her doctorate on the west coast, and it's not an option to drive or take the train when you only have a week or two of vacation time.
Other than that, there's no way I'll get on a plane, unless I have no other option. The cattle market in front of security is the least safe place in an airport. Whenever someone does get around to trying out another suicide bombing in the US, it's going to be in the middle of one of those huge masses of people waiting around to go through security. In our utter stupidity, we've provided a terrorist's dream target, that "security" can't do shit about. I'm sure several of the times I've been pulled to the side and "given special attention" are because I'm probably obviously worried about standing around in the middle of a nice big bullseye.
It's about fucking time someone fucking realized that a bit of fucking swearing is good for stress levels? Shit, how many fucking times have I told people this shit?!?!
Extortion also only really works in cases where the appearance of normalcy is more important to other trust relationships of the victim than whatever payment the extorter requires. That, or they have no recourse to the local law enforcement authorities for some reason.
From what I've heard, banks often get extorted successfully by Internet-based rings. They pay up, and shut up, because it's cheaper than the huge hit to the trust of their depositors in the institution. Look at what happened to Northern Rock when they stood up and did the right thing to ensure their depositors were safe by going to the Bank of England. The first run on an English bank in a century.
An auction site like eBay doesn't need my trust nearly as much. They don't have my credit card number (unless I use PayPal, but that's not a requirement to use eBay). I don't think I even had to put in an address to set up an eBay account to merely buy stuff. The only trust I need is in the particular seller. Now I'd be the first to admit that your average eBay seller is not toward the high end of the trustworthyness scale, and that the feedback system is abusable, but you're working from a pretty low baseline in any case. And what exactly does eBay have to lose if they broadcast to the world that some dastardly group threatened to make people think that eBay sellers are fraudsters?
Now your black market, that's a lot more like a bank in terms of amount of trust required. A bad deal on a black market doesn't mean you call up PayPal/eBay/bank and tell them that that bastard that promised you 100k of fresh credit card details ripped you, and you want your money back like the victim of a bad deal on a legal marketplace can. Hell, if you're an intelligent person doing business in a place like this, you know damn well that your buyer or seller might be a cop. A wasp doesn't complain too loudly when it gets stung. It's easier, and safer, to find another patch than try to rebuild trust in a compromised location. Not that it's asy, you need to rebuild trust in this new marketplace, which a determined poisoning scheme can probably easily deal with, so you'd theretically be forced into a more personal marketplace, where personal recommendation is required in order to be able to buy. Harder to crack, but WAY harder to use, and it keeps the cost of entry high enough to discourage all but the most determined criminal wannabes.
The only real way this could be used to profit by a "criminal" in the classical sense, is to facilitate extortion. "Pay us off or we'll make your auction site worthless." However at that point you get into the problem faced by every extortion racket, hiding your tracks, both financialy, and your communications. Easy enough to do the latter, a lot harder to do the former, especially if you pick a big fish with muscle to push an investigation.
Basically, it's impossible to know for certain that you're infected, because the people that design and implement these botnets are the best in the world at what they do. They are paid quite a lot, regularly, have no scruples about how they conduct their research, and can do their research totally anonymously.
The only way to know if your operating system has been infected is to be lucky enough to have the bad guys screw up and flood your system with enough bad stuff to affect performance. Even then, plain old operating system cruft can have much the same effect (especially on Windows, and often on Macs, even on Linux depending on how you muck around with it). Thankfully for most of us, criminals have been unable (through lack of ability or knowlege) to design software that hides well at all. When something bad got on your system, it could at least be found, if not directly dealt with beyond a nuke from orbit.
Storm is the most highly publicized way that this is all changing. These people are smart, motivated, and well funded. As opposed to merely reacting to AV companies, they've begun anticipating the kind of things that AV companies will be trying, and working out ways to protect against those attacks, and hiding in the host is the single most important part of that. Old computer viruses killed the host, but that's not a good survival trait for a virus. Viruses that hide around under the covers and do their spreading with a mimimum of impact on their hosts are the most successful. See: the common cold. And computer viruses do things that the common cold could never dream of doing, like mutating every half hour to avoid the body's own antivirus defenses.
Respect is probably something they should have. You respect the man with a gun to our head unless you're blessed with an immunity to bullets, or you don't care about living any longer.
I'm not sure whether to be impressed, depressed, or both.
These things are getting so insidious and vast in scope, I'm honestly wondering if I can safely believe that any Windows machine I come across with problems ISN'T on Storm or one of the other botnets. At what point does having a multi-use computing device become more of a problem than the benefits it provides? If 90% of what you get for connecting to the Internet is problems, what's the point? Bile spewing bloggers, bought-and-paid news reports and total advertising awareness?
