The old adage still holds true: The dose makes the poison.
These days we have a slew of jokers who failed high school chemistry and never had the brains for anything like organic chemistry in college, and these folks run around freaking out that you might get a few micrograms of a harmless pesticide or fungicide, whereas eating a slightly moldy spot in an apple probably gives you a much larger dose of cytotoxins, and insect penetration of fruit often leads to bacterial contamination, sometimes with something serious like salmonella or E. coil that can kill you.
But no, they rant against the harmless pesticides and fungicide out of complete ignorance... We need a law against public health statements by people without having the proper education in chemistry and biology (for both sides of the argument). Less hysteria, more science.
Um, John walker spied on the US Navy for like 16 years and only got caught because his ex wife turned him in...
The Rosenbergs stole secrets from the Manhattan project from 1942 until they were caught in 1950 (8 years).
These acts only seem simple or easily understandable after decades of investigation and perspective. You have no clue what the motivation was of the NSA guy who brought home cyber weapons and loaded them on his personal machine, and until we have dug through that guy's life and associates with a fine toot comb, you have no clue about what actually transpired, only a cover story put out by Kaspersky to try and prevent the US from sanctioning them and seizing their assets and blocking them from any US ISP as a malware vector. I'd say that Kaspersky has a lot of motive to obfuscate the truth, as does the NSA traitor who could be facing treason charges...
Don't foolishly believe everything you read without inserting an overlay of the basic knowledge of how the world works and the human condition. To do otherwise is to fall for every fake news story out there.
In the era when literally everything is networked and you can crash a country's economy or power grid with the right cyber weapon, they are the WMD of the modern era, and we did execute the Rosenbergs for stealing US nuclear bomb technology for the Russians.
The Rosenbergs and how they stole US nuclear bomb technology and sold it to the Russians.
John Walker and his family and how they managed to steal US Navy secrets for over 15 years and sell it to the Russians.
CIA double agent Aldrich Ames penetration of the CIA on behalf of the Russians.
NSA agent James Hall III spying for the Russians.
Wikipedia is your friend. There is a list as long as my arm of individuals in the US who were turned or used by the Russians to steal classified US intel, weapons and designs and nearly every one of the cases involves unique, innovative and unexpected methods, people, and activities to get the job done. If investigators had used Occam's razor, they would have found none of these people, instead assuming the more mundane cover explanations which were more plausible.
As far as I am aware, there is no wireless service that sells a reasonable (i.e. around 200% markup on cost) per MB use plan. In my analogy it is as if the car dealer has a monopoly on the kind of gas the car uses and will either charge you $50/gallon (totally unreasonable unless you only drive once a month) or requires you to buy the 200 gallons per month I used in my analogy. Sure there is a pay as you use model, but it is priced to drive you to buy more than you need and by contract the dealership can steal from you what you don't use each month and then turn around and sell it to you again...
Contrary to your assertion, other utilities, like water and electricity are required to charge you by the unit used (i.e. metered use) and are limited by law (defined by a public utility committee) on how much they can charge if they are a monopoly based on their costs and a reasonable markup. If the utility can show that the real cost to deliver the service has gone up 5%, then they can justify a 5% increase in their per unit fee (thats 5% of 2 cents/gb or $20/TB for wired data, so the increase would be $1 more for 1TB of wired data for example. The utility has to justify their operating costs (not "we paid the CEO a $20M bonus so give us more money") to the public utility committee which is publicly elected or appointed by the governor or other elected officials. No system is perfect, but it has been a near endless chain of lies, broken promises and price gouging for 20 years with the wireless providers and ISPs, and that needs to end, starting with a total restructure of how they make their money (switching to selling more data at a single, low set price with reasonable markup, driving them to increase profits by selling more data, instead of bait and switch data plans which are as much as 90% profit a.k.a. 1000% markup). Further, this moots the net neutrality debate, because the ONLY way for ISPs to make money is to sell data. If you want to watch 4K video 24/7, they will build out so you can do it because they make more money than when you watch 720p.
