Well at 4000 dollars a pop. I don't think they would care. Your talking about giving them 40 million for a few months , so that they can sit and earn interest on. it
I guess it depends on whether the interest they earn on it offsets the credit card fees for both the purchase and the return. On the other hand, if a small software developer tries to pull this crap you can attempt to return it for a refund and if you don't get it, sue them in small claims court in your jurisdiction. Assuming they don't bother to fly out for the hearing, you can take the default judgment and turn it over to a collections agency. You can also get court orders freezing their assets, etc. until the judgment is paid. Who says the law can't be fun?
So the plan is to allow a 5 year old to pick whatever he wants, a la carte, for his lunch, then you are going to see if it matches state guidelines? Here's a hint. It won't. Ever. Then what, you send him back to start over? Best of all is that somehow they expect this to make things go faster. I don't think so.
My children each have a seven digit code, given to them in kindergarten. Its sole purpose is to track money on their account so they don't have to carry cash and the school doesn't have to make change. As for meals, they have a choice of two preplanned meals, pb and j, or they can pack. There is no a la carte and each meal costs the same. In addition, the school takes a count of each type of meal at the beginning of the day so that they have a good idea of how much to prepare. It would seem to me that a la carte choices would really complicate things.
Obviously the fnord agency is trying to get our youth preprogrammed and conditioned to accept monitoring as a normal part of membership in our society.
Is the only solution to force them to feel exactly like their victims?
No, the solution would be to diagnose them correctly and treat them accordingly. The current DSM-IV term is
Antisocial Personality Disorder. Unfortunately the prognosis does not seem to be good. On the other hand it seems that many people suffering from this mental illness end up incarcerated, so maybe there is hope in this case.
Your example seems to indicate there is no 'hey, maybe I did unto others...' moment for sociopaths, so will they ever truly learn from their mistakes?
Antisocial Personality Disorder is deeply seated in the individual's psyche and is unlikely to react positively to such an experience.
This is the result of hand-wringing do-gooders who don't know the military from the bible.
You think the military isn't conducting training exercises with real humans in the role of the Taliban?
Putting it in a video game just makes it cheaper to repeat for the newbies.
Someone tell GameStop they're totally fucking stupid, here.
From the kotaku.com article and as imthesponge has pointed out:
"The Army and Air Force Exchange Services has confirmed to Kotaku that they requested the game pulled from the 49 GameStop's located on bases in the continent U.S. The ban, an AAFES representative told Kotaku, also extends to all military PXs worldwide."
Pulling the game was done at the request of AAFES. GameStop has nothing to do with it. They are simply abiding by AAFES' wishes.
And here is the biggest problem with dealing with anything that evolves. Someone or something else will come along and evolve a way to defeat it. This happens in the world of biological viruses and bacteria, this happens in the world of animals, this happens in the world of Electronic Viruses and Spyware, and this happens with encryption.
e
So essentially he is making the cut by drilling a series of adjacent holes. Depending on the spacing between the holes the cut may have a very rough finished edge.
If the laser is capable of removing material, the next logical step would be a laser based CNC machine. Basically the reverse of what they are doing with the sintering rig, but using a subtractive process rather than an additive process.
Ok, so when this becomes cheap enough to replace all lasers used to correct vision, instead of thousands of dollars, we would be talking about hundreds...cool
But are you really going to let someone shine a science fair project into your eyes?
That's what GNU/Linux's repository concept does - it takes the task of risk assessment and gives it to people who are trained at for the job so by definition they do it better.
"In essence, the other customers are not getting the bandwidth they paid for"
The problem with that statement is that you are assuming that these "other" customers were guaranteed something to begin with. They most likely were not. Terms of service vary of course, but every non-commercial account I have ever had uses wording like "up to XX mbps" when describing the service. In other words, there is an upper limit but no lower limit. The ISP could likely get away with actually giving them as low as 128 kbps and still be within the legal bounds of the contract.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth you usually have to step up to business class accounts, often to at least a fractional T1. There is a corresponding leap in price, but that is the cost that comes with the contractual obligation to deliver bandwidth to you.
A couple of paragraphs in the article indicate that the advertisers are not just looking to insert advertising into your ebooks, but to also update that advertising periodically and to get usage data back.
With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.
Really? This is the first that I've heard of this. If I redownload a book that has ads, I could see them updating the advertising for timeliness. Are the advertisers expecting the publishers to move to some sort of DRM method that requires periodic updates to keep working in order to have an opportunity to update the ads??
