You can patent pretty much anything. It doesn't mean you get to make use of the patent. What if you patented a way to electrocute people through their keyboard/mouse if they're caught using a pirated serial key. Sure, you can patent it... but you can't use it (although personally I'd like to be able to zap trolls on slashdot or gamerooms).
The fun part is, where such activities are legal and don't violate privacy laws, anyone but the patent-holder now engaging in such activities would be in breach of the patent, and thus MS could sue the bejeezes out of them. It's funny, because it really seems like they're patenting something that would lose customers, but in the other hand if they never used the method itself, just the patent (to sue others who tried to roll over privacy), then it would be like a sword swung in favour of good.
I think though, that there may just be prior art to this patent anyhow, sad as that is.
OK, so it uses a SIM card,which apparently also works in a mobile phone. So, it might be fun to pick up a cheap cellular phone from ebay, then slap the card in and regularly make a few bothersome phone calls to various numbers that have a caller-ID, then slap the card back in the device(s) before attaching them to one of the vehicles mentioned in the previous post.
Personally, though, I think it might be more fun to attach the thing to a sewer-sucker or garbage truck... something unpleasant at any rate. Perhaps the interface would allow one to reconfigure the number it calls out to, so you could make use of the device itself.
Regardless, though,it seems that - legitimately or not - the police have it in for this guy, and doing anything of the like is just going to piss them off and provoke an unpleasant response. How about taking them to court for police harassment? If they don't have a warrant then you've got a good case (and who knows, you might be able to keep the things after, especially if it's denied they own them). If they do... well at least you get to see what the grounds of the warrant were.
If it were a robotic parrot, maybe people would care more. Unfortunately, most people on here only acknowledge the "Computer Nerd" variety of nerdome, overlooking veterinary, medical, science, and many other forms of nerddome.
I must admit, at first I was wondering why an article about a parrot was on the front-page of slashdot. I'm a regular, but apparently I haven't caught Alex on the news on slashdot before. However, the article was enough to pique my interest and look up a bit more of Alex... although I do have a personal interest in African Grey's (always wanted one as a pet, but they're a lot of money, and require more attention than I could give right now). They're supposed to be incredibly intelligent birds, with live spans that often mean that need to be included in the owner's will (because they've been known to outlive humans).
I do wonder that, if Alex had been a famous Chimpanzee or primate, then perhaps more people would find interest in this article. Just because he's a bird and not a mammal such as a monkey or dolphin, doesn't mean that his intelligence isn't noteworthy or perhaps of scientific value. Heck, if you pay close attention to even some more common birds such as crows (or better, ravens) you'll find that they show rather keen level of intelligence and shrewdness. This is generally centered around getting food, but just because their needs/desires are much simpler than ours doesn't mean that their intellect is.
I've seen plenty of jobs that advertise as the following:
Looking for 5-7 years experience developing in PHP, Perl, C#, ASP and VB.NET
Require skills using windows/IIS servers, as well as Linux, Solaris, and AIX. Qmail, Sendmail, Active Directory, Exchange server, IIS, Apache blah blah. Oh, and Java too
Pay rate: $45k-55k/year (well, sometimes it's a bit better than this)
Now the thing is, I've got quite a number of those. I'm still good enough with my C-coding to debug many of the projects I run across (but those tend to be GCC compiled). My earlier days of coding involved a lot of VB and VC++, but I migrated towards more of a PHP/Perl environment as well as towards Linux server admin as opposed to windows
Do they really use all of the above, or even a heavy combination of both windows/ASP+C#+VB.NET dev and Linux/PHP/Perl at the same time? Many of the developers I know might be somewhat familiar with one, but tend to be most skilled at either the linux-type languages, or the windows-type languages. Ditto for the System Administration stuff. I'm primarily proficient at dealing with Linux servers, it's what we use in our shop. To keep my skills up, I'm poking at Solaris when I have free time, but I doubt I'll have a chance to crack at actual Sun hardware or any AIX/HP-UX boxes anytime soon. I've supported win2k servers but those were in times past, and my Active Directory/Exchange skills are somewhat lacking. Thus, these days my primary skills lie in administrating Linux Servers.
