The fashion industry spend a small fortune trying to prevent fakes of their products hitting the market - if people were only interested in the real brands that wouldn't be the case. Some people want the higher quality that comes with a particular brand, others aren't so fussy and just want to be seen carrying a product bearing the logo, and if they can do that at a low, low price, they'll happily go for it.
My guess is they're not "adding" anything - the code is probably all there and they're just iteratively testing it in blocks with a fixed number of users to see how well it scales before they open it to the world. If they open everything up on the same day it's much harder to track down bugs than if they say: this month you get basic circles, next month you get gaming, the month after you get... whatever's next... and when that's all working as expected the doors open to the general public.
That tells us more about your lack of predictive skills and less about the benefits/negatives of Google+ - it was pretty obvious games would be coming from day one, the only question is how good a job Google will do of allowing you to filter out gaming spam you're not interested in. I don't really see how they can (even if they block direct channels for spam the game designers will have the option of getting users to spam their contacts directly in return for points/cows/whatever passes as currency).
My favourite surreal moment in LA Noire is also related to driving. You can drive like a psycho, into oncoming traffic at top speed, handbrake turning aside at the last second to speed off and do it all again and your partner sits quietly in the passenger seat. Scrape your bumper on a fence post when reversing out of a driveway and he's screaming at you for being a maniac.
Hopping and running have always plagued CS - I've said for a long time they should introduce some kind of stamina meter to limit this behaviour and have it affect your accuracy for a few seconds until the bar refils or something. Running when someone is shooting in your direction is real but it does have a physical toll, and nobody should be able to run and gun with an AWM rifle. The problem was they pitched the game as having realism then instantly dumbed it down so as to not alienate the usual FPS crowd.
DRM has so far done next to nothing to stop piracy - go check out any of the popular torrent sites and see the evidence before your eyes. DRM is meant to control legitimate users, not pirates. It controls what you can do with the game you bought, it controls (or more often prevents) resale of the game you bought, it allows them to add dial home code that gives their marketing people all kinds of interesting metrics when you play the game you bought. Repeating this "pirates are the reason for DRM" garbage is just allowing them to get away with pulling the wool over your eyes.
But... but... if they gave you the ability to play offline, they wouldn't be able to profit from people selling you better equipment through the in-game market! On that note, I expect this now means awesome drops will be one in a million, otherwise the market will be flooded with cheap junk nobody wants. Wow, if I hadn't already canceled my pre-order I'd be really psyched about the prospect of grinding hundreds of hours for no reward...
So the time we get to play the game DRM free is around about the time everyone else loses interest and the community has pretty much moved on? I'll pass.
Same story here - I had many hours of fun playing both solo and multi D II. Multi for me was all about co-op, not PVP. I can understand measures to prevent cheating in PVP but co-operatively who are you cheating? The computer? I've already canceled my pre-order. If someone who has been a fan of the series since day one, has had a pre-order on the game for the last two years and actually bought a £2k gaming laptop to be able to play this on the move isn't their target audience then screw 'em. It wouldn't be the first time the fans of a series were sold down the river to make a quick buck, maybe some sanity will return around the time we're talking about D IV.
As an observer it seems the real issue for the military are having effective, i.e. achievable, goals. If the military were allowed to say "our goal is to remove dictator X then withdraw" they'd be able to achieve that reasonably simply - when politicians insist the goal is "remove dictator X then bring stability to a region that's been unstable for decades/centuries (where a not insignificant portion of the local populace are against you and even the ones nominally for you see you as an invading force and would rather you weren't there)" that's setting yourself up for a fail.
Indeed, I've always thought a real "cyber war" would only ever be a preface to a real invasion. After all, it's (relatively speaking) too easy to recover from a cyber attack, and long term the opposition have little to gain from it (you'll learn from it, secure things better and move on). The only way cyber warfare would be effective is a mass attack to try and cripple communications and essential infrastructure followed by a real attack to press home a real advantage, be that destruction of physical property or some kind of land grab. Short of that, any engagement is just going to be tit for tat - but I guess "cyber bickering" doesn't sell so well.
I don't think anyone is "rooting" for the Chinese government - I think people are more likely hoping the advances the Chinese government are making will be a wake up call to western governments which have coasted arrogantly along for too long. That, or they're just realists (the modern way to win civilization seems not to be through warfare but by ensuring every other country is too dependent on you to go it alone).
In the real world you'd see a lot of migrant workers who move to the city in the 0% years and move out in the 20% years - in the mid to long term that would sap money out of your local economy.
Also reserve peak time for pedestrians and cyclists and have delivery traffic outside peak hours - lots of city centres already operate something similar so it's a workable compromise. Ideally long term you'd factor this in to city design and have the frontages of shops pedestrianised and the rear connecting to the road network.
