it doesn't sound like they have an out to justify changing a password on a router with external access disabled. With that off, the password can be as weak as you like, the router is still (or should be) secure. It may give them an out to find out and send impertinent emails (to be met with the response that since external access is off, the password doesn't need to be changed), but not to just go in and change it. My router is somewhat difficult to access, I'd be royally p*ss*d off if my ISP changed my password to a long number in tiny print on the bottom of it.
you seem to be using the words 'modem' and 'router' as if they were interchangeable. Certainly in my own setup, those are different devices - one is supplied by my ISP, the other by me.
Not quite sure why you're calling pretty much anything other than an engineering class "bullshit." Universities are not trade schools. There are plenty of places around that will teach you a technical field without all of the "filler" you seem to despise. A university is there to educate you. Sure, you pick a major and that is your focused area of study, but you also take classes in the arts, social studies, etc to become more well rounded. In other words, to become an educated person.
Most of that 'rounding' should be done in highschool, or on your own time. You want to read history as a break from learning to build bridges, fine, but do it as a hobby, so that when the thing that you're actually at university to do gets tough, you can just drop it. If you have to do 10 classes, and you do 8 in bridge building and 1 each in history & sociology, you may know a more diverse range of stuff but you've done 20% less on building bridges than you could have done, and getting assignments etc. in for history will distract from learning about building bridges.
You've made the point that undergraduate study is to give you a broad education, and someone else around here made that point a year or more ago. Frankly, I think it's wrong, and the person in the article has got it backwards (that everyone should do a 4 year liberal arts degree). Once you've left school and gone to university, you should knuckle down and learn a specific subject in depth. School is there to train the mind generally until a person is at the point where they are capable of gaining specialist knowledge - the becoming generally educated should happen there, not squandering the limited amount of time that a person spends at university.
Where were those conferences held? And have you accounted for the factors of the cost of travelling and the fact that top US universities have quantities of money sloshing about that other universities can't even dream about (for instance, my university, joint 16th in the UK, has about the same number of students as Harvard - but its total budget is quarter of what Harvard gets from its endowment alone)
I'm just stabbing wildly - here in the UK there's a specific tax on insurance premiums (for instance) (Favourite conversation from a friend who works in the industry: "This 'insurance tax', do I have to pay it?", "yes, it's a tax")
Party A accuses party B of breaching contract Party A uses this to activate penalty terms Party B requests proof of breach from party A Party A refuses to provide proof.
I wonder how often Valve defaults on, or quietly settles, lawsuits.
Valve has been pretty clear on this, VAC bans are permanent and unappealable. You get banned, you have to buy a new copy, says it in their documentation.
If this has taken a few days to sort out, SOME people (out of 12,000) will have gone out and bought new copies. It's one thing for Valve to give out some of their own product (marginal cost: negligible), I'll believe that they truly care when I hear about them refunding the costs of peoples redundant second copies. Not just allowing them to gift them to someone else, actually reaching into their own pockets and handing money back.
This hasn't affected me, so I don't need to get some patience. An intelligent and literate person reads Valve's documentation and knows that it says that Valve does not distinguish between genuine cheaters, and people that it has mistakenly identified as cheaters. As such no amount of waiting will normally result in Valve 'taking ownership' of its mistake or ever fixing it.
And the point that I made was that it's not 'just a bloody game', it's real money that people could have spent on something else. That may not be on the scale of a heart transplant, but it is another step up from having to play something else for a few days.
and what will valve do for MW2 players who have already gone out and bought a new copy to continue playing? That is, after all, the only option that valve says is open to people who get banned by VAC.
because you can use something else as a doorstop. Can you use anything else to run homebrew?
Anyway, Auntie says that HMRC have siezed 165,000 of these things, that's a sizeable market. Hopefully pissing off that many ordinary consumers of Nintendo products (don't forget, all those people will have bought DSs) will hopefully hit them where it hurts.
Aw, they should let people off with the blue-shift defence, and then smack them with the speeding fine for the necessary speed to turn red into green, which by my calculations is about 0.34c. That should be pretty expensive.
Near where I live there are several junctions with right turn filters (I live in the UK, we drive on the correct side of the road so a right-filter is precious). The entire cycle of the lights is around 3 minutes, the right filter is about 15 seconds tops (it may only be 10). As such, people jump the red because they want to get through the junction without having to wait another 3 minutes. Someone stalling can cost everyone the entire cycle, someone not being in gear with the handbrake off can easily cost 20% of the available time. If people weren't being left with only a 12th or less of the total cycle in which to use the junction, they may be less inclined to jump the light.
Another one is where, at peak times, one road just gets dropped from the cycle. By the time the people in that road have seen where their light should have gone green staying red for the third time, they start to assume that the lights are broken and push into the junction anyway.
