I haven't done any picture-tagging on FB for awhile, but I do remember that you could take people/things that weren't linked to other FB accounts, so you'd see things tags like "Shannon's new puppies" etc
I've never found an option to prevent tagging, but to use it you'd have to have a facebook account in the first place.
We already *HAVE* something not much different than a patronage system, except now those who allow a work to go from manuscript to book/movie form are big studios rather than rich individuals.
However, we also have an internet, and increasingly affordable equipment, software, etc. Self-distribution isn't impossible for a group of dedicated individuals.
Yet one of the other major carriers is "Bell Canada", which I'm fairly sure still has some fairly strong attachment to their US megacorp counterpart. So what gives there?
Funny, because at one point in time I got ticketed for "following too closely" (tailgating). Essentially I had a nice safe following distance, then as we're coming around a corner the guy in front of me punches the brakes. Given the distance between him, myself, and the traffic behind, it would take awhile to allow the distance to grow again. However, the reason he hit the brakes was that he had a radar detector, and a cop was just around the bend.
Similar situations can occur when somebody cuts into traffic. In a rear-end collision, insurance corps tend to take the stance that any rear-end collision is caused by deliberate tailgating and/or not paying sufficient regard to environmental conditions (slick roads etc). In reality, plenty of situations do occur, especially in traffic where one must maintain a minimum safe following distance, but also a maximal distance before some jerk sees an open space and cuts in....
I have a hacked up 2.2 on my milestone right now. It was a real bitch to get it installed, since motorola hasn't actually released the update for my region.
I had already decided quite awhile back that I wouldn't be buying any more motorola phones, and if possible no more motorola products.
So how about they take the art talent to where it's useful. Remakes of older games isn't a terrible market. How many people have said they're buy FF7 or FF 6 (FF3 US) again if it were given a facelift? How many people haven't had a chance to experience them yet?
Take all those extra artists and a bit of budget, remake those games. Keep the story the same, the mechnics etc the same, and give them a new-gen facelift. I'd buy them.
How about this. Some guy in the US has a decent home-security system with cameras etc. He sees guys in dark clothes prowling around his house, so he grabs his (legally registered) gun and calls 9-1-1. While he's trying to get help from 9-1-1, one of the guys bursts in through a window, and he swings around and shoots the guy in the head. Since the house is wired, the security camera gets it all on tape.
Now, it turns out that the "intruder" was actually a cop, and this was a sting/bust that got the wrong address (or even the right one, but maybe without a warrant, whatever). However, what is published is that Mr Smith shot a cop, with an accompanying video of him whipping around with a gun and blowing said cop's brains out. Maybe that video is even shown to the jury when the guy gets charged.
In that case, do you think that it might be a good idea to perhaps REFUSE to show the video. How about if they only showing the video without all the other information (bad drug bust, 9-1-1 call records, etc). Still a good idea?
Maybe the information should be released, but if it's only part of the story, is it really an honest disclosure?
Let's say you like online contests. Not the "punch of monkey" ones, but ones that can win you real money/prizes, perhaps something like the McDonalds Monopoly game.
Now let's say you find a flaw in the system wherein you can always win, or at least win at an exponentially higher rate than normal. Maybe it doesn't parse an email address right and causes an SQL query or overflow, maybe there's something in the webpage that gives away answers to an important question.
Whatever the case, you manage to exploit it and rake in tons of prizes. Maybe it's cash. Maybe it's free cheeseburgers. Whatever. It's not just that you won once, and went, "wow, that's cool", but rather than you CONTINUALLY exploited the flaw to cash in.
You, maybe McD's could have built/bought a better system, but as we see, even ages-old well-tested systems can have flaws (see the recent PHP floating-conversion issue). But you continued to exploit the flaw, and essentially defraud the company. It's not a game or even a gamble at that point.
How about if you discovered that a silly error on your bank's website allows you to cause "negative" amounts for service charges. The vendor never actually gets a negative balance, but the cash in your account goes up. Is "the bank makes tons of money off of me anyhow" a valid excuse?
If you run across an error by accident, honest mistake. Keep abusing it to cash in, sounds like fraud to me.
And you don't think that the Chinese can come up with comparable electronics, or perhaps even superior electronics? So what if the exterior design is a copy, it doesn't make the aircraft inferior, and even if they're "slightly behind" (and who is to say that they are), China is a powerhouse of production. Imagine aircraft that are 90% as capable as US technology but with 200-300% the volume, I'm sure that's enough to prickle the hairs on many in the US military.
