Somebody invented it, but all people see is that they can't remember when it was novel, so it must be free.
I was going to try to prove you wrong, but I'm the one who was wrong because apparently Ravensberg got its European trademark on the mark "MEMORY" in 1972 and then on the mark "Memory" (mixed-case) in 1999.
Since I do not know German, here is the source from a French site (use the number 28 as the category/classification for games). The only part that I don't understand is that two other entities registered the mark "Krtek Memory Game" in 2012 and the mark "EDUCA Memory game" in 1997. Am I missing something, or have they allowed overlapping trademarks?
Marque : MEMORY
Classification de Nice : 28
Produits et services
28 Jeux et jouets. Déposant : Ravensburger AG, limited liability company, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 1 88214 Ravensburg, DE
Adresse pour la correspondance : Ravensburger AG, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 1 88214 Ravensburg, DE
Mandataire : Wuesthoff & Wuesthoff, Patent- und Rechtsanwälte, Schweigerstraße 2 81541 München, DE
Numéro : 393512
Date de dépôt / Enregistrement : 1972-11-14
Date prévue pour l'expiration : 2012-11-14
Pays désignés
Danemark, Estonie, Finlande, Géorgie, Lituanie, Norvège, Suède, Arménie, Autriche, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Bélarus, Suisse, République tchèque, Égypte, Espagne, France, Croatie, Hongrie, Italie, Liechtenstein, Lettonie, Monténégro, Ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine, Portugal, Serbie, Fédération de Russie, Slovénie, Slovaquie, Ukraine (Protocole) Dépôt origine : BX 38 328 1971-01-01
Historique
Enregistrement 1972-11-14 (Gazette 1972/12 du 1973-02-01) Autre décision finale pour France 1972-11-14 Limitation : Liste limitée à 28 : Jouets. Refus total provisoire de protection pour Allemagne (sans le territoire qui, avant le 3 octobre 1990, constituait la République fédérale d'Allemagne) 1972-11-14 Renouvellement 1992-11-14 (Gazette 1992/11 du 1993-01-21) Non renouvellement pour certaines parties Continuation des effets pour Croatie, Slovénie 1993-02-10 (Gazette 1993/3 du 1993-05-14) Continuation des effets pour République tchèque, Slovaquie 1993-03-29 (Gazette 1993/9 du 1993-11-17) Continuation des effets pour Ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine 1993-12-02 (Gazette 1994/1 du 1994-03-21) Continuation des effets pour Bosnie-Herzégovine 1996-12-23 (Gazette 1996/19 du 1997-02-07) Désignations postérieures pour Bélarus, Lettonie, Fédération de Russie, Ukraine, Danemark, Estonie, Finlande, Géorgie, Lituanie, Suède 2001-02-02 (Gazette 2001/6 du 2001-04-26) Protection Granted Opposition Period pour Géorgie 2002-03-26 (Gazette 2002/6 du 2002-05-02) Refus total provisoire de protection pour Finlande 2002-04-02 (Gazette 2002/7 du 2002-05-16) Octroi de protection pour Géorgie 2002-07-10 (Gazette 2002/14 du 2002-08-22) Période d'opposition pour Finlande 2002-09-16 (Gazette 2002/19 du 2002-10-31) Renouvellement selon la règle 40,3 2002-10-16 (Gazette 2002/23 du 2002-12-26) Désignations postérieures pour Norvège 2002-10-22 (Gazette 2002/23 du 2002-12-26) Limitation pour Allemagne 2002-11-13 (Gazette 2003/9 du 2003-06-12) Limitation : Finlande, Liste limitée à 28 : Jeux collectifs. Autre décision finale pour Finlande 2002-11-22 (Gazette 2002/25 du 2003-02-06) Renouvellement selon la règle 40,3 2003-05-14 (Gazette 2003/16 du 2003-09-18) Refus total provisoire de protection pour Norvège 2003-12-01 (Gazette 2003/24 du 2004-01-08) Infirmation finale de refus
Yes, your garden looks very nice at first glance. But I'll stay out here, thanks.
Sometimes a central authority is a good thing. But no-fucking-body is telling me what software I can or can't download, or banning me from downloading certain titles over some stupid shit like this. And this is just a mild example of what they *could* do if they wanted.
This game basically rips off the public domain game "Concentration", which we call "Memory" or "Pairs" in the United States. It may be called a "board game", but looking at its picture. It doesn't have a board. It's just a card game with pairs of cards, that they redesigned with a different look to make the rip off less obvious.
