People with one of the most common forms of dyslexia find it easier to read black on yellow (usually soft/light/pastel yellow) - it's high contrast but doesn't have the glare of pure white - just because that colour scheme doesn't sound more readable to you, that doesn't mean it's not more readable to someone.
The problem is, because they're serving up words that a computer has failed to recognise as part of their OCR project, those same words are often impossible for humans to identify also (maybe they're smudged on the original source for instance) - this does result in some incredibly difficult words to read. According to the powerpoint, you only have to get one word right, I tried this and sometimes it worked, other times it gave me an incorrect result - I think the truth is probably more like (and I'm sure I read once this is how it works) they serve one recognised word and one unrecognised word - the requirement for success is only getting the recognised word right, they just compile the results of the unrecognised word to advance their OCR projects. Usually the recognised word is more readable (because we know it at least started out readable whereas we can't make the same assumption for the unrecognised word), so in the majority of cases so long as you type the word you can read and then make a best guess at the other you will still successfully solve the captcha. Of course, it might still be easier to hit refresh a few times until you get a more readable pair.
And if you want to reconcile it with the storyline of the games, pretty much all of the games (with one or two notable exceptions) tell completely independent stories with different characters set on different worlds (perhaps even in different realities), so while it might be an ongoing series for the player, it could still feasibly be the final fantasy of the in-game characters.
That's why there are a whole raft of laws around this type of collusion - it might hurt Google a little but the chances are it would come back to those ten companies in a much bigger way. For an IT-specific example, PC manufacturers universally disliked Microsoft, but they didn't collude to teach MS a lesson, instead it was MS who called the shots (until they themselves were slapped on the wrist).
Well the first one was incredibly well received, it won't hurt them to produce a sequel - the extra funds might even speed up development of the MMO, and perhaps this second iteration is meant in a similar light anyway (it has all kinds of online and network play options so maybe it's partially a test game for their networking code).
My GF rather optimistically pre-ordered me Diablo 3 for my birthday when it appeared on a games site with a release date of May last year (she pre-ordered it in March thinking I'd get it within a couple months of my birthday). I told her right away that there was pretty much a snowball in hell's chance of it even being released before my next birthday and to cancel the pre-order. Have we even got a firm-ish release date yet?
They have the choice to take a public stance against moves like this and to use their standing as the biggest search provider on the web and an incredibly well known brand even amongst Joe Public to publicly state the reasons why this is a very bad idea - this move hardly makes them look like they're reluctantly dragging their heels and being forced down this route.
Just what I thought - "google will be paying verizon to speed up youtube" isn't as vague as GP suggests. Unless Google are paying an absolute fortune, it won't be sufficient to upgrade infrastructure to pay for the additional speed, and since we're seemingly already at capacity (there might be a bottleneck in delivering the content from Google to Verizon but there's also a bottleneck in delivering it from Verizon to the home, solving one won't solve the other) the only way to achieve that extra speed is to take it from elsewhere. I'm calling slippery slope.
That's an interesting point of view, but as a customer, what say do I get in this I wonder. Example, if a bunch of CEOs decide video is more important so they give it priority over everything else, but to me it's not nearly as important as moving around large files or having a snappy web, will I get a choice in the matter - do I get a discount because I'm not enjoying super fast video, or do I have to pay the same as people who are getting much greater benefit than me because they're only using their connection for video.
Seems like this would be pretty awesome for the Wipeout project - they'd need a bigger track but it looks far less prone to flipping and like you could actually throw it around corners much faster without it leaving the track.
I thought maybe a water cannon with a small cannister of water on the cars - driving over a weapon trigger would give you the ability to fire one blast of the cannon (maybe you can store these up for a cumulative longer blast). Some waterproofing on the cars and track and it would be pretty awesome driving around with a water cannon to blast your opponents into walls, etc (with the bonus that spills would make the track more treacherous so you'd have to time your attack so as to not mess up your own racing line), although obviously once your reserve was exhausted the weapon would be ineffective!
I think the usefulness as a botnet would be limited anyway. It would be quickly picked up by the media (a massive iPhone exploit would be much sexier news than another Windows bug), Apple would rush through a patch and most users would go update right away. The biggest payoff would be a fraud attack with a quick turnaround, or else malicious users undermining Apple's security message.
