It doesn't matter what people say trying to dress itup as some kind of preference BS...mouse and keyboard is vastly more accurate and intuitive.
While I may have to agree on the accuracy, analog controllers tend to beat keyboard/mouse in the speed department. Also, depending on the game of course, the options available for control can either be unbalanced, or just outright different.
I got a PS3 USB controller for my computer, and tried using it for call of duty. It didn't work. There was no physical way to map the controller 1:1 to the computer because the computer lacked the analog inputs. So for example, a consoler could aim by nearly instantly zipping their thumb on the one stick to the x,y of the target. The computer required the user to move the mouse, or to hold down keys to move the aim. (at a fixed speed) The stick has the k/m beat in target acquisition speed.
OTOH, once you have the crosshairs in the neighborhood, the accuracy of the mouse (trackball for me) takes over, and can make it much easier, faster, and more reliable to fine tune the aim down to the pixel for that across-the-map headshot. In that respect I think snipers would do better with k/m and melee better with a controller.
Thinking back on things, if computers more commonly came with controllers or even a joystick, more computer ports of games would have support for analog inputs. I remember having a joystick on my apple ii so long ago, and that worked so much better than keyboard with most games.
Some of it is the game mechanics itself being dictated by the controller in use. Back to COD, look at walking speed. The console player appears to be able to move at any speed in between 0 and fast, controlled by the amount you push on the stick. PC gamers don't have that luxury, they have several fixed speeds and no way to get in between them. I believe it's issues like that which are one of the main reasons we see so very few online games that allow pc and console to play together - they have different mechanics. Even if the console speed was stepped, the player can easily instantly switch between speeds, without needing to "ratchet up" or down with a double or triple tap of a key.
There are quite a few more lesser differences that also come immediately to mind, but these are some of the bigger issues. There's just too much difference between the two to make any kind of a reasonable comparison.
The only way that it makes any sense is in the context (as given by the article) of her mental illness: "The suit claims her existing obsessive-compulsive disorder was worsened by the anxiety brought on by the photo, as she feared that everything she was doing throughout the day was being secretly recorded.". Taking that into account, I do sympathise with her problems, but Google can't reasonably be held responsible for them.
That, and it looks like she got fired from her job not because of her laundry, but because her mental issues (OCD) went past their threshold. Sorry, but if you're on thin ice, you shouldn't dance. And someone showing you a spider that makes you hop doesn't make them responsible for your going through the ice.
Odds are fairly good that she wouldn't have lasted long at the job anyway if such a trivial thing sets her off enough to get canned. Another example of people trying to find someone to blame for their own responsibilities.
"If I was on trial I sure as hell wouldn't want the jury looking things up on wikipedia"
Well I'd prefer them doing some research rather than being a clueless bunch of fucks who make their decision about my freedom based on a hunch.
The jury is to obtain their information in the courtroom and nowhere else. It's the defense's job to provide the jurors with the information the accused requires them to have. Jurors that go out and gather information and conduct research themselves cause mistrials. Sometimes the jury can talk with the judge and ASK for certain information or clarifications, but they're barred form going out and getting it themselves. Requested information like that has to go through the judge to insure fairness. There's a reason there are very specific laws on what evidence is admissible in court, and if a juror is going out and getting the evidence themselves, they're bypassing the courtroom whose job is to insure fairness.
I can somewhat see the juror's motives though, they probably considered wikipedia on par with an encyclopedia or dictionary. (not that I AGRRE with that conclusion, but I could believe it could happen for someone) I don't even know offhand if an encyclopedia is allowed reference for a juror. But a wiki of any sort is obviously not.
and when people ask me why I don't like Republicans, I just give them answers like this. Whenever it's Big Business vs The People, we know where they're lobbying.
Would be nice if they lose and We (The People) win this time.
I think clipping a plugged in wall wart is going to be more destructive, that has potential to damage the actual outlet itself. if the coverplate is removed it's just a bit of broken plastic that doesn't require an electrician to replace
On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. . And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology...