And my hunch is that they were able to register this trademark in 42 countries precisely because none of those countries were English-speaking (or they didn't know the game Memory). For instance, if I were to register the german word "Speicher" (Memory) as a trademark in the US, no one would stop me because it's not a common word used in the United States (although we do use foreign words sometimes).
And the problem in this case is not that Apple is a walled garden, it's the actual mechanism that the iOS SDK provides for doing localisations. For iOS, localisation is done after the fact. For Android, the localization issue is thought out well in advance, long before the developer even begins working on his application. In several ways, it's just like the screen size/density issues. In Android, those screen size/density issues have been worked out well in advance, with iOS, the screen size/density variation issue is being handled much later in the process -- if at all.
In Android, if/when the same issue comes up, a non-developer will be able to handle it, they'll just need to get the list of the 42 countries affected, focus only on the countries where the larger foreign revenue-generating audiences are, and consult with a few foreign-speaking friends. And in less than one hour of work, that non-developer will have the application repackaged and up on the Market (Google Play), with its name intact in the US and in the UK, but with the name "Speicher" in Germany and Austria and with the name "Mémoire" in France (but with still the original name "Memory" in French-speaking Québec, since I assume that Québec won't be one of those 42 jurisdictions scammed by those people, at most in Quebec only the description may have to be in French), etc.
They should be using Facebook to drive people towards their primary site, not use their primary site to drive people towards a third party who doesn't really care about them, and that may disappear within the year (or whenever a new website comes up).
So all these brands that are on Facebook and not pushing people off Facebook are doing it wrong.
Brands usually try pushing fans to use their own web site and opt-in into their mailing lists, but they just end up spamming them, so the fans unsubscribe, or they just don't end up subscribing in the first place. Besides, it's not like the fans are there just for the branded content, sometimes they're just looking for fellow fans to interact with and to talk about the game.
E.g. webcomic artists who say, "see this Facebook exclusive comic", or companies that have Facebook exclusive deals.
"Exclusivity" is a perk you give in exchange for free cross-promotion, discounts, or money. No one really ever wants to give exclusivity, especially on the web where it's so easy to publish something. It's just that if you give exclusivity, there usually is a very specific reason for it.
That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'affairee' and his family.
Actually, it's not. If he wants to have an affair, he has to make this information public right away (and tell his wife). Otherwise, he's a possible candidate for blackmail. In this case, he probably didn't do that, or didn't do it in time, so his security clearance was probably placed in jeopardy.
I'm curious - could individuals host single pages, under the Fair Use doctrine? If you have enough individuals doing that, ones who don't forbid an aggregator from reframing their content (whilst hosting none itsef),...
Sure, you'd also need to hash the entire manual and compare the hash key every time someone downloads the manual, to make sure none of those pages got corrupted/modified in the process. While you're at it, you'll probably also need some kind of tracker to aggregate the list of manuals and aggregate the list of pages everyone makes available separately.
And why limit it to single pages? You could split up each manual into a thousand different data packets, and you could make sure multiple people have a copy of the same data packets, to build some redundancy into the system, just in case some of the volunteers' servers/computers are not online 24/7.
This is a great idea, that could potentially revolutionize the web.
You have to sign into battle.net to order one, which indicates right away that you do not need one to sign into battle.net.
That's not how authentication usually works. As an admin, I also require my users to use to 2-step verification, but 2-factor authentication requirement doesn't kick in until the second time they log-in.
Not only does the $6.50 help cover postage and pay for the dongle, its completely optional and Blizzard makes the app available to as many platforms as they can.
Their authentication software is available for the two dominant phone os platforms, Android and iOS. That's it.
Just to put things in perspective, the Google authenticator, which is open source (Apache license), uses open authentication standards, and which could be used for free by Blizzard, can also be run from the command-line on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, in addition to iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
You can even install the authenticator on a Android simulator on a computer.
How convenient.
First of all, Android doesn't really have a simulator, it has an emulator. It's slow. It's heavy-weight. It's not much of a solution for the average joe. Speaking as someone who works with it daily, I don't think the Android emulator is something that should be required for a consumer who wants to play a game he supposedly just purchased.
The only point of contention is whether, or not, this authentication system is really required to play the game. Right now, according to the companys' response, this new authentication is completely optional, but for some reason that consumer believes it was required, or that it will be required even for users that are not on the system right now.
