Are these game patches adding new content or just fixing bugs that should've been caught before release? I thought one of the biggest selling points of consoles was "no patches!" Adding features and content is one thing--that's a value-add for people with Internet connections. But if there are serious bugs at release time, what's the point of even buying a console? You can get the same "experience" on a PC.
When consoles become indistinguishable from PCs not just in terms of capability but complexity of operation, will people keep buying them?
I had a hell of a time installing SpellForce because it was very difficult to tell the 0's and O's apart in the key. They only differed by a couple pixels on the corners so you had to squint at 'em to figure out which was which. Finally figured the damn thing out and put slashes through all the zeroes. Really, though, I wonder how no one catches shit like this before it gets out the door. Or maybe they just don't care. "We've already got their money, who cares if they can't read our poorly-printed serial numbers?"
Some bacteria are killed by cold and others just have their reproduction slowed/stopped.
In any case, bacteria themselves aren't what produce odor, it's their waste products. Think about that. You stink because bacteria are doing number two all over your body, but especially under your armpits and around your crotch and ass.
If freezing reduces/eliminates odor, then the waste products of the bacteria are just undergoing a chemical change that makes them not stink anymore. Its effect on the bacteria themselves is a separate issue, although with fewer bacteria there will obviously be fewer smelly byproducts.
People also need to have their inventions protected. Patents exist just as much for the "little guy" as they do for big business. If we can have a model that eliminates the godawful minefield that is the current patent landscape but still offers legal protection for people who invent things, I'd be all for it. All I see happening if we just get rid of patents is a company like Sony or Microsoft catching wind of some little guy's cool new idea, and then utterly appropriating it without compensating him at all. That's the sort of thing patents are meant to prevent.
Exactly. If people lose all their data in/home because they downloaded and ran a malicious program, they aren't going to care one whit that the underlying OS wasn't compromised. All they're going to think is, "This Linux crap isn't as secure as I was told!" Unless it actually does protect people from doing stupid things to their own data/user space, it's not going to matter how secure the underlying platform is.
I'd prefer it if patents were vetted more thoroughly in the first place, but in the absence of that I'll take market leaders like Google focusing on legitimate, quality patents and working to invalidate bogus ones. It may not serve a major business purpose for them but it's a good public service, and good on Google for doing it.
Yeah, if you have 10,000 patents and 9000 of them are bullshit that would be invalidated under real scrutiny, you only really have 1000 patents that are worth a damn. My money's on Google's patent portfolio consisting predominantly of genuine, specific innovations that would hold up in court. Google is hardly perfect but they employ a ton of very bright people. I'd be surprised if they had any more than a tiny fraction of "selling cookies on the Internet"-type patents.
There's no reason this can't be done for spoken numbers, either. Android's built-in voice recognition system could easily be used to monitor whether you've just uttered a string of numbers.
Not to mention, the screen orientation of the 3DS would have to be rendered quite oddly on a TV. To show both screens stacked on top of each other like they are on the unit itself, you'd have about 2/3 of a widescreen TV going to waste. Maybe if widescreen TVs could rotate 90 as a standard feature...
I am not aware of any US jurisdiction where police can pull you over "just because." Probable cause is generally required. If they have the PC to pull you over, however, they can certainly ask for your "papers" and detain you if you don't have them.
There are also sobriety checkpoints in some places, but those are not random stops and I believe their Constitutionality has been challenged more than once.
In practice, there are obviously prick cops who will make up any reason to pull you over if they really want to, but that's not so much a problem with the law as it is a problem with law enforcement oversight.
I could've sworn there was an article on/. some time ago that indicated Facebook employees had to justify accessing "personally interesting" information they didn't have legitimate access to through their FB profile, namely, the sorts of things you mentioned: inboxes of exes, family members, etc. There was a master password and all uses of it were recorded and audited so you had to explain yourself whenever you used it. My memory might be a little fuzzy but it seemed that FB employees didn't have unmonitored access to all data on the site.
Even beyond that, haven't you ever dealt with typical PC users and their endless frustrations with Windows? It's not like they went out of their way to buy Microsoft, it's just what the computer came with. Microsoft didn't get into such a position by having the best image or the best product, they did it through backroom dealing and shutting out their competitors. 90%+ of desktop computers run Windows but if you ask the man on the street how he feels about Windows and/or Microsoft, at best you're likely to get an indifferent answer if not a negative one.
