Should have clarified that. When I said "that's incorrect", I meant that it was incorrect that it wasn't related through Tramiel's Atari Corp. (it was) and that it was a successor to Atari Games (which I assume was the entity you meant). Of course, as I mentioned, Atari Corp also did games-related business.
The Atari you see around these days is related to the games bit.
That's incorrect; Hasbro (and through them, Infogrames) got the "Atari" name and IP through the legal remnants of Atari Corp. who *did* deal in games.
Atari Inc. was split along *arcade* (Atari Games) and *home/consumer* (Atari Corp.) lines. The latter (Jack Tramiel's) certainly included a lot of games-related business over the years, even if Tramiel initially thought it was a dead end. They continued the VCS/2600, relaunched the 7800 (after canning it for 18 months or so), released the XE Games System (an updated Atari 800 without a keyboard), then the Lynx (a fantastic handheld console developed by Epyx that was years ahead of its time, and partly killed by their crappy marketing) and finally the ill-fated Jaguar.
Also, the deal was that Atari Games could only use the "Atari" name in the arcade; they used the "Tengen" brand for home releases. Atari Games became part of Midway and was later renamed Midway Games West around the time Hasbro got the home name (to avoid confusion, apparently). I don't know what the status is of Atari Games' rights to the name and IP, but I suspect their legal successor's use of the name will still be restricted to arcade use. (Given that even in Japan- apparently- actual arcade-based games are no longer popular, that's nowhere near as big a deal as it would have been in the mid-80s).
Actually, the Amiga was originally developed by an independent company (Amiga Inc.) who *did* have some former Atari people working for them. The old Atari Inc. provided some support with caveats attached, and when Jack Tramiel bought out Atari's computer division, he hoped (using his typical legally-dubious techniques) to use legal clauses and agreements to gain control of the Amiga. Commodore rushed in and bought them, there was a lot of fuss and legal bickering, but C= ended up with the rights and Tramiel's Atari rushed out the ST instead.
FWIW, the ST *did* do better early on in Europe, because the Amiga was so damn expensive, so don't knock it too much- it did provide "Power without the Price", even if it was eclipsed later on as the Amiga fell in price and took over as Europe's favourite 16-bit. Of course, both flopped in the US...
Didn't buy "Atari", they bought Hasbro Interactive
on
Atari Files For Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Infogrames bought not just the name, but the company [..] it is still the same company.
Not really, the "company" Infogrames bought and "continued" was merely Hasbro Interactive- and they themselves were merely an unrelated company that had purchased the Atari name and IP.
Quick rehash... the original "true" Atari Inc. ran into trouble following the 1983 US video game crash. It was split into arcade and consumer divisions; the former was "Atari Games" (later sold to Midway, who renamed it and eventually shut it down in 2003).
The latter was bought by Jack Tramiel and became "Atari Corp.", a legally separate company that nonetheless could still be seen as a spiritual continuation of Atari Inc's computer and console division.
Fast forward to the mid-90s, and all Atari Corp's recent products have flopped. The company is cash rich, but with no future, so Tramiel "merges" Atari Corp. with JTS, a second-rate hard drive maker. Since this is- in effect- just a means for him to transfer his investment to JTS, Atari Corp. basically ceases any meaningful operations at this point, remaining only a legal entity within JTS.
A couple of years later, JTS goes bankrupt, and Hasbro buys the Atari IP. No real connection with the original business(es) in any real sense, as there's nothing meaningful to continue by this point.
So, Hasbro weren't really "Atari" except that they bought the name and IP, and Infogrames aren't really either. Both successors that had any meaningful continuation of Atari Inc. (i.e. Atari Corp. and Atari Games) are both now long defunct with nothing left to continue.
I would purchase them again today.
Horses are not especially more intelligent than cows.
Viewing this though the issue of horsemeat misses the bigger (and more important) question raised. Namely, that if horsemeat was able to end up where it shouldn't have, what other garbage has "accidentally" made its way into these burgers over the years?
Meat rejected for human consumption (destined for pet food and the like or for destruction) making its way back into the human food chain? Quite likely, this has already been heard of. Other animals? God knows what crap?
