The board of ubisoft should be open to buyout offers which exceed the board's esitmated value of the company.
Absolutely agreed. However, the board thinks that currently Ubisoft is dramatically undervalued (even after the surge, when EA got involved). Somehow, I have to agree.
In all cases, the shareholders of Ubisoft benefit; the stock has already surged, and if EA wants the majority, they have to pay some nice premiums to get it.
If EA doesn't go for the majority, Ubisoft still gets all the publicity, which is basically free marketing. Just look, how many/. stories already ran, because of EA's move. And, nearly all comments are in favor for Ubisoft (not that this would matter...).
Do it the European way: Don't buy products that contain genetically modified food.
In Europe, most consumers think that way, and therefore no supermarket gets GM food, since it does not sell.
Now, if you are living in a country, in which every single product abuse must be clearly labeled ("Don't use the microwave to dry your cat!"), but which does not require to label GM food, someting is clearly wrong. But you can still do something: Ask for GM free products, do a test -- if they contain GM food, sue the supermarket where you bought it (some millions $ would be fine). I assure you: Everybody will afterwards label the products correctly.
Nope. Increasing the keyspace size only increases the theoretical security (upper bound), assuming that the code is perfect that produced the encryption.
Unfortunately, it seems that it highly depends on the quality of your pseudo-random generator. I do not know how much, but as in the article the physical manufacturing errors, not-so-radom generators will decrease the search space immensely.
Another obvious problem is: How can you store your key securely? And retrieve it securely?
There will be other implementation dependent problems with most algorithms that I am not aware of.
No, judges cannot levy taxes (in Germany).
However, a judge can rule that a parafiscal charge that already applies to other equipment can also be charged on computers.
And BTW, it is not a government tax, but a parafiscal charge that is given to a non-profit organization that distributes those charges among the copyright owners.
If this is a good or a bad idea can be discussed.
In the US/UK systems, the shareholders interest come first before the law. They can lay people off, off-shore jobs, merge, etc. if they think that is what will best enhance shareholder value. This is a good thing because it makes company's more competitive and, because the guarantee of control is there, it is easier to raise funds from investors for new job-creating project/companys/IPOs.
Curious. I was always under the impression that in the US company decisions are made by the executive management (e.g. CEO and other top positions). Never directly by the shareholders. But of course, the shareholders have the right to appoint a different management. However, this is exactly the same in France, and in other European countries.
However, it is true that many companies have chosen the road to focus on increasing the short-term shareholder value; sometimes on the expense of the long-term company interest. This focus can be more often observed in the US and UK than in France. Whether this is good or bad, is a question of interpretation.
In France, however, management has priority in the law. You might think that the shareholders control the company through a board of directors appointing the CEO and others in management, but the truth is under law the equity owners are extremely limited in making the kind of company-saving decisions that they can in the US.
True is that in France the managment is responsible for its actions that effect the employees. Especially, you can fire employees only, if you can prove that your company needs this to survive. You cannot fire at will. But managment can fire employees (and do, if needed).
It is correct that this handicaps the management to some extend. On the other hand, employees in France are more loyal and do not change as often as in US companies; this makes it easier to plan and you have always well trained and experienced employees.
The result is an anemic economy.
I wouldn't call the French economy "anemic". It is less dynamic that the US economy - with all the bad but also the good side effects.
No, seriously: I just like the impact probability page at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ip?; put an arbitrary number and link it as an official and validated probability to your/. posts.
Dell Support pages: they have very useful tools that are only supported with IE (e.g. "Find my service tag", "get current configuration").
Actually, the biggest pain is that I cannot even access the original system configuration without IE (at least not at Dell France where I bought my computer).
"Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base" has been (apparently) also published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Here is the
Online version.
Whether photovoltanic electricty becomes competitive is still an open question. But solar heating is already competitive, if you are based in the right region (enough sun shine).
And you are wrong about France: The nuclear power plants are only competitive because they get lots of subvesntions. And they pose problems (in their normal conditions and not only politically; up to now, no nuclear power plant in France is exploded): Also France has not solved the storage problem of nuclear waste -- in France it's (as anywhere else): We will decide this in the future -- hopefully.
let's start with charging the real costs for petroleum (e.g. the enviromental costs due to burning fossil oil, including CO2, pollution, etc.), and also the real costs for using a car (e.g. the costs to build and maintain streets, the costs for space taken by a parked car, etc.).
You will be surprised, but you'll see how competitive alternative energies will become in a real market (where costs are actually accounted for).
Another, very important factor, why placing solar energy factories in the Silicon Valley could be wise, is that there is usually enough sun to actually use the devices for powering these factories (or at least the offices of the administration and designers).
