In Thief 1, I once took out a burrick with one shot -- it was in the tunnels in Down in the Bonehoard, and I got it in the eye when it wasn't in alert mode. I've never been able to repeat it.
The Holy Trinity is Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience. No patch-pumpkin pie for you.
All kidding aside, though, impatience and apathy are two sides of the same coin. If you're releasing software out of impatience, you typically don't care about the consequences of not "finishing" the job, as if a software project is ever truly finished.
One of the extras on the Shrek DVD has someone talking about how they did it for that movie, because it made the movement of clothing over the characters' bodies as they moved more realistic. So somewhere in the depths of Dreamworks's render farm, there's a nude Princess Fiona mesh. (And a nude Shrek, and Farquaad, but only go there if that's what floats your boat...)
It's only a matter of time before most 3D models use the same technique, because the technology is there and it does make things look better. So what's a developer to do? The nude character mesh has to be stored somewhere in order to get the clothing overlaid onto it.
If it were up to me, I'd slap little pasties on the female nipples reading "THANX ESRB". Heck, put 'em on the male nipples too, just to be Fair'n'Balanced.
The real solution is for America to get over itself. A teenager will see more pokey nipples in the clothing stores flanking Gameslop in the mall, and with a lot less effort, than in half a dozen videogames. (When the heck did mannequins all get pokey nipples, by the way? I stopped going to malls for the last few years of my first marriage, and when I started up again a couple of years ago, all the female mannequins had been molded in very cold rooms, if you know what I mean...)
Slightly OT, but my girlfriend used to live in VA Beach, and some years back, there was a news story about a guy who had a hard time convincing his insurance company that a submarine had collided with his car.
The car was parked on a pier at the sub base, and the sub driver overshot the mark a bit and went broadside into the pier, slightly mangling the car in the process.
Needless to say, the claims adjuster on the phone didn't exactly buy his explanation of what had happened, and the Navy folks wouldn't let any pictures be taken, so he had to sit and wait there till the insurance company could send someone out to look in person.
No word on exactly how the claim was settled. Must've been a fun phone conversation, though...
Driver: My car was just involved in a collision. Adjuster: Can you describe the scene? Driver: The vehicle that hit me is about 300 feet long, black, and cigar-shaped...
Amen to that. My ISP provides SpamAssassin at their relay, and after I signed up with BlueSecurity, I widened the tolerances so as to get more spam in my inbox -- the better to feed the frog with, m'dear.
So, in other words, he's saying, "Don't try to create the next big thing. Just create the next thing, and let history decide if it's big."
I'm all for that. Too many people today who are in the business of creating set out from square one with the idea of changing the world. All they have to do is make a change...whether it ends up changing the world is up to too many factors that are beyond their control.
Back in the day, a strategy guide wouldn't come out until weeks or even months after the game did. It was written by people who had played the gold version of the game to death, without any sort of hard deadline, and it contained useful and relevant information. Some of them even could say "this is an issue, but it'll be fixed with an upcoming patch". One of my favorites was the Civ I guide written by the then-editors of Computer Gaming World, and in keeping with the department, the FFIII/VI guides were also very good.
But now Brady and Prima and the like are insistent on putting out guides that get released at the same time as the games themselves do, all in the name of having something to bundle along with the game. These don't work well for a number of reasons.
1) Particularly for Sony and Nintendo console games, many games get released in Japan first, and people are already attacking the Japanese releases for months before they hit American/European shores. I haven't gone to the Kingdom Hearts II section of GameFAQs yet (don't want to see anything resembling a spoiler, any more than I already have), but I bet there's at least 6 full walkthroughs and twice as many specialized topic FAQs already up there. If I'm the sort of gamer who wants to power my way through the game on the first pass, why plunk down the $20 for the paper guide when the material's already been out and is easy to find? (Incidentally, I'm not that kind of gamer -- I'll only hit FAQs on the first pass if it looks like I wouldn't want to play through again to uncover things.)
2) These days, wireless Internet and laptops aren't a novelty, and in many cases aren't even extravagant. (Especially if you've got clueless neighbors, and if you aren't above "hitching a ride".) If you had to run back and forth between your living room and your computer room to consult an Internet strategy guide for your console game, or if you only had one computer for a computer game, having a paper guide on hand made a bit more sense. But I can carry my wireless laptop with me all over the house and pull up a strategy guide for games either on the PS2 or on my desktop computer, any time I want.
