It was from 199? (before 1998) and it had no heroes and only small diversity in the teams. But the building and the order system were revolutionary, I'd say.
There were 2 switches for unit behaviour, that could be set per unit, directly, via a group selection or as a default for new units from a specific factory.
The first was aggression: always shoot, only shoot back, do never shoot and the second was allowed path deviance: break orders whenever aggression triggered, stray only lightly from the path, stay on orders no matter what.
That was perfect in my opinion, since you could easily create guards, patrols, offensive patrols and suicide missions without the need for any "pre-fab"-stances.
These stances also applied to non-combat units, since you had a multitude of construction vehicles, that were all able to interact with one another, automatically.
Set a constructor to shoot-all, and it will repair anything damaged and harvest any resource it sees along its patrol. Set path straying to light and it would only repair standing units and buildings, set it to liberal and it would follow damaged units until they are fully repaired, then returning to the next path vertex. And all would aid in construction buildings automatically.
Now imagine you do this with 20 construction aircrafts, that patrol your base, repair all buildings, repair all defense units, aid in all construction projects and harvesting minor resource thingies along the way.
Imagine another thing: you could set the aircraft factory with a predefined guard route and the stance behaviour, then assign some construction units to "guard" that factory. They will then aid in all construction projects this factory starts and will heal the factory if it gets damaged. Since there are 20 units helping, it churns out aircrafts extremely quick. All these go on an offensive patrol directly or meandering into enemy territory, sweeping anything away they see en-route. All this, while you concentrate on the main tank/battleship attack, resource expansion or a stealth operation behind the enemy.
This is automation and that's what I expect from todays games. Westwoods "Dune2 Battle for Arrakis" had essentially created the genre, but you had to click and command each and every unit on its own. Wasted mouse and brain of the avid gamer in less than 3 hours, but it was still a great game. Command & Conquer added a central build interface, unit grouping, hotkeys. Starcraft made this more RPG-like with clear values for each aspect of the units and allowed the first automations. "Attack ground" for a rapidly growing hydralisk army bred from 10 or more hatches was devastating against all but the most skillful micromanagers, since it used the most valuable resource in a realtime-strategy game - human attention.
Warcraft3 went leaps and bounds backwards. This game needs such a minute attention to details, micromanagement on all occasions, even special units to care and feed for and even an inventory to fill properly. Come on, I wouldn't consider this "strategic" anymore. Strategy is a concentration on overall goals, resource management, unit mix and attack plans. Warcraft is more like a tactical element on a smaller scale. If you like it that way, no problem. But it wasn't revolutionary on any aspects. It just consumed too much attention with no chance of recovery.
Strategic games shouldn't give the player the feeling of a trained hamster in a wheel. Recurring and trivial clicky-tasks should be assigned to some of the units in the game. "Repair all buildings damaged in the last whatever-storm" shouldn't involve more than 3 clicks. Let the player decide how much micromanagement he'd like to use. And through that, you not only make the game fun to play with, you also create possibilities for more discoveries and "real" skill & experience increase for the player as they find new ways to let the units interact. That way, you can win the game with less-than-perfect hand-eye-coordination since you don't compare click speed but some kind of "leadership"-qualities. At least it does not become a boring clickfest...
I say this is bullshit. I won't accept an oppressive system, neither for good nor for bad deeds. I will not give in to smallish benefits that come with a hefty impact on freedom and usability.
No cheater, no hacker, no worm, no virus, no nothing can annoy me that far that I will give up the rights to a computer I fully paid and own. I know what the real aim of the TCG is and I won't accept anything from them. No bargains, no rebates or extras on Palladium-Computers, no benefits from their restriction. They may succeed in feeding this freedom vs. security exchange to the American public in "real" politics, but they need a much much bigger threat than cheaters to convince the IT world and they will never convince me.
No matter if I use Linux or Windows, I'll have a virus scanner, a PFW or a real FW and the latest patches ready. I make backups of my important files and make provisions to protect the less important ones as good as possible.
I won't trade the malice of an anonymous hacker against the greed of a multinational corporation. A lone hacker has financial/technical limits or even a conscience on how much havoc he can cause. A corporation the size of Microsoft has neither.
The end does not justify the means. I will not accept any personal gains on fascist system and its technical derivatives. Period.
