Honestly, Netflix isn't going to die. There's a big demand for their service, it's just the movie studios that don't want to cooperate. So Netflix has two competing pressures (one that wants as much money as possible and one that wants to give as little money as possible) and must adjust their market to equalize those pressures. Eventually, Netflix will have all the latest and greatest movies, but you'll end up paying $40/month for it, and they'll regularly break everything in the name of DRM.
A lot of fun games come out of South Korea. I've played a few MMOs and other online games from there. However, the most annoying thing is the fatigue systems they put in. I can't even sit around with my friends, drink, and play any of these games with them over a Saturday because any in game gains I get will be cut off after an hour or two of playing. I used to play Dungeon Fighter Online, for example, and could only get about 3% of a level per day because the experience requirement was so high and I was so limited in the amount of actual effective play time I was allowed by the game.
A few high level dungeon runs (at a few minutes each) and I was no longer allowed to make any gains.
Or, more realistically, buying a Yugo and then complaining that it won't actually get you more than a few weeks of use without having to take to the shop.
But you see, it won't stop with only being used against criminals. Most people can agree that less crime is a good thing, and finding stolen cars is good too, since they often aren't recovered. Today it will be used to find stolen license plates. Tomorrow it will be used to find expired tags and automatically ticket the owner. Next week it will be to get a list of suspects in an area who may or may not have robbed a convenience store three blocks away. Next month it will be used to see who is driving around the bad part of town at late hours.
Then one day, far down the road, maybe when you've posted something controversial in one of these threads, you just might get a visit. They'll uncap the scrolls and read a rough review of your life, asking you questions, telling you that if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide. We know you were at that protest last month.
See, I could get behind this technology if and only if the plates were only checked to see if they were stolen or legit, with no data being kept unless the plate was flagged for some reason. But it won't be. They'll be able to data mine your driving habits for the past year, with every sighting of your plate being a dot on the map. But when your ex-wife gets murdered in a robbery across town, the evidence that you weren't anywhere close won't be released or brought to court to provide an alibi for you.
It isn't what we traditionally think of as a search, but it should, at the least, be considered a warrantless wiretap. Basically, anything that intercepts communication data is a wiretap. Be it listening in to their handheld radios or putting a recording device on their phone line or otherwise doing the fandango with data from their cell phone. All forms of wiretapping.
This would be just the same as them setting up an overpowering fake cordless phone base station and using it to listen in to their phone calls, and then arguing that it doesn't constitute wiretapping because they didn't have to go through the phone company to do it. No, sorry feds, you can't argue for spirit of the law in one case and then turn around and say that only the letter of the law matters in another case.
The whole point behind needing a warrant to wiretap is that people should be secure in their homes and have a reasonable expectation to privacy. You can't just go about using technical means to violate that spirit of the law, while your other arm turns around and arrests someone for 'inciting riots' because they posted in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Hey, we're selling this grand dual core 3GHz server grade processor today! And if you ever want to upgrade, simply let us know, pay a fee, and we'll flip a switch on the chip to turn it into a four core 3GHz server grade processor! Why, yes, the dual core is way more expensive than other dual cores at its level!
Or..
Yes, sir, your phone does come with GPS. Oh you can't use it without paying a monthly fee for us to unlock it.
But HR cannot easily administer and interpret that tests themselves. They can, however, apply a 'difference' condition to the number of years they've worked in the field and the level of their college degree. They're pretty good at that.
In the ring of price for performance, aka bang for buck, AMD comes out a little ahead in almost all catagories. I don't think they were ever the top dog in performance at the high end, but if you compare their mainstream products with those of Intel, the AMD products are generally much better in terms of price for performance. You can have 50 units of performance for 50 dollars, or you can have 65 units of performance for 80 dollars.
Ahh, but they have a card up their sleeve for just that situation. If you won't get violent, there are people that will. People that often work in law enforcement. People that won't be there when the riot police start issuing beat downs. Then they'll say on the news that the OW...err...insurgents..got violent and attempted to vandalize/loot/stampede/etc. It'll all be right there on tape.
It'll be blasted across your TV screen and favorite news website. Look, see what those protesters did today! We had to step in and keep them from harming innocent people!