Could I do most of the above? Well, I couldn't do all of them equally well, and I would be very hard pressed to find somebody who is an expert or even extremely strong in all of those categories. Yes, you might see somebody who's damn good with Linux servers as well as many of the Unixy variety. Chances are that type of shop is going to be predominantly Linux/Unix though, maybe with a few windows servers but nothing overly heavy. Could I learn all of the above, sure. Instead of listing everything under the sun, at the very least I'd like to see a position that says 80% Linux Servers, 20% windows. I'm confident I could manage that environment and then learn/re-learn more of the windows stuff as I have the opportunity. I've been hard-pressed to find any tech that I couldn't get a handle on very quickly (short of some with absolutely terrible documentation and low proliferation).
Same with coding. You might find a guy that primarily does PHP/Perl, maybe Java, but if he's doing those I doubt he's big on ASP or VB.net (the inverse applies for the MS programmers as well). Nowadays I'm one of the more PHP/Perl type guys (used to be perl, but now more PHP). Could I fix up a page using ASP? Sure thing! I remember once where I worked we had a contractor that developed a system (against my recommendation) using ColdFusion. It had some pretty big bugs, and I was the one that ended up fixing them, despite not having touched CF before. The same for C++ stuff, I don't code in it much, but I'm still good enough to debug and fix issues with other people's projects, though I don't often start my own from-scratch operations anymore.
So what do you want? Do you want a guy who knows your core operations like the back of his hand, and is decent or quick-to-learn on the other stuff? Perhaps you want the guy who knows a little bit of all those, but not much of any. Or maybe you'll just end up with the guy that *says* he knows a lot about these things, perhaps managed to fluff his way through the interview, and ends up doing more harm than good?
I stand by keeping my resume honest, partly because I believe in that type of thing partly because I don't want to get a job I'll lose because I was never qualified in the first place (and my current job is decent, but I'm looking at a different location). I've had the opportunity to lie, I've had people want to hire me - for good pay , but without using my strong skills - and had to refuse because I knew there were better candidates. Jobs are un
I'll play Devil's advocate and go ahead with the assumption that some (in the UK gov't) would think this a good idea. Even thus, there are issues:
I think that, often enough, the lawgivers don't understand the technology and the limits (not in terms of implementation so much as effectiveness and accuracy) of the information. Sure, recording everyone's DNA might be - in a screwed up way - more "fair" to the general public, but it also means that the system has to accommodate much, much more data. Suddenly scaling up a system with - say - 100,000 users or datapoints, to a user base that is in the millions is - depending on how well it was coded for scalability - likely going to bog it down. Suddenly, the tool has a lot more data, but it will take a *lot* longer to access and/or process due to the large of amount of data it has to deal with.
Then you add in the human error. If there's already plenty of that, then expanding the system is almost indefinitely not going to improve that situation. If anything, it's going to make things worse. With the added data, you're greatly increasing your chances of mis-entered data, collisions (people with the same first/last name, etc) and general errors.
From a personal perspective I'm horrified by this. From a technical perspective - if such a system were put into place effectively - I might actually find myself morbidly interesting in the inner workings and how it was put together.
Is it just the R&D that's subsidized, or perhaps the overall cost inherent in the vehicle? Perhaps sales of enviro-friendly vehicles are - in fact - subsidized through taxes as well?
OK, then wake me up when PBXVII does something amazing, because in this case it doesn't look to me like things have changed a lot. Hmm, people want me to face off against the evil corporate monsters, so let's decry the activities of some well-known large corporations. Looks like following the popular vote to me, especially when you consider that the church does plenty things itself to avoid paying the piper.
There are plenty of other things that large corporations - and in fact the corporation that have been mentioned - do that would be far more "evil," and moreover in many cases are actually illegal. This one's an easy way to get publicity and possibly public support though... since most people would be happy to feel a little indignation over tax-related issues. Maybe the pope should take a peek at the AT&T wiretapping scandal... oh, wait... not popular enough.
