On top of that, it can also be a good marketing tool to have your own domain and a small amount of web space with even just your CV/resume online, but even better if you have some kind of portfolio of your work to accompany it. That way if your email address makes it in front of the right person you might pick up extra work, instead of running the risk of losing clients because they, rightly or wrongly, make a snap judgement about you based on your email address.
The key to your rant there is the word "community". Has it occurred to you that the Slashdot one might be diverse enough to encompass both viewpoints (and many more shades of each besides)?
I'm surprised this was modded insightful, given that, out of Linux, Apple and Microsoft, something probably in the region of 99.9% of all games are on the latter's O/S, it's obvious there will be a massive MS slant to things.
The problem is going to be, without the threat of obsolesence, how to "drive everything that can be moved to Jetpacks to that model". If they tell developers extensions aren't going away, where is the incentive to invest hours rewriting your extension, when that time could be better spent refining it within the standard extension framework or working on other projects? In an ideal world everything that didn't require the extended framework would migrate to the less problematic Jetpacks and we'd get to keep the original framework only for the projects that make proper use of it, but we all know it's not an ideal world, developers will resist recoding, some extensions might no longer be actively supported, etc.
If there are wide open residential networks, that probably just shows a larger number of early adopters who got on board with broadband before ISPs started locking them down (that, or it shows European ISPs are more security conscious, rather than European broadband users). In any event, I'm not sure what we're meant to take away from this knowledge, if I really wanted free WiFi it seems a bit drastic to move to the US to obtain it! (Not least because I've been in several large public organisations in the past couple of years who had "secure" WiFi with username/passwords of either guest/guest or guest/).
It goes hand in hand with our doing nothing about global warming policy (the hope being once that kicks in it'll reduce the populace and free up some IPs). Stay the course.
Since they've already been trialling these at two airports, surely they must already have provision in place, whether that provision is exempting the staff operating the scanners, or having the scanners only operated by people who are otherwise exempt. I'm not sure if that means a police officer could perform the task, or medical staff, or whatever, but in any case this decision to implement full body scanners is not a snap knee jerk decision, it's obviously been planned for a while, even if the government is using recent events to justify it, and I'd be very surprised if they'd not considered this issue already.
The problem is that, while the gorvernment is not the law, it can move the goalposts by just changing/creating laws to legitimise its actions. A strong government in this country can pretty much legitimise anything it wants if the opposition parties don't have the combined numbers to stop it (and that's even assuming they don't covet the same laws).
I honestly don't see how they could ever expect to implement this - I don't think they can tax foreign advertisers (impossible to enforce unless those advertisers sell directly into France in which case they could just add their media bully tax at the sales stage but then that's not a tax on advertising because a user might be buying the goods without having seen or clicked an ad) and surely if they try and tax their own advertisers it will make their homegrown goods less competitive globally or force their companies to use foreign advertising agencies to avoid the tax, which will seriously hurt the rest of their economy.
Maybe that flew 10 years ago or more, but it's a pretty feeble excuse in the days when we can catalogue anything that was ever written and give people an electronic copy virtually cost free should they need it. In that world, why would we need restrictive laws anymore to ensure that books of dead authors get published (it was a feeble excuse anyway since it would only protect profitable books).
Surely the root of all this is could Google have avoided all this fuss (and yes, I think PDK's heirs are wrong and obviously just seeing $$ signs for even thinking about taking legal action over this) by simply, y'know, asking first?
Remember, this is only Nexus 1. The androids in the book were Nexus 6 - who knows how closely Google's creation will resemble them by its sixth iteration?
It's much easier to figure things out when you have the writings of those who went before you to help. Or to put it another way, several people may have "guessed" how the craters came to be, individually they just had interesting stories, put them together and you have something worthy of scientific investigation and then corroboration, all of this is a lot easier when you have writing.
Exactly right, which is why GFWL have the kludgy in game login interface instead of the much better XBL interface which allows you to remain logged in all the time. Apparently they did this because it created issues around where they send messages if you're logged in from two machines, but this sounds like a smokescreen to cover the fact that they've tried to lock down the user profile as much as possible and in doing so made a rod for their own backs (I know from having just spent several days working out how the hell I can use my profile across two 360s and in the end having to buy a used memory unit - because nowhere seems to stock them new anymore - and ferry it around on there, which is ridiculous when both 360s are on my home LAN and have cable access).