Either the consumer doing the suing is an idiot, or perhaps Blizzard implied that it would indeed become a requirement, and recently backpedaled as the lawsuit emerged. Either way, this issue seems to be moot right now.
The only (non-legal) questions remaining are: Why aren't they using open standards for authentication? And why are their passwords not case-sensitive? Are they converting them to all lower-case before doing the hashing? Or are they storing their passwords all in plain text?
If manufacturers must limit themselves to open, standardized interfaces they will be slower in achieving greater emissions and fuel efficiency.
This doesn't make any sense.
Go into any University research department in the World, and you'll see all the experimentation and all the learning taking place on open hardware and/or on open source software. The same goes for hobbyists and tinkerers. Those people were usually the first ones to experiment with alternative fuel technologies and converting existing cars/trucks.
Close everything up, let everything become embedded and proprietary, and you may kill off our next generation of car inventors and engineers.
I wonder if he will go after Ebay sellers too. After all, an auction is by definition a price maximizing enterprise.
And I also wonder if he will go after the out-of-state people who came from hundreds of miles away, just so they could make money selling generators and hard-to-find provisions. After all, those people probably incurred significant expenses buying inventory and driving to New York on such short notice.
...and the myth that Apple will not allow publishing anything that "duplicates functionality" is long dead at this point.
A myth? Are you kidding me? The last time Apple removed existing applications, because it "duplicated" (new) iPhone functionality, was just last week. And I'm talking about removing existing applications, not just banning new applications. Granted, those apps were for adding emoji icons, it's probably no big loss to anyone, but it at least proves that this clause in their developer EULA hasn't gone away.
Besides, no one is saying that Apple "will not allow publishing anything that 'duplicates functionality'". That's a straw man argument. From the very beginning, Apple hasn't been consistent in enforcing its rules anyway. For instance, it allowed some apps that duplicated functionality, while it rejected other applications that duplicated that same functionality.
The thing is. You don't really know. And Apple won't tell you of course. So you have to invest all this money and manpower in building your app for the iPhone platform and take the risk that the person reviewing your app is in a good mood that day, and/or that Apple won't go back on its decision six months from now (when they feel their mapping application has finally passed QA).
How about focusing on SMS instead? (except may be for the blind, the elderly, or 911). First mandate that all SMS are free and are part of the price of any phone plan you get, so everyone gets used to texting (still allow parents to optionally block texts for their kids, so that the parents' lobby doesn't intervene).
Then focus on building an infrastructure that supports that kind of lighter-weight traffic. That would be a much easier intermediary goal I think. We have enough trouble keeping up with phone traffic during New Years as it is (when there are no disasters).
Also do like the Japanese, in case of major emergency requiring mass evacuations, give everyone evacuated an emergency phone number that's based on a special area code + their own existing phone number. This gives them a mailbox where they can leave a message and other people can leave messages, which can also redirect phone calls, and of course this would also have to work with SMS (I actually don't know if the Japanese system works that way or not, I'm not familiar enough with it).
The second a union starts, the company closes the local shop and outsources all development to a place where unions are illegal.
It doesn't even need to be so blatant. Software development is an ever-changing field, where you can be replaced anytime if you can't adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.
Take word processing for instance, there was a time before Word Perfect and MS Word where word processing consultants made a lot of money recommending, installing, and doing training on word processing products. Again, this is before the word processing industry was consolidated and of course before word processing products were easy to install and easy to use. Would a Union have saved those word processing consultants jobs? Of course not, not for long anyway. And even if it had, any company required to keep on its payroll a mandatory number of out of date technicians would have simply gone out of business instead (instead of possibly going into a different line of business and cutting its losses).
Let's face it, we're software developers, we don't have to worry just about the developers in India, even without them, we'd still be automating ourselves out of our own jobs. That's what we do. We go from wave to wave. We stumble. We adapt. Those of us who can't adapt do something else, or retire.
If you take your cellphone into the store with nude pictures of yourself on it and some kid working there sees them then you are a fucking moron and deserve to be humiliated.
"Humiliated" may be too strong a word too. I don't have nude pictures of myself on my phone, but if I did and if they were leaked out the same way, I don't think I'd be humiliated, but I would still be upset that my privacy was breached in that way.