He didn't do anything BAD while in the Hitler Youth, he was just there. imo, that's pretty forgiveable, but I guess you don't agree.
Sometimes doing nothing is bad enough. While I don't expect the average person to defend his (or her) beliefs with his life, I would expect that the man who became the people might have had the strength of faith to do so.
How good government is really depends on the given selection, and the willingness of the people to oppose a bad government.
If you have a democratic-style government, and your choices are Adolph Hitler, Beezelbub, and OJ Simpson, chances are that no matter whom you choose it isn't going to work out very well. In contrast, if you have a dictatorship, monarchy, or whatever, and you happen to have a *good* government (I've heard the King of Thailand is well looked upon), then your country will prosper.
Given a combination of the government and the people, a semi-communist or semi-socialist philosophy may work (although too much of anything is usually not a good thing), but it's pretty hard to build anything on a weak foundation. Corrupt government, or weak citizens in most any case do not make a good foundation for any policy, and abuse will run rampant regardless.
Have the grocery stores already been found guilty of collaboration in relation to price-fixing? The music companies have...
You might think the two aren't related, but the fact is that it's a two-part scenario. The music companies have steadily been milking artists while simultaneously keeping music prices artificially high. Moreover, the lawsuits (or threats thereof) they initiate are designed for purposes of pure intimidation... aimed at making penalties so exorbitant for the possible loss that people are inclined to settle... and therefore making the lawsuits themselves a revenue-producing operation.
Finally, you must add the factor wherein the music companies have gotten many cases wrong, yet in many instances thick-headedly pursued innocent victims. Using their massed power, they have abused the corporate system to drive prices/profits up at the cost of the consumer, while simultaneously abusing the justice system to pummel citizens into the ground without allowing a fair court proceeding.
Sounds like it could also be a TIVO, or a local fileserver with rips of DVD's (I know people that have Terabyte storage just for ripping+archiving movies in a convenient manner)
The first levels in AVP1 were the most freaky, since you were pretty much waiting for aliens to jump out of nowhere... (although it helps to have watched the movie first, I think). I still remember deathmatching a few buddies late at night on AVP2, and hearing them complain that hearing the tickety-tick of my facehugger's claws had them looking around frantically and getting more than a little freaked out in real life
Seriously, one of the towns/villages along my normal work route - population under 1500 - is halfway up a mountain, far enough from the city to be pain to install high-speed, and yet still has internet.
See here for more info. Commercial broadband internet has been available for years, and residential popped in more recently. Here's another town with a population of a little under 3000. We've got areas that are little more than a smudge on the map that have decent broadband, since both Telus and Shaw cable have a good trunk. On top of that, smaller or more-local providers such as OCIS provide internet via shared/leased connections (with their own infrastructure added to make the last mile) and other technologies such as wireless etc... without being strangled off by the big guys
Sorry, but if we Canucks can manage it, the US can too. I'm fairly sure it's a case of piss-poor implementation, support, and just basic greed that keeps it from happening.
And before people start pointing out that the US has more population to reach, I'd like to point out that Canada has plenty of area, and plenty of open space between locations but still manages to for the most-part get internet out to nowheresville across plenty of long-empty distance and nasty unpleasant environmental conditions (no, we don't have 365 snow here, we go range from as much as +40c/104F in summer to -40C/-40F in winter, so we get it *all*)
For an individual, the ability to play WOW online and chat with your friends may be a luxury. However, depending on one's age, being without the technical resources provided by internet access is going to leave one seriously disadvantaged. Moreover, for a business, lack of internet is a very serious hit. Email, and in many cases a webpage etc are extremely important. The GP is right. Maybe in 1997 the internet was more a luxury, but in 2007 when most of your customers have an internet connection, and expect to be able to look your company, your email, and various other such things online, it's very near necessity.
