Assange has done a severe disservice to WL with his emphasis on injecting over the top editorial into the stories on the site.
I disagree. His whole "media performance" and anger over some of these incidents has been vital in actually getting the message out. Just releasing a photocopy of some document won't get any coverage at all. Just look at all the damning things that have been released via the Freedom of Information act over the years with no media interest whatsoever.
In case you don't know...
If you say "COINTELPRO" (not an FOI release) to most people, they have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Stories like COINTELPRO are exactly the kind that the media has no interest in covering. Someone has to push the issue and drum up that interest. Assange is not just analysing the leaked data, he is also acting as a PR man for that data and it's vitally important that he performs that extra role.
There was a little revolution between then and now: the CIA-created Shah regime signed that treaty. And, of course, parties are free to leave the NNPT whenever they like: that's how treaties work.
We also must not forget the CIA-trained SAVAK secret police who kept the dictator in power. They tortured and murdered thousands of dissidents. Of course, back when Iran signed the treaty, the US was only to happy to help Iran with its nuclear program, despite the fact it was not a democracy.
Then again, that's supposed to be part of the whole NNPT system, i.e. you agree not to develop weapons and the existing nuclear powers help you with your civilian nuclear power projects. The way things have gone though is that the NNPT is simply used as a weapon against any states that are not a US ally. The actions of western countries have weakened the NNPT and further strengthened the view that it is just a tool to maintain a system of nuclear apartheid.
The Truemotion controller from Sixense was showcased a few years back and looks a lot more impressive. It knows it's absolute position and orientation in 3D space by measuring a magnetic field from it's base station. Because it doesn't rely on sensing motion, it can deal with very slow and precise movements that other accelerometer-based systems can't deal with. The only problem is that you can't really buy it yet.
Once, a long long time ago, people were upset that the army uses lethal weapons to disperse unarmed crowds in conflict areas.
Denying people's right to assembly using non-lethal weaponry is still an aggressive denial of rights. Are people supposed to be grateful that they are only being given cataracts rather than being gunned down during a protest?
The other point is that many governments like to fund their own state news outlets. There are many of these with perhaps the BBC being the most famous. Even if all the private news outlets disappear, people will just fall back onto the BBC, Russia Today etc. When it comes to certain news stories they like to peddle their own propaganda of course, but that is the case with most of the media anyway.
Microsoft puts arbitrary memory limits on it's different flavours of 64 bit windows. Home Premium will only recognize 16GB whereas the more expensive Professional will recognize 192GB. Physical limitations are one thing, but arbitrary limitations annoy me. I don't exactly know what 64 bit Linux will support, but at least there won't be arbitrary limitations.
Microsoft seems to make a big marketing splash on a development toolset or language or API every few years only to throw it away with the "next big thing". For someone who's been programming long enough this gets to be a tiring waste of time.
Indeed. They even threw away an entire language, Visual Basic, much to the annoyance of all the companies that had invested millions in it (VB.NET is really not the same language and don't get me started on the auto-conversion tools). With proprietary languages the vendor makes (often sweeping changes) that suit THEIR business plan rather than addressing any pressing features their customers might really need. You can end up having to rewrite things pointlessly without adding any real value to your product. At the same time your competitors who chose to use something open, like Java or (and now QT) are spending that time adding new useful features to their product. They are also able to offer their product across a much larger range of platforms.
It's not just about having good polished development tools, it also about vendor lock-in and cross-platform ability. Lots of companies are moving over to Linux and.NET doesn't exactly play well there. There is Mono of course but there are potentially serious legal issues and I suspect many companies are quite dubious about using it.
C# and much of the.NET platform is very nice indeed. The Generics in.NET put Java's to shame. If Microsoft had actually open-sourced.NET it would probably have blown Java out of the water. But they didn't and they probably won't. When it comes to the mobile phone arena and its numerous operating systems, the lack of cross-platform ability becomes even more of a problem. Microsoft has never been into making their tools cross-platform because their real interest is in promoting their own platform. As long as they continue down that route, I think the user base of their development tools will continue to dwindle.
And this is why they don't want photography in public places. For example, when beating suspects with handcuffs on their knuckles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ2cLyblhpc.
When similar violence is perpetrated against peaceful protesters, and similarly caught on film, the mainstream media totally ignores it. The only mention it gets is something like "police scuffled with protesters". It takes someone to actually die for the media to take any interest in these kind of police assaults.
