Wow and people wonder why males aren't entering the education system as teachers.
That's the least of our problems, at some point this is going to become so ingrained that most males will decide having children is too much of a hassle. Then we can go the way of Japan where the population continues to age and birth rate declines. Then we won't have to worry any more, no kids!! But the side-effects will be awful on the country. I'm sure the "think of the children" crowd think it's worth it.
And worst of all, the kid will grow up seeing this state of affairs as perfectly normal.
Who said that wasn't part of the intent? If kids grow up thinking this kind of surveillance is normal, are they going to fight (as adults) the next time the FBI tries to demand back-doors into all encryption products and other such issues?
The Phelps Gang tests the extreme end of free speech.
To some extent, many believe they're already passed it however. Their funeral protests, which are (quite deliberately) done in a manner to provoke violent responses (so they can sue) are essentially an incitement to riot in order to personally profit. I don't consider this free speech, and neither does the law. Inciting a riot is a crime. No one's stood up to them enough to get this kind of verdict so far however, so they continue to do it.
There's a big difference in saying what you think, however hateful it is, and deliberately trying to provoke people to attack you. One is exercising your freedom of speech, the other is a crime, and WBC falls into the latter category. The whole reason they do this is so they can sue people and live off the money. It's a freaking business model for them!
Is there anything ironic about the self-appointed "voice of free speech" trying to bully an admittedly annoying and vocal cult into silence?
I don't think they're actually trying to bully them into silence. Anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about the Westboro Baptist Church assholes knows that they're not going to shut up, short of dying (and even they'd probably find some way to be assholes after they were dead). This is just going to end up with the WBC getting some consequences for exercising their free speech in a manner that is almost universally reviled. Remember, you have the freedom to say whatever you want, but that also means you get the consequences of what you say. If you piss off the wrong people you're going to get attacked, or even killed. Since the WBC jerks are quick to sue anyone who (unsurprisingly) attacks them physically, this is probably the best thing that can happen. It'll be damn near impossible for them to sue Anonymous.
In any case this is one instance where I just can't feel sorry for the target of Anonymous. The WBC people have proven repeatedly that they're just absolute first class assholes. They should consider themselves lucky they're just going to get attacked online. I'm honestly surprised someone hasn't tried to kill them yet.
To notice that, someone would have to be familiar with FreeDNS and what it does, which is a bit much to ask of an ICE investigator.
No it's not, that's their freaking job. Before they file their affidavit with the court asking for the warrant to seize the domain they're supposed to investigate and make damn sure they know what the hell they're swearing to in that affidavit. If they can't manage to discover something like this, how likely is it that everything else they said in that affidavit was correct? And if you don't think that's an issue consider this: if word gets back to the judge about royal screwups like this, the judge is going to be much less eager to sign off on those warrants in the future. Next time it might really be important that a domain is seized ASAP, and failing to do their proper research can jeopardize that in the future.
Also, it's not like it's hard to discover that not all of mooo.com was distributing child porn. Just search Google for site:mooo.com and you'll see that there's tons of subdomains dealing with all kinds of non-cp stuff. That should have been a warning right there. There's also contact info in the whois record, why didn't they bother contacting the owner once they saw that? Hell, the owner's in the US, if they were so convinced that all of mooo.com was distributing child porn, why they hell didn't they get an arrest warrant and go after the owner?
Whether or not to play in Apple's iOS garden is a business decision companies like Amazon or B&N will have to make. There's no reason for them to offer iOS versions of the e-readers. Oh, except for the large customer base. If that customer base is big enough I'm sure Amazon and B&N and others will agree to Apple's rules. 70% revenue for a customer pool of millions of iPhone and iPad users is better than 100% revenue for zero of them.
Apple's iOS customer base, while large, is much smaller than the general book buying customer base. With this move, Apple is trying to control the pricing on all eBook products sold. If Amazon or B&N want to continue to offer their iApps, they will have to make their eBook prices the same both in-app and on their storefront. To cover the 30% that goes to Apple they'll have to either lose money on every eBook they sold in any way to an iOS device basically, or raise their prices for everyone.
I seriously doubt Amazon or B&N either one is going to find Apple's iOS customer base large enough to justify the money loss or lowered sales due to higher prices. I'm sure they'll be complaining to regulators (I doubt this is going to fly in Europe, even if it does in the US), and more than likely dropping their apps when they come up for renewal. Apple already refused to approve Sony's eReader app last month, that was probably the first shot across the bow.
This move hurts consumers, hurts developers, and hurts publishers. The ONLY thing it benefits is Apple. I don't think this will end well for Apple though, even if the massive power grab doesn't get regulatory attention (and it's likely to do so, Apple's trying to command pricing on the entire eBook market with this move) it's likely to end with either higher prices for everyone, or the removal of some very, very popular apps. Apple may think that doesn't matter, but I just can't see people buying their eBooks from Apple just because Apple essentially demands they do so.