No, it's not something that's 100% necessary. Heck, a human could get by with a sharp stick, a cave, and a campfire, but the fact is that life in this day and age, and much of the communications associated with such, depend on being online to at least some extent. A bigger issue is specifically broadband access, but in this day-and-age I'd say that "broadband" (and I use the term sparingly, become some is near-dialup in terms of speed anyways) is pretty much near the level of requirement as a phone or other similar communications services. It depends on your lifestyle/career too, for somebody in a technical field it shifts from convenience towards necessity rather quickly
Try searching for a job sometime without a decent-speed connection and a cellphone. And for the record, my grandmother has neither and quite often complains about the lack of communication from other family members, whereas my grandparents on the other end of the family are online, and happily receive email from the family up north, replete with pictures of my cousin's young child, and other such messages from their friends back in Europe etc. Not a bare necessity, but definitely a functional part of life.
Doom 3 had those creepy little flying bug things with babies heads. I'd say that if something was going to provoke more of a shock-and-gasp media response than the "Little Sisters." However, I'm not entirely sure about how this plays into the plotline - although it seems that you are given more of a choice over your actions (kill or save) - so maybe it's a little more/less dramatic than it's being made out to be.
Off the top of my head I can recall a few had very odd mainboards, as I tried to find motherboard drivers only to discover the company no longer existed, and the brand itself was very oddball. Floppy/optical drives I wouldn't be so concerned about the brand of, and generally video/sound are integrated on cheaper machines anyways.
Oh wait, were you serious? I've serviced Dell's, HP's, and Gateways. While the former aren't great comparable to a lot of home-built systems, they're usually not too terrible except for the preloaded crapware. The worst issue I've had with Dell is the seemingly-deliberate introduced incompatibilities with consumer parts (to sell you Dell parts, like a floppy drive at 2.5x normal cost). Gateways, when they blow up (and I think the only reason I don't end up fixing more of them is because they're luckily not that common) tend to have all sorts of interesting components inside... usually a mix of hardware from brands I've never heard of, from companies that no longer exist, because they either recreate themselves regularly to avoid bad publicity or just died off due to suckishess.
How about when the machine gets compromised, aka a file in the hidden directory gets infected, or a virus decides to nest in there. Are you virus-scanners going to find the file, or are they being prevented so because this thing UPDATES A CORE FRICKING API ON YOUR MACHINE. Yes, it's a rootkit. It might not be used for malicious purposes quite so much as the sony-CD's were some time ago, but that doesn't mean it's not compromising the overall security of your system. It's an attempt at security-through-obscurity that endangers the overall system.
Besides - to put it in your terms - if somebody get ahold of your "data fingerprint," what are they going to do? Make fake eyes? Fake fingers?
For anyone who has actually bought the game or used the demo: Does it uninstall when you uninstall the game/demo (or at the least, have an option to remove securom seperately)? If not, that's enough to qualify it as malware in my books.
To my understanding, previous presidencies did not have specific "free speech" zones. I was astounded when I heard these passed in the US without a major uprising.
Ever been to one of those areas of town that have mixed businesses, private offices, and homes (loft rooms etc) - and you can't tell which is which?
Sorry, but there's not really any way to tell which wireless connections are public and which aren't. I leave my own open in case somebody needs a quick connection, and in the same concept I have hooked into various open wifi's with my PDA when I needed to quickly look something up online (an address, a phone number, or to quickly reference an email).
A door - closed or not - in most places does represent a private residence. However, if you're in the middle of a business district and have an open door then somebody might make a mistake. If you tell him, and he leaves, no problem. However, there's still an easy way to tell people that you are not open for business: CLOSE AND/OR LOCK YOUR DOOR.
The same applies to wireless. Unless an open AP is labelled "dontleech" or something similar, then I can't tell if it's deliberately open or not. Moreover, I can't even tell where it's coming from to ask. And if you're going to label it, then you might as well secure it. While some people might argue that it's too technical, it's not that difficult to read instructions, and most are fairly descriptive in terms of how to secure a wireless connection.
Slashdot Mirror
You can patent pretty much anything. It doesn't mean you get to make use of the patent. What if you patented a way to electrocute people through their keyboard/mouse if they're caught using a pirated serial key. Sure, you can patent it... but you can't use it (although personally I'd like to be able to zap trolls on slashdot or gamerooms).
