Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It looks like it already supports the binary plugins, it's just extensions that aren't supported. When I installed Chrome it automatically imported all my Firefox plugins, including my VLC plugin.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
There site says the Linux version, and presumably the OS X version are in development and should be released soon. They probably should have released at least the Linux and Windows versions simultaneously considering their target market, but oh well.
If all evidence points against you, even if you're innocent, you're likely to confess to get a lower sentence. IMO, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to the inquisition, where people would confess having sex with the devil in order to get off with less (in that case only an execution, instead of days of torture followed by execution.)
He got the sentence lowered because he was able to convince them he was guilty of a lesser crime. If you read TFA, the reduced sentence was contingent on the body not showing signs of a pre-meditated murder (that is first degree murder) which was what he was found guilty of. He produced the body, which matched his confession that he killed her in a fit of rage (I.E. Second degree murder), as such, he was sentenced to 15-to-life, the penalty for second degree murder, as opposed to 25-to-life, the sentence for first degree murder.
Also, in your example of the inquisition, they weren't confessing to get a reduced sentence, they were confessing to stop being tortured. Part of the reason the inquisition was so terrible was that the accused was already guilty in the eyes of the "court" (or what passed for one) and as such it was assumed that if they didn't immediately confess the crime, that they were hiding it and needed to be tortured to get them to confess. Despite it's flaws, the modern court system at least assumes that the defendant is innocent, and it's up to the prosecution to produce sufficient evidence to show that the defendant is guilty. Sure, they can plead guilty early on in the hopes that this will be taken as a sign of their repentance for their crime, or that they'll be found guilty of a lesser crime (that is, they want to make it seem more likely they committed a lesser crime than they're accused), but they're still being sentenced based on the crime the evidence shows they committed.
As someone who owns too human, and has spent a decent amount of time playing it, I have to say it's a solid game, but not as great as it could have been. The game play is entertaining, and the story is pretty good, even if it is really short (it's got 5 levels total, even if each one is divided into several different sub-sections and does take a hour or so to complete). I think the combat system was done pretty well, and certainly offers a lot of flexibility in terms of play style. Combat also has a very fast paced and, sort of action packed, feel to it, with bullets and bodies flying everywhere.
Now, for the points that fell short. First, is of course the already mentioned shortness of the game. It's replayable of course, and if you want to reach maximum level you'll definitely need to play through it at least 3 times, but for all that you're still looking at more or less the same 5 levels over and over again. Secondly, and I think this is the biggest problem, is that multiplayer falls short in several places. I was looking forward to this to tide me over till Diablo 3 came out, and hoping for a similar experience to the old Diablo 1/2 LAN games with several people running dungeons together. Instead, I find that it's limited to 2 players when having 4 or 5 shouldn't have been too much of a stretch. The other major failure in multiplayer is the limited class differentiation. Yes there are multiple classes, and yes they have different skills and areas of expertise, but they all feel like the exact same character with very minor differences, the sort of difference that having one set of equipment versus another set might make in another RPG. The healer has a very very minor heal over time ability, the tank class has slightly improved armor, the long range combat specialist has a slight bonus to gun damage, but for all that you can really play any of them exactly like the others. I think that's a shame because it means that instead of creating teamwork in multiplayer you instead feel like a tag team match, where it doesn't matter so much who does what, as that both of you just get in there and kill whatever happens to be closest to you.
Tell them no and strike a blow for Net Neutrality!
M
That's not net neutrality, do you even know what that means? They're not running an ISP, they're just trying to provide access to a handful of websites for free.
Russian Business Network, or RBN, just happens to be one of the largest mafia run botnets/spam organizations. Seeing as the mafia more or less runs the government over there, it's a semi-legal (as in, no one's going to realistically prosecute them) business that operates a massive for-hire botnet. It's not the only one over there, but it is the biggest and most visible one, so a lot of russian botnet activity just gets labeled as RBN.
Something has been resolved, not changed. It's one of the flaws with out legal system (a great many legal systems actually), that until a law has been brought to court (often many times), and all the edges cases get ironed out, there's a lot of wiggle room in exactly what the law "means" and whether it applies in this or that case. All this ruling has done is nailed down one of those edge cases, in copyright law.