Algeria's probably taken a page from Tunisia, and is stealing logins like Tunisia did. That was just last month, I'm surprised people have forgotten about it already.
Facebook responded to Tunisia's attempts then, from the article:
Sullivan's team rapidly coded a two-step response to the problem. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. The Https protocol encrypts the information you send across it, so it's not susceptible to the keylogging strategy employed by the Tunisian ISPs.
The second technical solution they implemented was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the malicious code was running. Like Facebook's version of a "mother's maiden name" question to get access to your old password, it asks you to identify your friends in photos to complete an account login.
They rolled out the new solutions to 100% of Tunisia by Monday morning, five days after they'd realized what was happening. It wasn't a totally perfect solution. Most specifically, ISPs can force a downgrade of https to http, but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
I have no doubt that if they're seeing something similar they'll implement the same thing to block Algeria from continuing to do this.
Yes and no...
A used PS3 might have been bought when sony lost money on their sale, therefore buying a used one prevents the sale of a new unit that would make sony a profit.
Unless you plan to pirate every game you play on it, Sony will make money off of every game you buy. You can probably go with used games only to offset that for the most part, but if you buy anything off of PSN, Sony will get a cut. If you really want to stick it to Sony, buy an Xbox360 or a Wii instead, and make sure Sony gets not a penny off of you.
They want the Striesand effect. If it becomes widely distributed and known that people who hack PS3's get sued into oblivion the lesson is clear: mess with Sony and you lose your house. This is especially true for the people who had the talent and interest to do it the first time and it's probably going to slow down future hacks. The population of skilled hardware/software/firmware/microcontroller hackers capable of jailbreaking PS3's out there is probably large, but not infinite and they're reducing the pool.
Sony is planning for the PS4,5,6,...
Pissing off the hacking community, even threatening them with lawsuits and criminal charges (and jail time) has never stopped it before. There's just too many people out there, many of which take it as a challenge when they're threatened. This is going to backfire on Sony big-time, they've probably painted the largest target in the world on themselves and any product they make for many, many years. People are going to make it a priority to hack Sony's products just to piss Sony off in the future. I seriously doubt they'll have anywhere near the lag-time on the PS4 until it's hacked that they did with the PS3
Sony's going to find out the hard way you can't stop people hacking your products, and pissing them off/threatening them just makes more people start hacking them.
How fucking long did you know her before marrying her?! I mean if you dated her for two years beforehand, are you freaking telling me there wasn't enough evidence to have you run far and run fast? And if you didn't have enough time to realize she was psycho, what the fuck were you doing marrying her?!
Seriously, someone help me come up with a scenario where this dude isn't just plain fucking stupid...
It's quite simple: people change once they're married. Haven't you known of people who lived together happily for years, sometimes 10+, then they get married and end up divorced and hating each other within a year? There's something about that legal piece of paper saying you're married that changes how people behave. Not everybody of course, but it happens often enough to almost be a given. Then you have the manipulative jerks who manage to keep their partner completely disillusioned as to their real personality, that then drop the act as soon as they manage to get married. Sometimes they even keep the act up until there's children.
This applies to both sexes, not just females. Life's not black and white, when dealing with other people especially so. No matter how well you think you know a person, you can never know everything about them simply because you're not them.
Besides, he mentioned she stopped taking her lithium. If she stopped taking care of her bi-polar soon after marriage it'd explain her personality change easily. Left untreated bi-polar people can easily become crazy people, threatening, violent, hateful, etc.
They don't have to copy an algorithm if they are just copying search results. This response is amateur.
You can certainly make the case that Google setting up the "sting" operation was "silly", or "petty", but Microsoft's response to the whole thing has been quite enlightening. I think it's Microsoft that's got issues with having a real competitor, and it shows. Google's kinda just rubbing salt into the wounds, which isn't very professional, but MS needs to respond better. Trying to deny it, and at the same time accuse Google of committing "click fraud" to setup the sting (something which has a very specific meaning that's mostly criminal and has not a damn thing to do with Google's "sting" operation) comes across as... desperate at best.
Personally I think the whole thing is silly on both sides, but MS's response has done a lot to wipe out the little bit of trust they'd gained in past years for behaving somewhat better. MS's response, and not the whole "sting", is making me even less likely to use Bing in the future as well. Both of these are outcomes I suspect MS didn't want to cause with their reaction. In a nutshell, Google won this little fight when MS started responding with denials and attempts to make Google look like they'd done criminal stuff.
They'll confiscate Apple.com and put an end to this nonsense.
It's Immigration and Customs Enforcement that's been doing all the domain seizures for alleged copyright infringement, not the FBI. The only domains I've heard of the FBI seizing were ones involved in distributing child pornography.
So other people will invite him to work on their products, which he'll do, and that'll generate buzz and excitement for those products.