The "Eat your own food" principle ensures that the producers know very well the problems that end-users face and therefore leads to better design and less bugs.
> I visited the US 4 or 5 times this year with a standard issue UK passport (living in the UK). The only restrictions right now on people who fall under the Visa Wavier program is they have to be fingerprinted and have their photo taken at the point of entry.
Yep. And this fingerprinting already scares me. What for? What are they compared against? Do you know any other (more or less free) country that requires fingerprinting to cross the border?
And, I don't even want to know, how people with other nationalities are treated.
Join any branch of the US military and you submit finger prints.
I don't understand whate they need the fingerprints for, unless you're working in high security areas -- but then: it's the military, and paranoia is their biggest supporter.
Work for almost any organization in the US that works with children and you submit finger prints.
What's that for? Where do they suspect your fingerprints to get evidence?
Work for almost and US govenment agency or contractor and you submit finger prints.
This is exactly the fear. Work in any research lab, university, or just collect taxes -- why should somebody need your fingerprints (as usual: unless in highly restricted areas)?
>> Especially scaring is that the PIV shall hold fingerprints; this is scaring because those fingerprints will be registered centrally in a database.
> Where do you think federal employees' fingerprints go now?
For ALL employees and ALL subcontractors?
If this was true, privacy is already gone.
It's hard to call it all paranoia when people and buildings keep getting blown up.
Not true. It's not that every week or so a building is blown up.
And the people who apparently did it say publically that they want to do it again.
True.
Nothing against good IDs that are hard to falsify. However, such comments clearly sounds like paranoia.
And the original poster will never make it to MIT, since he is apparently not able to think and to compare -- the comparison with the former Soviet Union is just silly and without any substance. However, he might have a point in saying that many people (and the government) in the US show some paranoic behavior...
Having IDs that are hard to counterfeit and hard to be used by other unauthorized persons is the idea of having IDs. So, all bullet points about the goals of this PIV in the official
project narrative (MS-Word doc) are actually wanted.
However, the danger to exploit such PIVs as big brother equipement is given. Especially scaring is that the PIV shall hold fingerprints; this is scaring because those fingerprints will be registered centrally in a database. The effects are that even if your fingerprints show up somewhere remotely to a crime (e.g. same place but completely different time -- and they stick), you are will become a suspect or, at least, a potential witness. And possibly you will then be on the observation list without knowing it even remotely. And all this has nothing to do with a federal agency, in which you might work (or have worked several years ago, for that matter).
Fingerprints are only one example. So, the problem is the data -- and where else (than on the PIV) it gets stored, and how it can be accessed.
Sure, but it is at least a tested procedure (in several countries) that seem to work.
Many people disagree with me, but I consider it immoral to use taxes to encourage changes in the behavior of others. That's just for starters though.
Taxes fulfill in all modern societies (including the US) two main purposes: Get money to be invested in gonvermental activities, and to try to control people actions. The same is true for the fiscal politics (e.g. the interest rate).
So, naming this immoral, is more than a bit too harsh.
Working towards efficiency is a good over all goal, but raising taxes on energy as a means to that end assumes that we want not only increase efficiency, but reduced overall energy consumption. While this is currently the case due to the poluting nature of our current energy generation methods, once we overcome the polution problems we may not care to, or may not even want to reduce consumption.
Obviously, the holy grail is to increase the quality of life and to decrease energy consumption (unless this energy is fully from regenerative sources and does not pollute).
Consuming less energy without decreasing the quality of life is always good. Consuming dramatically less energy with some decrease in the subjective quality of life is probably also a good goal (e.g. that the consumer buys an efficient car instead of the life-style SUV) -- but using taxes let's the individual still the choice: He cas still buy the SUV, it's just more expensive to operate than a more efficent car.
This is especially the case if you consider that increased energy consumption generally goes along with improved quality of life. If we want the entire world to be able to enjoy the quality of life that a distinct minority of us (you included, since you seem to at least have the capablilty to access this site), in the long term we want to increase consumption overall. So really we need to look for solutions that encourage increasing efficiency that don't also discourage consumption. In other words, rather than raising taxes on energy and punishing people for improving their quality of living, we should work towards making efficiency less expensive, and making energy production clean and cheap. There is no magic bullet...
Very diplomatic...
So your proposal is: just ignore the current research until somebody found the magic bullet. Until then just stop thinking about the problem, and defintely not changing our behavior or doing something against global warming?
Sorry but your proposal ("do nothing") is just not satisfying. Serve a better alternative istead!