Why your contempt for juries? It's the last line of civil defense against unjust laws
Because it turns out that they don't actually do that job. Judges regularly lie to juries that it isn't their job to stop unjust laws, and ill-educated juries swallow it whole.
They may have an exclusive monopoly, but if that didn't exist a natural monopoly would form anyway.
Cabling is REALLY expensive. NTL cabled 2/3 to 3/4 of the urban areas in the UK. This left them £12bn in debt and they almost collapsed until they got bought out by Virgin Media. VM also bought out Telewest. That was the other company which did lots of cabling. They cables 1/4 to 1/3 of the country. Guess which part? The part which NTL didn't do. I'm not aware that there were any areas cabled by both companies. At the phenomonal cost required to cable an area, it's not worth risking losing it all to having to compete.
Now, of course, it's all owned by VM and there is no competition.
Similarly, with BT and ADSL connections. BT had an enormous network of copper all over the country to offer ADSL services over. It would have been monstrously expensive to anyone to try and compete because they'd have to replicate about 80 years worth of copper laying. Their monopoly was broken apart by their being forced into local loop unbundling - selling use of their copper to other providers at wholesale prices. With that much infrastructure at a minimum required to work, it's basically impossible to get into a market that someone else has, and a natural monopoly forms.
yep, or the military will buy ADS2 in a few years time, and flog the old ones cheap to police departments (which is normally how military equipment ends up in the hands of civilian police)
I had a guidance counselor tell me to "cry her a river" when I told her taking night classes at a local college and a full schedule at high school and working two jobs was too much for me, and I wanted to only go to high school only half day (a program fully supported by the school district, or at least supposedly so...)
The correct response is to say "alright" and burst into uncontrollable floods of tears. The more manly you are the rest of the time, the better.
Oh, I don't deny that there are asshats on fora everywhere, but these were particularly bad asshats because they were:
Convinced that it was their forum to run and
Not challenged by Blizzard
Most asshats appear, disrupt stuff, and cop a swift thrashing with the banstick. But these guys used their asshattery in a combined effort to take the forum for their own, and didn't get any banstick.
I sympathize with Blizzard's desire to want to make the forums a more constructive and friendly environment,
I haven't been on the Blizzard Fora for years, but my last experience of it was a few years up until they finally killed of the last forum for Diablo I. I can tell you exactly what Blizzard could have done to make that forum more constructive and friendly. They could have actually dropped in once in a while to moderate it.
There was a group of a dozen or so forum regulars who had been there essentially since forever. These people were a very close-knit group, and esentially saw the forum as their own. Anyone new who dropped in and said, well, really anything was immediately treated to a spiel about how the regulars expected them to behave (over and above the actual rules of the forum), and woe betide aynone who said anything which the regs disapproved of, or told them what they though of 'extra' rules. Anyone who dared to argue with them, or the accepted wisdom of the forum, or tell them that they were wrong would bring the whole wrath of the pack down on themselves. They would then usually be accused of being 'defensive'. In short, the forum regulars were self-appointed moderators, who used a general barrage of unpleasantness to drive out anyone who they disapproved of. Most newcomers quickly realised that it wasn't worth hanging around and were never heard from again. Personally I hung around just to prove that I wasn't going to be beaten by them.
Now, the point of my telling that story is this. That could have been snuffed out YEARS before the forum was finally killed if a few Blizzard people had occassionally dropped in and swiftly dealt with the people who were under the false impression that it was their forum. A user with a blue username saying "This is our forum, not yours. You do not own, run or moderate it; please stop acting like you do" sufficiently early on might have stopped it entirely and prevented these people from getting too big for their boots.
Your getting all bothered by some rent-a-idiots didn't understand a finer point of the law that isn't covered in their Policy Manual? Get real.
I have a job, in my job I have to make decisions based upon individual situations with respect to policy. If I don't know for damn sure how the policy interracts with the situation, I ask up the chain until I find someone who does. I DO NOT just take a stab at it. Similarly if I take the decision and I get it wrong I get an earfull about it, and if I kept making wrong decisions I would no-doubt lose my position which allows me to make decisions.
My point being that if they didn't understand the finer points of the law, they should have stepped back until they DID know. Instead, they went charging in, made the wrong decision and harmed someone as a result. That's worth being annoyed about.
because the officers who showed up at Portcullis House without a warrant (which they didn't have to have, but would have been a good idea) bamboozled their way past the Speaker by allowing the Serjeant at Arms to imply that the investigation was national security\terrorism related. Take a gander at the select committee evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
it doesn't sound like they have an out to justify changing a password on a router with external access disabled. With that off, the password can be as weak as you like, the router is still (or should be) secure. It may give them an out to find out and send impertinent emails (to be met with the response that since external access is off, the password doesn't need to be changed), but not to just go in and change it.