3) Most damning, getting the guide out at the same time as the game hits shelves means that it has to go to press when the game goes gold, pretty much. So the guys writing the guide are playing on beta builds, with some features either broken or missing. In some cases, the guide's picture of parts of the game may have nothing in common with the released version. (And "The Guide is definitive -- reality is frequently inaccurate" doesn't apply here.) Writing strategy guides as a job may sound like fun, but it's about as much fun as most of the grunt-level jobs at a games developer.
Case in point, my girlfriend has an on-again/off-again contract with one of the major publishers to do freelance work. Most recently, she did the bulk of the editing on the guide for an XB360 title that's due out very soon (not saying which in case there's some NDA that I'd be violating on her behalf). She would've done all of it, except that a bugfix build that ran late in January delayed the playtester/writer of the guide for a week, and the book had to go to press regardless. As such, the publisher had to put out an all-call to their in-house staff to get the last few chapters edited. Meanwhile, my gf is keeping a tally of the number of times that the writer has included notes like "feature not implemented yet", "include maps at press time" (in other words, the man is making references in his text to a map which he hasn't seen), and "broken now, should be fixed by release". The final average came out to about 2-3 of those per mission/level.
She's not the gamer that I am, but she enjoys watching me play games that she won't play herself, and she understands what separates good games from bad ones. Based on what she saw in this guide, it looks like the game has the potential to be good and possibly even entertaining -- but it's more likely to suck the business end of an MP-5. And that's assuming that the guide accurately reflects the finished product. The game may be spectacular, and the guide as written won't do justice to it. So why print the guide at all?
When I was in school, I had an aerodynamics prof that was trying to make a point about the serious mechanical and material issues that helicopters have because of vibration. It's a real problem, and this system would help a lot, even if a crash landing isn't involved (as TFA mentions).
However, since his exact words were "Helicopters are flying vibrators", the point was largely lost on us at the time, and it took several minutes for the lecture hall to calm down enough for him to continue...
It's just another medium for people to come together socially, on a par with bars, clubs, personal ads, churches, parties, or any of the other myriad ways in which people meet and end up pursuing romance. Unlike those media, it comes with a bandwidth limitation on your personal interaction: you miss out on a lot of the non-verbal elements of communication. This isn't a problem if you're aware of it. But you get a lot of poor saps who mistake this throttling of bandwidth for an increased level of intimacy, leading to the many stories of disappointment resulting from meeting the online flame in real life.
I met my girlfriend 12 years ago on a talker. We ended up going our separate ways (romantically; we stayed friends for a while) because neither of us felt that we were good enough for the other, and we both ended up in marriages that ended badly. Through a few twists of fate, we ended up back in contact, started dating, and have been living together for just over a year now. It's taken the last 3+ years to turn the idealized images we had of each other back when we first met into real images of each other, images that we've both gladly decided that we can live with.
That pattern is the exception. Most relationships that start online involve people who think that they're seeing the "true" self of the other, since online communication can strip away a lot of facades. But the facades that we put on are part of who we are as well...take that away, and you're missing out on the complete person. And it's the complete person that you'll end up trying to make a life together with, not their online presence.
The problem is that in most MMOGs, there's no good way to measure the player's skill, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Puzzle Pirates manages to do this, but that's because all of the game actions that matter the most require the player to puzzle, and performance at the puzzle can be measured against all of the other players on the server. So you can have an "Expert" (relatively high experience level, can take many weeks to get there) at something who is rated "Able" (lowest performance rating), which tells you that they've spent a lot of time doing very badly at that particular puzzle. Or you can have a "Neophyte" (second-lowest experience level) rated "Legendary" (second-highest performance rating), which means they've either gotten lucky a couple of times, or they're a prodigy.
The system can fall down when alts get involved, but it doesn't take much playing of an alt for the performance ratings to start syncing up with the player's real skill. Unless the player of the alt is trying to shark people, but that takes work, and it's not a particularly lucrative career path anyhow.
Metal Gear Solid 3 uses the "analog" function of the pushbuttons for CQC. The problem is that to do anything interesting, you need to tap the circle button and hold it down to grab the enemy...but mash it too hard, and instead of grabbing the enemy, you slit his throat straight away. I still have trouble with the distinction, which is why I just tranq the bad guys and get it over with...