I have actually been saying this for a long time, that we need to completely eliminate the model of buying blocks of data that you don't use. Right now you buy "unlimited" which of course is impossible, since bandwidth is a limited resource or you buy an allotment of voice and data that you get reamed for if you go over that expires every month. You end up paying for data that you don't use and it's a scam that should have been outlawed long ago. It is totally skewed to the benefit of the utility. Imagine buying a car and getting an allotment of gas delivered to your house, say 100 gallons, and at the end of every month, a truck from the dealership rolls up, pumps your tank dry and then turns around and pumps back 100 gallons and charges you for 100 gallons of gas. No one would put up with that bullshit.
For both wired and wireless, we need to go to a federally regulated model that completely eliminates any monthly fee, and then companies can charge ONE rate advertised to everyone with no rebates, discounts etc. for data (this forces them to compete on an even playing field and not cut backroom deals that unfairly interfere with competition). The rate would end up being something like 1/2 cent per MB for wireless data and 2 cents per GB for wired data and you pay for what you USE each month. All voice is treated like the data that it is, so no more "voice" plans at all. It encourages Telcoms to invest in new, faster infrastructure and not try to minimize expenditures on new, faster hardware because they only make more money by providing more volume, not by overselling expensive plans and then trying to discourage consumers from using the plans they bought via data caps, throttling and other BS. The reality is nothing is unlimited and each MB you download has cost, the best model for consumers has always been the pay as you use model described above. It is harder for Telcoms because they have to anticipate demand and build out infrastructure to make more money, but that's just the business, if they don't like it, they can GTFO.
The smart ones work for companies that value competence and quality over price. I work with a bunch of them, not one under 30 and some in their late 60s who have more fun at work than retiring and watching TV all day. It is a joy to work with software engineers who actually know WTF they are doing. We often don't get the initial bid on the software portion of the job, but better than half the time we end up doing it when the idiots who under bid us fail spectacularly. Then our software guys come in, often starting from scratch because the cheap code is total garbage and have functional code up and running smoothly in half the time it took the cheap code mill from India (or wherever) to fail catastrophically.
There is "hacking" and then there is tacit approval:
Potential Kaspersky employee: "Hey, I will be leaving this backdoor open at 1am, here are the passwords you need and here is the location of the files you are looking for, please don't hurt my family"
While technically hacking (unauthorized access) it may not have left any traces if it was an inside job, but either way, the FSB got in to Kaspersky's files and lifted all the NSA cyber weapons.
I trust the Israelis (an actual democracy with similar values to America) a lot more than the Russians (dictatorship who would start a war tomorrow if they thought they could take over the world).
Alternatively, the FSB has an agent in the NSA, and they figured out a way to steal cyber weapons without getting caught (or so they thought). He illegally, under penalty of jail time or worse, brings home a trove of cyber weapons. He then turns on his home Kaspersky AV and infects himself and begins making AV scans, uploading all of the cyber weapons to Kaspersky in Russia, where his FSB counterpart makes copies to later leak as the Shadow Broker costing the US billions and destroying a decades worth of cyber weapons.
When the NSA finally tracks down the leak, it finds the employee who pleads incompetence... I don't buy it for a minute. Taking home all those cyber weapons was deliberate and an act of treason, and the guy should be executed just like the Rosenbergs. If nothing else, no other NSA/CIA/etc. analyst will be bringing home unsanctioned classified code from the NSA.
Both parties cover for each other in the hope that when out of power they will be protected as a courtesy from the other party. This is the textbook reason why special prosecutors should always be used when there is evidence of criminal activity (as opposed to the Trump Russia investigation, where there is a lot of innuendo, but no actual allegation or evidence of criminal activity, ask a real prosecutor, they will tell you).
As far as Sandy Berger, the guy was on camera stuffing classified documents into his pants the day before Clinton left office... That is what is known as evidence.
