Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk.
ABS compensates when the driver brakes too hard, but does not discourage the driver from taking such action in the future. A drunk-driving detector won't compensate for your poor driving while drunk, but it will instead warn you of your impairment to discourage you from continuing to drive. Those are two very different concepts.
The most disturbing part of this story is the new link between having stacks of cash at your disposal and specific success in the game. That is, if you can afford to collect all the best cards due to your RL wealth, you get special bonus prizes in the game. And apparently, not some dinky thing like you get when you fork over the extra $20 for the collector's edition of a MMOG, but actual worthwhile items.
This further weakens the barrier between RL wealth and in-game property, and sadly, bolsters the position of the RMTers. Of course, SOE has always been happy to sacrifice integrity to make an extra buck (such as EQ Legends, the EQ2Bay server, and about three times as many $25 expansions released as they really needed to).
Sorry, I guess I was going by the context further up in the thread of national news coverage, and missed the context that the parent to my post provided by saying "on the planet".
In Nevada, it's dependent not upon a total expectation of privacy, but upon the expectation that one's conversation won't be "intercepted". A sign outside the conference room saying "listening/recording devices prohibited" would have an effect on that expectation, and having to undergo a cursory search for such devices before admittance would be even better.
The statute reads as follows:
NRS 200.650 Unauthorized, surreptitious intrusion of privacy by listening device prohibited. Except as otherwise provided in NRS 179.410 to 179.515, inclusive, and 704.195, a person shall not intrude upon the privacy of other persons by surreptitiously listening to, monitoring or recording, or attempting to listen to, monitor or record, by means of any mechanical, electronic or other listening device, any private conversation engaged in by the other persons, or disclose the existence, content, substance, purport, effect or meaning of any conversation so listened to, monitored or recorded, unless authorized to do so by one of the persons engaging in the conversation.
The relevant definitions are
NRS 179.430 "Intercept" defined. "Intercept" means the aural acquisition of the contents of any wire or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical or other device or of any sending or receiving equipment.
NRS 179.440 "Oral communication" defined. "Oral communication" means any verbal message uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception, under circumstances justifying such expectation.
Sitting there writing down the contents of an overheard conversation is much, much different than recording it. Your scribbled notes or your memory of the conversation, in the context of a prosecution for events described in the conversation in question, would be considered hearsay. Your recording of that same conversation would not be considered hearsay (though it may not be admissible for other reasons). That's probably the biggest legal difference between the two.
It needs to return to the time where a reporter simply told what they saw,
You might look at a couple of independentweblogs by reporters who are currently embedded with the military in Iraq. They're on the ground, not beholden to corporate bosses, and telling it like it is. They give a much rosier picture than US mainstream media provides. Their personal politics are right-leaning, but if that's a concern to you, just go into it with your conservafilters turned on.
I should point out that while their reports have been published on the Fox News website, their reports are subsidized exclusively by reader donations.
New York Times LA Times Washington Post San Francisco Chronicle National Public Radio CBS NBC ABC Time Newsweek
All of these are easily left-leaning news outlets, either in major cities or with major nationwide reach. I'd mod you funny, but I think you actually somehow believe that the news media is suddenly dominated by the right after all these decades.
Debatably, CNN and MSNBC used to be left of center, but when Fox News showed that roughly half the country (a) was right of center and (b) watched cable news, they revised their lineups to be more inclusive.
Okay, suppose you're The Mole, on the hunt for those evil conference-attending black-hats. You're at the conference, and a presentation is being given. Well, Defcon presenters aren't stupid - as with any other publicized event where semi- and fully-illegal activities are being discussed, they know the Feds are there, posing as mild-mannered Joe Sixpack who enjoys hax0ring his TiVo in his spare time. They're not going to incriminate themselves on stage.
While you're there, you find yourself next to Fr3d and b0b, two black hats talking about "cracking the IRS d-base" or something. You pick up their conversation on your cleverly-disguised lapel pin flower microphone, but just to make sure, you lean in and ask them to repeate what they just said.
