It's what I admire most about foreign governments, their outward secularism. They may be religious, just as much as an American politician, but the difference between Europe and Asia (Japan at least) is that it's not a liability to not talk about your faith when running for office. In America, if you came out as an atheist you'd never make it beyond local levels of elected offices, and only in very liberal areas. Religion should be a private matter between a man and his god, or man and whatever he believes, it's no one's business and has no place in civil society. But in America, we want our politicians to be "good Christians", which leads to many socially and economic regressive policies.
It's still one of the best online FPS games for the PC, and has a large player base and active community. PC games have more longevity, the original Starcraft was only recently replaced with a sequel, and people still play the first one.
That's what I did after the recalcitrant customer support person locked me into that Kafkaesque exchange about not being able to prove I was the account holder.
This was over 1000 days ago, my friends can see my account and it says it's been that long since I've logged in. Considering that I shouldn't have ever had my account disabled to begin with, I've done all I could be expected to do on my part. This was a mistake on the part of Valve, and they've lost a customer for life. Honestly, just an explanation would have been enough, but they wouldn't even talk to me after I said I couldn't give them the info they wanted, and then they closed the support ticket.
I'd be careful with Steam. They make mistakes just like every company. I had my very first Steam account disabled (I wasn't cheating or hacking or doing anything wrong) and they flat out refused to even tell me why. I had used pre-paid debit cards to buy my games, and they demanded I give them my CC info I used to purchase them to prove it was really me trying to get my account reactivated. Since I didn't have the cards anymore and they were one time use I wasn't able to provide it to them. They wouldn't budge, and they repeated that since I couldn't prove I was the account holder they would not help me or even tell me why the account was suspended. I think it may have been related to using too many computers at once. I had three computers at the time that I wanted my games installed to, so I suspect this triggered some sort of fraud defense mechanism when they saw too many computers trying to use the same account.
The result was I lost 250+ dollars in games, and now I refuse to give Valve any more of my money, and I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.
The better solution is to simply declare all TOS agreements, EULAs, non free software licenses, etc as invalid forms of legal documents; because they're not. If you want a valid contract with a user, you'll need to go through the normal channels on a case by case basis or, because that's horribly impractical, err on the side of complete compliance and devotion to user privacy.
We heard the same things about the do not call registry and anti-telemarketing legislation. It didn't crash our economy, business simply had to find a way to reach customers that wasn't so intrusive and annoying. There's that old saying, why do people (spam/telemarket)? Because it works. Which baffles me, but I suppose when you can reduce your cost per call/e-mail to such a low level that you only need one out of every thousand or million communications to result in a sale to be profitable you'll eventually find those few idiots who'll buy your stuff regardless of how annoying or harmful their chosen method of communication was. Those idiots deserve protection too, which is why there's a role for government to shut down spammers and prosecute telemarketers who disobey the DNC registry.
The good news is that individuals can already take action to keep themselves from being tracked. A few firefox plugins (functionality I would love to see become standard and turned on by default) can greatly enhance your online security. Noscript, Adblock Plus, BetterPrivacy, Flashblock, and others effectively render most of the common tracking and advertising methods useless. I'd love to see a day when advertising online becomes entirely ineffective because no one ever sees those ads, their browser blocks them--but for the time being I think it's a necessary evil. Some ads have to be seen by someone in order for those services to remain free, I certainly don't want the alternative where I have to start paying for them to become a reality. There's no way I'd pay for online search or email. What can be done is to frustrate companies like Google and Facebook in their efforts to track and display ads as much as possible up to the point where any further loss of income would result in the service no longer being offered for free. So it's a balancing act for the time being. We need a few people to see ads so the service can remain free for the rest of us.
There are other important things that can be done too, like salting of their data with useless and garbage info. A FF plugin exists that constantly submits random search queries to Google so your real searches are hidden in mounds of fake ones, making your online profile useless for market research, and poisoning the results they do gather. Facebook is more difficult, but people can add fake or erroneous info to their profiles that don't reflect their real habits/preferences for the same effect.
The larger goal is fostering an anti-ad cultural movement that fights advertising at all levels of society. This means skipping commercials on your DVR, filtering ads online, and not purchasing from companies who's advertising practices are offensively ubiquitous.
