While there are some truly compelling advantages to KISS/dumb systems, there's usually no reason that the system has to have a painful interface. The UIs for medical equipment, for example, are highly polished and tested for ease-of-use. It's just IMHO dangerously stupid to put plug-n-play networking, USB, or Wifi on a drug infusion pump.
If plug A fits into socket B, somebody's going to plug it in. Drop some infected USB drives in the parking lot, somebody's going to stick one in a USB port behind your firewall. Have an open USB port, somebody's going to charge their MP3 player from it. If it has a web browser and connectivity, somebody's going to surf with it.
Power-grid-like critical systems need to export their data from a DVD burner, not over the network. This can happen even several times a day. If this causes problems due to the latency it introduces into some spreadsheet-based workflows, then the system needs to be fixed. It's horribly broken if desktop office applications have been allowed to creep into the control loop!
Just my 2c, I don't expect everyone to agree with it.
Completely separating it is not advisable, because it can actually make it harder to administer and protect (updates, antivirus, etc).
Yeah, it might make it a little harder to work with sometimes.
TOO FLIPPING BAD!
Get your lazy ass off out of your chair and maintain the low-level infrastructure like it needs to be. Sometimes the infrastructure needs a guy with a truck, a wrench, and even a firmware update to match.
There's absolutely no reason industrial control processes should be accessible to the same web browser that can play Facebook games. Ever. There's little or no security isolation between the systems, regardless of how many proxies you put in place. The web just was never designed to work that way.
They really should have as few interoperable ports (e.g. USB) as possible.
Don't believe me? Just ask the Iranians right now.
I'm not going to "Prepare To Be Watched While You Watch a Movie".
A few years back, theaters started forcing me to sit through several minutes of advertisements, some of it really loud and obnoxious. Then the RIAA and MPAA came along and made their industries enemy #1 and 2 of all the kids.
The last few times I've watched general-audience films, they've had so many prominent product placements that I literally felt ripped-off for having paid to watch essentially a long commercial.
Note to directors: if several people sit down to have a conversation, the brand label on the coffee doesn't all face the same way (toward the viewer).
Note to movie stars: any script that requires you to repeat the product brand name and a marketing slogan multiple times is going to diminish your own value.
So this honestly doesn't surprise me.
My family and I used to like going to movies. But we've quit going and it didn't take much effort. We don't buy or rent them very much either. Someone might fantasize that we're "pirating" the stuff instead, but although I have the technical means, in reality it's just appealing enough to bother with it. My kids are far more interested in Nintendo, YouTube, and anime than anything out of Hollywood.
He was a patent clerk after all. One wonders if he would have amounted to anything if he'd been given an interesting professorship instead of a taking a boring desk job to daydream at.
Perhaps that's an argument for the elimination of the USPTO: Free the Einsteins!
You and the rest of the public don't have a right to know private trade secrets
Says who? There's no inherent right to prevent "the public" from learning arbitrary information either.
Does that mean I have some inherent right to prevent Google from learning every URL I type into a web browser? If they find themselves at risk of public disclosure of this data should courts protect their "right" to keep it as their "secret", even though I was the one who typed every character of it?
The term "secret" is descriptive. If you know something, it's not a secret to you. You may want others not to know it, but once they do it's not a secret any more is it? "Trade secret" is a legal term of art, but even that term sounds to me more descriptive.
You can bluster all you want about "transparency", but it's just a pathetic excuse to unjustly cause up to billions of dollars of harm to an unpopular business.
You're not going to convince anyone if you don't give them at least a little credibility. Anyone who would agree that their own point of view is "just a pathetic excuse" is probably not worth convincing, in the rhetorical sense.
We don't need to see the extremely valuable computer code (and possibly other trade secrets) to have transparency in this court case, hence, we don't get to see it.
So you seem to be saying of "transparency"...
The talk of it is "bluster"
The talk of it is "just a pathetic excuse to cause harm"
The minimum amount of information to "have transparency" should be disclosed, at least in this case, and
We can "have transparency" in this case without disclosing the program source text
Your arguments here are poorly thought out and backed up only by an angry tone.
It seems to me that the best argument for an exception in this case (to the general rule of fully-public government) is that disclosure of the (formerly) trade secrets would be a big disincentive for any future victims to come forward and cooperate with prosecutors. This is hardly a new concept.
But you haven't made that argument. Assuming that an actual shill would have at least know the common talking points, my guess is you're not really a shill.
That's literally two months away!! OMG how could a software release schedule ever be allowed to slip by two months? What will the retailers do now that it won't be on shelves in time for Christmas?!
I just hope it's not too far into January. Especially not Jan 31. The flying car from the magazine ad I ordered back in 1972 was scheduled for delivery on that day.
No, they are going after manufacturers that infringe on their patents, they are not "suing their customers" as you put it.