Two things. First, as mentioned by a previous post, the biggest difference between a human brain and a computer, is that the human brain is inherently massively parallel, where as the computer is inherently serial (but we can fake it with multiple CPUs). Now, you can always put more cores in the computer to try to increase parallel processing, but then the programming complexity goes up massively, and we're still getting the hang of how to properly utilize parallel processing (as opposed to the old fashioned serial processing which has been studied to death, and is on pretty strong mathematic foundations at this point). Secondly the human brain, near as we have been able to determine is at it's core a pattern matching and extrapolation based system. We're naturally good at picking out patterns from the chaos (sometimes too good, which is when we see patterns that don't really exist), and making, shall we call them educated guesses based on those patterns. For computers we have several good algorithms for finding patterns in particular domains, but we don't have generalized ones that will work at anything you throw at them, but even that's barking up the wrong tree so to speak. The reason humans must rely on pattern matching and extrapolation is because even though our brains are massively parallel, they're also massively sloppy, and very limited in computing power. Quite simply, we lack the processing capability to do a proper in depth analysis of most situations, so we create a simplified abstraction and work from that. A computer on the other hand, has massive computing power, and is incredibly exact, but lacking somewhat on the parallel processing front, so it makes perfect sense to take a Monte Carlo approach in those conditions.
Remember, this isn't a true AI we're talking about, if that was the goal, yes a pattern matching, abstraction and extrapolation based system closer to a human brain would be appropriate, but what we have here is a case of machine learning within a specialized domain. The boundaries of the system are well defined, even if the content is not, and as such taking a generic approach is wasteful.
Friend of mine had a copy of Command and Conquer (Red Alert I think, it was the cold war themed one) explode inside his 52x DVD drive. He had left the game in the drive overnight with the mission paused, so it was spinning the whole night (or at least until it exploded). After looking it over, and looking at his other disks, we suspect that because of the way the case he was storing it in put pressure on the inside of the disk (the hole the spindle would normally rest in) it caused some fine cracks to form, then under the strain of the high RPM those became weak points that caused the disk to fail. Even at 52x, if the disk has structural weaknesses it can fail, and of course even at slower speeds if the damage is bad enough.
Because you can't. It still requires some very specific hardware to run OS X, in particular the motherboard has to support the next generation of BIOS (who's name escapes me at the moment), otherwise OS X won't boot, hacked up drivers or not. There's lot of guides out there that will walk you through building a custom PC and installing OS X on it, as well as point you to where you need to get the custom drivers and how to slipstream them into the OS X install. All Psystar did was to package all that so that you don't have to go looking for some specific brand of motherboard. Incidentally, finding out if the motherboard will work with OS X is the hardest part of the whole process because support for those features isn't really important to anyone but someone trying to run OS X on it. Pystar hasn't done anything that several others haven't done before, they're just commercializing the process.
So, I guess the answer is, because it's simpler to just buy the hardware from Psystar. The software side of things hasn't been a problem for a long time now.
You know, it occurs to me that this whole thing really hinges on the modifications done to the OS X install image to get the thing to boot. They could bypass the entire problem by taking the BartPE approach and simply bundling a program with the computers (say make it a Linux program and just ship a ultra-stripped down copy of linux installed with the app) that when you provide a copy of a OS X install disk it slipstreams the changes required to get it to install on their hardware and burns it to a new disk. That pushes the EULA violation down to the end user and requires them to get a copy of OS X from Apple. That also nicely eliminates any copyright infringement argument (ignoring the legality of the end user violating that particular clause of the EULA which may or may not be enforceable).
Sure it wouldn't be as nice and user friendly as a pre-installed image, but at least it would be unquestionably legal (at least from the manufacturers standpoint).
Better version of the steak/restaurant example would be:
I own a restaurant that sells 4 things. First I sell plates. They have my logo, and they're very nice, but it's still basically a plate. They're also three times the price of any other plates on the market. Secondly I sell steak. Printed on the packaging the steaks come in is a notice that by opening the package you agree to my license to eat the steak, and that as part of that license you agree to eat my steaks on one of my official plates, and only my official plates. Third, I sell a combo pack with 1 steak and 1 plate, but the packaging still bears the same license as for the steak by itself. Lastly I sell a combo platter with the steak, the plate, and some fries.
