That one was just a lame allegory for global warming, intimating that we should all revert to an agricultural society to keep from destroying the fabric of spacetime surrounding Earth.
Similar to the episode that was a lame allegory for it being okay for a man to fall in love with unattractive lesbians with haircuts customarily seen on men. Or something.
I've read (probably on Wikipedia) that the first season was largely ad-libbed, but they started scripting things a lot more heavily after that, which was one reason why Josh Weinstein (now apparently J. Elvis, to the WGA) left the show.
Still, there are moments I could swear were ad-libs, especially during the Joel years, where Joel or one of the bots would say something and earn a surprised-sounding laugh from the others.
But... it's still just 136 pages. And for $20, that seems a bit steep. I agree. But it's vaguely on-topic to point out that Wizards of the Coast regularly pawns off D&D sourcebooks shorter than 136 pages for more than $20 each.
I agree. Punishment should be done in the interest of society as a whole, not in the interest of one person who was wronged. Correcting the ills that befall the victim is what actual damages are for. Why should a person (or their lawyers) get a windfall because they ran afoul of misfortune or malice?
You've really struck upon the fundamental problem that allowed malware ads to creep onto otherwise reputable sites: There's still a lot of money to be made in web advertising, and in fact, there's so much that you can actually make money by being a middleman. Who knows how many layers of ad resale the malware ads have to go through before they bubble up to a reputable website?
However, I see "ad safety" quickly becoming a selling point for banner ads. No reputable company is going to want their users to get pwned while visiting their website, and many of them lack the technical expertise to vet things from their end. Somebody is going to start touting safety as the reason to use their services, and advertising services will start listing "we don't outsource our ads" on their trade literature.
My money is on Google for that one - they may not be the first to make that a selling point, but they'll probably be the most successful at leveraging it, especially since they won't really have to change their business model at all.
One, you can do things in animation that you can't do in live action without a budget a hundred times as large. Two, the Japanese tend to take on topics that American television won't touch with a ten meter cattleprod (hence great series like GitS:SAC being relegated to late night on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim once or twice a week). And three, a lot of anime isn't sold in the US, meaning that the only way to get it here is over the Intarweb.
Add those three things up and you get anime fans downloading and storing a lot of their favorite movies and series because it's the only way to get their fix.
There's one other huge huge glaring problem here. You have a system with real-world dangerous consequences that is dependent upon the continued proper operation of the software. When the software fails, the hardware apparently has no safe failure mode. This is a serious no-no in system design where improper operation of the hardware could create a hazard.
It's easy to solve. The hardware should be designed with a watchdog timer that, if it ever expires without being reset, triggers a failsafe mode such as releasing the throttle and applying the brakes. Each mission-critical thread should be required to regularly notify a watchdog thread that it is still running, and the watchdog thread sends the watchdog reset signal to the hardware if all of the mission-critical threads are still running. If any thread exits inappropriately, enters an infinite loop, or otherwise stops being able to respond at an acceptable rate, the watchdog timer times out, and the vehicle stops.
I realize that there is a manual system for stopping these vehicles if something goes awry, but as several teams found out the hard way, safety is absolutely paramount. Belt-and-suspenders is the way to go.
Conflation of terms like "complex" and "simple" doesn't hold a candle, at least in my book, to the mathematician's perverse pleasure in naming things after people instead of giving them descriptive names. Maybe it's their version of job security, similar to how case law makes the legal profession completely unapproachable by the layperson.
I understand your concerns about the data stream now being encrypted, and that's a choice you'll have to make for yourself as to whether you trust Blizzard enough not to raid your machine. My main point is that people should make those decisions based upon factual information rather than kneejerk responses to either (1) their own amateur interpretation of data they lack the background to interpret or (2) information purported to be truthful that is disseminated by people who have an agenda against Blizzard/other company.
There's a lot of FUD that surrounds systems like Warden, because it makes it riskier for people to cheat in games such as WoW. Furthermore, some people actually make money based upon the ability to cheat, whether it's people who are selling bot/cheat programs or people who use bot/cheat programs to make it easier to farm gold or items in-game. Anytime Blizzard updates Warden, it's countered by a smear campaign of varying magnitude propped up by those people who are hurt by Warden.
One should consider the risk versus reward of nefarious actions on the part of each of these parties. If the cheaters and cheat profiteers are lying, and Warden doesn't go around sucking private info off of people's machines, then the cheaters aren't any worse off than if they had kept quiet. They still get banned whether they lie or say nothing. If, on the other hand, Blizzard is lying, and Warden really does behave as malware, then Blizzard would not only risk losing millions of dollars if they were ever exposed, but would also face criminal prosecution (most malware is untouchable by the Feds due to international jurisdiction or the anonymity of the purveyors, neither of which applies to Blizzard). While the encryption does make real-time cracking of the datastream more difficult, you can rest assured that somebody will try to decrypt the datastream after the fact to find out just what's being sent back to Blizzard's machines. If Blizzard is lying, they will get caught eventually.
For that reason, it's a much safer assumption for the general public that Blizzard is acting on the up-and-up, compared to the cheaters and cheat purveyors who have a vested interest in tearing down Warden through the spread of FUD.