Actually I think this would be a nice device for reading news and magazine articles - e-ink is great for flat text and battery life but it's nice occasionally to see full colour images or even video. Would also be useful for text books with diagrams etc, but as I said before, they really need to thin it down a lot more to make it practical, otherwise you may as well carry two devices around.
Even if it only encourages the more design-oriented companies that are working on these to incorporate some of the more useful features, it will have been a win (maybe not for the company, but for consumers). I'd like to have design AND functionality out of the box for once, instead of being forced to choose.
It could have been if they'd worked out how to thin it down (and trim the price). It's definitely a step in the right direction, we're finally getting to the point where it might be worth picking up one of these for practical use rather than early adopter bragging rights, this has some great features which'll hopefully be adopted by e-readers that follow it.
Web of trust is all well and good in small groups, usually of people who know each other in the real world. It might work if you set it up within a small company for instance, but the fail points will always be the people in the web who are allowed to add their own, previously "untrusted" names, because you get back to the real issue - that scammers exploit the lack of verification because it's the easiest way to achieve their aims. If the easiest way to achieve their aims was to win the trust of one of the people in this web of trust and get their name added that way, they'd switch to that tactic instead (sure, it might be more labour intensive, but if people have a higher sense of trust this way, the payoff might be sufficiently higher to justify it). Once you've demonstrated the web of trust can be infiltrated, everyone in that web is back to square one in terms of not knowing which names to trust. The only thing you've really added is a massive layer of complexity for the layman and a false sense of security for everyone involved.
Similarly companies who do mail shots for clients need this functionality if they're not going to totally confuse end users. Our company uses an external agency to do this on behalf of our clients and it's not feasible to transfer the email domain to allow the third party to send from the "legitimate" address because many of the clients manage their own email server for employee mail - all our mails are opt-in so the users have to specifically request them, it would be ridiculous to tell all those users they also have to go reconfigure their spam filter to whitelist the relevant domains as well.
We can either have a relatively relaxed system and accept that some spam will get through, or we can have an overly strict system and risk missing out on mail we actually want to receive. Personally I'd rather have the minor inconvenience of the former (and, really, it is very minor these days, the spam filters might never catch everything but they catch a hell of a lot and make the rest managable).
If true, this doesn't surprise me at all. If he lives to tell his tale, well it was just a security operation gone bad, no harm no foul, we'll all laugh about this down the pub later, etc. If he doesn't make it, well, if those damned terrorists will try and smuggle bombs...
It's not a matter of "accidents happen", it's a matter of at what point do the ridiculous security measures put in place supposedly for our own "safety" but which lead to these "accidents" become a greater travesty than the terrorist acts that they were designed to combat? In law there is the view that it is better to let 100 guilty men walk free rather than risk sending 1 innocent man to prison, but it seems in the world of the terrorist threat our governments are happy to dick around sacrificing the lives of innocent people in order to... erm... save the lives of innocent people. Yeah, well done, I feel much more secure knowing I've almost as much chance of being killed by a cop as I have a terrorist.
1. We ask for a certain amount of money to do some job assigned to our agency. We base our request on our previous experience and come up with usually reasonable estimates given our past experience.
2. Congress then gives us much less than we said it would cost (I recall one budget allocation for an operation that came in at just over half of what we requested).
Maybe they're assuming that a "reasonable estimate based on past experience" would be almost double what was necessary (since past experience is that they cut the requested budget by up to half, it's reasonable to ask for twice as much), so they're just cutting the doubled budget and giving you what you actually require?
The fact that you can't effectively do a double blind test for this without using real passengers doesn't mean they should be using real passengers, it means they shouldn't be doing the test.
But they weren't even testing the security of carry-on luggage, they were testing bags that had been checked - the people responsible for the security of that baggage likely never even got to see the guy carrying it so his acting skills aren't that important and at the very least they could have told him immediately after check in instead of letting him take the thing home.