This is the issue I have with the mainstream media too. Tell what happend, not your analysis of what happened.
The problem with just reporting what happens is that it will also usually involve reporting what the government says. So in effect you already get an analysis/opinion. e.g. "The President said we need to stay the course and that pulling out of Afghanistan would encourage the terrorists.". If you look at the BBC news website, which prides itself on "balance", you will see this kind of reporting all the time. They report the event, e.g. an attack on a NATO base in Afghanistan and then some statements by officials. So you get some facts and the opinion of those in power. You can't get much more one-sided than that, yet the BBC is under the illusion that this is balanced reporting.
Well, the direct alternative to Cappuccino is Cocoa. Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C, a dynamically typed language. All of the large Mac and iPhone apps using Cocoa seem to manage just fine.
Objective-C supports explicit type declarations. e.g. You can declare an integer and the compiler will enforce the type. If you want to use "object" types you can of course, but many statically typed languages have "object" types you can make use of if you really need them.
Dynamic typing and user interfaces seem to go hand in hand. Even if you are not developing your application for the browser, there is a pretty good chance that you would be using a dynamically typed language anyway.
Most windows GUI apps are written in statically typed languages like, C++, C#, Java etc.
Static typing may be useful for heavy lifting code that responds to events from the interface, but even with browser development you are not limited to just Javascript for those kinds of tasks.
I would say Static typing is useful if you want some confidence your variables are not going to change type by mistake half way through your code. For me that is virtually all of the time.
I don't know about Cappuccino, but writing large apps in a dynamically typed language like Javascript doesn't seem to be a good idea. With application development, a large amount of time is spent debugging code so you really want to catch as many bugs as possible as early as possible.
If I am writing some kind of order system I might declare a variable called PackageWeight. I want that variable to always be a float. If it ever becomes a string or something else, then I have made a mistake in my code. In JavaScript I can't enforce the type of PackageWeight and this leaves my code open to more errors than I would like. Those errors will show up at runtime (and even worse, they may not show up all the time). In the particular case of Javascript the situation is even worse because you are not even required to explicitly declare variables at all. So if I mistype PackageWeight as PackageWieght, PackageWieght becomes a completely new variable, introducing bugs that could have you scratching your head for hours. The ability to mistype variable names without getting a compile time error is not a very useful feature.
Obviously having the ability to extend applications via scripting is a very useful thing, but the shortcomings of JavaScript have lead to various companies having to extend it to include static typing (e.g. Actionscript, Unity3D's flavour of JavaScript etc). These are all separate efforts though. It would be nice to have some standardized JavaScript that has been extended to include explicit type declarations. People who find it an effort to declare types could go on just using "object" types but everyone else could make use of static typing to reduce type-related bugs and frankly improve the readability of the code (e.g. It would be nice to see at a glance exactly what value types you are required to pass to a function). Static typing would also allow for more useful code completion etc, since more information about the code can be extracted by a compiler.
Because everyone in this country is still hung up on class. The working class would never vote for tories, and the middle/upper class would never vote labour. And only crazy hippies vote libdem. our parents did it, as did our parents parents... Maybe we'll realise we're being left behind before its too late.
The people who voted for the Lib Dems are not "crazy hippes", they are people who want a change in the system and/or are sick of Labour. They certainly didn't vote for the Lib Dems so that they could cement conservative power though. If they opt for a coalition with the conservatives I suspect that most of their support will vanish.
....NET itself is an open specification you can read whenever you want, and they recently made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone for using an alternate implementation (like Mono).
I'm not sure if you mean.NET being an ISO standard. If so, only some of.NET is an ISO standard. Much of it, including Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET etc are not. As for Microsoft's "legally binding" promise, it only applies to certain parts of.NET, many of the libraries are not covered.
It's because, as outlined in his letter, and as pointed out to you by the non-mad among us, he wants the iPhone OS devices to provide the best user experience Apple can create. That's how Apple tries to sell their products, by actually making them better than the competition. Yeah, I know, crazy concept right?"
Hmmm. So they would never exclude cross-platform tools like Flash (possibly including Unity3D and others) because they want iPhone applications to be exclusive, right? The iPhone is a less attractive purchase if you can just get all the same applications on another phone and Jobs knows this. They already excluded one major cross platform tool, Java, on the pretext of preventing viruses etc. Now they have targeted other cross platform tools with their most recent iPhone TOS.