My job situation is similar (fortunately, it's only one week in four), and by chance or design, it takes me about 2-3 minutes to get in a position to actually do something about a call that comes in, namely:
Cell phone rings. I answer it. Stumble out of bed, mumble something into the phone about getting to my computer, head to my work room. Kick the cat out of the chair if necessary. Open up the laptop, wait for it to come out of sleep mode (if I've got to do it, then the computer should too), unlock the screen, and connect to the VPN.
By the time I'm in the network, my brain's at processing speed. If I'm really lucky, the problem resolution takes little enough time that the brain doesn't have to get out of second gear, and falling back asleep is pretty easy. And if it's a real emergency, I've had enough lag time to be alert enough to think it through.
To elaborate, what makes a WMF a WMF is a few magic bytes at the beginning of the file. Windows sees these magic bytes and hands the file off to the GDI for processing, regardless of the extension. Hence the "M" in "WMF".
It's being disguised as "safe" image files for easier transmission, since the more-awake folks have already blocked *.wmf at the gate. (As a challenge, can anyone see if calling it an HTML file works to trigger the exploit? Or find a site where it's been done?)
And don't think that visiting "trusted" sites will keep you safe. According to SANS, knoppix-std.org became an unwitting vector for this beast.
Of course tabs are scary. Look at which browsers use tabs:
Mozilla -- Symbolized by a big red carnivorous lizard. Large carnivores are scary, and red things scream "DANGER!". Firefox -- Symbolized by...a burning fox. Burning things are scary. Opera -- Opera scares a lot of people, and many of those who aren't scared outright just plain don't understand it.
And then there's IE. Either a big blue E or a harmless little butterfly. Non-threatening. But they're doing some eeeeevil genetic manipulation and taking something out of those scaaaaaary browsers to put into our harmless little IE!
After some experiences during my younger days with very imperfect demagnetizers, I got into the habit of shoving the bag, with my new purchases, through the security field before I step through it. That way, the store droid at the door can see that it was something in my shopping bag that set the alarm off.
In all cases where I've set an alarm off like this, they've been satisfied with just going through the shopping bag. No insistence of searching my whole person.
Most customers of the data warehouses have no need for the full credit report. If someone is merely checking on someone's creditworthiness, then give that customer the individual's credit score, total line of credit, and the amount of credit that is used. They don't need to get the SSN, history of closed accounts, or any of the other information that's in the file. How does that help them determine how likely an individual is to make their payments?
I would find it hard to believe that anyone needs to get a citizen's FULL credit report, except for that citizen. And without the full report, or certain sensitive parts of it, identity scammers have a lot more work that they have to do.
If the businesses are going to make the information valuable, then their responsibility to protect it should be greater. There is a wide gap between the damage that can be done through ID-theft and the repercussions a company experiences when they let it out into the world.
But if your information leaks out, then the business holding it isn't directly harmed. If I'm not mistaken, there as yet is no legal obligation for the data warehouses to safeguard all of that personal information. Credit issuers and the like have an interest in seeing that information held securely, since it ultimately costs them (not much, but not zero) time and money to deal with any credit fraud that results from identity theft. It's just an interest, though, and all that the banks and credit card companies can do is apply pressure.
Meanwhile, the Big Three credit reporting agencies offer "protection" by charging a fee to place your file on the watch-list. (They're obligated to do this for free for a number of years if you are defrauded, but this is for those of us who haven't had their credit files fall into the wrong hands -- yet.) The implication, of course, is that they aren't watching your file if you're not paying for "protection". Nice little racket, hmm?
Equifax and Trans Union (didn't dig too deeply on Experian's website, so they may or may not offer it), as part of their "protection", also offer insurance against identity theft -- to the tune of $25,000. (And for Equifax, that's the "premium" level which costs you $100/year -- the "basic" level only gives you $2,500 in insurance.) Most documented cases of people stuck with having to fix their credit profiles have had direct costs much higher than that, to say nothing of the costs in time and personal well-being. Some insurance policy.
Citizen financial data is the commodity. The fact that it is directly linked to the lives of citizens is an afterthought to the financial services industry. Once the bills come up in Congress, I'm writing my congresscritters -- do you plan to do the same?