Oh I can see this: "too many connections on Port xcyc8749, cannot handle your request"
All that pressure for nutjobs that can't handle a two or three letter suffix on the domain name. Immense investment, two keystroke savings for things we rarely ever type by hand. What for?
seriously. I admit, I'm a windows guy, but I'd say, this game is really cool for lunchbreaks:) -
And for the rest I'd say: games are the driving factor for a rather big part of the geek community and one of the things my friends and I still keep using Windows. Configuration here and there, using console - I don't mind. If and only if there is something to gain from these excursions through the software setup. Setup alsa takes 3 hours? No problem, if there is a kind of goal at the end: giving the finger to Bill Gates *and* be able to play some killer games.
Games are the bridge between serious geeks and the average computer-using person. Most other "home" tasks are pretty easy to do on either Windows or Linux systems, except maybe for using firewire-devices. But the games are the turning point. Hardware manufactures have realised this for years, beginning with the Origin *Commander series and continuing with the FPS genre...
And who's gonna buy your products, once everyone's on minimum wage? Look at world economics at present and tell me if there is too much demand or too much supply. You'll see that the customer is missing in nearly all businesses.
If you cut their wages, they will buy less and you'll have to cut their wages some more. You can produce everything as cheaply as possible, but keep in mind, that your customers can only spend as much as they earn.
As a starting point, take the current situation on the US car market: rebates, discounts, free finance offers. And in turn: wage decreases and layoffs for the car companies. Any bets on when these former employees will buy their next pricey consumer product, if any? See what I mean...
This is a kind of prisoner's dilemma - as a sole employer, it is much more tempting to decrease costs by cutting wages and outsourcing jobs. But for society, it is destroying public wealth, if everyone does that. And by destroying the average income, you create dumb, ignorant masses that in turn have no political regards whatsoever and will either be criminals themselves or yield to criminals in political office.
It is not there yet, but if everyone is following Nikes revenue model "produce in sweatshops, sell overpriced", society, democracy and freedom will slowly dissolve.
Now label me a communist and ignore this, while you are working busy 80h weeks competing with the labor price of India. But no Indian employee will ever be able to afford your services. Because his wage is too low...
The mousepushers will pay your salary. As they always did. They are to stupid to remember "don't press this.exe-file in MS Outlook" and that won't go away soon.
And by the time they have learned to avoid.exe-files, YOU will have learned the next big thing in computer science to still be ahead of them.
And if you don't advance, if you don't gain knowledge and just sit on your job doing things someone could (and will) learn, it's a shame you lose that job, but unavoidable then. You always have to learn something new to stay ahead of the pack.
And yes, Linux will still be free and there's nothing you can do about it. Can't forbid someone to give his assets away for free. But if you got the chance to spread knowledge and technology for free - why would you try to keep it scarce? Think of the Third World, of emerging countries and of the immense good this will bring to the world.
Example: Donate 1'000$ for bread for the starving, they will have bread for 1'000$. Donate 1'000$ for free software and they can multiply your donation for the price of a CD-R many many times over and actually have some industry providing them income or improving the infrastructure. (and thereby producing bread for 100'000$)
Sure, some jobs will be lost. But others will be created as they always were. We don't have a horse carriage industry now, the railroad is going the way of the dodo and the plain old telephone system is next. You can't stop technology anyway so why don't embrace it and take your advantage and/or create something better for the world? After all, we enjoy this newfound freedom from hard, dirty, unrewarding and repetive work. And as we learn more, experience more, even formerly "attractive" work becomes dull and repetive...
The unstoppable human pursuit of knowledge doing its work again... Oh and I'm sure you're glad you don't have to pay long distance phone calls to put your message on a BBS or even use some avian carriers from your cave...;)
The arrest of shoplifters by corporate security takes place on their own property. This is vastly different than corporate security coming to a private home or an office building.
Security protecting the mall, the shop or the office is entirely different than security attacking something, I hope you'll understand.
Even if they are right, even if they have a court order or whatever freakin' law behind them - I do have a problem with people doing search and seizure that don't have a badge and are not exclusively on the taxpayers payroll, for they will be biased, uncontrollable and dangerous to an open society under the law.
If people's lives are at stake, I might change my mind. There is a transition zone between acceptable intrusion because of a witnessed crime, i.e. you were observing a home invasion at the neighbours house and unacceptable practices as corporate security entering other offices. The difference in acceptability of private "vigilante" action lies merely in the time available to protect lives and the health of people.
