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Comment Re:Frog is boiling.... (Score 1) 500

>If that were so, why would it take the Supreme Court to rule on this?

This was a weird case where a guy denied them the search, but they came back later and a different person consented to the search.

As long as the police had a reasonable belief that the person could grant a search (a roommate, family member, etc. all count for this), then the consent is valid.

To put it another way, if the search hadn't originally been denied, then there would have been nothing novel about this case.

Comment C-SPAN (Score 4, Interesting) 105

Yeah, I was listening to C-SPAN a couple days ago, and the military was talking about the possibility of freeing up a lot of its reserved spectrum for emergency use that rarely gets used as long as the commercial applications using it could be shunted aside in the case of an actual emergency.

It was a pretty interesting talk, which dealt with the interaction of land, air, and space networks, and their different needs and adaptive capabilities.

Comment Re:Go Amish? (Score 1) 664

I didn't get a ticket for it, and luckily I didn't hit anyone.

It was still a terrifying experience, though, as there were pedestrians everywhere.

It felt like the floor mat had ridden up on the accelerator, so I was trying to reach down to pull it off while it was accelerating out of control.

When that didn't work, I turned it off.

Comment Re:Non-story (Score 1) 268

>All they have to do is follow the law, file a counter-notification and this all goes away. The summary makes it look like YouTube is the bad guy when all they are doing is following the law and acting on the DMCA claims. It is up to the alleged infringer to counter-claim not the service provider.

YouTube *is* the bad guy. They don't even look at counter-claims most of the time, they just automatically side with the person filing the takedown notice. It's happened to me (when I had permission to use a song, and wrote that in the counter-claim) and there's a classical musician on Reddit who has had hostile DMCA claims filed against his own performances of Bach pieces that have been taken down.

It's only if you make a really big stink, or sue I suppose, that you'll get a human to actually look at it and correct the problem.

Google/YouTube is actually proud of the fact that 99% of the DMCA system is automated. This degenerate behavior is "Working As Intended".

Comment Re:Still abusive (Score 4, Interesting) 511

>Explaining something does not justify it. They should not go rummaging through my computer. Period.

Do you understand how VAC and similar anti-cheat software looks? It will scan through your memory looking for certain DLLs loaded, look through your computer files for cheats, and so forth.

Other than you being ignorant of what is actually happening before, I don't see anything that has changed with this announcement.

It's not like they're recording all of your metadata, uploading all your facebook posts to a data center in Utah, and targeting people for drone strikes using cell phone records.

Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 1) 67

>Do people want the NSA collecting a giant database about them?

No.

> Does it make the slightest difference if the giant database is nominally Verizon's giant database, that just so happens to respond to all queries from the NSA?

Yes. Because this, if nothing else, creates a paper trail and at least a properly worded query to the database, whereas currently (as Snowden demonstrated) anyone with a modicum of coding experience can download the whole thing and make off with it and no one's the wiser.

>Aside from the greater likelihood that the database will be used for marketing and surveillance, not a bit

You realize there is nothing stopping companies from using this for marketing right now, anyway, right?

Comment Re:This was a good thing for gamers. (Score 2) 146

>Two things had become constants at id: the lack of interesting games, and the boundary-pushing tech. Lets be honest, the only thing at id that kept it notable was Carmack. And I say that with a crushed, broken heart, as one who's run a TF server, mastered the trick jumps, and played thousands of rounds well after Quake was out of its prime.

Indeed. What was remarkable about Quake and Quakeworld was not the single player game (though lord knows I've played it through enough times by myself and in co-op) or the story, but the graphics technology, the client-server architecture (which *still* hasn't been beaten today, IMO, - no other modern game lets you move as fast as QW), and the ease of modability. QuakeC is a terrible hack, which is why they dropped it in Quake 2, but it had several important advantages: almost anyone could pick up the source code and mod it (leading to Team Fortress and then CustomTF), and since it was all run within a sandbox, you could download executable code from the internet and run it on your server without risking compromising your server. Quake 2, with its DLLs, didn't have that protection, which is one of the reasons why I stayed with Quakeworld.

Because QW was sandboxed, it was theoretically easier to debug, but the aforementioned hackishness of it meant that in reality debugging the thing was a nightmare for several important classes of bugs. I remember spending hours looking at where my code would crash, putting in sanity checks everywhere, and then having the problem turn out to be we were exceeding some internal limit in QuakeC. That the compiler would just silently ignore. Or entity overruns. Or the netcode limit on sending updates. Or the hardcoded limit on entity speed that had a soft limit that it would silently ignore. That sort of thing.

It was very impressive technology for something Carmack just hacked together in (IIRC) a couple days. I spent two quarters in my compilers class building my own language, and we didn't even have to write a VM to interpret the emitted code. It was brilliant, but hackish.

I'm sad as well, Phrosty... Carmack leaving id is the end of an era for me. I still have my emails I traded with him back in the day on implicit parallelization of Q2 code on the Tera Supercomputer...

Comment Re:This was a good thing for gamers. (Score 2) 146

>>Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim.

Which were better than Morrowind, which was better than Daggerfall. But that's specifically Bethesda Softworks (except FNV, which was made by Obsidian), a company with only a passing interest in QAing their code.

Obsidian actually did spend a lot of effort testing FNV (a friend of mine is near the top on the credits list), but it still had a ton of game breaking bugs at first. In part, it's because the Gamebryo engine is a buggy piece of shit, in part because it's a massive game, and in part because they missed a lot of the bugs.

Id's engines were and are much less buggy, but even still Rage was unplayable at release and I haven't tried it since.

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