There are three types of radiation you have to deal with when it comes to fallout. Alpha, beta, and gamma.
Alpha radiation can't even go very far through the air. Few inches give or take. It isn't dangerous to you at all unless ingested.
Beta radiation goes a little farther but isn't dangerous unless very concentrated and close, or is ingested.
Gamma radiation is what you would have to worry about the most, but significant levels aren't going to accumulate near you unless you're directly in the path of the fallout. In which case there would likely be much higher radiation readings between you and the plant.
As for alpha and beta, you won't be able to easily test for these. These are mostly rather transient in nature. Gamma rays you can easily test for, just buy a Geiger counter online and make sure it works. Your local university would probably be glad to help you calibrate it, talk to the physics or nuclear engineering department.
90% of the time you were getting completely curb stomped by groups of 50-200 people in the frontier areas. Whoever got the area mez (basically it stopped everyone in a given area from acting for a good thirty seconds, until damaged, or they used a (purchasable through PvP points) skill to break out of it) off first. Also, hacking was rampant. As soon as you stepped into a frontier a group of people would come running at approximately the speed of sound with their weapons out.
The only fun I EVER had was in the battlegrounds, where it wasn't always 200 people with the absolute best of the best gear. I quit the game for good when a guy casted the same spell five times in about two seconds, and Mythic said it was impossible, but was widely reported on forums..also them nerfing my class (berserker) into doing slightly less damage over time than a caster using only their staff..
Basically, the whole point of this law is to get people to write down what they sold and to whom and for how much. They want to be able to trace an item through various networks.
Say, for example, I purchase a Playstation 3 from you. When I give you cash for it, you have to keep track of who you sold it to and for how much. Then whenever the guy that sold it to you gets busted for breaking and entering, they can get the Playstation 3 from me, arrest me for buying stolen property, then arrest you for buying/selling stolen property, and arrest the original guy for stealing the property. So, all in all, three people in jail over one stolen Playstation 3.
Most likely me and you wouldn't be jailed, but we would be slapped with a fine. That fine is the nature of the beast. They'll fine as many people as it goes through. So every item would, in their mind, be a gold mine of fines. Even if it weren't stolen in the first place, if you didn't keep records, you get fined. Then they'll move on to the next node..
While Adderall is an amphetamine and is related to speed and meth, it is different than both. Taken per label, it does not have the stimulant effects of speed or meth, as it will be time released. Taken correctly, it does not easily lead to addiction or junkie behavior in most people. Whereas speed and meth would.
The economy is so bad right now that most people don't have enough time or resources to be creative. Most people don't even think about being creative when they aren't sure where their next meals are coming from, or are afraid they're about to get laid off.
All the while, the fat cats are wondering where all their money is going because they aren't being creative and making new products people want to buy. Of course it's our fault for not being creative enough.
Alright, let's give a scenario here. Imagine you're a producer of SCADA/PLC/etc bits. You develop and deploy a solution for a company and after a year of testing and making sure everything is running smoothly, you hand over the keys and do a tactical retreat to let them have their damn system. A lot of money changed hands.
Then the worst happens. They get hacked. Let's say it breaks down a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. Beyond repair. Has to be scrapped.
Obviously the fault depends on how it was hacked. If it was your vulnerability, programming flaw, something like that, it might be your fault. If they connected it to the internet with no protection, it would be their fault.
Assuming it was their fault, you will have a lot of bad publicity still. All most people would see is (YOUR COMPANY)'s industrial control system was hacked and caused millions of dollars of damage to a nearby factory! They won't know it was hacked because it was internet accessible and wasn't made to be secure against internet attacks.
The only solution is to design these systems knowing that they will be hacked, and to simply make it more difficult. Just like people buying shitty and bald used tires and putting them on their sports cars, people will connect naked SCADA systems to the internet.
The optimal method is very difficult to compute. However, you can get 80% efficiency by just planning your route based on the most scarce of the locations.
Funny you should mention that. Someone from my past bought a house recently which came with a reasonable home owner's association, or so they thought. They even met the 'board' who seemed down to earth and friendly.
Anyway, they collected 'dues' for misc expenses, such as sidewalks. A neighborhood next to them also had a different HOA.