After all, I do share private sensitive information to professionals, such as doctors, pharmacists, nurses, admins, etc., or I give potential partially unsupervised access to my home/my possessions to other professionals, such as plumbers, electricians, repairmen, gardeners, babysitters, etc.
But I would still be upset if I caught such a person rummaging through my personal effects, when there was no good reason to do so, or if I caught such a person trying to peek through a bathrooms' keyhole when somebody was getting undressed.
Ah, ok. I can't really complain anyhow. I was wrong.
I just checked the police report and it's sufficiently detailed that I see that the woman in question didn't delete her pictures before bringing them in.
Why would I need another card in my wallet to duplicate what my banks check card does?
Isn't the point of Google Wallet to combine all your existing cards into one card? Thought, I doubt this will work for the ATM part of your card. According to the article I read at least, the card will have a magnetic stripe and will work on all existing credit card processing machines.
Secondly, don't you think it might be a good idea to get rid of such photos before going in to get a new phone?
How do you know she didn't? Deleting pictures on a phone does very little. There are several completely freeware utilities that will recover those pictures with no problem. A Verizon in-store repairman would certainly know that.
Flash memory is even more of a problem than one would expect. Since manufacturers know that Flash memory is fallible, they take great care in making sure that the same memory space doesn't get used too many time (on average). Distributing the load on memory usage helps the failure rates stay low. In other words, a picture that you may have taken of yourself one year ago and also deleted that same day one year ago has a high chance of still being on your device to this day (without having been overwritten).
Now you could use sdcard/hardware/system-wide level encryption, but really, who wants to do that these days except for corporations? It makes your device painfully sluggish on reads/writes and it uses more battery. One other option would be to have a removable sdcard for your media files, but this is not a perfect solution either. I am no security expert, but I would only advise someone to take pictures of themselves naked with their phones only if it wasn't the end of the world for them to have those pictures potentially leak out. Perhaps, some Slashdoters can suggest some better solutions, or some good free apps for that specific problem. This is not a topic that I really know about.
Let's suppose that somebody at JPL was promoting atheism, complained that the Christmas party should be renamed to the Holiday party, and suggested that California allow gay marriage. Would that be offensive as well?
Offensive? No, not to me at least. But in a workplace like NASA, at a time where many people are getting laid off. I would expect that if the atheist in question was evangelical enough and annoying enough -- he would be one of the first ones to be let go. And I say this as an atheist myself. In times of lay offs, you let go of the troublemakers (even the ones that are of the same group and the same religion as you are).
But the reverse is also true, in periods of growth, when there is nobody else to hire and train, the standards for screening out the troublemakers are much lower. Take for instance the military. In the military, it makes little sense to let go of the troublemakers right now (except, for the most extreme cases of course).
The touch screen issue I can believe. My resistive-touch screen for my old gps unit was having the same issue (even when the unit was brand new). Some of the software buttons were working just fine, and some were not. And it wasn't a matter of re-calibration (at least, not a matter of re-calibration that I could do anything about). It was just a matter of the manufacturer using the cheapest possible hardware for the touch screen. Also, an actual picture of the screen would have been nice. I'm surprised that the voter didn't take any. Personally, I would have taken one, or I would have raised hell at the polling place itself.
In either case, whether you believe the story, or do not believe it. This story does bring up an underlying interesting issue. One of the main reasons Counties have switched from analog to digital is precisely to avoid these kinds of analog problems. But this will never be completely possible, to get rid of all the analog problems, whether it's a malfunctioning input device, or a badly designed input device, the process of converting an analog signal to a digital one will always be fraught with potential problems that won't be noticed until an election is really close and contested (just like it was with the hanging chad issue).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the UK is not listed in there.
So my initial instinct, that only non-English speaking countries would approve the request is probably correct.
Even in 1973, the card game Memory was probably already well known among UK and US trademark clerks.
Somebody invented it, but all people see is that they can't remember when it was novel, so it must be free.
I was going to try to prove you wrong, but I'm the one who was wrong because apparently Ravensberg got its European trademark on the mark "MEMORY" in 1972 and then on the mark "Memory" (mixed-case) in 1999.
Since I do not know German, here is the source from a French site (use the number 28 as the category/classification for games). The only part that I don't understand is that two other entities registered the mark "Krtek Memory Game" in 2012 and the mark "EDUCA Memory game" in 1997. Am I missing something, or have they allowed overlapping trademarks?