Well the first attack vector that springs to my mind is installing malicious code that will email/text everyone in your contact list (and update your facebook and send out a tweet etc) with a link to the originating site. Since this will look like a link from a trusted source, I'd imagine a fair number of users would follow the link. The fact that updates can't be pushed over the air, while meaning patches never become unavailable as 3G traffic gets flooded, also means it will take users longer to get the patch - they might not even realise there's an issue until they next connect to the computer (my GF does that maybe two or three times a month as she doesn't buy a lot from iTunes).
As for the reasons to take over a phone - well there's much more trouble you could cause than just using it for DoS on 3G - have all infected phones dial out to premium rate numbers at 3am, for instance, and there would be all kinds of chaos, or a key logger to capture people's account details for things like Amazon, eBay, banking apps (a bad idea if ever I heard one) etc.
An action like this doesn't originate off the back of one employee during his downtime - at the very least it would be discussed in committee with appropriate legal representation, but it's just as likely there will be a department specifically tasked with tracking down such violations and pursuing them. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean all of the above is unreasonable - for instance, it may be that spending X amount on this saves them twice as much on dealing with crimes involving copied seals being used to create fake IDs, in which case the ends possibly justify the means.
Heck, even wikipedia articles list their references and are conspicuously labeled if they are in need of references. This article says the figure is from "the authorities".......WTF is that???
Yes, the whole "An insider said" or "Authorities quoted" or "A close source reported" line is almost always garbage. Sure, in a few cases they're protecting a genuine source, but in the vast majority they're either hiding the fact that they stole the story from elsewhere or that they just outright invented the quote. After all, if you had the scoop on a particular subject and you could back up your claim with a recognised, verifiable source, why would you ever omit such a critical piece of information?
I wonder what kind of market there is for a newspaper that isn't afraid to run later but be more factually correct and cite sources, etc. It's something that would appeal to me - I don't care about having the latest hot gossip for the water cooler but I'd like to be able to get reliable, factually correct news without doing all of the digging myself. I'd happily pay more for such a thing too (up to a limit), but I'm guessing I'm not in a big enough demographic to make it financially viable.
If it doesn't and it sells then that's an indication that there is a market for the genuine producer to make a budget range. They can either do so and capitalise on another revenue source, or they can refuse and watch someone else do the same. The only reason they don't want to do that is because they want to manage demand to inflate their prices and profit margins - the only issue here is whether or not you agree the law should prop up such a flawed business model that relies on pretending an easily copied product is in any way scarce.
Before video games it was certainly "video nasties". I can extrapolate from that that before then it was likely TV, rock and roll, radio, cinema, music hall, newspapers, books, the theatre, humming, gathering around the fire to tell stories... essentially any form of entertainment that distracts people from the daily drudgery (cynically I'd say anything that makes life on earth more enjoyable makes the promise of a better afterlife less of a reward for, and therefore incentive to accept the status quo of said drudgery).
And that's before the media gets their hands on whatever the actual story may be and polarises it for the gratification of their target audience. The first casualty of mass-market journalism is objective reporting.
Well unless the monarch is largely powerless, as the Queen is today, I can think of a few reasons why you might not want to choose your head of state on the basis of which member of a single inbred family is lucky enough to be born first. Having said that, I quite like that the power resides with parliament and the monarch we do have is pretty much a figurehead, I can't imagine the UK with a president.
Unfortunately there are still sufficient users stuck on IE6 that we have to continue to develop for it (unless we're willing to turn away a sometimes significant number of users). These users are the ones who likely don't even have the option of using Firefox, probably because they're on a locked down corporate network. That means we have to rely either on MS back porting IE8 to older operating systems (never going to happen), admins allowing non-IE browser installations (I'm guessing there's a valid reason they're not doing this already) or just waiting around for those users to be migrated to more recent Windows installations. Either way we're still stuck with the horror of IE6 for some time yet, I fear.
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People with one of the most common forms of dyslexia find it easier to read black on yellow (usually soft/light/pastel yellow) - it's high contrast but doesn't have the glare of pure white - just because that colour scheme doesn't sound more readable to you, that doesn't mean it's not more readable to someone.
The problem is, because they're serving up words that a computer has failed to recognise as part of their OCR project, those same words are often impossible for humans to identify also (maybe they're smudged on the original source for instance) - this does result in some incredibly difficult words to read. According to the powerpoint, you only have to get one word right, I tried this and sometimes it worked, other times it gave me an incorrect result - I think the truth is probably more like (and I'm sure I read once this is how it works) they serve one recognised word and one unrecognised word - the requirement for success is only getting the recognised word right, they just compile the results of the unrecognised word to advance their OCR projects. Usually the recognised word is more readable (because we know it at least started out readable whereas we can't make the same assumption for the unrecognised word), so in the majority of cases so long as you type the word you can read and then make a best guess at the other you will still successfully solve the captcha. Of course, it might still be easier to hit refresh a few times until you get a more readable pair.
And if you want to reconcile it with the storyline of the games, pretty much all of the games (with one or two notable exceptions) tell completely independent stories with different characters set on different worlds (perhaps even in different realities), so while it might be an ongoing series for the player, it could still feasibly be the final fantasy of the in-game characters.
That's why there are a whole raft of laws around this type of collusion - it might hurt Google a little but the chances are it would come back to those ten companies in a much bigger way. For an IT-specific example, PC manufacturers universally disliked Microsoft, but they didn't collude to teach MS a lesson, instead it was MS who called the shots (until they themselves were slapped on the wrist).
Well the first one was incredibly well received, it won't hurt them to produce a sequel - the extra funds might even speed up development of the MMO, and perhaps this second iteration is meant in a similar light anyway (it has all kinds of online and network play options so maybe it's partially a test game for their networking code).
My GF rather optimistically pre-ordered me Diablo 3 for my birthday when it appeared on a games site with a release date of May last year (she pre-ordered it in March thinking I'd get it within a couple months of my birthday). I told her right away that there was pretty much a snowball in hell's chance of it even being released before my next birthday and to cancel the pre-order. Have we even got a firm-ish release date yet?
They have the choice to take a public stance against moves like this and to use their standing as the biggest search provider on the web and an incredibly well known brand even amongst Joe Public to publicly state the reasons why this is a very bad idea - this move hardly makes them look like they're reluctantly dragging their heels and being forced down this route.
Just what I thought - "google will be paying verizon to speed up youtube" isn't as vague as GP suggests. Unless Google are paying an absolute fortune, it won't be sufficient to upgrade infrastructure to pay for the additional speed, and since we're seemingly already at capacity (there might be a bottleneck in delivering the content from Google to Verizon but there's also a bottleneck in delivering it from Verizon to the home, solving one won't solve the other) the only way to achieve that extra speed is to take it from elsewhere. I'm calling slippery slope.
That's an interesting point of view, but as a customer, what say do I get in this I wonder. Example, if a bunch of CEOs decide video is more important so they give it priority over everything else, but to me it's not nearly as important as moving around large files or having a snappy web, will I get a choice in the matter - do I get a discount because I'm not enjoying super fast video, or do I have to pay the same as people who are getting much greater benefit than me because they're only using their connection for video.
Seems like this would be pretty awesome for the Wipeout project - they'd need a bigger track but it looks far less prone to flipping and like you could actually throw it around corners much faster without it leaving the track.
I thought maybe a water cannon with a small cannister of water on the cars - driving over a weapon trigger would give you the ability to fire one blast of the cannon (maybe you can store these up for a cumulative longer blast). Some waterproofing on the cars and track and it would be pretty awesome driving around with a water cannon to blast your opponents into walls, etc (with the bonus that spills would make the track more treacherous so you'd have to time your attack so as to not mess up your own racing line), although obviously once your reserve was exhausted the weapon would be ineffective!
Because we don't have real books or comics in the space year 2010?
What do you plan to do with the $5 change?
He has to maintain his alter ego to protect his secret identity.
