1) They see the future as Software as Service -- a place Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo!, are in many ways eitehr ahead of them or more competitive than they'd like, despite Microsoft having worked very hard to leverage its OS and browser dominance into dominance in that area.
2) Google, in particular, is working particularly hard to undermine Microsoft's browser dominance (promoting Firefox) and is leveraging its search dominance to promote its own standard software stack, which could eventually give it an advantage similar to Microsoft's OS dominance in terms of controlling user expectations and experience.
3) If browser/OS agnostic web apps become more important, the relevance of the OS dominance that has been the base of every Microsoft strategy since the 1980s will fade, forcing Microsoft to compete somewhere else. They want to delay this as long as possible, and be able to dominate the new emerging central front the way they have the OS market. So they have to compete here, to maintain their status at the top of the heap.
Saying that anti-virus is vital piece of protection on platform that hasn't yet seen any serious viruses IS spreading FUD.
I'd disagree with that generality. If there is a good reason to think the platform is vulnerable but merely hasn't been exploited yet, that claim is not FUD, its sensible, proactive security.
Note that I am not making any statement about the specific claims about OS X, merely stating that the general statement you are making here is overstated.
Most Mac users are not tech-savvy... many claim to be, but believe me they are not.:) There are, though, some real tech-savvy mac users, but they're in the minority.
Tech-savvy users of any consumer OS are, always have been, and always will be the minority. Wheter Mac users are more tech-savvy than PC users is a matter of degree, not a matter of the trend being reversed.
I suspect that it is the case that Mac users are at least a little more tech-savvy, overall, than PC users, if only because Pcs are so dominant that they are pretty much the default choice of the average buyer, and for the most part there is generally a glimmer of comparative featre awareness that goes into finding a reason to reject that default; especially given that most people can find a usable Wintel box with similar sticker specs for less money than a Mac, and it takes some tech savvy to know why those numbers might not tell the whole story.
When a college kid gets caught hooking up with a highschool girl who snuck into his fraternity party, he gets charged for the action of statutory rape -- regardless of what he thought at the time.
There is mens rea here; the required mental state, though, is fairly minimal, but if the action was, e.g., genuinely non-volitional (highly unlikely), its not punishable. That there doesn't have to be specific intent on all elements does not mean there is no mens rea -- mens rea has never been limited to specific intent.
When old men show up at the house of a "teenager" for sex when it was really a cop on the other computer, they're charged with the intent to commit statutory rape.
No, they are charged with the attempt to commit statutory rape, or doing a particular act with the intent to commit statutory rape, either of which requires a concrete act along with the intent. Intent alone is not prosecutable, in fact as well as in theory.
The system is supposed to function so that BOTH parts need to be commited for you to be guilty of a crime. But as you can see, it doesn't work that way.
Both of the offenses you point to have both actus reus and mens rea elements.
The "parent more" argument is a useful tool for people with agendas, but it has no logical stopping point.
I disagree, it has very logical stopping points.
Why should the state have battery laws?
Because battery is an actual offense against a specific person, not a crime designed to prevent a specific class of people ("children") from coming into contact with people or material which might harm them.
Shouldn't parents teach their kids how to avoid fights?
Yes, they should. And children shouldn't be prohibited from communicating with other people because they might therefore get into fights. But battery laws are needed to prohibit actual unconsented physical harm to people (children or not.)
This line of argument isn't to suggest that children don't need special protections that don't apply to others (i.e., against actual sexual contact which would not be abusive if the target was a consenting adult), but it does mean the prospect that some unsupervised or poorly raised child might get into trouble should not, in general, be the basis for general social prohibitions.
The law cannot create a bubble around everyone until they turn 18, and if it could, those overprotected 18 year olds wouldn't be ready for the responsibilities of adulthood, anyway. Parents need to, where appropriate, raise, teach, guide, and supervise their children, and the government making broad prohibitions or bullying private actors into broad limits on general service will not effectively protect children, it will just give parents a false, momentary sense of security and, when it fails because it failed to anticipate a particular venue where an unsupervised children were vulnerable, someone else to blame.
Sure, it would kill the site. So? Like politicians care. They're busy scoring cheap political points by proposing largely symbolic "solutions" to exploit the rage and powerlessness people feel over the exploitation of children.
Hardly stopped the US Congress from trying to do that for "adult" sites on the internet to combat porn -- IIRC, in at least two different bills that were struck down as unconstitutional.
Certainly not going to stop politicians from pressuring private sites from doing it "voluntarily" to "protect the children."