One of the main reasons people stick with Microsoft Windows is that they can't get the same applications for Linux. It's why people are paying good money for Windows 7 rather than just downloading Ubuntu. Apple hopes the same thing will be true with the iPhone. i.e. Your next mobile phone purchase will be the new iPhone because you want to have the applications you are used to.
Yeah, I'm sure vast untold hordes of developers are fleeing the App Store as we speak.
Given the recent clause in the TOS of iPhone OS, I am sure some are leaving. The new rules potentially affect not just Flash but all cross platform tools targeting the iPhone. Some people have invested a lot of time and money writing iPhone games with the cross-platform game engine Unity. That investment could now be for nothing. Given that Apple is not afraid to come out with these TOS bombshells, developing for the IPhone now represents a considerable risk. Will your innovative application fall foul of the TOS in the next version of iPhone OS? Who knows.
Most of the talk about the Digital Economy Act has been about catching file sharers. The media companies pose as file sharers, log your IP then complain to your ISP. But what about file hosting services like Rapidshare etc? Are ISPs required to do Deep Packet Inspection on everyone's traffic to catch them, or are they currently uncatchable? If so, there will surely be a massive move away from file-sharing over to file hosting services.
Aircraft carriers are good for projecting power against small weak enemies. For any reasonably advanced opponent though, they are really just floating coffins. Even if an aircraft carrier can manage to shoot down an advanced supersonic anti-ship missile, what about five of them simultaneously? It's not too difficult to saturate the defences.
Due to the vulnerability of ships to missiles, some experts believe that there will be a move to submerged vessels. Submarines may start to take on roles that have traditionally been performed by surface ships. No doubt it will be an expensive move though.
It looks very much like it will be. The forums are buzzing with fear and anger over there. It also affects a number of other tools including mono-touch. It really goes way beyond Adobe and is going to hurt a lot of developers. If people start using cross-platform toolkits to produce iPhone Apps, the apps are not going to be exclusive for the iPhone. If the same apps are available on Android and other platforms, the iPhone is less of a compelling purchase. That's probably the real reason Java is not allowed. It's not an issue with virtual machines, it's that they want applications to be exclusively developed for the iPhone.
I don't think I'd want to risk time and money writing apps for such a closed system. Even if you totally follow their rules and stick to using their tool chain, who knows what horrors the Terms of Service in version 5.0 of the OS will bring?
It does affect more than just flash. It also effects a number of other tools including Unity3d which is very popular for game development. Those poor guys are going nuts over there on their forums. Some people have invested a lot of time and money in writing games for the iPhone and now it looks like that will all be blown away. Even if you have developed your app just using Apple's tools and you think your line of applications is safe, who knows what bombs will be in the TOS of version 5.0 of the iPhone OS?
Writing for such a closed platform, particularly one where the company makes such sudden, damaging and sweeping announcements, is a very risky business.
There's a big media machine in Venezuela which uses every opportunity to make Chavez look as bad as possible and the western media seem to go along with it without question. The BBC's reporting on Chavez is incredibly biased. When Chavez was talking about holding a referendum to remove term limits (presidents were limited to 2 terms) the BBC reported that...
"Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has confirmed that he will try to change the law to allow him to remain in power indefinitely."
A completely ridiculous and childish distortion of the facts, but nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to BBC reports on Chavez. They also had a readers debate with the title "Why do some leaders want to go on for ever?" as well as numerous other scaremongering articles. Yet when the Colombian leader changed the law on term limits (without holding a referendum like Chavez), the BBC were not remotely interested. Every time you see an article implying that Chavez is a dictator, you really have to be very sceptical indeed.
I agree completely. We can quite easily circumvent the DRM by not buying the game in the first place. I've just had too many bad/annoying experiences with DRM infested games to ever consider buying one again. Recently I tried to re install Bioshock but it seems the DRM has other ideas.
When I finished a game I used to pass it on to my brother and vice versa. This is no longer possible due to all the online activations and DRM. Games seem to have virtually no resale value anymore and it's doubtful you'll even be able to re-install the game a few years down the line.
Boycotting these DRM encumbered games is possibly not enough though. We need to support organisations like http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ .
Slashdot Mirror
Assange has done a severe disservice to WL with his emphasis on injecting over the top editorial into the stories on the site.
