Would you argue that changes are necessary to poker because blind people can't play?
No, but I would argue that there's a market for braille playing cards. (Bad example.)
Companies aren't REQUIRED to accomodate anybody, but shutting out potential customers is not a good way to increase business. Accessibility arguments aside: Would adding a particular texture/shape/isobar format to replace subtle color differentiations cost more to implement than they would make back in increased sales to the colorblind? If not, there's no reason not to. If it would, the manufacturer has a decision: Maximize profit or maximize player base?
A game doesn't NEED to be universally accessable unless it's put out by the government. But should it? That's a matter of opinion, but I think so.
No, but changing the paper WOULD. And it seems to me that making braille indents into linen rag paper would be difficult to say the least.
IANA human factors/ergonomics expert, but I think the BoE&P has enough on the payroll that we can safely say that the US is willing to change some ink, design and color to a certain extent, and is unwilling to change the paper stock and the size of currency notes. They can't use things like holograms (and I'd guess plastic derivatives) due to how they stress-test new notes - holograms are notoriously bad in the crumple test. Thus, the green/black metallic color changing ink on the front.
What gets me is that somehow currency got grandfathered out of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA, for those unfamiliar, basically says that facilities paid for by taxes have to be accessible to, among others, the blind. When I worked for a.gov, our website went through a LOT of testing to make sure it was screen reader compliant. And yet, our money, a bit more pivotal than a seldom-used website, seemingly has no such requirements on it.
It might just be that changing it would require so many infrastructure changes (every ATM, every change machine, every vending machine that takes paper money, the self-checkout lanes at the supermarkets, every machine that handles money) that Treasury just says "To hell with it."
US paper currency is archaic. BoE&P is using band-aids and moving the target, but it's not a good solution. Of course, knowing this country, if we redid currency, they'd want to put a smart chip in it or barcode or somesuch. TO PREVENT TERRORISM and oh yeah anonymity in general.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but when I'm executing financial transactions (from going to the bank to going out to lunch), I CHECK the denominations of the bills I give and those I recieve. The new-look (not the brand-new-look) currency has a high-contrast, big, blocky, really-hard-to-miss printing of the denomination in one corner, and if I'm overpaying (using a $10 for less than $5, $20 for less than $10), I hand that side to the cashier or whoever's taking my money to make sure they get it.
I have sympathy for the blind, but no color change is going to help them. Changing the size of the bills here would meet with such outrage as hasn't been seen since the Susan B. Anthony dollar. (Good thing we issued the Sacajawea dollar - everybody's using that, right?)
It'd be more accurate to say "A SWG player logging enough time to concievably become a Jedi craves not these things."
I was PSYCHED when Galaxies came out. I bought the Sucker's^WCollector's Edition, I was on at Launch Day +1 and only because Launch Day was practically impossible to get on. I bookmarked about five Galaxies news sites and visited several times a day. I had a couple PAs (think guilds or clans here) lined up, I was good to go.
After three weeks of playing the game, I basically shelved it. Both Adventure and Excitement are noticably absent from the game. There's very little compelling about the missions available in game (go here and blow up this mob nest OR deliver this thing to this person), the static content was (maybe still is) broken - rewards promised by NPCs didn't materialize and oh by the way GMs won't give you the prizes retroactively, even if they can see you completed the missions. It was just a boring game to play.
Star Wars relies on drama. Good Versus Evil. Rebellion Versus Empire. interesting stuff. Galaxies relies on grinding out Newbie Pistols and hunting Corellian Butterfly (what?) after Corellian Butterfly for hours before you can reasonably expect to survive off-planet.
The whole Jedi thing smacks of the chatroom jewel in Diablo II. For those not fortunate enough to have played D2, in the battle.net pregame chat room, there was a "Jewel" that could be "activated" or not. Nobody at Blizzard would say what it did, and people spent hours discussing what effect it had on the game. I think it came out recently that it, in fact, did nothing but amuse Blizzard devs who sat there and watched people click it with no effect.
Now, I'm not saying that there's no way to become a Jedi and that it's all a red herring. I'm just saying that conspicuously undefined goals are a hard thing to get into. It's like being in a scavenger hunt where you don't know what you're supposed to be getting and no warmer/colder clues as to how you're doing. The prize is nice, but without any sort of feedback, you just get sick of it and get on with living your life. It's not -fun-. I've got enough boring same-old-same-old eight hours a day at work, thanks.