Actually, sending e-mail is still better than snail-mail, since the anthrax scare continues to wreak havoc with mail to Reps and Senators. I've gotten several response directly from my Rep when I've brought up issues (or at least they seemed to come from him). Nothing directly from my Senators, but I don't expect that.
What tech geeks need to do if they want to influence legislation is the same thing everyone else does, hire lobbyists. You can live in the happy fantasy land where every citizen speaking to their representative is given an equal hearing, or you can live in reality and try to get things done the way you get things done.
So how about you use that in your marketing campaign, that these foreign bastards are untrustworthy.
You know, something legal, as opposed to engaging in protectionist activity that you agreed to not engage in, and that you've sued people for engaging in.
Personally I hope the WTO brings the hammer down hard on this. Bush blinked on steel tariffs, he'll blink on this. Either that, or we'll pull out of the WTO, which will probably suit everyone just fine.
You mean the small number of 30 which I currently own for my GameCube? Not to mention the titles I'm waiting to drop to the real bargain basement before I buy used.
Not ot mention that, frankly, the PS3 library already blows the wii out of the water
The PS3's library has hardly any of the same games as the Wii. There's no contest for me, I want Wii games more than Xbox 360/PS3 games. The kind of games I can play on an Xbox 360 or a PS3 are not all that different from the games I currently am building up a library of on my PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. Yeah, the graphics are better, but I'm not in the market for a new television, so I don't particularly care.
The DS continues to be a money machine, though it's running neck and neck with the PSP in Japan right now too (and was beaten handily week before last, with the PSP redesign and Crisis Core launch).
When just about every man woman and child in Japan has a DS, you're going to see sales fall off. Only so many people need two or more of them. A redesigned PSP means that people who could afford a second console may be buying a PSP, simmilar to how the GameCube got a reputation as a "second console" in America.
More like an RTS
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I don't claim to be anything approaching good at go, but I've watched a lot of games on IGS PandaNet, and I really think the game of Go has far more in common with a Real Time Strategy game than something like chess or checkers, because of that sheer number of paths through the game (never mind the end states), and the possibility that the board can change so drastically during the game. You never really run out of stones in Go as long as you have places to put them on the board. In chess and checkers, you've got a hard limit on resources. RTS games let you churn out as many units as you're able to pay for in a simmilar way. As far as computer processing goes, that makes future state calculation far easier. When thinking about chess, you never have to consider the possibility that your opponent or you are going to recieve reinforcements. That queen you just captured is gone forever. In go, and RTS games, there are plenty more stones where the ones you just captured came from, and you've got to consider their possible impact on the future state of the game.
1. I have a ton of PS2 (and PS1 for that matter) games that I both continue to play, have not finished, and am waiting for the price to drop down far enough on, so I can snap them up. The only saving grace of the PS3 as I saw it was consolidating 3 boxes down into one, and that's pretty much nonexistant now.
2. There are now so many different versions of the PS3, I don't feel comfortable trying to figure out what exactly I'm freaking getting if I go get a refurbed/used PS3. The guy behind the counter at GameStop might tell me this is one of the ones that would play PS2 games, but do I know that for sure? Do I want to chance the day or more of frustration returning it would incur for me if the one I got turned out to be a version that wasn't what I was promised?
I don't have any of the three next-gen consoles. The first one I get is most likely going to be a Wii (100% backwards compatible, interesting controller and gameplay, way cheaper). However there are some games coming out that are making me think about one of the more powerful consoles (since I don't feel like upgrading my PC anymore) and Sony is making it harder and harder for me to make that purchase a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360, even with the rampant hardware failures on 360s.
Color is a perfect example. Red/green colorblindness. Just because people afflicted with that condition cannot percieve a difference between those wavelengths of light doesn't mean that no difference exists.
There have been quite a few reports of religious experience long before these guys made a contraption that apparently induces that experience. If you honestly believe that this scientifically proves the sources of those religious experiences were the same as whatever is generated by this helmet, you need to go take your intro to science classes again, not to mention logic classes.
How does creating a helmet that can induce feelings of "religious experience", which is by definition an outside influence, prove in any way that an outside influence is unnecessary.
Yes, we know. This should frankly be all of Europe since the laws governing this thing are QUITE clear to us now, now that everyone and their brother on this site has given us quite the legal education with regard to cell phone unlocking in the EU. I'm sure Apple with either comply with the law or just not sell iPhones in jurisdictions where they feel they can't comply with the law. They generally don't act quite like Microsoft in the "I don't care what the law says, I'm MICROSOFT!" way. From the sound of it though, it seems no one in Europe will care, because they apparently don't want iPhones, they want phones that do X Y and Z that an iPhone doesn't do. Apple's so dead.