Does anyone really like Microsoft, other than those who swear by their products and services? I really doubt it. Most users just seem to be forced to put up with it and are either ignorant of other options or afraid of trying something unfamiliar.
Then how do you explain Microsoft, which has never had a very positive image, yet managed to dominate both the desktop operating system and Web browser markets?
Just goes to show you, backroom deals and monopolist strongarming also have their place in business, and can sometimes trump "image."
I can install anything I want on my Android phone without having to root it. Your criticism is more applicable to Apple devices, which do require rooting if you want to install "unapproved" software.
I think Wikipedia is large enough that they could dictate terms regarding what sorts of ads they'll run. The Flash-laden, abusive crap you find on some sites probably wouldn't be allowed since it would destroy the user experience. The inline ads would also be destructive to Wikipedia's content, so those are right out. I think simple text- or image-based ads at the top of each page would be acceptable, and they'd have to be for legitimate products and services. I realize there are gray areas as to what's "legitimate," but for most things it's fairly apparent and I suspect Wikipedia would err on the side of caution when vetting what ads to run.
I agree that they shouldn't run ads unless they have to, though.
That's a pretty shitty list, honestly. Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 shouldn't get it by any stretch of the imagination. (Obama already got it. The rest are hardly influential enough to warrant it.) Numbers 8 and 9 appeal to the feel-good human interest angle but lack any substance. That leaves 1, 2, and 10. The bias toward Assange smacks of recentism, given how much he's been in the news lately. I don't know enough about the PM of Turkey to judge him. That leaves Zuck. Given the choice between a foreign leader hardly anyone has heard of and the guy who created Facebook (and about whom a movie was recently made), it's not hard to see how he was chosen. The "best" of limited options, I suppose.
Which would have easily been resolved by requiring a password change at the next login and locking the accounts until that occurred. Just sounds like laziness on Gawker's part.
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Are these game patches adding new content or just fixing bugs that should've been caught before release? I thought one of the biggest selling points of consoles was "no patches!" Adding features and content is one thing--that's a value-add for people with Internet connections. But if there are serious bugs at release time, what's the point of even buying a console? You can get the same "experience" on a PC.
When consoles become indistinguishable from PCs not just in terms of capability but complexity of operation, will people keep buying them?
I had a hell of a time installing SpellForce because it was very difficult to tell the 0's and O's apart in the key. They only differed by a couple pixels on the corners so you had to squint at 'em to figure out which was which. Finally figured the damn thing out and put slashes through all the zeroes. Really, though, I wonder how no one catches shit like this before it gets out the door. Or maybe they just don't care. "We've already got their money, who cares if they can't read our poorly-printed serial numbers?"
Some bacteria are killed by cold and others just have their reproduction slowed/stopped.
In any case, bacteria themselves aren't what produce odor, it's their waste products. Think about that. You stink because bacteria are doing number two all over your body, but especially under your armpits and around your crotch and ass.
If freezing reduces/eliminates odor, then the waste products of the bacteria are just undergoing a chemical change that makes them not stink anymore. Its effect on the bacteria themselves is a separate issue, although with fewer bacteria there will obviously be fewer smelly byproducts.
REST!
Yeah, I'm thinking non-technical users should never be told about sudo. :-p
People also need to have their inventions protected. Patents exist just as much for the "little guy" as they do for big business. If we can have a model that eliminates the godawful minefield that is the current patent landscape but still offers legal protection for people who invent things, I'd be all for it. All I see happening if we just get rid of patents is a company like Sony or Microsoft catching wind of some little guy's cool new idea, and then utterly appropriating it without compensating him at all. That's the sort of thing patents are meant to prevent.
Exactly. If people lose all their data in /home because they downloaded and ran a malicious program, they aren't going to care one whit that the underlying OS wasn't compromised. All they're going to think is, "This Linux crap isn't as secure as I was told!" Unless it actually does protect people from doing stupid things to their own data/user space, it's not going to matter how secure the underlying platform is.
I'd prefer it if patents were vetted more thoroughly in the first place, but in the absence of that I'll take market leaders like Google focusing on legitimate, quality patents and working to invalidate bogus ones. It may not serve a major business purpose for them but it's a good public service, and good on Google for doing it.
