That's what Microsoft's FUD would like to claim, but WebGL is not even close to as bad as ActiveX. You may recall that ActiveX was designed to allow websites to execute fully-privileged, unsandboxed native code. WebGL just allows websites to draw graphics using your GPU. Sure, in theory it's possible that a bug could exist in your graphics driver that WebGL could exploit... but the thing is that this already happens without WebGL - web browsers already allow websites to indirectly submit drawing commands to graphics drivers and this has been exploited in the past, as have bugs in core OS graphics functionality. About the only "unfixable" issue with WebGL is that it exposes users to minor denial-of-service issues, and even that can be reduced to a trivial annoyance.
Oh, and Microsoft have got their own proprietary equivalent of WebGL in Silverlight which has similar risks, except that Silverlight is also getting APIs that are approaching ActiveX levels of danger.
The part that allows people to be extradited to the US for crimes committed in the UK is this bit:
4. If the offense has been committed outside the territory of the Requesting State, extradition shall be granted in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty if the laws in the Requested State provide for the punishment of such conduct committed outside its territory in similar circumstances. If the laws in the Requested State do not provide for the punishment of such conduct committed outside of its territory in similar circumstances, the executive authority of the Requested State, in its discretion, may grant extradition provided that all other requirements of this Treaty are met.
For some reason I can't remember off-hand, it's not actually possible to do the reverse and extradite someone from the US to the UK for crimes committed in the US, even though the treaty suggests it should be. The other one-sided bit is that there's a higher standard of proof required to extradite someone from the US to the UK than vice-versa:
for requests to the United States, such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offense for which extradition is requested.
In fact, I don't think that extraditing from the UK requires any sort of evidence that the person being extradited committed a crime at all.
Not sure that's true anymore with this free-to-play update; they've got some sort of scheme involving restricting earning items to "premium" players that have forked over money at some point, either for the game itself or in the item shop.
. One example would be Google's hard-coded results for specific search terms that place its services at the top of the page regardless of their actual popularity (e.g., Google Finance appearing over the more popular Yahoo Finance, complete with a unique visual presentation).
That's probably not the best example. At least for me, the box at the top of the page has links to all the major services, including Yahoo Finance. Of course, the actual information on stock prices that's displayed in the search results is from Google Finance, but they have to get it from there - they don't have permission to embed anyone else's information.
The falling prices of computers aren't a result of deflation because (a) other prices haven't been affected in the same way and (b) they can be pretty obviously accounted for by improvements in efficiency of manufacture (that is to say, they're cheaper because they require less resources to make).
Ironically, this is actually something that's less likely to happen in a deflationary economy. Decreasing the price of manufacture required truely massive up-front investments, and with deflation it might well have been more profitable for the investors to just let that cash sit around doing nothing.
They've got Today Tonight viewers convinced that overseas pedos can crawl up your phone line and out of your computer to rape your kids!
Speaking of which: how many people here have seen the Brass Eye pedophilia special? Sadly it doesn't seem to have caused politicians anywhere to reform their ways.
"Their needs" are actually not that difficult: actually getting to see female characters that are individuals, perhaps even the main protagonist, rather than just being presented as tits-and-ass for the male demographic; less of the obnoxious rape jokes and mysogyny; and stop freaking assuming women aren't interested in gaming just because they don't like your games and are tired of the comments they get whenever someone discovers they're a female gamer. Unfortunately, parts of the male gaming market seem to like their games to be designed to drive away female gamers...
But so many male characters ARE beefy hunky shirtless guys (In Western-made games at least). The God of War series has Kratos in nothing but a loincloth for the entire thing. Conan, same thing, just off the top of my head.
Kratos is the counter-example everyone seems to come up with, probably because there aren't that many. Try naming a few more similarly-portrayed characters... it doesn't seem to be very easy.
I just knew someone was going to mention BG&E and Portal. Do you know how I knew that? Because there just aren't that many games with female protagonists that you could've mentioned. The problem isn't overstated at all.
I think this "problem" is being blown out of proportion. If there were a significant market in making "feminine" games, game publishers would be pushing money into it.
Most game developers aren't interested in anything more than churning out identikit sequels these days, and they seem to have the same viewpoint as you - if it was worth catering to female gamer, someone else would already have done it. Also, female is not the same as "feminine", and neither means "OMG pink!" - most previous attempts to target female gamers have spectacularly failed to realise this.
