I'm ordering more sarcasm for my postings. If the 2 firms are going to try an uphold a non-existant "verbal contract" to sue over (which the article didn't state), then a joke about the client verbally waiving protected rights might fit in as well. If you make one claim that can't be proved, may as well make two, yah?
As far as waiving protections, can anybody chime in on how agreements that include text like "to be settled in XXX State courts" would affect that? If you're like AC and in Washington, would the move to California courts affect your defense options?
Senator: "As head of the US Intelligence agencies, can you explain why has the any links between Google and child pornography a matter of national security?"
MIB: "I'm sorry, Senator. I'm not at liberty to discuss that"
The idea that Google makes billions just from child porn ads is ridiculous. I'm fairly sure they don't make that much from MMO gold sites or Viagra ads, and those are pretty common.
It's stupid to say that Google is making any thing available. Well, unless they have board meetings that revolve around opening child porn sites. That junk was around before the internet and google. If the problem is that it makes the material easier to find, then this lawsuit should also be going after ALL OTHER SEARCH ENGINES (MS and Yahoo come to mind) or explain why Google's been singled out. Wouldn't that make a great ad for omitted search sites? "We're good, but not good enough to find controversial material".
This is a useless lawsuit. For the follow up they should try suing god for harboring child pornographers. Omni-present, all knowing and perfectly able to send burning bushes to speak with authorities. Given that prayer is the currency of the spiritual world, god must be profiting quite well from the prayers of those wanting to be freed from their plight. That's not counting the prayers of the oppressors to not get caught. Wow. That could open up into all sorts of things. God supports terrorists, child pornogragphers, fornicators, jaywalkers... He's a criminal overlord like nothing we've seen before!!!
Oops, wait, it's a useless PR lawsuit. Nevermind. If you're going to do something stupid, you have to make sure it can't possibly piss off a decent chunk of your voter constituency. That's the truth behind being "Politically correct", yah?
Hmm. Ok. My first point was that I think deliberate bad raid behavior comes more from regular players. It's not like you PuG for the high level instances (I'm talking MC and beyond). If they get into a regular raid on somebody's recommendation, then usually there's an earned level of trust. Overcoming the farmer stereotype of being a thief isn't easy to do, and it's better business to go again rather than just steal one item. In the event of an "oops" ninja, then it's usually not understanding specific loot rules for a given run. This happens to english speakers too.
I will conceed that it's not fun for me to try explaining things in a foreign language. I literally have to stop doing anything else for those moments I'm translating in my head. I don't invite farmers, but for the PuGs I've hooked up with, it's proved to be a helpful skill (as does ML NPC's with good drops).
Actually, the farmers I have grouped with obey the normal loot rules as well. Ninja'ing items makes it hard for them to get groups again. It hurts them business-wise. I think more ninjas occur from "regular" players. They straight out don't care. It's just like the belief that gold-farmers drive up prices in the WoW economy. They drive most of our prices down. The high ticket items will be sold for as much as they can get, but almost always less than what others charge. Epic items aren't as good as gold.
As for the second article, the main reason we don't have have a lot of foriegn players in groups is just communication. Sorry, but if we can't make sure you understand the tactics or goals of a raid we're doing, you're a liability. English speakers have the advantage of being able to wipe the entire raid before everybody realizes they're liabilities. Even then, we can instruct them in a common language to ensure that they learn from the mistake. It's a matter of time vs effort. I've been on a few runs where my limited chinese skills were able to reign in an over enthusiastic chinese player that would have wiped us because they weren't working with the team. Once they understood who the puller was, things went fine. It took 5 minutes of typing and checking my dictionary to do it, though.
Re:I wish we knew what they were trying to patent.
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
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· Score: 1
Yah, I got a bit side-tracked by the whole "stupid terrorist" thing. It's not like they're all suicide bombers. Anyhow, sorry. I agree with not trying to stop the world moving because of unexpected things. Pause, think it over, adapt and overcome. Or something like that:)
Re:I wish we knew what they were trying to patent.
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 1
Something tells me that the Pentagon is more concerned with foriegn governments getting a hold of the patents rather than terorists.
Depending on the patent, I'd agree with that (not like we'll ever know). The idea of government sponsored industrial espionage is kind of interesting. I can see the NSA having lots of high-tech computer hardware stuff that'd any country would like their domestic industry or militaries to have. If nothing else, the Pentagon may just not want anybody to know some of the things we can do.
Terrorists are not relevant to this discussion, since in most cases technology like timers or remote controls are beyond them.
I wouldn't call Timothy McVeigh incapable of using technology like timers or remote controls, and I doubt many would argue he wasn't a terrorist. Assuming that terrorists are all ignorant specimans of humanity makes them more dangerous because it means you're not taking them seriously. There's absolutely no reason a person with a Doctorate level of education wouldn't become a terrorist. It's politics and extremism mixed up, not something that being able to program a VCR would preclude.