It's not remotely surprising that burgers costing less than 13p each (inc. VAT (*)) would contain any old rubbish. Doesn't mean it's acceptable for anyone to sell that, regardless of the price, but it shouldn't be surprising.
(*) Sales tax, for the benefit of those outside the UK
I normally don't like "mod parent ups"- but the link in the parent is very informative. Even if you're not directly involved in the graphic design field, the general principles strike me as some that could quite easily be stretched to various aspects of the IT field.
This isn't really an issue of closed source, it's an issue of pointlessly restricted access. One could quite easily (and still workably) have an open API to a closed source system.
As you say though, spending time creating an API that no-one gets access to really makes little sense- unless one assumes that the API was only ever intended as an excuse and necessary component for a marketing-driven PR campaign. Maybe it does do something useful and they're going to use it internally within the company, but I doubt it. My suspicion is that once this whole thing is over it'll be quickly forgotten about and left to moulder unused on a server somewhere.
Yes, potential employers will be impressed with your tale of losing a contest, and your app that doesn't work. These arguments are the same that some try to use to defend spec work (and that's what this is, honestly).
Yeah, well you'll be laughing out the other side of your face when the market for people with "Campbell's Recipe API" experience explodes, and I have it there on my resume, right beside the "Customise Ronald McDonald's Face Remote Protocol v1.3".
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that a cyber-criminal using a domestic cat to send messages to the police about a computer virus sounds more like something from a futuristic cyberpunk anime than real life?
Cool, another teenager posting on slashdot. Why don't you fuck off to bed and stop whining about the nasty grown ups?
A teenager? Unlikely, given his low user ID, which would suggest he's been on Slashdot since early on (i.e. the late 90s), unless he bought the account on eBay.
Of course, it's possible that he really *is* a 17-year old, assuming- of course- that one accepts the plausibility of him having contributed to Slashdot as a toddler.;-)
I'm guessing video games will get blamed for this.
Of course. That and milk.
You mean milk-plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what they were drinking? This would dull them down and get you ready for a bit of the old Facebook.
If they're going to print comic books, they'll need to be *about* the sort of character that'd drive those cars.
The Vauxhall Astra could get Thirtysomething-married-with-two-young-children-in-the-back-seats-Man.
The Ford Transit gets White Van Man, obviously.
With its contrived, overstyled appearance, the Nissan Juke looks like that puppet from the Saw films, though in reality our hero^w villian driving it would be Twenty-or-Thirtysomething-twonk-with-a-moderate-amount-of-disposable-income-to-spend-on-crappy-"lifestyle-oriented"-pretend-4x4-toy-vehicles-demographic-Man (or -Woman).
The possibilities are endless, problem is that 99% of cars will look like they should be driven by Boring-Stuffed-Shirt-Man or Dull-Suburban-Mother-Woman (er, because in reality... they are).;-)
If I where the game designer, I'd at least provide an ending for the players. Have all the pets [..] caught in an unwinnable gunfight.
Intentionally mis-paraphrased because when I read your comment my immediate thought was that something along the lines of the final scene in Scarface- but with your pet in place of Tony Montana- would be a fantastic way to go out.
Granted, it'd probably upset the child audience even more, but you can't please everyone.
Also, they could have all the mafia characters die by taking them to the vet to be put down.;-)
Facebook IPO wasnt a gaffe, it was a hedge fund scam. facebook was advised to give their IPO at a much higher value than they knew it could sustain, and the advisers hedged against facebook. made a lot of rich people richer, and fucked over some other rich people, and also fucked over some not so rich people.
Well, this is what gets me about the "Facebook IPO was a failure" argument. An IPO takes place for the benefit of the existing investors and stakeholders, whether or not that happens to be at the expense of anyone buying in.
Of course, normally one has to convince the would-be investors that it's also in *their* interest to do so, and obviously if you can be shown to have actually defrauded them, then that might not work out so well for you. But that doesn't change the basic principle- the people organising the IPO are doing so to benefit the existing stakeholders. From that somewhat amoral (but truthful) point of view, the Facebook IPO was a roaring success- for them.
Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? [..] It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
That's probably because it never even came close to that accomplishment.
I never played any of them, so I'm not really speaking from a position of authority. However, the MMORPG even *I* remember people going on about was Everquest. Looking back, I always got the impression that Everquest was the 800lb gorilla that dominated until the King Kong-sized WoW overshadowed even that.
Maybe as a non-game player I didn't notice FFXI because I assumed it was just a regular RPG like its predecessors, but I don't recall people going on about it anywhere near as much as "Evercrack".
No, it doesn't. This is an actual, legitimate question.
As I correctly predicted earlier this year, lots of Slashdotters have seized upon Betteridge as the latest fad kneejerk response, and are misapplying it without understanding what it means. In his own words,Betteridge's Law applies to cases where journalists "know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
For example, without the evidence to back it up, a headline saying "Tomato ketchup caused AIDS that led to exitinction of dinosaurs" would be obvious crap and lead to criticism of the paper and/or journalist. OTOH, "Did Tomato ketchup cause AIDS that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs?" gives them the weasellish get-out of "Well, we didn't actually *claim* that it did".
Even then, if a question headline was a genuine attempt to present a plausibly-supported but not universally-accepted idea (possibly because it was new and/or divisive), then Betteridge's wouldn't apply.
In short, Betteridge's original observation was insightful where he claimed it applied, but it was never a blanket dismissal of question headlines, so please stop the tedious, kneejerk misapplication.
If more people were willing to oppose the way things are done, instead of encouraging people to suck it up
If you think I was "encouraging people to suck it up" with what I was saying, then you missed the point and shot the messenger in exactly the way I was talking about. But if one ignorantly thinks going into court with some smartass scheme an AC cooked up would achieve anything, then this is like walking into a minefield having been warned of the dangers because one thinks that minefields shouldn't exist in a civilised world.
Yes, that's right, but you'll still be blown to smithereens.
I don't care what they know. Only what they can prove.
Okay, now you've *definitely* confirmed that you're an Internet Tough Guy fantasist. I was pretty sure that this was the way you were thinking, and this confirms it- you think that hiding behind "a dozen proxies in a dozen different nations" (*) means they have no way of *proving* that it was you in court.
If you ever had the guts to put your money where your mouth was in the real world, I suspect you'd get a *very* unpleasant awakening.
Your proxies- if they were all set up correctly- would almost certainly be a totally effective cover for your identity... if you weren't even known to them, let alone anywhere near their radar as a suspect. Unfortunately, in your case, it's quite the opposite. If they even have a *suspicion* that this wasn't just a random hacking and decide to investigate further, getting the police involved, you're already the single biggest suspect.
You have the motive. They have the code you wrote with the backdoor in it; they might or might not find that. They probably have some logs somewhere that indicate what was being done to their systems. They might be able to get some logs from your ISP that suggest, even if they don't provide direct evidence of, particular patterns of behaviour and timing. They'll probably take your computers away for evidence.
Let me predict what you'd do.... "Oh, I'd be clever, I'd destroy the hard drives with thermite, so they wouldn't be able to retrieve anything from them, I'm still safe, ha ha." Would you care to explain to the court what happened to your hard drives and/or why they were destroyed. *That* would be massively suspicious in itself.
Did you mention this to *any* of your friends online in any form that may have a retrievable record?
There are countless pieces of possible evidence that would prove nothing in themselves, but which taken together could collectively paint an incriminating case that proves your guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Which is all they need (even in a perfectly-functioning court system) to lock you up and throw away the key.
But you're safe behind your "dozen proxies in a dozen different nations", of course.;-)
It's Welsh. Which is ironic, as I'm Scottish, but there you go... (I don't speak Gaelic anyway!)
BTW, http://translate.google.com/ has an "auto-detect" option which is the default, so you don't even need to know which language it is to find out what it means.:-)
I actually had a great, if somewhat unusual, method of backing up my photographs- I got a deer to memorise them. I know it sounds weird, but it turned out to be quite effective, at least with the males (does, on the other hand, were less reliable). I trained it to understand basic commands and in response, it scratched out a basic reproduction of the requested image, eventually improving to quite impressive quality after a period of time.
