They're already trying to bill a guy that doesn't have a written contract, if you send them an e-mail soliciting advice, they'll sue you for harrassment, and then counter-sue *themselves* to collect legal fees with you as the unwilling defendant!
Asking for a cut is dangerous. That would certainly be considered a volunteering to take charge on the case. It would also tie him to the anchor if they lose the case, his 'cut' would be paying the same percentage of their expenses. Lawyers don't work based on the risk of winning or losing, they'll still get paid either way.
I can't imagine they can make a case out of this. Verbal agreements may have some binding, but they need witnesses to carry any weight against him simply denying it.
Otherwise, there's nothing to keep lawyers in line. Who needs to chase ambulances when you can just take the names off an accident report and then extort legal representation out of them?
I've never been a big fan of unions, but I'm starting to come around.
You're right that it makes more sense for factory workers, but other large groups are beginning to be treated in exactly the same way. You ARE a laborer, and you are just a replaceable commodity, not a skill. In a pool of dozens of coders, call center agents, or sysadmins, you don't stand out anymore.
Of course you know that you're good at your job, but the idiot exec holding the purse-strings over your departent might not. If you're in some type of position that does have a lot of upward mobility, then this issue never applied to you in the first place. If you've been stuck with little chance of any raise for the past several years, it starts to sound like a decent idea.
Depending on your level of security conscience, you may have blown the chance to expose them and get some valid changes made. There's plenty possibility they did another stupid level of encryption (maybe even back to a substitution? Sounds like these guys are fantastically lazy) and you know it, but now it's harder to wave in their face.
I don't know how deeply that bothers you, if it's not something that's completely trivial to crack again. If this is something where that software's failure will hurt you, or if you have a strong concern for the company's security, I'd say you should have taken the results directly to the IT suit who decided on that software package: "Hey, I'm not a security expert, but look at what these jackasses did and how easy it was to break." After screwup #2, it's pretty clear they aren't interested in putting much effort into it.
If they can't be bothered to protect passwords, I wouldn't trust any of their other work either. Then again, there may not be anyone technical enough in the company to do any real damage in someone else's name. But at the very least, it sounds like a waste of money.
In relation to TFA, this isn't evan a matter of poking through things where you don't belong, if you can crack your own password, that's enough of a concern that someone else could too.
Easy- If they actually FIXED the problem by taking down the offending images and just putting up their own, they'd lose out on the free press sympathy. So instead they get to throw a whining fit that Apple is persecuting them, when 5 minutes with a digital camera would remove the problem.
Why is there a problem with UAE owning ports in the US? I'm kind of shocked that I'm backing Bush on this, but he's right on. Who cares what country the company's head office is located in? Are you deluded into thinking there was never a single arab on their ships before the deal went through? It's not like we don't do the same thing, how many foreign ports and airbases does the US operate around the world?
Where Bush looks stupid is he and all the other politicians have been beating on the whole "TERRORISTS! OMG!" boogeyman for so long, now they have to 'fess up that there really isn't such a huge threat, and even less if we as a country weren't such assholes all the time.
It's a nice thought, but I'm still not buying music online because it doesn't give a significant incentive. The cost of a full album is nearly identical to a real CD, and for that you get regular 128-bitrate encoded files. I'd rather pay a little more and get the full-quality, which I can then re-rip according to whether it's going on a portable or another CD afterward.
I'd be more skeptical about data management than the shortcomings of the actual watermark. Will unlimited-music providers like Rhapsody generate a watermark for each file streamed? That'd be an insane amount of data to collect and track, and it'll only make a difference if my particular rip becomes one of Kazaa's top 100-most-common to matter.
Using it is not the problem, using it in context is what they want. You can have a jeep with the red cross on it, but there shouldn't also be a gun turret in the back. Nor should any similarly-marked items only restore health for one 'team'.
It's unfortunate that situations in reality don't respect non-combatants like that, but look at the alternative:
Under-educated and possibly nearly-illiterate (You didn't mention what country, but "war-torn" could easily infer this) gunmen shoot a Red Cross driver not because they've seen it in movies, but because they don't know what it means. They shoot a lot of trucks, they just learned that the symbol marks medical supplies instead of guns. They haven't ever been told those drivers are unarmed and would give direct aid to anyone injured, regardless of affiliation.
I use the normal controllers for games that are obviously at home on a console like Prince of Persia, and that's fine. Aiming in FPS games is *awful* though, and using a keyboard/mouse/trackball on your couch is no more convenient, though this would change my mind if it were console compatible.
