Interestingly they have achivements in Portal 2 that work exactly this way. There's something like you, having already completed the game in co-op, have to play through the game with someone from your friends list who hasn't yet completed the game in co-op - meaning if you're a completionist, you have to badger your friends who haven't bought the game yet into doing so (you also have to have at least one friend to do the initial play through with, so you're potentially bugging two friends to get the game). It's one of the main reasons I didn't buy the game - I don't know anyone on my list who is planning to buy it and I refuse to do Valve's marketing for them.
Indeed, it's the same everywhere. Here in the UK, 25 years ago the left was socialist, now the left has moved so far over to the right, they can't even see where the middle ground used to be (interestingly most of the freedoms that were granted to the banks to screw us all over in the 90's/00's were granted by the "left"). There is no real choice left any more and there are no checks and balances on the excesses of either party because they both seem to have the same goals.
Having said that - with the fun of going to the toilet in space, maybe they should have laid off the rich seafood and just stuck with a nice high fibre diet.
Says the anonymous coward - I hope you were going for massively ironic. On a side note, around a million people in the UK (with a population of only circa 60m) marched against the war in Iraq. The government of the time took zero notice. If a supposedly progressive western government can ignore the protests of such a huge gathering of its populace on such a massively important topic as going to war, what makes you think any government is going to listen to "thousands" complaining about an internet rating system? I applaud their effort, I just think it will more likely than not fall on deaf ears.
Only because of this ridiculous notion that we can only digest news if the person talking about it is standing in front of the scene with a five man crew for support. I don't see what's wrong in sending out some researchers to gather the news (hell, it's the information age, they don't really even need to leave the office if they don't want to) and just having the anchor behind the newsdesk read it out. Can we really only process information if it's accompanied by pretty pictures? For local news I'd be more than happy with just hearing the news if it means they can shave the costs and make it more accurate/plentiful.
But in the UK that's not the case: there are but two real parties (the liberals have in the last year proven themselves pointless), and they're fairly similar policy wise.
Amen to that. Our choice is basically between the group of people who want to give all the power to their friends in government at the expense of the populace and the group of people who want to give all the power to their friends in the private sector at the expense of the populace. Neither are interested in true democracy or the will of the people (see the sham referendum on the voting system recently for evidence - our only choices are either the old broken system or a different but equally broken system? well gee, thanks for giving us a choice...)
I think the point about it being a bubble, though, is that you become less aware that there even are opposing views. Over time you believe that your views aren't just the right views, but that they're the only views. I'm not sure how true this is (unless you live a very sheltered life on the web you're bound to run into other points of view) but I think that's what he's getting at.
Nobody ever said "Don't be evil" was going to be easy. I don't recall them officially adding "... well, you can be a little evil if it means a competitive advantage."
Yeah, I can't see any issue with someone knowing where I live, what expensive gadgets I like to buy and when I'm planning to be away on holiday - I mean if that data fell into the wrong hands, what's the worst that could happen?
It depends on the context. When you say someone's data is "protected" and you're talking about a cloud service, it's inherent that you're talking about making it difficult for others to access that data, not making it difficult for you to accidentally delete it. That's pretty much a fraudulent statemen. It's not marketing fluff, it's not a misunderstanding, it's saying a specific thing that you know people will interpret a specific way (even if you have a CYA "but I actually meant it this way..." excuse lined up) while knowing it to be untrue.
You've gone straight to the obvious, though. It's obvious that you shouldn't trust that kind of data to a service in the cloud, even if you are sure that it's all encrypted. Where people will be caught out are in the grey areas - companies uploading assets or accounting data that their competitors can potentially get hold of and use to gain an advantage, for instance. Those people thought they were getting a service that would protect them and yet enable them to be more flexible in how they do business, I find it difficult to hold anyone but the company who lied about the service accountable for the failures here.
Ultimately it comes down to accountability and being able to distance yourself from the consequences of your actions, but it still takes a certain mindset to follow that through. If there was a little button you could press, and when you pressed it there was a chance somewhere in the world someone would be harmed but you'd get a reward, most people probably still wouldn't do it - the few that would are the CEOs that are crashing the stock market and skimming off the pension funds.