If you have time to get a private search warrant, there certainly have been time to get orderly policemen to do that search. It was not time critical, the action was way too big and therefore unjustified.
So in short:
private "vigilante"-style action is generally ok, whenever police or public law enforcement agencies are not available or too far away. In particular when lives, the health or import property of people are at stake.
Private law enforcement is absolutely unacceptable, when public authorities are responsible, are able to react in a timely manner, subject is not likely to flee or destroy evidence and/or the assets at stake are not life-threatening for the victim.
Everything else goes somewhere in between. But if you raid a well-known corporate headquarter, have time to get a court order and it is unclear whether the target has something to do with the crime (as has Sharman with the trading going on on their networks), then it is absolutely insane to employ private security. I repeat: they are biased and will be paid "to find something" and most important: They might plant evidence if they can't find 'em. (Especially if they are from a competing industry association)
Re:Try this in the US. 'specially in the south...
on
Kazaa Offices Raided
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· Score: 1
Sad but true, I must admit. But recently it may be getting better at that, at least it seems it does...
I don't want to offend you, but I might ask if the US may be the "freest" country for blacks and hispanics in the world, in spite the discrimination from the white majority. Please no flames for this, it doesn't mean we should stop at this point trying to gain equal rights for anyone (relatively speaking), but a rather discriminated black living in the US may have more rights, more personal freedom and a higher standard of living than a non-discriminated black anywhere else (absolutely speaking). "Only" 20% of the black American are still living in "the hood" - so 80% of all black Americans maybe enjoy most if not all benefits a white person can.
Your comment was true, but I think it's not necessary to induce guilt every time one speaks of public freedom. Equal rights for all are still far from being reality, but we've come a rather long way closer to that from even the 1950s.
So, you are telling us what? That it is absolutely credible that a squad sized force of heavily armed corporate goons are storming a private property? You must be kidding me...
Either way, when corporate armies are assaulting other corporations or family homes, then you can be sure as hell it is time for resistance i.e. civil war. Nobody said a war would be easy or painless. But we will be fighting for freedom, fair law and a country by the people for the people. If that isn't worth the sacrifice, I don't know what is...
Try this in the US. 'specially in the south...
on
Kazaa Offices Raided
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· Score: 5, Insightful
and get shot the instant you set your first foot on the premises. No vigilant citizen should be expected to allow this madness. If the government does not protect you and your property from private intervention, heck, if it even endorses private break-in as similar to law enforcement with a warrant and due process unter public scrutiny, then it is the right and the duty of all law abiding citizens to withstand and prevent these actions and even if it sounds provocative: by all means necessary.
The United States of America have a long tradition of people's rights, human rights, democracy and personal freedom. If someone is undermining the very foundations of this country, if they try to finally corrupt the entire state starting with the legislative process through bought senators, bypassing the judicial branch through their own actions and even replacing the executive branch with their own mobsters, it is time for every citizen to react. Form militias, arm yourselves. This is exactly what the second amendmendment was created for: empowering the citizen to protect himself from unwarranted searches, abuse of governemntal powers and the failure of the offical system. Don't tolerate private companies violating private property! Don't tolerate companies who subvert the legal process! Don't tolerate the corruption of the land of the free!
And please remember the following sentences: "I don't agree with what you said, but I'd fight to my death for your right to say it!".
I don't endorse the breach of copyright or anything like that. Even if Sharman Networks did violate this law or another, I will not hesitate to fight with them or anyone else who is denied his constitutional rights and due process over a non-violent, non-capital and non-life threatening crime.
(Even if it sounds provocative or flamebait, it is not meant as such. I truly believe in the law and the constitution as the only rightful way to run a country. Posting logged-in to emphase this, even if the TIA and the rest of the three-letter agency scum will have a field day with their eternal databases. And yes, I reinstate: this comment is about about militant actions against the enemies of the constitution and yes I do make a call to arms against attempts to corrupt the last ones of our private rights.)
This is security by obscurity, but it is useful. Don't repeat this mantra just because "the experts" say so.
Since some still don't understand its use, i'll be speaking metaphorical:
Assume you need to have a special key to open a certain otherwise secure door. OpenSSH might be that door and your passphrase and your certificate are the key.
An attacker can still forge the key or attack the lock with a different approach, picking etc. - comparable to "social engineering" to get the password, brute forcing or exploits.