Or this is how the NSA malware was obtained and leaked in the first place. There is already a lot of evidence that Kaspersky is in bed with the FSB, there is no way in the real world that those hacking tools were just deleted before copies were made and sent to the FSB, AKA the Shadow Broker. Those hacking tools represented millions if not billions of dollars of investment and were active and potent cyber weapons. The jackass who took them home would have been executed for treason a few decades ago, and Kaspersky would have had all of their assets frozen everywhere outside of Russia, but the world has become a p&$$y whipped version of it'self, to coin a phrase.
If you think Kaspersky just deleted those NSA tools then I have some real estate to sell you...
Shit will get done when a member of congress Youtube channel gets censored by China or some other country, or when mobs show up on the national mall with torches and pitchforks. I suspect the former will happen first, but it could be the latter.
Kinect was a good product with some great applications both on the 360 and the Xbone. The reason that it fell flat was because they tried to charge $100 more for the Xbone with the kinect and wanted it to spy on you 24/7. If they had bundled it at the same price point as PS4, kept the same UI and store interface as the 360, made all 360 kinect titles backwards compatible to Xbone and not tried to dick over the customers with always online/spying, the Xbone launch would have been a lot smoother and more competitive. The death of the Kinect lies at the feet of marketing and a greedy company who tried MS monopoly BS tactics where there was real competition (PS4) and the market bitch slapped them.
It is high time that google search, Facebook, YouTube and the other mega corporations that have a de-facto monopoly get regulated by the US government as the monopoly utilities that they are. Then YouTube can say sorry China, the US government won't allow us to block that content. Within China you can block what you manage to block, outside you can sit and spin because YouTube is based in a country that values freedom and transparency. (Alt left facist America haters of the US and around the world, please just move along, your hatred of the US is out of proportion with reality and real suppression and evil around the world. The US isn't perfect, but it is still by far the best and most free country on the planet).
Beyond that, we don't need utilities cutting off peoples access to huge chunks of the internet simply because they disagree with them. That is what courts are for. We are at the cusp of this kind of regulation, and before you argue that Google search, Facebook, or Youtube are not de-facto monopoly utilities and they don't provide an essential service, keep in mind that electricity didn't historically fall into that category either, but it has become an essential utility. The companies listed above have the vast majority of their market share, and should be regulated as such.
To your point, 150 years ago, the penalty for stealing a horse or cattle was hanging, which is equivalent to stealing a car these days. I do think they had it right back then about the death penalty for rape and murder though. There are some lines which if you cross make you irredeemable and not worth keeping around for a chance at a repeat performance.
Effective cheat detection is key, I agree, and assumed in my earlier post, but your statement is patently false. If you have perfect capture rates (everyone who cheats is caught) but the only penalty is a warning email, no one who is cheating will stop. The penalty is a key part of discouraging cheating.
Invalidate all patents transferred in this manner for their blatant attempt to circumvent the law. Patent and copyright reform are so far beyond due it is reaching absurdity.
We need to get back to the original intent of the law, which was that only the inventor (a person or persons) who made the creation own the patent, and make it non-transferable. If it is developed in the employ of a company, that company gets an unlimited license of the patent, but if that company goes bankrupt, the license is automatically null and void, and ownership reverts to the creator and either way, the patent expires in 7 years from the date of first commercial product sold with no extensions on the original patent. This drives patent holders to saturate the market with their product and keep prices reasonable, because after 7 years the cash cow dies and everyone can get in on the product which is always how it was meant to work.
Beyond that, all computer software patents need to be vaporized and software needs to be transferred to the purview of copyright, which is where it belonged all along. Getting patents for real world things done "with a computer" or "on the internet" is a sad joke whose punchline is your wallet...