For me EoP works much better in my home environment. It would be a huge pain/cost to wire up most UK houses for ethernet, and likewise WiFi is not feasible in many situations (either the walls are too thick for a signal to go more than a couple of rooms meaning you're back to ethernet to extend the network or your signal is drenched in the 500 other signals competing for the same bit of spectrum). With EoP I just plug in a little box in each room I need it and wire/wireless off that. Cheap, incredibly easy to set up, incredibly easy to take with me when I move.
The presence of the water doesn't mean that the person wasn't in the process of dispersing - maybe he was leaving but others weren't and he just got caught in the spray. The police are more likely to use this as an investigatory rather than an evidentiary tool (to highlight or rule out persons of interest to their investigation). It's too flaky to be evidence of anything in court but it's probably a godsend when you have several thousand suspects and need to sort the not guilty from the worth following up quickly.
Maybe because the technology has been proven incredibly unreliable and even if you did nothing wrong it's at the very least an incredible inconvenience to be suspected of a crime you didn't commit and at worst you might serve someone else's sentence. The more widespread technology like this is, the more chance there is for false positives.
It's nothing to do with taking more of your money, it's to do with making sure everyone is taxed fairly. That 20% you pay on everything you buy, the tax on your petrol, these are unfair taxes, they disproportionately hurt people the poorer they are. The truth is, if we abolished all these ridiculous "hidden" taxes and had a single tax based on income (real income, no fudging the numbers or porting your earnings through an offshore umbrella company or whatever other tricks people use in the name of creative accountancy) then we could do away with tiered income tax bands and the vast, vast majority of people in the country would be better off - probably yourself included unless you're rich enough that you have nothing to complain about. You still wouldn't have a fair society (the poor still need to eat or heat their homes and the prices here will still disproportionately hurt them) but you'd have a fairer society, which is a start.
Nevertheless there is a significant number of people in this country who feel they have no voice - and that's not just those who resort to violence, but the hard working, law abiding too. Look at the way Blair ignored 1.5 million people turning up on his doorstep to protest going to war in Iraq. Look at the way there were thousands of students protesting tuition fees peacefully yet the media was dominated by the handful who decided to break things. If the people in power constantly refuse to acknowledge the voice of the masses (and people feel they have no real representation at the polls, when every party seems to have the same approach of empowering the powerful and taxing the poor and even the party they supported can volte face on their promises) then this is always going to be the end result sooner or later.
It doesn't legitimise their actions in any way, but it damn well helps to explain them. I see politician after politician on the news this week saying they can't understand why people would react this way - THAT is scary, it should be blindinly obvious why people are reacting this way and the politicians should be talking about how they deal with the factors that cause this reaction, not trying to blame it all on mindless yobs.
You can't rule out the factors that caused them to unite against the police and society. Gangs have been around for many, many years but it's telling that none of this happened during the boom years. I have no doubt that the collapse of the economy, the rise in unemployment, the incredible rise in the cost of higher education, a culture where the rich seem to go unpunished for their actions and the police appear to have free reign (shootings without repercussion, hiding their faces and badge numbers while using unecessary force at demonstrations, etc), demonisation of the poor in the media and swathing cuts to local services from the government have all contributed to this bout of violence. It's not like it's even unexpected - we had exactly the same circumstances leading to exactly the same outcome back in the 80's and nothing was learned.
If you want to stop it, do what you should of been doing for the last 20 years or so, and did to my generation.
When he gets home, give him a damn good thrashing and take him to the police station.
The problem with this suggestion is twofold:
Firstly, we have a society now where people are afraid to use force in their discipline of children - be they parents, teachers, etc. The stigma of being a parent who would smack their child, coupled with the prospect of social workers or even the police being involved is a huge disincentive to even responsible parents who would only ever use force as a last resort where absolutely necessary.
Secondly, many of these rioters are second, third, fourth generation descendents of familes who are entrenched in the "benefits culture" of never having to work for a living. You can't realistically expect that the children are going to be reprimanded when in many cases the parents can't see a problem with what they're doing. This needed to be tackled a long time ago before it ever got to this state, it's hard to see how this culture can be changed at this time.
Indeed - what's better than several thousand rioters armed with rocks and sticks and knives out on our streets? Several thousand rioters armed with (legally purchased and licensed) firearms! Not to mention that all the police would have to be similarly armed. As a resident Brit who is a non-participant in the riots, I certainly don't want either side to have lethal weapons.
Odd that we're not seeing similar trends in rich areas - they also have young people. The disenfranchisement of our youth is no excuse for the rioting, but to claim it's not one of the reasons is just being blinkered.