I guess you didn't play Simpsons Hit & Run then -- when confronted with an oversized wasp equipped with a camera, the solution is to jump in the air and kick it!
(Strangely apropos in light of the "I for one..." comment...)
Can't speak for Sprint, but Nextel offers repeaters, and they're the only reason why we get coverage inside the glass-steel-and-concrete cage that I work in. Before they got installed, you couldn't get a signal if you were more than 15 feet away from an exterior wall.
That doesn't mean I like the service (I don't), but certain departments that I work with are absolutely in love with the rassa-sassa-frassin' PTT function (and have too many people who will ramble on and on for minutes at a time over a half-duplex link, with the recipient literally being unable to get a word in edgewise) and won't give it up.
I'm a big fan of Katamari Damacy (witness the signature, at least as it stands this week), but I'd be leery of letting a kid loose with it. Not because of the implied violence, but because of the strong theme of parental abuse that runs through it.
Look at how the King treats the Prince...after a strongly-implied night of substance abuse, he goes and trashes the house. He makes the kid clean up the mess (and offers some not-so-kind words at the start of each mission), and when the kid doesn't live up to the parent's expectations, it's the kid's fault for not adequately cleaning up the parent's mess. (Or, in the case of the Ursa Major and Taurus missions, the kid is given vague instructions ("just pick up one bear/cow"), and is then berated for not reading the parent's mind and coming up with exactly what the parent was looking for.)
If there were a kid in my life, I wouldn't play this game with him/her unless I was also prepared to talk about abusive parenting.
(And with my luck, the opening movie would set off a seizure...)
Sure, why not jump all over Nintendo? We do it to the movie studios for releasing 5 or 6 different versions of a DVD (can someone say LOTR?), and that's for a $20-$50 piece of media.
When you're talking about a $80-$120 piece of hardware, isn't it worse?
Slashdot Mirror
In Thief 1, I once took out a burrick with one shot -- it was in the tunnels in Down in the Bonehoard, and I got it in the eye when it wasn't in alert mode. I've never been able to repeat it.
Laziness? Hubris? Apathy?
The Holy Trinity is Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience. No patch-pumpkin pie for you.
All kidding aside, though, impatience and apathy are two sides of the same coin. If you're releasing software out of impatience, you typically don't care about the consequences of not "finishing" the job, as if a software project is ever truly finished.
One of the extras on the Shrek DVD has someone talking about how they did it for that movie, because it made the movement of clothing over the characters' bodies as they moved more realistic. So somewhere in the depths of Dreamworks's render farm, there's a nude Princess Fiona mesh. (And a nude Shrek, and Farquaad, but only go there if that's what floats your boat...)
It's only a matter of time before most 3D models use the same technique, because the technology is there and it does make things look better. So what's a developer to do? The nude character mesh has to be stored somewhere in order to get the clothing overlaid onto it.
If it were up to me, I'd slap little pasties on the female nipples reading "THANX ESRB". Heck, put 'em on the male nipples too, just to be Fair'n'Balanced.
The real solution is for America to get over itself. A teenager will see more pokey nipples in the clothing stores flanking Gameslop in the mall, and with a lot less effort, than in half a dozen videogames. (When the heck did mannequins all get pokey nipples, by the way? I stopped going to malls for the last few years of my first marriage, and when I started up again a couple of years ago, all the female mannequins had been molded in very cold rooms, if you know what I mean...)
Slightly OT, but my girlfriend used to live in VA Beach, and some years back, there was a news story about a guy who had a hard time convincing his insurance company that a submarine had collided with his car.
The car was parked on a pier at the sub base, and the sub driver overshot the mark a bit and went broadside into the pier, slightly mangling the car in the process.
Needless to say, the claims adjuster on the phone didn't exactly buy his explanation of what had happened, and the Navy folks wouldn't let any pictures be taken, so he had to sit and wait there till the insurance company could send someone out to look in person.
No word on exactly how the claim was settled. Must've been a fun phone conversation, though...
Driver: My car was just involved in a collision.
Adjuster: Can you describe the scene?
Driver: The vehicle that hit me is about 300 feet long, black, and cigar-shaped...
Amen to that. My ISP provides SpamAssassin at their relay, and after I signed up with BlueSecurity, I widened the tolerances so as to get more spam in my inbox -- the better to feed the frog with, m'dear.