Do we need 50 BILLION stories about this? "OMG IPHONE SUX, APPLE SUX 2 LOL" I'm expecting to be the next story down the pike. How many of you people are so stupid as to buy an iPhone, when anyone who bothered to look saw that it was locked into AT&T even in the months and month of preview hype.
Actually, I disagree. Only an audiophile would, because audiophiles are the only ones with the specific fringe religious belief that "sounding better" is both a reason to, and can be achieved by spending $17200 on a CD player.
You might as well try convincing an indoctrinated suicide bomber that the Koran doesn't actually say that suicide bombers live forever in Heaven with however many virgins they're advertising this week. You'll get about as far in bringing the audiophile around to your position, but admittedly, you're probably less dead.
The thing is that there is no way to consistently reproduce the problem.
You've just hit the nail on the head. THIS is the real problem. As someone that does tech support work, and has had to deal with many inconsistent problems like this, the fact that it isn't reproducible makes it near impossible to fix it without a total replacement of the systems involved with it.
I had some issues with a PC I built, where it would randomly reboot itself. Electrical fault you'd say, and you'd be right I'd imagine. Except, which part of the PC caused this problem? Rebooting didn't happen at any particular time, or after taking any particular action. I don't have a magical electronics problem detector wand. I ended up having to replace every piece of hardware except the memory and the CD burner before the problem stopped. I can't say I'm the best at troubleshooting problems with hardware, but I'm at least as good as the people working at the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store. If it something works correctly every time you try to use it, what reasonable person is going to come to the conclusion that it's actually broken?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll believe it when I see it.
I seriously doubt that a judge would consider any Comcast advertising I've seen as an example of Comcast advertising "unrestricted" Internet service. "unlimited" could easily be argued to mean an unlimited amount of traffic, and there would've got a point. Unrestricted is a different thing, and I've never seen any Comcast advertising where they claimed that there are no restrictions on your use of their service.
It depends on what the exact legal status of an "interstate information service" is. If it's determined to be the same as if someone allowed you to connect your laptop to a corporate network where there is Internet access, then Comcast would have an awful lot of power to do damn near whatever they want on their network. From wht I've seen, Comcast seems to be taking this position, and the FCC in specifically absolving them of being regulated as a common carrier seems to be taking this position as well.
According to this document at the FCC's website, cable modem service is not subject to common carrier regulation. While I'm no lawyer, and my knowledge of what exactly the regulations surrounding a "interstate information service" are, if any exist, but a lot of the posts here seem to be assuming that they are a common carrier like most other Internet service is, and that's just not the case.
I don't watch TV anymore and even I know what that's from. Just because you don't watch TV doesn't mean you're an idiot, ya know.
I end up doing it a couple times a year, and only because I live on the east coast, and my fiancee is doing her doctorate on the west coast, and it's not an option to drive or take the train when you only have a week or two of vacation time.
Other than that, there's no way I'll get on a plane, unless I have no other option. The cattle market in front of security is the least safe place in an airport. Whenever someone does get around to trying out another suicide bombing in the US, it's going to be in the middle of one of those huge masses of people waiting around to go through security. In our utter stupidity, we've provided a terrorist's dream target, that "security" can't do shit about. I'm sure several of the times I've been pulled to the side and "given special attention" are because I'm probably obviously worried about standing around in the middle of a nice big bullseye.
It's about fucking time someone fucking realized that a bit of fucking swearing is good for stress levels? Shit, how many fucking times have I told people this shit?!?!
Jackasses.
Extortion also only really works in cases where the appearance of normalcy is more important to other trust relationships of the victim than whatever payment the extorter requires. That, or they have no recourse to the local law enforcement authorities for some reason.
From what I've heard, banks often get extorted successfully by Internet-based rings. They pay up, and shut up, because it's cheaper than the huge hit to the trust of their depositors in the institution. Look at what happened to Northern Rock when they stood up and did the right thing to ensure their depositors were safe by going to the Bank of England. The first run on an English bank in a century.
An auction site like eBay doesn't need my trust nearly as much. They don't have my credit card number (unless I use PayPal, but that's not a requirement to use eBay). I don't think I even had to put in an address to set up an eBay account to merely buy stuff. The only trust I need is in the particular seller. Now I'd be the first to admit that your average eBay seller is not toward the high end of the trustworthyness scale, and that the feedback system is abusable, but you're working from a pretty low baseline in any case. And what exactly does eBay have to lose if they broadcast to the world that some dastardly group threatened to make people think that eBay sellers are fraudsters?