If you read my prior post carefully, you will see that I suggested a progressive ban, i.e. first offense, 1 day, second offense, 1 week, third offense 1 month, fourth offense, permaban or some such progression. You could even put in a period after which you decent one ban rank, as long as you are not perma banned. First ban goes down one ban rank in 1 month, second ban goes down in 6 months, third ban goes down one rank in 1 year and further bans go down one rank per year.
It is not a one strike and permaban, but repeat cheaters should be blocked from all PVP. This does not brick their Steam account, it just prevents them from playing online. They can still play offline with themselves or in LAN games, etc. Once a few people get permabanned tied to their real identity and credit card, and the word gets out, most people will take it seriously and stop, or get banned. Either way, the community online will get a lot better.
I believe the word the author was looking for is "rife" as in filled with/replete with.
Just another reason that add blockers like uBlock Origin are mandatory. I also browse with a JS dynamic switch so I can kill JS with a button press for obnoxious sites.
IMO there is no punishment too severe for people who cheat in PVP. It ruins the experience for thousands of others just so they can get their jollies. I would love to see Steam update their TOS to include across the board PVP timed bans escalating to PVP permaban for repeat/multiple cheaters, tied to the name on the credit card, which would not only deprive the cheater of whatever game they were cheating in, but block them from all online play permanently on Steam in perpetuity.
The trick to preventing criminal behavior (or in this case cheating) is make the punishment so serious that people won't do it. After a first offense, in addition to a month ban from all PVP on Seam, force them to watch a video interview with some hackers/cheaters who lost big money in a civil suit over their damage to an online game and a round table discussion on how cheating damages the online community and gaming companies business models. Force the cheaters to sign a legally binding contract to never cheat on a Steam game again or face civil liability as well as acknowledging that they will lose their ability to play online permanently. The reality is that only about 10% of gamers cheat, and 90% of them are script kiddies in the 10-16yo range who would stop if mommy or daddy gave them the proper discipline, a legal notice in the mail to the CC holder typically gets parental attention.
Politifact is a blatantly biased organization at this point and a shill for the alt left fascist progressives.
Americans killed by guns in recorded history: 0
Americans murdered by other people with guns in 2012: 60% of all US homicides or about 8300 or about 0.0036% of the population. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
If you remove young black males, who make up less than 4% of the US population, that number is cut in half to 4150... and puts the US per capita murder rate roughly on par with European countries. On a side note, concealed carry warning and brandishing probably stops that many robberies, rapes and murders in a week... (There are about 16,000,000 concealed carry permits in the US right now). https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
Clearly guns are not that big a threat unless you are an alt left fascist progressive looking to dominate and subjugate the American people. Every dictator in the last 100 years from Stalin to Mao on down the line disarmed their people first and then murdered millions of them. Guns are in fact inanimate objects controlled by their wielder, which is why every LEO in the country carries one. Any group that uses "gun deaths" are political shills with no interest in truth. Gun deaths usually include suicides (who just use different methods in gun free countries), criminals shot by police or citizens, and other justified shootings that are actually a good thing for society and end up saving lives.
"Unless you're saying the applicant should always appear in person for credit decisions"
That is exactly what I am saying, either in person on site or at a local notary public to verify their identity. And when they appear in person, the person who is applying should be required to have a high resolution, full facial photograph with no obstruction (glasses, hats, hoodies, etc.). That photograph and a set of their fingerprints should then be compared with those on file and filed with the application for credit. Legit borrowers have no issue with this, but if the data doesn't match, no same day credit and a mandatory call to the number on file as well as the local PD to check things out further. Providing credit online almost never happens anyway, but when necessary could be handled by a notary public. Most of the retail credit cards and phone companies that extend credit don't do these basic things to verify that the person getting credit is actually the person whose identity is being used. They just take a few numbers which are honestly pretty easy to get these days, and that has got to change.
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The old adage still holds true: The dose makes the poison.