Re:I wish we knew what they were trying to patent.
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 1
NDA's for everybody!
I wish we knew what they were trying to patent...
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 1
That might make it easier to know how justifiable these patent blocks were. I knew that most of us think the Pentagon is being paranoid, but it's possible that maybe the NSA submitters missed an angle. Security through obscurity isn't exactly the best, but if it's one of those "oh,wow" sorts of things, then I can see that.
Domestic or foreign, I doubt the leadership (i.e. non-pawns) of a terrorist group would be be unwilling to make the best use of anything they can get their hands on. It's just too bad we won't know if the benefits of the patents would have balanced that out by providing to the American public:(
Front page/.
"A hack firmware hack has been published that enables a person with a kodak wireless camera to specify the photo uploads to multiple websites, not just the Kodak easyshare gallery. Streaming video features have also been enabled."
The living room of an unspecified porn star:
"Wow! This is the seventh camera I've recieved today!"
Well, it's that or hope nobody else goes public with their initial findings and takes funds that you could have used to further your research and career. The only other reason to at least not give a peek on your research is that you work for a world domination bent secret society that will kill you if you reveal their secrets. Lizardmen, anyone?
... I wish they mentioned that the "dvd crackers" they refer to had all their hard work completed years ago. I wish they mentioned some of the best pirated videos used to be the Academy screeners from insiders (since arrested, not sure if there's been a new leaker since). I am glad they mentioned the physical counterfeiters as that tends to be overlooked in favor of the sexier (RIAA funded? Nah) filesharing pirate stories.
Final wish: Somebody influential in the media would cover the arbitrary monopolies created by DVD region coding, how little it affects actual piracy and only serves to increase the dvd prices and limit the availablity of dvd titles to law abiding citizens.
I think it's more likely that the companies are pledging their support because it's not a good idea to argue with the Chinese goverment. Greed is secondary to survival. On the flip side, corruption from either side will enable the existence of loopholes in the laws or implementation where multiple accounts may allow gamers to bypass the time limit with multiple accounts. Just as likely would be (for WoW,at least) where rewards for killing specific NPC's (i.e. The last boss of any major instance) would be unaffected as those battles are expected to take a long time to reach and complete. Well, that or they incorporate some kind of weekend/holiday filters.
Too bad this won't affect the gold farmers on the US servers. Even if they made it so that chinese accounts on US servers were affected, there would just new hacks around it, if not just new accounts created. What will be interesting is how the farming on the Chinese servers.
While accountability and honesty is expected of police and investigators, I think the real problem comes in when juries expect a Hollywood based CSI budget for equipment, staffing and training. By that I mean DNA testing for everything, enough investigators that they only have to work one or two cases at once and that everyone is a PhD in several areas. More than that, I'd be scared to death if my fate basically hinged on some know-it-all juror's ability to recall the mating habits of a fly from CSI season 1 rather than a juror who was paying attention during the proceedings.
Cool. Never considered that as none of my laptops have ever lent themselves to having their cd drives removed. Time to go looking for those service manuals for my laptop.
Assuming they made space for it, I don't see why they couldn't make it so all the drives were hot swappable (several drives with front access?). The single cart would be more to house the raid adaptor and the removable drives. I won't argue with performance gains, but the redundancy for the size would be the main selling point. Geeks wanting RAID 5 or 10 on a laptop would be secondary.
True, but considering it'd probably cost a lot, the people buying it would hopefully have read about the dismal battery life you're refering to. Dispite that, something with that kind of portablity and potential drive space would still have a fair amount of adopters. I'd use it for data recovery house calls and just plug into the client's wall (or charge them some odd surcharge for having to recharge my batteries). Anyone that would need to have a quickly scalable network deployed to a remote location in a short period of time could find a use for it. I'm thinking early response teams to a natural disaster could appreciate dragging a couple of laptops instead of the compact crate rack servers (don't remember how many pizza boxes they hold). I imagine they'd have a generator already on the 'things to pack' list.
I'm thinking that laptop raid would be an excellent use for these. Maybe after some power and space tweaking, a single Raid 5 cartridge could be made in place of the normal hard drive. Since high performance laptops buyers don't seem to mind a little extra bulk/weight, a laptop made to accomodate such a setup might be well accepted by hardware lovers.
The support the poster's assumption that most/. nerds couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, wouldn't know what to do with a woman if they had one (willing or not) and spent all their $$ upgrading something that runs on electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm ordering more sarcasm for my postings. If the 2 firms are going to try an uphold a non-existant "verbal contract" to sue over (which the article didn't state), then a joke about the client verbally waiving protected rights might fit in as well. If you make one claim that can't be proved, may as well make two, yah?