And that port knocking sequence now effectively hides the lock, leaving an attacker without a first approach to pick or break the lock. It just adds another layer of security. You just don't know where to start your attack. You can't use exploits, you can't try brute force - nothing, heck you don't even know what type of daemon your target is.
A clean stainless steel door with a covert RFID-detector one square inch in size, hidden somewhere, sure as hell beats the same door with a clearly visible lock. You still need to pick the lock, but you can't poke your lockpicking tools into solid steel and you can't crack something you cannot discern.
---
Still one addition to say: having a machine connected to the internet with no ports open makes you a prime suspect for the port knocking scheme.
A good stealth scheme may be implemented, so a potential attacker (excuse for this metaphor again) does not even see the door (or the building, for that matter).
Friend of mine drives around with another friend. He had to stop at an intersection, his friend behind just did not. So they made a crash with a Lada Samara (small 2-door hatchback) in front and a Ford Escort from behind. Guess what? The Lada was not even dented, the Ford was totally ruined in the front, engine damaged - not recoverable.
Lesson learned: Lada may be low tech, but it's durable like the proverbial panzer. Oh and it heats up in less than 5 minutes in even the coldest (-20C) winter we'd ever experienced.
repeat after me: "Word of mouth goes a long way on the Internet"
That's the way most of us had found out about Google, ICQ/etc., ebay and hell, even Slashdot and Linux.
Word of mouth is the most important means of advertising on the internet. Everything else is just spam and therefore mostly ignored. But a word from a guy at the forum will get you almost instant hits. Because you almost ever know for sure, that a person with a not-too-different background (you're reading the same forum...) liked it so much to talk about it.
So we would have used p2p-apps just as we do now if there would've been no Napster. We would adore Gnutella, FastTrack or something else, that was not invented since Napster was already there.
And because of word of mouth, we would all have known about it within at least a year. A press review or two and a small campus converted and the networt effect would have rosen it to the same heights Napster had reached.
Napster was no miracle, it had come after ICQ set a precedent and therefore was an impeding disaster waiting to happen. Don't tell me Shawn Fanning was the first on the planet who copied compressed music via digital networks;)
Efficiency means a direct tradeoff to robustness. Inefficient systems CAN be robust, extremely efficient systems cannot.
Inefficiency could be a part redundancy, creating robustness or just plain waste. Knowing which inefficiency to reduce is the real art of entrepreneurship and I seriously doubt that the companies on the outsourcing bandwagon understood what they were doing.
Relying on efficiency is very comparable and in fact prerequisite to a strategy of being the lowest bidder. Being the cheapest was, until ten or twenty years ago, usually regarded as the worst strategy a company could choose and that view has some truth to it, as some other company will beat your price, every time. And as long as research and development cannot be reduced to monetary values with a clear return on investment, i.e. the future cannot be predicted, you will have to gamble on future prospects in your R&D department.
As a super-efficient company, you can just compete within an existing market, not create new ones. You may be able to make a living, but you are always a follower of bigger players and sooner or later you will meet the law of diminishing returns, as another cheaper-than-thou-player attacks your market share.
Colorful illustration of said subject: you cannot produce horse carriages cheap enough to beat car prices, however ineffient the car makers may be. (Withing a given frame of resource and worker prices and time of course.)
With no robustness, you cannot emerge on new growing markets, much less create them. With no robustness, you cannot stand changes in the economical or polical climate, local or international. At least as long as your business needs humans and humans cannot adapt to new situations with a Matrix-like download.
The question on how much operational vs. cash reserves you need and what inefficiencies may help you by creating a reputation, loyal employees, luxury customers and new markets through successful R&D cannot be answered by simple "cheaper is better"-thoughts.
And now the companies start feeling the backlash. I have to say, it's at least a small bit satisfying...
All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face: 1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring. 2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).
What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.
We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.
Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.
The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It was from 199? (before 1998) and it had no heroes and only small diversity in the teams. But the building and the order system were revolutionary, I'd say.
There were 2 switches for unit behaviour, that could be set per unit, directly, via a group selection or as a default for new units from a specific factory.
The first was aggression: always shoot, only shoot back, do never shoot and the second was allowed path deviance: break orders whenever aggression triggered, stray only lightly from the path, stay on orders no matter what.