A $700 video card is nothing but bling. My last one was $200. 3 years ago. A model you can't even buy except on eBay now, and it still works just fine. All the stupid raid-0, water cooling, over-clocking, brand-snooty PC shit *is* like driving an SUV, but PCs can also do the equivalent of a Geo Metro with a Porsche engine in it. The gap is narrowing, but simple preference still matters.
I can't install an HL2 add-on because it doesn't like my processor speed and refuses to go any farther, even though it's an AMD that can handle it.
This is not the way to ensure predictable hardware, and that's *exactly* what DirectX/OpenGL is for in the first place. Games do not talk directly to your hardware.
Rated PG-13 for violence, non-stop action sequences, sensuality, drug content and language.
How are those rating criteria when bad acting, uninspired directing, insipid plot and clice soundtrack aren't?
Re:Halo still is innovative in a number of ways...
on
Halo 2 Only on Vista
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· Score: 1
None of these things are groundbreaking must-have features, Halo just happens to have all of them together.
...vehicles were mostly viewed as single player feature
Half-Life and assorted mods did too. Forgettable because they were too efficient at killing your allies.
Single button grenade throw
Team Fortress, as you said.
Single button melee attack
Like... Duke Nukem? (which was funny, because the selectable melee was your other leg, and you'd hover around doing bicycle kicks if you hit both of them)
I wouldn't give it gushing praise to say it redefined anything. It's a derivative like Far Cry, UT, Doom, etc. Since there's no revolutionary change, it's just refining and adding minor features and tweaking what can be done without map or mod-specific scripting. Doesn't mean it's bad, it's just on-par for the industry.
Hearing footsteps, laying a spray of AK-47 fire at a wall and seeing dead enemies' names (or teammates, oops!) pop up on your tally was a unique experience in Counter-Strike, but I wouldn't call it a new era of gaming just for that.
I can't imagine why you'd need a specific OS version for a *game*. What, is Microsoft not going to publish new DirectX versions for older systems? What else could be so life-and-death critical that the version matters?
Of course, this IS Microsoft and their flagship game. If they want to deliberately obfuscate Halo to make it OS-dependent, it'll be simple enough. I'd wonder why they want to make players spend more money, but that's a pretty foolish question.
I guess I'll just have to settle for the next version of UT on my recently-'downgraded' Win2k box. What a shame.
No way. I put my money on blatant opportunists (who are not also pornsites). Check out shitstorm sites like goggle.com, yagoo.com any other potential misspellings of legitimate sites. I'd never be stupid enough to carelessly browse questionable porn sites, but I *can* make typos.
Heck, why'd you stop using it? I rather like the tiny memory usage, simple file management and minimal clutter. I don't want to screw around with playlists and visualizers! (or even skins and equalizers) I just want a player to sit unobtrusively in the background and run music like it's supposed to.
So I keep a copy of Winamp2.35 around and install it on every system I use. The size of its installer is measured in kb. Installing an updated version of Winamp is like trying to add glossy features to Notepad. Why bother?
Unfortunately, TFA is not very clear if it's talking about last-mile because it's been dumbed down for the suits reading their magazine. I can't imagine Verizon would be hauling video feeds up and down their backbone instead of distributing it locally or regionally. But then, I can't imagine why anyone's up in arms about tweaking on the customer end when they're fully capapble of enforcing their own ideas about what's a reasonable level of service.
Of course cable companies do the same thing. If one wire carries both TV and data signals, you should get better video quality/better data speeds by only having one. You don't.
That's not how it works. Unless you're way out in Backwater, Alabama, there are alternates.
A semi-monopoly will always control the wiring in your neighborhood, but an alternate ISP will be picking the phone signal up from Verizon without them touching, looking, altering, redirecting, or molesting it in any way. The only opportunity they have to screw up your service is the wire and a couple pieces of hardware.
Traffic on the internet doesn't just randomly flop around until it finds the right place. If Verizon is hauling data, you can bet it's being paid for somewhere along the line. And if that service deteriorates, so will the amount of income they get for providing it.
Maybe they'll figure video-on-demand is more profitable than operating a tier-1 backbone? Someone else can always fill in the gap.
Public utilities and common conveniences are VERY different. Try complaining to the Public Utilities Commission that you can't get cable because you're miles out in the boonies. Or how about bitching because your DSL connection has been broken for a month? Now, if your POTS service is gone, the PUC can step in, otherwise they don't care.
