the GPL 3 license is NOT free software. It significantly restricts CERTAIN people from using it, thus is clearly NOT FREE.
It doesn't restrict anyone from USING it.
It prevents 'other people' from RESTRICTING you from using it. If YOU are those 'other people', it prevents you from preventing other people from using it.
BSD is truly free license
Yeah it is, if you are lucky enough to get something BSD licensed. No guarantee that's going to happen even if all the projects it was based on were BSD, it might be all locked up proprietary when you obtain a derivative software.
People who write GPL software want the end users to be able to modify and redistribute the software. That's freedom. And the GPL ensures that goal is met.
What freedom do you get with the 'truly free' BSD? You get the 'freedom' to restrict people further down the line so that they can't modify or redistribute the software. Ever wonder what people 'down the line' think of this truly free BSD software? Oh wait... they didn't get any. By the time the software got to them it wasn't BSD anymore, it wasn't free anymore.
Not really. Being able to run on Linux implies a few very important things that are hard to avoid - you have to be using a free software license or at least libraries that are free (even like LGPL).
No. You don't. You can write 100% completely proprietary software for linux: Quake 4. Maya. Acrobat Distiller. There is nothing remotely approaching or connected to free about these. They might run on BSD; they might not. They might
That means porting it to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy because the code is guaranteed to be accessible by license.
The license could be your standard off the shelf EULA you'd see with any "Windows" software. Porting to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy for it proprietary owners... maybe. If they felt like it. Don't hold your breath.
It's dual-platform. Dual platform is hardly equivilant to running on everything but your amiga.
Ah, so if it was Windows + Linux, would you accept that it was cross-platform? Lots of software out there for linux with a windows port, but no Mac port... all calling itself cross-platform.
Seems a strange double standard.
Silverlight is a primarily a modern desktop browser flash-alternative technology. And its already available on the 2 primary modern desktop platforms, with beta support on the 3rd... there's a lot of "cross platform" software out there that isn't anywhere near this far along.
Hell, OpenOffice.org was less cross platform than silverlight in VERY recent memory. Sure it was 'available' for OSX, but you had to install X, and even then it was BARELY usable.
Only because you haven't tried it.
Its also not finished yet, and they are entirely upfront about that fact. However there is nothing preventing it from being finished, and indeed every indication it will be.
Mod parent up. Blackberries ARE better than the other PDA platforms in terms of security, because they do support this level of security 'out of the box'.
Other PDA's don't, and in most cases you can't even add it. With the BB, you can essentially set them up so that all data is end-to-end encrypted to YOUR server, and from their it can go out to retreive web pages, access address books, download documents, run applications, etc, etc. You can apply corporate filters to the web, limit applications, etc, etc all very easily.
All other PDA platforms require you to trust the carrier and the user for a significant chunk of the security. They give you exchange and imap support for example so email can be reasonably secure, but its much harder to lockdown EVERYTHING else... like blocking it so the pad web browser can't reach facebook or myspace or so poker can't be installed... blackberries make it as easy to manage PDA's as it is to manage desktops... which is to say... its a hassle. But on other platforms its not even really doable.
How easy is it to get an iphone to run through a 'VPN' so it can access an intranet site and have no or extremely limited access to the public WWW? This is a pretty common scenario for the PC's staff are provided by enterprises, but smartphones in general do no make this sort of configuration easy; in many cases its simply not possible.
Well, that right there satisfies 'cross platform' as far as I'm concerned. I mean sure, it might not run on -every platform- but very few things that call themselves cross-platform run on my Amiga.
Of course, this is slashdot, so by cross-platform you must mean does it run on linux... and apparenty the implementation that DOES is called Moonlight...
Does that count as cross platform support too? Personally, I think it does. After all, lots of FLOSS software is developed by a core team of developers on one platform, some even are only developed for one distro, and the ports to other platforms and distros are managed by completely other independant groups, yet we don't deny them being cross platform.
My problem with "Being forced into groups" is the inability to solo, or do small group quests.
Soloing and small groups are completely different.
I agree you shouldn't be forced into a 6 man group. And I agree games should have piles of content for small groups of 2-4. You shouldn't always need a full group. I never argued otherwise.
To start, just because you solo, does not mean you are anti-social.
True enough. But if the game is solo-friendly, it does mean a boatload of other people are. So when you DO want to group, most of the other players around you have no interest in it.
Sometimes you don't have the time to get a group together. IT always take 10-30 min (sometime smuch much longer) to get people together, and sometimes that is all you have to play.
And making the game solo-friendly AGGRAVATES the problem. Because now, instead of a whole bunch of people looking to form a quick group, they've all gone off to do their own thing. So even if you want to group you can't. Instead of taking 5 minutes to form a group it takes 30.
So if you jsut wanted to log in, do a quick quest or work on a little xp and log off before the wife get's home, you cant if you ahve to group.
You can if there are lots of other people in the same circumstances and everyone has to group.
Again, I am in favor of lots of features to make grouping easier like:
- short drop-in quests that you can add people to on the fly, and which people can leave so you don't have to commit to hours of play to be a part of it
- small group support
- dynamic classes (if a few melee types are currently available one of them could be able to temporarily assume the role of a healer; he wouldn't be a full on cleric -- but they wouldn't have to all sit around waiting for a real cleric. And if a cleric showed up he could revert back to a warrior.
- sidekick/mentor modes to allow higher and lower level players to group together more effectively. I don't advocate a level one going off to kill the dragon god with a group of level 100's, but there's no reason a bunch of 50s can't form up with a 30, and have the 30th level player temporarily enhanced so he could particpate meaninfully.
- npc minions to fill out groups. (e.g. if you get 2-3 players together the group can hire a dps or healer npc...)
