"Oh Dad I'm still playing it and if you pull the plug I'll lose all the virtual toys that I've built up"
I would be very surprised if cancelling an account deleted all progress. In every MMO I've ever played you can cancel your account and go back years later and pick up right where you left off. This is a big marketing tool for bringing players back, if you had to start from scratch every time then once players cancelled there would be pretty much no chance of getting them to resubscribe.
This would never happen, LEGO are not going to open source a game that is entirely based around their central brand and IP. This isn't comparable to an MMO with an original IP being open sourced, LEGO is a worldwide and very tightly controlled brand. They aren't about to hand control of part of that brand to all and sundry to do what they want with.
See I hadn't realised from reading any of the reviews that it was actually a two-way communication and that Siri would respond with questions for clarification. I also hadn't realised but found out today that you need network connectivity for Siri to work at all. How does this work in practice, is the amount of information that needs to be sent back and forth sufficiently small to work properly on GPRS / EDGE or does it require 3G?
I imagine that it's pretty useful to be able to press a button and say, "Text my wife and tell her I'm stuck in traffic, I won't be home for a half hour."
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
The problem with using natural language for voice control is that by it's very nature it isn't very precise. If the phone interprets what you have said slightly differently from the way you intended it then becomes a much bigger hassle than doing the task manually in the first place. Especially in a situation like using it while driving. Trying to frantically cancel a phone call to the wrong person, or respond to a confused text is not going to be very easy when driving.
I haven't used Siri and most of the reporting I have seen doesn't really delve into what does work and what doesn't, apart from it having a few issues with strong accents. For instance if Alice said "send a text to Bob saying that i'm on my way" does it send "I'm on my way" or does it send "Alice is on her way". Can you configure it in any way to tell it how you want it to respond to certain commands?
Does it work at all with non first party apps? If I say "Play the latest album by Passion Pits" does it just assume I want to use the iPod app despite all of my music being on Spotify?
Having come near death through hypothermia I can tell you that it certainly isn't a nice way to go. It is true that you get to a point where your brain is so addled that you don't know what is going on and therefore aren't scared about what is happening but the lead up to that is absolutely horrible. Feeling extremely cold, knowing that you are on the road to death but not being able to bring your muscles or your brain to do anything about it, hallucinating that everything is ok and then coming out of it to find that it isn't. It all adds up to a horrendous and pretty traumatic experience.
I think the myth that hypothermia is a painless way to go comes from people being found curled up looking like they just went to sleep. That does happen, but only after you have been through everything else.
I was a bit surprised that it included websites. I guess the reason they do is that the price guarantee is mainly to capture sales from people who go to the store to look at all of the equipment, make their decision and then order it from someone else online. Any profit they lose through price matching an item is then made back as once a customer is in store and making a purchase they will likely pick up various other items as well.
Yesterday I went to a big camping store to buy a tent. They offer a price guarantee where they beat any other UK retailers price by 10% something I didn't know until I got there. Because I have a smartphone and data contract I was able to quickly pull up a website offering the tent for £10 less, saving me (and my friend who bought the same model of tent) £16 each.
Being able to look up reviews and prices elsewhere before making a purchase can be invaluable.
Most email programs allow you to group messages in your inbox by age. For instance in Mozilla Thunderbird it will display messages grouped into Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Two weeks ago and Old mail.
This allows you to collapse older messages to allow easier browsing of newer ones. If you are scrolling up and down to find messages from more than a few days ago then you should probably be using search anyway.
That's why in iOS5 they added the camera to the lock screen. so you don't have to do anything but hit the home button, then the camera button.
Doesn't that leave you rather open to anyone who picks up your phone taking pictures with it? Look forward to your photo album being full of pictures of balls when you get back from the bar.
I understand that. But in your original post you were talking about privacy policies. Are you saying facebook shouldn't allow people to upload their pictures of you? Or are you saying that people shouldn't be allowed to take pictures of you?
