Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.

I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.

To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.

They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.

But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.

I don't think that's required any more - not on Linux or Mac OS X, anyway. I use rsync several times a day and each time it just reads my ~/.ssh/config file for the options, sets up the connection and performs the transfer without any fuss or bother.

I haven't set the RSYNC_RSH env parameter since about 2002.

Well, I hope you feel gouda bout it, because for my part I cheddar at the thought of what's going to become of this thread. Makes me feel bleu....

Or as we in KAOS like to put it:

STARKER! ZIS IS DE INTERNET! VE DON'T COUNTRY ON DE INTERNET!!

Not sure about this. While numerous national laws apply to overseas citizens (e.g. child abuse laws in Canada, Aus and the US), French citizenship is a little different. You cannot renounce French citizenship; it's simply not possible. So secrecy laws and various others which can and sometimes do conflict with human rights might be harder to enforce in a court of law.

But hey, the Napoleonic code on which French law is based differs significantly from Common Law, with which I'm more familiar, so I'm nearly certain to be upholding the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of talking through my hat. :-)

Well, the way you describe it, there's just no defense against that. But consider the following:

Many companies and individuals legitimately use tax havens as a way of keeping money offshore until they need it. The moment it enters their domestic bank account, of course, it can become capital gains/earnings and therefore subject to tax. But because they do a lot of business overseas, they leave a chunk parked in order to avoid unnecessary fees. So they use this as a floating pot they can dip into to conduct business at lower cost, and then pay the taxes whenever they repatriate some part of it.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is what you describe.

The problem is that regulatory oversight is slack-to-nonexistent, and that the entire system (like so many other parts of the financial sector) has been gamed so badly that the entire thing is widely (and justifiably) viewed as a sham.

Ironically, 9/11 put an end to some of the worst abuses. The US got so worried about stopping terrorist financing operations that they created a very strict new set of rules, and enforced them by disallowing anyone on their black list from trading in US currency. Smartened up a number of countries in a hurry.

So yeah, those rich schmucks are still hiding their money, but at least it's (slightly) harder for them to buy drugs and guns.... *sigh*

Heh, that just lens itself to humour, doesn't it.

Sorry I'll f-stop. I know what'll happen if iris one more pun. I shutter at the thought.

It's all in how it's presented.

Note to all: Not a rickroll. It's a masterpiece of symphonic comedy.

Actually, now that I said that only morons would believe EA's BS about the CPU not being enough for their game, and that they're actually processing your city on the server... it kinda makes me wonder if they ARE trying to get morons as a target demographic.

I was reading a paper a few months ago about Nigerian widow scams and such. The question they had basically asked themselves was: why those scams don't try to be a little less ridiculous and more plausible? Why don't they try to snag more people?

Their conclusion was that basically the scammers don't really want everyone. They actually want only the morons, who are more likely to then go through with it. If a smart person gets tipped off that it's bogus... GOOD! That's one less dead end to waste time on.

So I'm thinking, hmmmm, maybe that's EA's plan. Maybe they do want to reach the morons. More morons with money probably means more crap DLCs sold down the line :p

Well, that much is clear.

In fact, here's a thought: they said that the processing was so complex, they had to do some of it on their servers. But... if my still fairly top of the line 4 cpu / 8 thread Intel couldn't do it... what was EA going to do that actually makes a difference? Add one more CPU of their own for everyone who plays at a given time? Yeah, I'm so going to believe that they'll buy a 1 million CPU server farm just to handle everyone at launch. NOT.

So, yeah, it was clear that they're just shovelling ridiculous BS and hoping that enough morons would actually believe that.

The sad part, though, is that I've actually seen morons repeating it in excuse of the crashing servers fiasco.

Actually, considering how the game works, I'm 100% convinced that it's the result of EA considering the single-player case... except in EA management lingo that use-case sounds a bit like, "OMG, gazillions of people will pirate our game, or buy it used on EBay."

Seriously, the game IS at heart a single player game. I've managed to squeeze in between server crashes and start a game or two, and guess what? The game functions exactly the same when the server crashes while you're in your city.

The lie that the game is too complex for a single CPU and they need to do server-side processing too, was just that: a lie. The only "server-side processing" they do is saving the game and publishing your game events.

But here's the funny thing: Steam for example manages just fine to send your achievements to the server in the background, without needing the game to be tethered to a server all the time. Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, A Game Of Dwarves, etc, take your pick, they're all single player games that Steam can both provide DRM for and save the achievements (and for some even the save games) on their server without pretending it's an online game.

So anyway, the game IS perfectly able to run single player. It's not a real client-server product like WoW or EA's own TOR. It doesn't need a server or a server emulator to play exactly the same. It's a single player game, which is perfectly able to function without a server, plus some artificial tethering to their servers that doesn't really add much.

So why IS a single player mode missing at least as an official option to start the game, when the game functions perfectly well in single player?

It seems to me like the only reasonable explanation is that they considered single-player offline mode as something to prevent.

You know, it just occurs to me... their problem with piracy and with second hand games is that someone gets to play one of EA's games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

So let me get this straight, the result of putting the idiotic DRM in SimCity, is... that now a LOT of people get to play one of EA's (other) games, and EA doesn't get paid for it.

Sure, most of those wouldn't have bought the other EA game, but then neither would have most pirates. That is, outside of putting the BS in BSA.

But if you do the the maths BSA style, where every single copy downloaded is a lost sale -- and you just know whoever came up with that over-the-top DRM is -- yeah, great job, EA. Did you need a scope to shoot yourself in the foot so neatly, or is it a natural talent?

No, seriously, releasing SimCity without DRM would have probably resulted in less people playing an unpaid copy, AND saved them from all the negative publicity and angry customers.

At least on Amazon.de there were a couple of comments to the effect of, "Well, they couldn't have guessed that all the idiots who paid a lot of money for a game actually intend to play it." :p

It's not even just the personal attacks. It was also a combination of both annoying and amusing to see the fanboys come up with stuff like:

- Well, they said it would be online and have DRM, whoever is complaining can only blame themselves, bla, bla, bla, I'm giving it 5 stars out of principle!

(Really? Did they also say it would be impossible to play because the servers crash all the time? And what principle would that be? Fanboy devotion?)

- I don't believe any of the 1 star reviews, such a complex game can't be judged in just a couple of hours!

(Which part of "can't even start the tutorial" is too complex to judge? Would, say, 8 hours of servers crashing and being unable to even 'claim' an empty spot to build on, reveal some subtle nuances of experiencing a server crash, or what?)

- The game is pure genius and incredibly much fun, I'm giving it only 4 stars because I can't actually start it.

(Then how the eff would you know first hand if it's fun to play or not?)

- I didn't play it myself, I bought it for my kid and he seems happy with it, so I'm giving it 5 stars.

(Way to confess in public that you're paying exactly zero attention to your kid. Plus, if you have no personal experience with it, shouldn't the kid be writing the review?)

Loosely translated from German from Amazon.de, for what it's worth.

Really, it's the... faith-based giving top ratings or objecting to vad reviews for something they didn't even play that was disheartening at times.