First Tier: You can connect. You might get advertised speeds, but you'll probably get a good 1/3rd of that. Speed will be almost zero during peak hours.
Second Tier: You can connect, and you don't get BAD speeds, but they're closer to bad than passable. You get one support call a month.
Third Tier: Current Standards
Final Tier: Higher than current standards at 3x the price.
Imagine if the government said that all roads will now be reduced by one half of a lane for their 'special projects' (advertising opportunities). Now, we all pay tax to keep the road up, so we're essentially their customers. Now not only are we shorted half a lane and paying the same price, but the roadways just became more congested and much more dangerous. Its 'their' roadways, but we have en expectation of service.
It absolutely REFUSED to let me run the game because it decided that my oldish DVD drive was emulated. So rather than disconnect my DVD drive I found a way around StarForce. So now not only can I play the game without the DVD, but I know how StarForce works so I could do it to all the other StarForce games, too. Rest assured that I will never buy another StarForce product, especially after noticing a reduction in performance (boot time and FPS) because it likes to run memory-resident and look over my shoulder.
Hell, I might even go out of my way to download said games now that I can play them freely. Good job. Liking those increased profits?
Here's an idea. You pay a few bucks to watch the locked copy. You know..$1-5. Then if you want to buy it, you can have them send you the DVD just like you'd buy in the store, less the price of the download. Like if you paid $4 and the DVD is $20, you pay $16 and the DVD gets sent to you.
With discounts for those that are 'seeders' like free downloads and 25% off DVDs or something.
In the real world, this would be considered highly sexist. You can't get away with discriminating against someone for what they have the ability to do. Maybe she can't even get pregnant.
Moreover, males can pull shit just as stupid. Like knocking up their girlfriend and leaving town. There are risks with ALL employees that could involve the droppage of their responsibilities.
HOWEVER, females often tend to be very enthusiastic about using their maternity leave. This is well known among managers and HR departments. They feel like its owed to them, that multi-billion dollar corporations will bow down and worship their womb and shower them with money and benefits.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a kid or using maternity leave. I don't know what you call it, but here's another example.
I'm a guy. So, everything I say in the office is screened by some part of my mind to make sure it cannot be taken badly. I'm not the type to sexually harass anyone, but any guy is a target. If I were to say something about breasts, bad things would probably result. I'd definately hear about it from my supervisor. And six feet away I can overhear conversations of girls talking about their breasts, or her breasts, or someone elses breasts. Double standard. You can have your kids BUT might not get promoted if you're trying to get knocked up, and I have to watch everything I say because it MIGHT get me fired when some fundie overhears 1/3rd of a sentence talking about KFC.
Not quite a backdoor in itself, but it makes a very nice doorframe. Complete with the Windows 'critical flaw of the month' moulding and Welcome mat placed in front of it, just ready for someone with a door to install it into the wall...
The reason they'll never change is because they're 'almost' foolproof. The only way you can cause havoc is to press all the buttons. Thats what will get your ass kicked/stabbed by someone having a bad day.
Imagine one eight year old standing there pressing every different button repeatedly until the elevator starts going up and down randomly because its confused.
There should be some kind of inline tool that measures the 'quality' of the power coming from the line and flowing into devices. It could have like 5 levels or so and you could check the outlet for problems during real-time use. It could have a bunch of different functions, you know, like checking for electrical problems at the same time.
Unclean power is the problem that causes more crashes than people would like to admit. I've had my parents on the other side of the house start a vaccum cleaner and I've bluescreened at the same time..quite a few times..before. Obviously not a coincidence.
Its not whether you deserve to, want to, need to, or have a right to. If they can make more money off of it, they will try their hardest. I'm surprised that the Star Wars DVDs don't decay every 6 months so you have to buy a new trilogy everytime the old one dies. Of course they'd have a new edition out with 6 seconds of new footage out, every 6 months on the dot.
I can imagine that they don't do a lot of flying during the day over there. The real interesting thing would be to watch them with a high-powered telescope with night vision attachment.
You better be walking, with thermal camo, though. They've got sensors everywhere, I'm sure.
Not sure why you'd want to do this. The benefits (effective, silent cooling) are more than negated by the drawbacks.