Now, someone comes along and says "There's nothing special about those plates, why should people have to buy expensive plates just to eat this guys steak?" and so they buy a bunch of steak from me, package it with their own plates, and sell it for a fraction of the cost (because they use cheap plates and don't pay a license fee to me to plaster my logo all over it). The fries are irrelevant as they have no special license attached to them.
That more accurately captures the spirit of this case I think.
Now, licences agreed as part of an ongoing service; as part of an online game for example, are indeed valid as long as they are agreed as part of the subscription.
FYI, this is part of the reason why Blizzard requires people to agree to the WoW EULA after every patch, that way they can change the EULA at any time they put a patch out and anyone still playing after the patch has agreed to the new EULA explicitly.
I don't know if the EULA has ever actually changed or not, as after the first couple times I mostly just skim it, but even if someone violated the EULA all that would happen is their account would be canceled and banned, they'd still have a valid license to the software. Not that a license to the software without an account actually gets you anything.
Yes, not all alarms are created equal, but even considering your alarm that only goes off when it's supposed to, the utility of it is somewhat ruined by all the "bad" alarms that go off for no reason at all (because people will be inclined to ignore all alarms, good or not).
As for the thief taking their time, it's less about not wishing to inconvenience themselves as it is them wishing to draw as little attention as possible. Taking the 30 seconds it requires to pick a lock and then another minute or so to extract a radio is probably considered a fair trade by most over the noise and attention smashing a window and yanking a radio out would cause. Of course all that goes out the window if you've got an alarm blaring as you're already drawing attention and whats smashing a window going to really add? There's also the off chance that they actually do feel a little guilty about what they're doing and that reducing the inconvenience to you is sort of the least they could do. In my case when I had a stereo stolen a couple years back the cops told me I got lucky that the thief pulled the plugs out, that in a number of cases (they hit a couple dozen cars in this area that night) they simply cut the wires just behind the jacks rather than take the time to unplug them.
Everything has "value" even if it's only in the raw materials the item is made out of. The question people really mean when they talk about value is if the value of the item in question is significantly greater than the cost of the item to the point that it justifies the investment.
As for car alarms, they have the value of reducing your insurance under some providers, as well as potentially deterring inept thieves, although considering that the biggest danger with most cars is not car thieves but people stealing the car stereos or the car contents which a alarm will only be a very minor deterrence to, perhaps this isn't much of an advantage. On the negative side of things they tend to go off a lot for no apparent reason, they annoy the crap out of you and everyone that's anywhere near you, and there's a pretty good chance that if some twitchy teenager was thinking about ripping off your car they'll just settle for trashing it instead. It could also potentially work against you in the case of someone stealing a car stereo because they'll be less likely to take their time and try to reduce excess damage to the car and instead go for the most expedient smash and grab they can.
how is that in the summary exactly? ... the summary didn't say anything at all about stealing his identity being legal. It's that he's being sued for essentially selling a product he knows is snake oil. The only reason identity theft is even an issue here is because that's what his service is supposed to prevent against (and demonstrably doesn't).
The commercials imply that they'd be the ones making the calls for you, but if I'm reading the details of the lawsuit correctly that's not the case and is part of what they're being sued over. Apparently they only cover you if there's a flaw in their service, which since it's really just a front for the credit reporting agencies own service doesn't seem very likely. Apparently the fine print on this thing deviates drastically from the spoken guarantee of "If you're identity is stolen we'll reimburse you with our one million dollar guarantee".
You do however make an excellent point which is that in addition to ruined credit, the time it takes to simply sort the whole thing out is a major issue with identity theft. Something that it seems this service implies that it helps with, but which it actually doesn't.
No one ever said it was legal to steal his identity. I'd suggest you re-read TFA (or perhaps read it for the first time). Actually you don't even need to do that, read the summary again.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like it already supports the binary plugins, it's just extensions that aren't supported. When I installed Chrome it automatically imported all my Firefox plugins, including my VLC plugin.