Marque : MEMORY
Classification de Nice : 28
Produits et services
28 Jeux et jouets.
Déposant : Ravensburger AG, limited liability company, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 1 88214 Ravensburg, DE
Adresse pour la correspondance : Ravensburger AG, Robert-Bosch-Strasse 1 88214 Ravensburg, DE
Mandataire : Wuesthoff & Wuesthoff, Patent- und Rechtsanwälte, Schweigerstraße 2 81541 München, DE
Numéro : 393512
Date de dépôt / Enregistrement : 1972-11-14
Date prévue pour l'expiration : 2012-11-14
Pays désignés
Danemark, Estonie, Finlande, Géorgie, Lituanie, Norvège, Suède, Arménie, Autriche, Bosnie-Herzégovine, Bélarus, Suisse, République tchèque, Égypte, Espagne, France, Croatie, Hongrie, Italie, Liechtenstein, Lettonie, Monténégro, Ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine, Portugal, Serbie, Fédération de Russie, Slovénie, Slovaquie, Ukraine (Protocole)
Dépôt origine : BX 38 328 1971-01-01
Historique
Enregistrement 1972-11-14 (Gazette 1972/12 du 1973-02-01)
Autre décision finale pour France 1972-11-14
Limitation : Liste limitée à 28 : Jouets.
Refus total provisoire de protection pour Allemagne (sans le territoire qui, avant le 3 octobre 1990, constituait la République fédérale d'Allemagne) 1972-11-14
Renouvellement 1992-11-14 (Gazette 1992/11 du 1993-01-21)
Non renouvellement pour certaines parties
Continuation des effets pour Croatie, Slovénie 1993-02-10 (Gazette 1993/3 du 1993-05-14)
Continuation des effets pour République tchèque, Slovaquie 1993-03-29 (Gazette 1993/9 du 1993-11-17)
Continuation des effets pour Ex-République yougoslave de Macédoine 1993-12-02 (Gazette 1994/1 du 1994-03-21)
Continuation des effets pour Bosnie-Herzégovine 1996-12-23 (Gazette 1996/19 du 1997-02-07)
Désignations postérieures pour Bélarus, Lettonie, Fédération de Russie, Ukraine, Danemark, Estonie, Finlande, Géorgie, Lituanie, Suède 2001-02-02 (Gazette 2001/6 du 2001-04-26)
Protection Granted Opposition Period pour Géorgie 2002-03-26 (Gazette 2002/6 du 2002-05-02)
Refus total provisoire de protection pour Finlande 2002-04-02 (Gazette 2002/7 du 2002-05-16)
Octroi de protection pour Géorgie 2002-07-10 (Gazette 2002/14 du 2002-08-22)
Période d'opposition pour Finlande 2002-09-16 (Gazette 2002/19 du 2002-10-31)
Renouvellement selon la règle 40,3 2002-10-16 (Gazette 2002/23 du 2002-12-26)
Désignations postérieures pour Norvège 2002-10-22 (Gazette 2002/23 du 2002-12-26)
Limitation pour Allemagne 2002-11-13 (Gazette 2003/9 du 2003-06-12)
Limitation : Finlande, Liste limitée à 28 : Jeux collectifs.
Autre décision finale pour Finlande 2002-11-22 (Gazette 2002/25 du 2003-02-06)
Renouvellement selon la règle 40,3 2003-05-14 (Gazette 2003/16 du 2003-09-18)
Refus total provisoire de protection pour Norvège 2003-12-01 (Gazette 2003/24 du 2004-01-08)
Infirmation finale de refus
Yes, your garden looks very nice at first glance. But I'll stay out here, thanks.
Sometimes a central authority is a good thing. But no-fucking-body is telling me what software I can or can't download, or banning me from downloading certain titles over some stupid shit like this. And this is just a mild example of what they *could* do if they wanted.
This game basically rips off the public domain game "Concentration", which we call "Memory" or "Pairs" in the United States. It may be called a "board game", but looking at its picture. It doesn't have a board. It's just a card game with pairs of cards, that they redesigned with a different look to make the rip off less obvious.
And my hunch is that they were able to register this trademark in 42 countries precisely because none of those countries were English-speaking (or they didn't know the game Memory). For instance, if I were to register the german word "Speicher" (Memory) as a trademark in the US, no one would stop me because it's not a common word used in the United States (although we do use foreign words sometimes).