What if you want to sync Outlook? Send the photos and movies you take to your desktop? Use Bluetooth headset hardware? What if you don't dig the built in PDA and want to use your own?
I have a Nokia 3650 and the PDA functions suck my left one. I'm in the market for a bluetooth enabled PDA so I can get my info off the phone and let it do what it does well: be a phone. Managing your calendar, populating a to-do list, sending email, taking notes, tracking contacts. All of these things are things better done on a PDA with some handwriting function.
I'm all for gadget convergence between phone, PDA, camera, and media player, but if I had it to do over again, I'd get the Sony Ericsson P800. As it stands, the devices aren't to the point where they can converge and still be -good-, so I'm looking for a good flip cameraphone to replace the 3650 and I'll deal with carrying two pieces of hardware.
Just stand in front of ATM the next time a worm rocks through and watch it start spitting out bills.
CoinStar machines at your favorite grocery store run NT4 right now. Hang out in front of one of them during the next virus and wait for 'em to start spitting out change and/or vouchers for cash at the registers.
When you figure out how to make that happen, post it here - I could use the cash.
Not as risky as you might first think
on
Cracking GSM
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· Score: 1
The encryption is in the phone, so the phone needs to be upgraded.
From the article on the Register: "Both parties agree that the issue does not affect 3G phones, which use different protocols and security mechanisms than legacy GSM handsets."
You DO have one of the new phones, right? I mean, you ARE reading Slashdot.
I think this is what's going to keep it from being a problem legally - nobody's introducing phones to which this attack is vulnerable.
I'd be curious to know how this works if you sell on a CD or cassette holding copyright material; presumably there's some implicit permission to transfer granted when you buy it (or it's been technically illegal all the time, but no-one ever complained). Any IP lawyers out there?
Umm... That's exactly what this story is ABOUT. The uncharted ground of intellectual property law: Does the implicit permission to transfer follow the medium (CD/cassette) or the data (song)?
The IP lawyers (EFF and RIAA) will be looking at this one, or so we all assume.
Houston ISD wants to collect aggregate data about the student (attendance, grades, trends) in the name of keeping kids in school. How is this different from the FBI or local PD keeping an eye on when I leave for work, my salary history, and my career development? It's just the established authority making analogous observations.
What if it was to keep an eye on me to make sure I don't go postal (apologies to USPS) at work? Would it be okay then? And would you trust the government to do it legitimately?
Pardon me while I go into tin foil hat mode, but I don't like it when my employer watches me. I get really scared when my government starts watching people, and that includes the public schools looking at students. The assertion is that minors enrolled in public school don't have the right to privacy. Do they? Or is aggregation of data even an invasion of privacy?
By the time all of Microsoft's costs were added up, I'm sure it was at least $2000.
Dodgy financial arithmetic aside...
I don't understand how this is costing MS a cent. The EULA specifies that the user is to contact the computer manufacturer for a refund. That means Dell, Gateway, or Mom And Dad's Olde Tyme PC Shoppe gets the screw. They're out $200, plus court costs, plus the time of all the CSRs and lawyers and whomever else they paid to answer the refund claim.
This is not to say that these entities don't deserve it - you buy at wholesale, you know what you're getting yourself into. But don't make this into a crusade to drain the coffers of Bill The Gates $199 at a time, unless MS is agreeing to buy copies sold at wholesale back at retail. I find this to be unlikely at best.
IANA(Accountant), so if anybody wants to shed some light on this one, I'd appreciate it.
any data transferred over the internet has your encryption removed.
Oh, for a mod point.
This is the real reason that this technology is worthless to keep RIAA/FBI/NSA/CIA/AARP off your back. They're gonna pick it up when you transmit it over a public network. The Secure IDE technology that ABIT is touting protects your local machine on boot if you don't have the USB key - it does nothing for encrypting what you send on the network. If it did, it'd be rendering p2p useless, because nobody else has your sooper sekrit USB key to see what you're sharing. What moron is going to randomly pick your name out of a hat, and come over to your house and take the hard drive out without probable cause?