- etc, etc, etc
Forced grouping killed DDO for me.
DDO wasn't a good game, in my opinion, For a number of reasons. It wasn't the forced grouping per se, but the rigidity of the forced grouping.
I played nightly with a friend, but because so much of the material you had to have a full group (Rogue, Healer, Tank, DPS), we often found ourselves sitting around for an hour unable to find the missing player we needed for a group.
This is exactly the situation that should NEVER be allowed to happen. If you've got 2-3 people who are ready to play, they should be able to play. There should be lots of material for 2+ people; and players shouldn't be -locked- into their 'character' to the point that you can have 10+ people looking for a group, and yet still not have a viable group, due to the level/class mix.
IMO, a good MMO would have gameplay for people who want to solo, do small groups, reg. groups and raids.
That would not be a good anything. I have no problem with making mmo's for each of those demographics, or making an mmo with some overlap, but trying to support all demographics is going to be poor game.
Forcing people into groups means that there will be a lot of standing around shouting "X Class, X Level, LFG" and a lot of boredom for many people.
That just means the game has implemented grouping wrong. If a game wants to support 'casual small grouping' you need to SUPPORT 'casual small grouping'. Very few games even TRY. And the few that do make it even easier and more productive to just solo, which is counter productive to encouraging casual s
It's called a SIM only contract. 30-day termination and you don't have to pay for a subsidized handset. All decent cell phone providers offer them. Next time, stay out of Phones4u.
In North America half the phones (CDMA) don't even take SIMs. And you can take ANY rate plan without a subsidized handset, and pay month to month without the contract, but you still pay the full monthly rate as if you were subsidizing a handset.
until they end up in a situation where the phone fails or is lost or stolen. Cellphone theft is the biggest cash cow in terms of the devices market for the providers.
How is that the carriers fault? If you buy anything on a payment plan or on a credit card and then lose it, you still have to pay for it.
And to the complaint people have that such actions would increase the price of cellphones. YOU'RE ALREADY PAYING THAT PRICE FOR THE CELLPHONE.
Nobody disputes that. But few people want to pay $350 for their cellphone.
The ONLY real bullshit in the entire system, is that if you do provide your own phone, why is your monthly bill not any lower? Or alternatively, if you take a 3 year contract, and continue using the phone on the same rate plan after 3 years, why do your monthly payments not go down?
I agree with the idea that your purchase of a phone on a payment plan should be completely separate from the service. They can still give you a 'free' phone, and you can pay $8/mo for it for 3 years, etc.. like any other loan, with interest and early payment terms etc all spelled out.
No reason this couldn't be possible.
The carriers haven't done this and don't want to do this, because, quite simply, they make a lot more profit on then they'd care to so transparently disclose, and anyone paying for service with their own phone is just gravy.
the main flaw in https is in certificate creation. You are trusting the root CAs and anyone they delegate certificate creation power not to help your attacker.
You don't have to trust the root CAs if you don't want to. And you can manually add cert's you DO trust to your browser.
also iirc IE has a bug that makes mitm attacks pretty easy (iirc it defaults to assuming a cert that doesn't say otherwise can be used to sign other certs).
Again that's not a showstopper if you want security. You can either only trust certs that explicitly don't allow signing, or not use IE.;)
The problems aren't with HTTPs those are problems with cert management. And yeah, the default cert management is a balance of security and convenience, but you CAN remove all your certs, and import only those you actually trust if you are willing to take the trouble.
Whereas if you set up webmail over https in 'country X'... ?
Exactly the same scenario and that's my point. There is nothing special about blackberry.
The end to end encryption it supports is managed by the end users and this is no different than any other solution where that applies, including https webmail.
Blackberries are more user friendly for easy messaging between 'pda/cellphones' than webmail though.
Your argument is entirely based on the unstated assumption that only the government can provide defensive services. Naturally some defense is required against those who would employ coercion, but the government doesn't have to get involved.
Right...So... Only members of the largest 'defensive services corporation' can stand around robbing the people they see. I'm not sure how that would be an improvement.
What about Fat Tony and his legitimate businessman's club? Will my 'defensive services corp' defend me against the mafia? Or will it be in their financial best interest to simply exclude that?
What if the largest defensive services corps is the mafia? Smaller legitimate corps can't touch them. And even contacting them would bring reprisals... So now I have to pay ever increasing weekly protection money because "I wouldn't want that something unfortunate should happen to my business?"
What's the libertarian/market solution to organized crime?
Reminds me of privatized medicine; when a man collapses on the street... doctors hesitate to render aid because they expose themselves to all sorts of liability by helping, liability their insurance is loathe to cover. "You were practicing on an unclean street without your aide staff, or proper equipment? HAHAHAHAHA. No we're not covering THAT! If his family sues you, you're on your own."
Better to just not get involved. The free market at work.
The market is only good at efficiency, not effectiveness. Sometimes effectiveness is more important than efficiency.
Yes, but blackberries make it easy to communicate securely. You don't have the hassle of a PKI infrastructure with S/MIME certificates, or using PGP.
Actually you do have that infrastructure, and its managed by the IT people running the messaging server. That the point. Its all there, and its managed by the enterprises not RIM. That's why enterprises trust it... because they managed their own pki infrastructure, not RIM.
RIM made their devices support using it easily and out of the box, but they wouldn't have sold any if they hadn't, given who their original target market was.
The "problem" now is that I can setup an Exchange server in 'country X' and sell Blackberry hosted accounts on it to criminals or whoever, with end to end encryption to my server. And there is nothing the local government can do about it. They can't snoop on the data because its encrypted, and they can't even issue a warrant to the account host to get the data, because its in 'country X'.
