Comment Snail's pace (Score 1) 346
40 miles per year is like 12 cm per minute--you could actually watch it go!
40 miles per year is like 12 cm per minute--you could actually watch it go!
The GSM Association, the industry group based in London that devised the algorithm and represents wireless operators, called Mr. Nohl's efforts illegal and said they overstated the security threat to wireless calls. 'This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,' says Claire Cranton, a GSM spokeswoman, noting that no one else had broken the code since its adoption. 'What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.'
Oh, so now it's illegal to divulge impractical attacks that do not threaten privacy?
So it has come to this... At last I'm a positive badass for my GSM attack where you build a Turing-complete duck-based processor (using tasty duck treats to encourage the ducks to behave like little waddling transistors) and then use that to attack the crypto through brute-quacking-force! Ahhh HA HA HA!
You'll never catch me, coppers!
If they asked me if I could stand on one foot for 5 seconds at security for no reason whatsoever, it would piss me off.
So when they ask me to not get up during the last hour of a 10 hour flight, and ask me to check my one international bag instead of carrying it on, all for no reason whatsoever, yes, it pisses me off.
Why are we paying these guys to come up with this crap?
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Security Theater as much as anyone
I dunno--it kinda sounds like you don't really care that much what horseshit they pile on there, as long as it's only like an hour or something...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo
Wikipedia has a pile of links at the bottom of the page you can follow.
I can't find a record of a denial by the White House, and the guys who leaked the memo went to jail for it. Maybe the White House did issue an actual denial (I didn't search that much), and maybe there was something in the memo that wasn't Al Jazeera-related, that was why they went to jail.
But apparently it's well-acknowledged by everyone that there was a memo, but whether or not that memo contained any information about bombing Al Jazeera has not been confirmed nor denied.
That being said, I would be very shocked if this event didn't unfold in a similar form to the accusation. It would be a natural question as to whether or not to attack Al Jazeera—it's an uncontrolled media establishment operating in the war zone. If the question didn't arise, it would be remiss of those in charge. To actually bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar would be a capital B-A-D bad idea, so, if it was considered, it was rightly dropped.
I really hope it didn't actually come down to Bush and Blair having a discussion about it. The idea should have been considered and discarded before it got that high.
And if this is the trend, a trend that boycotting cannot stop because of the sheer amount of morons, in a few years we will have huge productions, costing in the excesses of 60 dollars, for which you have to purchase another 25$ extension for actually enjoy the game you bought in the first place.
It's not a rant about how they can be bug-free. As yourself actually said, bug-free is only pricier. But the balance will be so off in some years that we will have bugged games AND we have to purchase DLC to make them work.
If the market will bear it, that's exactly what we'll have.
The botnets are already more intelligent than your average spammer; making them autonomous is a small matter of programming.
I wouldn't mind them so much if there were at least some standards, like limited to a few per website, nothing annoying, simple text and images, perhaps allowing for moving ads where appropriate and non distracting, also no sound, EVER!
Dream on. Self-regulation isn't going to work, and neither is government regulation. The only sane solution is: if you don't want to view the ads, don't request them from a web server and display them to yourself.
Without entirely disagreeing with you, Flash is great for games, and makes cross-platform development dreamy compared to AJAX. I would argue that it's not intrinsically evil.
Reducing defects in code isn't free. It's the opposite of free. I wouldn't expect, as a video game consumer, the producers of these games are going to just eat that huge development cost; they're going to pass it right on.
“I think the idea that commercial software be judged by the same standards as other commercial products is not so crazy,” [Tanenbaum] says. “Cars, TVs, and telephones are all expected to work, and they are full of software. Why not standalone software?"
With all due respect to Tanenbaum, a modern video game is way more complex than a TV or telephone, and it has to run on a much wider variety of hardware. I'm so surprised by his response that I wonder if he is being quoted out of context.
Wardell believes enforced refunds would be a disaster. “When Demigod came out, there were people who couldn’t launch the game, but it turned out to be due to Google Desktop. It had a system hook that was preventing Demigod from launching on some people’s machines. We had to work around it. But whose bug is that? It wasn’t really a bug at all: it was just incompatibility. Retailers are not in any position to make that call.”
So imagine you spend the unheard-of amount of $100 million on testing to get a "defect-free" game that runs on every platform you can get your hands on, it goes gold, goes to press, and the day it gets on shelves, Google puts out a product that causes your game to not work. Nice.
My vote is the system is fine the way it is. If you can fix it for $zero, go for it. Otherwise forget it.
If it's hurting the bottom line, they'll fix it on their own. Hurting the bottom line is the one sure way to make a company change its habits.
But don't come to me to tell that bug free complex games are *impossible*. That's bullshit.
They're not impossible. They're just very very VERY expensive and you'd never buy them. The free market has figured out the proper amount of bug-fixing time to maximize profit.
On consoles, it's easier to release games with fewer defects because of the homogeneous hardware. On PCs you can forget about that.
If you came to me with a 2 MLOC video game and told me it was bug-free, I wouldn't believe you. And even if it was defect-free, you'd have to sell about 8 bazillion copies to recoup your development and testing costs.
Slowly but surely. Kids still do stupid stuff, but now pretty much ALL of it gets on the Internet. Instead of you being in the minority, you'll just be another person with wacky kid crap online. You're just about 10 years too early.
For text messages, they charge $1.5 million per gigabyte.
It's different than other data, though, because each gigabyte of texts comes encased in 87 pounds of solid gold.
Anyone care to comment on the possibility of this:
1. BadPerson puts up a web page, and put an iframe on there. A very tiny invisible one. That iframe links to some random 3rd-party childpornsite.com.
2. GoodPerson goes to BadPerson's web page, and unknowingly downloads stuff from childpornsite.com in the invisible iframe, which is dutifully cached.
As a variant, BadPerson could only include the iframe when requests are from the guy he is trying to frame. To everyone else, the web page would appear normal.
I'm not sure if BadPerson's URL will show up as a referring URL to the childpornsite.com, though.
Someone else already posted this, but it bears reposting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Reason #1 to never talk to the police: there's no way it can help. As he says, that really ought to be good enough, but he gives seven more reasons, just in case.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