No, they're going to watch what you're sharing, what you're transmitting and recieving, man-in-the-middle it for evidence if they're feeling inspired, THEN and only then, will they drag your ass into civil court, where "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't hold as much water. The damage is done before you see the subpoena.
Remember kids, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all that, is to protect you from the GOVERNMENT. The RIAA is NOT the government. (Yet.) The judges have to protect you from the RIAA, and they're most definitely not doing that.
Humans expire just like copyrights. ...which is to say, not at all. So when I'm about to die, I can be renewed in perpetuity? Cool.
If the RIAA can milk recording artists for money well after the artist is dead, I should be able to, erm, liberate the music well after I'm dead. Not that I will die - I'll have my friends renew me.
How long wold it take for most of you to figure out this is Spam? How many of you would approach the 10 second mark for deleting both of these?
The problem here is that you seem to be okay with accepting the average Slashdot user as an acceptable sample of the average spam recipient. I work as desktop support, and I can think of a dozen users that I support off the top of my head who'd lose at least a full minute on this message, either trying to figure out how to delete it, how to filter its ilk in the future, writing me a message telling me how terrible it is that they got spam and that I should fix it, or walking down the hall to tell their coworkers they got Viagraspam. This is to say nothing of when Upper Management gets a message they don't like. They're not the worst offenders, though - we have pretty good management here. It's middle management that you have to watch out for.
Just because YOU recognize it as spam and know what to do, that doesn't mean the majority of recipients of same are as enlightened.
It's not a question of being outvoted so much as it is there not being a product on the market that caters to this niche group.
The reason for this has been touched upon by earlier posters: Enforcing true Role Playing is not conducive to Making Big Buck$.
For purposes of this discussion, "Role Playing" is defined as communicating in-game as one's character would, not using 1337-speak, and leaving one's Real Life self and Real Life concerns "at the door". Looking for help with a quest one just recieved would be considered RP. Discussing Yankees' scores or the new website you created for your guild/clan/PA is not.
The only way to improve RP is to hire in-game GMs or NPCs or both to reward those players that play their roles and punish those who do not. The money you have to pay these GMs and NPCs cuts into your profits, and the players you punish for not playing their roles will get frustrated and leave, creating a ton of bad buzz about your RPG. What few true roleplayers you have will be thrilled at the prospect of the One True RPG, fiercely loyal to it and its creators, and very depressed when the MMORPG goes out of business in less than a year.
Slightly off topic, but bear with me: Did you ever see the Cartmanland episode of South Park? Cartman buys an amusement park for his sole use, denying everybody else entry. But then a ride breaks down, so he has to pay a maintenance man. To offset his salary, he lets two people in. Then he has to hire a ticket seller. Two more people let in. Ride operators, concession sellers, etc etc. By the end of the episode, it's just another amusement park.
I'm all for a Heavy-RP-only MMORPG - it'd get the purists off my back for not speaking in thees and thous. But their RP utopia would almost have to cave to market pressures or be exorbitantly priced in order to stay afloat.
I changed the keymap from the default to the FPS setup (WASD to move, single keystrokes, and hit enter to chat) and that worked out a LOT better for me. I don't know how people tolerate the default keymap (walk forward slaved to the right mouse button? C'mon.) but there are several built in and you can change any or all of the bindings.
Your blaster's replaced by a sword if you're playing the Brawler (melee fighter) class. Everybody else gets a CDEF (apparently Star Wars for "newbie") blaster pistol. Lightsabers are going to be reserved for the (woefully rare) jedi.
I use first-person almost exclusively and then miss out on half my own character's animations. It doesn't feel right playing third-person though. But some people dig it.
Whenever anybody asks me about SWG, I tell them that it's not for everybody, but I really dig it. The combat is kinda weak, but the rest of the world makes up for it.
There are still other calls to make besides pitches thrown kinda over home plate, and umps will still be needed to make those.
...for the time being. First it's balls and strikes, then fair and foul, then safe and out. Why stop with baseball? Football could use a camera system for ball spotting, illegal motion (Sorry, joe, you were moving one frame too early. five yards, replay the down.), basketball could use cameras to decide between 2 and 3 point shots, goaltending, hockey for icing, 2 line passes, tennis and volleyball for in/out, foot faults, net serves... the list goes on.
