I wonder if there will be an increase in muggings/robberies because of this. All a thief has to do is stand near a sign, look for a laptop-related, phone-related or ipod-related advert to appear as someone walks past and then they have their target for the day.
But as with all analog/digital differences, you wont be able to clone your identity as easily in analog. In digital it is 1 database record to make another you!
I am sure it will really have an effect on the many people selling pirated software around the world, especially since it is just a map of the US. The US already has the lowest software piracy rate in the world, but at what point is it impossible to reduce the numbers anymore? People will always pirate software, deal drugs, and commit other illegal activities as long as there is profit, and with the distributer being targetted rather than the purchaser, there will always be demand creating a vacuum of supply. Perhaps it would be more profitable to go to wealthy medium-piracy level countries and crack down there instead.
I am very glad they are cracking down on third party security software in Vista since Microsoft obviously have such a great security model we should have full confidence in. In all seriousness though, I wonder how many more people will start getting router-type devices between their computer and net connection, filtering content, connections and data, all because of this action. Looking forward to va-va-va-vista!
The death of Kuro5hin.org is one of the worst things I have seen on the Internet. Back when it was at its prime, K5's content was just brilliant. Every home page story and almost every section story would teach and entertain in some way. Then came the trolls and gamers. As Rusty and the other bigwigs fought back with technology, the trolls increased in number (many were drawn from/. which also had a very big troll problem at the time). Eventually the quality of the site could not be maintained with the signal to noise ratio that now existed, and the original users which made it great starting to migrate around the web (partly to HuSi), killing K5 as it was and leaving K5 as it is. Digg has always been in a weaker position than K5 due to it desire for many stories rather than the once a week/once a month that K5 would sometimes be in the quest for quality, but now digg verges on the edge of the same problems that K5 had but with different 'trolls'. Digg seems to be fragmenting in to a more apple/css/webdesign/politics crowd than the general crowd it once addressed in my opinion. Digg has a company behind it, K5 did not and in the end I think digg will not be destroyed by trolls, but might be beaten in to more of a niche market than it wanted to be in the beginning.
Why, because that would be too simple and would involve compliance with the EU monopoly requirements. Microsoft would much rather argue and pay the fine it seems!
I do have an xbox 360 and agree with xbox live as being a great thing, especially the community side of things. I have 720p HDTV with the xbox so it is of moreorless the same resolution as the PC version. I have only rented CoD2 on xbox, but bought it for PC and have the demo sitting on the xbox at the moment. Perhaps when it first came out things were not quite as good looking, but my PC is rather bleeding edge now and it just feels better (more responsive controls), and looks better due to more antialiasing and ansitropic filtering. The 360 version has noticeably worse antialiasing than the PC version with options cranked up (a quick google shows that 4xAA is required for all xbox games, which is quite a bit lower than the minimum of 8xS I used on PC).
5. Xbox Live. Aside from Battlefield 2, I can't think of any online game that's currently better on PC
Call of Duty 2 is without a doubt better on PC. Looks better, keyboard and mouse is much better for controlling and the online system is everything I would ever need on the PC.
The parent is correct and I would go as far as saying the UK banking system is more mature than the banking system in the US (having banked in the UK and US and knowing many people from both). When it comes to moving money around, everybody needs a bank account in the UK. Many services will allow cash payments but only through a long-winded payment process which typically incurs charges, whereas direct debit (basically a rapid, regulated, consistent bank transfer) will normally get you discounts. Credit cards are accepted by a lot of places for paying bills, but if you want to pay rent or a mortgage, 90% of the time there is no choice other than a direct debit (or a very hefty processing charge for cheques/money orders). There are many convenient things about having such an integrated banking system (no charges for cash withdrawals from the vast majority of ATMs, regardless of your bank and the bank of the ATM for one), but losing the ability to use cash to much of a degree is one of the downsides.
Standard practice (that I am aware of) is to 'leak' slightly different versions of similar information, making it appear that all people got the same information (eg; sending an email that normally goes out to a group, but instead marking the 'To' field the group name and just sending it to an individual, one at a time). This can be done to departments first of all, to figure out which department has the leak (if it is a company-wide leaker), or just to individuals within a group. It falls down if there are 2 or more people leaking who can compare information before leaking, but if you suspect a couple of people then you can leak information to them together and work from there.