If that's not sufficient for you, that's your choice, and I respect that you're basing your decision on what you know, rather than what you think you know.
If I get a call from a number I don't recognize, I just don't answer it. Then I look the number up online, and that way, if they call back, I'm now making a better-informed decision not to take their call.
Hopefully at some point enough people will use these sites that it could lead to, for example, scammers getting prosecuted. A lot of the numbers I've looked up on these sites have comments stating that the person on the other end tried to get (sometimes extort) personally-identifiable information and/or money out of their victims.
The difference is that the telemarketers actually call the numbers on the list. The average Joe using these websites simply wants nothing to do with them.
I can't believe I'm forgoing a full complement of mod points to respond to you, but I get tired of seeing people go ape-shit whenever they use tools like regmon and filemon without having clue one as to what they're seeing.
Pretty much any program will make tons of accesses to registry keys that would at first glance appear to have nothing to do with that program, because the program loads a bunch of Windows libraries that access those registry keys whenever they're loaded. The same goes for IE cookies, for any program that uses the IE rendering libraries to render HTML (including things like the frontend patchers for games like EverQuest), because those libraries go through your cookies just the same as IE does when it first loads.
Sorry that you felt it necessary to cancel your WoW account because you didn't understand how your computer works, but at least it gives you a lot more spare time for making tin-foil hats.
While I think the political motivations behind these laws are often different from what you've mentioned, I do think you've hit the big legitimate argument right on the head. When you shove money into a slot machine in Las Vegas, you can at least rest easy that the casino is playing the game fairly. Nevada has a pretty big regulatory structure surrounding casino gambling that does a good job of ensuring that the house only gets its legitimate take.
Of course, then the question becomes, how do you regulate online gambling based in places like Antigua or Costa Rica? I think that's where the US has a legitimate beef concerning internationally-based online gambling, because there's no way to know whether US citizens are getting ripped off or not.
Not only does the stupidity filter help you rise to a higher echelon of intelligence, but it'll save you money, too! Your ISP will be happy to install the stupidity filter on your connection, and it's easy to sign up. Simply stop paying your Internet service bill, and your ISP will add the stupidity filter to your connection in no time! (Allow four to six weeks for delivery.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm..... I suppose I'd pay $3 for Vista.
No, but he does steal your bike.
That one was just a lame allegory for global warming, intimating that we should all revert to an agricultural society to keep from destroying the fabric of spacetime surrounding Earth.
Similar to the episode that was a lame allegory for it being okay for a man to fall in love with unattractive lesbians with haircuts customarily seen on men. Or something.
Don't forget the Master Ninja Theme Song. You probably know the words to that one, too.
I've read (probably on Wikipedia) that the first season was largely ad-libbed, but they started scripting things a lot more heavily after that, which was one reason why Josh Weinstein (now apparently J. Elvis, to the WGA) left the show.
Still, there are moments I could swear were ad-libs, especially during the Joel years, where Joel or one of the bots would say something and earn a surprised-sounding laugh from the others.
All I know is a pint's a pound the world around. The difference is that pounds are easier to carry in your wallet and don't taste quite as good.
And don't try to tell me otherwise!
I agree. Punishment should be done in the interest of society as a whole, not in the interest of one person who was wronged. Correcting the ills that befall the victim is what actual damages are for. Why should a person (or their lawyers) get a windfall because they ran afoul of misfortune or malice?
You've really struck upon the fundamental problem that allowed malware ads to creep onto otherwise reputable sites: There's still a lot of money to be made in web advertising, and in fact, there's so much that you can actually make money by being a middleman. Who knows how many layers of ad resale the malware ads have to go through before they bubble up to a reputable website?
However, I see "ad safety" quickly becoming a selling point for banner ads. No reputable company is going to want their users to get pwned while visiting their website, and many of them lack the technical expertise to vet things from their end. Somebody is going to start touting safety as the reason to use their services, and advertising services will start listing "we don't outsource our ads" on their trade literature.
My money is on Google for that one - they may not be the first to make that a selling point, but they'll probably be the most successful at leveraging it, especially since they won't really have to change their business model at all.
One, you can do things in animation that you can't do in live action without a budget a hundred times as large. Two, the Japanese tend to take on topics that American television won't touch with a ten meter cattleprod (hence great series like GitS:SAC being relegated to late night on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim once or twice a week). And three, a lot of anime isn't sold in the US, meaning that the only way to get it here is over the Intarweb.
Add those three things up and you get anime fans downloading and storing a lot of their favorite movies and series because it's the only way to get their fix.
They do, but fortunately for him, the MPAA's lasers are no match for his 24th-century shield technology.
Hey, it's the show that launched the careers of Lawrence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson. It's gotta be good!
There's one other huge huge glaring problem here. You have a system with real-world dangerous consequences that is dependent upon the continued proper operation of the software. When the software fails, the hardware apparently has no safe failure mode. This is a serious no-no in system design where improper operation of the hardware could create a hazard.