The slippery slope of automated officiating begins with this. Sure, keep the machine around to rate officials, but let it be a tool for experienced umps who can make decisions based on game situations. You can't have an appreciation for how hard a game is to call until you've worn the stripes or the mask and plate shoes. Officiating is about judgment - let those exercising theirs on the field be evaluated by a person with judgment, not a computer with a camera attached.
I make my own muffins using my own oven etc, but I get all the ingredients for free from a shop, without the shop actually agreeing to give it to me.
<metaphor_nazi> Actually, it's running in back, stealing a copy of the copyrighted recipe, then going home and baking the food. </metaphor_nazi>
Remember, everybody, software (the "stolen" bits in question) are just instructions. You use your own CD burner, your own laser, your own electricity to power all of the above. The only crime you're committing is unauthorized use of copyrighted information. Which, granted, is a crime, but just to set the metaphor straight.
software will exponentially decrease in effective speed while exponentially increasing in install size, effectively canceling the more troubling consequences of Moore's law.
Commonly paraphrased as "Andy gives me power, Bill takes it away, Andy gives me power, Bill takes it away." Except in this case, it might be Hector instead of Andy, but you get the idea.
Yeah, sure, you can run it twice as fast, but the current version's bloated to effectively halve its speed. Sure, Windows 3.1 will blaze, but Windows $MOST_RECENT will -require- all that horsepower.
Substitute "Netscape" for "Netflix", and "Microsoft" for "Wal-Mart" and your comment seems frighteningly on-target.
And then Wal-Mart starts making DVD players and shipping their DVD players with a subscription to the service, and mucking with the firmware so that DVDs rented from Wal-Mart play better, and then getting the MPAA to add extensions that work only with Wal-Mart players and discs, and then Netflix gets bought by $GIANT_CORP and goes promptly nowhere.
is that it solves all the problems of the original GBA.
I would have got the original GBA, but I'm hard on my hardware, and screens get scratched. The "clamshell" design of the SP solves that problem.
I also hate buying batteries or battery packs. The SP solves that with an internal Li-Ion battery that lasts as long lit as the GBA could go on a set of alkalines without a light (ten hours) and longer unlit (eighteen hours).
The Castlevania games that every review site ever said "Get a halogen lamp and don't move while playing this" are no longer valid now that the SP has an even front-light (that does make the screen a bit bluer, but still very playable). I don't have to go third-party (sketchy) or trust my own skills (sketchier) to avoid getting dirt in the screen when installing a light.
It's also small. I've got enough crap in my pockets (cell, keys, PDA, etc etc) that I needed something a bit smaller than the GBA. At three inches square, the SP fits the bill.
Yes, the lack of a headphone jack is annoying, but I can play without sound and rarely lose anything. Unfolded, the form factor's similar to the original Game Boy, and I can play it just fine. I guess I have small girly hands. Lucky me.
The SP is replacing old GBAs ("MOMMY MOMMY BUY IT FOR ME" is a popular one, but far from all) and is increasing the userbase to adults who can drop a hundred bucks on a toy. I just wish they'd premiered with all four colors - I would have preferred black to silver. Oh, I'm sorry. ONYX to PLATINUM.
Parent's not kidding at all. My best friend in college wasn't a geek at all and graduated with a BA in English. Got work shortly after graduating, and now he's programming ColdFusion and SQL for the government and making a pretty nice living at it. I graduated with a BSE in Computer Engineering in 2001 and I -just- got hired two months ago, and I think he's still making more than I am.
We laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true.
Re:I liked it better...
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P2P Meets Push
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you were flipping channels and HBO showed a naked child that was later ruled to be kiddie porn, who would be legally responsible?
I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But that's not my main concern.
I'm not worried about seeing it, I'm worried about having a copy on my computer when the feds bust down the door, and they know it's there, and I don't cuz I haven't gone through this morning's downloads yet.
"I swear to god, I didn't know it was even there!" "Of course not. You have the right to remain silent..."
Possession is 9/10 of the law. If the TV saved a copy of the HBO kiddie porn, or a record that I "watched" it, I would be -really- careful about what I allowed it to automatically tape. But TV is a streaming medium, and doesn't tape without my knowledge and permission.
This particular application doesn't rely on big businesses with reputations like HBO or Skinemax or even Channel 385 on some random satellite. This allows Joe Internetuser to create a channel. Freedom of speech, power to the masses. I'm all for it. But I'm still gonna be careful.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you argue that changes are necessary to poker because blind people can't play?