These days we have a slew of jokers who failed high school chemistry and never had the brains for anything like organic chemistry in college, and these folks run around freaking out that you might get a few micrograms of a harmless pesticide or fungicide, whereas eating a slightly moldy spot in an apple probably gives you a much larger dose of cytotoxins, and insect penetration of fruit often leads to bacterial contamination, sometimes with something serious like salmonella or E. coil that can kill you.
But no, they rant against the harmless pesticides and fungicide out of complete ignorance... We need a law against public health statements by people without having the proper education in chemistry and biology (for both sides of the argument). Less hysteria, more science.
Um, John walker spied on the US Navy for like 16 years and only got caught because his ex wife turned him in...
The Rosenbergs stole secrets from the Manhattan project from 1942 until they were caught in 1950 (8 years).
These acts only seem simple or easily understandable after decades of investigation and perspective. You have no clue what the motivation was of the NSA guy who brought home cyber weapons and loaded them on his personal machine, and until we have dug through that guy's life and associates with a fine toot comb, you have no clue about what actually transpired, only a cover story put out by Kaspersky to try and prevent the US from sanctioning them and seizing their assets and blocking them from any US ISP as a malware vector. I'd say that Kaspersky has a lot of motive to obfuscate the truth, as does the NSA traitor who could be facing treason charges...
Don't foolishly believe everything you read without inserting an overlay of the basic knowledge of how the world works and the human condition. To do otherwise is to fall for every fake news story out there.
In the era when literally everything is networked and you can crash a country's economy or power grid with the right cyber weapon, they are the WMD of the modern era, and we did execute the Rosenbergs for stealing US nuclear bomb technology for the Russians.
I pity your failed public school education...
Here are a few:
The Rosenbergs and how they stole US nuclear bomb technology and sold it to the Russians.
John Walker and his family and how they managed to steal US Navy secrets for over 15 years and sell it to the Russians.
CIA double agent Aldrich Ames penetration of the CIA on behalf of the Russians.
NSA agent James Hall III spying for the Russians.
Wikipedia is your friend. There is a list as long as my arm of individuals in the US who were turned or used by the Russians to steal classified US intel, weapons and designs and nearly every one of the cases involves unique, innovative and unexpected methods, people, and activities to get the job done. If investigators had used Occam's razor, they would have found none of these people, instead assuming the more mundane cover explanations which were more plausible.
As far as I am aware, there is no wireless service that sells a reasonable (i.e. around 200% markup on cost) per MB use plan. In my analogy it is as if the car dealer has a monopoly on the kind of gas the car uses and will either charge you $50/gallon (totally unreasonable unless you only drive once a month) or requires you to buy the 200 gallons per month I used in my analogy. Sure there is a pay as you use model, but it is priced to drive you to buy more than you need and by contract the dealership can steal from you what you don't use each month and then turn around and sell it to you again...
Contrary to your assertion, other utilities, like water and electricity are required to charge you by the unit used (i.e. metered use) and are limited by law (defined by a public utility committee) on how much they can charge if they are a monopoly based on their costs and a reasonable markup. If the utility can show that the real cost to deliver the service has gone up 5%, then they can justify a 5% increase in their per unit fee (thats 5% of 2 cents/gb or $20/TB for wired data, so the increase would be $1 more for 1TB of wired data for example. The utility has to justify their operating costs (not "we paid the CEO a $20M bonus so give us more money") to the public utility committee which is publicly elected or appointed by the governor or other elected officials. No system is perfect, but it has been a near endless chain of lies, broken promises and price gouging for 20 years with the wireless providers and ISPs, and that needs to end, starting with a total restructure of how they make their money (switching to selling more data at a single, low set price with reasonable markup, driving them to increase profits by selling more data, instead of bait and switch data plans which are as much as 90% profit a.k.a. 1000% markup). Further, this moots the net neutrality debate, because the ONLY way for ISPs to make money is to sell data. If you want to watch 4K video 24/7, they will build out so you can do it because they make more money than when you watch 720p.