As far as waiving protections, can anybody chime in on how agreements that include text like "to be settled in XXX State courts" would affect that? If you're like AC and in Washington, would the move to California courts affect your defense options?
I think it's funny that the tax reciept will be longer than some of the messages.
Great research, but I'm sure he verbally waived those protections when this got started.
Senator: "As head of the US Intelligence agencies, can you explain why has the any links between Google and child pornography a matter of national security?"
MIB: "I'm sorry, Senator. I'm not at liberty to discuss that"
In the background... *fap* *fap* *fap*
The idea that Google makes billions just from child porn ads is ridiculous. I'm fairly sure they don't make that much from MMO gold sites or Viagra ads, and those are pretty common.
It's stupid to say that Google is making any thing available. Well, unless they have board meetings that revolve around opening child porn sites. That junk was around before the internet and google. If the problem is that it makes the material easier to find, then this lawsuit should also be going after ALL OTHER SEARCH ENGINES (MS and Yahoo come to mind) or explain why Google's been singled out. Wouldn't that make a great ad for omitted search sites? "We're good, but not good enough to find controversial material".
This is a useless lawsuit. For the follow up they should try suing god for harboring child pornographers. Omni-present, all knowing and perfectly able to send burning bushes to speak with authorities. Given that prayer is the currency of the spiritual world, god must be profiting quite well from the prayers of those wanting to be freed from their plight. That's not counting the prayers of the oppressors to not get caught. Wow. That could open up into all sorts of things. God supports terrorists, child pornogragphers, fornicators, jaywalkers... He's a criminal overlord like nothing we've seen before!!!
Oops, wait, it's a useless PR lawsuit. Nevermind. If you're going to do something stupid, you have to make sure it can't possibly piss off a decent chunk of your voter constituency. That's the truth behind being "Politically correct", yah?
Hmm. Ok. My first point was that I think deliberate bad raid behavior comes more from regular players. It's not like you PuG for the high level instances (I'm talking MC and beyond). If they get into a regular raid on somebody's recommendation, then usually there's an earned level of trust. Overcoming the farmer stereotype of being a thief isn't easy to do, and it's better business to go again rather than just steal one item. In the event of an "oops" ninja, then it's usually not understanding specific loot rules for a given run. This happens to english speakers too.
I will conceed that it's not fun for me to try explaining things in a foreign language. I literally have to stop doing anything else for those moments I'm translating in my head. I don't invite farmers, but for the PuGs I've hooked up with, it's proved to be a helpful skill (as does ML NPC's with good drops).
Actually, the farmers I have grouped with obey the normal loot rules as well. Ninja'ing items makes it hard for them to get groups again. It hurts them business-wise. I think more ninjas occur from "regular" players. They straight out don't care. It's just like the belief that gold-farmers drive up prices in the WoW economy. They drive most of our prices down. The high ticket items will be sold for as much as they can get, but almost always less than what others charge. Epic items aren't as good as gold.
As for the second article, the main reason we don't have have a lot of foriegn players in groups is just communication. Sorry, but if we can't make sure you understand the tactics or goals of a raid we're doing, you're a liability. English speakers have the advantage of being able to wipe the entire raid before everybody realizes they're liabilities. Even then, we can instruct them in a common language to ensure that they learn from the mistake. It's a matter of time vs effort. I've been on a few runs where my limited chinese skills were able to reign in an over enthusiastic chinese player that would have wiped us because they weren't working with the team. Once they understood who the puller was, things went fine. It took 5 minutes of typing and checking my dictionary to do it, though.
Yah, I got a bit side-tracked by the whole "stupid terrorist" thing. It's not like they're all suicide bombers. Anyhow, sorry. I agree with not trying to stop the world moving because of unexpected things. Pause, think it over, adapt and overcome. Or something like that :)
Something tells me that the Pentagon is more concerned with foriegn governments getting a hold of the patents rather than terorists.
Depending on the patent, I'd agree with that (not like we'll ever know). The idea of government sponsored industrial espionage is kind of interesting. I can see the NSA having lots of high-tech computer hardware stuff that'd any country would like their domestic industry or militaries to have. If nothing else, the Pentagon may just not want anybody to know some of the things we can do.
Terrorists are not relevant to this discussion, since in most cases technology like timers or remote controls are beyond them.
I wouldn't call Timothy McVeigh incapable of using technology like timers or remote controls, and I doubt many would argue he wasn't a terrorist. Assuming that terrorists are all ignorant specimans of humanity makes them more dangerous because it means you're not taking them seriously. There's absolutely no reason a person with a Doctorate level of education wouldn't become a terrorist. It's politics and extremism mixed up, not something that being able to program a VCR would preclude.