I can snoop of course, because its my infrastructure, and I do have the keys. But my business and reputation is staked on not snooping, that's WHY I have customers.
They ARE using encryption. That's how the blackberries work in 'enterprise' mode.
Its end to end encryption from the device to the enterprise messaging infrastructure. The encryption is essentially implemented and managed by the enterprise IT people not RIM, that's why rim has no 'access'; RIM just helps transport the data from device to enterprise and back, and designed their device and software to support enterprises that wanted to implement encryption.
The only real problem I have with this is your apathy for innocents being imprisoned.
Its not apathy. Its recognition of how society works. Innocent people are imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit all the time. Some are even executed for them.
We need to introduce as and devise as many safeguards as we can to prevent this, and I'm personally against the death penalty as one of those safeguards against the ultimate miscarriage of justice. But we can't stop passing laws simply because innocent people will be imprisoned. That's idealistic, but impractical.
Even murder comes down to 12 people guessing what was in the defendants head. Its only murder if he intended to kill. If he didn't intend to, it might be manslaughter... or even a completely faultless accident. Shall we repeal the laws against murder too? Simply because it comes down to guessing the defandants thoughts?
This is a serious problem as it allows the judge/jury to basically guess what the defendant was thinking when viewing the images, making it a thought crime.
No different than a "judge/jury basically guessing what [a murder] defendant was thinking when he [killed]".
Was it self defense? Was he afraid for his life? Was he provoked to an insane rage? Did he know the victim was even there behind the the target poster when he put six rounds into it? Or did he plan this out weeks in advance?
The only thing that separates first degree murder from second degree murder from manslaughter to a tragic but faultless accident is what the judge/jury guesses about what the defendant was thinking.
Just killing someone isn't a crime.
Killing someone on purpose with malice aforethought is among the most serious of crimes. Deliberately Killing someone in the heat of moment slightly less so. Killing someone without meaning to when it was completely avoidable further less so. Killing someone entirely by accident that you could not have reasonably have foreseen or prevented or in self defense when your life was immediately threatened... its not even a crime anymore.
So, is 'Murder' a thought crime too?
Of course not, you have to THINK about killing somene AND do it.
And ssimilarly, here: you have to THINK about getting images of child porn, AND get images of children for that purpose.
So here the judge alone, guided by the prosecution it sounds like, decided the photos were child porn even if no one sane would consider them that way, AND that even established guidelines (Dost factors) wouldn't consider them that way.
Innocent people end up in jail convicted of murder too.
I'm not saying its acceptable. I'm saying that its not unique to 'child porn', or any other crime.
To be honest it sounds more like the only people who found the photos arousing were the judge and prosecution, and yet this child psychiatrist ended up in jail.
Did the child psychiatrist find them arousing? You say the judge/jury has to guess. And guess they did. Did they have evidence he found them arousing? How do you know they guessed wrong? The fact that he was child psychiatrist would weight against him further if he WAS using them for that purpose.
The real issue you have here seems to me not to be a question of whether he WAS using what we would find to be otherwise innoccuous pictures of children like pornography for the purposes of arousal, but whether or not THAT should be illegal. Frankly I'm not sure I think it -should- be.
But at the same time, I'm not comfortable with a man who: a) fantasizes about children (although there is nothing I can do about this.) b) takes pictures of them for that purpose (regardless of whether or not I'd find them lewd myself) c) chooses a profession that sets him up as an authority figure in close contact with children
And to jump straight to Godwin, there was a time when Germany felt that way about the Jews. And I think we know how good an idea that was.
My history isn't as good as it should be, but my understanding is that Hitler gamed the election system heavily to obtain the head of state and rapidly dissolved any real democracy as soon as he was in control, well before the majority of offensive laws were passed against the jews. ie... it wasn't tyranny of the majority, it was the tyranny of hitler coupled with the apathy of the majority.
The lesson here: just because the majority think something should be outlawed, doesn't mean it should.
The lesson there? When democracy is dissolved into a dictatorship, bad things can happen. Or perhaps its a lesson on the evil of apathy in otherwise good people.
This would be why we have a judicial system: to prevent the tyranny of the majority that you're willing to so tacitly accept.
Sort of. But it doesn't matter what should or shouldn't be outlawed. On any issue which the great majority agree there is no stopping them.
A judicial system can't prevent the tyranny of the majority if the majority is big enough. It can only prevent the tyranny of a small majority. Think about it.
Suppose the supreme court of the united states made a ruling that the great majority strongly disagreed with. What recourse do the people have?
If the majority is great enough, the the consitution itself can be amended, the supreme court can be dissolved and then reformed from scratch, and the unpopular rulings can be nullified.
The odds getting that kind of support for your average issue is extremely low. But if you ever 'stir up the beast' there is no stopping it. Consider that only ~70% of the people were on the side of the American Revolution -- that was enough to gain the momentum to declare independence, and fight a war to form a new government from scratch.
American's generally think of it as heroic.
But at the same time, we can look at it from the loyalists point of view, those that were happy and comfortable with British rule. What would we call what happened to them? Tyranny of the majority sounds about right. The local government and judicial systems that protected them were dissolved out from under them; even the military, the force behind the 'legitimate' government, was defeated.
Can you imagine how hollow your reassurances that a judicial system would prevent tyranny of the majority would seem to them. The 'majority' simply and literally dissolved the government itself in order to get its way, and that wasn't even a democracy, it would have been much easier if it was.
Bottom line, any governmental system can be upended if enough people want to. Dictatorships etc may put up a fight, if the ones in charge are the ones being upended. But a democracy, by its design will bend to the will of the great majority, regardless of how unjust it might be. With enough people 'on board' the constitution and the rules for changing it can be rewritten to say what ever they want it to say. If this wasn't possible, you probably don't have a democracy in the first place.