I disagree. His whole "media performance" and anger over some of these incidents has been vital in actually getting the message out. Just releasing a photocopy of some document won't get any coverage at all. Just look at all the damning things that have been released via the Freedom of Information act over the years with no media interest whatsoever.
In case you don't know...
If you say "COINTELPRO" (not an FOI release) to most people, they have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Stories like COINTELPRO are exactly the kind that the media has no interest in covering. Someone has to push the issue and drum up that interest. Assange is not just analysing the leaked data, he is also acting as a PR man for that data and it's vitally important that he performs that extra role.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
There was a little revolution between then and now: the CIA-created Shah regime signed that treaty. And, of course, parties are free to leave the NNPT whenever they like: that's how treaties work.
We also must not forget the CIA-trained SAVAK secret police who kept the dictator in power. They tortured and murdered thousands of dissidents. Of course, back when Iran signed the treaty, the US was only to happy to help Iran with its nuclear program, despite the fact it was not a democracy.
Then again, that's supposed to be part of the whole NNPT system, i.e. you agree not to develop weapons and the existing nuclear powers help you with your civilian nuclear power projects. The way things have gone though is that the NNPT is simply used as a weapon against any states that are not a US ally. The actions of western countries have weakened the NNPT and further strengthened the view that it is just a tool to maintain a system of nuclear apartheid.
The Truemotion controller from Sixense was showcased a few years back and looks a lot more impressive. It knows it's absolute position and orientation in 3D space by measuring a magnetic field from it's base station. Because it doesn't rely on sensing motion, it can deal with very slow and precise movements that other accelerometer-based systems can't deal with. The only problem is that you can't really buy it yet.
Once, a long long time ago, people were upset that the army uses lethal weapons to disperse unarmed crowds in conflict areas.
Denying people's right to assembly using non-lethal weaponry is still an aggressive denial of rights. Are people supposed to be grateful that they are only being given cataracts rather than being gunned down during a protest?
The other point is that many governments like to fund their own state news outlets. There are many of these with perhaps the BBC being the most famous. Even if all the private news outlets disappear, people will just fall back onto the BBC, Russia Today etc. When it comes to certain news stories they like to peddle their own propaganda of course, but that is the case with most of the media anyway.
Microsoft puts arbitrary memory limits on it's different flavours of 64 bit windows. Home Premium will only recognize 16GB whereas the more expensive Professional will recognize 192GB. Physical limitations are one thing, but arbitrary limitations annoy me. I don't exactly know what 64 bit Linux will support, but at least there won't be arbitrary limitations.
Microsoft seems to make a big marketing splash on a development toolset or language or API every few years only to throw it away with the "next big thing". For someone who's been programming long enough this gets to be a tiring waste of time.
Indeed. They even threw away an entire language, Visual Basic, much to the annoyance of all the companies that had invested millions in it (VB.NET is really not the same language and don't get me started on the auto-conversion tools). With proprietary languages the vendor makes (often sweeping changes) that suit THEIR business plan rather than addressing any pressing features their customers might really need. You can end up having to rewrite things pointlessly without adding any real value to your product. At the same time your competitors who chose to use something open, like Java or (and now QT) are spending that time adding new useful features to their product. They are also able to offer their product across a much larger range of platforms.
It's not just about having good polished development tools, it also about vendor lock-in and cross-platform ability. Lots of companies are moving over to Linux and .NET doesn't exactly play well there. There is Mono of course but there are potentially serious legal issues and I suspect many companies are quite dubious about using it.
.NET platform is very nice indeed. The Generics in .NET put Java's to shame. If Microsoft had actually open-sourced .NET it would probably have blown Java out of the water. But they didn't and they probably won't. When it comes to the mobile phone arena and its numerous operating systems, the lack of cross-platform ability becomes even more of a problem. Microsoft has never been into making their tools cross-platform because their real interest is in promoting their own platform. As long as they continue down that route, I think the user base of their development tools will continue to dwindle.
C# and much of the
And this is why they don't want photography in public places. For example, when beating suspects with handcuffs on their knuckles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ2cLyblhpc.
When similar violence is perpetrated against peaceful protesters, and similarly caught on film, the mainstream media totally ignores it. The only mention it gets is something like "police scuffled with protesters". It takes someone to actually die for the media to take any interest in these kind of police assaults.
This is the issue I have with the mainstream media too. Tell what happend, not your analysis of what happened.