Someone had an idea to set up a walking 'track' by linking the two neighborhoods at both sides, so their sidewalk networks connected and formed a nice big rectangular loop. People regularly made this journey. HOA-B decided HOA-A should pay for all the appropriate linkages and do all the work, since they had the idea. HOA-A said they should split the cost. HOA-B ended up building walls/fences/impediments to keep HOA-A people out, and to keep HOA-B people from getting to HOA-A. They went so far as to block off every way HOA-A had to get in to HOA-B, severing roads, connections, etc, except for the main and only entrance into HOA-B. It cost them 10x more to be jerks than it did to simply pay for the connections themselves.
I do not fault Germany for wanting to increase their reliance on renewable resources for power generation. However, I do fault them for wanting to phase out nuclear power, since it is really the only viable generating method for the future-at-large.
Think about how much coal and how many coal plants will be required to replace their nuclear plants. I'd rather run the tiny tiny chance of an accident at a nuclear plant than the very large risk that I'll be coughing up black spit and dying at 35 from lung cancer when I've never smoked.
France, on the other hand, will be making a killing selling their nuclear power to Germany..I bet they're scrambling to build a couple of plants for it right now..
Actually, I've found that the most wasteful people are the poor ones. The people I know living paycheck-to-paycheck mostly end up spending every dime on crap instead of keeping some for savings. As an example, I know someone that will go out and eat at an expensive restaurant ($30+ a person) right after getting paid, for their 20 hours a week minimum wage, then complain about not having much money left over for gas. Did I mention they have the latest iPhone, pay $80/mo for mobile service? They can barely afford a place to stay or eat, but they can afford all that, apparently.
Absolutely all of that goes out the window when the store refuses to cover the damage because all the plan covers is strictly outlined in the plan itself and isn't based one tiny bit on what they tell you in person unless you've got it recorded with approval from the person telling it to you.
I had a laptop and bought a total protection plan to go with it. Three months after the original warranty ended, the power unit in the laptop failed and fried the motherboard, as well as everything connected to it. Best Buy refused to cover the damage citing that it was the manufacturer's fault, and the manufacturer placed blame on a batch of bad parts from a subcontracted company, which they were not responsible for, see, it says right there in their warranty.
Upon further examination, the total protection plan didn't cover a lot of things. Sure, it covered accidental damage as long as it didn't involve water or liquids, and it covered failure due to wear, but it didn't cover defects in the equipment. I since learned that with these plans, if you want something fixed, you just have to find a way within the bounds of the plan to destroy it if it ever breaks.
So you're saying that because I like to play games (besides tux racer and rogue clones) at a reasonable speed on reasonable hardware, and so I deserve to be targeted by criminals.
But there will be. Say your previous package arrives at your place at 3:10PM, and the one before that at 3:05PM, and the one before that at 4:10PM, and the one before that at 3:19PM. It's pretty safe to say that your package will arrive somewhere between 3 and 4PM, right?
You know this by heart, but imagine if your neighbor did a bunch of shipping and you didn't..and wanted to know around when it would arrive. In some places, an hour of time can be the difference between you getting your packages and your neighbor getting them and feigning ignorance.
Blackmail is releasing information harmful to someone if they don't pay up. It is illegal because it is extortion.
Basically, the spirit of the law makes it illegal to demand someone to do something (such as paying up), using some kind of threat to increase the chances of them actually paying up.
This differs from an actual business arrangement because actual business arrangements were agreed to beforehand. As an example, if you're late on your payments, we'll report you to the credit bureaus and they'll lower your credit score.
Depending on the threat, more criminal charges could be added to the extortion: Like if you threatened harm or murder, you'd get charged with making threats of physical violence. If you threatened to release nude photos or expose infidelity, you'd get charged with invasion or privacy. If you threatened to out someone for 'public knowledge' you probably would only get charged with extortion.
Even threatening to report people to the police for illegal activities unless they pay you can be extortion.
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Honestly, Netflix isn't going to die. There's a big demand for their service, it's just the movie studios that don't want to cooperate. So Netflix has two competing pressures (one that wants as much money as possible and one that wants to give as little money as possible) and must adjust their market to equalize those pressures. Eventually, Netflix will have all the latest and greatest movies, but you'll end up paying $40/month for it, and they'll regularly break everything in the name of DRM.