No, but I would argue that there's a market for braille playing cards. (Bad example.)
Companies aren't REQUIRED to accomodate anybody, but shutting out potential customers is not a good way to increase business. Accessibility arguments aside: Would adding a particular texture/shape/isobar format to replace subtle color differentiations cost more to implement than they would make back in increased sales to the colorblind? If not, there's no reason not to. If it would, the manufacturer has a decision: Maximize profit or maximize player base?
A game doesn't NEED to be universally accessable unless it's put out by the government. But should it? That's a matter of opinion, but I think so.
No, but changing the paper WOULD. And it seems to me that making braille indents into linen rag paper would be difficult to say the least.
.gov, our website went through a LOT of testing to make sure it was screen reader compliant. And yet, our money, a bit more pivotal than a seldom-used website, seemingly has no such requirements on it.
IANA human factors/ergonomics expert, but I think the BoE&P has enough on the payroll that we can safely say that the US is willing to change some ink, design and color to a certain extent, and is unwilling to change the paper stock and the size of currency notes. They can't use things like holograms (and I'd guess plastic derivatives) due to how they stress-test new notes - holograms are notoriously bad in the crumple test. Thus, the green/black metallic color changing ink on the front.
What gets me is that somehow currency got grandfathered out of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA, for those unfamiliar, basically says that facilities paid for by taxes have to be accessible to, among others, the blind. When I worked for a
It might just be that changing it would require so many infrastructure changes (every ATM, every change machine, every vending machine that takes paper money, the self-checkout lanes at the supermarkets, every machine that handles money) that Treasury just says "To hell with it."
US paper currency is archaic. BoE&P is using band-aids and moving the target, but it's not a good solution. Of course, knowing this country, if we redid currency, they'd want to put a smart chip in it or barcode or somesuch. TO PREVENT TERRORISM and oh yeah anonymity in general.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but when I'm executing financial transactions (from going to the bank to going out to lunch), I CHECK the denominations of the bills I give and those I recieve. The new-look (not the brand-new-look) currency has a high-contrast, big, blocky, really-hard-to-miss printing of the denomination in one corner, and if I'm overpaying (using a $10 for less than $5, $20 for less than $10), I hand that side to the cashier or whoever's taking my money to make sure they get it.
I have sympathy for the blind, but no color change is going to help them. Changing the size of the bills here would meet with such outrage as hasn't been seen since the Susan B. Anthony dollar. (Good thing we issued the Sacajawea dollar - everybody's using that, right?)
But hey. Something's better than nothing, right?
It'd be more accurate to say "A SWG player logging enough time to concievably become a Jedi craves not these things."
I was PSYCHED when Galaxies came out. I bought the Sucker's^WCollector's Edition, I was on at Launch Day +1 and only because Launch Day was practically impossible to get on. I bookmarked about five Galaxies news sites and visited several times a day. I had a couple PAs (think guilds or clans here) lined up, I was good to go.
After three weeks of playing the game, I basically shelved it. Both Adventure and Excitement are noticably absent from the game. There's very little compelling about the missions available in game (go here and blow up this mob nest OR deliver this thing to this person), the static content was (maybe still is) broken - rewards promised by NPCs didn't materialize and oh by the way GMs won't give you the prizes retroactively, even if they can see you completed the missions. It was just a boring game to play.
Star Wars relies on drama. Good Versus Evil. Rebellion Versus Empire. interesting stuff. Galaxies relies on grinding out Newbie Pistols and hunting Corellian Butterfly (what?) after Corellian Butterfly for hours before you can reasonably expect to survive off-planet.
The whole Jedi thing smacks of the chatroom jewel in Diablo II. For those not fortunate enough to have played D2, in the battle.net pregame chat room, there was a "Jewel" that could be "activated" or not. Nobody at Blizzard would say what it did, and people spent hours discussing what effect it had on the game. I think it came out recently that it, in fact, did nothing but amuse Blizzard devs who sat there and watched people click it with no effect.