And the problem in this case is not that Apple is a walled garden, it's the actual mechanism that the iOS SDK provides for doing localisations. For iOS, localisation is done after the fact. For Android, the localization issue is thought out well in advance, long before the developer even begins working on his application. In several ways, it's just like the screen size/density issues. In Android, those screen size/density issues have been worked out well in advance, with iOS, the screen size/density variation issue is being handled much later in the process -- if at all.
In Android, if/when the same issue comes up, a non-developer will be able to handle it, they'll just need to get the list of the 42 countries affected, focus only on the countries where the larger foreign revenue-generating audiences are, and consult with a few foreign-speaking friends. And in less than one hour of work, that non-developer will have the application repackaged and up on the Market (Google Play), with its name intact in the US and in the UK, but with the name "Speicher" in Germany and Austria and with the name "Mémoire" in France (but with still the original name "Memory" in French-speaking Québec, since I assume that Québec won't be one of those 42 jurisdictions scammed by those people, at most in Quebec only the description may have to be in French), etc.
They should be using Facebook to drive people towards their primary site, not use their primary site to drive people towards a third party who doesn't really care about them, and that may disappear within the year (or whenever a new website comes up).
So all these brands that are on Facebook and not pushing people off Facebook are doing it wrong.
Brands usually try pushing fans to use their own web site and opt-in into their mailing lists, but they just end up spamming them, so the fans unsubscribe, or they just don't end up subscribing in the first place. Besides, it's not like the fans are there just for the branded content, sometimes they're just looking for fellow fans to interact with and to talk about the game.
E.g. webcomic artists who say, "see this Facebook exclusive comic", or companies that have Facebook exclusive deals.
"Exclusivity" is a perk you give in exchange for free cross-promotion, discounts, or money. No one really ever wants to give exclusivity, especially on the web where it's so easy to publish something. It's just that if you give exclusivity, there usually is a very specific reason for it.
That is the only thing that should be taken into consideration. As long as it was between consenting adults, an affair is between him, the 'affairee' and his family.
Actually, it's not. If he wants to have an affair, he has to make this information public right away (and tell his wife). Otherwise, he's a possible candidate for blackmail. In this case, he probably didn't do that, or didn't do it in time, so his security clearance was probably placed in jeopardy.
I'm curious - could individuals host single pages, under the Fair Use doctrine? If you have enough individuals doing that, ones who don't forbid an aggregator from reframing their content (whilst hosting none itsef), ...
Sure, you'd also need to hash the entire manual and compare the hash key every time someone downloads the manual, to make sure none of those pages got corrupted/modified in the process. While you're at it, you'll probably also need some kind of tracker to aggregate the list of manuals and aggregate the list of pages everyone makes available separately.
And why limit it to single pages? You could split up each manual into a thousand different data packets, and you could make sure multiple people have a copy of the same data packets, to build some redundancy into the system, just in case some of the volunteers' servers/computers are not online 24/7.
This is a great idea, that could potentially revolutionize the web.
You have to sign into battle.net to order one, which indicates right away that you do not need one to sign into battle.net.
That's not how authentication usually works. As an admin, I also require my users to use to 2-step verification, but 2-factor authentication requirement doesn't kick in until the second time they log-in.
Not only does the $6.50 help cover postage and pay for the dongle, its completely optional and Blizzard makes the app available to as many platforms as they can.
Their authentication software is available for the two dominant phone os platforms, Android and iOS. That's it.
Just to put things in perspective, the Google authenticator, which is open source (Apache license), uses open authentication standards, and which could be used for free by Blizzard, can also be run from the command-line on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, in addition to iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
You can even install the authenticator on a Android simulator on a computer.
How convenient.
First of all, Android doesn't really have a simulator, it has an emulator. It's slow. It's heavy-weight. It's not much of a solution for the average joe. Speaking as someone who works with it daily, I don't think the Android emulator is something that should be required for a consumer who wants to play a game he supposedly just purchased.
The only point of contention is whether, or not, this authentication system is really required to play the game. Right now, according to the companys' response, this new authentication is completely optional, but for some reason that consumer believes it was required, or that it will be required even for users that are not on the system right now.
Either the consumer doing the suing is an idiot, or perhaps Blizzard implied that it would indeed become a requirement, and recently backpedaled as the lawsuit emerged. Either way, this issue seems to be moot right now.
The only (non-legal) questions remaining are: Why aren't they using open standards for authentication? And why are their passwords not case-sensitive? Are they converting them to all lower-case before doing the hashing? Or are they storing their passwords all in plain text?