Given the current state of military and military-industrial security, cyber-espionage, and other such things, I wouldn't be surprised if China had access to specs/designs for US technology anyhow. Just because it isn't exported doesn't mean they haven't seen it. Just because it isn't exported doesn't mean they don't have huge teams working on similar or even better tech.
Seriously, the US has to get past this everyone-else is inferior concept, and your post is a perfect example of how it still exists.
Awhile back all my friends were geeking out over Cataclysm. I don't play WoW so it took me awhile to understand what all the sudden weird jokes and references were on their IM and other sigs... not to mention the pictures of huge overnight line-ups prior to boxing day.
I'd say that it still gets lots of attention from existing players.
And as you mentioned in the title, not just any MegaCorp, but EA, a company which is very well known for taking existing hits or concepts and shovelling out sequels (often with little change from the original). In some cases, this isn't a terrible thing. If a game is storyline-focussed, then slightly tweaking an existing engine and focussing on story makes sense. I've just started Mass Effect 2, but this seems to be pretty much the case there... slightly more polished graphics, but decent storyline and character development.
However, this often precludes having an "original" game that ends up as a blockbuster, as the companies EA buys tend to have their real hits before being bought out, possibly get a few more pieces of quality product out the door, and then often strangle on the vine...
It's too bad really, I'd like to see some gaming-shops that are developing something new and innovative but struggling at maybe the 50-80% mark get picked up by EA and helped along to bring something new and cool to the world. Certainly EA doesn't seem to lack the funds to invest in something like this.
Depends. A device with a chipset dedicated to a given task may in many cases be comparatively low-powered compared to a general-purpose PC, but may be *very* efficient at what it does. It's one of the reasons even a slightly older GPU will kick ass over software-rendering on most PC's.
Dedicated hardware can make a big difference in a lot of things, which is one of the reasons why in many systems there is hardware support for specific crypto methods.
I think that - especially nowadays - this is mostly the result of phone/hardware companies becoming a bit lazy and/or apathetic in terms of data security. With all the focus on speed and profit, security/privacy have been sorely neglected.
Wow. What projects couldn't use a lawyer. Liability, patents, license (GPL etc) violations, legal documentation, etc etc.
I could think of plenty of FOSS that probably could use a bit of legal assistance. Heck, how about offering a cheap legal advice session - or maybe a free seminar - every now and then, for up-and-coming programmers on FOSS projects?
If you're sending fairly legit opt-in, I have no argument against you. I've got plenty of tech sites which I've subscribed to in various ways (often starting with contests etc), but which have legit unsubscribe links etc
As I enjoy reading the product listings, I continue to receive their email.
I have a few ebay sellers that auto-subscribed me to their mailing lists after I bought stuff from their stores, etc. They're a bit less "legit" in terms of the opt-in, but if they ever become truly annoying I'll just unsubscribe.
The worst sites for being unsubscribe'able are generally dating sites and job-hunt sites. I've got sites I haven't used for years, don't remember the passwords for, and continue to get mail from (often without proper unsubscribe links). THOSE piss me off, and start to strain the border of "legit" (I think an unsubscribe link is required for some anti-spam compliance). If I can't find a way to get rid of them, I hit the "mark as spam" button a few times and then filter them off to nowhere.
The rest of the spam, 99% is eaten by gmail's filters, that's the stuff I never asked for in any way.
So depending on where you fall in the pile, I won't immediately say that you're an "evil spammer." Sending mass-mail to those that want it isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you allow a legit unsubscribe.
Hell, I've even worked on the email marketing systems, etc, myself. One of the first things I did at my previous employer was explain why having a "subscribe to our newsletter" box our sites that *didn't* validate/confirm the subscriber owned the address was a very bad thing (luckily they let me fix it).
C. The elections are a sham,with a fraud and voter-intimidation running rampant (at least from the stories I heard). People didn't choose Mugabe so much as the elections were manipulated and/or people were threatened into voting for him.
Does a GPS work on a jet? Is it allowable (I believe they only receive, not send). If so, you could probably get some pretty ridiculous max speeds on those. For those reasons as well, I doubt it would usable as evidence unless you've also got a log of a recent clear-time, and a clear chain of possession since that time (who says you had the GPS the whole time, and for that matter that it was functioning properly).