Slashdot Mirror
On top of that, it can also be a good marketing tool to have your own domain and a small amount of web space with even just your CV/resume online, but even better if you have some kind of portfolio of your work to accompany it. That way if your email address makes it in front of the right person you might pick up extra work, instead of running the risk of losing clients because they, rightly or wrongly, make a snap judgement about you based on your email address.
The key to your rant there is the word "community". Has it occurred to you that the Slashdot one might be diverse enough to encompass both viewpoints (and many more shades of each besides)?
I'm surprised this was modded insightful, given that, out of Linux, Apple and Microsoft, something probably in the region of 99.9% of all games are on the latter's O/S, it's obvious there will be a massive MS slant to things.
The problem is going to be, without the threat of obsolesence, how to "drive everything that can be moved to Jetpacks to that model". If they tell developers extensions aren't going away, where is the incentive to invest hours rewriting your extension, when that time could be better spent refining it within the standard extension framework or working on other projects? In an ideal world everything that didn't require the extended framework would migrate to the less problematic Jetpacks and we'd get to keep the original framework only for the projects that make proper use of it, but we all know it's not an ideal world, developers will resist recoding, some extensions might no longer be actively supported, etc.
If there are wide open residential networks, that probably just shows a larger number of early adopters who got on board with broadband before ISPs started locking them down (that, or it shows European ISPs are more security conscious, rather than European broadband users). In any event, I'm not sure what we're meant to take away from this knowledge, if I really wanted free WiFi it seems a bit drastic to move to the US to obtain it! (Not least because I've been in several large public organisations in the past couple of years who had "secure" WiFi with username/passwords of either guest/guest or guest/).
It goes hand in hand with our doing nothing about global warming policy (the hope being once that kicks in it'll reduce the populace and free up some IPs). Stay the course.
I guess if they're really concerned they could always not follow it up and just post AC, right?
Since they've already been trialling these at two airports, surely they must already have provision in place, whether that provision is exempting the staff operating the scanners, or having the scanners only operated by people who are otherwise exempt. I'm not sure if that means a police officer could perform the task, or medical staff, or whatever, but in any case this decision to implement full body scanners is not a snap knee jerk decision, it's obviously been planned for a while, even if the government is using recent events to justify it, and I'd be very surprised if they'd not considered this issue already.
The problem is that, while the gorvernment is not the law, it can move the goalposts by just changing/creating laws to legitimise its actions. A strong government in this country can pretty much legitimise anything it wants if the opposition parties don't have the combined numbers to stop it (and that's even assuming they don't covet the same laws).
I honestly don't see how they could ever expect to implement this - I don't think they can tax foreign advertisers (impossible to enforce unless those advertisers sell directly into France in which case they could just add their media bully tax at the sales stage but then that's not a tax on advertising because a user might be buying the goods without having seen or clicked an ad) and surely if they try and tax their own advertisers it will make their homegrown goods less competitive globally or force their companies to use foreign advertising agencies to avoid the tax, which will seriously hurt the rest of their economy.
Maybe that flew 10 years ago or more, but it's a pretty feeble excuse in the days when we can catalogue anything that was ever written and give people an electronic copy virtually cost free should they need it. In that world, why would we need restrictive laws anymore to ensure that books of dead authors get published (it was a feeble excuse anyway since it would only protect profitable books).
Surely the root of all this is could Google have avoided all this fuss (and yes, I think PDK's heirs are wrong and obviously just seeing $$ signs for even thinking about taking legal action over this) by simply, y'know, asking first?
Remember, this is only Nexus 1. The androids in the book were Nexus 6 - who knows how closely Google's creation will resemble them by its sixth iteration?
It's much easier to figure things out when you have the writings of those who went before you to help. Or to put it another way, several people may have "guessed" how the craters came to be, individually they just had interesting stories, put them together and you have something worthy of scientific investigation and then corroboration, all of this is a lot easier when you have writing.
Exactly right, which is why GFWL have the kludgy in game login interface instead of the much better XBL interface which allows you to remain logged in all the time. Apparently they did this because it created issues around where they send messages if you're logged in from two machines, but this sounds like a smokescreen to cover the fact that they've tried to lock down the user profile as much as possible and in doing so made a rod for their own backs (I know from having just spent several days working out how the hell I can use my profile across two 360s and in the end having to buy a used memory unit - because nowhere seems to stock them new anymore - and ferry it around on there, which is ridiculous when both 360s are on my home LAN and have cable access).