Where the analogy falls down is that newspapers have editors who can preview the ads. This was a mostly automated system. Of course that's going to eventually encourage people engaged in shady activity to participate, it's obvious even from the outset, the fact that there were no gateways to prevent this is the issue. I'd expect the newspaper that just published any ad it was sent without reviewing it to be accountable for their wilful negligence, aside from scale I don't see a difference here (of course you won't catch everyone, but an automated system that looks for certain keywords and flags them for review might have been sufficient).
It still amounts to the same thing, in the same way that eBay are ostensibly against the selling of counterfeit goods but still profit from said sales. If Google had wanted to put systems in place to try and prevent illegal ads, they could have done... for a cost - and there's the rub. What company is going to nuke one of its revenue streams at personal cost if there is a belief that they can get away with it (or that any punishment will be less than the cost of the fix)? Companies are pretty much bound to bend the law to its extremes in pursuit of profit, the entire way they are set up encourages it (i.e. beyond a certain size almost consequence free actions) and requires a massive rethink. Of course, that won't happen because there's too much money at stake and politicians are ten-a-penny.
Not necessarily - could be that they have some contingency plans in place to handle loss of service to popular sites, and those plans don't distinguish based on politics only on traffic (as it makes financial sense to help fix one website instead of having to field thousands of support calls), so the site goes down, the engineers follow the plan and restore it and some management bod sees an opportunity for some personal glory and jumps on it. Not saying that's the case, but your assumption, without knowing the full facts, that management must have given this the green light is just as flawed as the original assumption that management wasn't involved.
I loved the first TR - what many people forget is that at the time it was incredibly innovative, it was the first big 3D platform puzzler. I was always a big fan of games like Flashback, that weren't just about combat and timing but had some logic problems to solve along the way, and this game took that idea and put it into a 3D world.
That and a smattering of mythology (I wasn't so keen on the later levels when the aliens showed up), and the fact that back then the spaces you were exploring felt huge compared to what we'd seen before, not to mention the clever way that combat was managed, meaning you felt you were in the thick of the action without managing a million button combos all added up to a fantastic experience. I don't think I really cared at the time that the in game avatar was a female, although it was still pretty unusual to see a strong female character lead in a game.
Of course, once the media picked up on it it became just a novelty game about a stereotypical big boobed protagonist (who seemed to get enlargment surgery between iterations) and the whole series turned into a self parody - that was a real shame, but yes, that first experience of that first game WAS something special at the time.
You don't have to take the engine out of your car and rebuild it every year.
True, but it is recommended to get a service every year to keep it running smooth. Since the average user lacks the know-how to perform the equivalent of a service on their PC, throwing in the restore media is a more likely response.
Exactly what I was thinking - if the fact that this company tried to put spyware on their paying customers' computers without their knowledge, or that they are massive advocates of DRM and locking down equipment you supposedly own and going after anyone who makes it easy for you to get around that, or that they will happily sell you a pricey console on the basis that it has a bunch of functionality which they then proceed to take away after they have your money, or any of the many other things they've done to the disadvantage of their customers over the years wasn't enough to put people off PSN in their droves, I very much doubt that a few weeks' server outage and the hassle of replacing credit cards will do the job.
Not true, he just didn't slide out the panel that's full of SW memorabilia, Cat5 cable and cheetos wrappers. Seriously, though, I would not want to start running a bath while I watch some TV and then have to figure out where I left it...
I think a lot of the Sci-Fi demographic aren't the "tune it at X time on Y day to watch" types, I know I personally like to drop in and out of channels and it's only a handful of shows I will actually make the effort to be there for (it used to be that you had to be there to be able to talk about the latest shows with your friends, but it's just too easy these days to catch up if you miss anything). The Sci-Fi channel used to be my go to channel when I had nothing to do because I knew I'd have a good chance of seeing something I was interested in. It was around about the time the name changed that the balance shifted so that, more often than not, when I flicked to the channel it would be something I didn't care about. Eventually I stopped even including it in my rotation of "skip through these known channels in case there's something decent on". Now I barely even bother to check it as a last resort when there's nothing else on - which means if they ever do show something decent, there's a very good chance I'll never encounter it.