Now, the first time their conversation appears on the tape, it indicates that you've already broken the law, even in Nevada. Zero parties who were part of the conversation were aware of your recording device. After you ask them to repeat themselves, it's a matter of debate (possibly for a jury) as to whether you were part of the conversation, but they'd be crazy to repeat themselves to someone who says, "Could you speak up and say that again into my flower, please?"
GameTap actually is a pretty good service, as several posters above have indicated. Lots of good games, including a number of recent releases such as Legend and Anniversary from the Tomb Raider series, and numerous older arcade and console games. The six Sam and Max episodes are worth the subscription fee alone, and there's a second "season" worth of those coming out later this year.
They recently switched to a sort of three-tier service. One tier is free, a subset of their game catalog that you can play without subscribing, as long as you don't mind sitting through an ad before you play a game. A portion of the free games rotate in and out of the selection every week or two.
The next tier is the subscription tier, in which you get unlimited access to their entire game catalog as long as you subscribe (and as long as you're connected to their servers).
The third tier is kind of separate - it's the ability to purchase and download games similar to how Stardock and Direct2Drive work. You don't really get a good deal on these games compared to Amazon, though, to be honest. Most of the purchase games are more recent, although some of them are also in the subscription tier catalog.
I do have a few beefs with GameTap, though. The past couple of months have seen the new games (they usually release about 5 new games a week) taken up mostly with fighting games. A few fighting games, sure, a dozen, maybe. But we're talking numerous fighting games here. I'm willing to forgive them this point, because they are making good deals with companies like Codemasters and Eidos to get some or all of their games on board. A dry spell isn't too bad if we get the monsoon eventually.
Another problem is that you (in most cases) sacrifice the ability to add custom mods to games that, when purchased, are very moddable. This is because GameTap uses a third-party content encryption scheme that locks up the games to prevent copying. Essentially, each game image includes two virtual drives: one for the game CD (if needed), and one for the install directory for the game itself. When you select a game to play, GameTap mounts the drive images, which have been preinstalled and configured. The virtual drive driver blocks access to the mounted images from other processes, preventing you from reading directory names or writing files to the images (there are ways to get around this, if you can convince the game process or a child process to do the work for you, but most games don't have a means of accomplishing this).
Vista's virtualization scheme concerning the Program Files directory tree is an example, though, of how GameTap could permit users to add third-party mods to the games without needing direct access to the virtual drive images. Numerous users have requested such a facility, but since the DRM is from a third party instead of being developed in-house, it's unlikely we'll see this feature request fulfilled.
The final, and biggest, beef is that GameTap does not permit you to unsubscribe without human interaction. You have to either call in by phone or use the website's online chat feature to contact customer service. The CSR will ask why you want to cancel your service, and depending on your answer, they will try to give you the hard sell, such as going through all the reasons that GameTap owns your world or offering you a free or reduced single month on the spot to change your mind. Since virtually all subscription game services, such as MMOGs, permit you to subscribe and unsubscribe with a few clicks, GameTap comes up woefully short here.
No kidding. They've been using UAVs that they can control from pretty much anywhere that actually fire missiles. What makes this different is that it's much more likely to be operating in close proximity to our own troops and known civilians, so there's a greater risk of friendly fire incidents.
Whoa, dude. By "slashvertisement", I wasn't attempting to imply that you guys were getting kickbacks - merely that an article submission itself looks like it was written more to sell something to one's fellow Slashdotters than to inform one's fellow Slashdotters of something interesting. Same thing happens on Wikipedia all the time.
Since the article was written by its submitter, the quality of the article is mainly on them. If it's pure advertising copy, that's on them, first and foremost. Still, you might consider taking the hint that Slashdotters are offering when the "slashvertisement" tag appears on an article, namely that the article crosses a line that your readership would rather not see crossed.
I've noticed that a lot of times this happens when the article describes a product with purported scientific basis, but when you go to read the linked webpage, it turns out that there's really no scientific substance to it at all. Since most Slashdotters are interested in the nuts and bolts more so than forking over cash for something of dubious usefulness, such articles get railed against.
