1) This is a future planning issue, not a service quality issue, and therefore there is nothing for end users to notice yet 2) Complaining is the Great British passtime and I'm affronted that you would dare question our continued dominance in the field
The data was not published! Gawker received and published a story about the data, but it was quite deliberately never publicly disclosed and was eventually destroyed.
An example: once upon a time if you wanted to use a computer you'd sit down at a dumb terminal that talked to whatever monster your institution had in the basement. Then "personal computers" came, and they were slow, riotously expensive per unit computing power, and used this horrible mouse thing to operate, but the big smart machines didn't go away. They just receded to the people that actually needed them, where they remain to this day.
Precisely. And somewhere in there is the act that he should be prosecuted for. It seems that they want to treat it as massive, coordinated security breach however.
Where the access is, in and of itself, the crime, then facilitating that access does become an issue. Not the whole issue - a transgression has still occurred - but something that needs consideration. There's a difference between wandering into someone's home uninvited, and wandering into other rooms after using the bathroom with their permission.
In that scenario there are two crimes, breaking and entering (the act of access) and theft (the act of depriving a person of his/her property). Unfortunately for your analogy he neither accessed a private residence or deprived a person of anything. Its closest real-world analogy would be peeking at your neighbour's unsealed mail in their unlocked mail box on the street, and then putting it back. You know where your mailbox is, you can guess where the other mailboxes are quite easily, and there is no barrier to opening and looking at the contents.
In what way was his access malicious? The word means "with harmful intent" - intent, mind you, not effect, although I don't believe any actual harm has been demonstrated either.
By "at a push" he really means "at a push": Gran Turismo had a high-res mode you unlocked if you won every Arcade race, and it dropped the draw distance down to about five inches and was only available as a time trial (IIRC). I can't think of a game that used it as a normal display mode.
BTW, it's an allusion to John Gilmore's classic statement that "the 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This does challenge whether that re-routing is enough, in itself, to rob censors of their teeth.
I really wish that the open-source hardware movement would target a broader subsection of homebrew gaming than "emulators". Someone needs to buy games to keep Jeff Minter in wooly coats and sheep dip.
The big challenge for the developers will be creating a device that's small, runs well, runs for a long time, and is cheap. The current handheld console companies - who set people's expectations of the technology - use economies of scale to push cost down, and often rely on hacker-unfriendly industrial design to cram components into the smallest possible space. They'll have to find a way to get around those limitations. And that's before you consider smartphones, which have set a ludicrously short life cycle for devices (heading towards 6 months) that's making it hard for even the big console manufacturers to keep up with performance expectations.
Maybe the answer it to simply embrace the smartphone. Do what Ooya did, use a commoditised smartphone platform, but keep the screen and throw in some thumbsticks and buttons.
Unfortunately we've only got funding for one bullet, so until the people holding the purse strings realise they need a shotgun, people are going to have to compete against one another as the One True Energy Source That We Should Fund.
I actually went through a period of intense existential crisis the last time I read a book on relativity and reminded myself that space opera simply isn't a future our species will ever experience. It passed, though. (Reading some old Arthur C. Clarke and reminding myself of the possibilities in a slower-than-light universe perked me up.) Space opera is fantasy; provided self-consistency is maintained I can live with it.
I would watch the fuck out of a version of Stargate where everyone disintegrates into a fireball at the end of the first act and the remainder of the movie is just a DoD physicist rocking back and forth under his desk in a pile of rubble, wishing that they'd only bothered to pay attention to him this one time.
Even if it were possible, to be consistent with current observations of relativistic effects, it would imply the kind of mind-bending time-travel paradoxes that sci-fi writers simply never, ever want to touch. You can't have a world like Star Trek without implying deeply broken causality.
I don't want to seem like I'm condoning vendor lock-in, but if the data didn't exist until the device gathered it, it hasn't been "held hostage". You don't pay a guy to design your house then get pissy when he won't share the blueprints, unless you agreed so in advance.
It amazes me that you think that "Google Glass", a product which is currently a textmode HUD the size of a fingernail partnered with a headily fictitious concept video, is a "game changer".
Slashdot Mirror
If it was in Celsius or Kelvin US readers wouldn't know whether to wear a coat or shorts when they went to visit the laser.
1) This is a future planning issue, not a service quality issue, and therefore there is nothing for end users to notice yet
2) Complaining is the Great British passtime and I'm affronted that you would dare question our continued dominance in the field
I'm sure that the fact that they decided doing any of those things makes no difference.
