Posts by Pascal Monett 18931 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
I note the wording of that phrase : the security that is ensured by the cookie is the security of the service, not the security of the users. That is not something that I will put in doubt.
However, I am quite certain that there are only two things that are ensuring my security : NoScript and the fact that I have Facebook redirected to 128.0.0.1 in my hosts file.
It's an EA Games title, what did you expect ?
I love the Star Wars universe, but I'd really rather they leave out the "hero" characters. Star Wars is fascinating enough without Jedi.
Nevertheless, I would like to get this game, except that I have suffered enough from sloppy EA DRM and abysmal patch management in the past. I am not giving EA one more penny.
I'll just enjoy the videos on YouTube, and relive the glory of Tie Fighter.
43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations. Add game theory to that, RPG with a dash of FPS for good measure.
You have 9 x 6 rooms to create, and where the player goes defines the setup of the next room. Equate player moves to rotations, jumble the initial settings at start, and you've got a really infinite game (for practical values of infinite, of course).
"there's no way Walmart doesn't get so big without subsidy in the form of reduced transport costs thanks to a government funded road system, or get to smooth over diseconomies of scale without the wholesale intervention in the economy, or offer such low prices without state intervention in the economies of many countries."
Everything you mention there may or may not be true, but there is nothing in there that is dedicated to Walmart. Roads are available to all companies by definition, and yes, the government is supposed to take care of that because the alternative is roads created/maintained only by companies. You'd hardly have enough roads if that were the case.
Wholesale intervention in the economy, whatever that is, is also done for the benefit of all companies. Unless you can prove that only Walmart benefits.
As for "state intervention" in the economies of other countries, again, if one accepts the idea of the existence of such a thing, it is not only for Walmart. Apple is another company that benefits very well from other countries' economies.
Your entire post feels very much one-sided and grasping at straws to me.
Most of us, when depressed, would likely take to the bottle. Whisky is a stalwart companion of depression, something we are given ample examples of in noir films.
But now and again, you get a behavior that skews from the norm, like this. Psychologically it must be quite intriguing.
I'm sure the landlord would have preferred whisky, though.
I don't appreciate how the US basically considers that anything it does is, by virtue of being done in America, legal and acceptable.
But concerning space, that is neither here nor there. In the long term we, as a species, will have to expand to other planets. In the shorter term we will need to mine asteroids to sustain our population's needs on Earth. Doing that implies industrial activity in space, it is unavoidable.
I read the act as the US saying that it will not pursue US companies or dispute a company's claim to having mined stuff. Well fine, where's the problem ? The act does not say that it does not allow other country's companies that right, nor does it say that only US companies are allowed to mine space. At no point does it declare US ownership of space.
Event of cosmic proportions ? More a storm in a teacup, as far as I'm concerned.
A film is a story. A story is told effectively when you concentrate on the relevant elements and ignore the mundane, humdrum stuff that has absolutely no interest to getting the story to move along. That's why you never see James Bond at the airport to get to his next exotic location.
VR films would be films in which, theoretically, you could choose to watch the plant in the airport lounge instead of watching the crazy kung-fu fight between the main protagonists. I doubt that will be allowed, the producer is going to want to know why he should fund however many cameras to shoot angles that have got nothing to do with the action that is the basis of the story.
As for VR in porn, sorry but no chance. Shoestring budget issues aside, producers in that industry absolutely do not want you watching anything else than what they want to show you - <ahem> from what I've seen heard.
So, VR in games ? Absolutely. Sandbox games are all the rage right now, and VR lends itself perfectly to that experience. Racing games will do okay with VR, but like 3D in films, it will bring next to nothing to the experience.
And apart from that ? Nothing. Films are a passive experience by nature, VR will bring next to nothing to that.
Personally, I do not fear spiders. When I find one in the house, I catch it in a jar and I throw it in the backyard.
I can understand the spider-hate. I find the girly shrieking funny. But could someone please explain how a single guy calls (the Australian equivalent of) 911 multiple times ? While desperately failing to kill a single spider ? Okay, it's Australia, maybe the spider was three feet wide - I would be uncomfortable with that, but come on, calling 911 ?
Sounds like an episode of Fawlty Towers.
Once the plant is built, I can't see that there be any emotional attachment to building a data center next to it. Once a power plant is plugged into the grid, the electricity it produces is not stamped with "Nuclear" on it. It goes into the grid, period.
So a data canter will be powered by some measure of nuclear electricity whether it is situated next to the nuclear plant or on the other side of the country.
Let's not encourage running like headless chickens whenever the mere notion of nuclear power is mentioned somewhere.
