at least on par with what the credit card companies have done.
Jebus! Have you used their systems?! AVS and 3DSecure are NOT inspirational targets...
Pros:
It's better than nothing
Cons:
AVS: All it does is hash the numerics in the address into a string and compare
AVS: It only works in the US and UK
AVS: The CC companies take no responsibility for the accuracy of their information
AVS: They absolve themselves of all responsibility anyway
3DS: With most systems you can reset the password using just the information on the card. Genius!
3DS: It's a major barrier to purchase; conversion rates plummet when 3d secure is enforced
You'd think a simple system that checks against a list of compromised card numbers would be straightforward enough, easier than checking ever changing addresses anyway.
If you've ever dealt with a CC company over a fraudulent card you might have got the strong impression they don't care, except in as much as they *really* want their chargeback fee from the retailer (the innocent party in 99.99% of cases). If you've dealt with them multiple times you may have found them so unhelpful you might even suspect that they *welcomed* CC fraud. After all most of it goes undetected, and when it doesn't they charge for the orginal transaction, the refund and then double for chargeback.
3D Secure (verified by visa etc) was meant to address the retailer's concerns about this by transferring some responsibility back to the CC issuer, but it makes the customer jump through so many hoops that it is disabled by most retailers in order for them to keep their business alive. Additionally the list of exemptions and pre-requisites for them taking liability is as long as your standard credit card terms and conditions, making it in practice completely useless.
Nothing to do with phones I know, but Credit Card companies are *not* aspirational technology leaders. Because of all politicians complete lack of understanding of technology they have managed to carve a privileged position where they profit from everyone and take no reponsibility themselves. If I'm leading the revolution they will be the first against the wall...
The biggest stability problem I have with Vista is frickin firefox. 150mb RAM usage after 10 minutes, hanging processes when you close it down and just random crashes. Of course it *must* be my plugins, it's not possible that it's an overcoded piece of bloatware...
(Obviously I still consider it better than the alternatives or I wouldn't be using it, but I really don't understand why it's so hard for anyone to make a simple web browser. IE is IE, Chrome is buggy beyond belief and Opera's just irritatingly holier-than-thou)
Or they would do if they were actually usable... Perhaps they work when you're connected to Internet2 or GEANT but out here in the real world of 4k/256 ADSL they suck ass.
Uh, what? Most "web developers" may well use windows as their local client but no one worthy of the tag is developing web apps on their local machine.
MySQL was first to market, it's as simple as that. Postgre for years was impenetrable and is generally pedalled by the type of holier-than-thou uber-geek that puts everyone off (you only need to read the comments on here that accompany any story about MySQL or PHP to find the ones I mean). That is their target market and I'm sure they are happy to have cornered it; if they started to impinge on MySQL's territory they would suddenly be encumbered by all those "lusers" who don't know how to partition their tables by hand. (I notice there is already a thread on the pg mailing list gloating: "Make your pick, half assed code that sometimes works, or postgresql". Good luck guys.)
Good god man! Presumably you get around by horse and cart? I mean, that petrol engine is very convenient and all, but think of the risk of explosion...
OK. We had the same deal here with deceptive selling of "unlimited" services, but they've largely stopped that now simply by enforcing the law. I think the caps are the wrong target here, it's too easy to make someone arguing against them look stupid. The real battle should be about dishonest selling. An "unlimited" service can simply never encompass any limit, and that should be a very simple lawsuit to win, if required.
Speaking as an Englander whose always had bandwidth caps (and much lower ones than this) I don't really get the problem. You don't get all-you-can-eat electricity or phone calls (or maybe you do?) why expect unlimited bandwidth?
250Gb a month is 3 and a bit CentOS images a day. What are you doing that requires that? Even if you had a skype video call on 24/7 for a month you'd only approach about 40gb. It's 100Kb/s constantly; if you're downloading torrents you'd be lucky to average that over a month anywhere that's not on or near a backbone.
I mean you're not going to run, for example, a proper website on that, but no-one seriously runs anything public like that on an ADSL line do they?
It will happen/is happening because the good ol' US legal system encourages registrars and hosts (and in fact pretty anyone) to roll over at even the faintest whiff of a legal threat, cf the DMCA. It used to be that you were "innocent until proven guilty" (except in Louisiana of course), but it's now very much that you are "guilty because we say you are".