For example, if you get water into the system you could fry your machine. Its not that difficult, especially if its not sealed too well. Another example being if the sealing were to catastrophically fail, you'd have 8 gallons of cooking oil that wanted out, and if you weren't at home could very well destroy the board.
Think you're going to try to take this thing to a LAN party? Good luck. Better wear one of those muscle belts to be able to lift and carry it. And better make sure those seals are extra tight. How's the buff Asian guy next to you going to feel when he and his machine are doused in cooking oil?
Anytime someone posts something bad about you, immediately call the police with full intent to press charges. After we waste enough of the government's time, it will either do the smart thing and revise the law, or the stupid thing and make it a felony.
Now personally I don't like it when people talk shit about me on my own blog, but I have the tools to remove their remarks thanks to the blog site. I surely don't need a law to protect me. The only way I could see it being useful is if some corporation decided they didn't like me and would engage in a smear campaign against my name on the websites I frequent. Then I would leverage this law (or libel..).
This would be a good idea for a honeynet. You could figure out a mathematical way for a bunch of dummy phones (or dummy cards/requests) to spider-web to each other and figure out who exactly is doing the looking-up...
Which would you rather do:
Carry 70 pounds throughout your journey, or carry 5 pounds for the first 15 minutes and then well over a hundred for the rest?
Just wait until someone writes a piece of code that cures a genetic disease, but must be 'fed' with a certain medication. If not fed with said medication, it will do something real bad.
"Hmmm... inability to lie to clear yourself of an accusation of crime. This is a negative because?"
The words 'wrong place at the wrong time' come to mind. With all that information, it becomes easy for the police to become lax in their detective work and not figure out what actually happened. "Oh, its just him again. Lock him up for another 20." isn't an acceptable answer when they see that he was in the area or shopping there.
Due process and just cause have gone to hell in that country. And its just setting an example of what will happen here, in the US.
Now, people will say "They paid for the streets, they can do whatever they like."
Nope. The PEOPLE paid for the streets. The people paid for those cameras, and their operation too. And I guaren-fucking-tee they'll be used for something other than just catching criminals. Wives tracking husbands, husbands tracking wives, stalkers tracking victims, people tracking people that have no legal reason to be tracked.
Now there's no saying, "Well, I was in another part of the country when this store got broken into." It will have to be, "I was at the store. I've been convicted twice of armed robbery, but it wasn't me this time. It was some hooligan on foot."
Basically they're looking for ways to be a common carrier, but with whatever rules they decide need to apply (good for them) while avoiding the other rules that would normally come with it (bad for them).
For example, ISPs want the right to filter out your P2P or VoIP packets, but not the burden of having to filter the illegal things (like pirated movies/music and banned pornography).
They're using the almighty lobbyist to do so, and if they get their way, we'll only be able to do what 'they' say we can do, or whatever we can hide from their packet shapers.
What would happen if the ISP silently blocked P2P, server, VoIP, and gaming ports of their entire user base?
A few people would cancel their accounts. No more than 10%. Really no one else would know that something is up. Its a free market, and people are voting with their money. But they don't even know they're voting and dutifully write their checks each month. More importantly, ISPs see this as compliance. Which opens the way for more restrictive rules..
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the US made like the Aussies and had draconian bandwidth restrictions. With..I dunno..say $300 per gigabyte over 2GB down per month? It'd sure make them a lot of money in saved bandwidth..think of how many more subscribers they could jam into the saved bandwidth..after all, its not about the customers or providing a good service. Its about extorting money out of people, through laws, regulations, shady service, passing the buck, whatever it takes.
Lets face it. eBay is a HUGE site. We cannot expect them to hand-hold every auction and make sure its followed-through with. However, we can expect them to be able to do something in the event of bums that won't cough up the item or the cash. Granted, there isn't a whole lot they can do, they could at least send out an aggregated report to certain police agencies to alert them of the scammers.
I've bought many items up to $100 and one was $200. All of them went without a hitch except for one. And that was because they shipped to the wrong address, even after I told them the correct one. The seller was very helpful and paid to re-ship it to me.