I agree to all what you say. And I even agree to the following:
The same thing goes for your house example. Believe it or not, people make decisions like that based on cost effectiveness. If it's more for the super-low-energy usage model of some home appliance than it is for the inefficient model plus the energy savings over 5-6 years, people are more likely to go with the more wasteful model. The same thing goes for energy saving home improvements. If what exists isn't wasting enough energy to justify an upgrade, people keep what they've got. It doesn't help that energy saving appliances typically cost at least three times as much as the inefficient models....
This is exactly, why EU nations (but also some other developed countries) have relatively high taxes on energy. This increases the motivation to change an inefficient system against a more efficient system. The US could apply the same self-regulating market rules: Just increase the taxes on energy (fuel, gas, electricity, etc.); it would work wonders.
Personally I loathe DVD encryption just for the region encoding alone.
Which is exactly the reason, why I don't own a DVD player. I just hate it that I have to "hack" a newly bought consumer device first (update the firmware) before it becomes usable.
And for a different reason, I don't own copy protected CDs (but a lot of standard CDs): Who guarantees me that I will be able to play them in 20 years, if the copy protection is actually a non-standard CD that works on some (most?) players? At least my old vinyls are playing still and flawlessly (even a scratch only removes tiny parts of the content -- and not everything as with CDs)
If e-voting is required, I would consider open source as the best possibility.
But so far, nobody has conviced me why e-voting is better. So, I stay with open source paper ballots. If somebody can convince me, I might change my attitude aginst making a siple problem, complex and buggier.
A patent is always public; so you can "cite" every patent that you want.
You can implement a patent as a study, you can release your study, you can improve the methods described in the patent etc. The only thing that you cannot do is using the study.
So the interpretation is: you can implement a patent and release it - but your users may infringe the patent and need to license it.
Sounds complicated? It is. And I bet, some lawyer finds a reason that already releasing it violates the patent law (e.g. similar to making file sharing software illegal).
Slashdot Mirror
The board of ubisoft should be open to buyout offers which exceed the board's esitmated value of the company.
Absolutely agreed. However, the board thinks that currently Ubisoft is dramatically undervalued (even after the surge, when EA got involved). Somehow, I have to agree.
In all cases, the shareholders of Ubisoft benefit; the stock has already surged, and if EA wants the majority, they have to pay some nice premiums to get it.
If EA doesn't go for the majority, Ubisoft still gets all the publicity, which is basically free marketing. Just look, how many /. stories already ran, because of EA's move. And, nearly all comments are in favor for Ubisoft (not that this would matter...).
Do it the European way: Don't buy products that contain genetically modified food.
In Europe, most consumers think that way, and therefore no supermarket gets GM food, since it does not sell.
Now, if you are living in a country, in which every single product abuse must be clearly labeled ("Don't use the microwave to dry your cat!"), but which does not require to label GM food, someting is clearly wrong. But you can still do something: Ask for GM free products, do a test -- if they contain GM food, sue the supermarket where you bought it (some millions $ would be fine). I assure you: Everybody will afterwards label the products correctly.
Nope. Increasing the keyspace size only increases the theoretical security (upper bound), assuming that the code is perfect that produced the encryption.
Unfortunately, it seems that it highly depends on the quality of your pseudo-random generator. I do not know how much, but as in the article the physical manufacturing errors, not-so-radom generators will decrease the search space immensely.
Another obvious problem is: How can you store your key securely? And retrieve it securely?
There will be other implementation dependent problems with most algorithms that I am not aware of.
You (or your editor) will need to be member of VG Wort. Then you can request your cheque.
And, it's about books, not music...
No, judges cannot levy taxes (in Germany). However, a judge can rule that a parafiscal charge that already applies to other equipment can also be charged on computers. And BTW, it is not a government tax, but a parafiscal charge that is given to a non-profit organization that distributes those charges among the copyright owners. If this is a good or a bad idea can be discussed.
You pay car tax and you're legally allowed to drive a car.
No, you are legally allowed to own a car; to drive it you need a driver license.
So if you pay a "digital copying tax" on a computer, you must be allowed to do digital copying on it, surely?
Yes. You are legally allowed to make copies for yourself or to copy parts of a book, for non profit purposes.
Out of curiosity, if you built a pc from scratch, which component gets this tax, or is it split up between all of them?
Good question. AFAIK, there are taxes on CD/DVD drives and on printers. But it would be great to have the actual list.
In the US/UK systems, the shareholders interest come first before the law. They can lay people off, off-shore jobs, merge, etc. if they think that is what will best enhance shareholder value. This is a good thing because it makes company's more competitive and, because the guarantee of control is there, it is easier to raise funds from investors for new job-creating project/companys/IPOs.