That was perfect in my opinion, since you could easily create guards, patrols, offensive patrols and suicide missions without the need for any "pre-fab"-stances.
These stances also applied to non-combat units, since you had a multitude of construction vehicles, that were all able to interact with one another, automatically.
Set a constructor to shoot-all, and it will repair anything damaged and harvest any resource it sees along its patrol. Set path straying to light and it would only repair standing units and buildings, set it to liberal and it would follow damaged units until they are fully repaired, then returning to the next path vertex. And all would aid in construction buildings automatically.
Now imagine you do this with 20 construction aircrafts, that patrol your base, repair all buildings, repair all defense units, aid in all construction projects and harvesting minor resource thingies along the way.
Imagine another thing: you could set the aircraft factory with a predefined guard route and the stance behaviour, then assign some construction units to "guard" that factory. They will then aid in all construction projects this factory starts and will heal the factory if it gets damaged. Since there are 20 units helping, it churns out aircrafts extremely quick. All these go on an offensive patrol directly or meandering into enemy territory, sweeping anything away they see en-route. All this, while you concentrate on the main tank/battleship attack, resource expansion or a stealth operation behind the enemy.
This is automation and that's what I expect from todays games. Westwoods "Dune2 Battle for Arrakis" had essentially created the genre, but you had to click and command each and every unit on its own. Wasted mouse and brain of the avid gamer in less than 3 hours, but it was still a great game. Command & Conquer added a central build interface, unit grouping, hotkeys. Starcraft made this more RPG-like with clear values for each aspect of the units and allowed the first automations. "Attack ground" for a rapidly growing hydralisk army bred from 10 or more hatches was devastating against all but the most skillful micromanagers, since it used the most valuable resource in a realtime-strategy game - human attention.
Warcraft3 went leaps and bounds backwards. This game needs such a minute attention to details, micromanagement on all occasions, even special units to care and feed for and even an inventory to fill properly. Come on, I wouldn't consider this "strategic" anymore. Strategy is a concentration on overall goals, resource management, unit mix and attack plans. Warcraft is more like a tactical element on a smaller scale. If you like it that way, no problem. But it wasn't revolutionary on any aspects. It just consumed too much attention with no chance of recovery.
Strategic games shouldn't give the player the feeling of a trained hamster in a wheel. Recurring and trivial clicky-tasks should be assigned to some of the units in the game. "Repair all buildings damaged in the last whatever-storm" shouldn't involve more than 3 clicks. Let the player decide how much micromanagement he'd like to use. And through that, you not only make the game fun to play with, you also create possibilities for more discoveries and "real" skill & experience increase for the player as they find new ways to let the units interact. That way, you can win the game with less-than-perfect hand-eye-coordination since you don't compare click speed but some kind of "leadership"-qualities. At least it does not become a boring clickfest...
for some uses.
I say this is bullshit. I won't accept an oppressive system, neither for good nor for bad deeds. I will not give in to smallish benefits that come with a hefty impact on freedom and usability.
No cheater, no hacker, no worm, no virus, no nothing can annoy me that far that I will give up the rights to a computer I fully paid and own. I know what the real aim of the TCG is and I won't accept anything from them. No bargains, no rebates or extras on Palladium-Computers, no benefits from their restriction. They may succeed in feeding this freedom vs. security exchange to the American public in "real" politics, but they need a much much bigger threat than cheaters to convince the IT world and they will never convince me.
No matter if I use Linux or Windows, I'll have a virus scanner, a PFW or a real FW and the latest patches ready. I make backups of my important files and make provisions to protect the less important ones as good as possible.
I won't trade the malice of an anonymous hacker against the greed of a multinational corporation. A lone hacker has financial/technical limits or even a conscience on how much havoc he can cause. A corporation the size of Microsoft has neither.
The end does not justify the means. I will not accept any personal gains on fascist system and its technical derivatives. Period.
Oh I can see this: "too many connections on Port xcyc8749, cannot handle your request"
All that pressure for nutjobs that can't handle a two or three letter suffix on the domain name. Immense investment, two keystroke savings for things we rarely ever type by hand. What for?
Never change a running.. ah you know the deal
seriously. I admit, I'm a windows guy, but I'd say, this game is really cool for lunchbreaks :) -
And for the rest I'd say: games are the driving factor for a rather big part of the geek community and one of the things my friends and I still keep using Windows. Configuration here and there, using console - I don't mind. If and only if there is something to gain from these excursions through the software setup. Setup alsa takes 3 hours? No problem, if there is a kind of goal at the end: giving the finger to Bill Gates *and* be able to play some killer games.