...there was some other agenda for the war in Iraq, that we are unlikely to find out for a long time if ever.
I don't think that the agenda is even in question: it's what is euphemistically called "Energy Security". Anyone who thinks otherwise is paying too much attention to what the British government says.
The counter-argument that oil supply is now less secure than before is beside the point - the intention was to put Iraqi oil in friendly hands, the actual result merely proves the incompetence of the people who were in charge.
As far as I can see no commenter yet has actually installed this game, it's just a bunch of "EA Sucks"/"I won't buy this (but I wouldn't have anyway)"/"It will run under WINE" rants based on stories they've read on slashdot.
I bought it and installed it and, aside from the usual serial number, I've not noticed any DRM yet.
And probably I won't because I won't be playing it again. DRM won't kill Spore, brain dead gameplay will kill Spore. Such a beautiful and well executed concept has been ruined by Will Wright's desire to go for the Sims-level market. There's nothing even remotely challenging about the first stages, though the concept and execution are great, then the last stage over-compensates by being impossible (it's basically Elite II without the tedious flying bits, but you always start next to large and aggressive empires who give you not a chance). I truly hope that they have a change of heart and produce some kind of advanced gamer mode patch to make the promising pre-space stages deeper and longer, but having read WW's unapologetic response I won't be holding my breath.
The US didn't like pollution from making stuff at home so it had it made in China, from where it could import the stuff and leave the pollution. Now the Chinese make so much stuff for America that the pollution is coming home by itself anyway. The irony is almost tangible...
Trouble is the list of suspected terrorists is quite large, and includes such deadly threats as Nelson Mandela, Cat Stevens, and Ted Kennedy.
The point of the 4th amendent is not at all debatable. We know exactly why it is there: because the British authorities had had the right to search any property in search of smuggled goods, and the good citizens of America decided they didn't want their new masters to have the same rights.
What is debatable is it's relevance to electronic communications. The answer is of course none, because the internet was unimaginable when it was written, even by such a prolific thinker as Benjamin Franklin. What actually needs to happen is for America to realise that semantic obessioning over the constitution is a diversionary tactic by the backers of these types of bills, and that the real laws are passed long before the press have stopped bitching about what "Unreasonable" means.
Heck, it is insignificant even compared to the economic losses, which my country may sustain, if China's industrial espionage is successful
What commercial knowledge do you imagine the Chinese would want to steal from the US? 98% of everything you consume is made in China or its close neighbours. The US (and in fact the whole of the "west") trumps China only in the service sector, where China doesn't want to, and geographically can't, compete. The US long ago shipped all it's industrial secrets willingly to China, relinquishing them eagerly in the pursuit of Mammon.
Compare the first and last on that list and bear in mind that they are each other's largest trading partners... (coincidence it maybe, but if you add together 1,2 and 4 (I'm guessing germany is not a huge trading partner) it almost balances out the US's deficit: perhaps a good indication of where the money went)
I wasn't disagreeing with you. Warfare is evolution in fast-forward: only the fittest live to go on and fight the next war, regardless of their techniques. Until of course they go on to build weapons that will wipe themselves out as well as their enemies. Let's hope for the sake of the world that the US doesn't decide to guarantee the liberty of Georgia right now...
Why? China only cares if you're trying to free tibet or mongolia, or possibly have discovered a super giant oilfield under beijing.
The feds however will be very interested in why you were in China and the reasons you are now returning to the US, where you're staying, how much tax you pay, how you voted last time, how much weed you smoked at high school and who you bought it off.
Were the humans of ancient times cowards when they decided that projectiles were a great way of killing people at a distance?
The ancient Greeks, particularly the Spartans, certainly thought so. And the medieval French were less than enamoured with the English longbow. The Samurai are not very good exemplars of modern day "honour". Their honour code was only applicable to other Samurai and to anyone else (ie 99% of the population) they were entitled to do, and did do, pretty horrific things.
Slashdot Mirror
ALL security is through obscurity... It's just a matter of degree.
at least on par with what the credit card companies have done.