If manufacturers must limit themselves to open, standardized interfaces they will be slower in achieving greater emissions and fuel efficiency.
This doesn't make any sense.
Go into any University research department in the World, and you'll see all the experimentation and all the learning taking place on open hardware and/or on open source software. The same goes for hobbyists and tinkerers. Those people were usually the first ones to experiment with alternative fuel technologies and converting existing cars/trucks.
Close everything up, let everything become embedded and proprietary, and you may kill off our next generation of car inventors and engineers.
And the Autohop feature lets viewers skip advertisements completely — rather than fast-forwarding through them — at the press of a button.
I would prefer if this feature worked without having to press a button.
In fact, I thought that's what the name implied: "autohop", automatically-hop-commercials.
Does anyone know? I don't have Dish Network.
It would have been better if they had taken the opt-in approach like Mint does.
I wonder if he will go after Ebay sellers too. After all, an auction is by definition a price maximizing enterprise.
And I also wonder if he will go after the out-of-state people who came from hundreds of miles away, just so they could make money selling generators and hard-to-find provisions. After all, those people probably incurred significant expenses buying inventory and driving to New York on such short notice.
He could just keep the system as it is, but slap a search interface onto it and have it index its files and their content -- to make them easier to find.
http://serverfault.com/questions/40356/open-source-alternative-to-google-appliance-for-intranet-search
http://university-web-developers.1112205.n2.nabble.com/Moving-away-from-a-Google-Search-Appliance-GSA-advice-td6509523.html
https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/secure_search/secure_search_crwlsrv
http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
I assume that Google Drive will get that capability soon, but right now, it doesn't have it.
...and the myth that Apple will not allow publishing anything that "duplicates functionality" is long dead at this point.
A myth? Are you kidding me? The last time Apple removed existing applications, because it "duplicated" (new) iPhone functionality, was just last week. And I'm talking about removing existing applications, not just banning new applications. Granted, those apps were for adding emoji icons, it's probably no big loss to anyone, but it at least proves that this clause in their developer EULA hasn't gone away.
Besides, no one is saying that Apple "will not allow publishing anything that 'duplicates functionality'". That's a straw man argument. From the very beginning, Apple hasn't been consistent in enforcing its rules anyway. For instance, it allowed some apps that duplicated functionality, while it rejected other applications that duplicated that same functionality.
The thing is. You don't really know. And Apple won't tell you of course. So you have to invest all this money and manpower in building your app for the iPhone platform and take the risk that the person reviewing your app is in a good mood that day, and/or that Apple won't go back on its decision six months from now (when they feel their mapping application has finally passed QA).
How about focusing on SMS instead? (except may be for the blind, the elderly, or 911). First mandate that all SMS are free and are part of the price of any phone plan you get, so everyone gets used to texting (still allow parents to optionally block texts for their kids, so that the parents' lobby doesn't intervene).
Then focus on building an infrastructure that supports that kind of lighter-weight traffic. That would be a much easier intermediary goal I think. We have enough trouble keeping up with phone traffic during New Years as it is (when there are no disasters).
Also do like the Japanese, in case of major emergency requiring mass evacuations, give everyone evacuated an emergency phone number that's based on a special area code + their own existing phone number. This gives them a mailbox where they can leave a message and other people can leave messages, which can also redirect phone calls, and of course this would also have to work with SMS (I actually don't know if the Japanese system works that way or not, I'm not familiar enough with it).
The second a union starts, the company closes the local shop and outsources all development to a place where unions are illegal.
It doesn't even need to be so blatant. Software development is an ever-changing field, where you can be replaced anytime if you can't adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.
Take word processing for instance, there was a time before Word Perfect and MS Word where word processing consultants made a lot of money recommending, installing, and doing training on word processing products. Again, this is before the word processing industry was consolidated and of course before word processing products were easy to install and easy to use. Would a Union have saved those word processing consultants jobs? Of course not, not for long anyway. And even if it had, any company required to keep on its payroll a mandatory number of out of date technicians would have simply gone out of business instead (instead of possibly going into a different line of business and cutting its losses).
Let's face it, we're software developers, we don't have to worry just about the developers in India, even without them, we'd still be automating ourselves out of our own jobs. That's what we do. We go from wave to wave. We stumble. We adapt. Those of us who can't adapt do something else, or retire.