The problem with just reporting what happens is that it will also usually involve reporting what the government says. So in effect you already get an analysis/opinion. e.g. "The President said we need to stay the course and that pulling out of Afghanistan would encourage the terrorists.". If you look at the BBC news website, which prides itself on "balance", you will see this kind of reporting all the time. They report the event, e.g. an attack on a NATO base in Afghanistan and then some statements by officials. So you get some facts and the opinion of those in power. You can't get much more one-sided than that, yet the BBC is under the illusion that this is balanced reporting.
That's quite an unfortunate filename
You'd have to measure votes by volume.
Well, the direct alternative to Cappuccino is Cocoa. Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C, a dynamically typed language. All of the large Mac and iPhone apps using Cocoa seem to manage just fine.
Objective-C supports explicit type declarations. e.g. You can declare an integer and the compiler will enforce the type. If you want to use "object" types you can of course, but many statically typed languages have "object" types you can make use of if you really need them.
Dynamic typing and user interfaces seem to go hand in hand. Even if you are not developing your application for the browser, there is a pretty good chance that you would be using a dynamically typed language anyway.
Most windows GUI apps are written in statically typed languages like, C++, C#, Java etc.
Static typing may be useful for heavy lifting code that responds to events from the interface, but even with browser development you are not limited to just Javascript for those kinds of tasks.
I would say Static typing is useful if you want some confidence your variables are not going to change type by mistake half way through your code. For me that is virtually all of the time.
Which features are missing, exactly?
I don't know about Cappuccino, but writing large apps in a dynamically typed language like Javascript doesn't seem to be a good idea. With application development, a large amount of time is spent debugging code so you really want to catch as many bugs as possible as early as possible.
If I am writing some kind of order system I might declare a variable called PackageWeight. I want that variable to always be a float. If it ever becomes a string or something else, then I have made a mistake in my code. In JavaScript I can't enforce the type of PackageWeight and this leaves my code open to more errors than I would like. Those errors will show up at runtime (and even worse, they may not show up all the time). In the particular case of Javascript the situation is even worse because you are not even required to explicitly declare variables at all. So if I mistype PackageWeight as PackageWieght, PackageWieght becomes a completely new variable, introducing bugs that could have you scratching your head for hours. The ability to mistype variable names without getting a compile time error is not a very useful feature.
Obviously having the ability to extend applications via scripting is a very useful thing, but the shortcomings of JavaScript have lead to various companies having to extend it to include static typing (e.g. Actionscript, Unity3D's flavour of JavaScript etc). These are all separate efforts though. It would be nice to have some standardized JavaScript that has been extended to include explicit type declarations. People who find it an effort to declare types could go on just using "object" types but everyone else could make use of static typing to reduce type-related bugs and frankly improve the readability of the code (e.g. It would be nice to see at a glance exactly what value types you are required to pass to a function). Static typing would also allow for more useful code completion etc, since more information about the code can be extracted by a compiler.
Because everyone in this country is still hung up on class. The working class would never vote for tories, and the middle/upper class would never vote labour. And only crazy hippies vote libdem. our parents did it, as did our parents parents... Maybe we'll realise we're being left behind before its too late.
The people who voted for the Lib Dems are not "crazy hippes", they are people who want a change in the system and/or are sick of Labour. They certainly didn't vote for the Lib Dems so that they could cement conservative power though. If they opt for a coalition with the conservatives I suspect that most of their support will vanish.
....NET itself is an open specification you can read whenever you want, and they recently made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone for using an alternate implementation (like Mono).
I'm not sure if you mean .NET being an ISO standard. If so, only some of .NET is an ISO standard. Much of it, including Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET etc are not. As for Microsoft's "legally binding" promise, it only applies to certain parts of .NET, many of the libraries are not covered.
It's because, as outlined in his letter, and as pointed out to you by the non-mad among us, he wants the iPhone OS devices to provide the best user experience Apple can create. That's how Apple tries to sell their products, by actually making them better than the competition. Yeah, I know, crazy concept right?"