In this way, I came to realise that I was using their brain as a sort of basic computer memory. This worked very well until I realised that my contract with the owner of the deer meant he had the right to reuse anything they had memorised.
Of course, this was not acceptable, so I no longer store my photos in stag RAM.
Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.
I'm pretty sure that the exponential growth of hard drive capacity has *slowed* significantly in recent years. In the 90s and early-2000s, they seemed to be increasing much faster. I remember considering buying a 120MB HDD for my Amiga circa 1993, which was moderately big at the time IIRC, then five years later my first Wintel PC had a 3.4GB HDD, and that was nothing special by the standards of the time. Four years after *that* I got an 80GB HDD, which was quite decent, but still pretty mainstream in terms of capacity. All this was well above (the misapplied to spinning discs) Moore's Law.
Nowdays... well, it's over 5 years since 1TB drives became "mainstream" affordable... we should be at around 10TB if we were doubling capacity every 18 months, and we're not. By ordinary standards this would still be amazing growth, by the standards of 10-15 years ago, it's not.
These are your pictures. You own them. No corporation has the right to use them without your permission just because they are holding them.
Their point would be that you *did* agree to give them permission when you agreed to their terms and conditions.
Not entirely sure if I'm playing devil's advocate or not here, because while I have nothing but contempt for this move by Facebook (or any similar "land grab"), people *do* have the choice whether or not to use their shitty, worthless service and did agree to terms and conditions, supposedly.
The question is to what extent people are made aware of these terms and to what extent they can truly be expected to have "agreed" to this clause, especially in cases where they've been changed. I suspect that it might or might not stand up in court- but it's certainly not as clear-cut as you imply.
Slashdot Mirror
Should have clarified that. When I said "that's incorrect", I meant that it was incorrect that it wasn't related through Tramiel's Atari Corp. (it was) and that it was a successor to Atari Games (which I assume was the entity you meant). Of course, as I mentioned, Atari Corp also did games-related business.
The Atari you see around these days is related to the games bit.
That's incorrect; Hasbro (and through them, Infogrames) got the "Atari" name and IP through the legal remnants of Atari Corp. who *did* deal in games.
Atari Inc. was split along *arcade* (Atari Games) and *home/consumer* (Atari Corp.) lines. The latter (Jack Tramiel's) certainly included a lot of games-related business over the years, even if Tramiel initially thought it was a dead end. They continued the VCS/2600, relaunched the 7800 (after canning it for 18 months or so), released the XE Games System (an updated Atari 800 without a keyboard), then the Lynx (a fantastic handheld console developed by Epyx that was years ahead of its time, and partly killed by their crappy marketing) and finally the ill-fated Jaguar.
Also, the deal was that Atari Games could only use the "Atari" name in the arcade; they used the "Tengen" brand for home releases. Atari Games became part of Midway and was later renamed Midway Games West around the time Hasbro got the home name (to avoid confusion, apparently). I don't know what the status is of Atari Games' rights to the name and IP, but I suspect their legal successor's use of the name will still be restricted to arcade use. (Given that even in Japan- apparently- actual arcade-based games are no longer popular, that's nowhere near as big a deal as it would have been in the mid-80s).
Actually, the Amiga was originally developed by an independent company (Amiga Inc.) who *did* have some former Atari people working for them. The old Atari Inc. provided some support with caveats attached, and when Jack Tramiel bought out Atari's computer division, he hoped (using his typical legally-dubious techniques) to use legal clauses and agreements to gain control of the Amiga. Commodore rushed in and bought them, there was a lot of fuss and legal bickering, but C= ended up with the rights and Tramiel's Atari rushed out the ST instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga#Amiga_Corporation
FWIW, the ST *did* do better early on in Europe, because the Amiga was so damn expensive, so don't knock it too much- it did provide "Power without the Price", even if it was eclipsed later on as the Amiga fell in price and took over as Europe's favourite 16-bit. Of course, both flopped in the US...