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Interestingly they have achivements in Portal 2 that work exactly this way. There's something like you, having already completed the game in co-op, have to play through the game with someone from your friends list who hasn't yet completed the game in co-op - meaning if you're a completionist, you have to badger your friends who haven't bought the game yet into doing so (you also have to have at least one friend to do the initial play through with, so you're potentially bugging two friends to get the game). It's one of the main reasons I didn't buy the game - I don't know anyone on my list who is planning to buy it and I refuse to do Valve's marketing for them.
Indeed, it's the same everywhere. Here in the UK, 25 years ago the left was socialist, now the left has moved so far over to the right, they can't even see where the middle ground used to be (interestingly most of the freedoms that were granted to the banks to screw us all over in the 90's/00's were granted by the "left"). There is no real choice left any more and there are no checks and balances on the excesses of either party because they both seem to have the same goals.
That was probably just all the lobster he crammed pre-flight.
Having said that - with the fun of going to the toilet in space, maybe they should have laid off the rich seafood and just stuck with a nice high fibre diet.
Almost. You forgot to mention what affect it will have on house prices.
Says the anonymous coward - I hope you were going for massively ironic. On a side note, around a million people in the UK (with a population of only circa 60m) marched against the war in Iraq. The government of the time took zero notice. If a supposedly progressive western government can ignore the protests of such a huge gathering of its populace on such a massively important topic as going to war, what makes you think any government is going to listen to "thousands" complaining about an internet rating system? I applaud their effort, I just think it will more likely than not fall on deaf ears.
Only because of this ridiculous notion that we can only digest news if the person talking about it is standing in front of the scene with a five man crew for support. I don't see what's wrong in sending out some researchers to gather the news (hell, it's the information age, they don't really even need to leave the office if they don't want to) and just having the anchor behind the newsdesk read it out. Can we really only process information if it's accompanied by pretty pictures? For local news I'd be more than happy with just hearing the news if it means they can shave the costs and make it more accurate/plentiful.
But in the UK that's not the case: there are but two real parties (the liberals have in the last year proven themselves pointless), and they're fairly similar policy wise.
Amen to that. Our choice is basically between the group of people who want to give all the power to their friends in government at the expense of the populace and the group of people who want to give all the power to their friends in the private sector at the expense of the populace. Neither are interested in true democracy or the will of the people (see the sham referendum on the voting system recently for evidence - our only choices are either the old broken system or a different but equally broken system? well gee, thanks for giving us a choice...)
At the risk of going dangerously back on topic, surely the results of such a search will be filtered to your own particular political leaning :)
I think the point about it being a bubble, though, is that you become less aware that there even are opposing views. Over time you believe that your views aren't just the right views, but that they're the only views. I'm not sure how true this is (unless you live a very sheltered life on the web you're bound to run into other points of view) but I think that's what he's getting at.
Nobody ever said "Don't be evil" was going to be easy. I don't recall them officially adding "... well, you can be a little evil if it means a competitive advantage."
You're a system admin and your answer to security in the cloud is to obfuscate your filenames? Ye gods...
Yeah, I can't see any issue with someone knowing where I live, what expensive gadgets I like to buy and when I'm planning to be away on holiday - I mean if that data fell into the wrong hands, what's the worst that could happen?
It depends on the context. When you say someone's data is "protected" and you're talking about a cloud service, it's inherent that you're talking about making it difficult for others to access that data, not making it difficult for you to accidentally delete it. That's pretty much a fraudulent statemen. It's not marketing fluff, it's not a misunderstanding, it's saying a specific thing that you know people will interpret a specific way (even if you have a CYA "but I actually meant it this way..." excuse lined up) while knowing it to be untrue.
You've gone straight to the obvious, though. It's obvious that you shouldn't trust that kind of data to a service in the cloud, even if you are sure that it's all encrypted. Where people will be caught out are in the grey areas - companies uploading assets or accounting data that their competitors can potentially get hold of and use to gain an advantage, for instance. Those people thought they were getting a service that would protect them and yet enable them to be more flexible in how they do business, I find it difficult to hold anyone but the company who lied about the service accountable for the failures here.
Ultimately it comes down to accountability and being able to distance yourself from the consequences of your actions, but it still takes a certain mindset to follow that through. If there was a little button you could press, and when you pressed it there was a chance somewhere in the world someone would be harmed but you'd get a reward, most people probably still wouldn't do it - the few that would are the CEOs that are crashing the stock market and skimming off the pension funds.