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The fashion industry spend a small fortune trying to prevent fakes of their products hitting the market - if people were only interested in the real brands that wouldn't be the case. Some people want the higher quality that comes with a particular brand, others aren't so fussy and just want to be seen carrying a product bearing the logo, and if they can do that at a low, low price, they'll happily go for it.
My guess is they're not "adding" anything - the code is probably all there and they're just iteratively testing it in blocks with a fixed number of users to see how well it scales before they open it to the world. If they open everything up on the same day it's much harder to track down bugs than if they say: this month you get basic circles, next month you get gaming, the month after you get... whatever's next... and when that's all working as expected the doors open to the general public.
That tells us more about your lack of predictive skills and less about the benefits/negatives of Google+ - it was pretty obvious games would be coming from day one, the only question is how good a job Google will do of allowing you to filter out gaming spam you're not interested in. I don't really see how they can (even if they block direct channels for spam the game designers will have the option of getting users to spam their contacts directly in return for points/cows/whatever passes as currency).
My favourite surreal moment in LA Noire is also related to driving. You can drive like a psycho, into oncoming traffic at top speed, handbrake turning aside at the last second to speed off and do it all again and your partner sits quietly in the passenger seat. Scrape your bumper on a fence post when reversing out of a driveway and he's screaming at you for being a maniac.
Hopping and running have always plagued CS - I've said for a long time they should introduce some kind of stamina meter to limit this behaviour and have it affect your accuracy for a few seconds until the bar refils or something. Running when someone is shooting in your direction is real but it does have a physical toll, and nobody should be able to run and gun with an AWM rifle. The problem was they pitched the game as having realism then instantly dumbed it down so as to not alienate the usual FPS crowd.
DRM has so far done next to nothing to stop piracy - go check out any of the popular torrent sites and see the evidence before your eyes. DRM is meant to control legitimate users, not pirates. It controls what you can do with the game you bought, it controls (or more often prevents) resale of the game you bought, it allows them to add dial home code that gives their marketing people all kinds of interesting metrics when you play the game you bought. Repeating this "pirates are the reason for DRM" garbage is just allowing them to get away with pulling the wool over your eyes.
But... but... if they gave you the ability to play offline, they wouldn't be able to profit from people selling you better equipment through the in-game market! On that note, I expect this now means awesome drops will be one in a million, otherwise the market will be flooded with cheap junk nobody wants. Wow, if I hadn't already canceled my pre-order I'd be really psyched about the prospect of grinding hundreds of hours for no reward...
So the time we get to play the game DRM free is around about the time everyone else loses interest and the community has pretty much moved on? I'll pass.
Same story here - I had many hours of fun playing both solo and multi D II. Multi for me was all about co-op, not PVP. I can understand measures to prevent cheating in PVP but co-operatively who are you cheating? The computer? I've already canceled my pre-order. If someone who has been a fan of the series since day one, has had a pre-order on the game for the last two years and actually bought a £2k gaming laptop to be able to play this on the move isn't their target audience then screw 'em. It wouldn't be the first time the fans of a series were sold down the river to make a quick buck, maybe some sanity will return around the time we're talking about D IV.
As an observer it seems the real issue for the military are having effective, i.e. achievable, goals. If the military were allowed to say "our goal is to remove dictator X then withdraw" they'd be able to achieve that reasonably simply - when politicians insist the goal is "remove dictator X then bring stability to a region that's been unstable for decades/centuries (where a not insignificant portion of the local populace are against you and even the ones nominally for you see you as an invading force and would rather you weren't there)" that's setting yourself up for a fail.
Indeed, I've always thought a real "cyber war" would only ever be a preface to a real invasion. After all, it's (relatively speaking) too easy to recover from a cyber attack, and long term the opposition have little to gain from it (you'll learn from it, secure things better and move on). The only way cyber warfare would be effective is a mass attack to try and cripple communications and essential infrastructure followed by a real attack to press home a real advantage, be that destruction of physical property or some kind of land grab. Short of that, any engagement is just going to be tit for tat - but I guess "cyber bickering" doesn't sell so well.
I don't think anyone is "rooting" for the Chinese government - I think people are more likely hoping the advances the Chinese government are making will be a wake up call to western governments which have coasted arrogantly along for too long. That, or they're just realists (the modern way to win civilization seems not to be through warfare but by ensuring every other country is too dependent on you to go it alone).
In the real world you'd see a lot of migrant workers who move to the city in the 0% years and move out in the 20% years - in the mid to long term that would sap money out of your local economy.
Also reserve peak time for pedestrians and cyclists and have delivery traffic outside peak hours - lots of city centres already operate something similar so it's a workable compromise. Ideally long term you'd factor this in to city design and have the frontages of shops pedestrianised and the rear connecting to the road network.