As far as my own experience with large cities goes, I've only lived in Vancouver/Toronto. Toronto is definitely much worse than Vancouver, but crime also seems to be going up in Van.
The main issues hitting the headlines lately are shootings near clubs, and a more recent shoot-up at a restaurant (one gangbanger was having a birthday, others tried to take him out it seems).
Of course, the news loves to publish those stories, so perhaps it's not much better than other large cities. From what I hear of Phoenix you're still likely better off in Vancouver, so long as you're not in the bad areas or in Surrey (Greater Vancouver Area) etc.
Actually, if you're looking to avoid such issues, you might want to try someplace other than Vancouver. It's not a *bad* place compared to other metropolis-sized places, but there have been a lot of issues with increasing gang violence and also some issues with police (I've heard more than a few about police getting in people's faces about cameras, in fact).
Van is a nice place, but it's also a coastal metro, which means there's a lot of nasty stuff that flows through the docs, and also the nearby border (both ways, I'm not going to blame the US on that).
You might find more luck in other major cities... as long as they're not Toronto:-)
Really, because from what I've read, even the Pentagon had admitted that no troops were endangered by the leaks.
Yes, they originally stated that lives were endangered, but later had to change their tune after they really couldn't find anything to that effect.
So unless you count lives being endangered by people being more pissed off at the US in general (a symptom I attribute more to the ignorance of corporate-government policy and meddling than wikileaks), I'd say that the only real danger thus far has been to the careers of various high-up politicos and corporations.
I'm fairly sure Amazon did this on their website. I actually have a few PDF'ed products I have to check, but there were paperback novels selling for "$15 marked down from $25" that sold for the usual $9.99 everywhere else.
I haven't had a chance yet, but I want to see if they're now back down to the normal price. Putting something on "sale" in that manner is illegal where I life, AFAIK.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't done any picture-tagging on FB for awhile, but I do remember that you could take people/things that weren't linked to other FB accounts, so you'd see things tags like "Shannon's new puppies" etc
I've never found an option to prevent tagging, but to use it you'd have to have a facebook account in the first place.
We already *HAVE* something not much different than a patronage system, except now those who allow a work to go from manuscript to book/movie form are big studios rather than rich individuals.
However, we also have an internet, and increasingly affordable equipment, software, etc. Self-distribution isn't impossible for a group of dedicated individuals.
Yet one of the other major carriers is "Bell Canada", which I'm fairly sure still has some fairly strong attachment to their US megacorp counterpart. So what gives there?
And yet that still sounds better than the last of the series...
Funny, because at one point in time I got ticketed for "following too closely" (tailgating).
Essentially I had a nice safe following distance, then as we're coming around a corner the guy in front of me punches the brakes. Given the distance between him, myself, and the traffic behind, it would take awhile to allow the distance to grow again. However, the reason he hit the brakes was that he had a radar detector, and a cop was just around the bend.
Similar situations can occur when somebody cuts into traffic. In a rear-end collision, insurance corps tend to take the stance that any rear-end collision is caused by deliberate tailgating and/or not paying sufficient regard to environmental conditions (slick roads etc). In reality, plenty of situations do occur, especially in traffic where one must maintain a minimum safe following distance, but also a maximal distance before some jerk sees an open space and cuts in....
I have a hacked up 2.2 on my milestone right now. It was a real bitch to get it installed, since motorola hasn't actually released the update for my region.
I had already decided quite awhile back that I wouldn't be buying any more motorola phones, and if possible no more motorola products.
Fuck them and their shitty lockdown.
So how about they take the art talent to where it's useful. Remakes of older games isn't a terrible market.
How many people have said they're buy FF7 or FF 6 (FF3 US) again if it were given a facelift? How many people haven't had a chance to experience them yet?
Take all those extra artists and a bit of budget, remake those games. Keep the story the same, the mechnics etc the same, and give them a new-gen facelift. I'd buy them.
It's not the truth unless it's the whole truth.
How about this. Some guy in the US has a decent home-security system with cameras etc. He sees guys in dark clothes prowling around his house, so he grabs his (legally registered) gun and calls 9-1-1. While he's trying to get help from 9-1-1, one of the guys bursts in through a window, and he swings around and shoots the guy in the head. Since the house is wired, the security camera gets it all on tape.