In this usage "going after" means making a credible, even if implied, threat of filing a lawsuit. Seeing that Acer and Asustek both distribute Windows on some of their products, the statement that "Microsoft is suing their customers" seems pretty accurate to me.
... how would you ever get the darn thing turned back on again?
Email...immediately down Web...down VPN access...down Phone systems...most are highly disrupted, if not completely down Remote access to critical infrastructure servers...down Remote access to critical embedded systems...partly Electric power...highly disrupted (grid monitoring systems rumored to use commodity data transport) Emergency services...minimal Water and sewer...no better than power Hospitals and medical services...minimal (no access to patient records, no resupply) E-commerce...down Financial trading...down Online banking...down Cable TV...down Broadcast TV...possibly available for those who have power and an HDTV ATMs and CC payment terminals...down Airlines...down Non-farm industries...down 80-90% of the US economy...down Data transit for non-US customers...mostly down, many will never exchange packets through the US again Security updates to computer systems...down Food distribution...highly disrupted Gas pumps...highly disrupted
On the first day of the outage, everyone leaves work early. It's the commute from hell as traffic lights, when they work, are not well synchronized. Even minor power flickers cause stores to sell out of candles, flashlight batteries, and water.
On the second day of the outage, most people visit their bank in person and demand cash. Long lines form at the gas pumps. Stores sell out of most non-perishable food.
After three days, all large US cities are simultaneously on the brink of post-Katrina anarchy (except those parts of DC and state capitals which are partially supplied by FEMA and the military). As fuel supplies dwindle, the sheer number of stalled-out vehicles in dense urban areas make roads largely impassable. Helpful locals push some cars out of the way to create narrow one-lane passages (at the end of which entrepreneurs will roll aside the final car for a high fee).
Unfortunately, it seems that the key personnel needed to reestablish the US backbones and reconnect to the global internet are at home boarding up windows. Even when they can be contacted, personnel would have to travel to the datacenters physically (obviously they can't remote access in). Few are willing to travel that far from home on their last half-tank of gas, which is now infinitely more valuable than theoretical employment in an economy that that no longer exists.
After 10 days, large population migrations begin on foot (carrying their possessions in makeshift wagons) to rural areas in search of food. Obviously they didn't make hotel reservations in advance.
Not really sure what this has to do with Wal-Mart, but (IMHO) I'm very disinclined to go back any time soon because:
The place was grungy. Not dirty, just the kind of grungy you get if you clean precisely the surfaces on some fixed list and nothing else, for years and years.
I stood around for 10 minutes and no staff made eye contact, much less offer to allow me to purchase the item in the locked glass cabinet that I went there to buy.
I find the nearest register in Electronics and ask. The guy gets the item, and rings it up with my 2 or 3 other things. He asks me if I want the extended protection plan. He gets distracted talking to another cashier about something more important. He rings it up again and asks me again if I want the extended protection plan. He refunds the duplicate item.
The freaking shoplifter alarm goes off as I leave. Oooh that makes me want to never pass through those doors again.
I take the bag over to the nearest staff, you know, the non-cashier who stands there to help the customer attempting a self-checkout. They glance at the receipt for no more than 200 milliseconds before disarming the item I bought in Electronics. (If your robotic sentries are going to loudly accuse me of being a shoplifter, at least grant me the courtesy of a human spending two full seconds considering my innocence.)
On the other hand, Target has always seemed a nice clean and friendly place to shop./me ducks
Google pulls fiber to some "faculty- and staff-owned homes" at the school which incubated their search engine company?
They have fiber optics running at "up to one gigabit per second" even. For a distance of two whole miles. Wow. Good to know that in the year 2010 there's still cutting edge research going on in the Valley. Usually a Google project is a little more innovative and ambitious than that.
But wait: "The location just a few miles away from Google will also make it easier for engineers to monitor progress." Could it be that Google just might be interested in some other benefits of "easy monitoring"?
You don't suppose they could be.... nahh.. they would never be so evil as to test their personal data collection and targeted marketing algorithms on their old college professors.
Next time you hear a politician talking about "securing the Internet" through legislation, remind them of this:
Granny's medic alert device failing to summon help from Symantec's "beg for mercy" captive portal would make a dynamite campaign ad, wouldn't it? http://bit.ly/adEngl
So unless US politicians really want to shut off the home internet on a majority the voters, every Netgear, every Linksys, every tablet and iPod, every Wii and Playstation, every home alarm system, every voip phone, every digital picture frame, you name it, which is made before this "grand solution" can imposed will end up with a blanket exemption.
That's pretty much everything with an ethernet port or wifi.
Except, of course, those systems from Microsoft and any other vendors that might go along with the plan. But look out! If their big power play is successful, they've won themselves the ability to f*** with their customers' network connections!
Way to go guys, let us know how that works out for ya.