The fun part is, where such activities are legal and don't violate privacy laws, anyone but the patent-holder now engaging in such activities would be in breach of the patent, and thus MS could sue the bejeezes out of them. It's funny, because it really seems like they're patenting something that would lose customers, but in the other hand if they never used the method itself, just the patent (to sue others who tried to roll over privacy), then it would be like a sword swung in favour of good.
I think though, that there may just be prior art to this patent anyhow, sad as that is.
No, it's a convenience. Convenience often comes at a cost, especially when somebody else has to do work or pay to bring you that convenience.
OK, so it uses a SIM card,which apparently also works in a mobile phone. So, it might be fun to pick up a cheap cellular phone from ebay, then slap the card in and regularly make a few bothersome phone calls to various numbers that have a caller-ID, then slap the card back in the device(s) before attaching them to one of the vehicles mentioned in the previous post.
Personally, though, I think it might be more fun to attach the thing to a sewer-sucker or garbage truck... something unpleasant at any rate. Perhaps the interface would allow one to reconfigure the number it calls out to, so you could make use of the device itself.
Regardless, though,it seems that - legitimately or not - the police have it in for this guy, and doing anything of the like is just going to piss them off and provoke an unpleasant response. How about taking them to court for police harassment? If they don't have a warrant then you've got a good case (and who knows, you might be able to keep the things after, especially if it's denied they own them). If they do... well at least you get to see what the grounds of the warrant were.
If it were a robotic parrot, maybe people would care more. Unfortunately, most people on here only acknowledge the "Computer Nerd" variety of nerdome, overlooking veterinary, medical, science, and many other forms of nerddome.
I must admit, at first I was wondering why an article about a parrot was on the front-page of slashdot. I'm a regular, but apparently I haven't caught Alex on the news on slashdot before. However, the article was enough to pique my interest and look up a bit more of Alex... although I do have a personal interest in African Grey's (always wanted one as a pet, but they're a lot of money, and require more attention than I could give right now). They're supposed to be incredibly intelligent birds, with live spans that often mean that need to be included in the owner's will (because they've been known to outlive humans).
I do wonder that, if Alex had been a famous Chimpanzee or primate, then perhaps more people would find interest in this article. Just because he's a bird and not a mammal such as a monkey or dolphin, doesn't mean that his intelligence isn't noteworthy or perhaps of scientific value. Heck, if you pay close attention to even some more common birds such as crows (or better, ravens) you'll find that they show rather keen level of intelligence and shrewdness. This is generally centered around getting food, but just because their needs/desires are much simpler than ours doesn't mean that their intellect is.
If that doesn't make his death "News for Nerds", then I don't know what does.
Initially I read Nerds as Birds... which would make for an interesting headline:
News for Birds, stuff with crackers
I've seen plenty of jobs that advertise as the following:
Looking for 5-7 years experience developing in PHP, Perl, C#, ASP and VB.NET
Require skills using windows/IIS servers, as well as Linux, Solaris, and AIX. Qmail, Sendmail, Active Directory, Exchange server, IIS, Apache blah blah. Oh, and Java too
Pay rate: $45k-55k/year (well, sometimes it's a bit better than this)
Now the thing is, I've got quite a number of those. I'm still good enough with my C-coding to debug many of the projects I run across (but those tend to be GCC compiled). My earlier days of coding involved a lot of VB and VC++, but I migrated towards more of a PHP/Perl environment as well as towards Linux server admin as opposed to windows
Do they really use all of the above, or even a heavy combination of both windows/ASP+C#+VB.NET dev and Linux/PHP/Perl at the same time? Many of the developers I know might be somewhat familiar with one, but tend to be most skilled at either the linux-type languages, or the windows-type languages. Ditto for the System Administration stuff. I'm primarily proficient at dealing with Linux servers, it's what we use in our shop. To keep my skills up, I'm poking at Solaris when I have free time, but I doubt I'll have a chance to crack at actual Sun hardware or any AIX/HP-UX boxes anytime soon. I've supported win2k servers but those were in times past, and my Active Directory/Exchange skills are somewhat lacking. Thus, these days my primary skills lie in administrating Linux Servers.
