Actually, surprisingly in my experience the FCC is one of the few government bodies that actually DOES care what the consumer thinks and wants. But there's a catch, they don't go looking for those opinions, they wait for the opinions to come to them. Which is why they do little for the tech crowd, we're more likely to complain here on/. than to actually write the FCC over an issue. Unlike when someone flashes a nipple on TV and every over sensitive group in the US promptly WRITES to complain.
But the FCC takes a surprisingly harsh stance towards any companies that cause enough annoyance to get people writing them. After all, they'd rather NOT have to do any useful work with their time, and written letters cause them to.;)
So if you have an opinion that even vaguely falls within the FCC's realm. Then write it to them and write it to them often.
Well, I'd hardly call it any more of a nightmare than it is now. And indeed, such a thing, as I said would be complicated. Who owed how much on what portions would obviously have to be detailed out in such a patent reform. Same as to prevent such things as spinning off companies to sell at a loss... though again, that's why it'd be on the gross, not the net. i.e. I sell my sister company the widget for $5, it wouldn't matter that it cost me $10 to make, the gross would still be $5 (even if the net is -$5), so the royalties would come out of that $5, not the -$5 that is left.
Either way, it's a moot point, a forced cap on what a patent would be worth would be a great reform. The actual implementation of such though would be quite complicated. Just as the current patent system is already quite complicated. An ideal system would put patent lawyers out of business (Sorry to any out there!;) but such a system would also always entirely be theoretical. There's too many ins and outs, especially when dealing with corporations vs. individuals and visa-versa to ever have a true ideal system. So the idea instead would be to make the system "better" than it is now.
Deciding on what the "better" would be though is almost as complicated as defining the laws surrounding any kind of patent system in the first place. Which I'd say is probably why we've yet to get any true patent law reform. It's a tangled mess of laws and anything we change it for is likely to simply be a different tangled mess of laws. Which means any reform, no matter the system is unlikely to happen quickly.
Meanwhile, as a small business owner, I'm just happy whenever anyway puts forth a theoretical solution to the issue and more than content to try and follow the train of thought through to a conclusion on how it would work out for me.
Well reading the description, making it a percentage would fix that anyway. A component for a cheap item would cost less because the profit/gross/whatever is less. While the component for the very expensive item would cost more for the royalties.
The real key would be weather the patent royalties percentage is based on an amount that took into account the other royalties being paid or not. If say it was %20 (which is probably very high for some such thing) then it'd be really easy for someone building, say a MRI machine, to infringe enough patents (just five needed!) to mean whoever builds the machine not only is paying out all their profit from the machine to patent holder, but would STILL owe others.
So it'd probably need to be more complicated of a formula than a straight percentage. Something more like %5 (max, free to negotiate with the patent holder for less), of say %80 of the gross on a sale. Leaving a profit for all involved. And on very complicated items (even like a car), it should probably be calculated per component. Because it's very easy for something like a car, or computer, or MRI machine to have hundreds of patented components. But you could probably calculate it based per component that would be replaceable on the cost of replacing the single component.
As complicated as it would get, it would basically solve the software patent issue in regards to open source software. Since it's being given away, no profit, no royalties owed on patents. And it'd put the patent system back firmly where it belongs, manufacturing inventions.
While I don't know how useful the 1394 port is for building home based DVRs, it's still a legal requirement (from what I understand, I'm not a lawyer) for the cable companies to provide. And you CAN complain to the FCC if they won't provide a box with a working port. And by all means, if they won't provide it, complain! The cable companies (and phone companies) really don't like people complaining to the FCC, and the FCC in my experience from days gone by where I worked for a cable company, takes complaints seriously. Assert your rights!
Actually, this is very unreasonable. They do NOT need to know anything about me to provide me the news. And this may surprise Murdoch, but the very idea of paying for a subscription and then having ads in the product I receive is one of the major reasons that I do not purchase or subscribe to any of their papers or magazines. They need to pick a business model, but can't have their cake and eat it too. Either it's free to me and the advertisers pay, or I'll pay and any advertising can shove it.