On the other hand, I have a friend that has been scammed three times. For a total of about $800. Mainly from bidding on something like NEW REAL CAR LQQK $0.01 NO RESERVE NOT A SCM!
Well, it seems that the people on the other side of the pond are putting up with this pretty well. Especially since they've been stripped of most of their guns..
A population kept docile by literally begging them to have families and lots of responsibilities is one that's signing up to lose freedoms. First our guns, then our right to get head in a dark alley, and then our right to not be watched in the shitter.
The next technology is to have two GPUs on one card!
What they don't tell you is, that the second GPU is wasting all of its time its not in a game running a botnet to factor NSA passwords..
US calls China out on its hacking game. This comes months after China is said to be training elite teams of hackers.
Chinese government gasps and says, "WE'RE trying to hack you? You must be mistaken. We would never attack the US! It must be those pesky rogue agents and splinter cells. The ones that we're still funding and paying. China's a big country, you know? We can't really control all 12 billion of our citizens. Never mind that the hackers are using a dual OC-3 with state-of-the-art equipment so advanced that our citizens could never even afford to look at it. We're deeply sorry. Whats that? Millions of bank accounts transferred to China? We're so sorry..we'll work our hardest to get this situation resolved. Oh, and we're building a new aircraft. We call it the C-22. It kind of looks like your F-22..."
Don't tell me it isn't already happening on a small scale.
The reason DRM even exists is to make the company more money. Now, it MIGHT make them more money, and it might not. But someone's trying to look good for a promotion for saying they tried.
"Well, I tried. But we just can't stop those darn pirates."
Translates into,
"Well, I tried. We annoyed the fuck out of a lot of customers, lost a LARGE amount of money through delays and retooling, made it popular to copy our movies because its really quite easy, AND made them incompatable with many DVD players."
And that's what most DRM is good for. Annoying the fuck out of the customers. Granted, some make it annoying, but you can bet after an 8GB download of a game or DVD I've wanted to experience, I'll not be giving up because of some pithy copy protection.
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First Tier: You can connect. You might get advertised speeds, but you'll probably get a good 1/3rd of that. Speed will be almost zero during peak hours.
Second Tier: You can connect, and you don't get BAD speeds, but they're closer to bad than passable. You get one support call a month.
Third Tier: Current Standards
Final Tier: Higher than current standards at 3x the price.
Imagine if the government said that all roads will now be reduced by one half of a lane for their 'special projects' (advertising opportunities). Now, we all pay tax to keep the road up, so we're essentially their customers. Now not only are we shorted half a lane and paying the same price, but the roadways just became more congested and much more dangerous. Its 'their' roadways, but we have en expectation of service.
X3 came with StarForce, like someone above said.
It absolutely REFUSED to let me run the game because it decided that my oldish DVD drive was emulated. So rather than disconnect my DVD drive I found a way around StarForce. So now not only can I play the game without the DVD, but I know how StarForce works so I could do it to all the other StarForce games, too. Rest assured that I will never buy another StarForce product, especially after noticing a reduction in performance (boot time and FPS) because it likes to run memory-resident and look over my shoulder.
Hell, I might even go out of my way to download said games now that I can play them freely. Good job. Liking those increased profits?
Here's an idea. You pay a few bucks to watch the locked copy. You know..$1-5. Then if you want to buy it, you can have them send you the DVD just like you'd buy in the store, less the price of the download. Like if you paid $4 and the DVD is $20, you pay $16 and the DVD gets sent to you.
With discounts for those that are 'seeders' like free downloads and 25% off DVDs or something.
In the real world, this would be considered highly sexist. You can't get away with discriminating against someone for what they have the ability to do. Maybe she can't even get pregnant.
Moreover, males can pull shit just as stupid. Like knocking up their girlfriend and leaving town. There are risks with ALL employees that could involve the droppage of their responsibilities.
HOWEVER, females often tend to be very enthusiastic about using their maternity leave. This is well known among managers and HR departments. They feel like its owed to them, that multi-billion dollar corporations will bow down and worship their womb and shower them with money and benefits.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a kid or using maternity leave. I don't know what you call it, but here's another example.