Actually I think this would be a nice device for reading news and magazine articles - e-ink is great for flat text and battery life but it's nice occasionally to see full colour images or even video. Would also be useful for text books with diagrams etc, but as I said before, they really need to thin it down a lot more to make it practical, otherwise you may as well carry two devices around.
Even if it only encourages the more design-oriented companies that are working on these to incorporate some of the more useful features, it will have been a win (maybe not for the company, but for consumers). I'd like to have design AND functionality out of the box for once, instead of being forced to choose.
It could have been if they'd worked out how to thin it down (and trim the price). It's definitely a step in the right direction, we're finally getting to the point where it might be worth picking up one of these for practical use rather than early adopter bragging rights, this has some great features which'll hopefully be adopted by e-readers that follow it.
Web of trust is all well and good in small groups, usually of people who know each other in the real world. It might work if you set it up within a small company for instance, but the fail points will always be the people in the web who are allowed to add their own, previously "untrusted" names, because you get back to the real issue - that scammers exploit the lack of verification because it's the easiest way to achieve their aims. If the easiest way to achieve their aims was to win the trust of one of the people in this web of trust and get their name added that way, they'd switch to that tactic instead (sure, it might be more labour intensive, but if people have a higher sense of trust this way, the payoff might be sufficiently higher to justify it). Once you've demonstrated the web of trust can be infiltrated, everyone in that web is back to square one in terms of not knowing which names to trust. The only thing you've really added is a massive layer of complexity for the layman and a false sense of security for everyone involved.
Similarly companies who do mail shots for clients need this functionality if they're not going to totally confuse end users. Our company uses an external agency to do this on behalf of our clients and it's not feasible to transfer the email domain to allow the third party to send from the "legitimate" address because many of the clients manage their own email server for employee mail - all our mails are opt-in so the users have to specifically request them, it would be ridiculous to tell all those users they also have to go reconfigure their spam filter to whitelist the relevant domains as well.
We can either have a relatively relaxed system and accept that some spam will get through, or we can have an overly strict system and risk missing out on mail we actually want to receive. Personally I'd rather have the minor inconvenience of the former (and, really, it is very minor these days, the spam filters might never catch everything but they catch a hell of a lot and make the rest managable).
If true, this doesn't surprise me at all. If he lives to tell his tale, well it was just a security operation gone bad, no harm no foul, we'll all laugh about this down the pub later, etc. If he doesn't make it, well, if those damned terrorists will try and smuggle bombs...
It's not a matter of "accidents happen", it's a matter of at what point do the ridiculous security measures put in place supposedly for our own "safety" but which lead to these "accidents" become a greater travesty than the terrorist acts that they were designed to combat? In law there is the view that it is better to let 100 guilty men walk free rather than risk sending 1 innocent man to prison, but it seems in the world of the terrorist threat our governments are happy to dick around sacrificing the lives of innocent people in order to... erm... save the lives of innocent people. Yeah, well done, I feel much more secure knowing I've almost as much chance of being killed by a cop as I have a terrorist.
1. We ask for a certain amount of money to do some job assigned to our agency. We base our request on our previous experience and come up with usually reasonable estimates given our past experience.
2. Congress then gives us much less than we said it would cost (I recall one budget allocation for an operation that came in at just over half of what we requested).
Maybe they're assuming that a "reasonable estimate based on past experience" would be almost double what was necessary (since past experience is that they cut the requested budget by up to half, it's reasonable to ask for twice as much), so they're just cutting the doubled budget and giving you what you actually require?
My head hurts now...
The fact that you can't effectively do a double blind test for this without using real passengers doesn't mean they should be using real passengers, it means they shouldn't be doing the test.
But they weren't even testing the security of carry-on luggage, they were testing bags that had been checked - the people responsible for the security of that baggage likely never even got to see the guy carrying it so his acting skills aren't that important and at the very least they could have told him immediately after check in instead of letting him take the thing home.