I don't understand how Verizon is obligated to anyone for THEIR network. Traffic going through their network is slow? Too bad! Don't go that way. You shouldn't even be touching them unless you're (a) A customer or (b) Trying to access one of their customers. If there's a problem, people will stop using Verzion not because of some mysterious snooty preferential treatment, but because their speed sucks. If their peering allows a shortcut between two places but is slowed, the networks next to them can always tweak route preferences to indicate that it's not the best path.
Verizon can do whatever they want, including turning the entire mess off, it will only affect themselves and their customers.
Because of course, the technical and social solution to spam has worked so well.
I don't care if someone's 10-year old girl gets Viagra ads. But if Susie can exempt herself from receiving crap, I'm going to lie about my age and sign up too. No privacy worries, kiddie-stalkers now have a diluted list to work with and if they don't accidentally send love notes to the feds, they'll just as likely find someone who'd take great joy in baiting them. I'm all for rolling this right in alongside the same restrictions that telemarketers have, it's so similar the databases can be combined.
But all my spam comes from.pl TDLs- I don't think they'll play along. Extra laws aren't the problem, it's just too ineffective.
How exactly does DRM come into it? If I run a rented game through my Wob-lo-matic DVD rewinder at max speed for a couple hours before sending it back and it gets scratched, how is that different than sticking a VHS tape in the Melt-o-tron and doing the same thing until it's unusable?
Heck, give them credit for at least sending out a warning instead of charging immediately. Beats having to toss the return envelope under a tire so you can pass the blame to postal damage, maybe there really is a detectable pattern of scratches they're finding.
Evolution shouldn't be taught as fact? Well, shit. Guess that means gravity needs a disclaimer too... electric universe theory and all that. Chemistry class? Never mind that it's a pretty exact science, actual atomic composition is ALL voodoo.
Yeah, there are some faults. In everything that's taught in grade schools. Do you thnk there should be corrections in language classes about every possible alternate meaning of words when their inflection is changed?
It's not perfect, but it's close. ID is not perfect, and is no closer to the facts, so it gets pushed aside. If someone really wants to dig into the details later they can, but that doesn't belong in an entry-level class on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Yikes, don't give them ideas!
They're already trying to bill a guy that doesn't have a written contract, if you send them an e-mail soliciting advice, they'll sue you for harrassment, and then counter-sue *themselves* to collect legal fees with you as the unwilling defendant!
Asking for a cut is dangerous. That would certainly be considered a volunteering to take charge on the case. It would also tie him to the anchor if they lose the case, his 'cut' would be paying the same percentage of their expenses. Lawyers don't work based on the risk of winning or losing, they'll still get paid either way.
I can't imagine they can make a case out of this. Verbal agreements may have some binding, but they need witnesses to carry any weight against him simply denying it. Otherwise, there's nothing to keep lawyers in line. Who needs to chase ambulances when you can just take the names off an accident report and then extort legal representation out of them?
I've never been a big fan of unions, but I'm starting to come around.
You're right that it makes more sense for factory workers, but other large groups are beginning to be treated in exactly the same way. You ARE a laborer, and you are just a replaceable commodity, not a skill. In a pool of dozens of coders, call center agents, or sysadmins, you don't stand out anymore.
Of course you know that you're good at your job, but the idiot exec holding the purse-strings over your departent might not. If you're in some type of position that does have a lot of upward mobility, then this issue never applied to you in the first place. If you've been stuck with little chance of any raise for the past several years, it starts to sound like a decent idea.
Depending on your level of security conscience, you may have blown the chance to expose them and get some valid changes made. There's plenty possibility they did another stupid level of encryption (maybe even back to a substitution? Sounds like these guys are fantastically lazy) and you know it, but now it's harder to wave in their face.
I don't know how deeply that bothers you, if it's not something that's completely trivial to crack again. If this is something where that software's failure will hurt you, or if you have a strong concern for the company's security, I'd say you should have taken the results directly to the IT suit who decided on that software package: "Hey, I'm not a security expert, but look at what these jackasses did and how easy it was to break." After screwup #2, it's pretty clear they aren't interested in putting much effort into it.
If they can't be bothered to protect passwords, I wouldn't trust any of their other work either. Then again, there may not be anyone technical enough in the company to do any real damage in someone else's name. But at the very least, it sounds like a waste of money.
In relation to TFA, this isn't evan a matter of poking through things where you don't belong, if you can crack your own password, that's enough of a concern that someone else could too.