I have actually been saying this for a long time, that we need to completely eliminate the model of buying blocks of data that you don't use. Right now you buy "unlimited" which of course is impossible, since bandwidth is a limited resource or you buy an allotment of voice and data that you get reamed for if you go over that expires every month. You end up paying for data that you don't use and it's a scam that should have been outlawed long ago. It is totally skewed to the benefit of the utility. Imagine buying a car and getting an allotment of gas delivered to your house, say 100 gallons, and at the end of every month, a truck from the dealership rolls up, pumps your tank dry and then turns around and pumps back 100 gallons and charges you for 100 gallons of gas. No one would put up with that bullshit.
For both wired and wireless, we need to go to a federally regulated model that completely eliminates any monthly fee, and then companies can charge ONE rate advertised to everyone with no rebates, discounts etc. for data (this forces them to compete on an even playing field and not cut backroom deals that unfairly interfere with competition). The rate would end up being something like 1/2 cent per MB for wireless data and 2 cents per GB for wired data and you pay for what you USE each month. All voice is treated like the data that it is, so no more "voice" plans at all. It encourages Telcoms to invest in new, faster infrastructure and not try to minimize expenditures on new, faster hardware because they only make more money by providing more volume, not by overselling expensive plans and then trying to discourage consumers from using the plans they bought via data caps, throttling and other BS. The reality is nothing is unlimited and each MB you download has cost, the best model for consumers has always been the pay as you use model described above. It is harder for Telcoms because they have to anticipate demand and build out infrastructure to make more money, but that's just the business, if they don't like it, they can GTFO.
The smart ones work for companies that value competence and quality over price. I work with a bunch of them, not one under 30 and some in their late 60s who have more fun at work than retiring and watching TV all day. It is a joy to work with software engineers who actually know WTF they are doing. We often don't get the initial bid on the software portion of the job, but better than half the time we end up doing it when the idiots who under bid us fail spectacularly. Then our software guys come in, often starting from scratch because the cheap code is total garbage and have functional code up and running smoothly in half the time it took the cheap code mill from India (or wherever) to fail catastrophically.
There is "hacking" and then there is tacit approval:
Potential Kaspersky employee: "Hey, I will be leaving this backdoor open at 1am, here are the passwords you need and here is the location of the files you are looking for, please don't hurt my family"
While technically hacking (unauthorized access) it may not have left any traces if it was an inside job, but either way, the FSB got in to Kaspersky's files and lifted all the NSA cyber weapons.
I trust the Israelis (an actual democracy with similar values to America) a lot more than the Russians (dictatorship who would start a war tomorrow if they thought they could take over the world).
"And a less-likely (more complicated) hypothesis can still turn out to be the correct one."
And often it is the correct one when you are dealing with espionage, hostile foreign governments and treason.
Exactly so.
Alternatively, the FSB has an agent in the NSA, and they figured out a way to steal cyber weapons without getting caught (or so they thought). He illegally, under penalty of jail time or worse, brings home a trove of cyber weapons. He then turns on his home Kaspersky AV and infects himself and begins making AV scans, uploading all of the cyber weapons to Kaspersky in Russia, where his FSB counterpart makes copies to later leak as the Shadow Broker costing the US billions and destroying a decades worth of cyber weapons.
When the NSA finally tracks down the leak, it finds the employee who pleads incompetence... I don't buy it for a minute. Taking home all those cyber weapons was deliberate and an act of treason, and the guy should be executed just like the Rosenbergs. If nothing else, no other NSA/CIA/etc. analyst will be bringing home unsanctioned classified code from the NSA.
Both parties cover for each other in the hope that when out of power they will be protected as a courtesy from the other party. This is the textbook reason why special prosecutors should always be used when there is evidence of criminal activity (as opposed to the Trump Russia investigation, where there is a lot of innuendo, but no actual allegation or evidence of criminal activity, ask a real prosecutor, they will tell you).
As far as Sandy Berger, the guy was on camera stuffing classified documents into his pants the day before Clinton left office... That is what is known as evidence.