Yeah, if you have 10,000 patents and 9000 of them are bullshit that would be invalidated under real scrutiny, you only really have 1000 patents that are worth a damn. My money's on Google's patent portfolio consisting predominantly of genuine, specific innovations that would hold up in court. Google is hardly perfect but they employ a ton of very bright people. I'd be surprised if they had any more than a tiny fraction of "selling cookies on the Internet"-type patents.
There's no reason this can't be done for spoken numbers, either. Android's built-in voice recognition system could easily be used to monitor whether you've just uttered a string of numbers.
Not to mention, the screen orientation of the 3DS would have to be rendered quite oddly on a TV. To show both screens stacked on top of each other like they are on the unit itself, you'd have about 2/3 of a widescreen TV going to waste. Maybe if widescreen TVs could rotate 90 as a standard feature...
I am not aware of any US jurisdiction where police can pull you over "just because." Probable cause is generally required. If they have the PC to pull you over, however, they can certainly ask for your "papers" and detain you if you don't have them.
There are also sobriety checkpoints in some places, but those are not random stops and I believe their Constitutionality has been challenged more than once.
In practice, there are obviously prick cops who will make up any reason to pull you over if they really want to, but that's not so much a problem with the law as it is a problem with law enforcement oversight.
I could've sworn there was an article on /. some time ago that indicated Facebook employees had to justify accessing "personally interesting" information they didn't have legitimate access to through their FB profile, namely, the sorts of things you mentioned: inboxes of exes, family members, etc. There was a master password and all uses of it were recorded and audited so you had to explain yourself whenever you used it. My memory might be a little fuzzy but it seemed that FB employees didn't have unmonitored access to all data on the site.
Even beyond that, haven't you ever dealt with typical PC users and their endless frustrations with Windows? It's not like they went out of their way to buy Microsoft, it's just what the computer came with. Microsoft didn't get into such a position by having the best image or the best product, they did it through backroom dealing and shutting out their competitors. 90%+ of desktop computers run Windows but if you ask the man on the street how he feels about Windows and/or Microsoft, at best you're likely to get an indifferent answer if not a negative one.
Does anyone really like Microsoft, other than those who swear by their products and services? I really doubt it. Most users just seem to be forced to put up with it and are either ignorant of other options or afraid of trying something unfamiliar.
Then how do you explain Microsoft, which has never had a very positive image, yet managed to dominate both the desktop operating system and Web browser markets?
Just goes to show you, backroom deals and monopolist strongarming also have their place in business, and can sometimes trump "image."
I can install anything I want on my Android phone without having to root it. Your criticism is more applicable to Apple devices, which do require rooting if you want to install "unapproved" software.
I have a Samsung Intercept and use ConnectBot, too. I always switch to the physical keyboard for terminal work. Great application.
I think Wikipedia is large enough that they could dictate terms regarding what sorts of ads they'll run. The Flash-laden, abusive crap you find on some sites probably wouldn't be allowed since it would destroy the user experience. The inline ads would also be destructive to Wikipedia's content, so those are right out. I think simple text- or image-based ads at the top of each page would be acceptable, and they'd have to be for legitimate products and services. I realize there are gray areas as to what's "legitimate," but for most things it's fairly apparent and I suspect Wikipedia would err on the side of caution when vetting what ads to run.
I agree that they shouldn't run ads unless they have to, though.
Dear God, then how did the Amiga fail??
I'm well aware, but Wikileaks has never been in the news as much as it has been recently--most people probably never heard of it until very recently.
That's a pretty shitty list, honestly. Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 shouldn't get it by any stretch of the imagination. (Obama already got it. The rest are hardly influential enough to warrant it.) Numbers 8 and 9 appeal to the feel-good human interest angle but lack any substance. That leaves 1, 2, and 10. The bias toward Assange smacks of recentism, given how much he's been in the news lately. I don't know enough about the PM of Turkey to judge him. That leaves Zuck. Given the choice between a foreign leader hardly anyone has heard of and the guy who created Facebook (and about whom a movie was recently made), it's not hard to see how he was chosen. The "best" of limited options, I suppose.
Not all jobs are conducive to this and many companies don't even trust their employees enough to allow it.
Which would have easily been resolved by requiring a password change at the next login and locking the accounts until that occurred. Just sounds like laziness on Gawker's part.
I guess I didn't "get it" because we (on a global scale) never really run out of money, so the joke doesn't make any sense.
I guess that's one way to look at it.