I understand that unwanted attention from anyone can be unpleasant, upsetting and in some cases dangerous. But your experience shows that this kind of technology isn't required for that to be the case. A guy stalked you, tried to follow you home and made you feel threatened, and he didn't need to look you up online to do that.
He could well have searched for you online. Finding out your name could be as easy as overhearing a co-worker calling for you, or reading your name badge. But to a large extent the amount of information available about you online is up to you. If you have your full address, telephone number and email on Facebook set to public so anyone can see it then yes of course you put yourself more at risk of unwanted contact from strangers.
What experiments like the ones talked about in this article show is that it is easy to find online information about someone *if* the information is there. If your only your friends can see your facebook profile and you are generally careful about not splashing your personal details around the web then this kind of search is going to come back with very little.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. The article talks about them matching a picture taken in public, with information such as images from facebook which are also set as public. Where is the violation of your privacy?
If you don't want random people in the street to be able to look at your facebook pictures then don't put them online, or make them as private.
Aggregating public information doesn't suddenly create privacy violations.
Problem with most iOS (and Android actually) devs is they make something over the weekend, toss it in the appstore or marketplace and sit back waiting for money to roll in.
I think it is a commonly held misconception that most iOS devs are bedroom hobbiests who throw something together in a couple of days and punt it on to the App store in the hope of making a few quid. Practically all iOS games that anyone has heard of are made by professional development companies with a significant budget.
For instance people seem to think Angry Birds was this out of the blue success. Actually it was produced with a budget of 100,000 euros a full development team and was the 52nd game they had produced.
so you could just walk in (hold drives very tightly), and keep them in the machine for a while.
Not the best idea as the drives would be ripped out of your hand and fly towards the machine at a high enough velocity to kill anyone in the way. Oh and you would probably destroy the MRI in the process.
There is a very good reason why you don't take metal anywhere near an MRI machine.
iOS easily is the most level playing field in existence yet.
Except the App store is the only playing field of iOS and it isn't as level as you seem to think. Apps that get promoted by Apple within the store get a massive increase in sales, often propelling them into the top 10 / top 50. Top 10 / top 50 apps are naturally bought a lot more than others so they tend to stay in the top charts. Apps that don't get promotion by Apple languish in the depths of the App Store.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the App Store was organised better with better categories, or filters instead of having to endlessly hit "show me more" to get another screen of icons with no real info about what the game is. At the moment the order of apps is based on a combination of sales and star rating which wouldn't be so bad if the star ratings weren't so misleading (obligatory xkcd).
too lazy to get off the couch to look up the name of a movie thats rattling around in my head.
So if you then decide you want to buy that movie would you get up and turn a desktop computer on rather than just loading up Amazon and ordering the DVD? E-commerce from mobile devices is already a significant force in retail so obviously most people don't think the same way you do.
No I doubt most people do. Google.com loads up nice and quick though.
Even on pages that do pull in a lot of ads using javascript if this works anything like Opera Mini they won't be a problem. Opera Mini gives any javascript 2 seconds and then bins it which means an ad server that is slow to respond won't slow the page load down. All the javascript is run in the cloud and only a flat page is pushed out to the device so there isn't any overhead for javascript.
If it gives as much of a boost as Opera mini then it will be well worth it. One of the biggest performance increases comes from javascript being run on their servers before they send the page to your device. They give any onLoad events 2 seconds to fire and then cancel them so you don't get pages hung up waiting for flaky javascript that has hung for some reason or another. Any on page javascript is also processed on the server which massively reduces the load on the device itself.
It does lead to slightly wonky interactions on sites that use a lot of javascript in the interface sometimes but it is miles faster than other mobile browsers (notably mobile safari).
no one wants to use a search engine that is shreds your privacy.
I can confidently say that the majority of people using Google aren't concerned about privacy at all. And if there was a major scandal they would either not hear about it at all, or quickly forget it.
At the end of the day most people either don't understand the issues sufficiently to worry about them, or flat out don't care.