Tibet is still happening, though - the existing Tibetan residents are still systematically being treated as second-class citizens compared to members of the more powerful Han Chinese ethnic group, despite only a small minority of the population there being Han. You just don't see much about it on the news because it's nearly impossible to get reporters in there andthe general public doesn't care much. (Oh, and the big media owners have business interests in China that would be harmed by such reports.)
Quite easily. In fact, thanks to Britain's one-sided extradition treaty with the US it's even possible for British citizens to be extradited to the US for crimes committed entirely in the UK against UK corporations, and this has actually happened.
Yep. In fact, one possible explanation for the $500,000 bitcoin heist of a week or so ago was that the affected user kept his wallet on Dropbox. (There are other possible avenues through which he could've been hacked of course.)
Something like 90% of trading between Bitcoin and traditional currencies happened on this one exchange. The few traders selling goods for bitcoins had mostly pinned their prices to its bitcoin-to-USD exchange rate. It's kinda a big deal; if any other bitcoin exchange site had been hacked it wouldn't have been so alarming.
As for the other markets - those don't have enough volume to come to any conclusion about where prices will end up, and most of the big currency traders have probably got all their money stuck in MtGox where they're unable to access it right now.
The trouble is, there's no underlying value to Bitcoin aside from speculation yet. Apple's stock price has grown so high because they're making lots of money from selling shiny gadgets that people want. The only reason I can see for Bitcoin being so high is because people think it'll be worth even more in the future; hardly anyone's actually trading in bitcoins.
Instead, the early joiners are trying to persuade investors they'll profit. With, I might add, the aid of the official forum's moderators who've been quietly deleting any excessively negative posts that might cause panic whilst allowing ludicrously optimistic posts that are likely to lead people into doing financially risky things. (Such as ones portraying this hack as a minor incident and anyone kicking up a fuss about it or suggesting not doing business with the hacked website as an anti-Bitcoin troll.)
$1000 worth at about $4.50 per bitcoin according to the site owner, though whether you trust him is another matter. (That makes about $3000-4000 or so at more normal exchange rates.)
Don't panic - the main Bitcoin discussion forum deleted the thread linking to this, so it never happened!;-) (They also quietly deleted any threads about this hack that were too negative for the moderators' liking.)
You're not quite grasping how Bitcoin works. There aren't individually-identifiable bitcoins; your account balance is just a number in a big database like with other electronic currencies. The cunning part is that this database isn't centralized and there's no central system authenticating transactions; instead it uses a distributed network of copies of the database, together with a cleverly-designed scheme to stop you double-spending Bitcoins or spending ones you don't actually have.
It's actually quite well designed. I'm not sure it's useful for anything, but the design's good.
There's bitcoin7 (which has an even more slapdash attitude towards security), BitMarket.eu (which I haven't heard of before and which mostly focuses on Europe), and Tradehill (the newcomer, has shut down all trading in case any Mt Gox users were using the same password). The vast majority of the trading volume has always been on Mt Gox though, and that's where most of the traders keep their funds.
Mt Gox is the website almost everyone uses to trade bitcoins for USD. A lot of products' prices in bitcoins are even automatically adjusted based on the Mt Gox USD to bitcoin exchange rates these days.
Oh, if only you could see all the Internet Libertarians in #bitcoin talking about how it's all the users' fault for not forseeing that the website would get hacked and using passwords strong enough to stand up against being brute-forced from their hashes. (Naturally, they didn't see it coming either and were talking about how any suggestion that the site might've been hacked was some kind of government FUD right up until the list of passwords went up online.)
The trouble is... the Zipit Z2 is cheaper and actually has wireless networking built in, so most people wanting to hack on a cheap handheld computer in this form factor just buy one of those and load Linux onto it.
Nope. The value of dollars is that they're accepted for goods and services, and that they're legal tender and can be used to pay taxes. This may surprise you, but most of the businesses selling goods or services for bitcoins (and there aren't a lot of them - they've tended to be quite short-lived) actually set their prices in dollars because the value of a dollar is more stable and because most of their expenses are in dollars or another real-world currency with a stable exchange rate to the dollar. There are scripts to check the Mt Gox exchange rate and update how many bitcoins someone's charged in real time.
Whereas I can't exchange my bitcoins for anything including the market value of a good or service (and with the instability of the bitcoin-USD market, it's not even clear what that would be). The US dollar may not be backed by anything, but there's still a lot more supporting it than bitcoins.
