"More progressive" is relative. Keep in mind that there are still entirely too many places where this shit still happens. I don't know much about Egypt, but if they don't have honor killings, that puts them ahead.
I mean, yes, the Internet is important. Yes, it's probably what will prevent this kind of thing in the first place. But let's keep in mind what's really important here.
That's like saying, they could just buy a PC. That's what I'd do, but that's also missing the point.point.
Aside from the opportunity to play around with different hardware, aside from the need to use their own hardware -- seriously, "just" throw away the PS3 you paid several hundred dollars for and buy a 360, because Sony decided to kill Other OS? -- there's also the fact that the PS3 has the Cell, which is much better at certain things than the 360.
If you're talking about XNA, by the way, go back and read the above. Does the 360 let me run whatever I want on bare metal, or do I need an exploit? If I need an exploit, what's your point?
It's more surprising that they think this will accomplish anything other than harassing this one guy. The damage is done -- everyone who wanted the keys has them, and there's nothing Sony can do about that.
The better solution is to actually stick to your boycott. Don't buy anything Sony, ever. Making it only "for some time" makes it clear that Sony can do whatever they want so long as they're willing to take a short-term financial hit, and that's assuming there are enough people to even make that point.
From the presentation I saw, it looks like roughly 80-90% of the work in completely pwning the PS3 was unrelated to piracy or cheating. That is, roughly 10-20% of what they did could've been used for piracy, the rest was for the complete and permanent ability to run any homebrew they like without restrictions, including (say) Linux with access to the PS3's GPU.
Also, note that the PS3 was pretty much left alone until Sony killed Other OS. So long as people were allowed to run Linux on the PS3, it was left alone. From the date Sony killed Other OS until it was completely pwned is about the same amount of time it took to pwn other systems (Wii, 360) from when they were initially released.
Essentially, if Sony had left Other OS intact, it's very likely people wouldn't be able to pirate stuff today.
I think it really depends what the glitch is. I know more than one game in which a glitch of some sort actually becomes a legitimate part of the game -- if it takes a significant amount of skill to master, and it doesn't really offer that huge of an advantage, what's the harm? Indeed, in some cases, I would argue fixing the glitch would actually result in a worse game.
A few examples:
The weird physics in Quake, especially Quake III, if I recall. Rocket-jumping, bunny-hopping, etc. These lead to things like the defrag mod, in which exploiting these borderline glitches becomes a sport.
Then there's the sword glitch in Halo 2. It's entirely possible to defend against, and it does take some amount of skill to execute properly. I can see where it might screw up the balance enough, but they deliberately left it in single-player.
Probably the best example is also the most obscure I can think of: In Nexus TK, a 2D for-pay MMO that I'd be very surprised if anyone here has heard of, there's the weird property where if a character is healed by any amount at the precise moment they've died, no matter how much they were overkilled by, they'll still be (barely) alive -- but the actual behavior is a bit more complex, tricky to nail correctly, and unreliable.
This means you can have one character being chased around by a sizable group of others, taking more damage than their maximum health, and if they time their self-heals properly, even the very weakest self-heal that everyone has, they can stay alive much longer than they should be able to. The Barbarians have even made this into a game, with in-game prizes -- put a group of people together, and I'll spare the details, but the goal is effectively to try to kill everyone else in a situation where everyone will be incredibly low health, and thus the only way to win is to constantly "heal out" -- as in, heal out of death.
Of course, there are glitches which completely ruin the game -- so long as I'm talking about Nexus, its entire in-game economy had to be reset once because of a gold-duplicating bug. But not all bugs are bad, and sometimes "hey it's part of the game" is legitimate.
I don't think that's the point here. It seems much more likely that it's a case where there was some sort of exploit or other trick -- other comments in this thread have suggested things like taking someone else's savegame, modifying it to match your account, then loading it onto your own xbox. Especially with multiplayer games, this leads to things like a discrepancy between what your xbox/account claims and what their servers actually know, or multiplayer achievements apparently earned offline, or obtaining an achievement known to be incomplete/bugged, or one for DLC which hasn't been released yet...
Or, of course, classic stuff like exploiting glitches in the gameplay itself.
In other words, it's not a question of how good you can play, it's a question of effectively violating the laws of physics of the game, or making an end-run around the game itself and convincing the network that you have an achievement when you don't.
That tweet isn't nearly enough information to know what the deal is, but this seems like a much more reasonable explanation.
The results with instant search are different, but I still get tons of torrent results near the top, and Google even helpfully suggests 'download' after I type a movie title and 'torrent'.