The only way your average web user is going to be up in arms about something like this is if the tabloids picked it up and ran big scare stories about it, and even then I bet most of them would be back using Google within a fortnight.
99% of what annoys/outrages your average Slashdot user goes completely unnoticed by your average web user.
but what if a burglar hacks into the system and uses the information to find people who are out of state.
Sounds like a lot of trouble when you could just have a peek through the letterbox to see how much post has built up, or just wander past the house in the evening a couple of times to see if any lights are on.
An installation happens manually at the user's request and generally proceeds to completion before the program can start for the first time
If that is your definition of an installation then World of Warcraft doesn't run off an installation. Nowadays to play WoW you download a client executable which when run automatically downloads the essential parts of the game, as soon as they have downloaded you can start playing while the rest of the game downloads in the background.
It just wasn't worth the risk of trying to steal someone's wallet to get a couple of small notes and some loose change.
When people get mugged the value of their phone, watch, jewellery, handbag, sunglasses etc. massively exceeds the amount of money the average person carries and all of those things can be easily sold on for cash. That is what muggers are interested in, not a credit card that will be cancelled within hours and introduces a much higher risk of being caught as it is trivial for the police to check the transactions made and pull CCTV footage of the person using the card.
At some point your wife would notice and report the card stolen, at that point the bank would check through all the transactions with her to establish which were fraudulent and then reverse them.
What is more likely though is that the bank would flag the card usage as fraudulent and call her to ask her about the transactions. Going to every shop in a mall in quick succession and buying just under the limit would almost certainly be flagged up by the bank's fraud prevention systems, prompting them to get in touch and check if they were genuine.
Even if they didn't flag it up for a week or two, and whoever stole the card ran up hundreds of dollars of charges it is the bank's problem not yours. Depending on the circumstances either the bank of the shop owner will be liable for the transaction and have to foot the bill. You won't be liable for a penny.
Even if someone does steal your card and max out your limit, the worst case scenario is that your card is declined next time you try and use it prompting you to phone the bank, who then reverse the fraudulent transactions. Slightly inconvenient but not very as card services almost always have a 24/7 number and can solve these issues in minutes.
You could just 3d print a cash machine and put a small lcd monitor in it and say sorry but your card has been kept please phone this number. Lots of cash machines aren't in banks anymore.
There have been a number of cases where criminals have set up their own ATMs to do just this. They don't need to fake them, they just buy them from a company who sells ATMs to independent retailers.
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I would be very surprised if cancelling an account deleted all progress. In every MMO I've ever played you can cancel your account and go back years later and pick up right where you left off. This is a big marketing tool for bringing players back, if you had to start from scratch every time then once players cancelled there would be pretty much no chance of getting them to resubscribe.
This would never happen, LEGO are not going to open source a game that is entirely based around their central brand and IP. This isn't comparable to an MMO with an original IP being open sourced, LEGO is a worldwide and very tightly controlled brand. They aren't about to hand control of part of that brand to all and sundry to do what they want with.
See I hadn't realised from reading any of the reviews that it was actually a two-way communication and that Siri would respond with questions for clarification. I also hadn't realised but found out today that you need network connectivity for Siri to work at all. How does this work in practice, is the amount of information that needs to be sent back and forth sufficiently small to work properly on GPRS / EDGE or does it require 3G?
Can Siri do this? Is it clever enough to know what you only want to send the part after "tell her" and how does it know which of your contacts is your wife?
The problem with using natural language for voice control is that by it's very nature it isn't very precise. If the phone interprets what you have said slightly differently from the way you intended it then becomes a much bigger hassle than doing the task manually in the first place. Especially in a situation like using it while driving. Trying to frantically cancel a phone call to the wrong person, or respond to a confused text is not going to be very easy when driving.