I can't shift into drive in my vehicle unless I have my foot on the brake. By your logic I should do without all the good reasons to own a vehicle and walk everywhere instead.
If I were to take out the blowtorch and modify my vehicle to bypass that interlock (perhaps it makes a better race car, tractor, electric generator power source, etc. that way), the company that I buy gas from would not remotely wipe out my modified creation without permission.
What if the modified car is being used to drill a well to provide clean water to starving orphans? Would you have them all drink mosquito-infested standing water from abandoned tires? (dumped by the greedy jailbreak-hating mobile phone carriers no doubt!) WHY DO YOU HATE ORPHANS?!?!
Sorry, got a little carried away there. I'll decline the karma bonus.
I figured I'd make a throwaway char to learn on offline, then switch to a persistent one for playing offline. Also, I imagined that I might want to use a different char when playing each one of the three races in the game because my skill level of each was likely to be different. Maybe that's considered cheating or something, but if the SC2 crowd is that uptight, I'd probably prefer not to participate.
Slashdot could attempt to restrict everyone to one ID too and prevent anonymous posting. This would arguably reduce trolling. In reality, it would be so obnoxious to enforce, and likely not even successful, that people simply would go somewhere else.
In my opinion, it looks like Blizzard implemented these policies in part to prevent kids from sharing the game with their little brother. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
My name, on all three of my accounts, is fred flintstone. Fuck blizzard, and fuck their RealID.
That's an idea. I could re-register with a "stage name" on my billing info and participate in RealID in some semi-private way (they'd still have the name on my CC and all that). Seems like a bit of a hassle, and it's probably a ToS violation.
But I have a lot of things competing for my limited time, so I'm just not going to go very far out of my way to get into some game that gave an un-inviting first impression.
I don't think I understood that. I never tried the online play since I went to pick a cool handle and found that it was ar forbidden. I felt a bit cheated since I didn't understand that the name was permanent the first time I chose it. Maybe it had been stated somewhere, but it wasn't very prominent and I assumed it worked like WoW.
Looking at the forums its hard to get an accurate picture (like reading/. I suppose). There was some controversy about transitive friend relationships revealing RealID info and a switch being added to disable it. There seemed to be a lot of SC1 players who were angry about missing LAN play, chat rooms, the name restrictions, or this or that. I wasn't an SC1 player, so I thought I had an open mind. Turns out I was assuming it'd be like WoW!
It still seems like quite an arbitrary restriction. I don't believe, like some posters, that Blizzard simply wants to squeeze more money out of the players in this case. My guess is that mainly they wanted players to feel less free to behave like jerks. A side effect is that I, who wouldn't behave like that in any case, felt less freedom to have fun making my character(s) on the game.
Thanks. I think I'd seen that link. Still no indication of when though. It looks like it's not happening until they can set up to charge fees for subsequent name changes.
Having heard Blizzard's reputation, I figured it could be a very long time. Their notice says "We'll announce more details on how the free name change and additional paid character name changes will be implemented in the near future." Yet it's been 7 weeks apparently without an update. I can imagine they're busy with Cataclysm related stuff.
I wasn't going to wait around since I figured my best chance at a refund would be if I hadn't had the game very long.
Your SC2 character name is not your Real ID. There's no way anyone can associate you with "Slayer#123" unless you explicitly add them as Real ID friends, the same way in WoW they can't associate you with "Legollaz" unless you explicitly add them.
Yes, but from a little reading on the SC2 forums I learned that they had eliminated the option of non-RealID friends. Anyone you were going to be friends with was going to be under your legal name from your account billing.
So SC2 forces you to choose: either give up your personal identity/privacy, or have no friends.
I chose the third option, which was to simply not play SC2.
[Retyping this. I don't know why the other one didn't go through. Sorry if it turns into a double post.]
you do realize of course that blizzard is allowing a name change due to the frequency of the complaint you have. So, they solve the issue you have, and you still complain?
I'd seen rumors of it (such as yours), but found nothing official. When I emailed their support and asked about it their solution was to give me a refund rather than offer a name change.
This was just a few weeks ago. Do you have a link to anything official?
I have a feeling that you'll find another reason seeing that your reason is most easily debunked. Clearly you just want to be negative, thats fine, but stop lying about a perfectly good game to get your warped view across.
No, I'd consider trying it again if their identity policies became nicer.
Why can't they just make it work like WoW? That's closer to what I was expecting.
Seriously? You returned the game because it shows YOU your own name?
No, that wasn't a major reason.
Was it a surprise?
I thought it was a bit odd. No other software I've ever used puts my full legal name (not my email, handle, etc) in big bold letters on the main screen.
Did you not know your own name previously?
No, I was previously aware of my own name.
You do realize it shows no one else that information unless you tell it to.