Since when was I going to be "available" to pirates in the first place??? Guess I need to go into hiding before the next Talk Like A Pirate Day...
So, in other words, he's saying, "Don't try to create the next big thing. Just create the next thing, and let history decide if it's big."
I'm all for that. Too many people today who are in the business of creating set out from square one with the idea of changing the world. All they have to do is make a change...whether it ends up changing the world is up to too many factors that are beyond their control.
Back in the day, a strategy guide wouldn't come out until weeks or even months after the game did. It was written by people who had played the gold version of the game to death, without any sort of hard deadline, and it contained useful and relevant information. Some of them even could say "this is an issue, but it'll be fixed with an upcoming patch". One of my favorites was the Civ I guide written by the then-editors of Computer Gaming World, and in keeping with the department, the FFIII/VI guides were also very good.
But now Brady and Prima and the like are insistent on putting out guides that get released at the same time as the games themselves do, all in the name of having something to bundle along with the game. These don't work well for a number of reasons.
1) Particularly for Sony and Nintendo console games, many games get released in Japan first, and people are already attacking the Japanese releases for months before they hit American/European shores. I haven't gone to the Kingdom Hearts II section of GameFAQs yet (don't want to see anything resembling a spoiler, any more than I already have), but I bet there's at least 6 full walkthroughs and twice as many specialized topic FAQs already up there. If I'm the sort of gamer who wants to power my way through the game on the first pass, why plunk down the $20 for the paper guide when the material's already been out and is easy to find? (Incidentally, I'm not that kind of gamer -- I'll only hit FAQs on the first pass if it looks like I wouldn't want to play through again to uncover things.)
2) These days, wireless Internet and laptops aren't a novelty, and in many cases aren't even extravagant. (Especially if you've got clueless neighbors, and if you aren't above "hitching a ride".) If you had to run back and forth between your living room and your computer room to consult an Internet strategy guide for your console game, or if you only had one computer for a computer game, having a paper guide on hand made a bit more sense. But I can carry my wireless laptop with me all over the house and pull up a strategy guide for games either on the PS2 or on my desktop computer, any time I want.
3) Most damning, getting the guide out at the same time as the game hits shelves means that it has to go to press when the game goes gold, pretty much. So the guys writing the guide are playing on beta builds, with some features either broken or missing. In some cases, the guide's picture of parts of the game may have nothing in common with the released version. (And "The Guide is definitive -- reality is frequently inaccurate" doesn't apply here.) Writing strategy guides as a job may sound like fun, but it's about as much fun as most of the grunt-level jobs at a games developer.
Case in point, my girlfriend has an on-again/off-again contract with one of the major publishers to do freelance work. Most recently, she did the bulk of the editing on the guide for an XB360 title that's due out very soon (not saying which in case there's some NDA that I'd be violating on her behalf). She would've done all of it, except that a bugfix build that ran late in January delayed the playtester/writer of the guide for a week, and the book had to go to press regardless. As such, the publisher had to put out an all-call to their in-house staff to get the last few chapters edited. Meanwhile, my gf is keeping a tally of the number of times that the writer has included notes like "feature not implemented yet", "include maps at press time" (in other words, the man is making references in his text to a map which he hasn't seen), and "broken now, should be fixed by release". The final average came out to about 2-3 of those per mission/level.
She's not the gamer that I am, but she enjoys watching me play games that she won't play herself, and she understands what separates good games from bad ones. Based on what she saw in this guide, it looks like the game has the potential to be good and possibly even entertaining -- but it's more likely to suck the business end of an MP-5. And that's assuming that the guide accurately reflects the finished product. The game may be spectacular, and the guide as written won't do justice to it. So why print the guide at all?
When I was in school, I had an aerodynamics prof that was trying to make a point about the serious mechanical and material issues that helicopters have because of vibration. It's a real problem, and this system would help a lot, even if a crash landing isn't involved (as TFA mentions).
However, since his exact words were "Helicopters are flying vibrators", the point was largely lost on us at the time, and it took several minutes for the lecture hall to calm down enough for him to continue...
It's just another medium for people to come together socially, on a par with bars, clubs, personal ads, churches, parties, or any of the other myriad ways in which people meet and end up pursuing romance. Unlike those media, it comes with a bandwidth limitation on your personal interaction: you miss out on a lot of the non-verbal elements of communication. This isn't a problem if you're aware of it. But you get a lot of poor saps who mistake this throttling of bandwidth for an increased level of intimacy, leading to the many stories of disappointment resulting from meeting the online flame in real life.