Nearly all southpaws I know have their mice set to right-handed use, I only know one person who has hers set to left-handed. I find it almost unusable.
When you say have their mice set to "right handed use", what do you actually mean?
1) They have their mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard and use it right handed with their right hand. e.g. they might as well be right handed.
2) They have their mouse on the left side of the keyboard, use it with their left hand, but have the buttons setup 'normally'.
3) They have their mouse on the left side of the keyboard, use it with their left hand, and have the buttons 'reversed', so that the 'left mouse button is context-menu' and the 'right mouse button' is 'select'.
I am a '#2'. This comes from years of living with RH people and sharing mice. While I prefer to operate it with my LH on the left side of the keyboard, its AWAYS configured for RH use. This is how most LH people I know operate.
Most of us can also cope fine with using it with our right hand if it's not convenient to move it. (e.g. someone elses workstation.)
I am as hopeless with a mouse configured with the buttons 'reversed' as most RHers.
When I buy a mouse I look for an ergonomic design that's comfortable in either hand, and I favor wireless mice because its that much easier for the user to put it on whichever side of the keyboard they are most comfortable.
I personally don't care that there aren't many ergo-left designs available. I generally favor ambi-mice because half my family is RH.
I -do- find it frustrating that there are very few higher end mice with an ambidextrous design.
Putting a left hand onto an ergo-right mouse is just uncomfortable, regardless how the buttons might be programmed.
As for the military, the M9 pistol is basically ambidextrous on major controls. The M4 carbine is semi-auto, so shooting left handed isn't that big of a deal, except for the charging lever.
My understanding was that the biggest issue with left handed shooting of right handed weapons was the shell casings. On a rifle, the casings eject right across your face. Pistols would be a similiar issue, with the casings ejecting towards the shooters body.
Every program on your screen and your OS was written in C/C++
I wish.
These days half the stuff people use is written in a vomit inducing stack of generated bastardized html with VisualBasic, C#, or PHP on the backend doing the heavy lifting (which is itself running on C/C++ interpreters/VMs/CLI/whatever) and Javascript gluing it all together.
And people wonder why even the best 'AJAX' apps suck.
The whole "intent to arouse" thing is troublesome, to say the least.
Why is the 'perpetrators' intentions troublesome? Surely its obvious that it bears on the degree of the crime, and whether a crime was even comitted.
Surely you can agree there is a difference between a man forgetting to turn off the stove and burning down his home killing his family... and a man plotting to set a fire, burn down his house and killing his family?
Surely the former deserves sympathy, while the latter deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
One, how do you discern intent and,
Same way intent is always determined. You look for evidence. You present the evidence. And a jury decides. Its not perfect. And criminals often go free, and sometimes innocent people are convicted. But that's life in an imperfect world.
How else would you have it?
two, arouse who? The average person, or someone who happens to have a very specific fetish?
Why would it matter WHO. If the intent was to arouse someone, then its intent was to arouse someone. If the intent was not to arouse someone, but someone got aroused anyway, then it still not intent to arouse.
And, as we all know too well, anything that even slightly reeks of "protect the children" insures that common sense and logic will quickly be cast aside....
1) If society as a whole finds something so distasteful that they want to purge it completely, why is it illogical that they would pass laws forbidding computer generated depictions of it? Why shouldn't they?
2) What is the benefit to society of allowing or even legally protecting computer generated child porn? If society near universally doesn't want it, and considers the extreme minority that does want it to be sick and in need of help at best and a perverted deviant criminal at worst...
At the end of the day there is no escaping the tyranny of the majority...if almost everybody agrees on something, then society will do it. There's no stopping that. There's no point in trying to stop it.
If you want to change this, you'll have to change the way society thinks. Slavery wasn't abolished because it was illogical and common sense... it took time and effort to convince enough people to think of them as people, that racism and slavery were wrong. Good luck doing that for child porn though; as even the most open minded people generally think its beyond distasteful. They might see the validity of an argument for computer generated child porn not hurting anyone... but that's a long way from getting their support -- they are hardly going to march in protest of the child pornographers rights, to protect them from injustice. We'll fully legalize drugs, prostitution, gambling, and gay marriage long before we'll legalize any form of child porn.
There's just virtually no support for it.
So let it be banned, there's no stopping it, and no real point to trying to legalize it anyway.
But be vigilant against politicians milking it for their own gain, or to slip other legislation through. We can't stop anti-child-porn legislation from passing, have little reason to stop it from passing... but we should be vigilant that we aren't passing anti-child-porn legislation that really has nothing to do with child-porn. Letting customs seize and search laptops for child-porn for example, is NOT about child-porn at all... its about letting customs seize and search everyone's laptops for whatever they want.
There are some things in this world us lefties just have to learn to do right handed. Fire a rifle would be another one.
Actually, while there aren't any worthwhile ergo left mice, there is a reasonable selection of ambi-mice available. I use a Razer Copperhead myself and find it very comfortable. I've also used some the upper tier microsoft mice and found them alright, until they stopped putting detents in the wheel.
As for rifles... they do make plenty of left handed rifles, but learning to shoot right-handed would probably be a valuable skill, simply because you may have to use the equipment at hand, which will probably be right handed. I learned to golf RH for the same reason - my Dad wouldn't buy a set of left handed clubs to so I could hack around as a kid.
How does the military account for handedness? Or is everybody just right handed, (like everybody is straight)?
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the GPL 3 license is NOT free software. It significantly restricts CERTAIN people from using it, thus is clearly NOT FREE.
It doesn't restrict anyone from USING it.
It prevents 'other people' from RESTRICTING you from using it. If YOU are those 'other people', it prevents you from preventing other people from using it.