Yes, as good an idea as he thought it was, any company that ever googles his name now will instantly see pages associated with sex-related pranks, and see pages and pages of controversy and arguments. I read in one place that a couple of marriages are breaking apart because of his actions*, and he has been anything but anonymous in his 'prank' (his full address was available along with phone number and name on his site when he first did this and it has been reposted in quite a few places), so one wonders what will come either legally or illegally of him as a result of this.
*Though they would probably have broken apart anyway as nobody can hide this sort of thing forever.
I agree with you, and have been hoping that some day they start doing this in denser areas. Being able to use advanced routing methods to move people from A to B in place of the inefficient and unaware cars and buses of today would be very useful. There are a few problems I can think of that need to be sorted out to get this to work properly though:
- Efficient routing around disasters, with breakdown detection to prevent a single system failure from breaking the entire network.
- Some sort of weight detection system to ensure that people do not leave anything on the vehicles (bags, bombs, etc). Normally a driver would point these things out but automated systems lack that ability.
- Some sort of 'digital nose' type device to detect the vehicles which have stink bombs, vomit, and whatever other lovely smells that can be accrued by frequent usage in a densely populated area, and allow the vehicles to be removed from service and cleaned instantly.
- Decent integration with pedestrians. They need to be able to go as fast as possible so that fewer vehicles are needed, but must not clog up roads for traffic and pedestrians. Ideally some sort of sunken road could be used where appropriate perhaps, allowing large boulevards at ground level, and enabling their usage in pedestrianised areas.
- Easy to use for disabled people.
- Free or cheaper than driving a car or taking a bus.
- Must run at all hours, not be limited like public transport is, as this encourages people to either stumble around cities drunk after clubs close, or sometimes risk driving home.
That is all that I can think of right now, anyone got any others? A private public-transport would be very welcome.
They can and do. No US credit card company will allow gambling transactions to go through, so people use third-party products like neteller and firepay (think paypal but allow gambling). They are used for more than the US though, as there are other countries around the world which have banking systems that gambling companies do not want to deal with, and these providers allow risk to be mitigated. For example, in the UK, debt to gambling companies is unenforceable*, so if you deposit with a gambling site, play, lose and then do a chargeback on your credit card, when the site comes calling you, if you say 'I refuse to pay', there is nothing (legally) that can be done. If you say 'I didnt make that transaction' then it is fraud so they can take action. Third-party providers (which do not care about your country) are used on the gambling sites to mitigate these sorts of risks as the third-party provider can get the chase you for money from the chargeback. US citizens use these providers to play games around the world (but mainly on sites based in israel and the UK).
* to discourage gambling companies from allowing people to build up huge debts with them directly.
I'll give another vote for Nagios for most things. I also use cacti to get a nice, locked-down set of logs which non-tech people can login to and check to see how things are (including usage patterns). I would not recommend either product unless you like instruction manuals though!
Especially now that firefox is so popular. Firefox makes up 10% of users on the general Internet (as counter by thecounter.com), with IE at 85%. My own tech related site has 76.4% of users using firefox, with just 10.1% on IE, and my other more casual site has 23.1% firefox and 64% IE (the rest being safari, opera, konq, etc.)
I am not so sure, as I think that some sort of programmable PCI-X card is going to exist sometime soonish which will allow programmeable hardware processing of simple routines like line of site or pathfinding (or other mathematical problems), and this will offload from the CPU. This would be more logical as it can then be used in many different applications from custom rendering for render farms, to hardware-assisted protein folding through to complicated firewalling/packet sniffing and back to gaming and other desktop usage. They have been in development for a while now, I just wonder when they will start becoming available to the consumer.
Because they are posers and just want to look like they have expensive equipment? That would apply to quite a few people with top-of-the-range systems that I know of.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there will be an increase in muggings/robberies because of this. All a thief has to do is stand near a sign, look for a laptop-related, phone-related or ipod-related advert to appear as someone walks past and then they have their target for the day.
But as with all analog/digital differences, you wont be able to clone your identity as easily in analog. In digital it is 1 database record to make another you!