It's easy to solve. The hardware should be designed with a watchdog timer that, if it ever expires without being reset, triggers a failsafe mode such as releasing the throttle and applying the brakes. Each mission-critical thread should be required to regularly notify a watchdog thread that it is still running, and the watchdog thread sends the watchdog reset signal to the hardware if all of the mission-critical threads are still running. If any thread exits inappropriately, enters an infinite loop, or otherwise stops being able to respond at an acceptable rate, the watchdog timer times out, and the vehicle stops.
I realize that there is a manual system for stopping these vehicles if something goes awry, but as several teams found out the hard way, safety is absolutely paramount. Belt-and-suspenders is the way to go.
Conflation of terms like "complex" and "simple" doesn't hold a candle, at least in my book, to the mathematician's perverse pleasure in naming things after people instead of giving them descriptive names. Maybe it's their version of job security, similar to how case law makes the legal profession completely unapproachable by the layperson.
If Bronfman really cared about the customer, he'd read this article and speak out against the RIAA's assault on college financial aid.
I understand your concerns about the data stream now being encrypted, and that's a choice you'll have to make for yourself as to whether you trust Blizzard enough not to raid your machine. My main point is that people should make those decisions based upon factual information rather than kneejerk responses to either (1) their own amateur interpretation of data they lack the background to interpret or (2) information purported to be truthful that is disseminated by people who have an agenda against Blizzard/other company.
There's a lot of FUD that surrounds systems like Warden, because it makes it riskier for people to cheat in games such as WoW. Furthermore, some people actually make money based upon the ability to cheat, whether it's people who are selling bot/cheat programs or people who use bot/cheat programs to make it easier to farm gold or items in-game. Anytime Blizzard updates Warden, it's countered by a smear campaign of varying magnitude propped up by those people who are hurt by Warden.
One should consider the risk versus reward of nefarious actions on the part of each of these parties. If the cheaters and cheat profiteers are lying, and Warden doesn't go around sucking private info off of people's machines, then the cheaters aren't any worse off than if they had kept quiet. They still get banned whether they lie or say nothing. If, on the other hand, Blizzard is lying, and Warden really does behave as malware, then Blizzard would not only risk losing millions of dollars if they were ever exposed, but would also face criminal prosecution (most malware is untouchable by the Feds due to international jurisdiction or the anonymity of the purveyors, neither of which applies to Blizzard). While the encryption does make real-time cracking of the datastream more difficult, you can rest assured that somebody will try to decrypt the datastream after the fact to find out just what's being sent back to Blizzard's machines. If Blizzard is lying, they will get caught eventually.
For that reason, it's a much safer assumption for the general public that Blizzard is acting on the up-and-up, compared to the cheaters and cheat purveyors who have a vested interest in tearing down Warden through the spread of FUD.
If that's not sufficient for you, that's your choice, and I respect that you're basing your decision on what you know, rather than what you think you know.
Dr. Zoidberg: I wouldn't want to follow that guy!
If I get a call from a number I don't recognize, I just don't answer it. Then I look the number up online, and that way, if they call back, I'm now making a better-informed decision not to take their call.
Hopefully at some point enough people will use these sites that it could lead to, for example, scammers getting prosecuted. A lot of the numbers I've looked up on these sites have comments stating that the person on the other end tried to get (sometimes extort) personally-identifiable information and/or money out of their victims.
The difference is that the telemarketers actually call the numbers on the list. The average Joe using these websites simply wants nothing to do with them.
I can't believe I'm forgoing a full complement of mod points to respond to you, but I get tired of seeing people go ape-shit whenever they use tools like regmon and filemon without having clue one as to what they're seeing.
Pretty much any program will make tons of accesses to registry keys that would at first glance appear to have nothing to do with that program, because the program loads a bunch of Windows libraries that access those registry keys whenever they're loaded. The same goes for IE cookies, for any program that uses the IE rendering libraries to render HTML (including things like the frontend patchers for games like EverQuest), because those libraries go through your cookies just the same as IE does when it first loads.
Sorry that you felt it necessary to cancel your WoW account because you didn't understand how your computer works, but at least it gives you a lot more spare time for making tin-foil hats.
I personally prefer "Firefoxius Noscriptius".
While I think the political motivations behind these laws are often different from what you've mentioned, I do think you've hit the big legitimate argument right on the head. When you shove money into a slot machine in Las Vegas, you can at least rest easy that the casino is playing the game fairly. Nevada has a pretty big regulatory structure surrounding casino gambling that does a good job of ensuring that the house only gets its legitimate take.
Of course, then the question becomes, how do you regulate online gambling based in places like Antigua or Costa Rica? I think that's where the US has a legitimate beef concerning internationally-based online gambling, because there's no way to know whether US citizens are getting ripped off or not.
Not only does the stupidity filter help you rise to a higher echelon of intelligence, but it'll save you money, too! Your ISP will be happy to install the stupidity filter on your connection, and it's easy to sign up. Simply stop paying your Internet service bill, and your ISP will add the stupidity filter to your connection in no time! (Allow four to six weeks for delivery.)
The biggest reason that Enterprise sucked total ass was because of time travel, the "temporal cold war", and alien space Nazis.
Paramount takes a few years off to let the franchise breathe again, and they come back revitalized with... more time travel crap?!
When will they ever learn?