Now your black market, that's a lot more like a bank in terms of amount of trust required. A bad deal on a black market doesn't mean you call up PayPal/eBay/bank and tell them that that bastard that promised you 100k of fresh credit card details ripped you, and you want your money back like the victim of a bad deal on a legal marketplace can. Hell, if you're an intelligent person doing business in a place like this, you know damn well that your buyer or seller might be a cop. A wasp doesn't complain too loudly when it gets stung. It's easier, and safer, to find another patch than try to rebuild trust in a compromised location. Not that it's asy, you need to rebuild trust in this new marketplace, which a determined poisoning scheme can probably easily deal with, so you'd theretically be forced into a more personal marketplace, where personal recommendation is required in order to be able to buy. Harder to crack, but WAY harder to use, and it keeps the cost of entry high enough to discourage all but the most determined criminal wannabes.
The only real way this could be used to profit by a "criminal" in the classical sense, is to facilitate extortion. "Pay us off or we'll make your auction site worthless." However at that point you get into the problem faced by every extortion racket, hiding your tracks, both financialy, and your communications. Easy enough to do the latter, a lot harder to do the former, especially if you pick a big fish with muscle to push an investigation.
Basically, it's impossible to know for certain that you're infected, because the people that design and implement these botnets are the best in the world at what they do. They are paid quite a lot, regularly, have no scruples about how they conduct their research, and can do their research totally anonymously.
The only way to know if your operating system has been infected is to be lucky enough to have the bad guys screw up and flood your system with enough bad stuff to affect performance. Even then, plain old operating system cruft can have much the same effect (especially on Windows, and often on Macs, even on Linux depending on how you muck around with it). Thankfully for most of us, criminals have been unable (through lack of ability or knowlege) to design software that hides well at all. When something bad got on your system, it could at least be found, if not directly dealt with beyond a nuke from orbit.
Storm is the most highly publicized way that this is all changing. These people are smart, motivated, and well funded. As opposed to merely reacting to AV companies, they've begun anticipating the kind of things that AV companies will be trying, and working out ways to protect against those attacks, and hiding in the host is the single most important part of that. Old computer viruses killed the host, but that's not a good survival trait for a virus. Viruses that hide around under the covers and do their spreading with a mimimum of impact on their hosts are the most successful. See: the common cold. And computer viruses do things that the common cold could never dream of doing, like mutating every half hour to avoid the body's own antivirus defenses.
Respect is probably something they should have. You respect the man with a gun to our head unless you're blessed with an immunity to bullets, or you don't care about living any longer.
Admiration, that they shouldn't have.
I'm not sure whether to be impressed, depressed, or both.
These things are getting so insidious and vast in scope, I'm honestly wondering if I can safely believe that any Windows machine I come across with problems ISN'T on Storm or one of the other botnets. At what point does having a multi-use computing device become more of a problem than the benefits it provides? If 90% of what you get for connecting to the Internet is problems, what's the point? Bile spewing bloggers, bought-and-paid news reports and total advertising awareness?
Actually, sending e-mail is still better than snail-mail, since the anthrax scare continues to wreak havoc with mail to Reps and Senators. I've gotten several response directly from my Rep when I've brought up issues (or at least they seemed to come from him). Nothing directly from my Senators, but I don't expect that.
What tech geeks need to do if they want to influence legislation is the same thing everyone else does, hire lobbyists. You can live in the happy fantasy land where every citizen speaking to their representative is given an equal hearing, or you can live in reality and try to get things done the way you get things done.
So how about you use that in your marketing campaign, that these foreign bastards are untrustworthy.
You know, something legal, as opposed to engaging in protectionist activity that you agreed to not engage in, and that you've sued people for engaging in.
Personally I hope the WTO brings the hammer down hard on this. Bush blinked on steel tariffs, he'll blink on this. Either that, or we'll pull out of the WTO, which will probably suit everyone just fine.
You mean the small number of 30 which I currently own for my GameCube? Not to mention the titles I'm waiting to drop to the real bargain basement before I buy used.
The PS3's library has hardly any of the same games as the Wii. There's no contest for me, I want Wii games more than Xbox 360/PS3 games. The kind of games I can play on an Xbox 360 or a PS3 are not all that different from the games I currently am building up a library of on my PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. Yeah, the graphics are better, but I'm not in the market for a new television, so I don't particularly care.
When just about every man woman and child in Japan has a DS, you're going to see sales fall off. Only so many people need two or more of them. A redesigned PSP means that people who could afford a second console may be buying a PSP, simmilar to how the GameCube got a reputation as a "second console" in America.