Yeah I'd say endurance is the weakest part about it, but that'll only get better with battery and motor tech. 30-45 minutes would start to be acceptable. With a top speed of 50 km/h it could only go about 10km before it would have to turn back to get home before running out of juice, and that's with no loiter time once it gets to the target area, which would be all but useless. And that's assuming the 25 minute battery rating is 25 minutes at sustained full speed flight. It probably means 25 minutes at light use, just hovering and making small maneuvers.
If this things was around $1000-1200 I'd think about getting one, even with the 25 minute endurance. But this system looks like it's quite a bit more than that.
I think it's because of Apple's development cycle. I feel like the only version of iOS actually made with any intention of running well is whatever version ships when a new iOS device revision is launched. Older models get updates to the newest version, but once launch is over Apple is already starting on the next model and all future iOS updates will have that models hardware specs as the baseline for testing performance, then if it works good enough on the other hardware versions great, release it for them too until it gets too bad that it simply won't install (3G won't get anymore updates, for example).
So the iPhone 4 is the newest iPhone, but it's not the newest iOS device (the iPad 2 is, and is faster than the iPhone 4), so all future updates to iOS will assume iPad 2 level hardware or greater. As you've said, you're already seeing latency even on an iPhone 4, and it'll only get worse when the iPhone 5 comes out and the newest version of iOS assumes your phone is at least that good.
That's just my interpretation of the Apple development cycle I have no way to confirm this except speculating based on what I see in the field.
There is no official "anonymous" and there is no leadership or command structure. It's a concept, an idea to describe an emergent system of hacktivism. Saying anonymous is responsible for this (or anything) is like saying democracy is responsible for causing the wars in the middle east. You're mixing up an idea, an ethos, with an organization.
What the fuck does your agreement to a contract mean?
Very little, actually. I didn't get to negotiate the contract, they simply presented it to me. I was only allowed to choose between "agreeing" or not agreeing and going without. But I chose to in effect pretend to agree, and then corrected the terms later to what I feel is fair. There's no way for them to stop me doing this, and I'm certainly not going to stop doing it myself out of a sense of justice toward the company that has mistreated me. I suppose in theory this could be solved if there was more competition between service providers, but there's not, so I'm stuck with either playing by their rules--which I don't like--or making my own. I choose the latter.
I don't have any responsibility to follow a contract I consider to be unfair to me, and I am personally justified in taking whatever measures necessary to restore the balance of power in my favor including subverting the terms of the contract.
Input lag is something I seem to be more sensitive to than most people. It is is my main, daily, frustration with my iPhone. I have a 3G, one of the last ones sold new, and although it was never fast even the first day I got it, it gets slower and slower with each iOS update. I can type out whole sentences before the screen reacts and shows the words, which usually results in mistakes. If I go slower to allow it time to display each keystroke I get a miserably slow, and I've measured this, 1 character (not word, CHARACTER) per second. Imagine the ticking of a clock, that's how fast I can input letters, any faster and it's unable to keep up. If I hold the phone in portrait view and then rotate it to landscape it can take as long as 12 seconds to respond. Restoring the phone doesn't help, this is normal behavior from the moment I reflash the firmware.
Starting an app can take 10-15 seconds, longer for more intensive ones. Google Maps (an Apple provided app) is one of the worst, it can take 25-35 seconds before I am able to begin inputting a destination. Moving around the map view is jerky and slow, and requires waiting after moving every little bit for it to redraw. When I use the iPod app, it takes 7-8 seconds before the controls become responsive after the now playing screen appears. I can sit there pressing pause or play and it just waits...and waits...and waits...and then decides to accept my press of the button.
If I was a terrorist the first thing I would do is stop all my online activity and change my identity or more likely I never would have had a FB account at all. It's trivial to have your public persona look nice and normal and do all your illegal, secret, subversive communications done in ways that are impossible to track or intercept. Terrorists have a lot to fear from government intelligence agencies, but FB is not one of them.
What the government CAN use FB for is to spy on and pacify its own citizens. Say a radical politician that the government doesn't like is getting too popular, you can use his followers info on FB to intimidate them or dig up dirt to discredit their cause. Things like that.