Could I do most of the above? Well, I couldn't do all of them equally well, and I would be very hard pressed to find somebody who is an expert or even extremely strong in all of those categories. Yes, you might see somebody who's damn good with Linux servers as well as many of the Unixy variety. Chances are that type of shop is going to be predominantly Linux/Unix though, maybe with a few windows servers but nothing overly heavy. Could I learn all of the above, sure. Instead of listing everything under the sun, at the very least I'd like to see a position that says 80% Linux Servers, 20% windows. I'm confident I could manage that environment and then learn/re-learn more of the windows stuff as I have the opportunity. I've been hard-pressed to find any tech that I couldn't get a handle on very quickly (short of some with absolutely terrible documentation and low proliferation).
Same with coding. You might find a guy that primarily does PHP/Perl, maybe Java, but if he's doing those I doubt he's big on ASP or VB.net (the inverse applies for the MS programmers as well). Nowadays I'm one of the more PHP/Perl type guys (used to be perl, but now more PHP). Could I fix up a page using ASP? Sure thing! I remember once where I worked we had a contractor that developed a system (against my recommendation) using ColdFusion. It had some pretty big bugs, and I was the one that ended up fixing them, despite not having touched CF before. The same for C++ stuff, I don't code in it much, but I'm still good enough to debug and fix issues with other people's projects, though I don't often start my own from-scratch operations anymore.
So what do you want? Do you want a guy who knows your core operations like the back of his hand, and is decent or quick-to-learn on the other stuff? Perhaps you want the guy who knows a little bit of all those, but not much of any. Or maybe you'll just end up with the guy that *says* he knows a lot about these things, perhaps managed to fluff his way through the interview, and ends up doing more harm than good?
I stand by keeping my resume honest, partly because I believe in that type of thing partly because I don't want to get a job I'll lose because I was never qualified in the first place (and my current job is decent, but I'm looking at a different location). I've had the opportunity to lie, I've had people want to hire me - for good pay , but without using my strong skills - and had to refuse because I knew there were better candidates. Jobs are un
I'll play Devil's advocate and go ahead with the assumption that some (in the UK gov't) would think this a good idea. Even thus, there are issues:
I think that, often enough, the lawgivers don't understand the technology and the limits (not in terms of implementation so much as effectiveness and accuracy) of the information. Sure, recording everyone's DNA might be - in a screwed up way - more "fair" to the general public, but it also means that the system has to accommodate much, much more data. Suddenly scaling up a system with - say - 100,000 users or datapoints, to a user base that is in the millions is - depending on how well it was coded for scalability - likely going to bog it down. Suddenly, the tool has a lot more data, but it will take a *lot* longer to access and/or process due to the large of amount of data it has to deal with.
Then you add in the human error. If there's already plenty of that, then expanding the system is almost indefinitely not going to improve that situation. If anything, it's going to make things worse. With the added data, you're greatly increasing your chances of mis-entered data, collisions (people with the same first/last name, etc) and general errors.
From a personal perspective I'm horrified by this. From a technical perspective - if such a system were put into place effectively - I might actually find myself morbidly interesting in the inner workings and how it was put together.
Is it just the R&D that's subsidized, or perhaps the overall cost inherent in the vehicle? Perhaps sales of enviro-friendly vehicles are - in fact - subsidized through taxes as well?
OK, then wake me up when PBXVII does something amazing, because in this case it doesn't look to me like things have changed a lot. Hmm, people want me to face off against the evil corporate monsters, so let's decry the activities of some well-known large corporations. Looks like following the popular vote to me, especially when you consider that the church does plenty things itself to avoid paying the piper.
... oh, wait ... not popular enough.
There are plenty of other things that large corporations - and in fact the corporation that have been mentioned - do that would be far more "evil," and moreover in many cases are actually illegal. This one's an easy way to get publicity and possibly public support though... since most people would be happy to feel a little indignation over tax-related issues. Maybe the pope should take a peek at the AT&T wiretapping scandal
He didn't do anything BAD while in the Hitler Youth, he was just there. imo, that's pretty forgiveable, but I guess you don't agree.