If you take your cellphone into the store with nude pictures of yourself on it and some kid working there sees them then you are a fucking moron and deserve to be humiliated.
"Humiliated" may be too strong a word too. I don't have nude pictures of myself on my phone, but if I did and if they were leaked out the same way, I don't think I'd be humiliated, but I would still be upset that my privacy was breached in that way.
After all, I do share private sensitive information to professionals, such as doctors, pharmacists, nurses, admins, etc., or I give potential partially unsupervised access to my home/my possessions to other professionals, such as plumbers, electricians, repairmen, gardeners, babysitters, etc.
But I would still be upset if I caught such a person rummaging through my personal effects, when there was no good reason to do so, or if I caught such a person trying to peek through a bathrooms' keyhole when somebody was getting undressed.
Ah, ok. I can't really complain anyhow. I was wrong.
I just checked the police report and it's sufficiently detailed that I see that the woman in question didn't delete her pictures before bringing them in.
Why would I need another card in my wallet to duplicate what my banks check card does?
Isn't the point of Google Wallet to combine all your existing cards into one card? Thought, I doubt this will work for the ATM part of your card. According to the article I read at least, the card will have a magnetic stripe and will work on all existing credit card processing machines.
The judge can now order the statement placed on the very top of the page, to make sure no one misses it. :)
Why the down-mod???
Secondly, don't you think it might be a good idea to get rid of such photos before going in to get a new phone?
How do you know she didn't? Deleting pictures on a phone does very little. There are several completely freeware utilities that will recover those pictures with no problem. A Verizon in-store repairman would certainly know that.
Flash memory is even more of a problem than one would expect. Since manufacturers know that Flash memory is fallible, they take great care in making sure that the same memory space doesn't get used too many time (on average). Distributing the load on memory usage helps the failure rates stay low. In other words, a picture that you may have taken of yourself one year ago and also deleted that same day one year ago has a high chance of still being on your device to this day (without having been overwritten).
Now you could use sdcard/hardware/system-wide level encryption, but really, who wants to do that these days except for corporations? It makes your device painfully sluggish on reads/writes and it uses more battery. One other option would be to have a removable sdcard for your media files, but this is not a perfect solution either. I am no security expert, but I would only advise someone to take pictures of themselves naked with their phones only if it wasn't the end of the world for them to have those pictures potentially leak out. Perhaps, some Slashdoters can suggest some better solutions, or some good free apps for that specific problem. This is not a topic that I really know about.
Let's suppose that somebody at JPL was promoting atheism, complained that the Christmas party should be renamed to the Holiday party, and suggested that California allow gay marriage. Would that be offensive as well?
Offensive? No, not to me at least. But in a workplace like NASA, at a time where many people are getting laid off. I would expect that if the atheist in question was evangelical enough and annoying enough -- he would be one of the first ones to be let go. And I say this as an atheist myself. In times of lay offs, you let go of the troublemakers (even the ones that are of the same group and the same religion as you are).
But the reverse is also true, in periods of growth, when there is nobody else to hire and train, the standards for screening out the troublemakers are much lower. Take for instance the military. In the military, it makes little sense to let go of the troublemakers right now (except, for the most extreme cases of course).
The touch screen issue I can believe. My resistive-touch screen for my old gps unit was having the same issue (even when the unit was brand new). Some of the software buttons were working just fine, and some were not. And it wasn't a matter of re-calibration (at least, not a matter of re-calibration that I could do anything about). It was just a matter of the manufacturer using the cheapest possible hardware for the touch screen. Also, an actual picture of the screen would have been nice. I'm surprised that the voter didn't take any. Personally, I would have taken one, or I would have raised hell at the polling place itself.
In either case, whether you believe the story, or do not believe it. This story does bring up an underlying interesting issue. One of the main reasons Counties have switched from analog to digital is precisely to avoid these kinds of analog problems. But this will never be completely possible, to get rid of all the analog problems, whether it's a malfunctioning input device, or a badly designed input device, the process of converting an analog signal to a digital one will always be fraught with potential problems that won't be noticed until an election is really close and contested (just like it was with the hanging chad issue).
Three guesses as to why it was publicized THIS week?
Well, this is Slashdot after all.
On our continuum, there is an automatic two months times lag before we get any non-geek related news from the Real world.
And once the story does make it to us, it's brought up to us multiple times just in case we didn't pay attention to it the first couple of times.