Going to be kinda hard for him to work on anything for a while, since the court order also requires him to turn over his computers and hard drives to Sony. He's unlikely to get them back for months, if ever, and it's going to take yet more lawyer time to get them back. Which is exactly what Sony wanted. This is all about making life difficult for Geohotz because he dared to publish the PS3 root key. It's harassment, plain and simple, and so far, Sony is winning.
Except Virgin got off in that case, the court basically rejected all her arguments, especially jurisdiction.
That's not to say a better case might not succeed, but that one only served to prove you can be sued by someone without standing. Even at first glance it was pretty obvious that she was suing the wrong parties, as it was Virgin Australia who had used the picture, not Virgin Mobile US. Hell, she even named the Creative Commons in her original lawsuit!
I don't think that will be a viable strategy any more. Sony has destroyed the trust such a move would have bought. Now when someone sees "OtherOS" on a console, they won't think "this is what I want, I don't have to hack", they'll think "It's only a matter of time before they take that away for no reason. I better hack faster."
It's still a viable strategy for anyone except Sony.
It seemed like Microsoft was betting HEAVILY that computer speed and storage prices would continue to keep up with the bloat. It's possible that when Vista came out and initially had poor performance on the hardware at the time, the issue wasn't really that Vista was too slow but that the hardware that users had on their desk did not progress as much as Microsoft had been betting it would. Eventually the hardware did catch up and Vista runs fine now.
There was more wrong with Vista than just needing heavy-duty hardware for the time. There were problems with things like copying files on the network (it could be insanely slow in some cases, and in others it appeared slower than it really was because of how the copying progress box updated), UAC prompting far, far more than it needed to, and needing LOTS of RAM. (Windows 7 seems to have the same problem, in my personal experience 4GB is the minimum to make Vista/Win7 truly happy. You can run it on less, but expect a lot of paging.) IIRC, they actually fixed some of the file copying problems in SP1, so it was a real bug, not all perceptual, and it still seems to copy slower than XP _and_ Win7 machines across the network. Personally I think they pushed Vista out too soon, before it was really finished. Win7 is what Vista should have been, after it finished development. That's why it works so much better and has had better adoption.
At least Vista wasn't as bad a ME, but it did have real issues, most of which were fixed in Win7.
Never got expertSexChange.com (and the like) in your results? I get them frequently and it's annoying.
Actually, if you know the trick, they can be useful. They have to have the answers visible for Google to index the pages, but they try to hide it. Keep scrolling down past the smudged, unreadable section and lo and behold, there they are readable. I've actually gotten the answer to a few things that way, for free. You just have to know how they're trying to game the system and game them right back.
Glad to see I'm not the only one that keeps reading the URL that way.:D
So don't. The more of us who refuse to buy games which allow them to cut off users at any time, the less games will be released with such draconian DRM.
Except it doesn't seem to work that way. Lower sales than projected on a game that has draconian DRM, even with massive public outcry about said DRM, almost always get the losses attributed to piracy instead of the DRM running off legit customers. Even with many examples out there that games can make money even without ANY DRM (see both Humble Bundles, Sins of a Solar Empire, among others) the people in the industry pushing for DRM just refuse to believe it.
So definitely vote with your wallet, they don't deserve the money. But don't expect it to make a damn bit of difference in whether DRM continues to be used or not. These people have their minds made up that piracy is the cause of all sales problems, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise.
So if nobody in Italy can access Youtube, from Berlusconi's point of view the problem is solved.
Which may be an overly simplistic viewpoint from him on this particular issue. How much do Italians use and like Youtube? How will they react to finding out they can no longer access it due to their government? While Google cutting Italy off may be exactly what Berlusconi thinks he wants, it may end up being exactly what he didn't really want. So I say Google should go for it, losing access to something major may be enough to stir up Italy's populace where no amount of political reporting would.
George Hotz ("geohot") tried his hand at it, given that he had been rather successful at cracking Apple's iStuff. He found an exploit that gave hypervisor access, and in response, Sony removed OtherOS in a firmware update, as geohot's hack required use of OtherOS.
So this can all be traced back to geohot getting involved... though in my opinion, Sony shouldn't have responded by removing OtherOS, causing all the collateral damage. It inevitably was going to result in a lot of really serious people getting involved and, by extension, more stories like this.
WRONG. Geohot started taking a look at it because the PS3 Slim didn't allow OtherOS. Once he found the hypervisor exploit, Sony retroactively pulled OtherOS from ALL PS3 systems. Sony started trying to remove OtherOS before Geohot was involved, they just accelerated it and retroactively removed it from all models once he found an actual exploit. I suspect they'd have removed it eventually with or without an exploit, it just gave them a convenient excuse. They obviously had decided somewhere between initial launch and the slim's launch that OtherOS wasn't something they wanted to allow any longer.