So, it's not really clear what or how much they're actually censoring. I still wish they weren't doing whatever it is they're doing, but I don't know how much I care when I can't really even tell what it is they're doing.
Interestingly, when I type exactly those keywords, the very first hit is on kickasstorrents.com, and it even helpfully suggests "download" as a term. I have noticed certain sites end up at different places before and after I hit enter...
It looks as though the only thing they've done is remove it from possible autocompletions.
Nope, it was in fact a Webkit bug, and one which has been fixed, and the fix should be included in Chrome 10. Of course, we won't really see it, because the new design, for whatever reason, doesn't trigger that bug.
I like the whitespace. I don't see what you're talking about with the solid colors (I see gradients) or the "boxed" design.
I don't really see any difference in the fonts, and ctrl+mousewheel works.
Submission box doesn't look significantly smaller, though I didn't submit many stories. It also does (to an extent) respond to Chrome/Safari's ability to resize textareas.
And, really? I mean, I guess I can see it -- I refuse to read certain sites because their layout manages to shove ads into 80% of the space, leaving only about 20% for actual content -- but all these years, and this is what's enough for you to leave?
First attempt to paste: Works. Any other attempts: Works on comments.pl, fails on any actual story page.
Also, whether it failed or not, pasting would incur massive lag. All of this behavior applied to middle-click (Linux), ctrl+v, right-click/paste, basically any way you chose to paste.
However, I do take back what I've said about the redesign being faster. It's more responsive, but right now, I have five tabs open, and Chrome is eating ~25% CPU, pretty much entirely idle. Closing the Slashdot tab will drop it down to under 5%. The other tabs aren't exactly lightweight, either -- GMail, two different versions of Blackboard, and a blog post from John Resig (alright, that might be lightweight).
It's especially disturbing that this is the idle usage, and it scales with the number of slashdot tabs I have open. WTF do they have on a timer that they could be doing with ordinary events?
For what it's worth, it is MUCH faster for me on Chrome than the old design. The page load time alone is worth it. I don't actually see anything that's either slower or buggier.
Religion is just the hoopla that forms around an idea (specifically, one that claims to hold the solution to mankind's ills).
The dictionary definition disagrees. Yes, it's what forms around an idea, but it's not just any idea.
You're the one who referred to your anti-religious stance as a battle you've picked. How does the word militant not apply?
Have you never heard the phrase "choose your battles" in a non-militaristic scenario? Maybe as a general life principle? By your logic, what wouldn't be "militant"?
Dawkins has repeatedly made it clear that religion is an impediment to a better society, that we suffer unnecessarily because of it.
I would agree with that.
His solution for society? Abolish religion.
Ah, but here, citation needed.
make it explicitly clear that there is nothing that causes more suffering in the world than religion, and that the only solution is to end religion.
If I said so explicitly, please show me where. You do know what explicit means, don't you?
You'd think you'd be more careful after your earlier "careless hyperbole". Perhaps you meant implicitly? If so, I'm waiting to hear your explanation, because I think you were inferring something which simply isn't there -- that is, yet another strawman.
In fact, I'm not convinced that religion causes the most suffering, but I find it particularly evil because it's one of the few things which can make a good person do evil things, while believing they are doing the right thing.
I certainly don't think the "only" solution is to eliminate religion, and I don't think that's a solution at all, largely because it wouldn't work, and if it did, the cost would be too high. I would rather seek to ensure religion has no privileged status, that it can be freely questioned and debated, and that it loses the influence it still has on government. That would be sufficient.
Certainly, I would rather a majority accept the same epistemology I do, but I would never seek to abolish something simply because I disagree with it.
Even here, it doesn't work. Unlike religion, I am open to being shown where I am wrong -- I would rather be proven wrong than forever be wrong.
Apparently you missed the part where there's an entirely different focus. Computer Science focuses more on math, abstract ideas, and programming itself. Software Engineering seems to focus more on process, design, and generally management ideas.
Even they can't explain properly what exactly is being engineered.
...so, how's this different than Computer Science?
electrons? magnetic fields on spinning discs? Lines of code?
Electrons and magnetic fields are building blocks. Here, let me turn it around for you:
Even they can't explain properly what exactly is being engineered. Steel? Concrete? Bridges?
One of these things is not like the other...
To answer your question more directly, a running program is the end result that people are interested in. The intermediate stages are lines of code. These are pretty directly analogous to an airplane being the end result, and drawings, streamlines, and so on all being things the engineers may or may not have to work with to achieve that final result.
If your issue is with the word "Engineer", I'd like to hear your suggestion for a better word. Problem is, "Developer" and "Programmer" have pretty much identical meanings, neither of which implies any experience designing processes or working with algorithms and theorems.
And why not Poetry Engineers? Think about what that would imply. A poetry engineer would make sense if you wanted a poem to have a specific effect. If there were well-understood principles by which you could design a poem such that everyone who read it would reliably experience the precise emotion you intended, then there would be poetry engineers, and they would be highly paid, I would think.
How about a "hair style engineer"? From Wikipedia:
Engineering is the discipline, art, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize solutions to the needs of society.
That seems to apply to software. It does not seem to apply to hairstyling.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people who manage to get through a comp sci program without really learning much, and I'd think that especially depends on the school. There are PhDs who are so out of touch with the act of programming itself, so lost in theory, that I've seen a group of high school graduates (might even have been some dropouts) run circles around them, doing things they dismissed as "impossible" in an afternoon. If I ever do go to graduate school, I don't really intend to become a sanctimonious asshole with a Dr in front of my name.
But the fact that these degrees are sometimes ineffective and abused doesn't rob them of their meaning, or render them mere buzzwords.
For what it's worth, I'm working on a Computer Science degree, mostly because it gives me time to dabble in other things like philosophy courses and martial arts.
Well, except that universities are offering "Software Engineer" degrees, which are significantly different than "Computer Science". Both involve coding, sure, but the focus is entirely different.
Slashdot Mirror
"More progressive" is relative. Keep in mind that there are still entirely too many places where this shit still happens. I don't know much about Egypt, but if they don't have honor killings, that puts them ahead.
I mean, yes, the Internet is important. Yes, it's probably what will prevent this kind of thing in the first place. But let's keep in mind what's really important here.
That's like saying, they could just buy a PC. That's what I'd do, but that's also missing the point.point.
Aside from the opportunity to play around with different hardware, aside from the need to use their own hardware -- seriously, "just" throw away the PS3 you paid several hundred dollars for and buy a 360, because Sony decided to kill Other OS? -- there's also the fact that the PS3 has the Cell, which is much better at certain things than the 360.
Example: These guys. Can the 360 do that?
If you're talking about XNA, by the way, go back and read the above. Does the 360 let me run whatever I want on bare metal, or do I need an exploit? If I need an exploit, what's your point?
It's more surprising that they think this will accomplish anything other than harassing this one guy. The damage is done -- everyone who wanted the keys has them, and there's nothing Sony can do about that.
This is worse than the MPAA trying to stop 09 F9.
The rootkit wasn't enough?
The better solution is to actually stick to your boycott. Don't buy anything Sony, ever. Making it only "for some time" makes it clear that Sony can do whatever they want so long as they're willing to take a short-term financial hit, and that's assuming there are enough people to even make that point.
From the presentation I saw, it looks like roughly 80-90% of the work in completely pwning the PS3 was unrelated to piracy or cheating. That is, roughly 10-20% of what they did could've been used for piracy, the rest was for the complete and permanent ability to run any homebrew they like without restrictions, including (say) Linux with access to the PS3's GPU.
Also, note that the PS3 was pretty much left alone until Sony killed Other OS. So long as people were allowed to run Linux on the PS3, it was left alone. From the date Sony killed Other OS until it was completely pwned is about the same amount of time it took to pwn other systems (Wii, 360) from when they were initially released.
Essentially, if Sony had left Other OS intact, it's very likely people wouldn't be able to pirate stuff today.
Hyperbole much?
Squinting -- does ctrl+mousewheel not work for you?
Bore your eyes out -- if Slashdot makes you wish that, you clearly need more exposure to 4chan.
I think it really depends what the glitch is. I know more than one game in which a glitch of some sort actually becomes a legitimate part of the game -- if it takes a significant amount of skill to master, and it doesn't really offer that huge of an advantage, what's the harm? Indeed, in some cases, I would argue fixing the glitch would actually result in a worse game.
A few examples:
The weird physics in Quake, especially Quake III, if I recall. Rocket-jumping, bunny-hopping, etc. These lead to things like the defrag mod, in which exploiting these borderline glitches becomes a sport.
Then there's the sword glitch in Halo 2. It's entirely possible to defend against, and it does take some amount of skill to execute properly. I can see where it might screw up the balance enough, but they deliberately left it in single-player.
Probably the best example is also the most obscure I can think of: In Nexus TK, a 2D for-pay MMO that I'd be very surprised if anyone here has heard of, there's the weird property where if a character is healed by any amount at the precise moment they've died, no matter how much they were overkilled by, they'll still be (barely) alive -- but the actual behavior is a bit more complex, tricky to nail correctly, and unreliable.
This means you can have one character being chased around by a sizable group of others, taking more damage than their maximum health, and if they time their self-heals properly, even the very weakest self-heal that everyone has, they can stay alive much longer than they should be able to. The Barbarians have even made this into a game, with in-game prizes -- put a group of people together, and I'll spare the details, but the goal is effectively to try to kill everyone else in a situation where everyone will be incredibly low health, and thus the only way to win is to constantly "heal out" -- as in, heal out of death.
Of course, there are glitches which completely ruin the game -- so long as I'm talking about Nexus, its entire in-game economy had to be reset once because of a gold-duplicating bug. But not all bugs are bad, and sometimes "hey it's part of the game" is legitimate.
I don't think that's the point here. It seems much more likely that it's a case where there was some sort of exploit or other trick -- other comments in this thread have suggested things like taking someone else's savegame, modifying it to match your account, then loading it onto your own xbox. Especially with multiplayer games, this leads to things like a discrepancy between what your xbox/account claims and what their servers actually know, or multiplayer achievements apparently earned offline, or obtaining an achievement known to be incomplete/bugged, or one for DLC which hasn't been released yet...
Or, of course, classic stuff like exploiting glitches in the gameplay itself.
In other words, it's not a question of how good you can play, it's a question of effectively violating the laws of physics of the game, or making an end-run around the game itself and convincing the network that you have an achievement when you don't.
That tweet isn't nearly enough information to know what the deal is, but this seems like a much more reasonable explanation.
Non-Slashdotted, actual source link.
The results with instant search are different, but I still get tons of torrent results near the top, and Google even helpfully suggests 'download' after I type a movie title and 'torrent'.
So, it's not really clear what or how much they're actually censoring. I still wish they weren't doing whatever it is they're doing, but I don't know how much I care when I can't really even tell what it is they're doing.
Interestingly, when I type exactly those keywords, the very first hit is on kickasstorrents.com, and it even helpfully suggests "download" as a term. I have noticed certain sites end up at different places before and after I hit enter...
It looks as though the only thing they've done is remove it from possible autocompletions.
Better yet, maybe reduce the prison population in general?
Nope, it was in fact a Webkit bug, and one which has been fixed, and the fix should be included in Chrome 10. Of course, we won't really see it, because the new design, for whatever reason, doesn't trigger that bug.
Hmm...
I like the whitespace. I don't see what you're talking about with the solid colors (I see gradients) or the "boxed" design.
I don't really see any difference in the fonts, and ctrl+mousewheel works.
Submission box doesn't look significantly smaller, though I didn't submit many stories. It also does (to an extent) respond to Chrome/Safari's ability to resize textareas.
And, really? I mean, I guess I can see it -- I refuse to read certain sites because their layout manages to shove ads into 80% of the space, leaving only about 20% for actual content -- but all these years, and this is what's enough for you to leave?
For me, it was:
First attempt to paste: Works.
Any other attempts: Works on comments.pl, fails on any actual story page.
Also, whether it failed or not, pasting would incur massive lag. All of this behavior applied to middle-click (Linux), ctrl+v, right-click/paste, basically any way you chose to paste.
However, I do take back what I've said about the redesign being faster. It's more responsive, but right now, I have five tabs open, and Chrome is eating ~25% CPU, pretty much entirely idle. Closing the Slashdot tab will drop it down to under 5%. The other tabs aren't exactly lightweight, either -- GMail, two different versions of Blackboard, and a blog post from John Resig (alright, that might be lightweight).
It's especially disturbing that this is the idle usage, and it scales with the number of slashdot tabs I have open. WTF do they have on a timer that they could be doing with ordinary events?
It doesn't in hibernation.
Regardless, this is a technology which would make that hardware reason go away. As I read it, it's basically a much, much faster form of hibernation.
Ah, that's what it is.
Since it's all web2.0-ish with JavaScript and all, I have to wonder WTF they were thinking using fixed-with anything. Ah, well, it's not important.
For what it's worth, it is MUCH faster for me on Chrome than the old design. The page load time alone is worth it. I don't actually see anything that's either slower or buggier.
Why?
It was a Chrome bug, most likely. Still, I'm just glad it works now.
Why? I mean, "rebooting" is still possible, it just sucks that much more since there'd no longer be any hardware reason to do so.
Religion is just the hoopla that forms around an idea (specifically, one that claims to hold the solution to mankind's ills).
The dictionary definition disagrees. Yes, it's what forms around an idea, but it's not just any idea.
You're the one who referred to your anti-religious stance as a battle you've picked. How does the word militant not apply?
Have you never heard the phrase "choose your battles" in a non-militaristic scenario? Maybe as a general life principle? By your logic, what wouldn't be "militant"?
Dawkins has repeatedly made it clear that religion is an impediment to a better society, that we suffer unnecessarily because of it.
I would agree with that.
His solution for society? Abolish religion.
Ah, but here, citation needed.
make it explicitly clear that there is nothing that causes more suffering in the world than religion, and that the only solution is to end religion.
If I said so explicitly, please show me where. You do know what explicit means, don't you?
You'd think you'd be more careful after your earlier "careless hyperbole". Perhaps you meant implicitly? If so, I'm waiting to hear your explanation, because I think you were inferring something which simply isn't there -- that is, yet another strawman.
In fact, I'm not convinced that religion causes the most suffering, but I find it particularly evil because it's one of the few things which can make a good person do evil things, while believing they are doing the right thing.
I certainly don't think the "only" solution is to eliminate religion, and I don't think that's a solution at all, largely because it wouldn't work, and if it did, the cost would be too high. I would rather seek to ensure religion has no privileged status, that it can be freely questioned and debated, and that it loses the influence it still has on government. That would be sufficient.
Certainly, I would rather a majority accept the same epistemology I do, but I would never seek to abolish something simply because I disagree with it.
Even here, it doesn't work. Unlike religion, I am open to being shown where I am wrong -- I would rather be proven wrong than forever be wrong.
I think your examination of my example of poetry and hairstyling engineers is quite arbitrary.
More arbitrary than your insistence that engineering concern itself with physical things only?
Even the work of a poet can withstand a large electro-magnetic pulse, either in our memory or in a printed piece of dead tree,
Ever hear of the PGP book?
Software Engineers ARE Software Developers with a cooler name.
Yet they are taught different things, at least in the place I've seen.
...a true moving target of a curriculum if ever there was one.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
Again, marketing buzzword.
Apparently you missed the part where there's an entirely different focus. Computer Science focuses more on math, abstract ideas, and programming itself. Software Engineering seems to focus more on process, design, and generally management ideas.
Even they can't explain properly what exactly is being engineered.
...so, how's this different than Computer Science?
electrons? magnetic fields on spinning discs? Lines of code?
Electrons and magnetic fields are building blocks. Here, let me turn it around for you:
Even they can't explain properly what exactly is being engineered. Steel? Concrete? Bridges?
One of these things is not like the other...
To answer your question more directly, a running program is the end result that people are interested in. The intermediate stages are lines of code. These are pretty directly analogous to an airplane being the end result, and drawings, streamlines, and so on all being things the engineers may or may not have to work with to achieve that final result.
If your issue is with the word "Engineer", I'd like to hear your suggestion for a better word. Problem is, "Developer" and "Programmer" have pretty much identical meanings, neither of which implies any experience designing processes or working with algorithms and theorems.
And why not Poetry Engineers? Think about what that would imply. A poetry engineer would make sense if you wanted a poem to have a specific effect. If there were well-understood principles by which you could design a poem such that everyone who read it would reliably experience the precise emotion you intended, then there would be poetry engineers, and they would be highly paid, I would think.
How about a "hair style engineer"? From Wikipedia:
Engineering is the discipline, art, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize solutions to the needs of society.
That seems to apply to software. It does not seem to apply to hairstyling.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people who manage to get through a comp sci program without really learning much, and I'd think that especially depends on the school. There are PhDs who are so out of touch with the act of programming itself, so lost in theory, that I've seen a group of high school graduates (might even have been some dropouts) run circles around them, doing things they dismissed as "impossible" in an afternoon. If I ever do go to graduate school, I don't really intend to become a sanctimonious asshole with a Dr in front of my name.
But the fact that these degrees are sometimes ineffective and abused doesn't rob them of their meaning, or render them mere buzzwords.
For what it's worth, I'm working on a Computer Science degree, mostly because it gives me time to dabble in other things like philosophy courses and martial arts.
Well, except that universities are offering "Software Engineer" degrees, which are significantly different than "Computer Science". Both involve coding, sure, but the focus is entirely different.