BSD is truly free license
Yeah it is, if you are lucky enough to get something BSD licensed. No guarantee that's going to happen even if all the projects it was based on were BSD, it might be all locked up proprietary when you obtain a derivative software.
People who write GPL software want the end users to be able to modify and redistribute the software. That's freedom. And the GPL ensures that goal is met.
What freedom do you get with the 'truly free' BSD? You get the 'freedom' to restrict people further down the line so that they can't modify or redistribute the software. Ever wonder what people 'down the line' think of this truly free BSD software? Oh wait... they didn't get any. By the time the software got to them it wasn't BSD anymore, it wasn't free anymore.
Right, but can IT setup the VPN and prevent the user from turning it off? Not now. But maybe with 2.0?
Not really. Being able to run on Linux implies a few very important things that are hard to avoid - you have to be using a free software license or at least libraries that are free (even like LGPL).
No. You don't. You can write 100% completely proprietary software for linux: Quake 4. Maya. Acrobat Distiller. There is nothing remotely approaching or connected to free about these. They might run on BSD; they might not. They might
That means porting it to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy because the code is guaranteed to be accessible by license.
The license could be your standard off the shelf EULA you'd see with any "Windows" software.
Porting to Darwin or BSD would be dead easy for it proprietary owners... maybe. If they felt like it. Don't hold your breath.
It's dual-platform. Dual platform is hardly equivilant to running on everything but your amiga.
Ah, so if it was Windows + Linux, would you accept that it was cross-platform? Lots of software out there for linux with a windows port, but no Mac port... all calling itself cross-platform.
Seems a strange double standard.
Silverlight is a primarily a modern desktop browser flash-alternative technology. And its already available on the 2 primary modern desktop platforms, with beta support on the 3rd... there's a lot of "cross platform" software out there that isn't anywhere near this far along.
Hell, OpenOffice.org was less cross platform than silverlight in VERY recent memory. Sure it was 'available' for OSX, but you had to install X, and even then it was BARELY usable.
Only because you haven't tried it.
Its also not finished yet, and they are entirely upfront about that fact. However there is nothing preventing it from being finished, and indeed every indication it will be.
Mod parent up. Blackberries ARE better than the other PDA platforms in terms of security, because they do support this level of security 'out of the box'.
Other PDA's don't, and in most cases you can't even add it. With the BB, you can essentially set them up so that all data is end-to-end encrypted to YOUR server, and from their it can go out to retreive web pages, access address books, download documents, run applications, etc, etc. You can apply corporate filters to the web, limit applications, etc, etc all very easily.
All other PDA platforms require you to trust the carrier and the user for a significant chunk of the security. They give you exchange and imap support for example so email can be reasonably secure, but its much harder to lockdown EVERYTHING else... like blocking it so the pad web browser can't reach facebook or myspace or so poker can't be installed... blackberries make it as easy to manage PDA's as it is to manage desktops... which is to say... its a hassle. But on other platforms its not even really doable.
How easy is it to get an iphone to run through a 'VPN' so it can access an intranet site and have no or extremely limited access to the public WWW? This is a pretty common scenario for the PC's staff are provided by enterprises, but smartphones in general do no make this sort of configuration easy; in many cases its simply not possible.
Mac OS X:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/silverlight.html
Well, that right there satisfies 'cross platform' as far as I'm concerned. I mean sure, it might not run on -every platform- but very few things that call themselves cross-platform run on my Amiga.
Of course, this is slashdot, so by cross-platform you must mean does it run on linux... and apparenty the implementation that DOES is called Moonlight...
Linux:
http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
Does that count as cross platform support too? Personally, I think it does. After all, lots of FLOSS software is developed by a core team of developers on one platform, some even are only developed for one distro, and the ports to other platforms and distros are managed by completely other independant groups, yet we don't deny them being cross platform.
My problem with "Being forced into groups" is the inability to solo, or do small group quests.
Soloing and small groups are completely different.
I agree you shouldn't be forced into a 6 man group. And I agree games should have piles of content for small groups of 2-4. You shouldn't always need a full group. I never argued otherwise.
To start, just because you solo, does not mean you are anti-social.
True enough. But if the game is solo-friendly, it does mean a boatload of other people are. So when you DO want to group, most of the other players around you have no interest in it.
Sometimes you don't have the time to get a group together. IT always take 10-30 min (sometime smuch much longer) to get people together, and sometimes that is all you have to play.
And making the game solo-friendly AGGRAVATES the problem. Because now, instead of a whole bunch of people looking to form a quick group, they've all gone off to do their own thing. So even if you want to group you can't. Instead of taking 5 minutes to form a group it takes 30.
So if you jsut wanted to log in, do a quick quest or work on a little xp and log off before the wife get's home, you cant if you ahve to group.
You can if there are lots of other people in the same circumstances and everyone has to group.
Again, I am in favor of lots of features to make grouping easier like:
- short drop-in quests that you can add people to on the fly, and which people can leave so you don't have to commit to hours of play to be a part of it
- small group support
- dynamic classes (if a few melee types are currently available one of them could be able to temporarily assume the role of a healer; he wouldn't be a full on cleric -- but they wouldn't have to all sit around waiting for a real cleric. And if a cleric showed up he could revert back to a warrior.
- sidekick/mentor modes to allow higher and lower level players to group together more effectively. I don't advocate a level one going off to kill the dragon god with a group of level 100's, but there's no reason a bunch of 50s can't form up with a 30, and have the 30th level player temporarily enhanced so he could particpate meaninfully.
- npc minions to fill out groups. (e.g. if you get 2-3 players together the group can hire a dps or healer npc...)
- etc, etc, etc
Forced grouping killed DDO for me.