I haven't used Siri and most of the reporting I have seen doesn't really delve into what does work and what doesn't, apart from it having a few issues with strong accents. For instance if Alice said "send a text to Bob saying that i'm on my way" does it send "I'm on my way" or does it send "Alice is on her way". Can you configure it in any way to tell it how you want it to respond to certain commands?
Does it work at all with non first party apps? If I say "Play the latest album by Passion Pits" does it just assume I want to use the iPod app despite all of my music being on Spotify?
Having come near death through hypothermia I can tell you that it certainly isn't a nice way to go. It is true that you get to a point where your brain is so addled that you don't know what is going on and therefore aren't scared about what is happening but the lead up to that is absolutely horrible. Feeling extremely cold, knowing that you are on the road to death but not being able to bring your muscles or your brain to do anything about it, hallucinating that everything is ok and then coming out of it to find that it isn't. It all adds up to a horrendous and pretty traumatic experience.
I think the myth that hypothermia is a painless way to go comes from people being found curled up looking like they just went to sleep. That does happen, but only after you have been through everything else.
I was a bit surprised that it included websites. I guess the reason they do is that the price guarantee is mainly to capture sales from people who go to the store to look at all of the equipment, make their decision and then order it from someone else online. Any profit they lose through price matching an item is then made back as once a customer is in store and making a purchase they will likely pick up various other items as well.
Yesterday I went to a big camping store to buy a tent. They offer a price guarantee where they beat any other UK retailers price by 10% something I didn't know until I got there. Because I have a smartphone and data contract I was able to quickly pull up a website offering the tent for £10 less, saving me (and my friend who bought the same model of tent) £16 each.
Being able to look up reviews and prices elsewhere before making a purchase can be invaluable.
Most email programs allow you to group messages in your inbox by age. For instance in Mozilla Thunderbird it will display messages grouped into Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Two weeks ago and Old mail.
This allows you to collapse older messages to allow easier browsing of newer ones. If you are scrolling up and down to find messages from more than a few days ago then you should probably be using search anyway.
Doesn't that leave you rather open to anyone who picks up your phone taking pictures with it? Look forward to your photo album being full of pictures of balls when you get back from the bar.
I understand that. But in your original post you were talking about privacy policies. Are you saying facebook shouldn't allow people to upload their pictures of you? Or are you saying that people shouldn't be allowed to take pictures of you?
I understand that unwanted attention from anyone can be unpleasant, upsetting and in some cases dangerous. But your experience shows that this kind of technology isn't required for that to be the case. A guy stalked you, tried to follow you home and made you feel threatened, and he didn't need to look you up online to do that.
He could well have searched for you online. Finding out your name could be as easy as overhearing a co-worker calling for you, or reading your name badge. But to a large extent the amount of information available about you online is up to you. If you have your full address, telephone number and email on Facebook set to public so anyone can see it then yes of course you put yourself more at risk of unwanted contact from strangers.
What experiments like the ones talked about in this article show is that it is easy to find online information about someone *if* the information is there. If your only your friends can see your facebook profile and you are generally careful about not splashing your personal details around the web then this kind of search is going to come back with very little.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. The article talks about them matching a picture taken in public, with information such as images from facebook which are also set as public. Where is the violation of your privacy?
If you don't want random people in the street to be able to look at your facebook pictures then don't put them online, or make them as private.
Aggregating public information doesn't suddenly create privacy violations.
I think it is a commonly held misconception that most iOS devs are bedroom hobbiests who throw something together in a couple of days and punt it on to the App store in the hope of making a few quid. Practically all iOS games that anyone has heard of are made by professional development companies with a significant budget.
For instance people seem to think Angry Birds was this out of the blue success. Actually it was produced with a budget of 100,000 euros a full development team and was the 52nd game they had produced.
Not the best idea as the drives would be ripped out of your hand and fly towards the machine at a high enough velocity to kill anyone in the way. Oh and you would probably destroy the MRI in the process.
There is a very good reason why you don't take metal anywhere near an MRI machine.