I am sure it will really have an effect on the many people selling pirated software around the world, especially since it is just a map of the US. The US already has the lowest software piracy rate in the world, but at what point is it impossible to reduce the numbers anymore? People will always pirate software, deal drugs, and commit other illegal activities as long as there is profit, and with the distributer being targetted rather than the purchaser, there will always be demand creating a vacuum of supply. Perhaps it would be more profitable to go to wealthy medium-piracy level countries and crack down there instead.
It will work, you just need to use a lot more than what you have used before!
I am very glad they are cracking down on third party security software in Vista since Microsoft obviously have such a great security model we should have full confidence in. In all seriousness though, I wonder how many more people will start getting router-type devices between their computer and net connection, filtering content, connections and data, all because of this action. Looking forward to va-va-va-vista!
The death of Kuro5hin.org is one of the worst things I have seen on the Internet. Back when it was at its prime, K5's content was just brilliant. Every home page story and almost every section story would teach and entertain in some way. Then came the trolls and gamers. As Rusty and the other bigwigs fought back with technology, the trolls increased in number (many were drawn from /. which also had a very big troll problem at the time). Eventually the quality of the site could not be maintained with the signal to noise ratio that now existed, and the original users which made it great starting to migrate around the web (partly to HuSi), killing K5 as it was and leaving K5 as it is. Digg has always been in a weaker position than K5 due to it desire for many stories rather than the once a week/once a month that K5 would sometimes be in the quest for quality, but now digg verges on the edge of the same problems that K5 had but with different 'trolls'. Digg seems to be fragmenting in to a more apple/css/webdesign/politics crowd than the general crowd it once addressed in my opinion. Digg has a company behind it, K5 did not and in the end I think digg will not be destroyed by trolls, but might be beaten in to more of a niche market than it wanted to be in the beginning.
simple, if it does not sound buzzwordy enough, people wont talk about it much and it wont get much publicity. It is the next-gen of news stories.
Why, because that would be too simple and would involve compliance with the EU monopoly requirements. Microsoft would much rather argue and pay the fine it seems!
Must be the Guardian report on the parking lot massacre at your office. They like to keep that censored as much as possible. Power to the people!
I do have an xbox 360 and agree with xbox live as being a great thing, especially the community side of things. I have 720p HDTV with the xbox so it is of moreorless the same resolution as the PC version. I have only rented CoD2 on xbox, but bought it for PC and have the demo sitting on the xbox at the moment. Perhaps when it first came out things were not quite as good looking, but my PC is rather bleeding edge now and it just feels better (more responsive controls), and looks better due to more antialiasing and ansitropic filtering. The 360 version has noticeably worse antialiasing than the PC version with options cranked up (a quick google shows that 4xAA is required for all xbox games, which is quite a bit lower than the minimum of 8xS I used on PC).
Call of Duty 2 is without a doubt better on PC. Looks better, keyboard and mouse is much better for controlling and the online system is everything I would ever need on the PC.
The parent is correct and I would go as far as saying the UK banking system is more mature than the banking system in the US (having banked in the UK and US and knowing many people from both). When it comes to moving money around, everybody needs a bank account in the UK. Many services will allow cash payments but only through a long-winded payment process which typically incurs charges, whereas direct debit (basically a rapid, regulated, consistent bank transfer) will normally get you discounts. Credit cards are accepted by a lot of places for paying bills, but if you want to pay rent or a mortgage, 90% of the time there is no choice other than a direct debit (or a very hefty processing charge for cheques/money orders). There are many convenient things about having such an integrated banking system (no charges for cash withdrawals from the vast majority of ATMs, regardless of your bank and the bank of the ATM for one), but losing the ability to use cash to much of a degree is one of the downsides.
Standard practice (that I am aware of) is to 'leak' slightly different versions of similar information, making it appear that all people got the same information (eg; sending an email that normally goes out to a group, but instead marking the 'To' field the group name and just sending it to an individual, one at a time). This can be done to departments first of all, to figure out which department has the leak (if it is a company-wide leaker), or just to individuals within a group. It falls down if there are 2 or more people leaking who can compare information before leaking, but if you suspect a couple of people then you can leak information to them together and work from there.