Yes, but I didn't feel like I had a good understanding of just how much of the game I would be sacrificing if I declined to participate. My experience is that choosing privacy (i.e., opting out of information sharing) tends to make one something of a second-class citizen when the product or service is heavily oriented to an online community. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but I got the sense that Blizzard was really pushing for me to give in to RealID friend sharing and I would end up missing out on a significant part of the game's experience.
And you thought the default avatar was "ugly" and were offended by CG models of smoking?
I don't really know if this counts as offended, but it just looks gross to me. When I was younger, people in my family would smoke cigarettes, and I developed chronic bronchitis. It gives me a dizzy shudder to smell it or sometimes even think about it. Some people will instantly relate to this, others won't at all.
Also you lied about the Facebook bit. If you never turn it on (and I don't even know how you turn it on so it isn't in your face or anything) then you never see it.
Sometimes I feel like the last guy on the planet without a Facebook account, but I'm pretty sure I would remember having signed up for it. Not sure how I could prove that negative (that I didn't turn on Facebook), nor am I really going to try.
What I'm saying is that, to me, the game startup screen felt like loading a web page with affiliate links. I see enough of that during the day to enjoy at more of it at night. I get tired visually of filtering out corporate logos. Here's a link to the startup screen in beta. To this they added my legal name, and the character name in big bold letters. As well as prominent/frequent invitations to associate my real identity on Facebook. Take a look at the WoW startup screen, it doesn't have any of that. If they ever added banner ads and affiliate links, I'd probably stop playing.
I hate sounding like a jerk, but those reasons are really silly.
No, absolutely, those on their own would be silly reasons to not play a game, and the actual gameplay didn't suck. As I said, the main reason I returned the game was because, after spending $60 on the thing, I was forbidden from ever changing my character name and I felt like that wasn't made clear to me at the time that I purchased it.
Hypothetically speaking, if you want me to be a customer and pay $60 for a game, and I say "No thanks, it turns out not to be enjoyable to me because I find your policies about identity to be heavy-handed and I'm not exactly in love with some of its other aesthetic qualities" then it's not really useful to anyone for you to argue back. I'm not under an obligation to be logical about what I like and don't like. The game (particularly the character name thing) wasn't what I thought it would be. Nothing personal.
It's not voluntary on Starcraft II. You can't create multiple characters, or even ever change your one character's name.
That and every time I start the game there's my real name in bold 24 point letters and this macro-lens close up of this real ugly guy. And links to Facebook. Most of the time the game shows videos you can't turn off of cigarette smoking. Gross. Made me really not want to play it.
I returned it for a refund.
My guess is that somebody at that company is trying to turn it into a social networking business and couldn't care less about making a product their customers want. The main point of games, for many of us, is to forget the real world for a bit.
Cool, so I can break into your website and deface it? Start a smear campaign against you claiming you are an ex Nazi who likes having sex with dead relatives? Break into your online bank account and steal your money?
Go for it dude, make it unforgettable, the stuff of legend. See URL above. Offer non-transferable. No points awarded for a dumb DoS. We'll share notes afterward and post on [Full-disclosure].
Admit it, you want at least some government regulation of the Internet. Unless, I don't know, maybe you want a lawless old west where groups like Anonymous can wreak havoc unmolested by evil government types.
No, I prefer the "old west" model actually. Not because I like chaos and anarchy, but simply that from a pragmatic perspective its what we'll get anyway.
I know this is hard for many people to hear, but you need to be responsible for your own data security. Before you were connected to the internet, you'd lose all your data because you didn't back it up properly. No one expected a government regulation would take that risk away for you. In this case, bad guys (from many other countries) want to pwn your public-facing server (and everything behind it too). Anyone waiting for some sort of law to be passed to make them secure is going to remain disappointed (and have less freedom and privacy of their own). For one thing, just about anything you don't like is probably already excessively illegal. Additionally, a law will do nothing unless you refuse to exchange packets with any system ("that exchanges packets with any system" x infinity) that is not covered by such a law. Data are data, this is not technically possible.
The case you name, Anonymous, a perfect example. There's quite a variety of laws around the world regulating data communications. I haven't kept up on the news about it lately, but just how much has any of this affected their operation? Approximately zero as far as I can tell.
That's certainly possible, they may have done a great job with the implementation. Going by history, there's a good chance that they did not. They might not have wanted to pull their top engineers off of whatever they were working on for a marketing trial.
Making a hack run early in the boot process is probably a bit difficult. Maybe not many people can do it, but it only takes one. That might make it all the more interesting for those who can.
Looks like I can get a quad core AMD and mobo under $200. I heard ATI finally had some decent X drivers. I think a shopping trip is in order today.
Look at the photos of the actual card. There's a barcode with a bunch of numbers. There are some digits on the left, a bunch of zeroes, and then a number that's just a bit over 2^31.Presumably, there's an unknown code under the silver. We don't yet know what data gets sent over the web during the un-downgrading process, but it's quite possible that upgrades may be performed even while that system is offline, perhaps by reading codes over the telephone.
