Could be a development/testing thing - we often use weak passwords to test functionality for accounts that only have access from restricted IPs, just because it's quicker and easier to type. I don't know if they verified the two digit password account or not, really if it is a dev thing it should have been removed from the live database but if it's locked down in the way I mentioned it wouldn't necessarily do any harm. On the other hand I have seen live applications that only do client-side JavaScript verification for string length, etc and therefore would allow one or potentially even zero character passwords if you sign up with JavaScript disabled, so I wouldn't rule anything out...
I was going to say the same thing - food and water play a more important role (assuming you play "hardcore"), although even then both mainly have the effect of improving your "health", though if they drop too far you start to suffer interesting side effects. It makes managing radiation poisoning a lot more interesting than Fallout 3, since you have to balance the need for food and water with the benefit of running low health and instead tracking down less irradiated sources, which was an interesting aside. Much more variation in guns and ammunition, too, although perhaps a little more confusing than it needed to be meaning after a certain point it's easier to just use a sniper rifle for everything. Moderately more interesting characters and side quests, although that seemed to be an issue in itself leading to lots of scripting bugs (if you don't do certain quests in a certain order you end up unable to complete them, or people randomly treat you as hostile, etc).
For me the part that breaks immersion in this type of game is that everyone around you is struggling just to survive, yet within a few game weeks you go from an absolute novice barely able to fight off rats to being almost godlike, the richest and most powerful man in the wasteland, by doing little more than running a few quests. If it's so damn easy why is everyone else scrabbling around in their own filth? At least in NV you're not emerging fresh faced from a vault before becoming an uber being, but in a way that's even worse, if my character had to potential to take over the entire Mojave, why was he working as a courier in the first place?
Maybe he only played the first two minutes and thought, "Hey, I spend all my time riding around my neighbourhood on my BMX too, these guys stole my life" and was onto the phone to his lawyer before finding out any more.
Not to mention women have a much shorter window during which they can produce offspring, while men can pretty much carry on right up until the day they die, so unless the entire gender disappears at once, it's likely much easier for males to do their bit to recover from an almost extinction level event than females.
I think the intention is that either the app would run on the server side and you'd just have an in-browser JavaScript GUI (so instead of downloading that 60MB PSD you're working on, you'd get a 200k PNG represenation or whatever), OR the libraries etc required to run the app would be cached client side (using HTML5) so the app can run almost entirely locally. I suspect Google would like the first approach, since it puts everything in "the cloud" - their domain - but in reality I think companies will like the second approach, since it means they don't need to provide dedicated servers capable of running all these apps.
It depends on the app. If you're doing heavy duty number crunching, it may well be better to have a JavaScript interface and have the heavy lifting done on some dedicated server in the cloud, but I suspect for most people who just want to write up the odd essay, you're likely correct (besides, I suspect what we'll really see is the people behind the apps pushing all the data down onto the machine using HTML5 mechanisms so the client is still stuck doing the donkey work, just less efficiently, but maybe I'm just being too cynical).
Especially considering you're then likely to have to dump your games catalogue in 12/18/24 months with a phone upgrade (unless they let you carry the library over, but that would mean you're tied to their phones from now on). I think most people don't mind paying a few pounds for a game, playing it until they're bored and then losing it when they upgrade, but if I pay £25-30 I want a) longevity and b) something I can come back and play in the future (I guess I can always keep the phone around - assuming it's still getting updates and can connect to the games library in the future - but I've had several phones just plain die after a couple of years forcing an upgrade, so for them that wouldn't be an option).
How does that work with incremental backups, though? Does that mean if you have 50GB of encrypted data, you would need to upload the entire 50GB every time you change a single file?
The point is that you accept a certain loss of privacy in order to sell a house - that's a necessary evil even if you value your privacy. The breach of privacy Google were responsible for was less than this, and could have been resolved easily by the Borings asking for their property to be removed from Street View. That's exactly why the judge found in their favour for a technical breach but considered there was no real damage done.
There is almost always precedent in previous cases. What you mean is that it's not binding precedent. A judge at the same level or higher is not forced to follow this decision next time (of course, a judge in a higher court wouldn't be forced to follow it anyway), but in many, many cases judges will rule as per previous findings unless there is a significant point on which the cases differ. If fifty previous judges have ruled one way on a certain set of facts, it's highly unlikely judge 51 will rule differently on the same facts - it's an unwritten rule and highly frowned upon to go against the grain (that's what the appeals process is for).