Hmmm. So they would never exclude cross-platform tools like Flash (possibly including Unity3D and others) because they want iPhone applications to be exclusive, right? The iPhone is a less attractive purchase if you can just get all the same applications on another phone and Jobs knows this. They already excluded one major cross platform tool, Java, on the pretext of preventing viruses etc. Now they have targeted other cross platform tools with their most recent iPhone TOS. One of the main reasons people stick with Microsoft Windows is that they can't get the same applications for Linux. It's why people are paying good money for Windows 7 rather than just downloading Ubuntu. Apple hopes the same thing will be true with the iPhone. i.e. Your next mobile phone purchase will be the new iPhone because you want to have the applications you are used to.
Yeah, I'm sure vast untold hordes of developers are fleeing the App Store as we speak.
Given the recent clause in the TOS of iPhone OS, I am sure some are leaving. The new rules potentially affect not just Flash but all cross platform tools targeting the iPhone. Some people have invested a lot of time and money writing iPhone games with the cross-platform game engine Unity. That investment could now be for nothing. Given that Apple is not afraid to come out with these TOS bombshells, developing for the IPhone now represents a considerable risk. Will your innovative application fall foul of the TOS in the next version of iPhone OS? Who knows.
Most of the talk about the Digital Economy Act has been about catching file sharers. The media companies pose as file sharers, log your IP then complain to your ISP. But what about file hosting services like Rapidshare etc? Are ISPs required to do Deep Packet Inspection on everyone's traffic to catch them, or are they currently uncatchable? If so, there will surely be a massive move away from file-sharing over to file hosting services.
Aircraft carriers are good for projecting power against small weak enemies. For any reasonably advanced opponent though, they are really just floating coffins. Even if an aircraft carrier can manage to shoot down an advanced supersonic anti-ship missile, what about five of them simultaneously? It's not too difficult to saturate the defences.
Due to the vulnerability of ships to missiles, some experts believe that there will be a move to submerged vessels. Submarines may start to take on roles that have traditionally been performed by surface ships. No doubt it will be an expensive move though.
Is the Unity3D Game Engine threatened?
It looks very much like it will be. The forums are buzzing with fear and anger over there. It also affects a number of other tools including mono-touch. It really goes way beyond Adobe and is going to hurt a lot of developers. If people start using cross-platform toolkits to produce iPhone Apps, the apps are not going to be exclusive for the iPhone. If the same apps are available on Android and other platforms, the iPhone is less of a compelling purchase. That's probably the real reason Java is not allowed. It's not an issue with virtual machines, it's that they want applications to be exclusively developed for the iPhone.
I don't think I'd want to risk time and money writing apps for such a closed system. Even if you totally follow their rules and stick to using their tool chain, who knows what horrors the Terms of Service in version 5.0 of the OS will bring?
If it was anything other than Flash
It does affect more than just flash. It also effects a number of other tools including Unity3d which is very popular for game development. Those poor guys are going nuts over there on their forums. Some people have invested a lot of time and money in writing games for the iPhone and now it looks like that will all be blown away. Even if you have developed your app just using Apple's tools and you think your line of applications is safe, who knows what bombs will be in the TOS of version 5.0 of the iPhone OS?
Writing for such a closed platform, particularly one where the company makes such sudden, damaging and sweeping announcements, is a very risky business.
http://img131.imagevenue.com/aAfkjfp01fo1i-2060/loc477/52504_DigitalEconomyPoster_122_477lo.jpg
"Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has confirmed that he will try to change the law to allow him to remain in power indefinitely."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6932605.stm
A completely ridiculous and childish distortion of the facts, but nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to BBC reports on Chavez. They also had a readers debate with the title "Why do some leaders want to go on for ever?" as well as numerous other scaremongering articles. Yet when the Colombian leader changed the law on term limits (without holding a referendum like Chavez), the BBC were not remotely interested. Every time you see an article implying that Chavez is a dictator, you really have to be very sceptical indeed.
Are they somehow specifically detecting Ablock Plus or just detecting that some flash ad is not running on the user's browser?
Oh lovely, a language that forces a brace style I absolutely hate. I think I'll be giving it a miss.
I agree completely. We can quite easily circumvent the DRM by not buying the game in the first place. I've just had too many bad/annoying experiences with DRM infested games to ever consider buying one again. Recently I tried to re install Bioshock but it seems the DRM has other ideas.
When I finished a game I used to pass it on to my brother and vice versa. This is no longer possible due to all the online activations and DRM. Games seem to have virtually no resale value anymore and it's doubtful you'll even be able to re-install the game a few years down the line.
Boycotting these DRM encumbered games is possibly not enough though. We need to support organisations like http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ .