The CIA and NSA are answerable to the government and, in theory, the people. AOL is answerable to its shareholders. The CIA and NSA will do what is necessary to carry out their mandate within the legal boundaries the government provides, AOL will do everything it can get away with to make money.
Quite frankly, I'd sooner trust the CIA and NSA and I'm a tinfoil hatter.
Whereas I disagree in a lot of places. Just as examples pulled from your message...
the gameplay was better than either of the previous games. Yes, whoever decided that the effect of flashbombs would be magically cancelled as soon as you try to blackjack or stab a guard deserves a medal. Not to mention the removal of rope arrows (please, those climbing gloves are not a substitute, they're a joke) and swimmable water that cut down gameplay options. The only addition to the gameplay was the real dynamic shadowing - the other additions were either dumb (oil flasks? Give me a break..), badly implemented (see below) or a poor substitute for things they'd removed.
like the City as an explorable area Which was so badly implemented as to be laughable: guards unable to cross between zones and time freezing in the zones you exit; respawning actors carrying loot that makes a mockery of the price balance int he game; the fact that the economy of the city now appears to be almost entirely based around thief supply shops, fences and pubs and the simple and incredibly annoying fact that city areas that, from the previous Thief games, were actually supposed to be very large ended up as so small you can cross all the mapped areas in six minutes (even allowing for the half-dozen load zones you need to go through to cover less ground than the Ambush or Tracing the courier missions from T2.) The City hub was a nice idea that simply couldn't be handled by the engine but was cobbled in anyway because they needed a method to string missions together after chucking out the characteristic cutscenes.
new more interactive lockpicking system. Which would have been okay were it not for the fact that whoever designed the interface system decided "oh, single frob, forced position, modal lockpicking, what a great way to get the player killed!". Yes, the picking in T1 and T2 was unrealistic (but then, it is in 3, but I digress) but when you frobbed a locked object you weren't immediately pulled into the picking routine - several places in T3 it is quite easy to get yourself pulled out into a lit area or stuck picking a door with a guard running at you. I liked the concept of the picking in 3, but the execution of it sucked like a black hole.
I rate T3 below the previous games except on graphics because of the monumentally bad UI decisions, poor implementation of (I freely admit) good ideas and the important gameplay elements from the previous games that were removed.
We the parliment decide and everything that has gone before is normal procedure. Of course this is true. The council would never ignore an instruction from parliament to restart a process or break its own rules to force through a controversial point that several countries have objected to. Could never happen.
No, it isn't. This is the quick way for the council to send a big "Fuck You" to the parliament and pass it as it stands.
Not only have the council ignored the parliament, and broken their own rules in the process, they've got the directive to the point where only a 2/3rds majority of all members states can prevent it becoming law (which isn't going to happen short of a miracle). No restart happens unless the parliament rejects it.
Run a rewriting proxy with a blacklist of domain typos, that way attempts to access them get silently redirected to the correct page. I use squid and squirm, but something like Proxomitron on a parent's/grandparent's windows box will do it.
That's not the point though - Microsoft know about object reference/quality testing in java, pointer and contents testing in C/C++ and so on. They've got their own vm/compilers etc after all.
No, the thing they want to to is prevent anyone else from using an operator called IsNot so that any VB that use that operation can not be trivially ported to "vb emulating" basic interpreters written by others. Those interpreters could implement != or include a NotSame operator or whatever but they couldn't include an operator called IsNot without a license from microsoft.
This means any VB script that does use IsNot would need modifying before it would run on these other systems. And if Microsoft can get this one through, expect them to do the same with other bits of the language. When a PHB is faced with "Shell out $X for microsoft software that will understand all our existing vb code" or "Pay out $0 for the alternative software but employ someone to fix up hundreds of vb scripts" they will go with the former, even if the latter is cheaper in the long run.
Or, forget about employing yet more bloody civil servants and change the rules so that when Parliament says something the commission has no choice in the matter.
Except that isn't going to happen because civil servants are the very last people to actually let politicians influence government.... And people thought Yes Minister was cynical...
Actually, 1 person out of that 100 is enough to make the system meaningless now that the file sizes involves are effectively normal on the net. That's the thing that means they'll never be able to stop it by technical means: there will always be one person smarter than the engineers who cook this systems up and willing to do it, even if it's just for the challenge.
When that person rips it, bungs it on IRC/FTP/P2P/whatever then within hours or less that 1 copy becomes hundreds even thousands of copies. And if its a good rip, it goes right onto those bootleg DVDs at the market.
It's the same as the situation with the old copy protection schemes on games: the instant one cracker gets past it, the protection is meaningless and a barrier only to legitimate users. Anyone who is going to use a copy is using that crack, the original is irrelivant. In this case, once one person has managed to make a good rip, that's the one that will be passed around and sold.
It was 7 patients and she correctly diagnosed 4 of them. Each patient had a different condition and they were things like removed appendix, lower aesophagus or lung section, metal staples left in the chest after surgery, an artificial hip and a metal plate in the skull while the 7th had nothing wrong.
It was also hardly a fair test - she had been seperated from her mother and interpreter, the CSICOP AND CSMMH testers had set the minimum match threshold higher than the standard probability of 1 in 20 in pscyhology tests and there were no independent observers. They also conceled the fact that she achieved higher than 50 to 1 odds to reach the correct matches by shouting about he missing the 5 matches they required he to get to pass their test.
This DMCA law, it is supposed to be for the US only isn't it? The DMCA itself is, but DMCA-like laws are now being introduced all over the place. The EUCD is another, if anything even worse, example that EU countries have to implement.
Am I wrong?, maybe one of the "solutions" for all this would be simply to move the company to another place out of US. Provided that you find a country where the creation and distribution of such a product is legal, you're okay.
Re:Ahhh IRC is evil...
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Going off his description, you might have heard of them under the different name of zombies or DDoS bots.
The idea is that when a box - almost always a domestic DSL-connected windows machine - is compromised by a worm or trojan it is quite common for part of the payload that is installed on the machine to include at least one IRC bot. The bot will attempt to connect to a prearranged network and channel and sit and wait for instructions. At some point the owner of the zombies comes into the channel and passes instructions to the bots, telling them to attack a certain IP, update themselves or pretty much anything you can think of that can be easily automated.
Steve Gibson may be somewhat... overzealous (I'm picking my words carefully)... but this page on his site has a fairly good explanation of what these things are and what they can do.
your comment sounds like LJ admins are actually hostages of poor, eclectic design of LJ architecture, don't you think so? So unlike slashdot of course. And pretty much every other major system I've run into over the past 10 years. Every one of them paragons of design, capable of changing a major backend component without a single problem.
the fact thatr LJ needs manual intervention after power loss like this means that noone ever had been thinking on design Have you actually ever maintained a significant, database-backed system and seen what happens when some twat of a contractor cuts through a power cable or something kills the power to everything on the spot? That is not something you want to power back up and let users right back onto it until you have made damn sure the system, especially the database, is sane - and I've seen even oracle boxes screw up after unexpected power loss, let alone postgres or mysql ones. Without a UPS and enough time to cleanly shut down - things you'd expect from a datacentre - any complex system is going to need checking before being put back in production otherwise any number of problems could crop up.
most companies will refuse to work with you if you where recording the call. Yeah, the last thing they want is a level playing field.
Because this is normally someone trying to catch a company screwing up, either by accident or on purpose. Which, IMO, should be something they are quite permitted to do: the number of times I've run into situations where things agreed or sorted out over a phone line suddenly become unsorted or different from what was agreed when black-and-white proof turns up weeks later in the mail (whether deliberately or through misunderstandings) is terrible. With serious business being done over the phone, I have a hard time seeing how it can be fair that one side can record it with impunity while the other is left with nothing if the other screws up or decides to change things.
And that's saying nothing about the way recognition systems can get hopelessly messed up by variations in background noise, other speakers and even a bad cold.
Every time someone mentions speaking instead of typing I always wonder whether they've actually seen inside a busy office, tech support centre or lab. The noise can be bad enough without people saying everything they are typing...
So the truth isn't the rediculous idea that computer games make people violent, it's the computers themselves!
This just proves it: computers are really a highly advanced race of beings, sworn to silence and willing to sacrifice some of their vast army. They manipulate people into homicidal rages in an attempt to get human beings to wipe themselves out. They're trying to take over the world I tell you!!
*eyes his tea* What're they putting in this stuff these days...
... Right, so you take someone questioning the quality of the US media, something that many widely respected academics and media observers have been doing for years, and then blow it up into some rant about 9/11 conspiracies?
Next thing you'll be telling us that you think Chomsky is a terrorist.
Actually, writing an OSS game engine isn't the problem - there's plenty of very capable coders out there who could pull off techniques the professionals use or don't even get time to write.
The problem isn't the code, the problem is the content. Especially artwork and music - trying to get artists and musicians involved in an OSS game is virtually impossible. They almost always want $$$ for thier time, somehting OSS developers don't have usually.
In that case, possibly a better example for BitTorrent could be X-Plane. Austin distributes the demo, betas and updates for the software using BT and he has done since the early 7.x releases. It may not have the tens of thousands of users, but it is a substantial legal use...
Slashdot Mirror
if one has protected data and the TPM fails, how does one recover it?
You don't.
Well, since you ask...
The CIA and NSA are answerable to the government and, in theory, the people. AOL is answerable to its shareholders. The CIA and NSA will do what is necessary to carry out their mandate within the legal boundaries the government provides, AOL will do everything it can get away with to make money.