My guess is that the left-justified digits identify the Intel project within the upgrade card network. The ones on the right are the card's unique code with 32 bits of entropy. If the uncrippling process can be unlocked over the phone, there's a probably a brute force attack against the CPU. Humans just can't read long streams of digits that accurately.
So, if the key or ID space really is something like 2^32, how does a gigahertz CPU resist brute force attack? Just a theory, but it may be that after too many failed attempts, the CPU burns itself out. (That's just the kind of heavy-handed solution these customer-hating DRM types seem to love to implement.)
This raises the real possibility that the un-downgrade application contains the seeds of either a crack, or permanent hardware destruction of the affected Intel products.
Slashdot Mirror
While there are some truly compelling advantages to KISS/dumb systems, there's usually no reason that the system has to have a painful interface. The UIs for medical equipment, for example, are highly polished and tested for ease-of-use. It's just IMHO dangerously stupid to put plug-n-play networking, USB, or Wifi on a drug infusion pump.
If plug A fits into socket B, somebody's going to plug it in. Drop some infected USB drives in the parking lot, somebody's going to stick one in a USB port behind your firewall. Have an open USB port, somebody's going to charge their MP3 player from it. If it has a web browser and connectivity, somebody's going to surf with it.
Power-grid-like critical systems need to export their data from a DVD burner, not over the network. This can happen even several times a day. If this causes problems due to the latency it introduces into some spreadsheet-based workflows, then the system needs to be fixed. It's horribly broken if desktop office applications have been allowed to creep into the control loop!
Just my 2c, I don't expect everyone to agree with it.
Yeah, it might make it a little harder to work with sometimes.
TOO FLIPPING BAD!
Get your lazy ass off out of your chair and maintain the low-level infrastructure like it needs to be. Sometimes the infrastructure needs a guy with a truck, a wrench, and even a firmware update to match.
There's absolutely no reason industrial control processes should be accessible to the same web browser that can play Facebook games. Ever. There's little or no security isolation between the systems, regardless of how many proxies you put in place. The web just was never designed to work that way.
They really should have as few interoperable ports (e.g. USB) as possible.
Don't believe me? Just ask the Iranians right now.
I'm not going to "Prepare To Be Watched While You Watch a Movie".
A few years back, theaters started forcing me to sit through several minutes of advertisements, some of it really loud and obnoxious. Then the RIAA and MPAA came along and made their industries enemy #1 and 2 of all the kids.
The last few times I've watched general-audience films, they've had so many prominent product placements that I literally felt ripped-off for having paid to watch essentially a long commercial.
Note to directors: if several people sit down to have a conversation, the brand label on the coffee doesn't all face the same way (toward the viewer).
Note to movie stars: any script that requires you to repeat the product brand name and a marketing slogan multiple times is going to diminish your own value.
So this honestly doesn't surprise me.
My family and I used to like going to movies. But we've quit going and it didn't take much effort. We don't buy or rent them very much either. Someone might fantasize that we're "pirating" the stuff instead, but although I have the technical means, in reality it's just appealing enough to bother with it. My kids are far more interested in Nintendo, YouTube, and anime than anything out of Hollywood.
"Does anyone really care" that you don't care about NK?
TFA is about some specific people who do care about it, enough to risk death, or worse. Maybe that answers your question.
Einstein patent: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=1781541
He was a patent clerk after all. One wonders if he would have amounted to anything if he'd been given an interesting professorship instead of a taking a boring desk job to daydream at.
Perhaps that's an argument for the elimination of the USPTO: Free the Einsteins!
Says who? There's no inherent right to prevent "the public" from learning arbitrary information either. Does that mean I have some inherent right to prevent Google from learning every URL I type into a web browser? If they find themselves at risk of public disclosure of this data should courts protect their "right" to keep it as their "secret", even though I was the one who typed every character of it? The term "secret" is descriptive. If you know something, it's not a secret to you. You may want others not to know it, but once they do it's not a secret any more is it? "Trade secret" is a legal term of art, but even that term sounds to me more descriptive.
You're not going to convince anyone if you don't give them at least a little credibility. Anyone who would agree that their own point of view is "just a pathetic excuse" is probably not worth convincing, in the rhetorical sense.
So you seem to be saying of "transparency"...
The talk of it is "bluster"
The talk of it is "just a pathetic excuse to cause harm"
The minimum amount of information to "have transparency" should be disclosed, at least in this case, and
We can "have transparency" in this case without disclosing the program source text
Your arguments here are poorly thought out and backed up only by an angry tone.
It seems to me that the best argument for an exception in this case (to the general rule of fully-public government) is that disclosure of the (formerly) trade secrets would be a big disincentive for any future victims to come forward and cooperate with prosecutors. This is hardly a new concept.