And the fact that their industry can't make people like Murdoch even -richer- unless they do subscriptions AND advertising, just goes to show that their industry is a moronic model. If we're lucky more people will wake up to that fact and let them, just like the RIAA, MPAA, and any other industry that thinks it has a absolute right to customers, die and be replaced my more modern industries that can fill those voids with business models that actually work in modern times.
You know, it didn't sound like they were trying to imply the cop was dumb. But that the legal system itself isn't able to redirect these kinds of reported crimes to the proper people within. Such as this, where for a domain name theft, they sent a officer, to the door of a house. Obviously that would be his first question, because he was the incorrect layer of law enforcement to even have responded to such a report, not because he was dumb. Now on the flip side, they probably shouldn't have been calling local police over it in the first place, but instead probably (and this is my guess, I may very well be incorrect myself) the FBI. But that's more the point, depending on the "crime" one may have to contact any of a number of different places and it's not all that clear, I think even to law enforcement professionals, let alone those -not- in law enforcement, on who to contact for what.
The thing is, it's hard to get worked up over something that is most likely user error. I mean even 100 out of 175 million is so miniscule...
And man, I've seen some dirt dumb users try to do the most ridiculous things with high tech equipment...
Sorry, I'd have to guess that even if it burst into flame at a later point, it had something to do with the user trying to bend it, or poke it with a screwdriver, or whatnot. If it was a true issue with the battery, which wouldn't surprise me as battery manufactures seem to have horrible QA these days (Just look at the Sony battery fiasco, which did hit Apple as well), then I would expect in a given run, much higher failure rates.
Actually it was a complete waste to ever stick him in prison. As others have said, let him loose, tax the hell out of him, garnish his wages, and make him pay what he owed. But sitting in prison has simply cost the tax payers money, prevented him from paying his owed debt by working, and potentially collecting the money he "hid". The judge was a fool in this case and accomplished nothing.
In fact this is a good example of why it's stupid to ever stick someone in prison because they owe money to someone else. It's far better to keep them out of prison, make sure they're working, and then collect the money owed. In fact, what are the odds that instead, they could have let him go, watched his bank transactions for a bit, then frozen his accounts and paid his debts? If he really did still have access to the money.
By saying that I don't mean that they have to be "state of the art photorealistic 3d" or any such thing. The graphics must have a good artistic style to them, and be consistent visually with the rest of the game itself.
My experience is that while gameplay is equally important, the best game gameplay wise won't keep me playing without "good" graphics. Just as fantastic graphics won't keep one playing if the gameplay sucks, and that doesn't mean say, nethack doesn't have good graphics, the ascii map is exactly what the game needs to be fun. So it's plenty good enough. On the other side I've seen games with the most fantastic modern up-to-date 3d engines, that are so barren and boring visually that who cares that the engine is good, who can even tell, the graphics are crap.
Just for sake of argument, one could instead say that any software that requires multiple buttons on a mouse to use, is a complete failure in user interface design. A huge amount of times where things require a right click, double click, shift-control-pray-to-the-gods-and-click-button-7, are not a failure of the hardware design, but a failure of the software. A great example of this is World of Warcraft requiring you to press both the left and right mouse buttons for certain actions (like moving forward while flying/swimming/etc). Now you can map these actions to keys, but not quite as effectively as performing the motion with a mouse. At the same time, the need to have multiple button pressed at all is simply pointless, and nothing that couldn't have been simply replaced with click-and-hold a single button on the background.
Now while I personally appreciate that multi button mice work out of the box with Macs, I have yet to see a program that uses multiple button mice that didn't give me the distinct impression of laziness on the part of the software designers. The real gain in multiple button mice should be allowing the user to assign what the other buttons do to maximize their efficiency with their software. But most users aren't able to do that anyway because the software designers have already decided what the other buttons should be doing, so all the gains the user should have from the extra buttons are lost.
That's of course up to perspective. I've been an avid console player my entire life, and have owned most of them (remember the Atari Lynx? yeah, that one too). But when the Dreamcast came out I waited quite awhile before buying one, about midway through it's life. Why? None of the games at launch made me care at all. Perhaps that's one of the real problems the Dreamcast had, despite the vocal, the majority of gamers just weren't finding that much to play on it.