My router is somewhat difficult to access, I'd be royally p*ss*d off if my ISP changed my password to a long number in tiny print on the bottom of it.
you seem to be using the words 'modem' and 'router' as if they were interchangeable. Certainly in my own setup, those are different devices - one is supplied by my ISP, the other by me.
Not quite sure why you're calling pretty much anything other than an engineering class "bullshit." Universities are not trade schools. There are plenty of places around that will teach you a technical field without all of the "filler" you seem to despise. A university is there to educate you. Sure, you pick a major and that is your focused area of study, but you also take classes in the arts, social studies, etc to become more well rounded. In other words, to become an educated person.
Most of that 'rounding' should be done in highschool, or on your own time. You want to read history as a break from learning to build bridges, fine, but do it as a hobby, so that when the thing that you're actually at university to do gets tough, you can just drop it. If you have to do 10 classes, and you do 8 in bridge building and 1 each in history & sociology, you may know a more diverse range of stuff but you've done 20% less on building bridges than you could have done, and getting assignments etc. in for history will distract from learning about building bridges.
You've made the point that undergraduate study is to give you a broad education, and someone else around here made that point a year or more ago. Frankly, I think it's wrong, and the person in the article has got it backwards (that everyone should do a 4 year liberal arts degree). Once you've left school and gone to university, you should knuckle down and learn a specific subject in depth. School is there to train the mind generally until a person is at the point where they are capable of gaining specialist knowledge - the becoming generally educated should happen there, not squandering the limited amount of time that a person spends at university.
Where were those conferences held? And have you accounted for the factors of the cost of travelling and the fact that top US universities have quantities of money sloshing about that other universities can't even dream about (for instance, my university, joint 16th in the UK, has about the same number of students as Harvard - but its total budget is quarter of what Harvard gets from its endowment alone)
some sort of a sales tax on cell phone or cable?
I'm just stabbing wildly - here in the UK there's a specific tax on insurance premiums (for instance)
(Favourite conversation from a friend who works in the industry: "This 'insurance tax', do I have to pay it?", "yes, it's a tax")
Party A accuses party B of breaching contract
Party A uses this to activate penalty terms
Party B requests proof of breach from party A
Party A refuses to provide proof.
I wonder how often Valve defaults on, or quietly settles, lawsuits.
doesn't mean that Ford will come and take the vehicle away without a refund.
yeah. right.
Valve has been pretty clear on this, VAC bans are permanent and unappealable. You get banned, you have to buy a new copy, says it in their documentation.
If this has taken a few days to sort out, SOME people (out of 12,000) will have gone out and bought new copies. It's one thing for Valve to give out some of their own product (marginal cost: negligible), I'll believe that they truly care when I hear about them refunding the costs of peoples redundant second copies. Not just allowing them to gift them to someone else, actually reaching into their own pockets and handing money back.
This hasn't affected me, so I don't need to get some patience. An intelligent and literate person reads Valve's documentation and knows that it says that Valve does not distinguish between genuine cheaters, and people that it has mistakenly identified as cheaters. As such no amount of waiting will normally result in Valve 'taking ownership' of its mistake or ever fixing it.
And the point that I made was that it's not 'just a bloody game', it's real money that people could have spent on something else. That may not be on the scale of a heart transplant, but it is another step up from having to play something else for a few days.
and what will valve do for MW2 players who have already gone out and bought a new copy to continue playing? That is, after all, the only option that valve says is open to people who get banned by VAC.
the name and location have changed. The actual judges are the same. Basically, it was an enormously expensive re-branding exercise.
because you can use something else as a doorstop. Can you use anything else to run homebrew?
Anyway, Auntie says that HMRC have siezed 165,000 of these things, that's a sizeable market. Hopefully pissing off that many ordinary consumers of Nintendo products (don't forget, all those people will have bought DSs) will hopefully hit them where it hurts.
Aw, they should let people off with the blue-shift defence, and then smack them with the speeding fine for the necessary speed to turn red into green, which by my calculations is about 0.34c. That should be pretty expensive.
Also, don't short-change people with the filters.
Near where I live there are several junctions with right turn filters (I live in the UK, we drive on the correct side of the road so a right-filter is precious). The entire cycle of the lights is around 3 minutes, the right filter is about 15 seconds tops (it may only be 10). As such, people jump the red because they want to get through the junction without having to wait another 3 minutes. Someone stalling can cost everyone the entire cycle, someone not being in gear with the handbrake off can easily cost 20% of the available time.
If people weren't being left with only a 12th or less of the total cycle in which to use the junction, they may be less inclined to jump the light.
Another one is where, at peak times, one road just gets dropped from the cycle. By the time the people in that road have seen where their light should have gone green staying red for the third time, they start to assume that the lights are broken and push into the junction anyway.