But you haven't made that argument. Assuming that an actual shill would have at least know the common talking points, my guess is you're not really a shill.
That's literally two months away!! OMG how could a software release schedule ever be allowed to slip by two months? What will the retailers do now that it won't be on shelves in time for Christmas?!
I just hope it's not too far into January. Especially not Jan 31. The flying car from the magazine ad I ordered back in 1972 was scheduled for delivery on that day.
-1 silly.
In this usage "going after" means making a credible, even if implied, threat of filing a lawsuit. Seeing that Acer and Asustek both distribute Windows on some of their products, the statement that "Microsoft is suing their customers" seems pretty accurate to me.
... how would you ever get the darn thing turned back on again?
Email...immediately down
Web...down
VPN access...down
Phone systems...most are highly disrupted, if not completely down
Remote access to critical infrastructure servers...down
Remote access to critical embedded systems...partly
Electric power...highly disrupted (grid monitoring systems rumored to use commodity data transport)
Emergency services...minimal
Water and sewer...no better than power
Hospitals and medical services...minimal (no access to patient records, no resupply)
E-commerce...down
Financial trading...down
Online banking...down
Cable TV...down
Broadcast TV...possibly available for those who have power and an HDTV
ATMs and CC payment terminals...down
Airlines...down
Non-farm industries...down
80-90% of the US economy...down
Data transit for non-US customers...mostly down, many will never exchange packets through the US again
Security updates to computer systems...down
Food distribution...highly disrupted
Gas pumps...highly disrupted
On the first day of the outage, everyone leaves work early. It's the commute from hell as traffic lights, when they work, are not well synchronized. Even minor power flickers cause stores to sell out of candles, flashlight batteries, and water.
On the second day of the outage, most people visit their bank in person and demand cash. Long lines form at the gas pumps. Stores sell out of most non-perishable food.
After three days, all large US cities are simultaneously on the brink of post-Katrina anarchy (except those parts of DC and state capitals which are partially supplied by FEMA and the military). As fuel supplies dwindle, the sheer number of stalled-out vehicles in dense urban areas make roads largely impassable. Helpful locals push some cars out of the way to create narrow one-lane passages (at the end of which entrepreneurs will roll aside the final car for a high fee).
Unfortunately, it seems that the key personnel needed to reestablish the US backbones and reconnect to the global internet are at home boarding up windows. Even when they can be contacted, personnel would have to travel to the datacenters physically (obviously they can't remote access in). Few are willing to travel that far from home on their last half-tank of gas, which is now infinitely more valuable than theoretical employment in an economy that that no longer exists.
After 10 days, large population migrations begin on foot (carrying their possessions in makeshift wagons) to rural areas in search of food. Obviously they didn't make hotel reservations in advance.
So what problem was this supposed to solve again?
Not really sure what this has to do with Wal-Mart, but (IMHO) I'm very disinclined to go back any time soon because:
The place was grungy. Not dirty, just the kind of grungy you get if you clean precisely the surfaces on some fixed list and nothing else, for years and years.
I stood around for 10 minutes and no staff made eye contact, much less offer to allow me to purchase the item in the locked glass cabinet that I went there to buy.
I find the nearest register in Electronics and ask. The guy gets the item, and rings it up with my 2 or 3 other things. He asks me if I want the extended protection plan. He gets distracted talking to another cashier about something more important. He rings it up again and asks me again if I want the extended protection plan. He refunds the duplicate item.
The freaking shoplifter alarm goes off as I leave. Oooh that makes me want to never pass through those doors again.
I take the bag over to the nearest staff, you know, the non-cashier who stands there to help the customer attempting a self-checkout. They glance at the receipt for no more than 200 milliseconds before disarming the item I bought in Electronics. (If your robotic sentries are going to loudly accuse me of being a shoplifter, at least grant me the courtesy of a human spending two full seconds considering my innocence.)
On the other hand, Target has always seemed a nice clean and friendly place to shop. /me ducks
OP may or may not be intentionally trolling, but the question is pretty easy to answer:
Yes.
Just about every program that does 3D graphics on anything besides MS Windows or XBox uses OpenGL, today.
Google pulls fiber to some "faculty- and staff-owned homes" at the school which incubated their search engine company?
They have fiber optics running at "up to one gigabit per second" even. For a distance of two whole miles. Wow. Good to know that in the year 2010 there's still cutting edge research going on in the Valley. Usually a Google project is a little more innovative and ambitious than that.
But wait: "The location just a few miles away from Google will also make it easier for engineers to monitor progress." Could it be that Google just might be interested in some other benefits of "easy monitoring"?
You don't suppose they could be .... nahh .. they would never be so evil as to test their personal data collection and targeted marketing algorithms on their old college professors.
Would they?