Publishers will need to come up with new ways of evaluating a book's commercial value. What is a best seller? Today the criteria is simple: total unit sales. Yet with advertising in the mix, a book downloaded 100,000 times but never read (think of that yet-to-be-opened prize-winning 600-pager) may be worth less than one downloaded 50,000 times and read cover-to-cover. Unread books suddenly become less profitable to a publisher.
They expect the publisher to receive data back from your ebook indicating how much of the book you have read, how long it took you, etc. Of course the next step is to move beyond targeting ads based on aggregate data and start inserting ads into your ebook copies based on your individual profile. Link that to other profiling data (web site trackers, customer "loyalty" cards etc.) and you will find advertising inserted that is downright spooky.
I like slashdot a lot more when it was just real geeks with a clue, you know, before all the angsty idiots who happened to be socially inept and own a computer started calling it home as though they were geeks too.
Slashdot Mirror
They couldn't have waited until Sunday to release this?
I guess it depends on whether the interest they earn on it offsets the credit card fees for both the purchase and the return. On the other hand, if a small software developer tries to pull this crap you can attempt to return it for a refund and if you don't get it, sue them in small claims court in your jurisdiction. Assuming they don't bother to fly out for the hearing, you can take the default judgment and turn it over to a collections agency. You can also get court orders freezing their assets, etc. until the judgment is paid. Who says the law can't be fun?
According to the article they can't tie their shoes yet, so maybe 4 digits is too much for them.
So the plan is to allow a 5 year old to pick whatever he wants, a la carte, for his lunch, then you are going to see if it matches state guidelines? Here's a hint. It won't. Ever. Then what, you send him back to start over? Best of all is that somehow they expect this to make things go faster. I don't think so.
My children each have a seven digit code, given to them in kindergarten. Its sole purpose is to track money on their account so they don't have to carry cash and the school doesn't have to make change. As for meals, they have a choice of two preplanned meals, pb and j, or they can pack. There is no a la carte and each meal costs the same. In addition, the school takes a count of each type of meal at the beginning of the day so that they have a good idea of how much to prepare. It would seem to me that a la carte choices would really complicate things.
Hey now, let's not get personal...
And by that you mean, of course, simply clicking on the post button.
No, the solution would be to diagnose them correctly and treat them accordingly. The current DSM-IV term is Antisocial Personality Disorder. Unfortunately the prognosis does not seem to be good. On the other hand it seems that many people suffering from this mental illness end up incarcerated, so maybe there is hope in this case.
Antisocial Personality Disorder is deeply seated in the individual's psyche and is unlikely to react positively to such an experience.
From the kotaku.com article and as imthesponge has pointed out:
Pulling the game was done at the request of AAFES. GameStop has nothing to do with it. They are simply abiding by AAFES' wishes.
Let's just call this what it really is:
A glorified fan fiction site.
From the FTA:
"Subutai is self funded."
Need I say more?
xcept that in cryptography that doesn't always happen.
Sort of an expensive choice of targets don't you think?
Not on a Kindle they didn't!
Try bologna and colonel to really blow your mind.
Both useful things if you have to deal with an ass.
No, but I'm guessing that most of us are the "IT guy/girl" for someone else who is.
So essentially he is making the cut by drilling a series of adjacent holes. Depending on the spacing between the holes the cut may have a very rough finished edge.
If the laser is capable of removing material, the next logical step would be a laser based CNC machine. Basically the reverse of what they are doing with the sintering rig, but using a subtractive process rather than an additive process.
But are you really going to let someone shine a science fair project into your eyes?
Sure they do.
Right conclusion, wrong answer.
Like having to watch the same 4 Hanna Montana episodes for 48 hours straight.
The problem with that statement is that you are assuming that these "other" customers were guaranteed something to begin with. They most likely were not. Terms of service vary of course, but every non-commercial account I have ever had uses wording like "up to XX mbps" when describing the service. In other words, there is an upper limit but no lower limit. The ISP could likely get away with actually giving them as low as 128 kbps and still be within the legal bounds of the contract.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth you usually have to step up to business class accounts, often to at least a fractional T1. There is a corresponding leap in price, but that is the cost that comes with the contractual obligation to deliver bandwidth to you.
Really? This is the first that I've heard of this. If I redownload a book that has ads, I could see them updating the advertising for timeliness. Are the advertisers expecting the publishers to move to some sort of DRM method that requires periodic updates to keep working in order to have an opportunity to update the ads??
They expect the publisher to receive data back from your ebook indicating how much of the book you have read, how long it took you, etc. Of course the next step is to move beyond targeting ads based on aggregate data and start inserting ads into your ebook copies based on your individual profile. Link that to other profiling data (web site trackers, customer "loyalty" cards etc.) and you will find advertising inserted that is downright spooky.
Same difference these days.
It's starting to feel like 4chan lite!