And the PS2 kind of proves Nintendo's point doesn't it? It was where the fun ended up, so did the players. Dreamcast was indeed much better hardware, but the reality is any suggestion that it's game library was better is simply myth. It had a few gems, but that was it. Anyway, just a differing opinion:)
Thing is, I remember when it was first announced thinking that if it gave AOL access to Time Warner's content it was a great idea. But the thing is, it never really did. In the end none of Time Warner's companies ever really put their content out there (Standard MPAA/RIAA fears) and so AOL never got any content out of it. So while the merger had potential, neither side took any advantage of it at all. Now AOL is just a ISP basically, and Time Warner is still just another content provider trying to cling to the old ways while they figure out what this Internet thing is.
Back when it first launched, like so many others, my wife and I gave AoC a try. When we canceled our accounts about a week later we gave them a whole list of very simple technical issues that the game had that made it basically impossible to play. Things like, getting to close to a wall and your character would "hook" on the wall and get stuck. Or the complete inability to switch characters without logging all the way out.
All these companies trying to compete with Blizzard are missing the one thing Blizzard has done well. Refinements. Oh WoW as a game isn't perfect, but what it is, is imminently playable (in a UI perspective) from the moment you open it up.
Actually, the immediate parent has hit the nail on the head for my family as well. We have a blu-ray player (ps3) and we -do- buy movies on the format. But unlike DVD where I did make an effort to replace most of our VHS tapes with DVDs (after all, we bought them on VHS because we liked the movies), we aren't going to any effort to replace our existing DVD collection with Blu-ray (Well actually, there are a few films we've been happy to re-buy such as the new Blade Runner releases, and LotR if it ever gets out).
So when we do pay the extra cost for the Blu-ray it's always films that we actually feel will benefit from the quality (Epic Fantasy, sci-fi, action, CG), but simpler films (Comedies need hi-def, why?) we tend to just pick up the DVD.
Figures the one time I don't have mod points is the one time I see a post by someone who obviously didn't read the actual links. Lithium batteries are NOT "now illegal to carry". There's just some rules being put in place for when they can be in checked baggage or must be carried on, and how they must be stored. Looking at the actual page on the subject, it looks like they went to great lengths to make sure it won't directly impact most travelers with regards to the batteries people tend to travel with. On that note I see nothing anywhere suggesting that this has anything to do with terrorism. And as you say if it's "to reduce the possibility of a lithium battery shorting out" then they can be in their shipping packages and be "no more dangerous than many other items that you can carry on planes". Which is exactly what they suggest for storing spare batteries.
I'm all for government conspiracy theories and thinking most of this stuff is completely idiotic. But nothing is going to improve if we go around making grossly inaccurate statements about what a rule actually is.
Back in the day I remember always being told that a single hash function was never secure for verifying information... and that for security you should use two -different- algorithms or more. Simply because an attacker can manipulate the data to collide in a single function, it's that much more difficult to manipulate the data to collide in two entirely different hash spaces.
Did this concept change over the years, or is it just me? heh
Actually, I always assumed in the Mac OS X case, that the reason we haven't hit 11.0 is simply because of the old ideas of version numbering. It's not a -major- OS version bump, unless it breaks binary compatibility completely. So we'll continue with 10.x's until binary compatibility is entirely broken. At which point we'll finally get Mac OS XI... or Mac OS Macaw, or whatever animal they decide to switch to after cats;)
I enjoyed it too. One mistake I think -Sony- made with the film was having pushed it in the trailers as an CGI action film. Since the trailers didn't portray the film properly to American audiences, I think it left a lot of early goers to the film uninterested. It just wasn't what they came expecting.
It's a Work at Will state. Not only can an employer let you go for any (legal) reason at anytime with no particular notice (Again, there's catches to that for employers), but employees can quit for any reason whatsoever at any time with no notice. The two weeks notice is being polite and respectable, but as per the law isn't required. Of course individual contracts you've signed could change that slightly, but that'd depend on what you've signed.
Well, while I expect Apple to not really "care" and probably support both at some level or other eventually. You can see the Apple backs Blu-Ray in the easiest way possible. They're a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association and have a seat on it's board. http://www.blu-raydisc.com/
Meanwhile they aren't a member of the HD-DVD associated companies. Or if they are they're not interested in having their name mentioned anywhere on official materials.