Maybe a system where legal costs are looked at as part of reasonable damages. In other words, if you had absolutely no choice but to go to court to rectify a matter, your costs are legitimate damages and can be reclaimed - if, on the other hand, all you had to do was email Google and ask them to remove the images and no real damage was therefore done (as the images were already available online elsewhere), then it might be considered that legal fees are not a reasonable part of any damage claim since they could easily have been avoided/reduced.
Agreed - I'm not sure why all uses have to be listed when this one alone would be invaluable to a lot of people. I've had a couple of slightly warped disks that self destructed in the XBOX due to the issue where, if the alignment is off while the disk is spinning, the disk gets scratched. I assume it was warped disks, I've put hundreds of other disks in there and never had any issue, although I do keep my XBOX lying on its side instead of its end these days just in case... in any case it would be nice to be able to play backups because, even in the absence of kids in the area, accidents seemingly do happen (I was lucky enough to get a refund or store credit for my two disks, I know plenty of others have been less so).
Well think about it - assuming it's not a branching form of existing life on earth, it would indicate that life had sprung up independently twice on one planet. Leave out the consideration that this means life could exist in more places in the universe than we could definitively say before, this would be proof that we weren't some astronomical anomaly. Not quite as exciting as proof of life on another planet, but very, very close. If life can spring from nothing twice here that renders it much more likely it can happen out there.
I don't think he ever claimed to be selling them as "new" (maybe "unused", which is a fair claim under the circumstances). As far as I know there's no law to prevent me buying a bunch of cars, fitting my own parts and selling them as second-hand.
He buys the phones. At that point they are his phones. He modifies them and then sells them second-hand (it's just that, in this case, second-hand happens to be better than new).
So if you have the technical know-how to do this yourself, it's fine, if you share that skill with people who don't have the know-how, it's suddenly a crime? I can't believe for a second that that is what the LoC intended with its reading of the law. It would be like saying locksmith skills that help you break into your own house when you lose your keys are fine, but selling that servive to people who have lost their keys and don't know how to get into their homes is illegal. Either the breaking is legal or not, the selling of services should have no bearing without a specific law ruling it out.
It's our right to know that potentially harmful or embarassing information can so easily pass out into the public domain. If these things are meant to be secret, you'd kind of hope that the agencies responsible for keeping things secret would be all over them. If they can leak to a benevolent source such as Wikileaks, what's to stop them being passed on to a malevolent source such as an opposing nation? Maybe there's more chance of the harmful stuff going to an opposing nation because there's more of a financial reward than when it's just "chatter" - we have a right to know that, too. And even the chatter, if embarassing, can be used as leverage and is therefore dangerous in itself. There are a few things in these cables I can imagine people might want to keep quiet to protect their own careers or personal interests, even if that means doing a few favours. That's a threat to national security, and if the agencies responsible for ensuring national security are doing a poor job of that, don't you think the people have a right to know? I'd much rather this information was out in the open where it's highly embarassing but otherwise harmless/can't be used as leverage than see it fall into the hands of one or two nations with their own personal agendas.
It's probably slightly cyclical as well. People know about the site in the West because it's reported in the Western news. It's reported in the Western news because it leaks information pertinent to the West. If the news around the rest of the world glosses over the leaks or fails to pick them up at all, it's obvious the site will be better recognised as the go-to for whistleblowers in the West and less so in the rest of the world, so it will attract more leaks from Westerners accordingly.
But is that a conscious choice, or are they just releasing what they get? I can imagine Russia and China might have fewer whistleblowers willing to risk their lives than the US, for instance.
It's not even the point anyway. What they should be doing is tracing the people who use the modded device for piracy and taking the appropriate action against them, not killing the mod scene as a whole, ergo the legitimate uses as well. That's like going after Kodak because a camera can be used to photograph a copyrighted image, or Bic for making pens that can be used to copy copyrighted stories - it throws out all of the legitimate uses just because the rights holder is too lazy to prosecute the actual infringers.
The issue is that it calls into doubt the trustworthiness of the witness testimony. If they're prepared to break the law, what else might they be prepared to do? Lie under oath? Does it mean they have a grudge against the defendant? Might there be a financial incentive that makes their evidence dubious? Of course, even if these things exist it doesn't necessarily mean their evidence is bad, but trying to hide this sure sounds like it's trying to artificially add weight to their evidence or remove any traces of such doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be a development/testing thing - we often use weak passwords to test functionality for accounts that only have access from restricted IPs, just because it's quicker and easier to type. I don't know if they verified the two digit password account or not, really if it is a dev thing it should have been removed from the live database but if it's locked down in the way I mentioned it wouldn't necessarily do any harm. On the other hand I have seen live applications that only do client-side JavaScript verification for string length, etc and therefore would allow one or potentially even zero character passwords if you sign up with JavaScript disabled, so I wouldn't rule anything out...