Infogrames bought not just the name, but the company [..] it is still the same company.
Not really, the "company" Infogrames bought and "continued" was merely Hasbro Interactive- and they themselves were merely an unrelated company that had purchased the Atari name and IP.
Quick rehash... the original "true" Atari Inc. ran into trouble following the 1983 US video game crash. It was split into arcade and consumer divisions; the former was "Atari Games" (later sold to Midway, who renamed it and eventually shut it down in 2003).
The latter was bought by Jack Tramiel and became "Atari Corp.", a legally separate company that nonetheless could still be seen as a spiritual continuation of Atari Inc's computer and console division.
Fast forward to the mid-90s, and all Atari Corp's recent products have flopped. The company is cash rich, but with no future, so Tramiel "merges" Atari Corp. with JTS, a second-rate hard drive maker. Since this is- in effect- just a means for him to transfer his investment to JTS, Atari Corp. basically ceases any meaningful operations at this point, remaining only a legal entity within JTS.
A couple of years later, JTS goes bankrupt, and Hasbro buys the Atari IP. No real connection with the original business(es) in any real sense, as there's nothing meaningful to continue by this point.
So, Hasbro weren't really "Atari" except that they bought the name and IP, and Infogrames aren't really either. Both successors that had any meaningful continuation of Atari Inc. (i.e. Atari Corp. and Atari Games) are both now long defunct with nothing left to continue.
I would purchase them again today. Horses are not especially more intelligent than cows.
Viewing this though the issue of horsemeat misses the bigger (and more important) question raised. Namely, that if horsemeat was able to end up where it shouldn't have, what other garbage has "accidentally" made its way into these burgers over the years?
Meat rejected for human consumption (destined for pet food and the like or for destruction) making its way back into the human food chain? Quite likely, this has already been heard of. Other animals? God knows what crap?
It's not remotely surprising that burgers costing less than 13p each (inc. VAT (*)) would contain any old rubbish. Doesn't mean it's acceptable for anyone to sell that, regardless of the price, but it shouldn't be surprising.
(*) Sales tax, for the benefit of those outside the UK
I normally don't like "mod parent ups"- but the link in the parent is very informative. Even if you're not directly involved in the graphic design field, the general principles strike me as some that could quite easily be stretched to various aspects of the IT field.
This isn't really an issue of closed source, it's an issue of pointlessly restricted access. One could quite easily (and still workably) have an open API to a closed source system.
As you say though, spending time creating an API that no-one gets access to really makes little sense- unless one assumes that the API was only ever intended as an excuse and necessary component for a marketing-driven PR campaign. Maybe it does do something useful and they're going to use it internally within the company, but I doubt it. My suspicion is that once this whole thing is over it'll be quickly forgotten about and left to moulder unused on a server somewhere.
Yes, potential employers will be impressed with your tale of losing a contest, and your app that doesn't work. These arguments are the same that some try to use to defend spec work (and that's what this is, honestly).
Yeah, well you'll be laughing out the other side of your face when the market for people with "Campbell's Recipe API" experience explodes, and I have it there on my resume, right beside the "Customise Ronald McDonald's Face Remote Protocol v1.3".
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that a cyber-criminal using a domestic cat to send messages to the police about a computer virus sounds more like something from a futuristic cyberpunk anime than real life?
Cool, another teenager posting on slashdot. Why don't you fuck off to bed and stop whining about the nasty grown ups?
A teenager? Unlikely, given his low user ID, which would suggest he's been on Slashdot since early on (i.e. the late 90s), unless he bought the account on eBay.
;-)
Of course, it's possible that he really *is* a 17-year old, assuming- of course- that one accepts the plausibility of him having contributed to Slashdot as a toddler.
I'm guessing video games will get blamed for this.
Of course. That and milk.
You mean milk-plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what they were drinking? This would dull them down and get you ready for a bit of the old Facebook.
If they're going to print comic books, they'll need to be *about* the sort of character that'd drive those cars.
;-)
The Vauxhall Astra could get Thirtysomething-married-with-two-young-children-in-the-back-seats-Man.