What I find funny about these stories and the obligatory "parents need to not suck!" argument is that it assumes that all parents have the same technical ability that we do.
No special technical ability is required to supervise children.
Risus is an excellent minimalist game, but you're going to have to dispute that all of my specific counters are not simpler than GURPS?
No, I'm not going to have to dispute them, I'm pointing out that the issue is subjective and that I disagree with your assessment. I'm most emphatically not going to argue about each of them.
Though, as an example, I emphatically agree with the factual part of your description of Theatrix but would suggest that resorting to subjective story-based determination for everything takes the load of the game designers back and places it squarely on the GMs, but is neither "simple" nor "clear" as I would use the term, especially from a GM's perspective. (In fact, its pretty much the default rule most GMs I've ever known have used in practice, looking to the susbtantive game rules in products to simplify or clarify such decisions when that "rule" didn't clearly, to them, compel one particular outcome.)
You're not familure with SJGame's Online police, and the "Powered by GURPS" Divistions 8) Powered By GURPS allows other publishers to use the GURPS rules for their settings, with only a small restristion of a finial edtorial pass by SJGames before publishing. PbG settings inled Prime Directive and Hellboy
Yeah, I am familiar with PbG. PbG is a conventional licensing arrangement, nothing like open source. (And Hellboy isn't third-party, even though its PbG: its an SJG in-house project, just like Transhuman Space [also PbG]. Prime Directive and GURPS: Conspiracy X are third-party PbG products, though.)
If I'm going to dump much of my existing app library (games are particularly ill-behaved, but hardly the only pre-Vista apps that are) to upgrade to Vista, why wouldn't I stay with XP and/or "upgrade" to Linux or OS X?
So people fill out their age as 18 instead of 14. So what? It says in the article snippet right there that someone was going after a 13-year-old, and that's below the current minimum age. What are they going to do, force people to use credit cards to verify their age?
Probably; that's usually what's implied by "Age Verification".
"Playability" is of course a completely subjective virtue, so I won't try to dispute you there since it's pointless to argue about a subjective opinion.
Simplicity and clarity are subjective, too, and you had not problem debating them.
(and I disagree with all your specific counters, though I think that Risus beats GURPS for simplicity, and some forms of clarity, though not realism.
Objectively, though, any time your game relies on a grid of some sort with facing, turning, and movement rigidly defined, you've already lost the battle for simplicity.
This is both subjective, rather than objective, and irrelevant to GURPS which, while it has a tactical combat system which relies on a grid, can be run without it, and indeed the system is not present in GURPS Light, the free ("like beer") basic introductory version available as a PDF download. (Though certainly, in one sense, having multiple plug-and-play options, which GURPS clearly does have, is a strike against simplicity.)
GURPS would be Linux (or maybe *BSD) D&D would be Windows Warhammer would be a Mac
Well, except that D&D is the one with a core available under an "open" license inspired, in part, by the GPL, whereas GURPS and Warhammer and both "closed".
There aren't really good analogies; the P&P RPG market isn't much like the OS market (though maybe its like what the OS retaining enormous marketshare dominance, was bought out by a dominant player in an faster-growing, overlapping market [Google, maybe?] who then released most of the operating system under a open-source license but kept some critical parts proprietary; or maybe its not like that, either.)
The Pope is Catholic, Water is Wet, and...
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Boot Camp is really just a plan to get Windows users to convert to OS X.
Well, obviously (that, and to prevent Mac users from switching to Windows.) I mean, that's not even like a secret plan. Its fairly overt, if not spelled out in so many letters.
Next you are going to tell me that OOo's support for MSOffice formats is just a plan to get MSOffice users to switch to OOo.
Oh, BTW, how would you like your job title to be "senior director for monetization." Is "monetization" even a word?
Yes, it refers to a government printing or coining money, especially as a means of paying off its debt. (For debt repayment, this is a bad and destabilizing thing, and one of the things "independent" central banks were created to avoid.)
In the context of the Microsoft job title, it sounds like someone was looking for something that it sound like it had to do with making money by selling ads in existing products and services, didn't like "Advertising Sales", thought "commercialization" was too clear, typed "monetization" into Word and didn't get a spelling error and assumed that since it sounded to them like it meant what it was supposed to mean, and it apparently was actually a word, it was the word they were looking for.
Or, maybe, its a clue that Microsoft sees the opportunity to sell advertising space -- even in already-commercial products -- as a "license to print money".
...on all kinds of trade- and commerce-related matters governed by treaties like this, negotiated through the UN framework, because most major players realize that having consistent rules (which the powerful interested players have all had a hand in writing) is to their advantage.
On security matters, yeah, it gets ignored a lot.
Well, as long as I only have a 512/256 kbps net connection, why would I need anything faster than 802.11b?
If you've got more than one computer on your LAN, and you ever communicate between them, then more speed on the LAN is good whatever the speed on your upstream link to the rest of the network. If you've just got one computer, and you use 802.11foo simply as a way to avoid running cable (maybe you've got a laptop you want to move around the house with without hassle), then the extra speed isn't much good.
Clearly, you get more benefit from fast LAN speed if you've also got fast upstream speed.
Every game maker should add a disclaimer similar to the one used for online play:
"Game experience may vary when used in conjunction with third-party products which alter game functionality. Third-party content and experience resulting from modification are not rated by the ESRB."
(Of course, if parents really cared to control what their children were experiencing, they would install the games for them, using privileged accounts to which their children didn't have passwords, on an operating system whose security features weren't easily evaded, and their children wouldn't have the permissions to alter any of the game files in the first place. But since repeated surveys (and not just in the US) show consistently that parents don't actually pay much attention to what their children are playing, and don't effectively limit what they purchase or play by rating anyway, that probably doesn't matter. The ratings and videogame makers are, largely, just something else to blame for the effects of parental neglect.)
Not until the treaty is actually written, signed, and ratified by actual governments.
But the US making particular proposals is a sign that the US administration wants those to be in a final treaty that it wants to sign and get ratified.
That's not really, IMO, the relevant difference. If, e.g., Google had a monopoly OS and used it to promote Firefox (or bundled Firefox with it) then, even if it didn't own Firefox, if it paid or otherwise arranged to have its search default, most of the same monopoly based objections would apply.
Content ratings make sense if they are based on the accessible content of the game-as-provided, and I guess there is some sense to including "locked out" content, though if you start rating based on what "what content could be experienced if you hack the game yourself and/or install additional third-party software that modifies the content", everything that comes out is going to be rated AO in a few years.
I am also aware that users are "admin" by default, and can write to "Applications" and numerous other directories without a sudo login, which is the only access required for a trojan. This is unlike almost every other Unix setup and seems to be overlooked by all you smarty-pants Mac users.
This "makes sense" from a business perspective because its an inconvenience for most users to have to deal with the alternative (after several years of using only Windows -- yeah, yeah, its Slashdot so pile on the derision for that -- I've recently, after trying out a few Linux LiveCDs/DVDs, installed Kubuntu on my home desktop and started using it for just about everything, and with the default setup there you can't write pretty much anywhere but/home/ without sudo which is good, but takes quite a bit of getting used to, and forces you -- since somethings you'll want to do don't have a nice GUI option that lets you do the equivalent of sudo, though some do -- break the GUI paradigm and drop to the command-line.)
But its something of an undesirable feature from a security perspective. Better integration of sudo-like functionality (jumping to "administration mode" on a per-use basis) in the GUI would seem to be a better solution than leaving so much open to normal (even admin-privileged) user accounts for "silent access".
Slashdot Mirror
1) They see the future as Software as Service -- a place Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo!, are in many ways eitehr ahead of them or more competitive than they'd like, despite Microsoft having worked very hard to leverage its OS and browser dominance into dominance in that area. 2) Google, in particular, is working particularly hard to undermine Microsoft's browser dominance (promoting Firefox) and is leveraging its search dominance to promote its own standard software stack, which could eventually give it an advantage similar to Microsoft's OS dominance in terms of controlling user expectations and experience. 3) If browser/OS agnostic web apps become more important, the relevance of the OS dominance that has been the base of every Microsoft strategy since the 1980s will fade, forcing Microsoft to compete somewhere else. They want to delay this as long as possible, and be able to dominate the new emerging central front the way they have the OS market. So they have to compete here, to maintain their status at the top of the heap.
I'd disagree with that generality. If there is a good reason to think the platform is vulnerable but merely hasn't been exploited yet, that claim is not FUD, its sensible, proactive security.
Note that I am not making any statement about the specific claims about OS X, merely stating that the general statement you are making here is overstated.
Tech-savvy users of any consumer OS are, always have been, and always will be the minority. Wheter Mac users are more tech-savvy than PC users is a matter of degree, not a matter of the trend being reversed.