You're absolutely right, but Apple has managed to make it easy to use, popular, and most importantly, profitable. Linux has only recently been able to achieve one of those, Ubuntu's package manager is very easy to use now but wasn't always; and that's only one distro out of many.
The success and popularity IS something new, and Apple can leverage that walled garden into a user experience no one else is going to be able to offer.
The reason Apple will be able to win here where Windows hasn't been able to is because of the App Store for the Mac. Users who are not sufficiently savvy to vet software themselves can rely solely on the App Store to do that, and since only software that is verified by Apple can get on there, we are unlikely to see any malware sneak into the App Store or stay there for long. And if it does, Apple has the author's identity (CC info, etc), which although able to be faked could still serve as a starting point for a criminal investigation by the police. People who know enough to keep safe can still install software from other places, but for most people the App Store, privilege system based on the Unix model, and a more secure starting codebase is going to protect them.
Glad at least someone thought so. I'm sure I got downmodded because of my comment about Israel, but it's a hard truth about the world. We meddle in the affairs of foreign nations both by undermining ones we don't like and supporting ones we do--the enemies of the states we support in turn see us as attacking them by proxy. To ignore the fact that our support of Israel has drawn much fire from the Islamic world would be foolish; and it's all because the dominant religion in this country sees the existence of Israel as necessary for their doomsday cult to reach its conclusion.
They're not really a network known for journalistic integrity, hard work, fact checking, or professionalism. They exist to serve as a mouthpiece for neocon Republicans, and accomplish this through their various "Opinion" shows that are not journalism at all, but flag waving, anti-progressive talking points for the day, and indoctrination.
Fox News is the 24/7 "two minutes hate" of the Republican Party and their lunatic fringe.
Slashdot Mirror
It's what I admire most about foreign governments, their outward secularism. They may be religious, just as much as an American politician, but the difference between Europe and Asia (Japan at least) is that it's not a liability to not talk about your faith when running for office. In America, if you came out as an atheist you'd never make it beyond local levels of elected offices, and only in very liberal areas. Religion should be a private matter between a man and his god, or man and whatever he believes, it's no one's business and has no place in civil society. But in America, we want our politicians to be "good Christians", which leads to many socially and economic regressive policies.
It's still one of the best online FPS games for the PC, and has a large player base and active community. PC games have more longevity, the original Starcraft was only recently replaced with a sequel, and people still play the first one.
Any society with the capacity to engineer and build such a construction wouldn't need one.
I was hoping it meant Niven-like ringworlds, not saturn-like. Still cool though.
All the downloaded copies are perfectly playable without the DRM :)
That's what I did after the recalcitrant customer support person locked me into that Kafkaesque exchange about not being able to prove I was the account holder.
This was over 1000 days ago, my friends can see my account and it says it's been that long since I've logged in. Considering that I shouldn't have ever had my account disabled to begin with, I've done all I could be expected to do on my part. This was a mistake on the part of Valve, and they've lost a customer for life. Honestly, just an explanation would have been enough, but they wouldn't even talk to me after I said I couldn't give them the info they wanted, and then they closed the support ticket.
$250 worth from Valve.
And there is another side to it, but Valve won't even bother to tell me.
I'd be careful with Steam. They make mistakes just like every company. I had my very first Steam account disabled (I wasn't cheating or hacking or doing anything wrong) and they flat out refused to even tell me why. I had used pre-paid debit cards to buy my games, and they demanded I give them my CC info I used to purchase them to prove it was really me trying to get my account reactivated. Since I didn't have the cards anymore and they were one time use I wasn't able to provide it to them. They wouldn't budge, and they repeated that since I couldn't prove I was the account holder they would not help me or even tell me why the account was suspended. I think it may have been related to using too many computers at once. I had three computers at the time that I wanted my games installed to, so I suspect this triggered some sort of fraud defense mechanism when they saw too many computers trying to use the same account.
The result was I lost 250+ dollars in games, and now I refuse to give Valve any more of my money, and I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.
Or block all scripts except the ones you authorize. Noscript does this.
Oops, that first line should end "...because they're not valid."