The Ford Transit gets White Van Man, obviously.
With its contrived, overstyled appearance, the Nissan Juke looks like that puppet from the Saw films, though in reality our hero^w villian driving it would be Twenty-or-Thirtysomething-twonk-with-a-moderate-amount-of-disposable-income-to-spend-on-crappy-"lifestyle-oriented"-pretend-4x4-toy-vehicles-demographic-Man (or -Woman).
The possibilities are endless, problem is that 99% of cars will look like they should be driven by Boring-Stuffed-Shirt-Man or Dull-Suburban-Mother-Woman (er, because in reality... they are).
If I where the game designer, I'd at least provide an ending for the players. Have all the pets [..] caught in an unwinnable gunfight.
Intentionally mis-paraphrased because when I read your comment my immediate thought was that something along the lines of the final scene in Scarface- but with your pet in place of Tony Montana- would be a fantastic way to go out.
;-)
Granted, it'd probably upset the child audience even more, but you can't please everyone.
Also, they could have all the mafia characters die by taking them to the vet to be put down.
Facebook IPO wasnt a gaffe, it was a hedge fund scam. facebook was advised to give their IPO at a much higher value than they knew it could sustain, and the advisers hedged against facebook. made a lot of rich people richer, and fucked over some other rich people, and also fucked over some not so rich people.
Well, this is what gets me about the "Facebook IPO was a failure" argument. An IPO takes place for the benefit of the existing investors and stakeholders, whether or not that happens to be at the expense of anyone buying in.
Of course, normally one has to convince the would-be investors that it's also in *their* interest to do so, and obviously if you can be shown to have actually defrauded them, then that might not work out so well for you. But that doesn't change the basic principle- the people organising the IPO are doing so to benefit the existing stakeholders. From that somewhat amoral (but truthful) point of view, the Facebook IPO was a roaring success- for them.
And it fairly easy to take away money you give to the poor later since thay cannot afford lobbiests
That depends on how much money you gave them ;-)
Another Final Fantasy XI expansion? [..] It feels a bit like a relic from another world now; easy to forget it was probably the world's most successful MMO until World of Warcraft launched.
That's probably because it never even came close to that accomplishment.
I never played any of them, so I'm not really speaking from a position of authority. However, the MMORPG even *I* remember people going on about was Everquest. Looking back, I always got the impression that Everquest was the 800lb gorilla that dominated until the King Kong-sized WoW overshadowed even that.
Maybe as a non-game player I didn't notice FFXI because I assumed it was just a regular RPG like its predecessors, but I don't recall people going on about it anywhere near as much as "Evercrack".
betteridge's law of headlines applies here.
No, it doesn't. This is an actual, legitimate question.
As I correctly predicted earlier this year, lots of Slashdotters have seized upon Betteridge as the latest fad kneejerk response, and are misapplying it without understanding what it means. In his own words, Betteridge's Law applies to cases where journalists "know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."
For example, without the evidence to back it up, a headline saying "Tomato ketchup caused AIDS that led to exitinction of dinosaurs" would be obvious crap and lead to criticism of the paper and/or journalist. OTOH, "Did Tomato ketchup cause AIDS that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs?" gives them the weasellish get-out of "Well, we didn't actually *claim* that it did".
Even then, if a question headline was a genuine attempt to present a plausibly-supported but not universally-accepted idea (possibly because it was new and/or divisive), then Betteridge's wouldn't apply.
In short, Betteridge's original observation was insightful where he claimed it applied, but it was never a blanket dismissal of question headlines, so please stop the tedious, kneejerk misapplication.
Billy Joel needs to do a 2013 version of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
No, trust me, he really *doesn't*.
If more people were willing to oppose the way things are done, instead of encouraging people to suck it up
If you think I was "encouraging people to suck it up" with what I was saying, then you missed the point and shot the messenger in exactly the way I was talking about. But if one ignorantly thinks going into court with some smartass scheme an AC cooked up would achieve anything, then this is like walking into a minefield having been warned of the dangers because one thinks that minefields shouldn't exist in a civilised world.