For me EoP works much better in my home environment. It would be a huge pain/cost to wire up most UK houses for ethernet, and likewise WiFi is not feasible in many situations (either the walls are too thick for a signal to go more than a couple of rooms meaning you're back to ethernet to extend the network or your signal is drenched in the 500 other signals competing for the same bit of spectrum). With EoP I just plug in a little box in each room I need it and wire/wireless off that. Cheap, incredibly easy to set up, incredibly easy to take with me when I move.
The presence of the water doesn't mean that the person wasn't in the process of dispersing - maybe he was leaving but others weren't and he just got caught in the spray. The police are more likely to use this as an investigatory rather than an evidentiary tool (to highlight or rule out persons of interest to their investigation). It's too flaky to be evidence of anything in court but it's probably a godsend when you have several thousand suspects and need to sort the not guilty from the worth following up quickly.
Maybe because the technology has been proven incredibly unreliable and even if you did nothing wrong it's at the very least an incredible inconvenience to be suspected of a crime you didn't commit and at worst you might serve someone else's sentence. The more widespread technology like this is, the more chance there is for false positives.
I'm not sure where you got that idea, but duress certainly can be a defence.
It doesn't really require them to build one, it just requires Nike/Adidas/Reebok/whoever to realise there's money to be made by selling one.
It's nothing to do with taking more of your money, it's to do with making sure everyone is taxed fairly. That 20% you pay on everything you buy, the tax on your petrol, these are unfair taxes, they disproportionately hurt people the poorer they are. The truth is, if we abolished all these ridiculous "hidden" taxes and had a single tax based on income (real income, no fudging the numbers or porting your earnings through an offshore umbrella company or whatever other tricks people use in the name of creative accountancy) then we could do away with tiered income tax bands and the vast, vast majority of people in the country would be better off - probably yourself included unless you're rich enough that you have nothing to complain about. You still wouldn't have a fair society (the poor still need to eat or heat their homes and the prices here will still disproportionately hurt them) but you'd have a fairer society, which is a start.
Nevertheless there is a significant number of people in this country who feel they have no voice - and that's not just those who resort to violence, but the hard working, law abiding too. Look at the way Blair ignored 1.5 million people turning up on his doorstep to protest going to war in Iraq. Look at the way there were thousands of students protesting tuition fees peacefully yet the media was dominated by the handful who decided to break things. If the people in power constantly refuse to acknowledge the voice of the masses (and people feel they have no real representation at the polls, when every party seems to have the same approach of empowering the powerful and taxing the poor and even the party they supported can volte face on their promises) then this is always going to be the end result sooner or later.
It doesn't legitimise their actions in any way, but it damn well helps to explain them. I see politician after politician on the news this week saying they can't understand why people would react this way - THAT is scary, it should be blindinly obvious why people are reacting this way and the politicians should be talking about how they deal with the factors that cause this reaction, not trying to blame it all on mindless yobs.
You can't rule out the factors that caused them to unite against the police and society. Gangs have been around for many, many years but it's telling that none of this happened during the boom years. I have no doubt that the collapse of the economy, the rise in unemployment, the incredible rise in the cost of higher education, a culture where the rich seem to go unpunished for their actions and the police appear to have free reign (shootings without repercussion, hiding their faces and badge numbers while using unecessary force at demonstrations, etc), demonisation of the poor in the media and swathing cuts to local services from the government have all contributed to this bout of violence. It's not like it's even unexpected - we had exactly the same circumstances leading to exactly the same outcome back in the 80's and nothing was learned.
If you want to stop it, do what you should of been doing for the last 20 years or so, and did to my generation.
When he gets home, give him a damn good thrashing and take him to the police station.
The problem with this suggestion is twofold:
Firstly, we have a society now where people are afraid to use force in their discipline of children - be they parents, teachers, etc. The stigma of being a parent who would smack their child, coupled with the prospect of social workers or even the police being involved is a huge disincentive to even responsible parents who would only ever use force as a last resort where absolutely necessary.
Secondly, many of these rioters are second, third, fourth generation descendents of familes who are entrenched in the "benefits culture" of never having to work for a living. You can't realistically expect that the children are going to be reprimanded when in many cases the parents can't see a problem with what they're doing. This needed to be tackled a long time ago before it ever got to this state, it's hard to see how this culture can be changed at this time.
Indeed - what's better than several thousand rioters armed with rocks and sticks and knives out on our streets? Several thousand rioters armed with (legally purchased and licensed) firearms! Not to mention that all the police would have to be similarly armed. As a resident Brit who is a non-participant in the riots, I certainly don't want either side to have lethal weapons.
Odd that we're not seeing similar trends in rich areas - they also have young people. The disenfranchisement of our youth is no excuse for the rioting, but to claim it's not one of the reasons is just being blinkered.