Games are the bridge between serious geeks and the average computer-using person. Most other "home" tasks are pretty easy to do on either Windows or Linux systems, except maybe for using firewire-devices. But the games are the turning point. Hardware manufactures have realised this for years, beginning with the Origin *Commander series and continuing with the FPS genre...
And who's gonna buy your products, once everyone's on minimum wage? Look at world economics at present and tell me if there is too much demand or too much supply. You'll see that the customer is missing in nearly all businesses.
If you cut their wages, they will buy less and you'll have to cut their wages some more. You can produce everything as cheaply as possible, but keep in mind, that your customers can only spend as much as they earn.
As a starting point, take the current situation on the US car market: rebates, discounts, free finance offers. And in turn: wage decreases and layoffs for the car companies. Any bets on when these former employees will buy their next pricey consumer product, if any? See what I mean...
This is a kind of prisoner's dilemma - as a sole employer, it is much more tempting to decrease costs by cutting wages and outsourcing jobs. But for society, it is destroying public wealth, if everyone does that. And by destroying the average income, you create dumb, ignorant masses that in turn have no political regards whatsoever and will either be criminals themselves or yield to criminals in political office.
It is not there yet, but if everyone is following Nikes revenue model "produce in sweatshops, sell overpriced", society, democracy and freedom will slowly dissolve.
Now label me a communist and ignore this, while you are working busy 80h weeks competing with the labor price of India. But no Indian employee will ever be able to afford your services. Because his wage is too low...
Gerrymandering? (More on this via google)
Don't download that and please spread the word to other forums: This is a fake!
Can be verified by a glimpse at the partially downloaded files: every part-file just consists of text lines saying this:
"Rar!Fake!Hahaha!"
A zillion times of course. So don't waste your time & bandwidth for that. If in doubt, download the first parts to see for yourselves...
The mousepushers will pay your salary. As they always did. They are to stupid to remember "don't press this .exe-file in MS Outlook" and that won't go away soon.
.exe-files, YOU will have learned the next big thing in computer science to still be ahead of them.
;)
And by the time they have learned to avoid
And if you don't advance, if you don't gain knowledge and just sit on your job doing things someone could (and will) learn, it's a shame you lose that job, but unavoidable then. You always have to learn something new to stay ahead of the pack.
And yes, Linux will still be free and there's nothing you can do about it. Can't forbid someone to give his assets away for free. But if you got the chance to spread knowledge and technology for free - why would you try to keep it scarce? Think of the Third World, of emerging countries and of the immense good this will bring to the world.
Example: Donate 1'000$ for bread for the starving, they will have bread for 1'000$. Donate 1'000$ for free software and they can multiply your donation for the price of a CD-R many many times over and actually have some industry providing them income or improving the infrastructure. (and thereby producing bread for 100'000$)
Sure, some jobs will be lost. But others will be created as they always were. We don't have a horse carriage industry now, the railroad is going the way of the dodo and the plain old telephone system is next. You can't stop technology anyway so why don't embrace it and take your advantage and/or create something better for the world? After all, we enjoy this newfound freedom from hard, dirty, unrewarding and repetive work. And as we learn more, experience more, even formerly "attractive" work becomes dull and repetive...
The unstoppable human pursuit of knowledge doing its work again... Oh and I'm sure you're glad you don't have to pay long distance phone calls to put your message on a BBS or even use some avian carriers from your cave...
The arrest of shoplifters by corporate security takes place on their own property. This is vastly different than corporate security coming to a private home or an office building.
Security protecting the mall, the shop or the office is entirely different than security attacking something, I hope you'll understand.
Even if they are right, even if they have a court order or whatever freakin' law behind them - I do have a problem with people doing search and seizure that don't have a badge and are not exclusively on the taxpayers payroll, for they will be biased, uncontrollable and dangerous to an open society under the law.
If people's lives are at stake, I might change my mind. There is a transition zone between acceptable intrusion because of a witnessed crime, i.e. you were observing a home invasion at the neighbours house and unacceptable practices as corporate security entering other offices. The difference in acceptability of private "vigilante" action lies merely in the time available to protect lives and the health of people.