Next time you hear a politician talking about "securing the Internet" through legislation, remind them of this:
Granny's medic alert device failing to summon help from Symantec's "beg for mercy" captive portal would make a dynamite campaign ad, wouldn't it?
http://bit.ly/adEngl
So unless US politicians really want to shut off the home internet on a majority the voters, every Netgear, every Linksys, every tablet and iPod, every Wii and Playstation, every home alarm system, every voip phone, every digital picture frame, you name it, which is made before this "grand solution" can imposed will end up with a blanket exemption.
That's pretty much everything with an ethernet port or wifi.
Except, of course, those systems from Microsoft and any other vendors that might go along with the plan. But look out! If their big power play is successful, they've won themselves the ability to f*** with their customers' network connections!
Way to go guys, let us know how that works out for ya.
If I were to take out the blowtorch and modify my vehicle to bypass that interlock (perhaps it makes a better race car, tractor, electric generator power source, etc. that way), the company that I buy gas from would not remotely wipe out my modified creation without permission.
What if the modified car is being used to drill a well to provide clean water to starving orphans? Would you have them all drink mosquito-infested standing water from abandoned tires? (dumped by the greedy jailbreak-hating mobile phone carriers no doubt!) WHY DO YOU HATE ORPHANS?!?!
Sorry, got a little carried away there. I'll decline the karma bonus.
I figured I'd make a throwaway char to learn on offline, then switch to a persistent one for playing offline. Also, I imagined that I might want to use a different char when playing each one of the three races in the game because my skill level of each was likely to be different. Maybe that's considered cheating or something, but if the SC2 crowd is that uptight, I'd probably prefer not to participate.
Slashdot could attempt to restrict everyone to one ID too and prevent anonymous posting. This would arguably reduce trolling. In reality, it would be so obnoxious to enforce, and likely not even successful, that people simply would go somewhere else.
In my opinion, it looks like Blizzard implemented these policies in part to prevent kids from sharing the game with their little brother. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
That's an idea. I could re-register with a "stage name" on my billing info and participate in RealID in some semi-private way (they'd still have the name on my CC and all that). Seems like a bit of a hassle, and it's probably a ToS violation.
But I have a lot of things competing for my limited time, so I'm just not going to go very far out of my way to get into some game that gave an un-inviting first impression.
I don't think I understood that. I never tried the online play since I went to pick a cool handle and found that it was ar forbidden. I felt a bit cheated since I didn't understand that the name was permanent the first time I chose it. Maybe it had been stated somewhere, but it wasn't very prominent and I assumed it worked like WoW.
Looking at the forums its hard to get an accurate picture (like reading /. I suppose). There was some controversy about transitive friend relationships revealing RealID info and a switch being added to disable it. There seemed to be a lot of SC1 players who were angry about missing LAN play, chat rooms, the name restrictions, or this or that. I wasn't an SC1 player, so I thought I had an open mind. Turns out I was assuming it'd be like WoW!
It still seems like quite an arbitrary restriction. I don't believe, like some posters, that Blizzard simply wants to squeeze more money out of the players in this case. My guess is that mainly they wanted players to feel less free to behave like jerks. A side effect is that I, who wouldn't behave like that in any case, felt less freedom to have fun making my character(s) on the game.
Thanks. I think I'd seen that link. Still no indication of when though. It looks like it's not happening until they can set up to charge fees for subsequent name changes.
Having heard Blizzard's reputation, I figured it could be a very long time. Their notice says "We'll announce more details on how the free name change and additional paid character name changes will be implemented in the near future." Yet it's been 7 weeks apparently without an update. I can imagine they're busy with Cataclysm related stuff.
I wasn't going to wait around since I figured my best chance at a refund would be if I hadn't had the game very long.
Yes, but from a little reading on the SC2 forums I learned that they had eliminated the option of non-RealID friends. Anyone you were going to be friends with was going to be under your legal name from your account billing.
So SC2 forces you to choose: either give up your personal identity/privacy, or have no friends.
I chose the third option, which was to simply not play SC2.
[Retyping this. I don't know why the other one didn't go through. Sorry if it turns into a double post.]
I'd seen rumors of it (such as yours), but found nothing official. When I emailed their support and asked about it their solution was to give me a refund rather than offer a name change.
This was just a few weeks ago. Do you have a link to anything official?
No, I'd consider trying it again if their identity policies became nicer.
Why can't they just make it work like WoW? That's closer to what I was expecting.
No, that wasn't a major reason.
I thought it was a bit odd. No other software I've ever used puts my full legal name (not my email, handle, etc) in big bold letters on the main screen.
No, I was previously aware of my own name.
Yes, but I didn't feel like I had a good understanding of just how much of the game I would be sacrificing if I declined to participate. My experience is that choosing privacy (i.e., opting out of information sharing) tends to make one something of a second-class citizen when the product or service is heavily oriented to an online community. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but I got the sense that Blizzard was really pushing for me to give in to RealID friend sharing and I would end up missing out on a significant part of the game's experience.