I was going to say the same thing - food and water play a more important role (assuming you play "hardcore"), although even then both mainly have the effect of improving your "health", though if they drop too far you start to suffer interesting side effects. It makes managing radiation poisoning a lot more interesting than Fallout 3, since you have to balance the need for food and water with the benefit of running low health and instead tracking down less irradiated sources, which was an interesting aside. Much more variation in guns and ammunition, too, although perhaps a little more confusing than it needed to be meaning after a certain point it's easier to just use a sniper rifle for everything. Moderately more interesting characters and side quests, although that seemed to be an issue in itself leading to lots of scripting bugs (if you don't do certain quests in a certain order you end up unable to complete them, or people randomly treat you as hostile, etc).
For me the part that breaks immersion in this type of game is that everyone around you is struggling just to survive, yet within a few game weeks you go from an absolute novice barely able to fight off rats to being almost godlike, the richest and most powerful man in the wasteland, by doing little more than running a few quests. If it's so damn easy why is everyone else scrabbling around in their own filth? At least in NV you're not emerging fresh faced from a vault before becoming an uber being, but in a way that's even worse, if my character had to potential to take over the entire Mojave, why was he working as a courier in the first place?
Maybe he only played the first two minutes and thought, "Hey, I spend all my time riding around my neighbourhood on my BMX too, these guys stole my life" and was onto the phone to his lawyer before finding out any more.
Not to mention women have a much shorter window during which they can produce offspring, while men can pretty much carry on right up until the day they die, so unless the entire gender disappears at once, it's likely much easier for males to do their bit to recover from an almost extinction level event than females.
I think the intention is that either the app would run on the server side and you'd just have an in-browser JavaScript GUI (so instead of downloading that 60MB PSD you're working on, you'd get a 200k PNG represenation or whatever), OR the libraries etc required to run the app would be cached client side (using HTML5) so the app can run almost entirely locally. I suspect Google would like the first approach, since it puts everything in "the cloud" - their domain - but in reality I think companies will like the second approach, since it means they don't need to provide dedicated servers capable of running all these apps.
It depends on the app. If you're doing heavy duty number crunching, it may well be better to have a JavaScript interface and have the heavy lifting done on some dedicated server in the cloud, but I suspect for most people who just want to write up the odd essay, you're likely correct (besides, I suspect what we'll really see is the people behind the apps pushing all the data down onto the machine using HTML5 mechanisms so the client is still stuck doing the donkey work, just less efficiently, but maybe I'm just being too cynical).
Especially considering you're then likely to have to dump your games catalogue in 12/18/24 months with a phone upgrade (unless they let you carry the library over, but that would mean you're tied to their phones from now on). I think most people don't mind paying a few pounds for a game, playing it until they're bored and then losing it when they upgrade, but if I pay £25-30 I want a) longevity and b) something I can come back and play in the future (I guess I can always keep the phone around - assuming it's still getting updates and can connect to the games library in the future - but I've had several phones just plain die after a couple of years forcing an upgrade, so for them that wouldn't be an option).
You didn't squirt anything at it, did you?
Let's give it a few days and see what influence the US brings to bear oversees, first.
How does that work with incremental backups, though? Does that mean if you have 50GB of encrypted data, you would need to upload the entire 50GB every time you change a single file?
The point is that you accept a certain loss of privacy in order to sell a house - that's a necessary evil even if you value your privacy. The breach of privacy Google were responsible for was less than this, and could have been resolved easily by the Borings asking for their property to be removed from Street View. That's exactly why the judge found in their favour for a technical breach but considered there was no real damage done.
There is almost always precedent in previous cases. What you mean is that it's not binding precedent. A judge at the same level or higher is not forced to follow this decision next time (of course, a judge in a higher court wouldn't be forced to follow it anyway), but in many, many cases judges will rule as per previous findings unless there is a significant point on which the cases differ. If fifty previous judges have ruled one way on a certain set of facts, it's highly unlikely judge 51 will rule differently on the same facts - it's an unwritten rule and highly frowned upon to go against the grain (that's what the appeals process is for).
I believe awarding one dollar to add insult to injury is known as the Trading Places principle.