There site says the Linux version, and presumably the OS X version are in development and should be released soon. They probably should have released at least the Linux and Windows versions simultaneously considering their target market, but oh well.
If all evidence points against you, even if you're innocent, you're likely to confess to get a lower sentence. IMO, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to the inquisition, where people would confess having sex with the devil in order to get off with less (in that case only an execution, instead of days of torture followed by execution.)
He got the sentence lowered because he was able to convince them he was guilty of a lesser crime. If you read TFA, the reduced sentence was contingent on the body not showing signs of a pre-meditated murder (that is first degree murder) which was what he was found guilty of. He produced the body, which matched his confession that he killed her in a fit of rage (I.E. Second degree murder), as such, he was sentenced to 15-to-life, the penalty for second degree murder, as opposed to 25-to-life, the sentence for first degree murder.
Also, in your example of the inquisition, they weren't confessing to get a reduced sentence, they were confessing to stop being tortured. Part of the reason the inquisition was so terrible was that the accused was already guilty in the eyes of the "court" (or what passed for one) and as such it was assumed that if they didn't immediately confess the crime, that they were hiding it and needed to be tortured to get them to confess. Despite it's flaws, the modern court system at least assumes that the defendant is innocent, and it's up to the prosecution to produce sufficient evidence to show that the defendant is guilty. Sure, they can plead guilty early on in the hopes that this will be taken as a sign of their repentance for their crime, or that they'll be found guilty of a lesser crime (that is, they want to make it seem more likely they committed a lesser crime than they're accused), but they're still being sentenced based on the crime the evidence shows they committed.
You could write it off as a business expense?
As someone who owns too human, and has spent a decent amount of time playing it, I have to say it's a solid game, but not as great as it could have been. The game play is entertaining, and the story is pretty good, even if it is really short (it's got 5 levels total, even if each one is divided into several different sub-sections and does take a hour or so to complete). I think the combat system was done pretty well, and certainly offers a lot of flexibility in terms of play style. Combat also has a very fast paced and, sort of action packed, feel to it, with bullets and bodies flying everywhere.
Now, for the points that fell short. First, is of course the already mentioned shortness of the game. It's replayable of course, and if you want to reach maximum level you'll definitely need to play through it at least 3 times, but for all that you're still looking at more or less the same 5 levels over and over again. Secondly, and I think this is the biggest problem, is that multiplayer falls short in several places. I was looking forward to this to tide me over till Diablo 3 came out, and hoping for a similar experience to the old Diablo 1/2 LAN games with several people running dungeons together. Instead, I find that it's limited to 2 players when having 4 or 5 shouldn't have been too much of a stretch. The other major failure in multiplayer is the limited class differentiation. Yes there are multiple classes, and yes they have different skills and areas of expertise, but they all feel like the exact same character with very minor differences, the sort of difference that having one set of equipment versus another set might make in another RPG. The healer has a very very minor heal over time ability, the tank class has slightly improved armor, the long range combat specialist has a slight bonus to gun damage, but for all that you can really play any of them exactly like the others. I think that's a shame because it means that instead of creating teamwork in multiplayer you instead feel like a tag team match, where it doesn't matter so much who does what, as that both of you just get in there and kill whatever happens to be closest to you.
Tell them no and strike a blow for Net Neutrality!
M
That's not net neutrality, do you even know what that means? They're not running an ISP, they're just trying to provide access to a handful of websites for free.
Russian Business Network, or RBN, just happens to be one of the largest mafia run botnets/spam organizations. Seeing as the mafia more or less runs the government over there, it's a semi-legal (as in, no one's going to realistically prosecute them) business that operates a massive for-hire botnet. It's not the only one over there, but it is the biggest and most visible one, so a lot of russian botnet activity just gets labeled as RBN.
I do the same thing. Far more secure, as it's essentially a "backup" password.
Something has been resolved, not changed. It's one of the flaws with out legal system (a great many legal systems actually), that until a law has been brought to court (often many times), and all the edges cases get ironed out, there's a lot of wiggle room in exactly what the law "means" and whether it applies in this or that case. All this ruling has done is nailed down one of those edge cases, in copyright law.