I'm a guy. So, everything I say in the office is screened by some part of my mind to make sure it cannot be taken badly. I'm not the type to sexually harass anyone, but any guy is a target. If I were to say something about breasts, bad things would probably result. I'd definately hear about it from my supervisor. And six feet away I can overhear conversations of girls talking about their breasts, or her breasts, or someone elses breasts. Double standard. You can have your kids BUT might not get promoted if you're trying to get knocked up, and I have to watch everything I say because it MIGHT get me fired when some fundie overhears 1/3rd of a sentence talking about KFC.
Not quite a backdoor in itself, but it makes a very nice doorframe. Complete with the Windows 'critical flaw of the month' moulding and Welcome mat placed in front of it, just ready for someone with a door to install it into the wall...
The reason they'll never change is because they're 'almost' foolproof. The only way you can cause havoc is to press all the buttons. Thats what will get your ass kicked/stabbed by someone having a bad day.
Imagine one eight year old standing there pressing every different button repeatedly until the elevator starts going up and down randomly because its confused.
There should be some kind of inline tool that measures the 'quality' of the power coming from the line and flowing into devices. It could have like 5 levels or so and you could check the outlet for problems during real-time use. It could have a bunch of different functions, you know, like checking for electrical problems at the same time.
Unclean power is the problem that causes more crashes than people would like to admit. I've had my parents on the other side of the house start a vaccum cleaner and I've bluescreened at the same time..quite a few times..before. Obviously not a coincidence.
Its not whether you deserve to, want to, need to, or have a right to. If they can make more money off of it, they will try their hardest. I'm surprised that the Star Wars DVDs don't decay every 6 months so you have to buy a new trilogy everytime the old one dies. Of course they'd have a new edition out with 6 seconds of new footage out, every 6 months on the dot.
I can imagine that they don't do a lot of flying during the day over there. The real interesting thing would be to watch them with a high-powered telescope with night vision attachment.
You better be walking, with thermal camo, though. They've got sensors everywhere, I'm sure.
Tinfoil hat not included.
Not sure why you'd want to do this. The benefits (effective, silent cooling) are more than negated by the drawbacks.
For example, if you get water into the system you could fry your machine. Its not that difficult, especially if its not sealed too well. Another example being if the sealing were to catastrophically fail, you'd have 8 gallons of cooking oil that wanted out, and if you weren't at home could very well destroy the board.
Think you're going to try to take this thing to a LAN party? Good luck. Better wear one of those muscle belts to be able to lift and carry it. And better make sure those seals are extra tight. How's the buff Asian guy next to you going to feel when he and his machine are doused in cooking oil?
This is easy to take care of.
Anytime someone posts something bad about you, immediately call the police with full intent to press charges. After we waste enough of the government's time, it will either do the smart thing and revise the law, or the stupid thing and make it a felony.
Now personally I don't like it when people talk shit about me on my own blog, but I have the tools to remove their remarks thanks to the blog site. I surely don't need a law to protect me. The only way I could see it being useful is if some corporation decided they didn't like me and would engage in a smear campaign against my name on the websites I frequent. Then I would leverage this law (or libel..).
This would be a good idea for a honeynet. You could figure out a mathematical way for a bunch of dummy phones (or dummy cards/requests) to spider-web to each other and figure out who exactly is doing the looking-up...
Which would you rather do: Carry 70 pounds throughout your journey, or carry 5 pounds for the first 15 minutes and then well over a hundred for the rest?
Just wait until someone writes a piece of code that cures a genetic disease, but must be 'fed' with a certain medication. If not fed with said medication, it will do something real bad.
"Can I come into your house?"
"Nope."
"Ok."
Man turns around to find the stranger at the door has already moved his shit into his house. Does this not constitute tresspassing?
"Hmmm... inability to lie to clear yourself of an accusation of crime. This is a negative because?"
The words 'wrong place at the wrong time' come to mind. With all that information, it becomes easy for the police to become lax in their detective work and not figure out what actually happened. "Oh, its just him again. Lock him up for another 20." isn't an acceptable answer when they see that he was in the area or shopping there.
Due process and just cause have gone to hell in that country. And its just setting an example of what will happen here, in the US.
Now, people will say "They paid for the streets, they can do whatever they like."