You're not getting my point. If I steal from your mailbox I am not charged with multiple counts of grand theft.
The data was not published! Gawker received and published a story about the data, but it was quite deliberately never publicly disclosed and was eventually destroyed.
What stopped him from going to AT&T, then going to the press when AT&T didn't respond? A lack of executive function?
Almost everything you described is going into the CPU these days to cut down power and size.
An example: once upon a time if you wanted to use a computer you'd sit down at a dumb terminal that talked to whatever monster your institution had in the basement. Then "personal computers" came, and they were slow, riotously expensive per unit computing power, and used this horrible mouse thing to operate, but the big smart machines didn't go away. They just receded to the people that actually needed them, where they remain to this day.
Precisely. And somewhere in there is the act that he should be prosecuted for. It seems that they want to treat it as massive, coordinated security breach however.
If this was a civil court case then "severe embarrassment" might be malicious intent for some torts*, but this is a criminal case.
*I doubt it
Where the access is, in and of itself, the crime, then facilitating that access does become an issue. Not the whole issue - a transgression has still occurred - but something that needs consideration. There's a difference between wandering into someone's home uninvited, and wandering into other rooms after using the bathroom with their permission.
I don't think anyone's objecting to AT&T's chagrin, ken.
Given that the issue is not the act but the punishment, I'm curious. Where would you draw the line at "what is coming to" him? What would be unfair?
In that scenario there are two crimes, breaking and entering (the act of access) and theft (the act of depriving a person of his/her property). Unfortunately for your analogy he neither accessed a private residence or deprived a person of anything. Its closest real-world analogy would be peeking at your neighbour's unsealed mail in their unlocked mail box on the street, and then putting it back. You know where your mailbox is, you can guess where the other mailboxes are quite easily, and there is no barrier to opening and looking at the contents.
In what way was his access malicious? The word means "with harmful intent" - intent, mind you, not effect, although I don't believe any actual harm has been demonstrated either.
By "at a push" he really means "at a push": Gran Turismo had a high-res mode you unlocked if you won every Arcade race, and it dropped the draw distance down to about five inches and was only available as a time trial (IIRC). I can't think of a game that used it as a normal display mode.
BTW, it's an allusion to John Gilmore's classic statement that "the 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This does challenge whether that re-routing is enough, in itself, to rob censors of their teeth.
The Xpreia Play is basically a slightly-out-of-date Android phone with a SNES controller attached.
I really wish that the open-source hardware movement would target a broader subsection of homebrew gaming than "emulators". Someone needs to buy games to keep Jeff Minter in wooly coats and sheep dip.
The big challenge for the developers will be creating a device that's small, runs well, runs for a long time, and is cheap. The current handheld console companies - who set people's expectations of the technology - use economies of scale to push cost down, and often rely on hacker-unfriendly industrial design to cram components into the smallest possible space. They'll have to find a way to get around those limitations. And that's before you consider smartphones, which have set a ludicrously short life cycle for devices (heading towards 6 months) that's making it hard for even the big console manufacturers to keep up with performance expectations.
Maybe the answer it to simply embrace the smartphone. Do what Ooya did, use a commoditised smartphone platform, but keep the screen and throw in some thumbsticks and buttons.
Unfortunately we've only got funding for one bullet, so until the people holding the purse strings realise they need a shotgun, people are going to have to compete against one another as the One True Energy Source That We Should Fund.
I actually went through a period of intense existential crisis the last time I read a book on relativity and reminded myself that space opera simply isn't a future our species will ever experience. It passed, though. (Reading some old Arthur C. Clarke and reminding myself of the possibilities in a slower-than-light universe perked me up.) Space opera is fantasy; provided self-consistency is maintained I can live with it.
I would watch the fuck out of a version of Stargate where everyone disintegrates into a fireball at the end of the first act and the remainder of the movie is just a DoD physicist rocking back and forth under his desk in a pile of rubble, wishing that they'd only bothered to pay attention to him this one time.
Even if it were possible, to be consistent with current observations of relativistic effects, it would imply the kind of mind-bending time-travel paradoxes that sci-fi writers simply never, ever want to touch. You can't have a world like Star Trek without implying deeply broken causality.
I don't want to seem like I'm condoning vendor lock-in, but if the data didn't exist until the device gathered it, it hasn't been "held hostage". You don't pay a guy to design your house then get pissy when he won't share the blueprints, unless you agreed so in advance.
It amazes me that you think that "Google Glass", a product which is currently a textmode HUD the size of a fingernail partnered with a headily fictitious concept video, is a "game changer".