The thing is. It IS true. Parents need to start taking responsibility for the children they have. And the government needs to not be passing laws designed to "make up" for parents who don't take responsibility, instead perhaps they should be holding parents responsible along with the children for their actions.
Say what you will about parents being too busy, but I was raised by my Mom, who worked >40 hours a week (IT staff) my entire childhood. She also was always aware of what I was up to and took her role as parent very seriously. She knew what I was watching, she knew who I was spending time with, she knew what games I'd bought and was playing (because she made sure she was the one that bought them). She also did something that I see lacking from most parents these days, including families where one parent IS home with the children... she COMMUNICATED with me. She made sure to keep the dialog open at all times and to listen to what I was saying too.
Meanwhile the friends I had with the most screwed up childhoods? One parent was always home, parents still married, parents completely self absorbed and ignoring their kids. Go figure.
I've yet to find a game (or series) that freaks me out as much as the Project Zero games. I mean, Silent Hill? Resident Evil? I have WEAPONS! Project Zero... a camera, a bloody old camera with no film.
And that insane ability for them to put dolls everywhere that don't move... then there's that one that catches your eye, but doesn't move... until you finally put the camera away and decide it's just another doll.
2. Right to Win Not sure on this one, unless he means arcade-style games that don't have an end. Perhaps he's referring to games which have a bug that prevents finishing, none of which I've had the misfortune to encounter yet.
---- I haven't seen this happen in many recent games, but I also haven't picked up many games in recent years that even have a "win" state. But one I remember very well was the original Defender of the Crown game, at least on the Mac, maybe not the other versions. No matter how well you did, how much you conquered, or how big your armies became, you couldn't change "history". At a point in the game you'd just always run into an army more massive and powerful than yours. Which left you no chance to succeed in conquering England. While this lent the game a bit of historical accuracy... it was still a game, not a historical battle simulation, and had implied that you could potentially "win".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, surprisingly in my experience the FCC is one of the few government bodies that actually DOES care what the consumer thinks and wants. But there's a catch, they don't go looking for those opinions, they wait for the opinions to come to them. Which is why they do little for the tech crowd, we're more likely to complain here on /. than to actually write the FCC over an issue. Unlike when someone flashes a nipple on TV and every over sensitive group in the US promptly WRITES to complain.
But the FCC takes a surprisingly harsh stance towards any companies that cause enough annoyance to get people writing them. After all, they'd rather NOT have to do any useful work with their time, and written letters cause them to. ;)
So if you have an opinion that even vaguely falls within the FCC's realm. Then write it to them and write it to them often.
Well, I'd hardly call it any more of a nightmare than it is now. And indeed, such a thing, as I said would be complicated. Who owed how much on what portions would obviously have to be detailed out in such a patent reform. Same as to prevent such things as spinning off companies to sell at a loss... though again, that's why it'd be on the gross, not the net. i.e. I sell my sister company the widget for $5, it wouldn't matter that it cost me $10 to make, the gross would still be $5 (even if the net is -$5), so the royalties would come out of that $5, not the -$5 that is left.
Either way, it's a moot point, a forced cap on what a patent would be worth would be a great reform. The actual implementation of such though would be quite complicated. Just as the current patent system is already quite complicated. An ideal system would put patent lawyers out of business (Sorry to any out there!;) but such a system would also always entirely be theoretical. There's too many ins and outs, especially when dealing with corporations vs. individuals and visa-versa to ever have a true ideal system. So the idea instead would be to make the system "better" than it is now.
Deciding on what the "better" would be though is almost as complicated as defining the laws surrounding any kind of patent system in the first place. Which I'd say is probably why we've yet to get any true patent law reform. It's a tangled mess of laws and anything we change it for is likely to simply be a different tangled mess of laws. Which means any reform, no matter the system is unlikely to happen quickly.
Meanwhile, as a small business owner, I'm just happy whenever anyway puts forth a theoretical solution to the issue and more than content to try and follow the train of thought through to a conclusion on how it would work out for me.
Well reading the description, making it a percentage would fix that anyway. A component for a cheap item would cost less because the profit/gross/whatever is less. While the component for the very expensive item would cost more for the royalties.