Sometimes doing nothing is bad enough. While I don't expect the average person to defend his (or her) beliefs with his life, I would expect that the man who became the people might have had the strength of faith to do so.
How good government is really depends on the given selection, and the willingness of the people to oppose a bad government.
If you have a democratic-style government, and your choices are Adolph Hitler, Beezelbub, and OJ Simpson, chances are that no matter whom you choose it isn't going to work out very well. In contrast, if you have a dictatorship, monarchy, or whatever, and you happen to have a *good* government (I've heard the King of Thailand is well looked upon), then your country will prosper.
Given a combination of the government and the people, a semi-communist or semi-socialist philosophy may work (although too much of anything is usually not a good thing), but it's pretty hard to build anything on a weak foundation. Corrupt government, or weak citizens in most any case do not make a good foundation for any policy, and abuse will run rampant regardless.
Have the grocery stores already been found guilty of collaboration in relation to price-fixing? The music companies have...
You might think the two aren't related, but the fact is that it's a two-part scenario. The music companies have steadily been milking artists while simultaneously keeping music prices artificially high. Moreover, the lawsuits (or threats thereof) they initiate are designed for purposes of pure intimidation... aimed at making penalties so exorbitant for the possible loss that people are inclined to settle... and therefore making the lawsuits themselves a revenue-producing operation.
Finally, you must add the factor wherein the music companies have gotten many cases wrong, yet in many instances thick-headedly pursued innocent victims. Using their massed power, they have abused the corporate system to drive prices/profits up at the cost of the consumer, while simultaneously abusing the justice system to pummel citizens into the ground without allowing a fair court proceeding.
Sounds like it could also be a TIVO, or a local fileserver with rips of DVD's (I know people that have Terabyte storage just for ripping+archiving movies in a convenient manner)
The first levels in AVP1 were the most freaky, since you were pretty much waiting for aliens to jump out of nowhere... (although it helps to have watched the movie first, I think). I still remember deathmatching a few buddies late at night on AVP2, and hearing them complain that hearing the tickety-tick of my facehugger's claws had them looking around frantically and getting more than a little freaked out in real life
Seriously, one of the towns/villages along my normal work route - population under 1500 - is halfway up a mountain, far enough from the city to be pain to install high-speed, and yet still has internet.
See here for more info. Commercial broadband internet has been available for years, and residential popped in more recently. Here's another town with a population of a little under 3000. We've got areas that are little more than a smudge on the map that have decent broadband, since both Telus and Shaw cable have a good trunk. On top of that, smaller or more-local providers such as OCIS provide internet via shared/leased connections (with their own infrastructure added to make the last mile) and other technologies such as wireless etc... without being strangled off by the big guys
Sorry, but if we Canucks can manage it, the US can too. I'm fairly sure it's a case of piss-poor implementation, support, and just basic greed that keeps it from happening.
And before people start pointing out that the US has more population to reach, I'd like to point out that Canada has plenty of area, and plenty of open space between locations but still manages to for the most-part get internet out to nowheresville across plenty of long-empty distance and nasty unpleasant environmental conditions (no, we don't have 365 snow here, we go range from as much as +40c/104F in summer to -40C/-40F in winter, so we get it *all*)
For an individual, the ability to play WOW online and chat with your friends may be a luxury. However, depending on one's age, being without the technical resources provided by internet access is going to leave one seriously disadvantaged. Moreover, for a business, lack of internet is a very serious hit. Email, and in many cases a webpage etc are extremely important. The GP is right. Maybe in 1997 the internet was more a luxury, but in 2007 when most of your customers have an internet connection, and expect to be able to look your company, your email, and various other such things online, it's very near necessity.