A lot of fun games come out of South Korea. I've played a few MMOs and other online games from there. However, the most annoying thing is the fatigue systems they put in. I can't even sit around with my friends, drink, and play any of these games with them over a Saturday because any in game gains I get will be cut off after an hour or two of playing. I used to play Dungeon Fighter Online, for example, and could only get about 3% of a level per day because the experience requirement was so high and I was so limited in the amount of actual effective play time I was allowed by the game.
A few high level dungeon runs (at a few minutes each) and I was no longer allowed to make any gains.
I now avoid games that have a fatigue system.
Or, more realistically, buying a Yugo and then complaining that it won't actually get you more than a few weeks of use without having to take to the shop.
But you see, it won't stop with only being used against criminals. Most people can agree that less crime is a good thing, and finding stolen cars is good too, since they often aren't recovered. Today it will be used to find stolen license plates. Tomorrow it will be used to find expired tags and automatically ticket the owner. Next week it will be to get a list of suspects in an area who may or may not have robbed a convenience store three blocks away. Next month it will be used to see who is driving around the bad part of town at late hours.
Then one day, far down the road, maybe when you've posted something controversial in one of these threads, you just might get a visit. They'll uncap the scrolls and read a rough review of your life, asking you questions, telling you that if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide. We know you were at that protest last month.
See, I could get behind this technology if and only if the plates were only checked to see if they were stolen or legit, with no data being kept unless the plate was flagged for some reason. But it won't be. They'll be able to data mine your driving habits for the past year, with every sighting of your plate being a dot on the map. But when your ex-wife gets murdered in a robbery across town, the evidence that you weren't anywhere close won't be released or brought to court to provide an alibi for you.
Why would anyone want HDMI on their phones? Are the phones really powerful enough to output an HD signal to TVs that people would want to watch?
It isn't what we traditionally think of as a search, but it should, at the least, be considered a warrantless wiretap. Basically, anything that intercepts communication data is a wiretap. Be it listening in to their handheld radios or putting a recording device on their phone line or otherwise doing the fandango with data from their cell phone. All forms of wiretapping.
This would be just the same as them setting up an overpowering fake cordless phone base station and using it to listen in to their phone calls, and then arguing that it doesn't constitute wiretapping because they didn't have to go through the phone company to do it. No, sorry feds, you can't argue for spirit of the law in one case and then turn around and say that only the letter of the law matters in another case.
The whole point behind needing a warrant to wiretap is that people should be secure in their homes and have a reasonable expectation to privacy. You can't just go about using technical means to violate that spirit of the law, while your other arm turns around and arrests someone for 'inciting riots' because they posted in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Hey, we're selling this grand dual core 3GHz server grade processor today! And if you ever want to upgrade, simply let us know, pay a fee, and we'll flip a switch on the chip to turn it into a four core 3GHz server grade processor! Why, yes, the dual core is way more expensive than other dual cores at its level!
Or..
Yes, sir, your phone does come with GPS. Oh you can't use it without paying a monthly fee for us to unlock it.
But HR cannot easily administer and interpret that tests themselves. They can, however, apply a 'difference' condition to the number of years they've worked in the field and the level of their college degree. They're pretty good at that.
In the ring of price for performance, aka bang for buck, AMD comes out a little ahead in almost all catagories. I don't think they were ever the top dog in performance at the high end, but if you compare their mainstream products with those of Intel, the AMD products are generally much better in terms of price for performance. You can have 50 units of performance for 50 dollars, or you can have 65 units of performance for 80 dollars.
Ahh, but they have a card up their sleeve for just that situation. If you won't get violent, there are people that will. People that often work in law enforcement. People that won't be there when the riot police start issuing beat downs. Then they'll say on the news that the OW...err...insurgents..got violent and attempted to vandalize/loot/stampede/etc. It'll all be right there on tape.
It'll be blasted across your TV screen and favorite news website. Look, see what those protesters did today! We had to step in and keep them from harming innocent people!
There are three types of radiation you have to deal with when it comes to fallout. Alpha, beta, and gamma.