If you have time to get a private search warrant, there certainly have been time to get orderly policemen to do that search. It was not time critical, the action was way too big and therefore unjustified.
So in short:
private "vigilante"-style action is generally ok, whenever police or public law enforcement agencies are not available or too far away. In particular when lives, the health or import property of people are at stake.
Private law enforcement is absolutely unacceptable, when public authorities are responsible, are able to react in a timely manner, subject is not likely to flee or destroy evidence and/or the assets at stake are not life-threatening for the victim.
Everything else goes somewhere in between. But if you raid a well-known corporate headquarter, have time to get a court order and it is unclear whether the target has something to do with the crime (as has Sharman with the trading going on on their networks), then it is absolutely insane to employ private security. I repeat: they are biased and will be paid "to find something" and most important:
They might plant evidence if they can't find 'em. (Especially if they are from a competing industry association)
Sad but true, I must admit. But recently it may be getting better at that, at least it seems it does...
I don't want to offend you, but I might ask if the US may be the "freest" country for blacks and hispanics in the world, in spite the discrimination from the white majority. Please no flames for this, it doesn't mean we should stop at this point trying to gain equal rights for anyone (relatively speaking), but a rather discriminated black living in the US may have more rights, more personal freedom and a higher standard of living than a non-discriminated black anywhere else (absolutely speaking). "Only" 20% of the black American are still living in "the hood" - so 80% of all black Americans maybe enjoy most if not all benefits a white person can.
Your comment was true, but I think it's not necessary to induce guilt every time one speaks of public freedom. Equal rights for all are still far from being reality, but we've come a rather long way closer to that from even the 1950s.
So, you are telling us what? That it is absolutely credible that a squad sized force of heavily armed corporate goons are storming a private property? You must be kidding me...
Either way, when corporate armies are assaulting other corporations or family homes, then you can be sure as hell it is time for resistance i.e. civil war. Nobody said a war would be easy or painless. But we will be fighting for freedom, fair law and a country by the people for the people. If that isn't worth the sacrifice, I don't know what is...
and get shot the instant you set your first foot on the premises. No vigilant citizen should be expected to allow this madness. If the government does not protect you and your property from private intervention, heck, if it even endorses private break-in as similar to law enforcement with a warrant and due process unter public scrutiny, then it is the right and the duty of all law abiding citizens to withstand and prevent these actions and even if it sounds provocative: by all means necessary.
The United States of America have a long tradition of people's rights, human rights, democracy and personal freedom. If someone is undermining the very foundations of this country, if they try to finally corrupt the entire state starting with the legislative process through bought senators, bypassing the judicial branch through their own actions and even replacing the executive branch with their own mobsters, it is time for every citizen to react. Form militias, arm yourselves. This is exactly what the second amendmendment was created for: empowering the citizen to protect himself from unwarranted searches, abuse of governemntal powers and the failure of the offical system. Don't tolerate private companies violating private property! Don't tolerate companies who subvert the legal process! Don't tolerate the corruption of the land of the free!
And please remember the following sentences: "I don't agree with what you said, but I'd fight to my death for your right to say it!".
I don't endorse the breach of copyright or anything like that. Even if Sharman Networks did violate this law or another, I will not hesitate to fight with them or anyone else who is denied his constitutional rights and due process over a non-violent, non-capital and non-life threatening crime.
(Even if it sounds provocative or flamebait, it is not meant as such. I truly believe in the law and the constitution as the only rightful way to run a country. Posting logged-in to emphase this, even if the TIA and the rest of the three-letter agency scum will have a field day with their eternal databases. And yes, I reinstate: this comment is about about militant actions against the enemies of the constitution and yes I do make a call to arms against attempts to corrupt the last ones of our private rights.)
By the people - for the people. Nothing else!
This is security by obscurity, but it is useful. Don't repeat this mantra just because "the experts" say so.
Since some still don't understand its use, i'll be speaking metaphorical:
Assume you need to have a special key to open a certain otherwise secure door. OpenSSH might be that door and your passphrase and your certificate are the key.
An attacker can still forge the key or attack the lock with a different approach, picking etc. - comparable to "social engineering" to get the password, brute forcing or exploits.
And that port knocking sequence now effectively hides the lock, leaving an attacker without a first approach to pick or break the lock. It just adds another layer of security. You just don't know where to start your attack. You can't use exploits, you can't try brute force - nothing, heck you don't even know what type of daemon your target is.