Quite frankly, I'd sooner trust the CIA and NSA and I'm a tinfoil hatter.
Whereas I disagree in a lot of places. Just as examples pulled from your message...
the gameplay was better than either of the previous games.
Yes, whoever decided that the effect of flashbombs would be magically cancelled as soon as you try to blackjack or stab a guard deserves a medal. Not to mention the removal of rope arrows (please, those climbing gloves are not a substitute, they're a joke) and swimmable water that cut down gameplay options. The only addition to the gameplay was the real dynamic shadowing - the other additions were either dumb (oil flasks? Give me a break..), badly implemented (see below) or a poor substitute for things they'd removed.
like the City as an explorable area
Which was so badly implemented as to be laughable: guards unable to cross between zones and time freezing in the zones you exit; respawning actors carrying loot that makes a mockery of the price balance int he game; the fact that the economy of the city now appears to be almost entirely based around thief supply shops, fences and pubs and the simple and incredibly annoying fact that city areas that, from the previous Thief games, were actually supposed to be very large ended up as so small you can cross all the mapped areas in six minutes (even allowing for the half-dozen load zones you need to go through to cover less ground than the Ambush or Tracing the courier missions from T2.) The City hub was a nice idea that simply couldn't be handled by the engine but was cobbled in anyway because they needed a method to string missions together after chucking out the characteristic cutscenes.
new more interactive lockpicking system.
Which would have been okay were it not for the fact that whoever designed the interface system decided "oh, single frob, forced position, modal lockpicking, what a great way to get the player killed!". Yes, the picking in T1 and T2 was unrealistic (but then, it is in 3, but I digress) but when you frobbed a locked object you weren't immediately pulled into the picking routine - several places in T3 it is quite easy to get yourself pulled out into a lit area or stuck picking a door with a guard running at you. I liked the concept of the picking in 3, but the execution of it sucked like a black hole.
I rate T3 below the previous games except on graphics because of the monumentally bad UI decisions, poor implementation of (I freely admit) good ideas and the important gameplay elements from the previous games that were removed.
We the parliment decide and everything that has gone before is normal procedure.
Of course this is true. The council would never ignore an instruction from parliament to restart a process or break its own rules to force through a controversial point that several countries have objected to. Could never happen.
No, it isn't. This is the quick way for the council to send a big "Fuck You" to the parliament and pass it as it stands.
Not only have the council ignored the parliament, and broken their own rules in the process, they've got the directive to the point where only a 2/3rds majority of all members states can prevent it becoming law (which isn't going to happen short of a miracle). No restart happens unless the parliament rejects it.
Run a rewriting proxy with a blacklist of domain typos, that way attempts to access them get silently redirected to the correct page. I use squid and squirm, but something like Proxomitron on a parent's/grandparent's windows box will do it.
That's not the point though - Microsoft know about object reference/quality testing in java, pointer and contents testing in C/C++ and so on. They've got their own vm/compilers etc after all.
No, the thing they want to to is prevent anyone else from using an operator called IsNot so that any VB that use that operation can not be trivially ported to "vb emulating" basic interpreters written by others. Those interpreters could implement != or include a NotSame operator or whatever but they couldn't include an operator called IsNot without a license from microsoft.
This means any VB script that does use IsNot would need modifying before it would run on these other systems. And if Microsoft can get this one through, expect them to do the same with other bits of the language. When a PHB is faced with "Shell out $X for microsoft software that will understand all our existing vb code" or "Pay out $0 for the alternative software but employ someone to fix up hundreds of vb scripts" they will go with the former, even if the latter is cheaper in the long run.
Or, forget about employing yet more bloody civil servants and change the rules so that when Parliament says something the commission has no choice in the matter.
... And people thought Yes Minister was cynical...
Except that isn't going to happen because civil servants are the very last people to actually let politicians influence government.
Actually, 1 person out of that 100 is enough to make the system meaningless now that the file sizes involves are effectively normal on the net. That's the thing that means they'll never be able to stop it by technical means: there will always be one person smarter than the engineers who cook this systems up and willing to do it, even if it's just for the challenge.
When that person rips it, bungs it on IRC/FTP/P2P/whatever then within hours or less that 1 copy becomes hundreds even thousands of copies. And if its a good rip, it goes right onto those bootleg DVDs at the market.
It's the same as the situation with the old copy protection schemes on games: the instant one cracker gets past it, the protection is meaningless and a barrier only to legitimate users. Anyone who is going to use a copy is using that crack, the original is irrelivant. In this case, once one person has managed to make a good rip, that's the one that will be passed around and sold.
Damn I wish I hadn't spent all my mod points earlier...