NDA's for everybody!
That might make it easier to know how justifiable these patent blocks were. I knew that most of us think the Pentagon is being paranoid, but it's possible that maybe the NSA submitters missed an angle. Security through obscurity isn't exactly the best, but if it's one of those "oh,wow" sorts of things, then I can see that.
:(
Domestic or foreign, I doubt the leadership (i.e. non-pawns) of a terrorist group would be be unwilling to make the best use of anything they can get their hands on. It's just too bad we won't know if the benefits of the patents would have balanced that out by providing to the American public
Front page /.
"A hack firmware hack has been published that enables a person with a kodak wireless camera to specify the photo uploads to multiple websites, not just the Kodak easyshare gallery. Streaming video features have also been enabled."
The living room of an unspecified porn star:
"Wow! This is the seventh camera I've recieved today!"
Well, it's that or hope nobody else goes public with their initial findings and takes funds that you could have used to further your research and career. The only other reason to at least not give a peek on your research is that you work for a world domination bent secret society that will kill you if you reveal their secrets. Lizardmen, anyone?
... I wish they mentioned that the "dvd crackers" they refer to had all their hard work completed years ago. I wish they mentioned some of the best pirated videos used to be the Academy screeners from insiders (since arrested, not sure if there's been a new leaker since). I am glad they mentioned the physical counterfeiters as that tends to be overlooked in favor of the sexier (RIAA funded? Nah) filesharing pirate stories.
Final wish: Somebody influential in the media would cover the arbitrary monopolies created by DVD region coding, how little it affects actual piracy and only serves to increase the dvd prices and limit the availablity of dvd titles to law abiding citizens.
In communist China...
I think it's more likely that the companies are pledging their support because it's not a good idea to argue with the Chinese goverment. Greed is secondary to survival. On the flip side, corruption from either side will enable the existence of loopholes in the laws or implementation where multiple accounts may allow gamers to bypass the time limit with multiple accounts. Just as likely would be (for WoW,at least) where rewards for killing specific NPC's (i.e. The last boss of any major instance) would be unaffected as those battles are expected to take a long time to reach and complete. Well, that or they incorporate some kind of weekend/holiday filters.
Too bad this won't affect the gold farmers on the US servers. Even if they made it so that chinese accounts on US servers were affected, there would just new hacks around it, if not just new accounts created. What will be interesting is how the farming on the Chinese servers.
I'd vote for life irritating art...
Getting a Grip on the 'CSI Effect'
While accountability and honesty is expected of police and investigators, I think the real problem comes in when juries expect a Hollywood based CSI budget for equipment, staffing and training. By that I mean DNA testing for everything, enough investigators that they only have to work one or two cases at once and that everyone is a PhD in several areas. More than that, I'd be scared to death if my fate basically hinged on some know-it-all juror's ability to recall the mating habits of a fly from CSI season 1 rather than a juror who was paying attention during the proceedings.
Cool. Never considered that as none of my laptops have ever lent themselves to having their cd drives removed. Time to go looking for those service manuals for my laptop.
Sorry I'm out of mod points :)
Assuming they made space for it, I don't see why they couldn't make it so all the drives were hot swappable (several drives with front access?). The single cart would be more to house the raid adaptor and the removable drives. I won't argue with performance gains, but the redundancy for the size would be the main selling point. Geeks wanting RAID 5 or 10 on a laptop would be secondary.
True, but considering it'd probably cost a lot, the people buying it would hopefully have read about the dismal battery life you're refering to. Dispite that, something with that kind of portablity and potential drive space would still have a fair amount of adopters. I'd use it for data recovery house calls and just plug into the client's wall (or charge them some odd surcharge for having to recharge my batteries). Anyone that would need to have a quickly scalable network deployed to a remote location in a short period of time could find a use for it. I'm thinking early response teams to a natural disaster could appreciate dragging a couple of laptops instead of the compact crate rack servers (don't remember how many pizza boxes they hold). I imagine they'd have a generator already on the 'things to pack' list.
Do you mean something like this?
I'm thinking that laptop raid would be an excellent use for these. Maybe after some power and space tweaking, a single Raid 5 cartridge could be made in place of the normal hard drive. Since high performance laptops buyers don't seem to mind a little extra bulk/weight, a laptop made to accomodate such a setup might be well accepted by hardware lovers.
I'll let the sig speak for itself...
I'm rather worried you might accidentally please the paper bag and poke out the woman... ;)
The support the poster's assumption that most /. nerds couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, wouldn't know what to do with a woman if they had one (willing or not) and spent all their $$ upgrading something that runs on electricity.