Curious. I was always under the impression that in the US company decisions are made by the executive management (e.g. CEO and other top positions). Never directly by the shareholders. But of course, the shareholders have the right to appoint a different management. However, this is exactly the same in France, and in other European countries.
However, it is true that many companies have chosen the road to focus on increasing the short-term shareholder value; sometimes on the expense of the long-term company interest. This focus can be more often observed in the US and UK than in France. Whether this is good or bad, is a question of interpretation.
In France, however, management has priority in the law. You might think that the shareholders control the company through a board of directors appointing the CEO and others in management, but the truth is under law the equity owners are extremely limited in making the kind of company-saving decisions that they can in the US.
True is that in France the managment is responsible for its actions that effect the employees. Especially, you can fire employees only, if you can prove that your company needs this to survive. You cannot fire at will. But managment can fire employees (and do, if needed).
It is correct that this handicaps the management to some extend. On the other hand, employees in France are more loyal and do not change as often as in US companies; this makes it easier to plan and you have always well trained and experienced employees.
The result is an anemic economy.
I wouldn't call the French economy "anemic". It is less dynamic that the US economy - with all the bad but also the good side effects.
See the pictures on the official Nasa sites.
Probability: 1.8%...
No, seriously: I just like the impact probability page at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ip?; put an arbitrary number and link it as an official and validated probability to your /. posts.
Don't even ignore spam.
;-)
Seriously.
Dell Support pages: they have very useful tools that are only supported with IE (e.g. "Find my service tag", "get current configuration").
Actually, the biggest pain is that I cannot even access the original system configuration without IE (at least not at Dell France where I bought my computer).
"Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base" has been (apparently) also published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Here is the Online version.
Whether photovoltanic electricty becomes competitive is still an open question. But solar heating is already competitive, if you are based in the right region (enough sun shine).
And you are wrong about France: The nuclear power plants are only competitive because they get lots of subvesntions. And they pose problems (in their normal conditions and not only politically; up to now, no nuclear power plant in France is exploded): Also France has not solved the storage problem of nuclear waste -- in France it's (as anywhere else): We will decide this in the future -- hopefully.
Absolutely agreed,
let's start with charging the real costs for petroleum (e.g. the enviromental costs due to burning fossil oil, including CO2, pollution, etc.), and also the real costs for using a car (e.g. the costs to build and maintain streets, the costs for space taken by a parked car, etc.).
You will be surprised, but you'll see how competitive alternative energies will become in a real market (where costs are actually accounted for).
Another, very important factor, why placing solar energy factories in the Silicon Valley could be wise, is that there is usually enough sun to actually use the devices for powering these factories (or at least the offices of the administration and designers).
The "Eat your own food" principle ensures that the producers know very well the problems that end-users face and therefore leads to better design and less bugs.
> I visited the US 4 or 5 times this year with a standard issue UK passport (living in the UK). The only restrictions right now on people who fall under the Visa Wavier program is they have to be fingerprinted and have their photo taken at the point of entry.
Yep. And this fingerprinting already scares me. What for? What are they compared against? Do you know any other (more or less free) country that requires fingerprinting to cross the border?
And, I don't even want to know, how people with other nationalities are treated.
Brave new world!
Join any branch of the US military and you submit finger prints.
I don't understand whate they need the fingerprints for, unless you're working in high security areas -- but then: it's the military, and paranoia is their biggest supporter.
Work for almost any organization in the US that works with children and you submit finger prints.
What's that for? Where do they suspect your fingerprints to get evidence?
Work for almost and US govenment agency or contractor and you submit finger prints.
This is exactly the fear. Work in any research lab, university, or just collect taxes -- why should somebody need your fingerprints (as usual: unless in highly restricted areas)?
>> Especially scaring is that the PIV shall hold fingerprints; this is scaring because those fingerprints will be registered centrally in a database. > Where do you think federal employees' fingerprints go now? For ALL employees and ALL subcontractors? If this was true, privacy is already gone.
It's hard to call it all paranoia when people and buildings keep getting blown up.
Not true. It's not that every week or so a building is blown up.
And the people who apparently did it say publically that they want to do it again.
True.
Nothing against good IDs that are hard to falsify. However, such comments clearly sounds like paranoia.
And the original poster will never make it to MIT, since he is apparently not able to think and to compare -- the comparison with the former Soviet Union is just silly and without any substance. However, he might have a point in saying that many people (and the government) in the US show some paranoic behavior...
Having IDs that are hard to counterfeit and hard to be used by other unauthorized persons is the idea of having IDs. So, all bullet points about the goals of this PIV in the official project narrative (MS-Word doc) are actually wanted.