I don't claim to be anything approaching good at go, but I've watched a lot of games on IGS PandaNet, and I really think the game of Go has far more in common with a Real Time Strategy game than something like chess or checkers, because of that sheer number of paths through the game (never mind the end states), and the possibility that the board can change so drastically during the game. You never really run out of stones in Go as long as you have places to put them on the board. In chess and checkers, you've got a hard limit on resources. RTS games let you churn out as many units as you're able to pay for in a simmilar way. As far as computer processing goes, that makes future state calculation far easier. When thinking about chess, you never have to consider the possibility that your opponent or you are going to recieve reinforcements. That queen you just captured is gone forever. In go, and RTS games, there are plenty more stones where the ones you just captured came from, and you've got to consider their possible impact on the future state of the game.
NO, PLEASE!!!
Don't make them all come back to World of Warcraft and annoy the hell out of us more. =(
We thought we'd finally been rid of them.
...because:
1. I have a ton of PS2 (and PS1 for that matter) games that I both continue to play, have not finished, and am waiting for the price to drop down far enough on, so I can snap them up. The only saving grace of the PS3 as I saw it was consolidating 3 boxes down into one, and that's pretty much nonexistant now.
2. There are now so many different versions of the PS3, I don't feel comfortable trying to figure out what exactly I'm freaking getting if I go get a refurbed/used PS3. The guy behind the counter at GameStop might tell me this is one of the ones that would play PS2 games, but do I know that for sure? Do I want to chance the day or more of frustration returning it would incur for me if the one I got turned out to be a version that wasn't what I was promised?
I don't have any of the three next-gen consoles. The first one I get is most likely going to be a Wii (100% backwards compatible, interesting controller and gameplay, way cheaper). However there are some games coming out that are making me think about one of the more powerful consoles (since I don't feel like upgrading my PC anymore) and Sony is making it harder and harder for me to make that purchase a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360, even with the rampant hardware failures on 360s.
Perhaps you get what you pay for.
Color is a perfect example. Red/green colorblindness. Just because people afflicted with that condition cannot percieve a difference between those wavelengths of light doesn't mean that no difference exists.
There have been quite a few reports of religious experience long before these guys made a contraption that apparently induces that experience. If you honestly believe that this scientifically proves the sources of those religious experiences were the same as whatever is generated by this helmet, you need to go take your intro to science classes again, not to mention logic classes.
How does creating a helmet that can induce feelings of "religious experience", which is by definition an outside influence, prove in any way that an outside influence is unnecessary.
Yes, we know. This should frankly be all of Europe since the laws governing this thing are QUITE clear to us now, now that everyone and their brother on this site has given us quite the legal education with regard to cell phone unlocking in the EU. I'm sure Apple with either comply with the law or just not sell iPhones in jurisdictions where they feel they can't comply with the law. They generally don't act quite like Microsoft in the "I don't care what the law says, I'm MICROSOFT!" way. From the sound of it though, it seems no one in Europe will care, because they apparently don't want iPhones, they want phones that do X Y and Z that an iPhone doesn't do. Apple's so dead.
Do we need 50 BILLION stories about this? "OMG IPHONE SUX, APPLE SUX 2 LOL" I'm expecting to be the next story down the pike. How many of you people are so stupid as to buy an iPhone, when anyone who bothered to look saw that it was locked into AT&T even in the months and month of preview hype.
Actually, I disagree. Only an audiophile would, because audiophiles are the only ones with the specific fringe religious belief that "sounding better" is both a reason to, and can be achieved by spending $17200 on a CD player.
You might as well try convincing an indoctrinated suicide bomber that the Koran doesn't actually say that suicide bombers live forever in Heaven with however many virgins they're advertising this week. You'll get about as far in bringing the audiophile around to your position, but admittedly, you're probably less dead.
You've just hit the nail on the head. THIS is the real problem. As someone that does tech support work, and has had to deal with many inconsistent problems like this, the fact that it isn't reproducible makes it near impossible to fix it without a total replacement of the systems involved with it.
I had some issues with a PC I built, where it would randomly reboot itself. Electrical fault you'd say, and you'd be right I'd imagine. Except, which part of the PC caused this problem? Rebooting didn't happen at any particular time, or after taking any particular action. I don't have a magical electronics problem detector wand. I ended up having to replace every piece of hardware except the memory and the CD burner before the problem stopped. I can't say I'm the best at troubleshooting problems with hardware, but I'm at least as good as the people working at the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store. If it something works correctly every time you try to use it, what reasonable person is going to come to the conclusion that it's actually broken?