Or this is how the NSA malware was obtained and leaked in the first place. There is already a lot of evidence that Kaspersky is in bed with the FSB, there is no way in the real world that those hacking tools were just deleted before copies were made and sent to the FSB, AKA the Shadow Broker. Those hacking tools represented millions if not billions of dollars of investment and were active and potent cyber weapons. The jackass who took them home would have been executed for treason a few decades ago, and Kaspersky would have had all of their assets frozen everywhere outside of Russia, but the world has become a p&$$y whipped version of it'self, to coin a phrase.
If you think Kaspersky just deleted those NSA tools then I have some real estate to sell you...
Shit will get done when a member of congress Youtube channel gets censored by China or some other country, or when mobs show up on the national mall with torches and pitchforks. I suspect the former will happen first, but it could be the latter.
Kinect was a good product with some great applications both on the 360 and the Xbone. The reason that it fell flat was because they tried to charge $100 more for the Xbone with the kinect and wanted it to spy on you 24/7. If they had bundled it at the same price point as PS4, kept the same UI and store interface as the 360, made all 360 kinect titles backwards compatible to Xbone and not tried to dick over the customers with always online/spying, the Xbone launch would have been a lot smoother and more competitive. The death of the Kinect lies at the feet of marketing and a greedy company who tried MS monopoly BS tactics where there was real competition (PS4) and the market bitch slapped them.
It is high time that google search, Facebook, YouTube and the other mega corporations that have a de-facto monopoly get regulated by the US government as the monopoly utilities that they are. Then YouTube can say sorry China, the US government won't allow us to block that content. Within China you can block what you manage to block, outside you can sit and spin because YouTube is based in a country that values freedom and transparency. (Alt left facist America haters of the US and around the world, please just move along, your hatred of the US is out of proportion with reality and real suppression and evil around the world. The US isn't perfect, but it is still by far the best and most free country on the planet).
Beyond that, we don't need utilities cutting off peoples access to huge chunks of the internet simply because they disagree with them. That is what courts are for. We are at the cusp of this kind of regulation, and before you argue that Google search, Facebook, or Youtube are not de-facto monopoly utilities and they don't provide an essential service, keep in mind that electricity didn't historically fall into that category either, but it has become an essential utility. The companies listed above have the vast majority of their market share, and should be regulated as such.
To your point, 150 years ago, the penalty for stealing a horse or cattle was hanging, which is equivalent to stealing a car these days. I do think they had it right back then about the death penalty for rape and murder though. There are some lines which if you cross make you irredeemable and not worth keeping around for a chance at a repeat performance.
Effective cheat detection is key, I agree, and assumed in my earlier post, but your statement is patently false. If you have perfect capture rates (everyone who cheats is caught) but the only penalty is a warning email, no one who is cheating will stop. The penalty is a key part of discouraging cheating.
You are correct, auto correct gets me all the time.
Invalidate all patents transferred in this manner for their blatant attempt to circumvent the law. Patent and copyright reform are so far beyond due it is reaching absurdity.
We need to get back to the original intent of the law, which was that only the inventor (a person or persons) who made the creation own the patent, and make it non-transferable. If it is developed in the employ of a company, that company gets an unlimited license of the patent, but if that company goes bankrupt, the license is automatically null and void, and ownership reverts to the creator and either way, the patent expires in 7 years from the date of first commercial product sold with no extensions on the original patent. This drives patent holders to saturate the market with their product and keep prices reasonable, because after 7 years the cash cow dies and everyone can get in on the product which is always how it was meant to work.
Beyond that, all computer software patents need to be vaporized and software needs to be transferred to the purview of copyright, which is where it belonged all along. Getting patents for real world things done "with a computer" or "on the internet" is a sad joke whose punchline is your wallet...