Alpha radiation can't even go very far through the air. Few inches give or take. It isn't dangerous to you at all unless ingested.
Beta radiation goes a little farther but isn't dangerous unless very concentrated and close, or is ingested.
Gamma radiation is what you would have to worry about the most, but significant levels aren't going to accumulate near you unless you're directly in the path of the fallout. In which case there would likely be much higher radiation readings between you and the plant.
As for alpha and beta, you won't be able to easily test for these. These are mostly rather transient in nature. Gamma rays you can easily test for, just buy a Geiger counter online and make sure it works. Your local university would probably be glad to help you calibrate it, talk to the physics or nuclear engineering department.
Best PvP? Really?
90% of the time you were getting completely curb stomped by groups of 50-200 people in the frontier areas. Whoever got the area mez (basically it stopped everyone in a given area from acting for a good thirty seconds, until damaged, or they used a (purchasable through PvP points) skill to break out of it) off first. Also, hacking was rampant. As soon as you stepped into a frontier a group of people would come running at approximately the speed of sound with their weapons out.
The only fun I EVER had was in the battlegrounds, where it wasn't always 200 people with the absolute best of the best gear. I quit the game for good when a guy casted the same spell five times in about two seconds, and Mythic said it was impossible, but was widely reported on forums..also them nerfing my class (berserker) into doing slightly less damage over time than a caster using only their staff..
Basically, the whole point of this law is to get people to write down what they sold and to whom and for how much. They want to be able to trace an item through various networks.
Say, for example, I purchase a Playstation 3 from you. When I give you cash for it, you have to keep track of who you sold it to and for how much. Then whenever the guy that sold it to you gets busted for breaking and entering, they can get the Playstation 3 from me, arrest me for buying stolen property, then arrest you for buying/selling stolen property, and arrest the original guy for stealing the property. So, all in all, three people in jail over one stolen Playstation 3.
Most likely me and you wouldn't be jailed, but we would be slapped with a fine. That fine is the nature of the beast. They'll fine as many people as it goes through. So every item would, in their mind, be a gold mine of fines. Even if it weren't stolen in the first place, if you didn't keep records, you get fined. Then they'll move on to the next node..
While Adderall is an amphetamine and is related to speed and meth, it is different than both. Taken per label, it does not have the stimulant effects of speed or meth, as it will be time released. Taken correctly, it does not easily lead to addiction or junkie behavior in most people. Whereas speed and meth would.
The economy is so bad right now that most people don't have enough time or resources to be creative. Most people don't even think about being creative when they aren't sure where their next meals are coming from, or are afraid they're about to get laid off.
All the while, the fat cats are wondering where all their money is going because they aren't being creative and making new products people want to buy. Of course it's our fault for not being creative enough.
My city actually closes a ton of parking meters for football game days for two reasons:
1) To force people to go to those $20 parking lots that it runs.
2) To ticket people that abso-fucking-lutely cannot find a space within ten miles for a day before or after the game and have to park there.
(optional)
3) To come back and ticket people that were parked at the meters before they put the 'no parking' hoods over them, after they put them on them.
Alright, let's give a scenario here. Imagine you're a producer of SCADA/PLC/etc bits. You develop and deploy a solution for a company and after a year of testing and making sure everything is running smoothly, you hand over the keys and do a tactical retreat to let them have their damn system. A lot of money changed hands.
Then the worst happens. They get hacked. Let's say it breaks down a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. Beyond repair. Has to be scrapped.
Obviously the fault depends on how it was hacked. If it was your vulnerability, programming flaw, something like that, it might be your fault. If they connected it to the internet with no protection, it would be their fault.
Assuming it was their fault, you will have a lot of bad publicity still. All most people would see is (YOUR COMPANY)'s industrial control system was hacked and caused millions of dollars of damage to a nearby factory! They won't know it was hacked because it was internet accessible and wasn't made to be secure against internet attacks.
The only solution is to design these systems knowing that they will be hacked, and to simply make it more difficult. Just like people buying shitty and bald used tires and putting them on their sports cars, people will connect naked SCADA systems to the internet.
The optimal method is very difficult to compute. However, you can get 80% efficiency by just planning your route based on the most scarce of the locations.