Two things. First, as mentioned by a previous post, the biggest difference between a human brain and a computer, is that the human brain is inherently massively parallel, where as the computer is inherently serial (but we can fake it with multiple CPUs). Now, you can always put more cores in the computer to try to increase parallel processing, but then the programming complexity goes up massively, and we're still getting the hang of how to properly utilize parallel processing (as opposed to the old fashioned serial processing which has been studied to death, and is on pretty strong mathematic foundations at this point). Secondly the human brain, near as we have been able to determine is at it's core a pattern matching and extrapolation based system. We're naturally good at picking out patterns from the chaos (sometimes too good, which is when we see patterns that don't really exist), and making, shall we call them educated guesses based on those patterns. For computers we have several good algorithms for finding patterns in particular domains, but we don't have generalized ones that will work at anything you throw at them, but even that's barking up the wrong tree so to speak. The reason humans must rely on pattern matching and extrapolation is because even though our brains are massively parallel, they're also massively sloppy, and very limited in computing power. Quite simply, we lack the processing capability to do a proper in depth analysis of most situations, so we create a simplified abstraction and work from that. A computer on the other hand, has massive computing power, and is incredibly exact, but lacking somewhat on the parallel processing front, so it makes perfect sense to take a Monte Carlo approach in those conditions.
Remember, this isn't a true AI we're talking about, if that was the goal, yes a pattern matching, abstraction and extrapolation based system closer to a human brain would be appropriate, but what we have here is a case of machine learning within a specialized domain. The boundaries of the system are well defined, even if the content is not, and as such taking a generic approach is wasteful.
Seems to be rather widespread usage already according to this wikipedia article.
There are always spots on fine silver that do NOT tarnish, even when all the silver around them has turned totally black. What's with that??
My guess would be some sort of contaminate layer preventing the silver from oxidizing, most likely the oils from your skin. Just a guess though.
Friend of mine had a copy of Command and Conquer (Red Alert I think, it was the cold war themed one) explode inside his 52x DVD drive. He had left the game in the drive overnight with the mission paused, so it was spinning the whole night (or at least until it exploded). After looking it over, and looking at his other disks, we suspect that because of the way the case he was storing it in put pressure on the inside of the disk (the hole the spindle would normally rest in) it caused some fine cracks to form, then under the strain of the high RPM those became weak points that caused the disk to fail. Even at 52x, if the disk has structural weaknesses it can fail, and of course even at slower speeds if the damage is bad enough.
Because you can't. It still requires some very specific hardware to run OS X, in particular the motherboard has to support the next generation of BIOS (who's name escapes me at the moment), otherwise OS X won't boot, hacked up drivers or not. There's lot of guides out there that will walk you through building a custom PC and installing OS X on it, as well as point you to where you need to get the custom drivers and how to slipstream them into the OS X install. All Psystar did was to package all that so that you don't have to go looking for some specific brand of motherboard. Incidentally, finding out if the motherboard will work with OS X is the hardest part of the whole process because support for those features isn't really important to anyone but someone trying to run OS X on it. Pystar hasn't done anything that several others haven't done before, they're just commercializing the process.
So, I guess the answer is, because it's simpler to just buy the hardware from Psystar. The software side of things hasn't been a problem for a long time now.
You know, it occurs to me that this whole thing really hinges on the modifications done to the OS X install image to get the thing to boot. They could bypass the entire problem by taking the BartPE approach and simply bundling a program with the computers (say make it a Linux program and just ship a ultra-stripped down copy of linux installed with the app) that when you provide a copy of a OS X install disk it slipstreams the changes required to get it to install on their hardware and burns it to a new disk. That pushes the EULA violation down to the end user and requires them to get a copy of OS X from Apple. That also nicely eliminates any copyright infringement argument (ignoring the legality of the end user violating that particular clause of the EULA which may or may not be enforceable).
Sure it wouldn't be as nice and user friendly as a pre-installed image, but at least it would be unquestionably legal (at least from the manufacturers standpoint).