On a side note, if there are problems with quality-of-article at certain points during the day, you might consider automatic queueing and posting of articles to add some pacing, so that article quality doesn't decrease during the off hours. Instead of several articles showing up during a short span, the editors could add the articles to a queue which automatically adds a new article to the front page after a somewhat random period of time.
On another side note, regarding the Firehose spam in the first place, I don't think nofollow is going to cut it. Lots of weblogs and forums have nofollow on their links as well, and some weblogs and forums haven't even been posted to in months. That doesn't stop the spambots from posting to them, because of the possibility of someone seeing the spam eventually (which is the whole point of spam). If the threshold for worthwhileness of posting spam is that low, the Firehose is a gold mine in comparison.
If the purpose of spam is to get people to see its contents, and the purpose of the Firehose is to let people see most or all of the article submissions, then doesn't the Firehose encourage spam submissions?
Aside from the thinly-veiled slashvertisements we sometimes see, the average front page reader on Slashdot doesn't see the spam, because it's rejected by the editors. With the Firehose, there are at least some eyeballs looking at all those rejected submissions, so it's worth the spammers' time to submit more spam even if it never makes it past the Firehose, because it gets seen on the Firehose.
The first Internet was partly designed by large corporations who viewed it as a tool for doing whatever business they did at the time. Today, large corporations view the Internet as a product in itself. That's a huge difference.
the two guys who created the Spice Girls that killed good music, and that was before teh Intarweb had gained rampant popularity. It's all been downhill from there.
One of the complaints the cable industry has about CableCard is that it's one-way (which means that they can't use it to push PPV to the customer). Presumably, this would mean that private efforts to crack CableCard (which would also require hardware hacking, since there are no PCI cards that will accept and read from a CableCard) would be undetectable.
Cable companies could also run afoul of the law for revoking a CableCard lease, since they are required by law to make it available to their consumers (not that this requirement has actually affected their behavior, of course).
Less spam, but more ads. Digital signatures through encrypted browsers with DMCA-backed hack prevention to prevent filtering out the ads. More ads means more annoying ads, to distract you from the other ads on the same page.
In general, I'd take our current Intarweb over that, warts and all.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a bad idea. It will encourage drivers to drive drunk.
ABS compensates when the driver brakes too hard, but does not discourage the driver from taking such action in the future. A drunk-driving detector won't compensate for your poor driving while drunk, but it will instead warn you of your impairment to discourage you from continuing to drive. Those are two very different concepts.
The most disturbing part of this story is the new link between having stacks of cash at your disposal and specific success in the game. That is, if you can afford to collect all the best cards due to your RL wealth, you get special bonus prizes in the game. And apparently, not some dinky thing like you get when you fork over the extra $20 for the collector's edition of a MMOG, but actual worthwhile items.
This further weakens the barrier between RL wealth and in-game property, and sadly, bolsters the position of the RMTers. Of course, SOE has always been happy to sacrifice integrity to make an extra buck (such as EQ Legends, the EQ2Bay server, and about three times as many $25 expansions released as they really needed to).
Sorry, I guess I was going by the context further up in the thread of national news coverage, and missed the context that the parent to my post provided by saying "on the planet".
The statute reads as follows:The relevant definitions areSitting there writing down the contents of an overheard conversation is much, much different than recording it. Your scribbled notes or your memory of the conversation, in the context of a prosecution for events described in the conversation in question, would be considered hearsay. Your recording of that same conversation would not be considered hearsay (though it may not be admissible for other reasons). That's probably the biggest legal difference between the two.
It needs to return to the time where a reporter simply told what they saw,
You might look at a couple of independent weblogs by reporters who are currently embedded with the military in Iraq. They're on the ground, not beholden to corporate bosses, and telling it like it is. They give a much rosier picture than US mainstream media provides. Their personal politics are right-leaning, but if that's a concern to you, just go into it with your conservafilters turned on.
I should point out that while their reports have been published on the Fox News website, their reports are subsidized exclusively by reader donations.
New York Times
LA Times
Washington Post
San Francisco Chronicle
National Public Radio
CBS
NBC
ABC
Time
Newsweek
All of these are easily left-leaning news outlets, either in major cities or with major nationwide reach. I'd mod you funny, but I think you actually somehow believe that the news media is suddenly dominated by the right after all these decades.