Oh where have I heard that description before.... oh ya, here
Bush claimed to be a Christian, but the bible says "he who is not against us is with us." Why would a Christian take a biblical quote and turn it around exactly backwards?
How can you expect anyone to be consistent with the Bible when it can't even get a start at being consistent with itself?
The christian bible is one of the most self-contradictory pieces of literature in existence, and that's after all the edits made in the last 600 years to try to make it more consistent.
I think it's commendable this guy did his level best to rescue himself before calling for a helicopter.
OR he could have just around day 4 or so made the same call and someone could have just leasurely came out with a BOAT. The helicopter WAS that unneccesary and embarassing result he was trying to avoid, and easily could have.
Not calling immediatley for help was bravado. Not calling for help by day 4 was just plain stupid
Looks like they do "White Glove" service for radioactive materials.
With a name like that it's hard to imagine them losing something they're "white-gloving"
TFA: FedEx Custom Critical White Glove Services feature specially trained drivers and specialty equipment for the safe transport of your most sensitive shipments. These services include a full range of temperature-control offerings as well as a complete suite of Secure Transportation Solutions.
Sounds like total FAIL on their part. They claim to have this under control?
What is next? Making it illegal for your users to even look at products of your competitors?
No, they're going to target advertising next. You're not allowed to advertise to any of their customers with a competing product. Use of terminology relating to the product, such as "database" will be considered infringement on their IP.
Ahh very true sorry I was in a hurry when I made the post.
One other thing I meant to address and neglected was that you'd THINK word of mouth would eventually shut down these parasitic/incompetent consultants, but it's been my observation that it does not. There's an especially bad BOFH that's been operating in my area for over 20 years, and he's got his game DOWN. He just moves from group to group, about once a year, burning them almost to the ground, and then moves on. (almost always with a raft of litigation and threats following in his wake) Lots of people know him by name now, but that doesn't stop him from continuing to find new suckers on a regular basis. It's a shame too, the problem is he knows what he's doing, he doesn't have to make his living that way, but he just apparently can't help himself. Guess he likes being the person that people grow to hate.
It's not necessarily that simple. Backup tends to get no respect or funding. A horrifying number of sites don't include backup solutions as a part of the cost of funding new machines. And if it was there that long it's entirely possible that whatever backup solutions were available and used then aren't going to be useful now.
What happens most of the time is you've got a small group/department/business, they hire a consultant group to come in and set things up, and then call them when they have a problem. There is no admin
So then when a drive or DB crashes and there is no functional safety net in place, they fire consultant A and hire consultant B and B moves in, cleans up, and starts the cycle all over again.
Sounds like what's happening here. Problem is that consultants generally operate on the WC Fields principle, "there's a sucker born every minute". So instead of solving people's problems, they merely mitigate them so they can get regular business, and when they screw up, they just take the firing in stride and find another sucker almost immediately. It's a problem that won't end until stupidity itself ends. The deck is stacked against the customers though - they're hiring a consultant because they don't know what they're doing, so by definition, the consultant always has a very easy job of totally bullshitting them. And when the customer gets burned, what can they do? Either hire someone inhouse, or hire another consultant. (usually the latter)
The process of replacing bad consultants with bad consultants usually repeats itself until the customer goes out of business, gets lucky and finds a consultant that's still a leech but is at least competent, or hire someone in-house, often buying out a no-complete from the consulting firm to get the support person that knows the customer's systems.
we looped the rubber band between our thumb and index finger and fired them like a slingshot
didn't want to waste a rubber band, had more control, and more discrete. I was quite the good shot. It was the little darts that were rolled really tight that were the most 'effective'. Only the amateurs would try to shoot loosely rolled large strips of paper.