Better version of the steak/restaurant example would be:
I own a restaurant that sells 4 things. First I sell plates. They have my logo, and they're very nice, but it's still basically a plate. They're also three times the price of any other plates on the market. Secondly I sell steak. Printed on the packaging the steaks come in is a notice that by opening the package you agree to my license to eat the steak, and that as part of that license you agree to eat my steaks on one of my official plates, and only my official plates. Third, I sell a combo pack with 1 steak and 1 plate, but the packaging still bears the same license as for the steak by itself. Lastly I sell a combo platter with the steak, the plate, and some fries.
Now, someone comes along and says "There's nothing special about those plates, why should people have to buy expensive plates just to eat this guys steak?" and so they buy a bunch of steak from me, package it with their own plates, and sell it for a fraction of the cost (because they use cheap plates and don't pay a license fee to me to plaster my logo all over it). The fries are irrelevant as they have no special license attached to them.
That more accurately captures the spirit of this case I think.
Now, licences agreed as part of an ongoing service; as part of an online game for example, are indeed valid as long as they are agreed as part of the subscription.
FYI, this is part of the reason why Blizzard requires people to agree to the WoW EULA after every patch, that way they can change the EULA at any time they put a patch out and anyone still playing after the patch has agreed to the new EULA explicitly. I don't know if the EULA has ever actually changed or not, as after the first couple times I mostly just skim it, but even if someone violated the EULA all that would happen is their account would be canceled and banned, they'd still have a valid license to the software. Not that a license to the software without an account actually gets you anything.
So then MS would be innovative
I guess if you consider large wads of cash, lawyers, and ham-handed media blitzes to be technology.
Yes, not all alarms are created equal, but even considering your alarm that only goes off when it's supposed to, the utility of it is somewhat ruined by all the "bad" alarms that go off for no reason at all (because people will be inclined to ignore all alarms, good or not).
As for the thief taking their time, it's less about not wishing to inconvenience themselves as it is them wishing to draw as little attention as possible. Taking the 30 seconds it requires to pick a lock and then another minute or so to extract a radio is probably considered a fair trade by most over the noise and attention smashing a window and yanking a radio out would cause. Of course all that goes out the window if you've got an alarm blaring as you're already drawing attention and whats smashing a window going to really add? There's also the off chance that they actually do feel a little guilty about what they're doing and that reducing the inconvenience to you is sort of the least they could do. In my case when I had a stereo stolen a couple years back the cops told me I got lucky that the thief pulled the plugs out, that in a number of cases (they hit a couple dozen cars in this area that night) they simply cut the wires just behind the jacks rather than take the time to unplug them.
Everything has "value" even if it's only in the raw materials the item is made out of. The question people really mean when they talk about value is if the value of the item in question is significantly greater than the cost of the item to the point that it justifies the investment.
As for car alarms, they have the value of reducing your insurance under some providers, as well as potentially deterring inept thieves, although considering that the biggest danger with most cars is not car thieves but people stealing the car stereos or the car contents which a alarm will only be a very minor deterrence to, perhaps this isn't much of an advantage. On the negative side of things they tend to go off a lot for no apparent reason, they annoy the crap out of you and everyone that's anywhere near you, and there's a pretty good chance that if some twitchy teenager was thinking about ripping off your car they'll just settle for trashing it instead. It could also potentially work against you in the case of someone stealing a car stereo because they'll be less likely to take their time and try to reduce excess damage to the car and instead go for the most expedient smash and grab they can.
The commercials imply that they'd be the ones making the calls for you, but if I'm reading the details of the lawsuit correctly that's not the case and is part of what they're being sued over. Apparently they only cover you if there's a flaw in their service, which since it's really just a front for the credit reporting agencies own service doesn't seem very likely. Apparently the fine print on this thing deviates drastically from the spoken guarantee of "If you're identity is stolen we'll reimburse you with our one million dollar guarantee".
You do however make an excellent point which is that in addition to ruined credit, the time it takes to simply sort the whole thing out is a major issue with identity theft. Something that it seems this service implies that it helps with, but which it actually doesn't.
I can't decide if this is someone trolling, a clever personal attack (utilizing /. to do your dirty work), or a genuine moron.
No one ever said it was legal to steal his identity. I'd suggest you re-read TFA (or perhaps read it for the first time). Actually you don't even need to do that, read the summary again.