Yes, as good an idea as he thought it was, any company that ever googles his name now will instantly see pages associated with sex-related pranks, and see pages and pages of controversy and arguments. I read in one place that a couple of marriages are breaking apart because of his actions*, and he has been anything but anonymous in his 'prank' (his full address was available along with phone number and name on his site when he first did this and it has been reposted in quite a few places), so one wonders what will come either legally or illegally of him as a result of this.
*Though they would probably have broken apart anyway as nobody can hide this sort of thing forever.
Well maybe if you didnt have this frivolous ass surgery, you wouldn't get these debts! (joke of course, hope it all works out for you!)
I agree with you, and have been hoping that some day they start doing this in denser areas. Being able to use advanced routing methods to move people from A to B in place of the inefficient and unaware cars and buses of today would be very useful. There are a few problems I can think of that need to be sorted out to get this to work properly though:
- Efficient routing around disasters, with breakdown detection to prevent a single system failure from breaking the entire network.
- Some sort of weight detection system to ensure that people do not leave anything on the vehicles (bags, bombs, etc). Normally a driver would point these things out but automated systems lack that ability.
- Some sort of 'digital nose' type device to detect the vehicles which have stink bombs, vomit, and whatever other lovely smells that can be accrued by frequent usage in a densely populated area, and allow the vehicles to be removed from service and cleaned instantly.
- Decent integration with pedestrians. They need to be able to go as fast as possible so that fewer vehicles are needed, but must not clog up roads for traffic and pedestrians. Ideally some sort of sunken road could be used where appropriate perhaps, allowing large boulevards at ground level, and enabling their usage in pedestrianised areas.
- Easy to use for disabled people.
- Free or cheaper than driving a car or taking a bus.
- Must run at all hours, not be limited like public transport is, as this encourages people to either stumble around cities drunk after clubs close, or sometimes risk driving home.
That is all that I can think of right now, anyone got any others? A private public-transport would be very welcome.
They can and do. No US credit card company will allow gambling transactions to go through, so people use third-party products like neteller and firepay (think paypal but allow gambling). They are used for more than the US though, as there are other countries around the world which have banking systems that gambling companies do not want to deal with, and these providers allow risk to be mitigated. For example, in the UK, debt to gambling companies is unenforceable*, so if you deposit with a gambling site, play, lose and then do a chargeback on your credit card, when the site comes calling you, if you say 'I refuse to pay', there is nothing (legally) that can be done. If you say 'I didnt make that transaction' then it is fraud so they can take action. Third-party providers (which do not care about your country) are used on the gambling sites to mitigate these sorts of risks as the third-party provider can get the chase you for money from the chargeback. US citizens use these providers to play games around the world (but mainly on sites based in israel and the UK).
* to discourage gambling companies from allowing people to build up huge debts with them directly.
I'll give another vote for Nagios for most things. I also use cacti to get a nice, locked-down set of logs which non-tech people can login to and check to see how things are (including usage patterns). I would not recommend either product unless you like instruction manuals though!
MSIE 3.0 here I come!
Especially now that firefox is so popular. Firefox makes up 10% of users on the general Internet (as counter by thecounter.com), with IE at 85%. My own tech related site has 76.4% of users using firefox, with just 10.1% on IE, and my other more casual site has 23.1% firefox and 64% IE (the rest being safari, opera, konq, etc.)
Not all encryption. My patented 100% lossy encryption seems to be unbreakable!
Hold CTRL and press + a few times. If it still says porn porns then you should probably google 'porn porns'.
I am not so sure, as I think that some sort of programmable PCI-X card is going to exist sometime soonish which will allow programmeable hardware processing of simple routines like line of site or pathfinding (or other mathematical problems), and this will offload from the CPU. This would be more logical as it can then be used in many different applications from custom rendering for render farms, to hardware-assisted protein folding through to complicated firewalling/packet sniffing and back to gaming and other desktop usage. They have been in development for a while now, I just wonder when they will start becoming available to the consumer.
And with jpeg as the codec, they can keep their 1950s picture quality too!
Because they are posers and just want to look like they have expensive equipment? That would apply to quite a few people with top-of-the-range systems that I know of.