Now, I'm not saying that there's no way to become a Jedi and that it's all a red herring. I'm just saying that conspicuously undefined goals are a hard thing to get into. It's like being in a scavenger hunt where you don't know what you're supposed to be getting and no warmer/colder clues as to how you're doing. The prize is nice, but without any sort of feedback, you just get sick of it and get on with living your life. It's not -fun-. I've got enough boring same-old-same-old eight hours a day at work, thanks.
What if you want to sync Outlook? Send the photos and movies you take to your desktop? Use Bluetooth headset hardware? What if you don't dig the built in PDA and want to use your own?
I have a Nokia 3650 and the PDA functions suck my left one. I'm in the market for a bluetooth enabled PDA so I can get my info off the phone and let it do what it does well: be a phone. Managing your calendar, populating a to-do list, sending email, taking notes, tracking contacts. All of these things are things better done on a PDA with some handwriting function.
I'm all for gadget convergence between phone, PDA, camera, and media player, but if I had it to do over again, I'd get the Sony Ericsson P800. As it stands, the devices aren't to the point where they can converge and still be -good-, so I'm looking for a good flip cameraphone to replace the 3650 and I'll deal with carrying two pieces of hardware.
Just stand in front of ATM the next time a worm rocks through and watch it start spitting out bills.
CoinStar machines at your favorite grocery store run NT4 right now. Hang out in front of one of them during the next virus and wait for 'em to start spitting out change and/or vouchers for cash at the registers.
When you figure out how to make that happen, post it here - I could use the cash.
The encryption is in the phone, so the phone needs to be upgraded.
From the article on the Register:
"Both parties agree that the issue does not affect 3G phones, which use different protocols and security mechanisms than legacy GSM handsets."
You DO have one of the new phones, right? I mean, you ARE reading Slashdot.
I think this is what's going to keep it from being a problem legally - nobody's introducing phones to which this attack is vulnerable.
I'd be curious to know how this works if you sell on a CD or cassette holding copyright material; presumably there's some implicit permission to transfer granted when you buy it (or it's been technically illegal all the time, but no-one ever complained). Any IP lawyers out there?
Umm... That's exactly what this story is ABOUT. The uncharted ground of intellectual property law: Does the implicit permission to transfer follow the medium (CD/cassette) or the data (song)?
The IP lawyers (EFF and RIAA) will be looking at this one, or so we all assume.
Someone should do the math and determine what the ratio of good to suck games is
"Ninety percent of anything is crud."
--Sturgeon's Law
Not quite as accurate an assessment as Moore's Law, but not far off, and of a much less limited scope.
This reeks of the slippery slope to me.
Houston ISD wants to collect aggregate data about the student (attendance, grades, trends) in the name of keeping kids in school. How is this different from the FBI or local PD keeping an eye on when I leave for work, my salary history, and my career development? It's just the established authority making analogous observations.
What if it was to keep an eye on me to make sure I don't go postal (apologies to USPS) at work? Would it be okay then? And would you trust the government to do it legitimately?
Pardon me while I go into tin foil hat mode, but I don't like it when my employer watches me. I get really scared when my government starts watching people, and that includes the public schools looking at students. The assertion is that minors enrolled in public school don't have the right to privacy. Do they? Or is aggregation of data even an invasion of privacy?
By the time all of Microsoft's costs were added up, I'm sure it was at least $2000.
Dodgy financial arithmetic aside...
I don't understand how this is costing MS a cent. The EULA specifies that the user is to contact the computer manufacturer for a refund. That means Dell, Gateway, or Mom And Dad's Olde Tyme PC Shoppe gets the screw. They're out $200, plus court costs, plus the time of all the CSRs and lawyers and whomever else they paid to answer the refund claim.
This is not to say that these entities don't deserve it - you buy at wholesale, you know what you're getting yourself into. But don't make this into a crusade to drain the coffers of Bill The Gates $199 at a time, unless MS is agreeing to buy copies sold at wholesale back at retail. I find this to be unlikely at best.
IANA(Accountant), so if anybody wants to shed some light on this one, I'd appreciate it.
any data transferred over the internet has your encryption removed.
Oh, for a mod point.
This is the real reason that this technology is worthless to keep RIAA/FBI/NSA/CIA/AARP off your back. They're gonna pick it up when you transmit it over a public network. The Secure IDE technology that ABIT is touting protects your local machine on boot if you don't have the USB key - it does nothing for encrypting what you send on the network. If it did, it'd be rendering p2p useless, because nobody else has your sooper sekrit USB key to see what you're sharing. What moron is going to randomly pick your name out of a hat, and come over to your house and take the hard drive out without probable cause?