I remember some time ago when it was the rage to fold paper and shoot it at each other with rubber bands. For awhile rubber bands were considered a "regulated" item, and getting caught with a piece of rolled up paper could get you in trouble.
it's pretty clear that the engine is looking for an exact match for a known routine (in oh say, a benchmarking application) that it knows a way to optimize, or even just plain cheat its way around doing the task and get away with it. and adding a line or two of actual code (as opposed to say, comments) causes it to not recognize what it can optimize, and thus fail like it should.
wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of that going on in the world of benchmarking. benchmark apps need to be more dynamic... not just present a range of different kinds of test, but actually generate pseudorandom things that on the average will always produce very close to the same results, but that cannot be "pre-optimized" for as easily as SunSpider is.
at least they're not flaming obvious over it. I recall awhile ago someone got busted for detecting the benchmark app's process running on the computer and modifying its behavior accordingly. Probably some talk went around like "wow our test on xxx really stinks... what can we DO about that? not in general cases eh? any way we can say, look for their test and do it some other way?" I bet if you know what test is being thrown at you, this specifically, you can really optimize it well. They just never thought to nerf their optimized code a bit to make it more realistic. Problem here is it's an evolutionary process. They're not going to stop cheating, they're just going to learn to cheat better.
To help ensure a great user experience, Microsoft has performed exhaustive testing to determine which SD cards perform well with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has worked closely with OEMs and MOs to ensure that they only add these cards to Windows Phone 7 devices.
Corporate-speak-translator, engaged:
To help ensure a great profit margin, Microsoft has performed exhaustive testing to determine which SD cards can be restricted to work exclusively with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has worked closely with OEMs and MOs to ensure that they only wholesale these cards exclusively to us so we can retail them at vastly inflated cost for our Windows Phone 7 devices.
I also find it quite entertaining that if you make the "mistake" of putting an SD card in their SD card slot, that the phone "annexes" your card for its exclusive use, probably forcing you to buy another card to replace it. It's like a peripheral vacuum cleaner. Imagine a computer that once you plugged a USB flash drive into it, the flash drive would never work again with any other computer. The only saving grace here is that the card slot is in a somewhat inaccessible place, not baiting a curious user to give it a try. I would hope they all have warning stickers over the top of them.
Most reasonable people would summarize this behavior as the unit damaging the peripheral beyond repair.
The only reason it uses an SD card is because it's convenient to build, and it allows the different providers to use whatever size storage they want. In this phone, the SD card it not a user serviceable part.
That, and it doesn't even surprise me in the slightest that MS is going to require you to buy an SD card from THEM. At twice the price I'm sure, "for the added quality" of course. They're doing you a favor don't you see?
Who else in the world would consider making a proprietary format of SD card?
It's like those game consoles that can take a hard drive upgrade, but only if they get to dip their hand into your wallet during the upgrade, selling you an "upgrade kit" that gets you past their clandestine restrictions on swapping of hardware.
You can piss and moan all you want, but be sure to Vote with your wallet - it's the only vote they count.
Slipping a little bit more towards on topic though... the SD card format (sony iirc?) has a lot of cloak-and-dagger DRM features built into it, that up until now haven't gotten used much. There's a reason it's called a "secure digital" card. I expect this problem is coming up because when you stick in a new unlocked SD card, MS flips all the switches to turn on the DRM on the card, effectively bricking it for any device short of that specific phone you put it in. Preventing you from using it to move data between your phone and anything else. I'm sure they'll sell you an app to do that though.
maybe ISPs should block Saudi Arabia entirely from the internet. See how they feel about censorship then.
Take a look at countries like north korea and china. the dangers of external freedom are taken very seriously when they threaten to loosen their grip on the control over their people.
They usually don't care about any repercussions simply because in their eyes, it risks everything. No cost is too high to protect their control. And they don't have to learn to live with it, just their people do. But they don't care about that unless they can't keep the riots under control. But them check out how skilled and experienced their military is in handling such riots - they get a lot of practice and the people know they're not afraid to shoot into a crowd.