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That's what Microsoft's FUD would like to claim, but WebGL is not even close to as bad as ActiveX. You may recall that ActiveX was designed to allow websites to execute fully-privileged, unsandboxed native code. WebGL just allows websites to draw graphics using your GPU. Sure, in theory it's possible that a bug could exist in your graphics driver that WebGL could exploit... but the thing is that this already happens without WebGL - web browsers already allow websites to indirectly submit drawing commands to graphics drivers and this has been exploited in the past, as have bugs in core OS graphics functionality. About the only "unfixable" issue with WebGL is that it exposes users to minor denial-of-service issues, and even that can be reduced to a trivial annoyance.
Oh, and Microsoft have got their own proprietary equivalent of WebGL in Silverlight which has similar risks, except that Silverlight is also getting APIs that are approaching ActiveX levels of danger.
The part that allows people to be extradited to the US for crimes committed in the UK is this bit:
4. If the offense has been committed outside the territory of the Requesting State, extradition shall be granted in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty if the laws in the Requested State provide for the punishment of such conduct committed outside its territory in similar circumstances. If the laws in the Requested State do not provide for the punishment of such conduct committed outside of its territory in similar circumstances, the executive authority of the Requested State, in its discretion, may grant extradition provided that all other requirements of this Treaty are met.
For some reason I can't remember off-hand, it's not actually possible to do the reverse and extradite someone from the US to the UK for crimes committed in the US, even though the treaty suggests it should be. The other one-sided bit is that there's a higher standard of proof required to extradite someone from the US to the UK than vice-versa:
for requests to the United States, such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offense for which extradition is requested.
In fact, I don't think that extraditing from the UK requires any sort of evidence that the person being extradited committed a crime at all.
Not sure that's true anymore with this free-to-play update; they've got some sort of scheme involving restricting earning items to "premium" players that have forked over money at some point, either for the game itself or in the item shop.
. One example would be Google's hard-coded results for specific search terms that place its services at the top of the page regardless of their actual popularity (e.g., Google Finance appearing over the more popular Yahoo Finance, complete with a unique visual presentation).
That's probably not the best example. At least for me, the box at the top of the page has links to all the major services, including Yahoo Finance. Of course, the actual information on stock prices that's displayed in the search results is from Google Finance, but they have to get it from there - they don't have permission to embed anyone else's information.
The falling prices of computers aren't a result of deflation because (a) other prices haven't been affected in the same way and (b) they can be pretty obviously accounted for by improvements in efficiency of manufacture (that is to say, they're cheaper because they require less resources to make).
Ironically, this is actually something that's less likely to happen in a deflationary economy. Decreasing the price of manufacture required truely massive up-front investments, and with deflation it might well have been more profitable for the investors to just let that cash sit around doing nothing.
They've got Today Tonight viewers convinced that overseas pedos can crawl up your phone line and out of your computer to rape your kids!
Speaking of which: how many people here have seen the Brass Eye pedophilia special? Sadly it doesn't seem to have caused politicians anywhere to reform their ways.
"Their needs" are actually not that difficult: actually getting to see female characters that are individuals, perhaps even the main protagonist, rather than just being presented as tits-and-ass for the male demographic; less of the obnoxious rape jokes and mysogyny; and stop freaking assuming women aren't interested in gaming just because they don't like your games and are tired of the comments they get whenever someone discovers they're a female gamer. Unfortunately, parts of the male gaming market seem to like their games to be designed to drive away female gamers...
But so many male characters ARE beefy hunky shirtless guys (In Western-made games at least). The God of War series has Kratos in nothing but a loincloth for the entire thing. Conan, same thing, just off the top of my head.
Kratos is the counter-example everyone seems to come up with, probably because there aren't that many. Try naming a few more similarly-portrayed characters... it doesn't seem to be very easy.
I just knew someone was going to mention BG&E and Portal. Do you know how I knew that? Because there just aren't that many games with female protagonists that you could've mentioned. The problem isn't overstated at all.
I think this "problem" is being blown out of proportion. If there were a significant market in making "feminine" games, game publishers would be pushing money into it.
Most game developers aren't interested in anything more than churning out identikit sequels these days, and they seem to have the same viewpoint as you - if it was worth catering to female gamer, someone else would already have done it. Also, female is not the same as "feminine", and neither means "OMG pink!" - most previous attempts to target female gamers have spectacularly failed to realise this.