Easy- If they actually FIXED the problem by taking down the offending images and just putting up their own, they'd lose out on the free press sympathy. So instead they get to throw a whining fit that Apple is persecuting them, when 5 minutes with a digital camera would remove the problem.
Way to go off-topic. Alas, IHBT...
Why is there a problem with UAE owning ports in the US? I'm kind of shocked that I'm backing Bush on this, but he's right on. Who cares what country the company's head office is located in? Are you deluded into thinking there was never a single arab on their ships before the deal went through? It's not like we don't do the same thing, how many foreign ports and airbases does the US operate around the world?
Where Bush looks stupid is he and all the other politicians have been beating on the whole "TERRORISTS! OMG!" boogeyman for so long, now they have to 'fess up that there really isn't such a huge threat, and even less if we as a country weren't such assholes all the time.
It's a nice thought, but I'm still not buying music online because it doesn't give a significant incentive. The cost of a full album is nearly identical to a real CD, and for that you get regular 128-bitrate encoded files. I'd rather pay a little more and get the full-quality, which I can then re-rip according to whether it's going on a portable or another CD afterward. I'd be more skeptical about data management than the shortcomings of the actual watermark. Will unlimited-music providers like Rhapsody generate a watermark for each file streamed? That'd be an insane amount of data to collect and track, and it'll only make a difference if my particular rip becomes one of Kazaa's top 100-most-common to matter.
Using it is not the problem, using it in context is what they want. You can have a jeep with the red cross on it, but there shouldn't also be a gun turret in the back. Nor should any similarly-marked items only restore health for one 'team'.
It's unfortunate that situations in reality don't respect non-combatants like that, but look at the alternative:
Under-educated and possibly nearly-illiterate (You didn't mention what country, but "war-torn" could easily infer this) gunmen shoot a Red Cross driver not because they've seen it in movies, but because they don't know what it means. They shoot a lot of trucks, they just learned that the symbol marks medical supplies instead of guns. They haven't ever been told those drivers are unarmed and would give direct aid to anyone injured, regardless of affiliation.
Whatever.
I use the normal controllers for games that are obviously at home on a console like Prince of Persia, and that's fine. Aiming in FPS games is *awful* though, and using a keyboard/mouse/trackball on your couch is no more convenient, though this would change my mind if it were console compatible.
A $700 video card is nothing but bling. My last one was $200. 3 years ago. A model you can't even buy except on eBay now, and it still works just fine. All the stupid raid-0, water cooling, over-clocking, brand-snooty PC shit *is* like driving an SUV, but PCs can also do the equivalent of a Geo Metro with a Porsche engine in it. The gap is narrowing, but simple preference still matters.
I can't install an HL2 add-on because it doesn't like my processor speed and refuses to go any farther, even though it's an AMD that can handle it. This is not the way to ensure predictable hardware, and that's *exactly* what DirectX/OpenGL is for in the first place. Games do not talk directly to your hardware.
Sounds like the MPAA rating on xXx:
Rated PG-13 for violence, non-stop action sequences, sensuality, drug content and language.
How are those rating criteria when bad acting, uninspired directing, insipid plot and clice soundtrack aren't?
None of these things are groundbreaking must-have features, Halo just happens to have all of them together.
...vehicles were mostly viewed as single player feature
Half-Life and assorted mods did too. Forgettable because they were too efficient at killing your allies.
Single button grenade throw
Team Fortress, as you said.
Single button melee attack
Like... Duke Nukem? (which was funny, because the selectable melee was your other leg, and you'd hover around doing bicycle kicks if you hit both of them)
I wouldn't give it gushing praise to say it redefined anything. It's a derivative like Far Cry, UT, Doom, etc. Since there's no revolutionary change, it's just refining and adding minor features and tweaking what can be done without map or mod-specific scripting. Doesn't mean it's bad, it's just on-par for the industry.
Hearing footsteps, laying a spray of AK-47 fire at a wall and seeing dead enemies' names (or teammates, oops!) pop up on your tally was a unique experience in Counter-Strike, but I wouldn't call it a new era of gaming just for that.
I can't imagine why you'd need a specific OS version for a *game*. What, is Microsoft not going to publish new DirectX versions for older systems? What else could be so life-and-death critical that the version matters?
Of course, this IS Microsoft and their flagship game. If they want to deliberately obfuscate Halo to make it OS-dependent, it'll be simple enough. I'd wonder why they want to make players spend more money, but that's a pretty foolish question.
I guess I'll just have to settle for the next version of UT on my recently-'downgraded' Win2k box. What a shame.