The real key would be weather the patent royalties percentage is based on an amount that took into account the other royalties being paid or not. If say it was %20 (which is probably very high for some such thing) then it'd be really easy for someone building, say a MRI machine, to infringe enough patents (just five needed!) to mean whoever builds the machine not only is paying out all their profit from the machine to patent holder, but would STILL owe others.
So it'd probably need to be more complicated of a formula than a straight percentage. Something more like %5 (max, free to negotiate with the patent holder for less), of say %80 of the gross on a sale. Leaving a profit for all involved. And on very complicated items (even like a car), it should probably be calculated per component. Because it's very easy for something like a car, or computer, or MRI machine to have hundreds of patented components. But you could probably calculate it based per component that would be replaceable on the cost of replacing the single component.
As complicated as it would get, it would basically solve the software patent issue in regards to open source software. Since it's being given away, no profit, no royalties owed on patents. And it'd put the patent system back firmly where it belongs, manufacturing inventions.
How does this effect the FCC requirement for 1394 ports to be made available?
http://www.1394ta.org/consumers/FCC_complaint.html
While I don't know how useful the 1394 port is for building home based DVRs, it's still a legal requirement (from what I understand, I'm not a lawyer) for the cable companies to provide. And you CAN complain to the FCC if they won't provide a box with a working port. And by all means, if they won't provide it, complain! The cable companies (and phone companies) really don't like people complaining to the FCC, and the FCC in my experience from days gone by where I worked for a cable company, takes complaints seriously. Assert your rights!
Actually, this is very unreasonable. They do NOT need to know anything about me to provide me the news. And this may surprise Murdoch, but the very idea of paying for a subscription and then having ads in the product I receive is one of the major reasons that I do not purchase or subscribe to any of their papers or magazines. They need to pick a business model, but can't have their cake and eat it too. Either it's free to me and the advertisers pay, or I'll pay and any advertising can shove it.
And the fact that their industry can't make people like Murdoch even -richer- unless they do subscriptions AND advertising, just goes to show that their industry is a moronic model. If we're lucky more people will wake up to that fact and let them, just like the RIAA, MPAA, and any other industry that thinks it has a absolute right to customers, die and be replaced my more modern industries that can fill those voids with business models that actually work in modern times.
You know, it didn't sound like they were trying to imply the cop was dumb. But that the legal system itself isn't able to redirect these kinds of reported crimes to the proper people within. Such as this, where for a domain name theft, they sent a officer, to the door of a house. Obviously that would be his first question, because he was the incorrect layer of law enforcement to even have responded to such a report, not because he was dumb. Now on the flip side, they probably shouldn't have been calling local police over it in the first place, but instead probably (and this is my guess, I may very well be incorrect myself) the FBI. But that's more the point, depending on the "crime" one may have to contact any of a number of different places and it's not all that clear, I think even to law enforcement professionals, let alone those -not- in law enforcement, on who to contact for what.
Indeed, in fact, from my understanding of things (IANAL) the DMCA specifically includes exemptions for interoperability purposes..
The thing is, it's hard to get worked up over something that is most likely user error. I mean even 100 out of 175 million is so miniscule...
And man, I've seen some dirt dumb users try to do the most ridiculous things with high tech equipment...
Sorry, I'd have to guess that even if it burst into flame at a later point, it had something to do with the user trying to bend it, or poke it with a screwdriver, or whatnot. If it was a true issue with the battery, which wouldn't surprise me as battery manufactures seem to have horrible QA these days (Just look at the Sony battery fiasco, which did hit Apple as well), then I would expect in a given run, much higher failure rates.
Actually it was a complete waste to ever stick him in prison. As others have said, let him loose, tax the hell out of him, garnish his wages, and make him pay what he owed. But sitting in prison has simply cost the tax payers money, prevented him from paying his owed debt by working, and potentially collecting the money he "hid". The judge was a fool in this case and accomplished nothing.
In fact this is a good example of why it's stupid to ever stick someone in prison because they owe money to someone else. It's far better to keep them out of prison, make sure they're working, and then collect the money owed. In fact, what are the odds that instead, they could have let him go, watched his bank transactions for a bit, then frozen his accounts and paid his debts? If he really did still have access to the money.