It is unfortunate that the Nazis chose to pollute such a peaceful and historical symbol. The swastika is NOT an 'evil' symbol, and it has a long and interesting history. It is - in fact - quite 'cool'.
Believe it or not? I'm going to choose 'not'.
There are billions of people in the Indo-Asia area which believe strongly that this is a valid, and respected religious symbol. To me, that does not equal his belief being 'normal and commonly held'. Maybe among ignorant fools.
It is a shame that the Nazis did that, but it's done and there's no going back. In the US in particular the swastika is almost always associated with the Nazis simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events. Not to mention there's plenty of aryan brotherhood groups still using the swastika as a symbol to promote everything wrong the Nazis did. It's very much still in use as a symbol of hate.
Believe it? Sure I do, I've known about it for a long time, doesn't change the fact that most people in the US (also Europe, Canada) associate it with the Nazis. And your argument kinda runs off the rails in that bolded part. We're not dealing with the Indo-Asia area. We're dealing with North America. Even if you try to argue that people from that area use Xbox Live, Microsoft is still a US company. Their policies on acceptable use are going to by and large reflect that.
Personally I've yet to see someone use the swastika online that was trying to promote discussion about it. Every time, without exception, I've encountered it on forums and such it was someone trying to promote the "ideals" of Nazi Germany and/or harassing people. So yeah, people who use it online by and large are doing so to promote the ideas of the Nazis. I'm certain there are exceptions, but they're few enough that it makes sense for site owners to ban it. Besides, if your goal is education, using it as an avatar is a bad idea. Most people would simply see it and never ask you why you used it. Hardly a teaching moment there.
Besides, this is a total non-issue. Xbox Live's Terms of Service forbids this type of thing. You agreed to that ToS when you signed up. So it's not so much about the swastika as it is about violating a contract. (ToS's are a contract between the user and the company.) And really, online games are NOT the place to even try to educate people about this issue. When you're playing a game you want to have fun, to escape reality, not to get a 5 minute lecture on why the swastika's actually a totally cool symbol that the Nazis corrupted.
Well, you can't change the perception of the image, precisely because it is banned almost everywhere! And to be honest, I don't really grasp why. The argument "oh it was used by the evil evil evil nazis" is bull to me. So what? If we start banning things away like that, we'll run out of symbols pretty fast... If it was the portrait of AH we were talking about, I would maybe remotely start to understand... But that doesn't seem to be banned anywhere... And who are you to say what is bad taste and what is not? If it's a free world then it's got to be all free. No exceptions. What's bad taste next? Pedobear? Islamic symbols and lettering?
It (and other controversial items/topics) are banned on most all forums online for a simple reason -- the vast majority of people using them are NOT trying to do so to engender discussion, but to troll/harass/etc. If you want to blame anyone for this, blame all the people out there that think anonymity on the Internet = license to be the biggest asshole they can be.
In the case of the swastika though, it is most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events and so everyone learns about them. The Nazis used the swastika quite extensively, so it's quite difficult to disassociate them for purposes of teaching. Even if you could do so, why would you? There are plenty of groups who continue to use it as a symbol to promote Nazi Germany's ideals, including killing off everyone who's not blonde and blue-eyed. People need to know the context behind the symbol because it's still relevant. So here you can blame all those aryan brotherhood folks for keeping the swastika in use as a symbol of hate.
Who am I to say what's in bad taste and not? If you're on a forum that runs on my servers on a domain I own, I'm basically god. It's my site, my rules. If you don't like it, go find somewhere else to discuss it. I'm betting you wouldn't like it much if someone started posting stuff you found horribly offense on a site you owned and controlled either. And this is exactly what Microsoft's saying. It's their service, their rules and you agreed to their Terms of Service when you signed up for the service. That ToS forbids using symbols like the swastika.
This is a complete non-issue. What it boils down to is "user wants to do something that violates the ToS, company doesn't allow it and explains why".
Yeah, I've always thought that a people capable of time travel would also develop what I see as final evolution of the cell phone: C.A.C.T.U.S. (Colonic Audio Conduction Technology, Ultimately Sadomasochistic), an inter-chronologic audio communication device, in convenient suppository form. It vibrates your colon such a manner that sound waves travel up your spine, resonating the inner ear. It is, unfortunately, quite uncomfortable to wear.
Not exactly the same thing, but the opening of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream starts out with a guy farting his way into creating an interstellar incident. The aliens communicate among themselves partially with scent and he had a device installed in his colon to allow him to dial up insults and such and have the odors emitted. Hilarious book actually.
Slashdot Mirror
Here you go folks, let those at the Muskegon Prosecutors office know how you feel about their use of tax dollars....
prosecutor@co.muskegon.mi.us
Not like he's going to care what any of us say, unless we're a reporter and are going to get him media attention.
Wow and people wonder why males aren't entering the education system as teachers.