Debatably, CNN and MSNBC used to be left of center, but when Fox News showed that roughly half the country (a) was right of center and (b) watched cable news, they revised their lineups to be more inclusive.
Okay, suppose you're The Mole, on the hunt for those evil conference-attending black-hats. You're at the conference, and a presentation is being given. Well, Defcon presenters aren't stupid - as with any other publicized event where semi- and fully-illegal activities are being discussed, they know the Feds are there, posing as mild-mannered Joe Sixpack who enjoys hax0ring his TiVo in his spare time. They're not going to incriminate themselves on stage.
While you're there, you find yourself next to Fr3d and b0b, two black hats talking about "cracking the IRS d-base" or something. You pick up their conversation on your cleverly-disguised lapel pin flower microphone, but just to make sure, you lean in and ask them to repeate what they just said.
Now, the first time their conversation appears on the tape, it indicates that you've already broken the law, even in Nevada. Zero parties who were part of the conversation were aware of your recording device. After you ask them to repeat themselves, it's a matter of debate (possibly for a jury) as to whether you were part of the conversation, but they'd be crazy to repeat themselves to someone who says, "Could you speak up and say that again into my flower, please?"
Now, nearly all are simple mouth pieces of the republican party (and will probably turn shrill when the dems win).
Dammit, where's my mod points when I need them? That's the most hilarious thing I've seen on Slashdot in weeks.
GameTap actually is a pretty good service, as several posters above have indicated. Lots of good games, including a number of recent releases such as Legend and Anniversary from the Tomb Raider series, and numerous older arcade and console games. The six Sam and Max episodes are worth the subscription fee alone, and there's a second "season" worth of those coming out later this year.
They recently switched to a sort of three-tier service. One tier is free, a subset of their game catalog that you can play without subscribing, as long as you don't mind sitting through an ad before you play a game. A portion of the free games rotate in and out of the selection every week or two.
The next tier is the subscription tier, in which you get unlimited access to their entire game catalog as long as you subscribe (and as long as you're connected to their servers).
The third tier is kind of separate - it's the ability to purchase and download games similar to how Stardock and Direct2Drive work. You don't really get a good deal on these games compared to Amazon, though, to be honest. Most of the purchase games are more recent, although some of them are also in the subscription tier catalog.
I do have a few beefs with GameTap, though. The past couple of months have seen the new games (they usually release about 5 new games a week) taken up mostly with fighting games. A few fighting games, sure, a dozen, maybe. But we're talking numerous fighting games here. I'm willing to forgive them this point, because they are making good deals with companies like Codemasters and Eidos to get some or all of their games on board. A dry spell isn't too bad if we get the monsoon eventually.
Another problem is that you (in most cases) sacrifice the ability to add custom mods to games that, when purchased, are very moddable. This is because GameTap uses a third-party content encryption scheme that locks up the games to prevent copying. Essentially, each game image includes two virtual drives: one for the game CD (if needed), and one for the install directory for the game itself. When you select a game to play, GameTap mounts the drive images, which have been preinstalled and configured. The virtual drive driver blocks access to the mounted images from other processes, preventing you from reading directory names or writing files to the images (there are ways to get around this, if you can convince the game process or a child process to do the work for you, but most games don't have a means of accomplishing this).
Vista's virtualization scheme concerning the Program Files directory tree is an example, though, of how GameTap could permit users to add third-party mods to the games without needing direct access to the virtual drive images. Numerous users have requested such a facility, but since the DRM is from a third party instead of being developed in-house, it's unlikely we'll see this feature request fulfilled.
The final, and biggest, beef is that GameTap does not permit you to unsubscribe without human interaction. You have to either call in by phone or use the website's online chat feature to contact customer service. The CSR will ask why you want to cancel your service, and depending on your answer, they will try to give you the hard sell, such as going through all the reasons that GameTap owns your world or offering you a free or reduced single month on the spot to change your mind. Since virtually all subscription game services, such as MMOGs, permit you to subscribe and unsubscribe with a few clicks, GameTap comes up woefully short here.