No, they're going to watch what you're sharing, what you're transmitting and recieving, man-in-the-middle it for evidence if they're feeling inspired, THEN and only then, will they drag your ass into civil court, where "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't hold as much water. The damage is done before you see the subpoena.
Remember kids, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all that, is to protect you from the GOVERNMENT. The RIAA is NOT the government. (Yet.) The judges have to protect you from the RIAA, and they're most definitely not doing that.
If you're going to be a spelling whore, use the right "its".
Humans expire just like copyrights. ...which is to say, not at all. So when I'm about to die, I can be renewed in perpetuity? Cool.
If the RIAA can milk recording artists for money well after the artist is dead, I should be able to, erm, liberate the music well after I'm dead. Not that I will die - I'll have my friends renew me.
How long wold it take for most of you to figure out this is Spam? How many of you would approach the 10 second mark for deleting both of these?
The problem here is that you seem to be okay with accepting the average Slashdot user as an acceptable sample of the average spam recipient. I work as desktop support, and I can think of a dozen users that I support off the top of my head who'd lose at least a full minute on this message, either trying to figure out how to delete it, how to filter its ilk in the future, writing me a message telling me how terrible it is that they got spam and that I should fix it, or walking down the hall to tell their coworkers they got Viagraspam. This is to say nothing of when Upper Management gets a message they don't like. They're not the worst offenders, though - we have pretty good management here. It's middle management that you have to watch out for.
Just because YOU recognize it as spam and know what to do, that doesn't mean the majority of recipients of same are as enlightened.
It's not a question of being outvoted so much as it is there not being a product on the market that caters to this niche group.
The reason for this has been touched upon by earlier posters: Enforcing true Role Playing is not conducive to Making Big Buck$.
For purposes of this discussion, "Role Playing" is defined as communicating in-game as one's character would, not using 1337-speak, and leaving one's Real Life self and Real Life concerns "at the door". Looking for help with a quest one just recieved would be considered RP. Discussing Yankees' scores or the new website you created for your guild/clan/PA is not.
The only way to improve RP is to hire in-game GMs or NPCs or both to reward those players that play their roles and punish those who do not. The money you have to pay these GMs and NPCs cuts into your profits, and the players you punish for not playing their roles will get frustrated and leave, creating a ton of bad buzz about your RPG. What few true roleplayers you have will be thrilled at the prospect of the One True RPG, fiercely loyal to it and its creators, and very depressed when the MMORPG goes out of business in less than a year.
Slightly off topic, but bear with me: Did you ever see the Cartmanland episode of South Park? Cartman buys an amusement park for his sole use, denying everybody else entry. But then a ride breaks down, so he has to pay a maintenance man. To offset his salary, he lets two people in. Then he has to hire a ticket seller. Two more people let in. Ride operators, concession sellers, etc etc. By the end of the episode, it's just another amusement park.
I'm all for a Heavy-RP-only MMORPG - it'd get the purists off my back for not speaking in thees and thous. But their RP utopia would almost have to cave to market pressures or be exorbitantly priced in order to stay afloat.
I changed the keymap from the default to the FPS setup (WASD to move, single keystrokes, and hit enter to chat) and that worked out a LOT better for me. I don't know how people tolerate the default keymap (walk forward slaved to the right mouse button? C'mon.) but there are several built in and you can change any or all of the bindings.
Your blaster's replaced by a sword if you're playing the Brawler (melee fighter) class. Everybody else gets a CDEF (apparently Star Wars for "newbie") blaster pistol. Lightsabers are going to be reserved for the (woefully rare) jedi.
I use first-person almost exclusively and then miss out on half my own character's animations. It doesn't feel right playing third-person though. But some people dig it.
Whenever anybody asks me about SWG, I tell them that it's not for everybody, but I really dig it. The combat is kinda weak, but the rest of the world makes up for it.
The slippery slope of automated officiating begins with this. Sure, keep the machine around to rate officials, but let it be a tool for experienced umps who can make decisions based on game situations. You can't have an appreciation for how hard a game is to call until you've worn the stripes or the mask and plate shoes. Officiating is about judgment - let those exercising theirs on the field be evaluated by a person with judgment, not a computer with a camera attached.