Now, it turns out that the "intruder" was actually a cop, and this was a sting/bust that got the wrong address (or even the right one, but maybe without a warrant, whatever). However, what is published is that Mr Smith shot a cop, with an accompanying video of him whipping around with a gun and blowing said cop's brains out. Maybe that video is even shown to the jury when the guy gets charged.
In that case, do you think that it might be a good idea to perhaps REFUSE to show the video. How about if they only showing the video without all the other information (bad drug bust, 9-1-1 call records, etc). Still a good idea?
Maybe the information should be released, but if it's only part of the story, is it really an honest disclosure?
Let's say you like online contests. Not the "punch of monkey" ones, but ones that can win you real money/prizes, perhaps something like the McDonalds Monopoly game.
Now let's say you find a flaw in the system wherein you can always win, or at least win at an exponentially higher rate than normal. Maybe it doesn't parse an email address right and causes an SQL query or overflow, maybe there's something in the webpage that gives away answers to an important question.
Whatever the case, you manage to exploit it and rake in tons of prizes. Maybe it's cash. Maybe it's free cheeseburgers. Whatever. It's not just that you won once, and went, "wow, that's cool", but rather than you CONTINUALLY exploited the flaw to cash in.
You, maybe McD's could have built/bought a better system, but as we see, even ages-old well-tested systems can have flaws (see the recent PHP floating-conversion issue). But you continued to exploit the flaw, and essentially defraud the company. It's not a game or even a gamble at that point.
How about if you discovered that a silly error on your bank's website allows you to cause "negative" amounts for service charges. The vendor never actually gets a negative balance, but the cash in your account goes up. Is "the bank makes tons of money off of me anyhow" a valid excuse?
If you run across an error by accident, honest mistake. Keep abusing it to cash in, sounds like fraud to me.
And you don't think that the Chinese can come up with comparable electronics, or perhaps even superior electronics?
So what if the exterior design is a copy, it doesn't make the aircraft inferior, and even if they're "slightly behind" (and who is to say that they are), China is a powerhouse of production. Imagine aircraft that are 90% as capable as US technology but with 200-300% the volume, I'm sure that's enough to prickle the hairs on many in the US military.
Given the current state of military and military-industrial security, cyber-espionage, and other such things, I wouldn't be surprised if China had access to specs/designs for US technology anyhow. Just because it isn't exported doesn't mean they haven't seen it. Just because it isn't exported doesn't mean they don't have huge teams working on similar or even better tech.
Seriously, the US has to get past this everyone-else is inferior concept, and your post is a perfect example of how it still exists.
Awhile back all my friends were geeking out over Cataclysm. I don't play WoW so it took me awhile to understand what all the sudden weird jokes and references were on their IM and other sigs... not to mention the pictures of huge overnight line-ups prior to boxing day.
I'd say that it still gets lots of attention from existing players.
And as you mentioned in the title, not just any MegaCorp, but EA, a company which is very well known for taking existing hits or concepts and shovelling out sequels (often with little change from the original). In some cases, this isn't a terrible thing. If a game is storyline-focussed, then slightly tweaking an existing engine and focussing on story makes sense. I've just started Mass Effect 2, but this seems to be pretty much the case there... slightly more polished graphics, but decent storyline and character development.
However, this often precludes having an "original" game that ends up as a blockbuster, as the companies EA buys tend to have their real hits before being bought out, possibly get a few more pieces of quality product out the door, and then often strangle on the vine...
It's too bad really, I'd like to see some gaming-shops that are developing something new and innovative but struggling at maybe the 50-80% mark get picked up by EA and helped along to bring something new and cool to the world. Certainly EA doesn't seem to lack the funds to invest in something like this.
Sounds like the blackberry is a winner here. I believe that the data on the device (discounting an SD card) is/can-be encrypted.
Meanwhile, he was busy getting a BJ in the oval-office... but hey, score one for decency (or hypocrisy)
Depends. A device with a chipset dedicated to a given task may in many cases be comparatively low-powered compared to a general-purpose PC, but may be *very* efficient at what it does. It's one of the reasons even a slightly older GPU will kick ass over software-rendering on most PC's.
Dedicated hardware can make a big difference in a lot of things, which is one of the reasons why in many systems there is hardware support for specific crypto methods.
I think that - especially nowadays - this is mostly the result of phone/hardware companies becoming a bit lazy and/or apathetic in terms of data security. With all the focus on speed and profit, security/privacy have been sorely neglected.