Strongly islamic countries are a little different though in this respect, because so many of their citizens are accepting of the behavior, and that leads to a greater percentage of them being what the rest of the world would call 'extremists'. It cuts down on the riots and (anti-government) protests, and fuels some "not officially sanctioned" extremist activities like those freaks that try to gun down cartoonists.
And it's even possible for a browser to alter the registry exactly why???
This is simplifying things a bit, but in short, the registry is the one central place where all preferences are stored, for everything, including the OS, its security system, and every single installed application. So at least in hindsight MS tries to stop apps from being able to change each other's registry keys, or add new keys that other systems will use. But the whole thing is basically starting with a sponge and trying to fix the holes one at a time, while the sponge is getting bigger.
Basically if you have unrestricted access to the machine, you own it. And the OS must allow you a somewhat liberal degree of access to function. It's like being forced to allow thieves into a warehouse size department store, and you've only got a handful of guards. There's just so many ways you can lock so much stuff down, you're going to lose. The entire concept is broken, but all the windows apps rely heavily on it, so you either break the world, or live with it. Nowadays most malware removal consists of two steps: (1) delete files and (2) delete registry keys.
How the concept of "registry" survived into vista, let alone 7, astounds me. By XP everyone realized it was a horrible idea.
and even a ? instead of a / , they were obviously in quite a hurry to take it down... I'm also surprised it takes "centre"... silly brits and their proprietary english!
(you'd think by now slashdot wouldn't blow a gasket trying to use a less than or greater than symbol in the text of their post...)
Slashdot Mirror
So does Intelsat have to give the insurance money back now? Or does it take more than a year to process this kind of claim anyway?
They were delayed due to problems scheduling an appointment for an adjustment agent to take a look at the satellite.
It doesn't matter what people say trying to dress itup as some kind of preference BS...mouse and keyboard is vastly more accurate and intuitive.
While I may have to agree on the accuracy, analog controllers tend to beat keyboard/mouse in the speed department. Also, depending on the game of course, the options available for control can either be unbalanced, or just outright different.
I got a PS3 USB controller for my computer, and tried using it for call of duty. It didn't work. There was no physical way to map the controller 1:1 to the computer because the computer lacked the analog inputs. So for example, a consoler could aim by nearly instantly zipping their thumb on the one stick to the x,y of the target. The computer required the user to move the mouse, or to hold down keys to move the aim. (at a fixed speed) The stick has the k/m beat in target acquisition speed.
OTOH, once you have the crosshairs in the neighborhood, the accuracy of the mouse (trackball for me) takes over, and can make it much easier, faster, and more reliable to fine tune the aim down to the pixel for that across-the-map headshot. In that respect I think snipers would do better with k/m and melee better with a controller.
Thinking back on things, if computers more commonly came with controllers or even a joystick, more computer ports of games would have support for analog inputs. I remember having a joystick on my apple ii so long ago, and that worked so much better than keyboard with most games.
Some of it is the game mechanics itself being dictated by the controller in use. Back to COD, look at walking speed. The console player appears to be able to move at any speed in between 0 and fast, controlled by the amount you push on the stick. PC gamers don't have that luxury, they have several fixed speeds and no way to get in between them. I believe it's issues like that which are one of the main reasons we see so very few online games that allow pc and console to play together - they have different mechanics. Even if the console speed was stepped, the player can easily instantly switch between speeds, without needing to "ratchet up" or down with a double or triple tap of a key.
There are quite a few more lesser differences that also come immediately to mind, but these are some of the bigger issues. There's just too much difference between the two to make any kind of a reasonable comparison.
The only way that it makes any sense is in the context (as given by the article) of her mental illness: "The suit claims her existing obsessive-compulsive disorder was worsened by the anxiety brought on by the photo, as she feared that everything she was doing throughout the day was being secretly recorded.". Taking that into account, I do sympathise with her problems, but Google can't reasonably be held responsible for them.