That's the least of our problems, at some point this is going to become so ingrained that most males will decide having children is too much of a hassle. Then we can go the way of Japan where the population continues to age and birth rate declines. Then we won't have to worry any more, no kids!! But the side-effects will be awful on the country. I'm sure the "think of the children" crowd think it's worth it.
And worst of all, the kid will grow up seeing this state of affairs as perfectly normal.
Who said that wasn't part of the intent? If kids grow up thinking this kind of surveillance is normal, are they going to fight (as adults) the next time the FBI tries to demand back-doors into all encryption products and other such issues?
The Phelps Gang tests the extreme end of free speech.
To some extent, many believe they're already passed it however. Their funeral protests, which are (quite deliberately) done in a manner to provoke violent responses (so they can sue) are essentially an incitement to riot in order to personally profit. I don't consider this free speech, and neither does the law. Inciting a riot is a crime. No one's stood up to them enough to get this kind of verdict so far however, so they continue to do it.
There's a big difference in saying what you think, however hateful it is, and deliberately trying to provoke people to attack you. One is exercising your freedom of speech, the other is a crime, and WBC falls into the latter category. The whole reason they do this is so they can sue people and live off the money. It's a freaking business model for them!
Is there anything ironic about the self-appointed "voice of free speech" trying to bully an admittedly annoying and vocal cult into silence?
I don't think they're actually trying to bully them into silence. Anyone who knows even the tiniest bit about the Westboro Baptist Church assholes knows that they're not going to shut up, short of dying (and even they'd probably find some way to be assholes after they were dead). This is just going to end up with the WBC getting some consequences for exercising their free speech in a manner that is almost universally reviled. Remember, you have the freedom to say whatever you want, but that also means you get the consequences of what you say. If you piss off the wrong people you're going to get attacked, or even killed. Since the WBC jerks are quick to sue anyone who (unsurprisingly) attacks them physically, this is probably the best thing that can happen. It'll be damn near impossible for them to sue Anonymous.
In any case this is one instance where I just can't feel sorry for the target of Anonymous. The WBC people have proven repeatedly that they're just absolute first class assholes. They should consider themselves lucky they're just going to get attacked online. I'm honestly surprised someone hasn't tried to kill them yet.
To notice that, someone would have to be familiar with FreeDNS and what it does, which is a bit much to ask of an ICE investigator.
No it's not, that's their freaking job. Before they file their affidavit with the court asking for the warrant to seize the domain they're supposed to investigate and make damn sure they know what the hell they're swearing to in that affidavit. If they can't manage to discover something like this, how likely is it that everything else they said in that affidavit was correct? And if you don't think that's an issue consider this: if word gets back to the judge about royal screwups like this, the judge is going to be much less eager to sign off on those warrants in the future. Next time it might really be important that a domain is seized ASAP, and failing to do their proper research can jeopardize that in the future.
Also, it's not like it's hard to discover that not all of mooo.com was distributing child porn. Just search Google for site:mooo.com and you'll see that there's tons of subdomains dealing with all kinds of non-cp stuff. That should have been a warning right there. There's also contact info in the whois record, why didn't they bother contacting the owner once they saw that? Hell, the owner's in the US, if they were so convinced that all of mooo.com was distributing child porn, why they hell didn't they get an arrest warrant and go after the owner?
Whether or not to play in Apple's iOS garden is a business decision companies like Amazon or B&N will have to make. There's no reason for them to offer iOS versions of the e-readers. Oh, except for the large customer base. If that customer base is big enough I'm sure Amazon and B&N and others will agree to Apple's rules. 70% revenue for a customer pool of millions of iPhone and iPad users is better than 100% revenue for zero of them.
Apple's iOS customer base, while large, is much smaller than the general book buying customer base. With this move, Apple is trying to control the pricing on all eBook products sold. If Amazon or B&N want to continue to offer their iApps, they will have to make their eBook prices the same both in-app and on their storefront. To cover the 30% that goes to Apple they'll have to either lose money on every eBook they sold in any way to an iOS device basically, or raise their prices for everyone.
I seriously doubt Amazon or B&N either one is going to find Apple's iOS customer base large enough to justify the money loss or lowered sales due to higher prices. I'm sure they'll be complaining to regulators (I doubt this is going to fly in Europe, even if it does in the US), and more than likely dropping their apps when they come up for renewal. Apple already refused to approve Sony's eReader app last month, that was probably the first shot across the bow.
This move hurts consumers, hurts developers, and hurts publishers. The ONLY thing it benefits is Apple. I don't think this will end well for Apple though, even if the massive power grab doesn't get regulatory attention (and it's likely to do so, Apple's trying to command pricing on the entire eBook market with this move) it's likely to end with either higher prices for everyone, or the removal of some very, very popular apps. Apple may think that doesn't matter, but I just can't see people buying their eBooks from Apple just because Apple essentially demands they do so.