A clean stainless steel door with a covert RFID-detector one square inch in size, hidden somewhere, sure as hell beats the same door with a clearly visible lock. You still need to pick the lock, but you can't poke your lockpicking tools into solid steel and you can't crack something you cannot discern.
--- Still one addition to say: having a machine connected to the internet with no ports open makes you a prime suspect for the port knocking scheme.
A good stealth scheme may be implemented, so a potential attacker (excuse for this metaphor again) does not even see the door (or the building, for that matter).
After his death, Karey Kirkpatrick came aboard for a rewrite.
Written in hell. No doubt...
hehe.
It may get worse than that:
Friend of mine drives around with another friend. He had to stop at an intersection, his friend behind just did not. So they made a crash with a Lada Samara (small 2-door hatchback) in front and a Ford Escort from behind. Guess what? The Lada was not even dented, the Ford was totally ruined in the front, engine damaged - not recoverable.
Lesson learned: Lada may be low tech, but it's durable like the proverbial panzer. Oh and it heats up in less than 5 minutes in even the coldest (-20C) winter we'd ever experienced.
repeat after me: "Word of mouth goes a long way on the Internet"
;)
That's the way most of us had found out about Google, ICQ/etc., ebay and hell, even Slashdot and Linux.
Word of mouth is the most important means of advertising on the internet. Everything else is just spam and therefore mostly ignored. But a word from a guy at the forum will get you almost instant hits. Because you almost ever know for sure, that a person with a not-too-different background (you're reading the same forum...) liked it so much to talk about it.
So we would have used p2p-apps just as we do now if there would've been no Napster. We would adore Gnutella, FastTrack or something else, that was not invented since Napster was already there.
And because of word of mouth, we would all have known about it within at least a year. A press review or two and a small campus converted and the networt effect would have rosen it to the same heights Napster had reached.
Napster was no miracle, it had come after ICQ set a precedent and therefore was an impeding disaster waiting to happen. Don't tell me Shawn Fanning was the first on the planet who copied compressed music via digital networks
Just make yourself a baseball cap of dollar bills and all cameras will deny scanning your image.
Efficiency means a direct tradeoff to robustness. Inefficient systems CAN be robust, extremely efficient systems cannot.
Inefficiency could be a part redundancy, creating robustness or just plain waste. Knowing which inefficiency to reduce is the real art of entrepreneurship and I seriously doubt that the companies on the outsourcing bandwagon understood what they were doing.
Relying on efficiency is very comparable and in fact prerequisite to a strategy of being the lowest bidder. Being the cheapest was, until ten or twenty years ago, usually regarded as the worst strategy a company could choose and that view has some truth to it, as some other company will beat your price, every time. And as long as research and development cannot be reduced to monetary values with a clear return on investment, i.e. the future cannot be predicted, you will have to gamble on future prospects in your R&D department.
As a super-efficient company, you can just compete within an existing market, not create new ones. You may be able to make a living, but you are always a follower of bigger players and sooner or later you will meet the law of diminishing returns, as another cheaper-than-thou-player attacks your market share.
Colorful illustration of said subject: you cannot produce horse carriages cheap enough to beat car prices, however ineffient the car makers may be. (Withing a given frame of resource and worker prices and time of course.)
With no robustness, you cannot emerge on new growing markets, much less create them. With no robustness, you cannot stand changes in the economical or polical climate, local or international. At least as long as your business needs humans and humans cannot adapt to new situations with a Matrix-like download.
The question on how much operational vs. cash reserves you need and what inefficiencies may help you by creating a reputation, loyal employees, luxury customers and new markets through successful R&D cannot be answered by simple "cheaper is better"-thoughts.
And now the companies start feeling the backlash. I have to say, it's at least a small bit satisfying...
mod parent up please, as this idea is not as far fetched as it seems.
/.-PhD's help me out?
Plants are trapping only a very small amount of weight with each photon they absorb. But there are an awful lot of plants on this planet.
Maybe the produced biomass is not so very small compared to the entire earth weight, especially if you accumulate this over millions of years.
Have I lost the rest of my barely adequate scientific education or could this at least bear some truth?
Could one of our
All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face:
:-)
1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring.
2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).
What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.
We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.
Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.
The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this.