Maybe a system where legal costs are looked at as part of reasonable damages. In other words, if you had absolutely no choice but to go to court to rectify a matter, your costs are legitimate damages and can be reclaimed - if, on the other hand, all you had to do was email Google and ask them to remove the images and no real damage was therefore done (as the images were already available online elsewhere), then it might be considered that legal fees are not a reasonable part of any damage claim since they could easily have been avoided/reduced.
Agreed - I'm not sure why all uses have to be listed when this one alone would be invaluable to a lot of people. I've had a couple of slightly warped disks that self destructed in the XBOX due to the issue where, if the alignment is off while the disk is spinning, the disk gets scratched. I assume it was warped disks, I've put hundreds of other disks in there and never had any issue, although I do keep my XBOX lying on its side instead of its end these days just in case... in any case it would be nice to be able to play backups because, even in the absence of kids in the area, accidents seemingly do happen (I was lucky enough to get a refund or store credit for my two disks, I know plenty of others have been less so).
Well think about it - assuming it's not a branching form of existing life on earth, it would indicate that life had sprung up independently twice on one planet. Leave out the consideration that this means life could exist in more places in the universe than we could definitively say before, this would be proof that we weren't some astronomical anomaly. Not quite as exciting as proof of life on another planet, but very, very close. If life can spring from nothing twice here that renders it much more likely it can happen out there.
I don't think he ever claimed to be selling them as "new" (maybe "unused", which is a fair claim under the circumstances). As far as I know there's no law to prevent me buying a bunch of cars, fitting my own parts and selling them as second-hand.
He buys the phones. At that point they are his phones. He modifies them and then sells them second-hand (it's just that, in this case, second-hand happens to be better than new).
So if you have the technical know-how to do this yourself, it's fine, if you share that skill with people who don't have the know-how, it's suddenly a crime? I can't believe for a second that that is what the LoC intended with its reading of the law. It would be like saying locksmith skills that help you break into your own house when you lose your keys are fine, but selling that servive to people who have lost their keys and don't know how to get into their homes is illegal. Either the breaking is legal or not, the selling of services should have no bearing without a specific law ruling it out.
It's our right to know that potentially harmful or embarassing information can so easily pass out into the public domain. If these things are meant to be secret, you'd kind of hope that the agencies responsible for keeping things secret would be all over them. If they can leak to a benevolent source such as Wikileaks, what's to stop them being passed on to a malevolent source such as an opposing nation? Maybe there's more chance of the harmful stuff going to an opposing nation because there's more of a financial reward than when it's just "chatter" - we have a right to know that, too. And even the chatter, if embarassing, can be used as leverage and is therefore dangerous in itself. There are a few things in these cables I can imagine people might want to keep quiet to protect their own careers or personal interests, even if that means doing a few favours. That's a threat to national security, and if the agencies responsible for ensuring national security are doing a poor job of that, don't you think the people have a right to know? I'd much rather this information was out in the open where it's highly embarassing but otherwise harmless/can't be used as leverage than see it fall into the hands of one or two nations with their own personal agendas.
Maybe the submitter got some inside information about the real purpose behind the site...
It's probably slightly cyclical as well. People know about the site in the West because it's reported in the Western news. It's reported in the Western news because it leaks information pertinent to the West. If the news around the rest of the world glosses over the leaks or fails to pick them up at all, it's obvious the site will be better recognised as the go-to for whistleblowers in the West and less so in the rest of the world, so it will attract more leaks from Westerners accordingly.
But is that a conscious choice, or are they just releasing what they get? I can imagine Russia and China might have fewer whistleblowers willing to risk their lives than the US, for instance.
It's not even the point anyway. What they should be doing is tracing the people who use the modded device for piracy and taking the appropriate action against them, not killing the mod scene as a whole, ergo the legitimate uses as well. That's like going after Kodak because a camera can be used to photograph a copyrighted image, or Bic for making pens that can be used to copy copyrighted stories - it throws out all of the legitimate uses just because the rights holder is too lazy to prosecute the actual infringers.
The issue is that it calls into doubt the trustworthiness of the witness testimony. If they're prepared to break the law, what else might they be prepared to do? Lie under oath? Does it mean they have a grudge against the defendant? Might there be a financial incentive that makes their evidence dubious? Of course, even if these things exist it doesn't necessarily mean their evidence is bad, but trying to hide this sure sounds like it's trying to artificially add weight to their evidence or remove any traces of such doubt.