Yes, that's right, but you'll still be blown to smithereens.
I don't care what they know. Only what they can prove.
Okay, now you've *definitely* confirmed that you're an Internet Tough Guy fantasist. I was pretty sure that this was the way you were thinking, and this confirms it- you think that hiding behind "a dozen proxies in a dozen different nations" (*) means they have no way of *proving* that it was you in court.
;-)
If you ever had the guts to put your money where your mouth was in the real world, I suspect you'd get a *very* unpleasant awakening.
Your proxies- if they were all set up correctly- would almost certainly be a totally effective cover for your identity... if you weren't even known to them, let alone anywhere near their radar as a suspect. Unfortunately, in your case, it's quite the opposite. If they even have a *suspicion* that this wasn't just a random hacking and decide to investigate further, getting the police involved, you're already the single biggest suspect.
You have the motive. They have the code you wrote with the backdoor in it; they might or might not find that. They probably have some logs somewhere that indicate what was being done to their systems. They might be able to get some logs from your ISP that suggest, even if they don't provide direct evidence of, particular patterns of behaviour and timing. They'll probably take your computers away for evidence.
Let me predict what you'd do.... "Oh, I'd be clever, I'd destroy the hard drives with thermite, so they wouldn't be able to retrieve anything from them, I'm still safe, ha ha." Would you care to explain to the court what happened to your hard drives and/or why they were destroyed. *That* would be massively suspicious in itself.
Did you mention this to *any* of your friends online in any form that may have a retrievable record?
There are countless pieces of possible evidence that would prove nothing in themselves, but which taken together could collectively paint an incriminating case that proves your guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Which is all they need (even in a perfectly-functioning court system) to lock you up and throw away the key.
But you're safe behind your "dozen proxies in a dozen different nations", of course.
It's Welsh. Which is ironic, as I'm Scottish, but there you go... (I don't speak Gaelic anyway!)
:-)
BTW, http://translate.google.com/ has an "auto-detect" option which is the default, so you don't even need to know which language it is to find out what it means.
I actually had a great, if somewhat unusual, method of backing up my photographs- I got a deer to memorise them. I know it sounds weird, but it turned out to be quite effective, at least with the males (does, on the other hand, were less reliable). I trained it to understand basic commands and in response, it scratched out a basic reproduction of the requested image, eventually improving to quite impressive quality after a period of time.
In this way, I came to realise that I was using their brain as a sort of basic computer memory. This worked very well until I realised that my contract with the owner of the deer meant he had the right to reuse anything they had memorised.
Of course, this was not acceptable, so I no longer store my photos in stag RAM.
do you write for dinosaure comics ?
No, he's the artist.
Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.
I'm pretty sure that the exponential growth of hard drive capacity has *slowed* significantly in recent years. In the 90s and early-2000s, they seemed to be increasing much faster. I remember considering buying a 120MB HDD for my Amiga circa 1993, which was moderately big at the time IIRC, then five years later my first Wintel PC had a 3.4GB HDD, and that was nothing special by the standards of the time. Four years after *that* I got an 80GB HDD, which was quite decent, but still pretty mainstream in terms of capacity. All this was well above (the misapplied to spinning discs) Moore's Law.
Nowdays... well, it's over 5 years since 1TB drives became "mainstream" affordable... we should be at around 10TB if we were doubling capacity every 18 months, and we're not. By ordinary standards this would still be amazing growth, by the standards of 10-15 years ago, it's not.
These are your pictures. You own them. No corporation has the right to use them without your permission just because they are holding them.
Their point would be that you *did* agree to give them permission when you agreed to their terms and conditions.
Not entirely sure if I'm playing devil's advocate or not here, because while I have nothing but contempt for this move by Facebook (or any similar "land grab"), people *do* have the choice whether or not to use their shitty, worthless service and did agree to terms and conditions, supposedly.
The question is to what extent people are made aware of these terms and to what extent they can truly be expected to have "agreed" to this clause, especially in cases where they've been changed. I suspect that it might or might not stand up in court- but it's certainly not as clear-cut as you imply.