The better solution is to simply declare all TOS agreements, EULAs, non free software licenses, etc as invalid forms of legal documents; because they're not. If you want a valid contract with a user, you'll need to go through the normal channels on a case by case basis or, because that's horribly impractical, err on the side of complete compliance and devotion to user privacy.
We heard the same things about the do not call registry and anti-telemarketing legislation. It didn't crash our economy, business simply had to find a way to reach customers that wasn't so intrusive and annoying. There's that old saying, why do people (spam/telemarket)? Because it works. Which baffles me, but I suppose when you can reduce your cost per call/e-mail to such a low level that you only need one out of every thousand or million communications to result in a sale to be profitable you'll eventually find those few idiots who'll buy your stuff regardless of how annoying or harmful their chosen method of communication was. Those idiots deserve protection too, which is why there's a role for government to shut down spammers and prosecute telemarketers who disobey the DNC registry.
The good news is that individuals can already take action to keep themselves from being tracked. A few firefox plugins (functionality I would love to see become standard and turned on by default) can greatly enhance your online security. Noscript, Adblock Plus, BetterPrivacy, Flashblock, and others effectively render most of the common tracking and advertising methods useless. I'd love to see a day when advertising online becomes entirely ineffective because no one ever sees those ads, their browser blocks them--but for the time being I think it's a necessary evil. Some ads have to be seen by someone in order for those services to remain free, I certainly don't want the alternative where I have to start paying for them to become a reality. There's no way I'd pay for online search or email. What can be done is to frustrate companies like Google and Facebook in their efforts to track and display ads as much as possible up to the point where any further loss of income would result in the service no longer being offered for free. So it's a balancing act for the time being. We need a few people to see ads so the service can remain free for the rest of us.
There are other important things that can be done too, like salting of their data with useless and garbage info. A FF plugin exists that constantly submits random search queries to Google so your real searches are hidden in mounds of fake ones, making your online profile useless for market research, and poisoning the results they do gather. Facebook is more difficult, but people can add fake or erroneous info to their profiles that don't reflect their real habits/preferences for the same effect.
The larger goal is fostering an anti-ad cultural movement that fights advertising at all levels of society. This means skipping commercials on your DVR, filtering ads online, and not purchasing from companies who's advertising practices are offensively ubiquitous.
Yeah I'd say endurance is the weakest part about it, but that'll only get better with battery and motor tech. 30-45 minutes would start to be acceptable. With a top speed of 50 km/h it could only go about 10km before it would have to turn back to get home before running out of juice, and that's with no loiter time once it gets to the target area, which would be all but useless. And that's assuming the 25 minute battery rating is 25 minutes at sustained full speed flight. It probably means 25 minutes at light use, just hovering and making small maneuvers.
If this things was around $1000-1200 I'd think about getting one, even with the 25 minute endurance. But this system looks like it's quite a bit more than that.
I think it's because of Apple's development cycle. I feel like the only version of iOS actually made with any intention of running well is whatever version ships when a new iOS device revision is launched. Older models get updates to the newest version, but once launch is over Apple is already starting on the next model and all future iOS updates will have that models hardware specs as the baseline for testing performance, then if it works good enough on the other hardware versions great, release it for them too until it gets too bad that it simply won't install (3G won't get anymore updates, for example).
So the iPhone 4 is the newest iPhone, but it's not the newest iOS device (the iPad 2 is, and is faster than the iPhone 4), so all future updates to iOS will assume iPad 2 level hardware or greater. As you've said, you're already seeing latency even on an iPhone 4, and it'll only get worse when the iPhone 5 comes out and the newest version of iOS assumes your phone is at least that good.
That's just my interpretation of the Apple development cycle I have no way to confirm this except speculating based on what I see in the field.
It's obvious you're the one who is confused. Re-read my post until it sinks in. Anonymous is just an idea that a lot of people share.
There is no official "anonymous" and there is no leadership or command structure. It's a concept, an idea to describe an emergent system of hacktivism. Saying anonymous is responsible for this (or anything) is like saying democracy is responsible for causing the wars in the middle east. You're mixing up an idea, an ethos, with an organization.
I have principles, they just don't fit your socio-economic world view.