Wow. What projects couldn't use a lawyer. Liability, patents, license (GPL etc) violations, legal documentation, etc etc.
I could think of plenty of FOSS that probably could use a bit of legal assistance. Heck, how about offering a cheap legal advice session - or maybe a free seminar - every now and then, for up-and-coming programmers on FOSS projects?
If you're sending fairly legit opt-in, I have no argument against you. I've got plenty of tech sites which I've subscribed to in various ways (often starting with contests etc), but which have legit unsubscribe links etc
As I enjoy reading the product listings, I continue to receive their email.
I have a few ebay sellers that auto-subscribed me to their mailing lists after I bought stuff from their stores, etc. They're a bit less "legit" in terms of the opt-in, but if they ever become truly annoying I'll just unsubscribe.
The worst sites for being unsubscribe'able are generally dating sites and job-hunt sites. I've got sites I haven't used for years, don't remember the passwords for, and continue to get mail from (often without proper unsubscribe links). THOSE piss me off, and start to strain the border of "legit" (I think an unsubscribe link is required for some anti-spam compliance). If I can't find a way to get rid of them, I hit the "mark as spam" button a few times and then filter them off to nowhere.
The rest of the spam, 99% is eaten by gmail's filters, that's the stuff I never asked for in any way.
So depending on where you fall in the pile, I won't immediately say that you're an "evil spammer." Sending mass-mail to those that want it isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if you allow a legit unsubscribe.
Hell, I've even worked on the email marketing systems, etc, myself. One of the first things I did at my previous employer was explain why having a "subscribe to our newsletter" box our sites that *didn't* validate/confirm the subscriber owned the address was a very bad thing (luckily they let me fix it).
C. The elections are a sham,with a fraud and voter-intimidation running rampant (at least from the stories I heard). People didn't choose Mugabe so much as the elections were manipulated and/or people were threatened into voting for him.
Does a GPS work on a jet? Is it allowable (I believe they only receive, not send). If so, you could probably get some pretty ridiculous max speeds on those.
For those reasons as well, I doubt it would usable as evidence unless you've also got a log of a recent clear-time, and a clear chain of possession since that time (who says you had the GPS the whole time, and for that matter that it was functioning properly).
As far as my own experience with large cities goes, I've only lived in Vancouver/Toronto. Toronto is definitely much worse than Vancouver, but crime also seems to be going up in Van.
The main issues hitting the headlines lately are shootings near clubs, and a more recent shoot-up at a restaurant (one gangbanger was having a birthday, others tried to take him out it seems).
Of course, the news loves to publish those stories, so perhaps it's not much better than other large cities. From what I hear of Phoenix you're still likely better off in Vancouver, so long as you're not in the bad areas or in Surrey (Greater Vancouver Area) etc.
Google has the bad news.
One good thing is that the police do seem to be really pushing back against the gang issues, but there's a lot of work to be done.
Plenty of said sites are hosts for things such as noCD cracks or keygens. Depending on where you live, they're not necessarily illegal.
Actually, if you're looking to avoid such issues, you might want to try someplace other than Vancouver. It's not a *bad* place compared to other metropolis-sized places, but there have been a lot of issues with increasing gang violence and also some issues with police (I've heard more than a few about police getting in people's faces about cameras, in fact).
Van is a nice place, but it's also a coastal metro, which means there's a lot of nasty stuff that flows through the docs, and also the nearby border (both ways, I'm not going to blame the US on that).
You might find more luck in other major cities... as long as they're not Toronto :-)
Because google is just so hard to use, isn't it...
police shoot Mayor's dogs
Police shoot teenager over stolen PS3
police no-knock shooting
Really, because from what I've read, even the Pentagon had admitted that no troops were endangered by the leaks.
Yes, they originally stated that lives were endangered, but later had to change their tune after they really couldn't find anything to that effect.
So unless you count lives being endangered by people being more pissed off at the US in general (a symptom I attribute more to the ignorance of corporate-government policy and meddling than wikileaks), I'd say that the only real danger thus far has been to the careers of various high-up politicos and corporations.
I'm fairly sure Amazon did this on their website. I actually have a few PDF'ed products I have to check, but there were paperback novels selling for "$15 marked down from $25" that sold for the usual $9.99 everywhere else.
I haven't had a chance yet, but I want to see if they're now back down to the normal price. Putting something on "sale" in that manner is illegal where I life, AFAIK.