Rock-paper-scissors will have to decide this, guys.
Good ol' rock. Nothing beats that.
I'm guessing the "Goatse Wingding super font pack" is not on that list.
Today's episode of Slashdot has been brought to you by the letter O.
Next up: the Anal Bum Cover.
No kidding. They've been using UAVs that they can control from pretty much anywhere that actually fire missiles. What makes this different is that it's much more likely to be operating in close proximity to our own troops and known civilians, so there's a greater risk of friendly fire incidents.
Whoa, dude. By "slashvertisement", I wasn't attempting to imply that you guys were getting kickbacks - merely that an article submission itself looks like it was written more to sell something to one's fellow Slashdotters than to inform one's fellow Slashdotters of something interesting. Same thing happens on Wikipedia all the time.
Since the article was written by its submitter, the quality of the article is mainly on them. If it's pure advertising copy, that's on them, first and foremost. Still, you might consider taking the hint that Slashdotters are offering when the "slashvertisement" tag appears on an article, namely that the article crosses a line that your readership would rather not see crossed.
I've noticed that a lot of times this happens when the article describes a product with purported scientific basis, but when you go to read the linked webpage, it turns out that there's really no scientific substance to it at all. Since most Slashdotters are interested in the nuts and bolts more so than forking over cash for something of dubious usefulness, such articles get railed against.
On a side note, if there are problems with quality-of-article at certain points during the day, you might consider automatic queueing and posting of articles to add some pacing, so that article quality doesn't decrease during the off hours. Instead of several articles showing up during a short span, the editors could add the articles to a queue which automatically adds a new article to the front page after a somewhat random period of time.
On another side note, regarding the Firehose spam in the first place, I don't think nofollow is going to cut it. Lots of weblogs and forums have nofollow on their links as well, and some weblogs and forums haven't even been posted to in months. That doesn't stop the spambots from posting to them, because of the possibility of someone seeing the spam eventually (which is the whole point of spam). If the threshold for worthwhileness of posting spam is that low, the Firehose is a gold mine in comparison.
If the purpose of spam is to get people to see its contents, and the purpose of the Firehose is to let people see most or all of the article submissions, then doesn't the Firehose encourage spam submissions?
Aside from the thinly-veiled slashvertisements we sometimes see, the average front page reader on Slashdot doesn't see the spam, because it's rejected by the editors. With the Firehose, there are at least some eyeballs looking at all those rejected submissions, so it's worth the spammers' time to submit more spam even if it never makes it past the Firehose, because it gets seen on the Firehose.
Does a CableCard device that doesn't make use of any upstream functionality (i.e., no PPV, no channel guide) have to conform to OCAP?
The first Internet was partly designed by large corporations who viewed it as a tool for doing whatever business they did at the time. Today, large corporations view the Internet as a product in itself. That's a huge difference.
the two guys who created the Spice Girls that killed good music, and that was before teh Intarweb had gained rampant popularity. It's all been downhill from there.
One of the complaints the cable industry has about CableCard is that it's one-way (which means that they can't use it to push PPV to the customer). Presumably, this would mean that private efforts to crack CableCard (which would also require hardware hacking, since there are no PCI cards that will accept and read from a CableCard) would be undetectable.
Cable companies could also run afoul of the law for revoking a CableCard lease, since they are required by law to make it available to their consumers (not that this requirement has actually affected their behavior, of course).
Well, of course it does... in France.
Less spam, but more ads. Digital signatures through encrypted browsers with DMCA-backed hack prevention to prevent filtering out the ads. More ads means more annoying ads, to distract you from the other ads on the same page.
In general, I'd take our current Intarweb over that, warts and all.
Maybe because I was only kinda trying to be funny.
...with selling such a tiny car in the US is that "Escalade" is French for "trash compactor".
Who said anything about conducting up a stream of water (or urine)?
Rumor has it that one or more of these DVDs will feature a very special full-length episode of Everybody Loves Hypno-Toad.
All glory to the Hypno-Toad!