Algeria's probably taken a page from Tunisia, and is stealing logins like Tunisia did. That was just last month, I'm surprised people have forgotten about it already.
Facebook responded to Tunisia's attempts then, from the article:
Sullivan's team rapidly coded a two-step response to the problem. First, all Tunisian requests for Facebook were routed to an https server. The Https protocol encrypts the information you send across it, so it's not susceptible to the keylogging strategy employed by the Tunisian ISPs.
The second technical solution they implemented was a "roadblock" for anyone who had logged out and then back in during the time when the malicious code was running. Like Facebook's version of a "mother's maiden name" question to get access to your old password, it asks you to identify your friends in photos to complete an account login.
They rolled out the new solutions to 100% of Tunisia by Monday morning, five days after they'd realized what was happening. It wasn't a totally perfect solution. Most specifically, ISPs can force a downgrade of https to http, but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
I have no doubt that if they're seeing something similar they'll implement the same thing to block Algeria from continuing to do this.
I've used my secret decoder to decipher your message. It says "Hello Streisand Effect, Goody Bye Sony".
Damn, Sony's programmers couldn't even spell the secret message right, no wonder they the got the public key encryption implementation fatally wrong!
Yes and no... A used PS3 might have been bought when sony lost money on their sale, therefore buying a used one prevents the sale of a new unit that would make sony a profit.
Unless you plan to pirate every game you play on it, Sony will make money off of every game you buy. You can probably go with used games only to offset that for the most part, but if you buy anything off of PSN, Sony will get a cut. If you really want to stick it to Sony, buy an Xbox360 or a Wii instead, and make sure Sony gets not a penny off of you.
They want the Striesand effect. If it becomes widely distributed and known that people who hack PS3's get sued into oblivion the lesson is clear: mess with Sony and you lose your house. This is especially true for the people who had the talent and interest to do it the first time and it's probably going to slow down future hacks. The population of skilled hardware/software/firmware/microcontroller hackers capable of jailbreaking PS3's out there is probably large, but not infinite and they're reducing the pool.
Sony is planning for the PS4,5,6,...
Pissing off the hacking community, even threatening them with lawsuits and criminal charges (and jail time) has never stopped it before. There's just too many people out there, many of which take it as a challenge when they're threatened. This is going to backfire on Sony big-time, they've probably painted the largest target in the world on themselves and any product they make for many, many years. People are going to make it a priority to hack Sony's products just to piss Sony off in the future. I seriously doubt they'll have anywhere near the lag-time on the PS4 until it's hacked that they did with the PS3
Sony's going to find out the hard way you can't stop people hacking your products, and pissing them off/threatening them just makes more people start hacking them.
How fucking long did you know her before marrying her?! I mean if you dated her for two years beforehand, are you freaking telling me there wasn't enough evidence to have you run far and run fast? And if you didn't have enough time to realize she was psycho, what the fuck were you doing marrying her?! Seriously, someone help me come up with a scenario where this dude isn't just plain fucking stupid...
It's quite simple: people change once they're married. Haven't you known of people who lived together happily for years, sometimes 10+, then they get married and end up divorced and hating each other within a year? There's something about that legal piece of paper saying you're married that changes how people behave. Not everybody of course, but it happens often enough to almost be a given. Then you have the manipulative jerks who manage to keep their partner completely disillusioned as to their real personality, that then drop the act as soon as they manage to get married. Sometimes they even keep the act up until there's children.
This applies to both sexes, not just females. Life's not black and white, when dealing with other people especially so. No matter how well you think you know a person, you can never know everything about them simply because you're not them.
Besides, he mentioned she stopped taking her lithium. If she stopped taking care of her bi-polar soon after marriage it'd explain her personality change easily. Left untreated bi-polar people can easily become crazy people, threatening, violent, hateful, etc.
They don't have to copy an algorithm if they are just copying search results. This response is amateur.
You can certainly make the case that Google setting up the "sting" operation was "silly", or "petty", but Microsoft's response to the whole thing has been quite enlightening. I think it's Microsoft that's got issues with having a real competitor, and it shows. Google's kinda just rubbing salt into the wounds, which isn't very professional, but MS needs to respond better. Trying to deny it, and at the same time accuse Google of committing "click fraud" to setup the sting (something which has a very specific meaning that's mostly criminal and has not a damn thing to do with Google's "sting" operation) comes across as... desperate at best.
Personally I think the whole thing is silly on both sides, but MS's response has done a lot to wipe out the little bit of trust they'd gained in past years for behaving somewhat better. MS's response, and not the whole "sting", is making me even less likely to use Bing in the future as well. Both of these are outcomes I suspect MS didn't want to cause with their reaction. In a nutshell, Google won this little fight when MS started responding with denials and attempts to make Google look like they'd done criminal stuff.
They'll confiscate Apple.com and put an end to this nonsense.