Jebus! Have you used their systems?! AVS and 3DSecure are NOT inspirational targets...
Pros:
Cons:
You'd think a simple system that checks against a list of compromised card numbers would be straightforward enough, easier than checking ever changing addresses anyway.
If you've ever dealt with a CC company over a fraudulent card you might have got the strong impression they don't care, except in as much as they *really* want their chargeback fee from the retailer (the innocent party in 99.99% of cases). If you've dealt with them multiple times you may have found them so unhelpful you might even suspect that they *welcomed* CC fraud. After all most of it goes undetected, and when it doesn't they charge for the orginal transaction, the refund and then double for chargeback.
3D Secure (verified by visa etc) was meant to address the retailer's concerns about this by transferring some responsibility back to the CC issuer, but it makes the customer jump through so many hoops that it is disabled by most retailers in order for them to keep their business alive. Additionally the list of exemptions and pre-requisites for them taking liability is as long as your standard credit card terms and conditions, making it in practice completely useless.
Nothing to do with phones I know, but Credit Card companies are *not* aspirational technology leaders. Because of all politicians complete lack of understanding of technology they have managed to carve a privileged position where they profit from everyone and take no reponsibility themselves. If I'm leading the revolution they will be the first against the wall...
The biggest stability problem I have with Vista is frickin firefox. 150mb RAM usage after 10 minutes, hanging processes when you close it down and just random crashes. Of course it *must* be my plugins, it's not possible that it's an overcoded piece of bloatware...
(Obviously I still consider it better than the alternatives or I wouldn't be using it, but I really don't understand why it's so hard for anyone to make a simple web browser. IE is IE, Chrome is buggy beyond belief and Opera's just irritatingly holier-than-thou)
Well with an infinite number of monkeys, sorry, science fiction writers, at least one of them's bound to get the correct answer to everything..
Or they would do if they were actually usable... Perhaps they work when you're connected to Internet2 or GEANT but out here in the real world of 4k/256 ADSL they suck ass.
Uh, what? Most "web developers" may well use windows as their local client but no one worthy of the tag is developing web apps on their local machine.
MySQL was first to market, it's as simple as that. Postgre for years was impenetrable and is generally pedalled by the type of holier-than-thou uber-geek that puts everyone off (you only need to read the comments on here that accompany any story about MySQL or PHP to find the ones I mean). That is their target market and I'm sure they are happy to have cornered it; if they started to impinge on MySQL's territory they would suddenly be encumbered by all those "lusers" who don't know how to partition their tables by hand. (I notice there is already a thread on the pg mailing list gloating: "Make your pick, half assed code that sometimes works, or postgresql". Good luck guys.)
Good god man! Presumably you get around by horse and cart? I mean, that petrol engine is very convenient and all, but think of the risk of explosion...
Scripting languages are for convenience
Oh noes! God forbid computers might make life easier...
Looks like a solution in need of a problem to me. Real plants fulfil their functions just fine. And they look better.
You read it, you can't unread it!
Coal? Oil?
OK. We had the same deal here with deceptive selling of "unlimited" services, but they've largely stopped that now simply by enforcing the law. I think the caps are the wrong target here, it's too easy to make someone arguing against them look stupid. The real battle should be about dishonest selling. An "unlimited" service can simply never encompass any limit, and that should be a very simple lawsuit to win, if required.
Speaking as an Englander whose always had bandwidth caps (and much lower ones than this) I don't really get the problem. You don't get all-you-can-eat electricity or phone calls (or maybe you do?) why expect unlimited bandwidth? 250Gb a month is 3 and a bit CentOS images a day. What are you doing that requires that? Even if you had a skype video call on 24/7 for a month you'd only approach about 40gb. It's 100Kb/s constantly; if you're downloading torrents you'd be lucky to average that over a month anywhere that's not on or near a backbone. I mean you're not going to run, for example, a proper website on that, but no-one seriously runs anything public like that on an ADSL line do they?
It will happen/is happening because the good ol' US legal system encourages registrars and hosts (and in fact pretty anyone) to roll over at even the faintest whiff of a legal threat, cf the DMCA. It used to be that you were "innocent until proven guilty" (except in Louisiana of course), but it's now very much that you are "guilty because we say you are".