Nope. The PEOPLE paid for the streets. The people paid for those cameras, and their operation too. And I guaren-fucking-tee they'll be used for something other than just catching criminals. Wives tracking husbands, husbands tracking wives, stalkers tracking victims, people tracking people that have no legal reason to be tracked.
Now there's no saying, "Well, I was in another part of the country when this store got broken into." It will have to be, "I was at the store. I've been convicted twice of armed robbery, but it wasn't me this time. It was some hooligan on foot."
Basically they're looking for ways to be a common carrier, but with whatever rules they decide need to apply (good for them) while avoiding the other rules that would normally come with it (bad for them).
For example, ISPs want the right to filter out your P2P or VoIP packets, but not the burden of having to filter the illegal things (like pirated movies/music and banned pornography).
They're using the almighty lobbyist to do so, and if they get their way, we'll only be able to do what 'they' say we can do, or whatever we can hide from their packet shapers.
Yep. Its a free market.
What would happen if the ISP silently blocked P2P, server, VoIP, and gaming ports of their entire user base?
A few people would cancel their accounts. No more than 10%. Really no one else would know that something is up. Its a free market, and people are voting with their money. But they don't even know they're voting and dutifully write their checks each month. More importantly, ISPs see this as compliance. Which opens the way for more restrictive rules..
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the US made like the Aussies and had draconian bandwidth restrictions. With..I dunno..say $300 per gigabyte over 2GB down per month? It'd sure make them a lot of money in saved bandwidth..think of how many more subscribers they could jam into the saved bandwidth..after all, its not about the customers or providing a good service. Its about extorting money out of people, through laws, regulations, shady service, passing the buck, whatever it takes.
Lets face it. eBay is a HUGE site. We cannot expect them to hand-hold every auction and make sure its followed-through with. However, we can expect them to be able to do something in the event of bums that won't cough up the item or the cash. Granted, there isn't a whole lot they can do, they could at least send out an aggregated report to certain police agencies to alert them of the scammers.
I've bought many items up to $100 and one was $200. All of them went without a hitch except for one. And that was because they shipped to the wrong address, even after I told them the correct one. The seller was very helpful and paid to re-ship it to me.
On the other hand, I have a friend that has been scammed three times. For a total of about $800. Mainly from bidding on something like NEW REAL CAR LQQK $0.01 NO RESERVE NOT A SCM!
Well, it seems that the people on the other side of the pond are putting up with this pretty well. Especially since they've been stripped of most of their guns..
A population kept docile by literally begging them to have families and lots of responsibilities is one that's signing up to lose freedoms. First our guns, then our right to get head in a dark alley, and then our right to not be watched in the shitter.
The next technology is to have two GPUs on one card! What they don't tell you is, that the second GPU is wasting all of its time its not in a game running a botnet to factor NSA passwords..
US calls China out on its hacking game. This comes months after China is said to be training elite teams of hackers.
Chinese government gasps and says, "WE'RE trying to hack you? You must be mistaken. We would never attack the US! It must be those pesky rogue agents and splinter cells. The ones that we're still funding and paying. China's a big country, you know? We can't really control all 12 billion of our citizens. Never mind that the hackers are using a dual OC-3 with state-of-the-art equipment so advanced that our citizens could never even afford to look at it. We're deeply sorry. Whats that? Millions of bank accounts transferred to China? We're so sorry..we'll work our hardest to get this situation resolved. Oh, and we're building a new aircraft. We call it the C-22. It kind of looks like your F-22..."
Don't tell me it isn't already happening on a small scale.
The reason DRM even exists is to make the company more money. Now, it MIGHT make them more money, and it might not. But someone's trying to look good for a promotion for saying they tried.
"Well, I tried. But we just can't stop those darn pirates."
Translates into,
"Well, I tried. We annoyed the fuck out of a lot of customers, lost a LARGE amount of money through delays and retooling, made it popular to copy our movies because its really quite easy, AND made them incompatable with many DVD players."
And that's what most DRM is good for. Annoying the fuck out of the customers. Granted, some make it annoying, but you can bet after an 8GB download of a game or DVD I've wanted to experience, I'll not be giving up because of some pithy copy protection.