DDO wasn't a good game, in my opinion, For a number of reasons. It wasn't the forced grouping per se, but the rigidity of the forced grouping.
I played nightly with a friend, but because so much of the material you had to have a full group (Rogue, Healer, Tank, DPS), we often found ourselves sitting around for an hour unable to find the missing player we needed for a group.
This is exactly the situation that should NEVER be allowed to happen. If you've got 2-3 people who are ready to play, they should be able to play. There should be lots of material for 2+ people; and players shouldn't be -locked- into their 'character' to the point that you can have 10+ people looking for a group, and yet still not have a viable group, due to the level/class mix.
IMO, a good MMO would have gameplay for people who want to solo, do small groups, reg. groups and raids.
That would not be a good anything. I have no problem with making mmo's for each of those demographics, or making an mmo with some overlap, but trying to support all demographics is going to be poor game.
Forcing people into groups means that there will be a lot of standing around shouting "X Class, X Level, LFG" and a lot of boredom for many people.
That just means the game has implemented grouping wrong. If a game wants to support 'casual small grouping' you need to SUPPORT 'casual small grouping'. Very few games even TRY. And the few that do make it even easier and more productive to just solo, which is counter productive to encouraging casual s
It's called a SIM only contract. 30-day termination and you don't have to pay for a subsidized handset. All decent cell phone providers offer them. Next time, stay out of Phones4u.
In North America half the phones (CDMA) don't even take SIMs. And you can take ANY rate plan without a subsidized handset, and pay month to month without the contract, but you still pay the full monthly rate as if you were subsidizing a handset.
until they end up in a situation where the phone fails or is lost or stolen. Cellphone theft is the biggest cash cow in terms of the devices market for the providers.
How is that the carriers fault? If you buy anything on a payment plan or on a credit card and then lose it, you still have to pay for it.
And to the complaint people have that such actions would increase the price of cellphones. YOU'RE ALREADY PAYING THAT PRICE FOR THE CELLPHONE.
Nobody disputes that. But few people want to pay $350 for their cellphone.
The ONLY real bullshit in the entire system, is that if you do provide your own phone, why is your monthly bill not any lower? Or alternatively, if you take a 3 year contract, and continue using the phone on the same rate plan after 3 years, why do your monthly payments not go down?
I agree with the idea that your purchase of a phone on a payment plan should be completely separate from the service. They can still give you a 'free' phone, and you can pay $8/mo for it for 3 years, etc.. like any other loan, with interest and early payment terms etc all spelled out.
No reason this couldn't be possible.
The carriers haven't done this and don't want to do this, because, quite simply, they make a lot more profit on then they'd care to so transparently disclose, and anyone paying for service with their own phone is just gravy.
the main flaw in https is in certificate creation. You are trusting the root CAs and anyone they delegate certificate creation power not to help your attacker.
;)
You don't have to trust the root CAs if you don't want to.
And you can manually add cert's you DO trust to your browser.
also iirc IE has a bug that makes mitm attacks pretty easy (iirc it defaults to assuming a cert that doesn't say otherwise can be used to sign other certs).
Again that's not a showstopper if you want security. You can either only trust certs that explicitly don't allow signing, or not use IE.
The problems aren't with HTTPs those are problems with cert management. And yeah, the default cert management is a balance of security and convenience, but you CAN remove all your certs, and import only those you actually trust if you are willing to take the trouble.
Whereas if you set up webmail over https in 'country X'... ?
Exactly the same scenario and that's my point. There is nothing special about blackberry.
The end to end encryption it supports is managed by the end users and this is no different than any other solution where that applies, including https webmail.
Blackberries are more user friendly for easy messaging between 'pda/cellphones' than webmail though.
Welcome to free society. Please take a number and someone will be with you shortly to handle your complaint. /sarcasm
What did I say that sounded like a complaint??
Your argument is entirely based on the unstated assumption that only the government can provide defensive services. Naturally some defense is required against those who would employ coercion, but the government doesn't have to get involved.
Right...So... Only members of the largest 'defensive services corporation' can stand around robbing the people they see. I'm not sure how that would be an improvement.
What about Fat Tony and his legitimate businessman's club? Will my 'defensive services corp' defend me against the mafia? Or will it be in their financial best interest to simply exclude that?
What if the largest defensive services corps is the mafia? Smaller legitimate corps can't touch them. And even contacting them would bring reprisals... So now I have to pay ever increasing weekly protection money because "I wouldn't want that something unfortunate should happen to my business?"
What's the libertarian/market solution to organized crime?
Reminds me of privatized medicine; when a man collapses on the street... doctors hesitate to render aid because they expose themselves to all sorts of liability by helping, liability their insurance is loathe to cover. "You were practicing on an unclean street without your aide staff, or proper equipment? HAHAHAHAHA. No we're not covering THAT! If his family sues you, you're on your own."
Better to just not get involved. The free market at work.
The market is only good at efficiency, not effectiveness. Sometimes effectiveness is more important than efficiency.
Yes, but blackberries make it easy to communicate securely. You don't have the hassle of a PKI infrastructure with S/MIME certificates, or using PGP.
Actually you do have that infrastructure, and its managed by the IT people running the messaging server. That the point. Its all there, and its managed by the enterprises not RIM. That's why enterprises trust it... because they managed their own pki infrastructure, not RIM.
RIM made their devices support using it easily and out of the box, but they wouldn't have sold any if they hadn't, given who their original target market was.
The "problem" now is that I can setup an Exchange server in 'country X' and sell Blackberry hosted accounts on it to criminals or whoever, with end to end encryption to my server. And there is nothing the local government can do about it. They can't snoop on the data because its encrypted, and they can't even issue a warrant to the account host to get the data, because its in 'country X'.