What the fuck does your agreement to a contract mean?
Very little, actually. I didn't get to negotiate the contract, they simply presented it to me. I was only allowed to choose between "agreeing" or not agreeing and going without. But I chose to in effect pretend to agree, and then corrected the terms later to what I feel is fair. There's no way for them to stop me doing this, and I'm certainly not going to stop doing it myself out of a sense of justice toward the company that has mistreated me. I suppose in theory this could be solved if there was more competition between service providers, but there's not, so I'm stuck with either playing by their rules--which I don't like--or making my own. I choose the latter.
I don't have any responsibility to follow a contract I consider to be unfair to me, and I am personally justified in taking whatever measures necessary to restore the balance of power in my favor including subverting the terms of the contract.
Input lag is something I seem to be more sensitive to than most people. It is is my main, daily, frustration with my iPhone. I have a 3G, one of the last ones sold new, and although it was never fast even the first day I got it, it gets slower and slower with each iOS update. I can type out whole sentences before the screen reacts and shows the words, which usually results in mistakes. If I go slower to allow it time to display each keystroke I get a miserably slow, and I've measured this, 1 character (not word, CHARACTER) per second. Imagine the ticking of a clock, that's how fast I can input letters, any faster and it's unable to keep up. If I hold the phone in portrait view and then rotate it to landscape it can take as long as 12 seconds to respond. Restoring the phone doesn't help, this is normal behavior from the moment I reflash the firmware.
Starting an app can take 10-15 seconds, longer for more intensive ones. Google Maps (an Apple provided app) is one of the worst, it can take 25-35 seconds before I am able to begin inputting a destination. Moving around the map view is jerky and slow, and requires waiting after moving every little bit for it to redraw. When I use the iPod app, it takes 7-8 seconds before the controls become responsive after the now playing screen appears. I can sit there pressing pause or play and it just waits...and waits...and waits...and then decides to accept my press of the button.
If I was a terrorist the first thing I would do is stop all my online activity and change my identity or more likely I never would have had a FB account at all. It's trivial to have your public persona look nice and normal and do all your illegal, secret, subversive communications done in ways that are impossible to track or intercept. Terrorists have a lot to fear from government intelligence agencies, but FB is not one of them.
What the government CAN use FB for is to spy on and pacify its own citizens. Say a radical politician that the government doesn't like is getting too popular, you can use his followers info on FB to intimidate them or dig up dirt to discredit their cause. Things like that.
You're absolutely right, but Apple has managed to make it easy to use, popular, and most importantly, profitable. Linux has only recently been able to achieve one of those, Ubuntu's package manager is very easy to use now but wasn't always; and that's only one distro out of many.
The success and popularity IS something new, and Apple can leverage that walled garden into a user experience no one else is going to be able to offer.
The reason Apple will be able to win here where Windows hasn't been able to is because of the App Store for the Mac. Users who are not sufficiently savvy to vet software themselves can rely solely on the App Store to do that, and since only software that is verified by Apple can get on there, we are unlikely to see any malware sneak into the App Store or stay there for long. And if it does, Apple has the author's identity (CC info, etc), which although able to be faked could still serve as a starting point for a criminal investigation by the police. People who know enough to keep safe can still install software from other places, but for most people the App Store, privilege system based on the Unix model, and a more secure starting codebase is going to protect them.
Glad at least someone thought so. I'm sure I got downmodded because of my comment about Israel, but it's a hard truth about the world. We meddle in the affairs of foreign nations both by undermining ones we don't like and supporting ones we do--the enemies of the states we support in turn see us as attacking them by proxy. To ignore the fact that our support of Israel has drawn much fire from the Islamic world would be foolish; and it's all because the dominant religion in this country sees the existence of Israel as necessary for their doomsday cult to reach its conclusion.
They're not really a network known for journalistic integrity, hard work, fact checking, or professionalism. They exist to serve as a mouthpiece for neocon Republicans, and accomplish this through their various "Opinion" shows that are not journalism at all, but flag waving, anti-progressive talking points for the day, and indoctrination.
Fox News is the 24/7 "two minutes hate" of the Republican Party and their lunatic fringe.