I don't really know if this counts as offended, but it just looks gross to me. When I was younger, people in my family would smoke cigarettes, and I developed chronic bronchitis. It gives me a dizzy shudder to smell it or sometimes even think about it. Some people will instantly relate to this, others won't at all.
Sometimes I feel like the last guy on the planet without a Facebook account, but I'm pretty sure I would remember having signed up for it. Not sure how I could prove that negative (that I didn't turn on Facebook), nor am I really going to try.
What I'm saying is that, to me, the game startup screen felt like loading a web page with affiliate links. I see enough of that during the day to enjoy at more of it at night. I get tired visually of filtering out corporate logos. Here's a link to the startup screen in beta. To this they added my legal name, and the character name in big bold letters. As well as prominent/frequent invitations to associate my real identity on Facebook. Take a look at the WoW startup screen, it doesn't have any of that. If they ever added banner ads and affiliate links, I'd probably stop playing.
No, absolutely, those on their own would be silly reasons to not play a game, and the actual gameplay didn't suck. As I said, the main reason I returned the game was because, after spending $60 on the thing, I was forbidden from ever changing my character name and I felt like that wasn't made clear to me at the time that I purchased it.
Hypothetically speaking, if you want me to be a customer and pay $60 for a game, and I say "No thanks, it turns out not to be enjoyable to me because I find your policies about identity to be heavy-handed and I'm not exactly in love with some of its other aesthetic qualities" then it's not really useful to anyone for you to argue back. I'm not under an obligation to be logical about what I like and don't like. The game (particularly the character name thing) wasn't what I thought it would be. Nothing personal.
It's not voluntary on Starcraft II. You can't create multiple characters, or even ever change your one character's name.
That and every time I start the game there's my real name in bold 24 point letters and this macro-lens close up of this real ugly guy. And links to Facebook. Most of the time the game shows videos you can't turn off of cigarette smoking. Gross. Made me really not want to play it.
I returned it for a refund.
My guess is that somebody at that company is trying to turn it into a social networking business and couldn't care less about making a product their customers want. The main point of games, for many of us, is to forget the real world for a bit.
Go for it dude, make it unforgettable, the stuff of legend. See URL above. Offer non-transferable. No points awarded for a dumb DoS. We'll share notes afterward and post on [Full-disclosure].
No, I prefer the "old west" model actually. Not because I like chaos and anarchy, but simply that from a pragmatic perspective its what we'll get anyway.
I know this is hard for many people to hear, but you need to be responsible for your own data security. Before you were connected to the internet, you'd lose all your data because you didn't back it up properly. No one expected a government regulation would take that risk away for you. In this case, bad guys (from many other countries) want to pwn your public-facing server (and everything behind it too). Anyone waiting for some sort of law to be passed to make them secure is going to remain disappointed (and have less freedom and privacy of their own). For one thing, just about anything you don't like is probably already excessively illegal. Additionally, a law will do nothing unless you refuse to exchange packets with any system ("that exchanges packets with any system" x infinity) that is not covered by such a law. Data are data, this is not technically possible.
The case you name, Anonymous, a perfect example. There's quite a variety of laws around the world regulating data communications. I haven't kept up on the news about it lately, but just how much has any of this affected their operation? Approximately zero as far as I can tell.
That's certainly possible, they may have done a great job with the implementation. Going by history, there's a good chance that they did not. They might not have wanted to pull their top engineers off of whatever they were working on for a marketing trial.
Making a hack run early in the boot process is probably a bit difficult. Maybe not many people can do it, but it only takes one. That might make it all the more interesting for those who can.
Looks like I can get a quad core AMD and mobo under $200. I heard ATI finally had some decent X drivers. I think a shopping trip is in order today.
Look at the photos of the actual card. There's a barcode with a bunch of numbers. There are some digits on the left, a bunch of zeroes, and then a number that's just a bit over 2^31.Presumably, there's an unknown code under the silver. We don't yet know what data gets sent over the web during the un-downgrading process, but it's quite possible that upgrades may be performed even while that system is offline, perhaps by reading codes over the telephone.
My guess is that the left-justified digits identify the Intel project within the upgrade card network. The ones on the right are the card's unique code with 32 bits of entropy. If the uncrippling process can be unlocked over the phone, there's a probably a brute force attack against the CPU. Humans just can't read long streams of digits that accurately.
So, if the key or ID space really is something like 2^32, how does a gigahertz CPU resist brute force attack? Just a theory, but it may be that after too many failed attempts, the CPU burns itself out. (That's just the kind of heavy-handed solution these customer-hating DRM types seem to love to implement.)
This raises the real possibility that the un-downgrade application contains the seeds of either a crack, or permanent hardware destruction of the affected Intel products.