It was 7 patients and she correctly diagnosed 4 of them. Each patient had a different condition and they were things like removed appendix, lower aesophagus or lung section, metal staples left in the chest after surgery, an artificial hip and a metal plate in the skull while the 7th had nothing wrong.
It was also hardly a fair test - she had been seperated from her mother and interpreter, the CSICOP AND CSMMH testers had set the minimum match threshold higher than the standard probability of 1 in 20 in pscyhology tests and there were no independent observers. They also conceled the fact that she achieved higher than 50 to 1 odds to reach the correct matches by shouting about he missing the 5 matches they required he to get to pass their test.
Airstrip 1. Sometimes known as Blairland or the UK.
Nah, nuking them is far too quick. Something longer and far more painful would be in order.
This DMCA law, it is supposed to be for the US only isn't it?
The DMCA itself is, but DMCA-like laws are now being introduced all over the place. The EUCD is another, if anything even worse, example that EU countries have to implement.
Am I wrong?, maybe one of the "solutions" for all this would be simply to move the company to another place out of US.
Provided that you find a country where the creation and distribution of such a product is legal, you're okay.
Going off his description, you might have heard of them under the different name of zombies or DDoS bots.
The idea is that when a box - almost always a domestic DSL-connected windows machine - is compromised by a worm or trojan it is quite common for part of the payload that is installed on the machine to include at least one IRC bot. The bot will attempt to connect to a prearranged network and channel and sit and wait for instructions. At some point the owner of the zombies comes into the channel and passes instructions to the bots, telling them to attack a certain IP, update themselves or pretty much anything you can think of that can be easily automated.
Steve Gibson may be somewhat... overzealous (I'm picking my words carefully)... but this page on his site has a fairly good explanation of what these things are and what they can do.
your comment sounds like LJ admins are actually hostages of poor, eclectic design of LJ architecture, don't you think so?
So unlike slashdot of course. And pretty much every other major system I've run into over the past 10 years. Every one of them paragons of design, capable of changing a major backend component without a single problem.
the fact thatr LJ needs manual intervention after power loss like this means that noone ever had been thinking on design
Have you actually ever maintained a significant, database-backed system and seen what happens when some twat of a contractor cuts through a power cable or something kills the power to everything on the spot? That is not something you want to power back up and let users right back onto it until you have made damn sure the system, especially the database, is sane - and I've seen even oracle boxes screw up after unexpected power loss, let alone postgres or mysql ones. Without a UPS and enough time to cleanly shut down - things you'd expect from a datacentre - any complex system is going to need checking before being put back in production otherwise any number of problems could crop up.
most companies will refuse to work with you if you where recording the call.
Yeah, the last thing they want is a level playing field.
Because this is normally someone trying to catch a company screwing up, either by accident or on purpose.
Which, IMO, should be something they are quite permitted to do: the number of times I've run into situations where things agreed or sorted out over a phone line suddenly become unsorted or different from what was agreed when black-and-white proof turns up weeks later in the mail (whether deliberately or through misunderstandings) is terrible. With serious business being done over the phone, I have a hard time seeing how it can be fair that one side can record it with impunity while the other is left with nothing if the other screws up or decides to change things.
And that's saying nothing about the way recognition systems can get hopelessly messed up by variations in background noise, other speakers and even a bad cold.
Every time someone mentions speaking instead of typing I always wonder whether they've actually seen inside a busy office, tech support centre or lab. The noise can be bad enough without people saying everything they are typing...
So the truth isn't the rediculous idea that computer games make people violent, it's the computers themselves!
This just proves it: computers are really a highly advanced race of beings, sworn to silence and willing to sacrifice some of their vast army. They manipulate people into homicidal rages in an attempt to get human beings to wipe themselves out. They're trying to take over the world I tell you!!
*eyes his tea*
What're they putting in this stuff these days...
ASL == Age/Sex/Location
... Right, so you take someone questioning the quality of the US media, something that many widely respected academics and media observers have been doing for years, and then blow it up into some rant about 9/11 conspiracies?
Next thing you'll be telling us that you think Chomsky is a terrorist.
Get a grip.
It's more giving the customer the illusion of what they want...
Actually, writing an OSS game engine isn't the problem - there's plenty of very capable coders out there who could pull off techniques the professionals use or don't even get time to write.
The problem isn't the code, the problem is the content. Especially artwork and music - trying to get artists and musicians involved in an OSS game is virtually impossible. They almost always want $$$ for thier time, somehting OSS developers don't have usually.
In that case, possibly a better example for BitTorrent could be X-Plane. Austin distributes the demo, betas and updates for the software using BT and he has done since the early 7.x releases. It may not have the tens of thousands of users, but it is a substantial legal use...
At which point you hook up some circuitry to the coil connections on the speakers, plug that back into the line in and there you go...
And that's even assuming they find some way to make a secure path between the media and the speakers, going off past performance, this isn't likely.