I met my girlfriend 12 years ago on a talker. We ended up going our separate ways (romantically; we stayed friends for a while) because neither of us felt that we were good enough for the other, and we both ended up in marriages that ended badly. Through a few twists of fate, we ended up back in contact, started dating, and have been living together for just over a year now. It's taken the last 3+ years to turn the idealized images we had of each other back when we first met into real images of each other, images that we've both gladly decided that we can live with.
That pattern is the exception. Most relationships that start online involve people who think that they're seeing the "true" self of the other, since online communication can strip away a lot of facades. But the facades that we put on are part of who we are as well...take that away, and you're missing out on the complete person. And it's the complete person that you'll end up trying to make a life together with, not their online presence.
The problem is that in most MMOGs, there's no good way to measure the player's skill, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Puzzle Pirates manages to do this, but that's because all of the game actions that matter the most require the player to puzzle, and performance at the puzzle can be measured against all of the other players on the server. So you can have an "Expert" (relatively high experience level, can take many weeks to get there) at something who is rated "Able" (lowest performance rating), which tells you that they've spent a lot of time doing very badly at that particular puzzle. Or you can have a "Neophyte" (second-lowest experience level) rated "Legendary" (second-highest performance rating), which means they've either gotten lucky a couple of times, or they're a prodigy.
The system can fall down when alts get involved, but it doesn't take much playing of an alt for the performance ratings to start syncing up with the player's real skill. Unless the player of the alt is trying to shark people, but that takes work, and it's not a particularly lucrative career path anyhow.
Metal Gear Solid 3 uses the "analog" function of the pushbuttons for CQC. The problem is that to do anything interesting, you need to tap the circle button and hold it down to grab the enemy...but mash it too hard, and instead of grabbing the enemy, you slit his throat straight away. I still have trouble with the distinction, which is why I just tranq the bad guys and get it over with...
My job situation is similar (fortunately, it's only one week in four), and by chance or design, it takes me about 2-3 minutes to get in a position to actually do something about a call that comes in, namely:
Cell phone rings. I answer it. Stumble out of bed, mumble something into the phone about getting to my computer, head to my work room. Kick the cat out of the chair if necessary. Open up the laptop, wait for it to come out of sleep mode (if I've got to do it, then the computer should too), unlock the screen, and connect to the VPN.
By the time I'm in the network, my brain's at processing speed. If I'm really lucky, the problem resolution takes little enough time that the brain doesn't have to get out of second gear, and falling back asleep is pretty easy. And if it's a real emergency, I've had enough lag time to be alert enough to think it through.
To elaborate, what makes a WMF a WMF is a few magic bytes at the beginning of the file. Windows sees these magic bytes and hands the file off to the GDI for processing, regardless of the extension. Hence the "M" in "WMF".
It's being disguised as "safe" image files for easier transmission, since the more-awake folks have already blocked *.wmf at the gate. (As a challenge, can anyone see if calling it an HTML file works to trigger the exploit? Or find a site where it's been done?)
And don't think that visiting "trusted" sites will keep you safe. According to SANS, knoppix-std.org became an unwitting vector for this beast.
Favorite bit of dialog from The Lost Vikings (character attributions may be wrong -- it's been a while since I played it):
Olaf: If Tomator is such a bad guy, then how come he left all these tools and weapons lying around for us to use?
Erik: Just don't think about it.
Of course tabs are scary. Look at which browsers use tabs:
Mozilla -- Symbolized by a big red carnivorous lizard. Large carnivores are scary, and red things scream "DANGER!".
Firefox -- Symbolized by...a burning fox. Burning things are scary.
Opera -- Opera scares a lot of people, and many of those who aren't scared outright just plain don't understand it.
And then there's IE. Either a big blue E or a harmless little butterfly. Non-threatening. But they're doing some eeeeevil genetic manipulation and taking something out of those scaaaaaary browsers to put into our harmless little IE!
Of course it'll scare people.
After some experiences during my younger days with very imperfect demagnetizers, I got into the habit of shoving the bag, with my new purchases, through the security field before I step through it. That way, the store droid at the door can see that it was something in my shopping bag that set the alarm off.
In all cases where I've set an alarm off like this, they've been satisfied with just going through the shopping bag. No insistence of searching my whole person.
Most women I know don't complain anywhere near as much about popups and I've always assumed they don't hunt for porn as much.
Women don't have to hunt for it. They just need to use their husband's/boyfriend's bookmark list.
Most customers of the data warehouses have no need for the full credit report. If someone is merely checking on someone's creditworthiness, then give that customer the individual's credit score, total line of credit, and the amount of credit that is used. They don't need to get the SSN, history of closed accounts, or any of the other information that's in the file. How does that help them determine how likely an individual is to make their payments?
I would find it hard to believe that anyone needs to get a citizen's FULL credit report, except for that citizen. And without the full report, or certain sensitive parts of it, identity scammers have a lot more work that they have to do.
If the businesses are going to make the information valuable, then their responsibility to protect it should be greater. There is a wide gap between the damage that can be done through ID-theft and the repercussions a company experiences when they let it out into the world.
But if your information leaks out, then the business holding it isn't directly harmed. If I'm not mistaken, there as yet is no legal obligation for the data warehouses to safeguard all of that personal information. Credit issuers and the like have an interest in seeing that information held securely, since it ultimately costs them (not much, but not zero) time and money to deal with any credit fraud that results from identity theft. It's just an interest, though, and all that the banks and credit card companies can do is apply pressure.
Meanwhile, the Big Three credit reporting agencies offer "protection" by charging a fee to place your file on the watch-list. (They're obligated to do this for free for a number of years if you are defrauded, but this is for those of us who haven't had their credit files fall into the wrong hands -- yet.) The implication, of course, is that they aren't watching your file if you're not paying for "protection". Nice little racket, hmm?
Equifax and Trans Union (didn't dig too deeply on Experian's website, so they may or may not offer it), as part of their "protection", also offer insurance against identity theft -- to the tune of $25,000. (And for Equifax, that's the "premium" level which costs you $100/year -- the "basic" level only gives you $2,500 in insurance.) Most documented cases of people stuck with having to fix their credit profiles have had direct costs much higher than that, to say nothing of the costs in time and personal well-being. Some insurance policy.
Citizen financial data is the commodity. The fact that it is directly linked to the lives of citizens is an afterthought to the financial services industry. Once the bills come up in Congress, I'm writing my congresscritters -- do you plan to do the same?
I guess you didn't play Simpsons Hit & Run then -- when confronted with an oversized wasp equipped with a camera, the solution is to jump in the air and kick it!
(Strangely apropos in light of the "I for one..." comment...)
Can't speak for Sprint, but Nextel offers repeaters, and they're the only reason why we get coverage inside the glass-steel-and-concrete cage that I work in. Before they got installed, you couldn't get a signal if you were more than 15 feet away from an exterior wall. That doesn't mean I like the service (I don't), but certain departments that I work with are absolutely in love with the rassa-sassa-frassin' PTT function (and have too many people who will ramble on and on for minutes at a time over a half-duplex link, with the recipient literally being unable to get a word in edgewise) and won't give it up.
I'm a big fan of Katamari Damacy (witness the signature, at least as it stands this week), but I'd be leery of letting a kid loose with it. Not because of the implied violence, but because of the strong theme of parental abuse that runs through it.
Look at how the King treats the Prince...after a strongly-implied night of substance abuse, he goes and trashes the house. He makes the kid clean up the mess (and offers some not-so-kind words at the start of each mission), and when the kid doesn't live up to the parent's expectations, it's the kid's fault for not adequately cleaning up the parent's mess. (Or, in the case of the Ursa Major and Taurus missions, the kid is given vague instructions ("just pick up one bear/cow"), and is then berated for not reading the parent's mind and coming up with exactly what the parent was looking for.)
If there were a kid in my life, I wouldn't play this game with him/her unless I was also prepared to talk about abusive parenting.
(And with my luck, the opening movie would set off a seizure...)
Sure, why not jump all over Nintendo? We do it to the movie studios for releasing 5 or 6 different versions of a DVD (can someone say LOTR?), and that's for a $20-$50 piece of media.
When you're talking about a $80-$120 piece of hardware, isn't it worse?
Maybe it's just some alien race out there who wants to illustrate that they too, emjoy blowing things up with oversized guns.
Either that, or the gods are playing Katamari Damacy again.