...there was some other agenda for the war in Iraq, that we are unlikely to find out for a long time if ever.
I don't think that the agenda is even in question: it's what is euphemistically called "Energy Security". Anyone who thinks otherwise is paying too much attention to what the British government says.
The counter-argument that oil supply is now less secure than before is beside the point - the intention was to put Iraqi oil in friendly hands, the actual result merely proves the incompetence of the people who were in charge.
Thank you for proving my first point for me, Mart.
As far as I can see no commenter yet has actually installed this game, it's just a bunch of "EA Sucks"/"I won't buy this (but I wouldn't have anyway)"/"It will run under WINE" rants based on stories they've read on slashdot.
I bought it and installed it and, aside from the usual serial number, I've not noticed any DRM yet.
And probably I won't because I won't be playing it again. DRM won't kill Spore, brain dead gameplay will kill Spore. Such a beautiful and well executed concept has been ruined by Will Wright's desire to go for the Sims-level market. There's nothing even remotely challenging about the first stages, though the concept and execution are great, then the last stage over-compensates by being impossible (it's basically Elite II without the tedious flying bits, but you always start next to large and aggressive empires who give you not a chance). I truly hope that they have a change of heart and produce some kind of advanced gamer mode patch to make the promising pre-space stages deeper and longer, but having read WW's unapologetic response I won't be holding my breath.
The US didn't like pollution from making stuff at home so it had it made in China, from where it could import the stuff and leave the pollution. Now the Chinese make so much stuff for America that the pollution is coming home by itself anyway. The irony is almost tangible...
Yeah? I was just going to say that I have 3 versions of Rock Island Line (all from albums, all by Leadbelly) and none of them are the same as his.
so was I...
Trouble is the list of suspected terrorists is quite large, and includes such deadly threats as Nelson Mandela, Cat Stevens, and Ted Kennedy.
The point of the 4th amendent is not at all debatable. We know exactly why it is there: because the British authorities had had the right to search any property in search of smuggled goods, and the good citizens of America decided they didn't want their new masters to have the same rights.
What is debatable is it's relevance to electronic communications. The answer is of course none, because the internet was unimaginable when it was written, even by such a prolific thinker as Benjamin Franklin. What actually needs to happen is for America to realise that semantic obessioning over the constitution is a diversionary tactic by the backers of these types of bills, and that the real laws are passed long before the press have stopped bitching about what "Unreasonable" means.
Heck, it is insignificant even compared to the economic losses, which my country may sustain, if China's industrial espionage is successful
What commercial knowledge do you imagine the Chinese would want to steal from the US? 98% of everything you consume is made in China or its close neighbours. The US (and in fact the whole of the "west") trumps China only in the service sector, where China doesn't want to, and geographically can't, compete. The US long ago shipped all it's industrial secrets willingly to China, relinquishing them eagerly in the pursuit of Mammon.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html
Compare the first and last on that list and bear in mind that they are each other's largest trading partners... (coincidence it maybe, but if you add together 1,2 and 4 (I'm guessing germany is not a huge trading partner) it almost balances out the US's deficit: perhaps a good indication of where the money went)
I wasn't disagreeing with you. Warfare is evolution in fast-forward: only the fittest live to go on and fight the next war, regardless of their techniques. Until of course they go on to build weapons that will wipe themselves out as well as their enemies. Let's hope for the sake of the world that the US doesn't decide to guarantee the liberty of Georgia right now...
Why? China only cares if you're trying to free tibet or mongolia, or possibly have discovered a super giant oilfield under beijing.
The feds however will be very interested in why you were in China and the reasons you are now returning to the US, where you're staying, how much tax you pay, how you voted last time, how much weed you smoked at high school and who you bought it off.
Ch-Ch-Check your priorities...
Were the humans of ancient times cowards when they decided that projectiles were a great way of killing people at a distance?
The ancient Greeks, particularly the Spartans, certainly thought so. And the medieval French were less than enamoured with the English longbow. The Samurai are not very good exemplars of modern day "honour". Their honour code was only applicable to other Samurai and to anyone else (ie 99% of the population) they were entitled to do, and did do, pretty horrific things.