No, it's not something that's 100% necessary. Heck, a human could get by with a sharp stick, a cave, and a campfire, but the fact is that life in this day and age, and much of the communications associated with such, depend on being online to at least some extent. A bigger issue is specifically broadband access, but in this day-and-age I'd say that "broadband" (and I use the term sparingly, become some is near-dialup in terms of speed anyways) is pretty much near the level of requirement as a phone or other similar communications services. It depends on your lifestyle/career too, for somebody in a technical field it shifts from convenience towards necessity rather quickly
Try searching for a job sometime without a decent-speed connection and a cellphone. And for the record, my grandmother has neither and quite often complains about the lack of communication from other family members, whereas my grandparents on the other end of the family are online, and happily receive email from the family up north, replete with pictures of my cousin's young child, and other such messages from their friends back in Europe etc. Not a bare necessity, but definitely a functional part of life.
Doom 3 had those creepy little flying bug things with babies heads. I'd say that if something was going to provoke more of a shock-and-gasp media response than the "Little Sisters." However, I'm not entirely sure about how this plays into the plotline - although it seems that you are given more of a choice over your actions (kill or save) - so maybe it's a little more/less dramatic than it's being made out to be.
Off the top of my head I can recall a few had very odd mainboards, as I tried to find motherboard drivers only to discover the company no longer existed, and the brand itself was very oddball. Floppy/optical drives I wouldn't be so concerned about the brand of, and generally video/sound are integrated on cheaper machines anyways.
You forgot the #@$)(*! NO CARRIER part...
Oh wait, were you serious? I've serviced Dell's, HP's, and Gateways. While the former aren't great comparable to a lot of home-built systems, they're usually not too terrible except for the preloaded crapware. The worst issue I've had with Dell is the seemingly-deliberate introduced incompatibilities with consumer parts (to sell you Dell parts, like a floppy drive at 2.5x normal cost). Gateways, when they blow up (and I think the only reason I don't end up fixing more of them is because they're luckily not that common) tend to have all sorts of interesting components inside... usually a mix of hardware from brands I've never heard of, from companies that no longer exist, because they either recreate themselves regularly to avoid bad publicity or just died off due to suckishess.
How about when the machine gets compromised, aka a file in the hidden directory gets infected, or a virus decides to nest in there. Are you virus-scanners going to find the file, or are they being prevented so because this thing UPDATES A CORE FRICKING API ON YOUR MACHINE. Yes, it's a rootkit. It might not be used for malicious purposes quite so much as the sony-CD's were some time ago, but that doesn't mean it's not compromising the overall security of your system. It's an attempt at security-through-obscurity that endangers the overall system.
Besides - to put it in your terms - if somebody get ahold of your "data fingerprint," what are they going to do? Make fake eyes? Fake fingers?
For anyone who has actually bought the game or used the demo: Does it uninstall when you uninstall the game/demo (or at the least, have an option to remove securom seperately)? If not, that's enough to qualify it as malware in my books.
They'll have a robotic replacement for one of those soon enough as well...
To my understanding, previous presidencies did not have specific "free speech" zones. I was astounded when I heard these passed in the US without a major uprising.
Nobody has explicitly been granted permission to do mine, but I haven't any issues with them doing so (though I do monitor for excessive usage).
Ever been to one of those areas of town that have mixed businesses, private offices, and homes (loft rooms etc) - and you can't tell which is which?
Sorry, but there's not really any way to tell which wireless connections are public and which aren't. I leave my own open in case somebody needs a quick connection, and in the same concept I have hooked into various open wifi's with my PDA when I needed to quickly look something up online (an address, a phone number, or to quickly reference an email).
A door - closed or not - in most places does represent a private residence. However, if you're in the middle of a business district and have an open door then somebody might make a mistake. If you tell him, and he leaves, no problem. However, there's still an easy way to tell people that you are not open for business: CLOSE AND/OR LOCK YOUR DOOR.
The same applies to wireless. Unless an open AP is labelled "dontleech" or something similar, then I can't tell if it's deliberately open or not. Moreover, I can't even tell where it's coming from to ask. And if you're going to label it, then you might as well secure it. While some people might argue that it's too technical, it's not that difficult to read instructions, and most are fairly descriptive in terms of how to secure a wireless connection.