I think the usefulness as a botnet would be limited anyway. It would be quickly picked up by the media (a massive iPhone exploit would be much sexier news than another Windows bug), Apple would rush through a patch and most users would go update right away. The biggest payoff would be a fraud attack with a quick turnaround, or else malicious users undermining Apple's security message.
Well the first attack vector that springs to my mind is installing malicious code that will email/text everyone in your contact list (and update your facebook and send out a tweet etc) with a link to the originating site. Since this will look like a link from a trusted source, I'd imagine a fair number of users would follow the link. The fact that updates can't be pushed over the air, while meaning patches never become unavailable as 3G traffic gets flooded, also means it will take users longer to get the patch - they might not even realise there's an issue until they next connect to the computer (my GF does that maybe two or three times a month as she doesn't buy a lot from iTunes).
As for the reasons to take over a phone - well there's much more trouble you could cause than just using it for DoS on 3G - have all infected phones dial out to premium rate numbers at 3am, for instance, and there would be all kinds of chaos, or a key logger to capture people's account details for things like Amazon, eBay, banking apps (a bad idea if ever I heard one) etc.
An action like this doesn't originate off the back of one employee during his downtime - at the very least it would be discussed in committee with appropriate legal representation, but it's just as likely there will be a department specifically tasked with tracking down such violations and pursuing them. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean all of the above is unreasonable - for instance, it may be that spending X amount on this saves them twice as much on dealing with crimes involving copied seals being used to create fake IDs, in which case the ends possibly justify the means.
If the FBI get a seal it's only fair if we all get ponies.
Heck, even wikipedia articles list their references and are conspicuously labeled if they are in need of references. This article says the figure is from "the authorities".......WTF is that???
Yes, the whole "An insider said" or "Authorities quoted" or "A close source reported" line is almost always garbage. Sure, in a few cases they're protecting a genuine source, but in the vast majority they're either hiding the fact that they stole the story from elsewhere or that they just outright invented the quote. After all, if you had the scoop on a particular subject and you could back up your claim with a recognised, verifiable source, why would you ever omit such a critical piece of information?
I wonder what kind of market there is for a newspaper that isn't afraid to run later but be more factually correct and cite sources, etc. It's something that would appeal to me - I don't care about having the latest hot gossip for the water cooler but I'd like to be able to get reliable, factually correct news without doing all of the digging myself. I'd happily pay more for such a thing too (up to a limit), but I'm guessing I'm not in a big enough demographic to make it financially viable.
If it doesn't and it sells then that's an indication that there is a market for the genuine producer to make a budget range. They can either do so and capitalise on another revenue source, or they can refuse and watch someone else do the same. The only reason they don't want to do that is because they want to manage demand to inflate their prices and profit margins - the only issue here is whether or not you agree the law should prop up such a flawed business model that relies on pretending an easily copied product is in any way scarce.
Before video games it was certainly "video nasties". I can extrapolate from that that before then it was likely TV, rock and roll, radio, cinema, music hall, newspapers, books, the theatre, humming, gathering around the fire to tell stories... essentially any form of entertainment that distracts people from the daily drudgery (cynically I'd say anything that makes life on earth more enjoyable makes the promise of a better afterlife less of a reward for, and therefore incentive to accept the status quo of said drudgery).
And that's before the media gets their hands on whatever the actual story may be and polarises it for the gratification of their target audience. The first casualty of mass-market journalism is objective reporting.
Well unless the monarch is largely powerless, as the Queen is today, I can think of a few reasons why you might not want to choose your head of state on the basis of which member of a single inbred family is lucky enough to be born first. Having said that, I quite like that the power resides with parliament and the monarch we do have is pretty much a figurehead, I can't imagine the UK with a president.
Unfortunately there are still sufficient users stuck on IE6 that we have to continue to develop for it (unless we're willing to turn away a sometimes significant number of users). These users are the ones who likely don't even have the option of using Firefox, probably because they're on a locked down corporate network. That means we have to rely either on MS back porting IE8 to older operating systems (never going to happen), admins allowing non-IE browser installations (I'm guessing there's a valid reason they're not doing this already) or just waiting around for those users to be migrated to more recent Windows installations. Either way we're still stuck with the horror of IE6 for some time yet, I fear.