If you read my prior post carefully, you will see that I suggested a progressive ban, i.e. first offense, 1 day, second offense, 1 week, third offense 1 month, fourth offense, permaban or some such progression. You could even put in a period after which you decent one ban rank, as long as you are not perma banned. First ban goes down one ban rank in 1 month, second ban goes down in 6 months, third ban goes down one rank in 1 year and further bans go down one rank per year.
It is not a one strike and permaban, but repeat cheaters should be blocked from all PVP. This does not brick their Steam account, it just prevents them from playing online. They can still play offline with themselves or in LAN games, etc. Once a few people get permabanned tied to their real identity and credit card, and the word gets out, most people will take it seriously and stop, or get banned. Either way, the community online will get a lot better.
I believe the word the author was looking for is "rife" as in filled with/replete with.
Just another reason that add blockers like uBlock Origin are mandatory. I also browse with a JS dynamic switch so I can kill JS with a button press for obnoxious sites.
IMO there is no punishment too severe for people who cheat in PVP. It ruins the experience for thousands of others just so they can get their jollies. I would love to see Steam update their TOS to include across the board PVP timed bans escalating to PVP permaban for repeat/multiple cheaters, tied to the name on the credit card, which would not only deprive the cheater of whatever game they were cheating in, but block them from all online play permanently on Steam in perpetuity.
The trick to preventing criminal behavior (or in this case cheating) is make the punishment so serious that people won't do it. After a first offense, in addition to a month ban from all PVP on Seam, force them to watch a video interview with some hackers/cheaters who lost big money in a civil suit over their damage to an online game and a round table discussion on how cheating damages the online community and gaming companies business models. Force the cheaters to sign a legally binding contract to never cheat on a Steam game again or face civil liability as well as acknowledging that they will lose their ability to play online permanently. The reality is that only about 10% of gamers cheat, and 90% of them are script kiddies in the 10-16yo range who would stop if mommy or daddy gave them the proper discipline, a legal notice in the mail to the CC holder typically gets parental attention.
Politifact is a blatantly biased organization at this point and a shill for the alt left fascist progressives.
Americans killed by guns in recorded history: 0
Americans murdered by other people with guns in 2012: 60% of all US homicides or about 8300 or about 0.0036% of the population.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
If you remove young black males, who make up less than 4% of the US population, that number is cut in half to 4150... and puts the US per capita murder rate roughly on par with European countries. On a side note, concealed carry warning and brandishing probably stops that many robberies, rapes and murders in a week... (There are about 16,000,000 concealed carry permits in the US right now).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
Americans killed by medical mistakes each year: about 250,000
http://www.npr.org/sections/he...
Americans killed by antibiotic resistant bacteria each year: 23,000
https://www.cdc.gov/drugresist...
Clearly guns are not that big a threat unless you are an alt left fascist progressive looking to dominate and subjugate the American people. Every dictator in the last 100 years from Stalin to Mao on down the line disarmed their people first and then murdered millions of them. Guns are in fact inanimate objects controlled by their wielder, which is why every LEO in the country carries one. Any group that uses "gun deaths" are political shills with no interest in truth. Gun deaths usually include suicides (who just use different methods in gun free countries), criminals shot by police or citizens, and other justified shootings that are actually a good thing for society and end up saving lives.
"Unless you're saying the applicant should always appear in person for credit decisions"
That is exactly what I am saying, either in person on site or at a local notary public to verify their identity. And when they appear in person, the person who is applying should be required to have a high resolution, full facial photograph with no obstruction (glasses, hats, hoodies, etc.). That photograph and a set of their fingerprints should then be compared with those on file and filed with the application for credit. Legit borrowers have no issue with this, but if the data doesn't match, no same day credit and a mandatory call to the number on file as well as the local PD to check things out further. Providing credit online almost never happens anyway, but when necessary could be handled by a notary public. Most of the retail credit cards and phone companies that extend credit don't do these basic things to verify that the person getting credit is actually the person whose identity is being used. They just take a few numbers which are honestly pretty easy to get these days, and that has got to change.