So much for downloading the trailer for $NEXT_BIG_MOVIE on company bandwidth. We'll have to do work now. Dammit.
I make my own muffins using my own oven etc, but I get all the ingredients for free from a shop, without the shop actually agreeing to give it to me.
<metaphor_nazi>
Actually, it's running in back, stealing a copy of the copyrighted recipe, then going home and baking the food.
</metaphor_nazi>
Remember, everybody, software (the "stolen" bits in question) are just instructions. You use your own CD burner, your own laser, your own electricity to power all of the above. The only crime you're committing is unauthorized use of copyrighted information. Which, granted, is a crime, but just to set the metaphor straight.
software will exponentially decrease in effective speed while exponentially increasing in install size, effectively canceling the more troubling consequences of Moore's law.
Commonly paraphrased as "Andy gives me power, Bill takes it away, Andy gives me power, Bill takes it away." Except in this case, it might be Hector instead of Andy, but you get the idea.
Yeah, sure, you can run it twice as fast, but the current version's bloated to effectively halve its speed. Sure, Windows 3.1 will blaze, but Windows $MOST_RECENT will -require- all that horsepower.
Substitute "Netscape" for "Netflix", and "Microsoft" for "Wal-Mart" and your comment seems frighteningly on-target.
And then Wal-Mart starts making DVD players and shipping their DVD players with a subscription to the service, and mucking with the firmware so that DVDs rented from Wal-Mart play better, and then getting the MPAA to add extensions that work only with Wal-Mart players and discs, and then Netflix gets bought by $GIANT_CORP and goes promptly nowhere.
is that it solves all the problems of the original GBA.
I would have got the original GBA, but I'm hard on my hardware, and screens get scratched. The "clamshell" design of the SP solves that problem.
I also hate buying batteries or battery packs. The SP solves that with an internal Li-Ion battery that lasts as long lit as the GBA could go on a set of alkalines without a light (ten hours) and longer unlit (eighteen hours).
The Castlevania games that every review site ever said "Get a halogen lamp and don't move while playing this" are no longer valid now that the SP has an even front-light (that does make the screen a bit bluer, but still very playable). I don't have to go third-party (sketchy) or trust my own skills (sketchier) to avoid getting dirt in the screen when installing a light.
It's also small. I've got enough crap in my pockets (cell, keys, PDA, etc etc) that I needed something a bit smaller than the GBA. At three inches square, the SP fits the bill.
Yes, the lack of a headphone jack is annoying, but I can play without sound and rarely lose anything. Unfolded, the form factor's similar to the original Game Boy, and I can play it just fine. I guess I have small girly hands. Lucky me.
The SP is replacing old GBAs ("MOMMY MOMMY BUY IT FOR ME" is a popular one, but far from all) and is increasing the userbase to adults who can drop a hundred bucks on a toy. I just wish they'd premiered with all four colors - I would have preferred black to silver. Oh, I'm sorry. ONYX to PLATINUM.
Parent's not kidding at all. My best friend in college wasn't a geek at all and graduated with a BA in English. Got work shortly after graduating, and now he's programming ColdFusion and SQL for the government and making a pretty nice living at it. I graduated with a BSE in Computer Engineering in 2001 and I -just- got hired two months ago, and I think he's still making more than I am.
We laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true.
If you were flipping channels and HBO showed a naked child that was later ruled to be kiddie porn, who would be legally responsible?
I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But that's not my main concern.
I'm not worried about seeing it, I'm worried about having a copy on my computer when the feds bust down the door, and they know it's there, and I don't cuz I haven't gone through this morning's downloads yet.
"I swear to god, I didn't know it was even there!"
"Of course not. You have the right to remain silent..."
Possession is 9/10 of the law. If the TV saved a copy of the HBO kiddie porn, or a record that I "watched" it, I would be -really- careful about what I allowed it to automatically tape. But TV is a streaming medium, and doesn't tape without my knowledge and permission.
This particular application doesn't rely on big businesses with reputations like HBO or Skinemax or even Channel 385 on some random satellite. This allows Joe Internetuser to create a channel. Freedom of speech, power to the masses. I'm all for it. But I'm still gonna be careful.