I suspect that it is the case that Mac users are at least a little more tech-savvy, overall, than PC users, if only because Pcs are so dominant that they are pretty much the default choice of the average buyer, and for the most part there is generally a glimmer of comparative featre awareness that goes into finding a reason to reject that default; especially given that most people can find a usable Wintel box with similar sticker specs for less money than a Mac, and it takes some tech savvy to know why those numbers might not tell the whole story.
Sure, it would kill the site. So? Like politicians care. They're busy scoring cheap political points by proposing largely symbolic "solutions" to exploit the rage and powerlessness people feel over the exploitation of children.
Hardly stopped the US Congress from trying to do that for "adult" sites on the internet to combat porn -- IIRC, in at least two different bills that were struck down as unconstitutional.
Certainly not going to stop politicians from pressuring private sites from doing it "voluntarily" to "protect the children."
They probably mean some kind of more serious age verification, likely relying on a credit card or something similar.
Well, except that D&D is the one with a core available under an "open" license inspired, in part, by the GPL, whereas GURPS and Warhammer and both "closed".
There aren't really good analogies; the P&P RPG market isn't much like the OS market (though maybe its like what the OS retaining enormous marketshare dominance, was bought out by a dominant player in an faster-growing, overlapping market [Google, maybe?] who then released most of the operating system under a open-source license but kept some critical parts proprietary; or maybe its not like that, either.)
Yes, it refers to a government printing or coining money, especially as a means of paying off its debt. (For debt repayment, this is a bad and destabilizing thing, and one of the things "independent" central banks were created to avoid.)
In the context of the Microsoft job title, it sounds like someone was looking for something that it sound like it had to do with making money by selling ads in existing products and services, didn't like "Advertising Sales", thought "commercialization" was too clear, typed "monetization" into Word and didn't get a spelling error and assumed that since it sounded to them like it meant what it was supposed to mean, and it apparently was actually a word, it was the word they were looking for.
Or, maybe, its a clue that Microsoft sees the opportunity to sell advertising space -- even in already-commercial products -- as a "license to print money".
...on all kinds of trade- and commerce-related matters governed by treaties like this, negotiated through the UN framework, because most major players realize that having consistent rules (which the powerful interested players have all had a hand in writing) is to their advantage. On security matters, yeah, it gets ignored a lot.
If you've got more than one computer on your LAN, and you ever communicate between them, then more speed on the LAN is good whatever the speed on your upstream link to the rest of the network. If you've just got one computer, and you use 802.11foo simply as a way to avoid running cable (maybe you've got a laptop you want to move around the house with without hassle), then the extra speed isn't much good.
Clearly, you get more benefit from fast LAN speed if you've also got fast upstream speed.
Every game maker should add a disclaimer similar to the one used for online play:
"Game experience may vary when used in conjunction with third-party products which alter game functionality. Third-party content and experience resulting from modification are not rated by the ESRB."
(Of course, if parents really cared to control what their children were experiencing, they would install the games for them, using privileged accounts to which their children didn't have passwords, on an operating system whose security features weren't easily evaded, and their children wouldn't have the permissions to alter any of the game files in the first place. But since repeated surveys (and not just in the US) show consistently that parents don't actually pay much attention to what their children are playing, and don't effectively limit what they purchase or play by rating anyway, that probably doesn't matter. The ratings and videogame makers are, largely, just something else to blame for the effects of parental neglect.)
Not until the treaty is actually written, signed, and ratified by actual governments. But the US making particular proposals is a sign that the US administration wants those to be in a final treaty that it wants to sign and get ratified.
That's not really, IMO, the relevant difference. If, e.g., Google had a monopoly OS and used it to promote Firefox (or bundled Firefox with it) then, even if it didn't own Firefox, if it paid or otherwise arranged to have its search default, most of the same monopoly based objections would apply.
Content ratings make sense if they are based on the accessible content of the game-as-provided, and I guess there is some sense to including "locked out" content, though if you start rating based on what "what content could be experienced if you hack the game yourself and/or install additional third-party software that modifies the content", everything that comes out is going to be rated AO in a few years.
This "makes sense" from a business perspective because its an inconvenience for most users to have to deal with the alternative (after several years of using only Windows -- yeah, yeah, its Slashdot so pile on the derision for that -- I've recently, after trying out a few Linux LiveCDs/DVDs, installed Kubuntu on my home desktop and started using it for just about everything, and with the default setup there you can't write pretty much anywhere but
But its something of an undesirable feature from a security perspective. Better integration of sudo-like functionality (jumping to "administration mode" on a per-use basis) in the GUI would seem to be a better solution than leaving so much open to normal (even admin-privileged) user accounts for "silent access".