It's Immigration and Customs Enforcement that's been doing all the domain seizures for alleged copyright infringement, not the FBI. The only domains I've heard of the FBI seizing were ones involved in distributing child pornography.
So other people will invite him to work on their products, which he'll do, and that'll generate buzz and excitement for those products.
Going to be kinda hard for him to work on anything for a while, since the court order also requires him to turn over his computers and hard drives to Sony. He's unlikely to get them back for months, if ever, and it's going to take yet more lawyer time to get them back. Which is exactly what Sony wanted. This is all about making life difficult for Geohotz because he dared to publish the PS3 root key. It's harassment, plain and simple, and so far, Sony is winning.
Except Virgin got off in that case, the court basically rejected all her arguments, especially jurisdiction.
That's not to say a better case might not succeed, but that one only served to prove you can be sued by someone without standing. Even at first glance it was pretty obvious that she was suing the wrong parties, as it was Virgin Australia who had used the picture, not Virgin Mobile US. Hell, she even named the Creative Commons in her original lawsuit!
I don't think that will be a viable strategy any more. Sony has destroyed the trust such a move would have bought. Now when someone sees "OtherOS" on a console, they won't think "this is what I want, I don't have to hack", they'll think "It's only a matter of time before they take that away for no reason. I better hack faster."
It's still a viable strategy for anyone except Sony.
It seemed like Microsoft was betting HEAVILY that computer speed and storage prices would continue to keep up with the bloat. It's possible that when Vista came out and initially had poor performance on the hardware at the time, the issue wasn't really that Vista was too slow but that the hardware that users had on their desk did not progress as much as Microsoft had been betting it would. Eventually the hardware did catch up and Vista runs fine now.
There was more wrong with Vista than just needing heavy-duty hardware for the time. There were problems with things like copying files on the network (it could be insanely slow in some cases, and in others it appeared slower than it really was because of how the copying progress box updated), UAC prompting far, far more than it needed to, and needing LOTS of RAM. (Windows 7 seems to have the same problem, in my personal experience 4GB is the minimum to make Vista/Win7 truly happy. You can run it on less, but expect a lot of paging.) IIRC, they actually fixed some of the file copying problems in SP1, so it was a real bug, not all perceptual, and it still seems to copy slower than XP _and_ Win7 machines across the network. Personally I think they pushed Vista out too soon, before it was really finished. Win7 is what Vista should have been, after it finished development. That's why it works so much better and has had better adoption.
At least Vista wasn't as bad a ME, but it did have real issues, most of which were fixed in Win7.
Never got expertSexChange.com (and the like) in your results? I get them frequently and it's annoying.
Actually, if you know the trick, they can be useful. They have to have the answers visible for Google to index the pages, but they try to hide it. Keep scrolling down past the smudged, unreadable section and lo and behold, there they are readable. I've actually gotten the answer to a few things that way, for free. You just have to know how they're trying to game the system and game them right back.
Glad to see I'm not the only one that keeps reading the URL that way. :D
So don't. The more of us who refuse to buy games which allow them to cut off users at any time, the less games will be released with such draconian DRM.
Except it doesn't seem to work that way. Lower sales than projected on a game that has draconian DRM, even with massive public outcry about said DRM, almost always get the losses attributed to piracy instead of the DRM running off legit customers. Even with many examples out there that games can make money even without ANY DRM (see both Humble Bundles, Sins of a Solar Empire, among others) the people in the industry pushing for DRM just refuse to believe it.
So definitely vote with your wallet, they don't deserve the money. But don't expect it to make a damn bit of difference in whether DRM continues to be used or not. These people have their minds made up that piracy is the cause of all sales problems, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise.
So if nobody in Italy can access Youtube, from Berlusconi's point of view the problem is solved.
Which may be an overly simplistic viewpoint from him on this particular issue. How much do Italians use and like Youtube? How will they react to finding out they can no longer access it due to their government? While Google cutting Italy off may be exactly what Berlusconi thinks he wants, it may end up being exactly what he didn't really want. So I say Google should go for it, losing access to something major may be enough to stir up Italy's populace where no amount of political reporting would.
George Hotz ("geohot") tried his hand at it, given that he had been rather successful at cracking Apple's iStuff. He found an exploit that gave hypervisor access, and in response, Sony removed OtherOS in a firmware update, as geohot's hack required use of OtherOS. So this can all be traced back to geohot getting involved... though in my opinion, Sony shouldn't have responded by removing OtherOS, causing all the collateral damage. It inevitably was going to result in a lot of really serious people getting involved and, by extension, more stories like this.
WRONG. Geohot started taking a look at it because the PS3 Slim didn't allow OtherOS. Once he found the hypervisor exploit, Sony retroactively pulled OtherOS from ALL PS3 systems. Sony started trying to remove OtherOS before Geohot was involved, they just accelerated it and retroactively removed it from all models once he found an actual exploit. I suspect they'd have removed it eventually with or without an exploit, it just gave them a convenient excuse. They obviously had decided somewhere between initial launch and the slim's launch that OtherOS wasn't something they wanted to allow any longer.