Funny you should mention that. Someone from my past bought a house recently which came with a reasonable home owner's association, or so they thought. They even met the 'board' who seemed down to earth and friendly.
Anyway, they collected 'dues' for misc expenses, such as sidewalks. A neighborhood next to them also had a different HOA.
Someone had an idea to set up a walking 'track' by linking the two neighborhoods at both sides, so their sidewalk networks connected and formed a nice big rectangular loop. People regularly made this journey. HOA-B decided HOA-A should pay for all the appropriate linkages and do all the work, since they had the idea. HOA-A said they should split the cost. HOA-B ended up building walls/fences/impediments to keep HOA-A people out, and to keep HOA-B people from getting to HOA-A. They went so far as to block off every way HOA-A had to get in to HOA-B, severing roads, connections, etc, except for the main and only entrance into HOA-B. It cost them 10x more to be jerks than it did to simply pay for the connections themselves.
I do not fault Germany for wanting to increase their reliance on renewable resources for power generation. However, I do fault them for wanting to phase out nuclear power, since it is really the only viable generating method for the future-at-large.
Think about how much coal and how many coal plants will be required to replace their nuclear plants. I'd rather run the tiny tiny chance of an accident at a nuclear plant than the very large risk that I'll be coughing up black spit and dying at 35 from lung cancer when I've never smoked.
France, on the other hand, will be making a killing selling their nuclear power to Germany..I bet they're scrambling to build a couple of plants for it right now..
Actually, I've found that the most wasteful people are the poor ones. The people I know living paycheck-to-paycheck mostly end up spending every dime on crap instead of keeping some for savings. As an example, I know someone that will go out and eat at an expensive restaurant ($30+ a person) right after getting paid, for their 20 hours a week minimum wage, then complain about not having much money left over for gas. Did I mention they have the latest iPhone, pay $80/mo for mobile service? They can barely afford a place to stay or eat, but they can afford all that, apparently.
Absolutely all of that goes out the window when the store refuses to cover the damage because all the plan covers is strictly outlined in the plan itself and isn't based one tiny bit on what they tell you in person unless you've got it recorded with approval from the person telling it to you.
I had a laptop and bought a total protection plan to go with it. Three months after the original warranty ended, the power unit in the laptop failed and fried the motherboard, as well as everything connected to it. Best Buy refused to cover the damage citing that it was the manufacturer's fault, and the manufacturer placed blame on a batch of bad parts from a subcontracted company, which they were not responsible for, see, it says right there in their warranty.
Upon further examination, the total protection plan didn't cover a lot of things. Sure, it covered accidental damage as long as it didn't involve water or liquids, and it covered failure due to wear, but it didn't cover defects in the equipment. I since learned that with these plans, if you want something fixed, you just have to find a way within the bounds of the plan to destroy it if it ever breaks.
So you're saying that because I like to play games (besides tux racer and rogue clones) at a reasonable speed on reasonable hardware, and so I deserve to be targeted by criminals.
Stay classy, sir or madam.
But there will be. Say your previous package arrives at your place at 3:10PM, and the one before that at 3:05PM, and the one before that at 4:10PM, and the one before that at 3:19PM. It's pretty safe to say that your package will arrive somewhere between 3 and 4PM, right?
You know this by heart, but imagine if your neighbor did a bunch of shipping and you didn't..and wanted to know around when it would arrive. In some places, an hour of time can be the difference between you getting your packages and your neighbor getting them and feigning ignorance.
Blackmail is releasing information harmful to someone if they don't pay up. It is illegal because it is extortion.
Basically, the spirit of the law makes it illegal to demand someone to do something (such as paying up), using some kind of threat to increase the chances of them actually paying up.
This differs from an actual business arrangement because actual business arrangements were agreed to beforehand. As an example, if you're late on your payments, we'll report you to the credit bureaus and they'll lower your credit score.
Depending on the threat, more criminal charges could be added to the extortion: Like if you threatened harm or murder, you'd get charged with making threats of physical violence. If you threatened to release nude photos or expose infidelity, you'd get charged with invasion or privacy. If you threatened to out someone for 'public knowledge' you probably would only get charged with extortion.
Even threatening to report people to the police for illegal activities unless they pay you can be extortion.