By saying that I don't mean that they have to be "state of the art photorealistic 3d" or any such thing. The graphics must have a good artistic style to them, and be consistent visually with the rest of the game itself.
My experience is that while gameplay is equally important, the best game gameplay wise won't keep me playing without "good" graphics. Just as fantastic graphics won't keep one playing if the gameplay sucks, and that doesn't mean say, nethack doesn't have good graphics, the ascii map is exactly what the game needs to be fun. So it's plenty good enough. On the other side I've seen games with the most fantastic modern up-to-date 3d engines, that are so barren and boring visually that who cares that the engine is good, who can even tell, the graphics are crap.
Just for sake of argument, one could instead say that any software that requires multiple buttons on a mouse to use, is a complete failure in user interface design. A huge amount of times where things require a right click, double click, shift-control-pray-to-the-gods-and-click-button-7, are not a failure of the hardware design, but a failure of the software. A great example of this is World of Warcraft requiring you to press both the left and right mouse buttons for certain actions (like moving forward while flying/swimming/etc). Now you can map these actions to keys, but not quite as effectively as performing the motion with a mouse. At the same time, the need to have multiple button pressed at all is simply pointless, and nothing that couldn't have been simply replaced with click-and-hold a single button on the background.
Now while I personally appreciate that multi button mice work out of the box with Macs, I have yet to see a program that uses multiple button mice that didn't give me the distinct impression of laziness on the part of the software designers. The real gain in multiple button mice should be allowing the user to assign what the other buttons do to maximize their efficiency with their software. But most users aren't able to do that anyway because the software designers have already decided what the other buttons should be doing, so all the gains the user should have from the extra buttons are lost.
That's of course up to perspective. I've been an avid console player my entire life, and have owned most of them (remember the Atari Lynx? yeah, that one too). But when the Dreamcast came out I waited quite awhile before buying one, about midway through it's life. Why? None of the games at launch made me care at all. Perhaps that's one of the real problems the Dreamcast had, despite the vocal, the majority of gamers just weren't finding that much to play on it.
And the PS2 kind of proves Nintendo's point doesn't it? It was where the fun ended up, so did the players. Dreamcast was indeed much better hardware, but the reality is any suggestion that it's game library was better is simply myth. It had a few gems, but that was it. Anyway, just a differing opinion :)
Thing is, I remember when it was first announced thinking that if it gave AOL access to Time Warner's content it was a great idea. But the thing is, it never really did. In the end none of Time Warner's companies ever really put their content out there (Standard MPAA/RIAA fears) and so AOL never got any content out of it. So while the merger had potential, neither side took any advantage of it at all. Now AOL is just a ISP basically, and Time Warner is still just another content provider trying to cling to the old ways while they figure out what this Internet thing is.
Apparently it does matter, and these were obviously very poorly designed if three of them straight up broke.
Back when it first launched, like so many others, my wife and I gave AoC a try. When we canceled our accounts about a week later we gave them a whole list of very simple technical issues that the game had that made it basically impossible to play. Things like, getting to close to a wall and your character would "hook" on the wall and get stuck. Or the complete inability to switch characters without logging all the way out.
All these companies trying to compete with Blizzard are missing the one thing Blizzard has done well. Refinements. Oh WoW as a game isn't perfect, but what it is, is imminently playable (in a UI perspective) from the moment you open it up.
Actually, the immediate parent has hit the nail on the head for my family as well. We have a blu-ray player (ps3) and we -do- buy movies on the format. But unlike DVD where I did make an effort to replace most of our VHS tapes with DVDs (after all, we bought them on VHS because we liked the movies), we aren't going to any effort to replace our existing DVD collection with Blu-ray (Well actually, there are a few films we've been happy to re-buy such as the new Blade Runner releases, and LotR if it ever gets out).
So when we do pay the extra cost for the Blu-ray it's always films that we actually feel will benefit from the quality (Epic Fantasy, sci-fi, action, CG), but simpler films (Comedies need hi-def, why?) we tend to just pick up the DVD.