However, the danger to exploit such PIVs as big brother equipement is given. Especially scaring is that the PIV shall hold fingerprints; this is scaring because those fingerprints will be registered centrally in a database. The effects are that even if your fingerprints show up somewhere remotely to a crime (e.g. same place but completely different time -- and they stick), you are will become a suspect or, at least, a potential witness. And possibly you will then be on the observation list without knowing it even remotely. And all this has nothing to do with a federal agency, in which you might work (or have worked several years ago, for that matter).
Fingerprints are only one example. So, the problem is the data -- and where else (than on the PIV) it gets stored, and how it can be accessed.
There are several problems with what you suggest.
Sure, but it is at least a tested procedure (in several countries) that seem to work.
Many people disagree with me, but I consider it immoral to use taxes to encourage changes in the behavior of others. That's just for starters though.
Taxes fulfill in all modern societies (including the US) two main purposes: Get money to be invested in gonvermental activities, and to try to control people actions. The same is true for the fiscal politics (e.g. the interest rate).
So, naming this immoral, is more than a bit too harsh.
Working towards efficiency is a good over all goal, but raising taxes on energy as a means to that end assumes that we want not only increase efficiency, but reduced overall energy consumption. While this is currently the case due to the poluting nature of our current energy generation methods, once we overcome the polution problems we may not care to, or may not even want to reduce consumption.
Obviously, the holy grail is to increase the quality of life and to decrease energy consumption (unless this energy is fully from regenerative sources and does not pollute).
Consuming less energy without decreasing the quality of life is always good. Consuming dramatically less energy with some decrease in the subjective quality of life is probably also a good goal (e.g. that the consumer buys an efficient car instead of the life-style SUV) -- but using taxes let's the individual still the choice: He cas still buy the SUV, it's just more expensive to operate than a more efficent car.
This is especially the case if you consider that increased energy consumption generally goes along with improved quality of life. If we want the entire world to be able to enjoy the quality of life that a distinct minority of us (you included, since you seem to at least have the capablilty to access this site), in the long term we want to increase consumption overall. So really we need to look for solutions that encourage increasing efficiency that don't also discourage consumption. In other words, rather than raising taxes on energy and punishing people for improving their quality of living, we should work towards making efficiency less expensive, and making energy production clean and cheap. There is no magic bullet...
Very diplomatic...
So your proposal is: just ignore the current research until somebody found the magic bullet. Until then just stop thinking about the problem, and defintely not changing our behavior or doing something against global warming?
Sorry but your proposal ("do nothing") is just not satisfying. Serve a better alternative istead!
I agree to all what you say. And I even agree to the following:
The same thing goes for your house example. Believe it or not, people make decisions like that based on cost effectiveness. If it's more for the super-low-energy usage model of some home appliance than it is for the inefficient model plus the energy savings over 5-6 years, people are more likely to go with the more wasteful model. The same thing goes for energy saving home improvements. If what exists isn't wasting enough energy to justify an upgrade, people keep what they've got. It doesn't help that energy saving appliances typically cost at least three times as much as the inefficient models....
This is exactly, why EU nations (but also some other developed countries) have relatively high taxes on energy. This increases the motivation to change an inefficient system against a more efficient system. The US could apply the same self-regulating market rules: Just increase the taxes on energy (fuel, gas, electricity, etc.); it would work wonders.
>> I like hot chicks standing next to big servers
> I just love that this has been moderated as "Insightful".
But it IS insightful!
Personally I loathe DVD encryption just for the region encoding alone.
Which is exactly the reason, why I don't own a DVD player. I just hate it that I have to "hack" a newly bought consumer device first (update the firmware) before it becomes usable.
And for a different reason, I don't own copy protected CDs (but a lot of standard CDs): Who guarantees me that I will be able to play them in 20 years, if the copy protection is actually a non-standard CD that works on some (most?) players? At least my old vinyls are playing still and flawlessly (even a scratch only removes tiny parts of the content -- and not everything as with CDs)
If e-voting is required, I would consider open source as the best possibility.
But so far, nobody has conviced me why e-voting is better. So, I stay with open source paper ballots. If somebody can convince me, I might change my attitude aginst making a siple problem, complex and buggier.
A patent is always public; so you can "cite" every patent that you want.
You can implement a patent as a study, you can release your study, you can improve the methods described in the patent etc. The only thing that you cannot do is using the study.
So the interpretation is: you can implement a patent and release it - but your users may infringe the patent and need to license it.
Sounds complicated? It is. And I bet, some lawyer finds a reason that already releasing it violates the patent law (e.g. similar to making file sharing software illegal).