I can snoop of course, because its my infrastructure, and I do have the keys. But my business and reputation is staked on not snooping, that's WHY I have customers.
They ARE using encryption. That's how the blackberries work in 'enterprise' mode.
Its end to end encryption from the device to the enterprise messaging infrastructure. The encryption is essentially implemented and managed by the enterprise IT people not RIM, that's why rim has no 'access'; RIM just helps transport the data from device to enterprise and back, and designed their device and software to support enterprises that wanted to implement encryption.
The only real problem I have with this is your apathy for innocents being imprisoned.
Its not apathy. Its recognition of how society works. Innocent people are imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit all the time. Some are even executed for them.
We need to introduce as and devise as many safeguards as we can to prevent this, and I'm personally against the death penalty as one of those safeguards against the ultimate miscarriage of justice. But we can't stop passing laws simply because innocent people will be imprisoned. That's idealistic, but impractical.
Even murder comes down to 12 people guessing what was in the defendants head. Its only murder if he intended to kill. If he didn't intend to, it might be manslaughter... or even a completely faultless accident. Shall we repeal the laws against murder too? Simply because it comes down to guessing the defandants thoughts?
This is a serious problem as it allows the judge/jury to basically guess what the defendant was thinking when viewing the images, making it a thought crime.
No different than a "judge/jury basically guessing what [a murder] defendant was thinking when he [killed]".
Was it self defense? Was he afraid for his life? Was he provoked to an insane rage? Did he know the victim was even there behind the the target poster when he put six rounds into it? Or did he plan this out weeks in advance?
The only thing that separates first degree murder from second degree murder from manslaughter to a tragic but faultless accident is what the judge/jury guesses about what the defendant was thinking.
Just killing someone isn't a crime.
Killing someone on purpose with malice aforethought is among the most serious of crimes. Deliberately Killing someone in the heat of moment slightly less so.
Killing someone without meaning to when it was completely avoidable further less so.
Killing someone entirely by accident that you could not have reasonably have foreseen or prevented or in self defense when your life was immediately threatened... its not even a crime anymore.
So, is 'Murder' a thought crime too?
Of course not, you have to THINK about killing somene AND do it.
And ssimilarly, here: you have to THINK about getting images of child porn, AND get images of children for that purpose.
So here the judge alone, guided by the prosecution it sounds like, decided the photos were child porn even if no one sane would consider them that way, AND that even established guidelines (Dost factors) wouldn't consider them that way.
Innocent people end up in jail convicted of murder too.
I'm not saying its acceptable. I'm saying that its not unique to 'child porn', or any other crime.
To be honest it sounds more like the only people who found the photos arousing were the judge and prosecution, and yet this child psychiatrist ended up in jail.
Did the child psychiatrist find them arousing? You say the judge/jury has to guess. And guess they did. Did they have evidence he found them arousing? How do you know they guessed wrong? The fact that he was child psychiatrist would weight against him further if he WAS using them for that purpose.
The real issue you have here seems to me not to be a question of whether he WAS using what we would find to be otherwise innoccuous pictures of children like pornography for the purposes of arousal, but whether or not THAT should be illegal. Frankly I'm not sure I think it -should- be.
But at the same time, I'm not comfortable with a man who:
a) fantasizes about children (although there is nothing I can do about this.)
b) takes pictures of them for that purpose (regardless of whether or not I'd find them lewd myself)
c) chooses a profession that sets him up as an authority figure in close contact with children
And to jump straight to Godwin, there was a time when Germany felt that way about the Jews. And I think we know how good an idea that was.
My history isn't as good as it should be, but my understanding is that Hitler gamed the election system heavily to obtain the head of state and rapidly dissolved any real democracy as soon as he was in control, well before the majority of offensive laws were passed against the jews. ie... it wasn't tyranny of the majority, it was the tyranny of hitler coupled with the apathy of the majority.
The lesson here: just because the majority think something should be outlawed, doesn't mean it should.
The lesson there? When democracy is dissolved into a dictatorship, bad things can happen. Or perhaps its a lesson on the evil of apathy in otherwise good people.
This would be why we have a judicial system: to prevent the tyranny of the majority that you're willing to so tacitly accept.
Sort of. But it doesn't matter what should or shouldn't be outlawed. On any issue which the great majority agree there is no stopping them.
A judicial system can't prevent the tyranny of the majority if the majority is big enough. It can only prevent the tyranny of a small majority. Think about it.
Suppose the supreme court of the united states made a ruling that the great majority strongly disagreed with. What recourse do the people have?
If the majority is great enough, the the consitution itself can be amended, the supreme court can be dissolved and then reformed from scratch, and the unpopular rulings can be nullified.
The odds getting that kind of support for your average issue is extremely low. But if you ever 'stir up the beast' there is no stopping it. Consider that only ~70% of the people were on the side of the American Revolution -- that was enough to gain the momentum to declare independence, and fight a war to form a new government from scratch.
American's generally think of it as heroic.
But at the same time, we can look at it from the loyalists point of view, those that were happy and comfortable with British rule. What would we call what happened to them? Tyranny of the majority sounds about right. The local government and judicial systems that protected them were dissolved out from under them; even the military, the force behind the 'legitimate' government, was defeated.
Can you imagine how hollow your reassurances that a judicial system would prevent tyranny of the majority would seem to them. The 'majority' simply and literally dissolved the government itself in order to get its way, and that wasn't even a democracy, it would have been much easier if it was.
Bottom line, any governmental system can be upended if enough people want to. Dictatorships etc may put up a fight, if the ones in charge are the ones being upended. But a democracy, by its design will bend to the will of the great majority, regardless of how unjust it might be. With enough people 'on board' the constitution and the rules for changing it can be rewritten to say what ever they want it to say. If this wasn't possible, you probably don't have a democracy in the first place.
sqrt function only returns one value
:)
Evidently I was using the 'multi-valued square root relation', not the single-valued 'principal square root function'.