That, and it looks like she got fired from her job not because of her laundry, but because her mental issues (OCD) went past their threshold. Sorry, but if you're on thin ice, you shouldn't dance. And someone showing you a spider that makes you hop doesn't make them responsible for your going through the ice.
Odds are fairly good that she wouldn't have lasted long at the job anyway if such a trivial thing sets her off enough to get canned. Another example of people trying to find someone to blame for their own responsibilities.
"If I was on trial I sure as hell wouldn't want the jury looking things up on wikipedia"
Well I'd prefer them doing some research rather than being a clueless bunch of fucks who make their decision about my freedom based on a hunch.
The jury is to obtain their information in the courtroom and nowhere else. It's the defense's job to provide the jurors with the information the accused requires them to have. Jurors that go out and gather information and conduct research themselves cause mistrials. Sometimes the jury can talk with the judge and ASK for certain information or clarifications, but they're barred form going out and getting it themselves. Requested information like that has to go through the judge to insure fairness. There's a reason there are very specific laws on what evidence is admissible in court, and if a juror is going out and getting the evidence themselves, they're bypassing the courtroom whose job is to insure fairness.
I can somewhat see the juror's motives though, they probably considered wikipedia on par with an encyclopedia or dictionary. (not that I AGRRE with that conclusion, but I could believe it could happen for someone) I don't even know offhand if an encyclopedia is allowed reference for a juror. But a wiki of any sort is obviously not.
and the researchers behind it stress that it works best on de-obfuscated code."
So we're safe until they start obfuscating their code? wait, aren't they doing that already?
This needs to fall squarely under "defective by design", right along with "somebody, please ask the malware makers to not obfuscate their code/"
and when people ask me why I don't like Republicans, I just give them answers like this. Whenever it's Big Business vs The People, we know where they're lobbying.
Would be nice if they lose and We (The People) win this time.
I think clipping a plugged in wall wart is going to be more destructive, that has potential to damage the actual outlet itself. if the coverplate is removed it's just a bit of broken plastic that doesn't require an electrician to replace
On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. . And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology...
Oh where have I heard that description before.... oh ya, here
Bush claimed to be a Christian, but the bible says "he who is not against us is with us." Why would a Christian take a biblical quote and turn it around exactly backwards?
How can you expect anyone to be consistent with the Bible when it can't even get a start at being consistent with itself?
The christian bible is one of the most self-contradictory pieces of literature in existence, and that's after all the edits made in the last 600 years to try to make it more consistent.
It's better for you to cannibalize your own products, than for your competitors to do it for you.
Easily the most insightful comment I've heard all week.
I think it's commendable this guy did his level best to rescue himself before calling for a helicopter.
OR he could have just around day 4 or so made the same call and someone could have just leasurely came out with a BOAT. The helicopter WAS that unneccesary and embarassing result he was trying to avoid, and easily could have.
Not calling immediatley for help was bravado. Not calling for help by day 4 was just plain stupid
Looks like they do "White Glove" service for radioactive materials.
With a name like that it's hard to imagine them losing something they're "white-gloving"
TFA: FedEx Custom Critical White Glove Services feature specially trained drivers and specialty equipment for the safe transport of your most sensitive shipments. These services include a full range of temperature-control offerings as well as a complete suite of Secure Transportation Solutions.
Sounds like total FAIL on their part. They claim to have this under control?
I can't believe that fedex accepts shipment of radioactive material. they have restrictions on explosives, corrosives, compressed gasses, etc.
What is next? Making it illegal for your users to even look at products of your competitors?
No, they're going to target advertising next. You're not allowed to advertise to any of their customers with a competing product. Use of terminology relating to the product, such as "database" will be considered infringement on their IP.
Ahh very true sorry I was in a hurry when I made the post.
One other thing I meant to address and neglected was that you'd THINK word of mouth would eventually shut down these parasitic/incompetent consultants, but it's been my observation that it does not. There's an especially bad BOFH that's been operating in my area for over 20 years, and he's got his game DOWN. He just moves from group to group, about once a year, burning them almost to the ground, and then moves on. (almost always with a raft of litigation and threats following in his wake) Lots of people know him by name now, but that doesn't stop him from continuing to find new suckers on a regular basis. It's a shame too, the problem is he knows what he's doing, he doesn't have to make his living that way, but he just apparently can't help himself. Guess he likes being the person that people grow to hate.
It's not necessarily that simple. Backup tends to get no respect or funding. A horrifying number of sites don't include backup solutions as a part of the cost of funding new machines. And if it was there that long it's entirely possible that whatever backup solutions were available and used then aren't going to be useful now.
What happens most of the time is you've got a small group/department/business, they hire a consultant group to come in and set things up, and then call them when they have a problem. There is no admin
So then when a drive or DB crashes and there is no functional safety net in place, they fire consultant A and hire consultant B and B moves in, cleans up, and starts the cycle all over again.
Sounds like what's happening here. Problem is that consultants generally operate on the WC Fields principle, "there's a sucker born every minute". So instead of solving people's problems, they merely mitigate them so they can get regular business, and when they screw up, they just take the firing in stride and find another sucker almost immediately. It's a problem that won't end until stupidity itself ends. The deck is stacked against the customers though - they're hiring a consultant because they don't know what they're doing, so by definition, the consultant always has a very easy job of totally bullshitting them. And when the customer gets burned, what can they do? Either hire someone inhouse, or hire another consultant. (usually the latter)
The process of replacing bad consultants with bad consultants usually repeats itself until the customer goes out of business, gets lucky and finds a consultant that's still a leech but is at least competent, or hire someone in-house, often buying out a no-complete from the consulting firm to get the support person that knows the customer's systems.
we looped the rubber band between our thumb and index finger and fired them like a slingshot
didn't want to waste a rubber band, had more control, and more discrete. I was quite the good shot. It was the little darts that were rolled really tight that were the most 'effective'. Only the amateurs would try to shoot loosely rolled large strips of paper.
I remember some time ago when it was the rage to fold paper and shoot it at each other with rubber bands. For awhile rubber bands were considered a "regulated" item, and getting caught with a piece of rolled up paper could get you in trouble.
But ya, mental teachers here I think.
I thought it was illegal to demand money in exchange for not reporting your illegal activity to the authorities?
though I suppose this is more in exchange for a promise not to sue. But to call it a "fine" seems to lean more in the direction of the former.
it's pretty clear that the engine is looking for an exact match for a known routine (in oh say, a benchmarking application) that it knows a way to optimize, or even just plain cheat its way around doing the task and get away with it. and adding a line or two of actual code (as opposed to say, comments) causes it to not recognize what it can optimize, and thus fail like it should.
wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of that going on in the world of benchmarking. benchmark apps need to be more dynamic... not just present a range of different kinds of test, but actually generate pseudorandom things that on the average will always produce very close to the same results, but that cannot be "pre-optimized" for as easily as SunSpider is.
at least they're not flaming obvious over it. I recall awhile ago someone got busted for detecting the benchmark app's process running on the computer and modifying its behavior accordingly. Probably some talk went around like "wow our test on xxx really stinks... what can we DO about that? not in general cases eh? any way we can say, look for their test and do it some other way?" I bet if you know what test is being thrown at you, this specifically, you can really optimize it well. They just never thought to nerf their optimized code a bit to make it more realistic. Problem here is it's an evolutionary process. They're not going to stop cheating, they're just going to learn to cheat better.
(mod parent up that's a good link!)
To help ensure a great user experience, Microsoft has performed exhaustive testing to determine which SD cards perform well with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has worked closely with OEMs and MOs to ensure that they only add these cards to Windows Phone 7 devices.
Corporate-speak-translator, engaged:
To help ensure a great profit margin, Microsoft has performed exhaustive testing to determine which SD cards can be restricted to work exclusively with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has worked closely with OEMs and MOs to ensure that they only wholesale these cards exclusively to us so we can retail them at vastly inflated cost for our Windows Phone 7 devices.