There have been commenters stepping up to say that, Microsoft having acknowledged a bug in its download image, we should all consider that MS is not that shady and cut it some slack.
Well here is your answer : no way we're cutting Microsoft some slack on anything.
Microsoft CAN NO LONGER BE TRUSTED, period.
Well from what I can see, memory limitations are not baked into CPUs but into motherboard chipsets.
And there are quite a few Skylake boards that are apparently ready for 64GB.
Besides, it is not logical that a 64-bit processor able to address 1GB of RAM would be limited in any way to not be able to address 128GB.
Well you know what they say : if a company is stagnating, it is on the decline because it is leaving market opportunities to its competitors.
Funny that, the black/white outlook on company performance. It's almost as if there is no possibility of the market not allowing for expansion at a given point.
And don't forget the many high-level government types throwing in contradictory requirements after the fact, or disagreeing with the specs and the realisation simply because they just noticed that it will give them some work in some area.
Don't throw the entire book at the companies, there's plenty of blame to be handed to government incompetence as well.
Our "democratically elected" governments are using every excuse to take away our dearly-bought freedoms, and because we are more interested in what's on TV after the news, we aren't getting our fat(tening) asses of the couch and shouting a resounding "STOP!" in the streets.
Cloud "provider" offers new service, gets attention, users decide to sign up, service ramps up, costs ramp up, service maintained for a while, investors decide not enough revenue generated, service gets killed, users are left with nothing.
Whether the service was free or paid for makes hardly any difference.
I do agree with the name though : cloud. As solid as the ones in the sky. Trust it as far as you can walk on it and you'll be fine.
1) Go through the Services and disable all services allowing for remote control of PC. Why, in 2015, has Microsoft kept those enabled is beyond me.
1) Uninstall all vendor software. It is always crap, and it bogs down Windows like an anvil tied to your foot. No vendor has ever made any update of any worth to the crap it puts on top of Windows. Now we know that, in addition, vendor software comes with vulnerabilities baked in. Get rid of all of it.
2) Remove all promotional, demo, or time-limited applications. You already have paid for what you need to work with, you're not going to be forking over more for any of those.
3) Install Windows Defender and AV of your choice. Check for driver updates. Run complete scan. Decrapify the abomination called the Registry.
4) Backup.
Takes about a day, but it's worth it - if only for the peace of mind.
Of course, major corporation says there is nothing to worry about so we shouldn't worry. It's not like major corporations have ever lied to us before, now is it ? Nor has any major corporation ever been proven wrong about something as sensitive and critical as security, right ?
Riiight.
So first you take the site down "for maintenance", then a few days later you admit that there was a breach, and now you want me to trust your word that I am not at risk ?
I would have been inclined to trust you if you been straightforward about admitting the issue instead of trying to hide it before being forced to come clean. Such shenanigans inspire the reverse of trust because you have demonstrated that you're willing to lie if you think you can cover up the issue.
So I will be checking my details and so on and, if I have the slightest suspicion of foul play at work, I guarantee you are going to hear from me.
Because the perps were absolutely not known by police forces, no sir. Their whereabouts could absolutely not have been discerned with a bit of eyeball surveillance, not at all. There is no way anyone could have known what the perps were up to if they had simply gone out the bloody door to find out.
Yep, linking databases is the solution. Yessirreeee.
So much for political promises and official declarations.
It's like talking to a drunk addict. They never stop drinking. Tell them to stop drinking and they go "Yup", then turn around and take an alcohol enema to get drunk again.
Can't trust them, period.
It's time to bring in the ghosts of the Founding Fathers.
Therefor the OP is correct, since all this data collecting didn't change the result one iota.
What is the use of invading everyone's privacy all the time if things like this still slip through ? If you're invading, then at least make it do the bloody job right.
I don't want to learn that some things are caught. If you're invading everyone's life then I want all things to be caught.
Otherwise it's just not worth it.
If the call concerned spouse battery of drunken idiot, you would be right. However swatting is a call that specifically directs police to a hostage situation.
The police are therefor going in under the presumption that lives are at risk, and one or more perps are armed (this is the US, remember ?) and ready to respond.
It is normal for them to charge in, because that is supposed to give them the element of surprise. It is also, unfortunately, understandable that in such a tense moment, otherwise innocent acts from totally surprised innocent people can be wrongly interpreted as dangerous. If you're going in expecting bad guys and being told to respond with lethal force, it takes superhuman calm, Buddha levels of self-control and split-second observation abilities to not fire a shot if a threat you expect seems to crop up.
I think 20 years to life is a perfectly reasonable outcome for some asshat who is sooo unhappy about losing that he unleashes lethal weaponry upon the family of his opponent. If someone dies because of this, they won't be coming back.
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