But at least back then the rest of the world could just get on with it without inheriting security theatre.
Where the analogy falls down is that newspapers have editors who can preview the ads. This was a mostly automated system. Of course that's going to eventually encourage people engaged in shady activity to participate, it's obvious even from the outset, the fact that there were no gateways to prevent this is the issue. I'd expect the newspaper that just published any ad it was sent without reviewing it to be accountable for their wilful negligence, aside from scale I don't see a difference here (of course you won't catch everyone, but an automated system that looks for certain keywords and flags them for review might have been sufficient).
It still amounts to the same thing, in the same way that eBay are ostensibly against the selling of counterfeit goods but still profit from said sales. If Google had wanted to put systems in place to try and prevent illegal ads, they could have done... for a cost - and there's the rub. What company is going to nuke one of its revenue streams at personal cost if there is a belief that they can get away with it (or that any punishment will be less than the cost of the fix)? Companies are pretty much bound to bend the law to its extremes in pursuit of profit, the entire way they are set up encourages it (i.e. beyond a certain size almost consequence free actions) and requires a massive rethink. Of course, that won't happen because there's too much money at stake and politicians are ten-a-penny.
Not necessarily - could be that they have some contingency plans in place to handle loss of service to popular sites, and those plans don't distinguish based on politics only on traffic (as it makes financial sense to help fix one website instead of having to field thousands of support calls), so the site goes down, the engineers follow the plan and restore it and some management bod sees an opportunity for some personal glory and jumps on it. Not saying that's the case, but your assumption, without knowing the full facts, that management must have given this the green light is just as flawed as the original assumption that management wasn't involved.
I loved the first TR - what many people forget is that at the time it was incredibly innovative, it was the first big 3D platform puzzler. I was always a big fan of games like Flashback, that weren't just about combat and timing but had some logic problems to solve along the way, and this game took that idea and put it into a 3D world.
That and a smattering of mythology (I wasn't so keen on the later levels when the aliens showed up), and the fact that back then the spaces you were exploring felt huge compared to what we'd seen before, not to mention the clever way that combat was managed, meaning you felt you were in the thick of the action without managing a million button combos all added up to a fantastic experience. I don't think I really cared at the time that the in game avatar was a female, although it was still pretty unusual to see a strong female character lead in a game.
Of course, once the media picked up on it it became just a novelty game about a stereotypical big boobed protagonist (who seemed to get enlargment surgery between iterations) and the whole series turned into a self parody - that was a real shame, but yes, that first experience of that first game WAS something special at the time.
You don't have to take the engine out of your car and rebuild it every year.
True, but it is recommended to get a service every year to keep it running smooth. Since the average user lacks the know-how to perform the equivalent of a service on their PC, throwing in the restore media is a more likely response.
Exactly what I was thinking - if the fact that this company tried to put spyware on their paying customers' computers without their knowledge, or that they are massive advocates of DRM and locking down equipment you supposedly own and going after anyone who makes it easy for you to get around that, or that they will happily sell you a pricey console on the basis that it has a bunch of functionality which they then proceed to take away after they have your money, or any of the many other things they've done to the disadvantage of their customers over the years wasn't enough to put people off PSN in their droves, I very much doubt that a few weeks' server outage and the hassle of replacing credit cards will do the job.
Not true, he just didn't slide out the panel that's full of SW memorabilia, Cat5 cable and cheetos wrappers. Seriously, though, I would not want to start running a bath while I watch some TV and then have to figure out where I left it...
I think a lot of the Sci-Fi demographic aren't the "tune it at X time on Y day to watch" types, I know I personally like to drop in and out of channels and it's only a handful of shows I will actually make the effort to be there for (it used to be that you had to be there to be able to talk about the latest shows with your friends, but it's just too easy these days to catch up if you miss anything). The Sci-Fi channel used to be my go to channel when I had nothing to do because I knew I'd have a good chance of seeing something I was interested in. It was around about the time the name changed that the balance shifted so that, more often than not, when I flicked to the channel it would be something I didn't care about. Eventually I stopped even including it in my rotation of "skip through these known channels in case there's something decent on". Now I barely even bother to check it as a last resort when there's nothing else on - which means if they ever do show something decent, there's a very good chance I'll never encounter it.