Except the App store is the only playing field of iOS and it isn't as level as you seem to think. Apps that get promoted by Apple within the store get a massive increase in sales, often propelling them into the top 10 / top 50. Top 10 / top 50 apps are naturally bought a lot more than others so they tend to stay in the top charts. Apps that don't get promotion by Apple languish in the depths of the App Store.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the App Store was organised better with better categories, or filters instead of having to endlessly hit "show me more" to get another screen of icons with no real info about what the game is. At the moment the order of apps is based on a combination of sales and star rating which wouldn't be so bad if the star ratings weren't so misleading (obligatory xkcd).
So if you then decide you want to buy that movie would you get up and turn a desktop computer on rather than just loading up Amazon and ordering the DVD? E-commerce from mobile devices is already a significant force in retail so obviously most people don't think the same way you do.
No I doubt most people do. Google.com loads up nice and quick though.
Even on pages that do pull in a lot of ads using javascript if this works anything like Opera Mini they won't be a problem. Opera Mini gives any javascript 2 seconds and then bins it which means an ad server that is slow to respond won't slow the page load down. All the javascript is run in the cloud and only a flat page is pushed out to the device so there isn't any overhead for javascript.
If it gives as much of a boost as Opera mini then it will be well worth it. One of the biggest performance increases comes from javascript being run on their servers before they send the page to your device. They give any onLoad events 2 seconds to fire and then cancel them so you don't get pages hung up waiting for flaky javascript that has hung for some reason or another. Any on page javascript is also processed on the server which massively reduces the load on the device itself.
It does lead to slightly wonky interactions on sites that use a lot of javascript in the interface sometimes but it is miles faster than other mobile browsers (notably mobile safari).
I can confidently say that the majority of people using Google aren't concerned about privacy at all. And if there was a major scandal they would either not hear about it at all, or quickly forget it.
At the end of the day most people either don't understand the issues sufficiently to worry about them, or flat out don't care.
The only way your average web user is going to be up in arms about something like this is if the tabloids picked it up and ran big scare stories about it, and even then I bet most of them would be back using Google within a fortnight.
99% of what annoys/outrages your average Slashdot user goes completely unnoticed by your average web user.
Sounds like a lot of trouble when you could just have a peek through the letterbox to see how much post has built up, or just wander past the house in the evening a couple of times to see if any lights are on.
If that is your definition of an installation then World of Warcraft doesn't run off an installation. Nowadays to play WoW you download a client executable which when run automatically downloads the essential parts of the game, as soon as they have downloaded you can start playing while the rest of the game downloads in the background.
When people get mugged the value of their phone, watch, jewellery, handbag, sunglasses etc. massively exceeds the amount of money the average person carries and all of those things can be easily sold on for cash. That is what muggers are interested in, not a credit card that will be cancelled within hours and introduces a much higher risk of being caught as it is trivial for the police to check the transactions made and pull CCTV footage of the person using the card.
At some point your wife would notice and report the card stolen, at that point the bank would check through all the transactions with her to establish which were fraudulent and then reverse them.
What is more likely though is that the bank would flag the card usage as fraudulent and call her to ask her about the transactions. Going to every shop in a mall in quick succession and buying just under the limit would almost certainly be flagged up by the bank's fraud prevention systems, prompting them to get in touch and check if they were genuine.
Even if they didn't flag it up for a week or two, and whoever stole the card ran up hundreds of dollars of charges it is the bank's problem not yours. Depending on the circumstances either the bank of the shop owner will be liable for the transaction and have to foot the bill. You won't be liable for a penny.
Even if someone does steal your card and max out your limit, the worst case scenario is that your card is declined next time you try and use it prompting you to phone the bank, who then reverse the fraudulent transactions. Slightly inconvenient but not very as card services almost always have a 24/7 number and can solve these issues in minutes.
There have been a number of cases where criminals have set up their own ATMs to do just this. They don't need to fake them, they just buy them from a company who sells ATMs to independent retailers.