No way. I put my money on blatant opportunists (who are not also pornsites). Check out shitstorm sites like goggle.com, yagoo.com any other potential misspellings of legitimate sites. I'd never be stupid enough to carelessly browse questionable porn sites, but I *can* make typos.
Heck, why'd you stop using it? I rather like the tiny memory usage, simple file management and minimal clutter. I don't want to screw around with playlists and visualizers! (or even skins and equalizers) I just want a player to sit unobtrusively in the background and run music like it's supposed to.
So I keep a copy of Winamp2.35 around and install it on every system I use. The size of its installer is measured in kb. Installing an updated version of Winamp is like trying to add glossy features to Notepad. Why bother?
Unfortunately, TFA is not very clear if it's talking about last-mile because it's been dumbed down for the suits reading their magazine. I can't imagine Verizon would be hauling video feeds up and down their backbone instead of distributing it locally or regionally. But then, I can't imagine why anyone's up in arms about tweaking on the customer end when they're fully capapble of enforcing their own ideas about what's a reasonable level of service. Of course cable companies do the same thing. If one wire carries both TV and data signals, you should get better video quality/better data speeds by only having one. You don't.
That's not how it works. Unless you're way out in Backwater, Alabama, there are alternates.
A semi-monopoly will always control the wiring in your neighborhood, but an alternate ISP will be picking the phone signal up from Verizon without them touching, looking, altering, redirecting, or molesting it in any way. The only opportunity they have to screw up your service is the wire and a couple pieces of hardware.
Traffic on the internet doesn't just randomly flop around until it finds the right place. If Verizon is hauling data, you can bet it's being paid for somewhere along the line. And if that service deteriorates, so will the amount of income they get for providing it.
Maybe they'll figure video-on-demand is more profitable than operating a tier-1 backbone? Someone else can always fill in the gap.
Public utilities and common conveniences are VERY different. Try complaining to the Public Utilities Commission that you can't get cable because you're miles out in the boonies. Or how about bitching because your DSL connection has been broken for a month? Now, if your POTS service is gone, the PUC can step in, otherwise they don't care.
I don't understand how Verizon is obligated to anyone for THEIR network. Traffic going through their network is slow? Too bad! Don't go that way. You shouldn't even be touching them unless you're (a) A customer or (b) Trying to access one of their customers. If there's a problem, people will stop using Verzion not because of some mysterious snooty preferential treatment, but because their speed sucks. If their peering allows a shortcut between two places but is slowed, the networks next to them can always tweak route preferences to indicate that it's not the best path.
Verizon can do whatever they want, including turning the entire mess off, it will only affect themselves and their customers.
Because of course, the technical and social solution to spam has worked so well.
.pl TDLs- I don't think they'll play along. Extra laws aren't the problem, it's just too ineffective.
I don't care if someone's 10-year old girl gets Viagra ads. But if Susie can exempt herself from receiving crap, I'm going to lie about my age and sign up too. No privacy worries, kiddie-stalkers now have a diluted list to work with and if they don't accidentally send love notes to the feds, they'll just as likely find someone who'd take great joy in baiting them. I'm all for rolling this right in alongside the same restrictions that telemarketers have, it's so similar the databases can be combined.
But all my spam comes from
I'm a little lost.
How exactly does DRM come into it? If I run a rented game through my Wob-lo-matic DVD rewinder at max speed for a couple hours before sending it back and it gets scratched, how is that different than sticking a VHS tape in the Melt-o-tron and doing the same thing until it's unusable?
Heck, give them credit for at least sending out a warning instead of charging immediately. Beats having to toss the return envelope under a tire so you can pass the blame to postal damage, maybe there really is a detectable pattern of scratches they're finding.
You assume they're actually taking action based on their http logs. Well, besides just running traffic stats and deleting them.
Kind of defeats the purpose of scare tactics if you actually follow through with the threats.
Not that they *could*, but the whole stunt is a stupidity contest to begin with.
Evolution shouldn't be taught as fact? Well, shit. Guess that means gravity needs a disclaimer too... electric universe theory and all that. Chemistry class? Never mind that it's a pretty exact science, actual atomic composition is ALL voodoo.
Yeah, there are some faults. In everything that's taught in grade schools. Do you thnk there should be corrections in language classes about every possible alternate meaning of words when their inflection is changed?
It's not perfect, but it's close. ID is not perfect, and is no closer to the facts, so it gets pushed aside. If someone really wants to dig into the details later they can, but that doesn't belong in an entry-level class on the subject.