Figures the one time I don't have mod points is the one time I see a post by someone who obviously didn't read the actual links. Lithium batteries are NOT "now illegal to carry". There's just some rules being put in place for when they can be in checked baggage or must be carried on, and how they must be stored. Looking at the actual page on the subject, it looks like they went to great lengths to make sure it won't directly impact most travelers with regards to the batteries people tend to travel with. On that note I see nothing anywhere suggesting that this has anything to do with terrorism. And as you say if it's "to reduce the possibility of a lithium battery shorting out" then they can be in their shipping packages and be "no more dangerous than many other items that you can carry on planes". Which is exactly what they suggest for storing spare batteries.
I'm all for government conspiracy theories and thinking most of this stuff is completely idiotic. But nothing is going to improve if we go around making grossly inaccurate statements about what a rule actually is.
Back in the day I remember always being told that a single hash function was never secure for verifying information... and that for security you should use two -different- algorithms or more. Simply because an attacker can manipulate the data to collide in a single function, it's that much more difficult to manipulate the data to collide in two entirely different hash spaces.
Did this concept change over the years, or is it just me? heh
Actually, I always assumed in the Mac OS X case, that the reason we haven't hit 11.0 is simply because of the old ideas of version numbering. It's not a -major- OS version bump, unless it breaks binary compatibility completely. So we'll continue with 10.x's until binary compatibility is entirely broken. At which point we'll finally get Mac OS XI... or Mac OS Macaw, or whatever animal they decide to switch to after cats ;)
I enjoyed it too. One mistake I think -Sony- made with the film was having pushed it in the trailers as an CGI action film. Since the trailers didn't portray the film properly to American audiences, I think it left a lot of early goers to the film uninterested. It just wasn't what they came expecting.
It's a Work at Will state. Not only can an employer let you go for any (legal) reason at anytime with no particular notice (Again, there's catches to that for employers), but employees can quit for any reason whatsoever at any time with no notice. The two weeks notice is being polite and respectable, but as per the law isn't required. Of course individual contracts you've signed could change that slightly, but that'd depend on what you've signed.
Well, while I expect Apple to not really "care" and probably support both at some level or other eventually. You can see the Apple backs Blu-Ray in the easiest way possible. They're a member of the Blu-ray Disc Association and have a seat on it's board. http://www.blu-raydisc.com/
Meanwhile they aren't a member of the HD-DVD associated companies. Or if they are they're not interested in having their name mentioned anywhere on official materials.
The thing is. It IS true. Parents need to start taking responsibility for the children they have. And the government needs to not be passing laws designed to "make up" for parents who don't take responsibility, instead perhaps they should be holding parents responsible along with the children for their actions.
Say what you will about parents being too busy, but I was raised by my Mom, who worked >40 hours a week (IT staff) my entire childhood. She also was always aware of what I was up to and took her role as parent very seriously. She knew what I was watching, she knew who I was spending time with, she knew what games I'd bought and was playing (because she made sure she was the one that bought them). She also did something that I see lacking from most parents these days, including families where one parent IS home with the children... she COMMUNICATED with me. She made sure to keep the dialog open at all times and to listen to what I was saying too.
Meanwhile the friends I had with the most screwed up childhoods? One parent was always home, parents still married, parents completely self absorbed and ignoring their kids. Go figure.
I've yet to find a game (or series) that freaks me out as much as the Project Zero games.
I mean, Silent Hill? Resident Evil? I have WEAPONS! Project Zero... a camera, a bloody old camera with no film.
And that insane ability for them to put dolls everywhere that don't move...
then there's that one that catches your eye, but doesn't move...
until you finally put the camera away and decide it's just another doll.
2. Right to Win
Not sure on this one, unless he means arcade-style games that don't have an end. Perhaps he's referring to games which have a bug that prevents finishing, none of which I've had the misfortune to encounter yet.
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I haven't seen this happen in many recent games, but I also haven't picked up many games in recent years that even have a "win" state. But one I remember very well was the original Defender of the Crown game, at least on the Mac, maybe not the other versions. No matter how well you did, how much you conquered, or how big your armies became, you couldn't change "history". At a point in the game you'd just always run into an army more massive and powerful than yours. Which left you no chance to succeed in conquering England. While this lent the game a bit of historical accuracy... it was still a game, not a historical battle simulation, and had implied that you could potentially "win".