I also find it quite entertaining that if you make the "mistake" of putting an SD card in their SD card slot, that the phone "annexes" your card for its exclusive use, probably forcing you to buy another card to replace it. It's like a peripheral vacuum cleaner. Imagine a computer that once you plugged a USB flash drive into it, the flash drive would never work again with any other computer. The only saving grace here is that the card slot is in a somewhat inaccessible place, not baiting a curious user to give it a try. I would hope they all have warning stickers over the top of them.
Most reasonable people would summarize this behavior as the unit damaging the peripheral beyond repair.
The only reason it uses an SD card is because it's convenient to build, and it allows the different providers to use whatever size storage they want. In this phone, the SD card it not a user serviceable part.
That, and it doesn't even surprise me in the slightest that MS is going to require you to buy an SD card from THEM. At twice the price I'm sure, "for the added quality" of course. They're doing you a favor don't you see?
Who else in the world would consider making a proprietary format of SD card?
It's like those game consoles that can take a hard drive upgrade, but only if they get to dip their hand into your wallet during the upgrade, selling you an "upgrade kit" that gets you past their clandestine restrictions on swapping of hardware.
You can piss and moan all you want, but be sure to Vote with your wallet - it's the only vote they count.
Slipping a little bit more towards on topic though... the SD card format (sony iirc?) has a lot of cloak-and-dagger DRM features built into it, that up until now haven't gotten used much. There's a reason it's called a "secure digital" card. I expect this problem is coming up because when you stick in a new unlocked SD card, MS flips all the switches to turn on the DRM on the card, effectively bricking it for any device short of that specific phone you put it in. Preventing you from using it to move data between your phone and anything else. I'm sure they'll sell you an app to do that though.
maybe ISPs should block Saudi Arabia entirely from the internet. See how they feel about censorship then.
Take a look at countries like north korea and china. the dangers of external freedom are taken very seriously when they threaten to loosen their grip on the control over their people.
They usually don't care about any repercussions simply because in their eyes, it risks everything. No cost is too high to protect their control. And they don't have to learn to live with it, just their people do. But they don't care about that unless they can't keep the riots under control. But them check out how skilled and experienced their military is in handling such riots - they get a lot of practice and the people know they're not afraid to shoot into a crowd.
Strongly islamic countries are a little different though in this respect, because so many of their citizens are accepting of the behavior, and that leads to a greater percentage of them being what the rest of the world would call 'extremists'. It cuts down on the riots and (anti-government) protests, and fuels some "not officially sanctioned" extremist activities like those freaks that try to gun down cartoonists.
And it's even possible for a browser to alter the registry exactly why???
This is simplifying things a bit, but in short, the registry is the one central place where all preferences are stored, for everything, including the OS, its security system, and every single installed application. So at least in hindsight MS tries to stop apps from being able to change each other's registry keys, or add new keys that other systems will use. But the whole thing is basically starting with a sponge and trying to fix the holes one at a time, while the sponge is getting bigger.
Basically if you have unrestricted access to the machine, you own it. And the OS must allow you a somewhat liberal degree of access to function. It's like being forced to allow thieves into a warehouse size department store, and you've only got a handful of guards. There's just so many ways you can lock so much stuff down, you're going to lose. The entire concept is broken, but all the windows apps rely heavily on it, so you either break the world, or live with it. Nowadays most malware removal consists of two steps: (1) delete files and (2) delete registry keys.
How the concept of "registry" survived into vista, let alone 7, astounds me. By XP everyone realized it was a horrible idea.
{html}
{centre}{img src="navysitedown.gif" alt=""/}{/centre}
{?html}
and even a ? instead of a / , they were obviously in quite a hurry to take it down... I'm also surprised it takes "centre"... silly brits and their proprietary english!
(you'd think by now slashdot wouldn't blow a gasket trying to use a less than or greater than symbol in the text of their post...)