Tibet is still happening, though - the existing Tibetan residents are still systematically being treated as second-class citizens compared to members of the more powerful Han Chinese ethnic group, despite only a small minority of the population there being Han. You just don't see much about it on the news because it's nearly impossible to get reporters in there andthe general public doesn't care much. (Oh, and the big media owners have business interests in China that would be harmed by such reports.)
Quite easily. In fact, thanks to Britain's one-sided extradition treaty with the US it's even possible for British citizens to be extradited to the US for crimes committed entirely in the UK against UK corporations, and this has actually happened.
Yep. In fact, one possible explanation for the $500,000 bitcoin heist of a week or so ago was that the affected user kept his wallet on Dropbox. (There are other possible avenues through which he could've been hacked of course.)
Something like 90% of trading between Bitcoin and traditional currencies happened on this one exchange. The few traders selling goods for bitcoins had mostly pinned their prices to its bitcoin-to-USD exchange rate. It's kinda a big deal; if any other bitcoin exchange site had been hacked it wouldn't have been so alarming.
As for the other markets - those don't have enough volume to come to any conclusion about where prices will end up, and most of the big currency traders have probably got all their money stuck in MtGox where they're unable to access it right now.
The trouble is, there's no underlying value to Bitcoin aside from speculation yet. Apple's stock price has grown so high because they're making lots of money from selling shiny gadgets that people want. The only reason I can see for Bitcoin being so high is because people think it'll be worth even more in the future; hardly anyone's actually trading in bitcoins.
Instead, the early joiners are trying to persuade investors they'll profit. With, I might add, the aid of the official forum's moderators who've been quietly deleting any excessively negative posts that might cause panic whilst allowing ludicrously optimistic posts that are likely to lead people into doing financially risky things. (Such as ones portraying this hack as a minor incident and anyone kicking up a fuss about it or suggesting not doing business with the hacked website as an anti-Bitcoin troll.)
$1000 worth at about $4.50 per bitcoin according to the site owner, though whether you trust him is another matter. (That makes about $3000-4000 or so at more normal exchange rates.)
Don't panic - the main Bitcoin discussion forum deleted the thread linking to this, so it never happened! ;-) (They also quietly deleted any threads about this hack that were too negative for the moderators' liking.)
You're not quite grasping how Bitcoin works. There aren't individually-identifiable bitcoins; your account balance is just a number in a big database like with other electronic currencies. The cunning part is that this database isn't centralized and there's no central system authenticating transactions; instead it uses a distributed network of copies of the database, together with a cleverly-designed scheme to stop you double-spending Bitcoins or spending ones you don't actually have.
It's actually quite well designed. I'm not sure it's useful for anything, but the design's good.
There's bitcoin7 (which has an even more slapdash attitude towards security), BitMarket.eu (which I haven't heard of before and which mostly focuses on Europe), and Tradehill (the newcomer, has shut down all trading in case any Mt Gox users were using the same password). The vast majority of the trading volume has always been on Mt Gox though, and that's where most of the traders keep their funds.
Mt Gox is the website almost everyone uses to trade bitcoins for USD. A lot of products' prices in bitcoins are even automatically adjusted based on the Mt Gox USD to bitcoin exchange rates these days.
Oh, if only you could see all the Internet Libertarians in #bitcoin talking about how it's all the users' fault for not forseeing that the website would get hacked and using passwords strong enough to stand up against being brute-forced from their hashes. (Naturally, they didn't see it coming either and were talking about how any suggestion that the site might've been hacked was some kind of government FUD right up until the list of passwords went up online.)
The trouble is... the Zipit Z2 is cheaper and actually has wireless networking built in, so most people wanting to hack on a cheap handheld computer in this form factor just buy one of those and load Linux onto it.
I think the people who didn't get shelled and bombed to death by Gadaffi's attempts to attack civilians with the weapons we blew up kinda benefited...
Nope. The value of dollars is that they're accepted for goods and services, and that they're legal tender and can be used to pay taxes. This may surprise you, but most of the businesses selling goods or services for bitcoins (and there aren't a lot of them - they've tended to be quite short-lived) actually set their prices in dollars because the value of a dollar is more stable and because most of their expenses are in dollars or another real-world currency with a stable exchange rate to the dollar. There are scripts to check the Mt Gox exchange rate and update how many bitcoins someone's charged in real time.
Whereas I can't exchange my bitcoins for anything including the market value of a good or service (and with the instability of the bitcoin-USD market, it's not even clear what that would be). The US dollar may not be backed by anything, but there's still a lot more supporting it than bitcoins.