It is unfortunate that the Nazis chose to pollute such a peaceful and historical symbol. The swastika is NOT an 'evil' symbol, and it has a long and interesting history. It is - in fact - quite 'cool'.
Believe it or not? I'm going to choose 'not'.
There are billions of people in the Indo-Asia area which believe strongly that this is a valid, and respected religious symbol. To me, that does not equal his belief being 'normal and commonly held'. Maybe among ignorant fools.
It is a shame that the Nazis did that, but it's done and there's no going back. In the US in particular the swastika is almost always associated with the Nazis simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events. Not to mention there's plenty of aryan brotherhood groups still using the swastika as a symbol to promote everything wrong the Nazis did. It's very much still in use as a symbol of hate.
Believe it? Sure I do, I've known about it for a long time, doesn't change the fact that most people in the US (also Europe, Canada) associate it with the Nazis. And your argument kinda runs off the rails in that bolded part. We're not dealing with the Indo-Asia area. We're dealing with North America. Even if you try to argue that people from that area use Xbox Live, Microsoft is still a US company. Their policies on acceptable use are going to by and large reflect that.
Personally I've yet to see someone use the swastika online that was trying to promote discussion about it. Every time, without exception, I've encountered it on forums and such it was someone trying to promote the "ideals" of Nazi Germany and/or harassing people. So yeah, people who use it online by and large are doing so to promote the ideas of the Nazis. I'm certain there are exceptions, but they're few enough that it makes sense for site owners to ban it. Besides, if your goal is education, using it as an avatar is a bad idea. Most people would simply see it and never ask you why you used it. Hardly a teaching moment there.
Besides, this is a total non-issue. Xbox Live's Terms of Service forbids this type of thing. You agreed to that ToS when you signed up. So it's not so much about the swastika as it is about violating a contract. (ToS's are a contract between the user and the company.) And really, online games are NOT the place to even try to educate people about this issue. When you're playing a game you want to have fun, to escape reality, not to get a 5 minute lecture on why the swastika's actually a totally cool symbol that the Nazis corrupted.
Well, you can't change the perception of the image, precisely because it is banned almost everywhere! And to be honest, I don't really grasp why. The argument "oh it was used by the evil evil evil nazis" is bull to me. So what? If we start banning things away like that, we'll run out of symbols pretty fast... If it was the portrait of AH we were talking about, I would maybe remotely start to understand... But that doesn't seem to be banned anywhere... And who are you to say what is bad taste and what is not? If it's a free world then it's got to be all free. No exceptions. What's bad taste next? Pedobear? Islamic symbols and lettering?
It (and other controversial items/topics) are banned on most all forums online for a simple reason -- the vast majority of people using them are NOT trying to do so to engender discussion, but to troll/harass/etc. If you want to blame anyone for this, blame all the people out there that think anonymity on the Internet = license to be the biggest asshole they can be.
In the case of the swastika though, it is most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, simply because WWII and the Holocaust are rather major historical events and so everyone learns about them. The Nazis used the swastika quite extensively, so it's quite difficult to disassociate them for purposes of teaching. Even if you could do so, why would you? There are plenty of groups who continue to use it as a symbol to promote Nazi Germany's ideals, including killing off everyone who's not blonde and blue-eyed. People need to know the context behind the symbol because it's still relevant. So here you can blame all those aryan brotherhood folks for keeping the swastika in use as a symbol of hate.
Who am I to say what's in bad taste and not? If you're on a forum that runs on my servers on a domain I own, I'm basically god. It's my site, my rules. If you don't like it, go find somewhere else to discuss it. I'm betting you wouldn't like it much if someone started posting stuff you found horribly offense on a site you owned and controlled either. And this is exactly what Microsoft's saying. It's their service, their rules and you agreed to their Terms of Service when you signed up for the service. That ToS forbids using symbols like the swastika.
This is a complete non-issue. What it boils down to is "user wants to do something that violates the ToS, company doesn't allow it and explains why".
Yeah, I've always thought that a people capable of time travel would also develop what I see as final evolution of the cell phone: C.A.C.T.U.S. (Colonic Audio Conduction Technology, Ultimately Sadomasochistic), an inter-chronologic audio communication device, in convenient suppository form. It vibrates your colon such a manner that sound waves travel up your spine, resonating the inner ear. It is, unfortunately, quite uncomfortable to wear.
Not exactly the same thing, but the opening of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream starts out with a guy farting his way into creating an interstellar incident. The aliens communicate among themselves partially with scent and he had a device installed in his colon to allow him to dial up insults and such and have the odors emitted. Hilarious book actually.