Why your contempt for juries? It's the last line of civil defense against unjust laws
Because it turns out that they don't actually do that job. Judges regularly lie to juries that it isn't their job to stop unjust laws, and ill-educated juries swallow it whole.
why would you want to live in a communist-bloc country?
They may have an exclusive monopoly, but if that didn't exist a natural monopoly would form anyway.
Cabling is REALLY expensive. NTL cabled 2/3 to 3/4 of the urban areas in the UK. This left them £12bn in debt and they almost collapsed until they got bought out by Virgin Media. VM also bought out Telewest. That was the other company which did lots of cabling. They cables 1/4 to 1/3 of the country.
Guess which part? The part which NTL didn't do. I'm not aware that there were any areas cabled by both companies. At the phenomonal cost required to cable an area, it's not worth risking losing it all to having to compete.
Now, of course, it's all owned by VM and there is no competition.
Similarly, with BT and ADSL connections. BT had an enormous network of copper all over the country to offer ADSL services over. It would have been monstrously expensive to anyone to try and compete because they'd have to replicate about 80 years worth of copper laying. Their monopoly was broken apart by their being forced into local loop unbundling - selling use of their copper to other providers at wholesale prices. With that much infrastructure at a minimum required to work, it's basically impossible to get into a market that someone else has, and a natural monopoly forms.
yep, or the military will buy ADS2 in a few years time, and flog the old ones cheap to police departments (which is normally how military equipment ends up in the hands of civilian police)
No good, the North Koreans already managed to capture him once (Die Another Day)
I had a guidance counselor tell me to "cry her a river" when I told her taking night classes at a local college and a full schedule at high school and working two jobs was too much for me, and I wanted to only go to high school only half day (a program fully supported by the school district, or at least supposedly so...)
The correct response is to say "alright" and burst into uncontrollable floods of tears. The more manly you are the rest of the time, the better.
Oh, I don't deny that there are asshats on fora everywhere, but these were particularly bad asshats because they were:
Most asshats appear, disrupt stuff, and cop a swift thrashing with the banstick. But these guys used their asshattery in a combined effort to take the forum for their own, and didn't get any banstick.
I sympathize with Blizzard's desire to want to make the forums a more constructive and friendly environment,
I haven't been on the Blizzard Fora for years, but my last experience of it was a few years up until they finally killed of the last forum for Diablo I.
I can tell you exactly what Blizzard could have done to make that forum more constructive and friendly. They could have actually dropped in once in a while to moderate it.
There was a group of a dozen or so forum regulars who had been there essentially since forever. These people were a very close-knit group, and esentially saw the forum as their own.
Anyone new who dropped in and said, well, really anything was immediately treated to a spiel about how the regulars expected them to behave (over and above the actual rules of the forum), and woe betide aynone who said anything which the regs disapproved of, or told them what they though of 'extra' rules.
Anyone who dared to argue with them, or the accepted wisdom of the forum, or tell them that they were wrong would bring the whole wrath of the pack down on themselves. They would then usually be accused of being 'defensive'.
In short, the forum regulars were self-appointed moderators, who used a general barrage of unpleasantness to drive out anyone who they disapproved of. Most newcomers quickly realised that it wasn't worth hanging around and were never heard from again. Personally I hung around just to prove that I wasn't going to be beaten by them.
Now, the point of my telling that story is this. That could have been snuffed out YEARS before the forum was finally killed if a few Blizzard people had occassionally dropped in and swiftly dealt with the people who were under the false impression that it was their forum. A user with a blue username saying "This is our forum, not yours. You do not own, run or moderate it; please stop acting like you do" sufficiently early on might have stopped it entirely and prevented these people from getting too big for their boots.
Perfect Dark required it, as did The World is Not Enough. There were also plenty of games which saw no benefit from it; Goldeneye, for example.
Your getting all bothered by some rent-a-idiots didn't understand a finer point of the law that isn't covered in their Policy Manual? Get real.
I have a job, in my job I have to make decisions based upon individual situations with respect to policy. If I don't know for damn sure how the policy interracts with the situation, I ask up the chain until I find someone who does. I DO NOT just take a stab at it.
Similarly if I take the decision and I get it wrong I get an earfull about it, and if I kept making wrong decisions I would no-doubt lose my position which allows me to make decisions.
My point being that if they didn't understand the finer points of the law, they should have stepped back until they DID know. Instead, they went charging in, made the wrong decision and harmed someone as a result. That's worth being annoyed about.
Sure we ultimately pay for it ourselves, but having the manufacturers handle it ensure that it's done efficiently.
In fact, since you already paid for it when you bought it, you might as well get your money's worth.
because the officers who showed up at Portcullis House without a warrant (which they didn't have to have, but would have been a good idea) bamboozled their way past the Speaker by allowing the Serjeant at Arms to imply that the investigation was national security\terrorism related. Take a gander at the select committee evidence.