Nearly all southpaws I know have their mice set to right-handed use, I only know one person who has hers set to left-handed. I find it almost unusable.
When you say have their mice set to "right handed use", what do you actually mean?
1) They have their mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard and use it right handed with their right hand. e.g. they might as well be right handed.
2) They have their mouse on the left side of the keyboard, use it with their left hand, but have the buttons setup 'normally'.
3) They have their mouse on the left side of the keyboard, use it with their left hand, and have the buttons 'reversed', so that the 'left mouse button is context-menu' and the 'right mouse button' is 'select'.
I am a '#2'. This comes from years of living with RH people and sharing mice. While I prefer to operate it with my LH on the left side of the keyboard, its AWAYS configured for RH use. This is how most LH people I know operate.
Most of us can also cope fine with using it with our right hand if it's not convenient to move it. (e.g. someone elses workstation.)
I am as hopeless with a mouse configured with the buttons 'reversed' as most RHers.
When I buy a mouse I look for an ergonomic design that's comfortable in either hand, and I favor wireless mice because its that much easier for the user to put it on whichever side of the keyboard they are most comfortable.
I personally don't care that there aren't many ergo-left designs available. I generally favor ambi-mice because half my family is RH.
I -do- find it frustrating that there are very few higher end mice with an ambidextrous design.
Putting a left hand onto an ergo-right mouse is just uncomfortable, regardless how the buttons might be programmed.
As for the military, the M9 pistol is basically ambidextrous on major controls. The M4 carbine is semi-auto, so shooting left handed isn't that big of a deal, except for the charging lever.
My understanding was that the biggest issue with left handed shooting of right handed weapons was the shell casings. On a rifle, the casings eject right across your face. Pistols would be a similiar issue, with the casings ejecting towards the shooters body.
Every program on your screen and your OS was written in C/C++
I wish.
These days half the stuff people use is written in a vomit inducing stack of generated bastardized html with VisualBasic, C#, or PHP on the backend doing the heavy lifting (which is itself running on C/C++ interpreters/VMs/CLI/whatever) and Javascript gluing it all together.
And people wonder why even the best 'AJAX' apps suck.
The whole "intent to arouse" thing is troublesome, to say the least.
Why is the 'perpetrators' intentions troublesome? Surely its obvious that it bears on the degree of the crime, and whether a crime was even comitted.
Surely you can agree there is a difference between a man forgetting to turn off the stove and burning down his home killing his family... and a man plotting to set a fire, burn down his house and killing his family?
Surely the former deserves sympathy, while the latter deserves to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
One, how do you discern intent and,
Same way intent is always determined. You look for evidence. You present the evidence. And a jury decides. Its not perfect. And criminals often go free, and sometimes innocent people are convicted. But that's life in an imperfect world.
How else would you have it?
two, arouse who? The average person, or someone who happens to have a very specific fetish?
Why would it matter WHO. If the intent was to arouse someone, then its intent was to arouse someone. If the intent was not to arouse someone, but someone got aroused anyway, then it still not intent to arouse.
And, as we all know too well, anything that even slightly reeks of "protect the children" insures that common sense and logic will quickly be cast aside....
1) If society as a whole finds something so distasteful that they want to purge it completely, why is it illogical that they would pass laws forbidding computer generated depictions of it? Why shouldn't they?
2) What is the benefit to society of allowing or even legally protecting computer generated child porn? If society near universally doesn't want it, and considers the extreme minority that does want it to be sick and in need of help at best and a perverted deviant criminal at worst...
At the end of the day there is no escaping the tyranny of the majority...if almost everybody agrees on something, then society will do it. There's no stopping that. There's no point in trying to stop it.
If you want to change this, you'll have to change the way society thinks. Slavery wasn't abolished because it was illogical and common sense... it took time and effort to convince enough people to think of them as people, that racism and slavery were wrong. Good luck doing that for child porn though; as even the most open minded people generally think its beyond distasteful. They might see the validity of an argument for computer generated child porn not hurting anyone... but that's a long way from getting their support -- they are hardly going to march in protest of the child pornographers rights, to protect them from injustice. We'll fully legalize drugs, prostitution, gambling, and gay marriage long before we'll legalize any form of child porn.
There's just virtually no support for it.
So let it be banned, there's no stopping it, and no real point to trying to legalize it anyway.
But be vigilant against politicians milking it for their own gain, or to slip other legislation through. We can't stop anti-child-porn legislation from passing, have little reason to stop it from passing... but we should be vigilant that we aren't passing anti-child-porn legislation that really has nothing to do with child-porn. Letting customs seize and search laptops for child-porn for example, is NOT about child-porn at all... its about letting customs seize and search everyone's laptops for whatever they want.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
;)
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; sqrt(1^2) = sqrt((-1)^2); {1,-1} = {1,- 1}
there fixed that for you
There are some things in this world us lefties just have to learn to do right handed. Fire a rifle would be another one.
Actually, while there aren't any worthwhile ergo left mice, there is a reasonable selection of ambi-mice available. I use a Razer Copperhead myself and find it very comfortable. I've also used some the upper tier microsoft mice and found them alright, until they stopped putting detents in the wheel.
As for rifles... they do make plenty of left handed rifles, but learning to shoot right-handed would probably be a valuable skill, simply because you may have to use the equipment at hand, which will probably be right handed. I learned to golf RH for the same reason - my Dad wouldn't buy a set of left handed clubs to so I could hack around as a kid.
How does the military account for handedness? Or is everybody just right handed, (like everybody is straight)?