Posts by Pablo 348 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2009
Video games, just like movies, are "speech" (expression), that's what. Were you perhaps under the impression that only adults had rights? Or that there was any evidence that violent video games were actually dangerous, like drinking, driving, and sex are? (Voting, unlike speech, is only guaranteed to adults in the constitution.)
Actually, there's a pretty big difference between a voluntary rating system and a mandatory one. For on thing, if it was a law, it would most likely apply to every stupid little iPhone game, and maybe even free games on the internet. Getting these rated would be prohibitively expensive. Most likely the law would end up being ignored in those cases anyway, but any law that's unenforceable shouldn't be made in the first place.
Currently, nobody is obliged to get their game rated if they don't want to. Of course most retail stores won't sell it if they don't. (Which is kind of ironic given the popularity of unrated cuts of movies around here.) But there is likewise no law that retail stores have to obey the ratings either, most of them do anyway for the sake of their family-friendly image.
Another difference is that when a system is voluntary they can't do like Australia and "refuse classification" to certain media, thereby banning it without actually having to use the B word.
Finally, this law in particular had some even more problematic aspects. For one thing it piggy-backed legal power onto the ratings from the existing private rating organization. It shouldn't be to hard to figure out why that's not a great idea. Also, it required a giant "18+" warning on games considered "patently offensive to children" without even attempting to explain what that means. This would almost certainly have a severe chilling effect.
It's irritating that Craigslist never really explained their decision to pull the adult section and whether or not it was permanent. BUT in their defense, they clearly made a deliberate effort not to "ruin the internet" by confining the change to US-based listings only. Of course it would have been even better if they had limited it to the states whose attorney-generals were giving them grief, but whatever.
Jailbreaking and unlocking are not the same thing. Unlocking refers to allowing use with any carrier, whereas jailbreaking means allowing the use of any software. Though at least at one time, jailbreaking was the only means of unlocking an iPhone, so in practice you may be correct.
Nine times out of ten when someone starts talking about "children's rights" it turns out they're either on some kick that actually has nothing to do with children (like censoring Craigslist) or their definition of "rights" includes only the Jobsian "freedom (from porn)" kind of rights.
So it's a bit of a shock to see that label used for a group actually genuinely advocating protecting the rights of children. Amazing.
"Quantum key distribution systems became commercially available around five or six years ago and are used for the secure exchange of highly sensitive material by banks and governments..."
I have to admit this came as a bit of a surprise to me. I see at least one other commenter was unaware as well.
I that just goes too show you... something or other. I don't really have a point I guess. Now where's my flying car.
I don't agree with the view that one person can no longer make an interesting/useful program in a reasonable amount of time. Mobile apps are just one example that disproves that. Even on a standard PC platform, it's still possible to write a genuinely helpful utility of your own. Because of course, you know exactly what YOU need. And with luck, someone else might need it too.
Being American, I obviously have no experience with introductory programing classes in British schools, but I have a sneaking suspicion they're still using Quick Basic, Pascal or something equally inappropriate for creating modern software. If true, that's the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Students should be introduced to something easy and rewarding first and learn the nitty-gritty details later on.
It's logical, relatively safe, and potentially useful for an application to use DLLs placed its own folder preferentially. It's not logical, safe, or very useful (except maliciously) for an application to use DLLs from the folder of the data file you're trying to open. If I understand correctly, the latter is what's happening.
I can imagine how it worked out that way, but there's really no good reason for it to do that.
So this is going to be an IWF style arrangement then? That's better than putting the government directly in control, but assuming this is still something end users get no choice in, serious issues remain.
First of all, who makes the list, and who will be allowed to audit it?
Second, how do they define child abuse? Do they mean child porn, or are they using the Aussie definition that includes drawings of Bart Simpson, videos of acrobatic Russian circus babies and women with small breasts?
Finally, wasn't one of the big criticisms of the filter that it would slow down the internet? Does that change just because they're blocking less content? I don't know if the UK's internet is slow or not, but I do recall IWF screwed up Wikipedia and the Internet Archive on separate occasions.
This case deals with California law, not federal. The CA constitution has a stronger freedom of speech protection, making it a "positive right", not just forbidding the government from restricting speech. For this reason people soliciting donations or signatures for some cause or another are a common sight in front of stores around here, even though businesses would prefer not to have them there.
I don't know what the situation is in other states, but in California at least, private property doesn't automatically trump freedom of speech, not once you invite the public onto your property in the first place.
I think really the main point of these kinds of graphical programing environments is to make it look easy and inviting for a novice, not actually to make it easier. And that has some value, there are many people who wouldn't even consider trying something that required writing *gasp* code. But once they're eased into it they might find it's not as hard as they thought.
In a similar way I was impressed by a free utility called AutoHotkey, which at first appears to be a simple macro system, but when I was on their forums I regularly saw newbies discovering that it wasn't hard to start adding logic and before they knew it they'd have a nice little script to help with some task or other.
Is something like NoScript, but with a built in (if you pardon the term) crowdsourced domain review feature. So when I see that "suihhx.net" is trying to run a script I can submit a request and see reviews for a clue about what they heck it is. Even if they were fairly terse like "Apparently just serves ads.", "OMG it ate my computer ^_^;;" or "Necessary to read comments on Washington Post." it would be better than just guessing.
Note that I specifically didn't suggest it should base the default policy on these reviews or even automatically display them, which would require summiting a list of every domain I visit to their server.
Security conscious login systems won't even reveal whether an account exists if you don't provide the correct password, the standard response is something like "User name or password is invalid." Admittedly that is a little bit annoying, so they might be excused to doing away with that security measure. But to actually reveal information about that account is idiotic, and when they combine it with a system where something widely known like an email address functions as the user name, that pushes this into Epic Fail territory.
I suppose they are, but that doesn't mean there's no reason for a civilian to have one. Nasty things are very handy when nasty people try to hurt you.
In the US, at least in most states, even famously pro-gun control California, you can easily buy a (non-projectile) stungun. Recently I've seen (projectile) Tasers in stores to, but these are fairly tightly controlled. Arguably even more than guns, not only do you have to register it and pass a background check, it fires serial number confetti when used.
In my opinion they have a bad reputation just because police are trigger happy with them. If anything they're probably safer in the hands of a civilian who knows they can't get away with that kind of behavior.
Admittedly, I'm not sure there's a really good reason for them to be disguised as phones.
That's exactly what I was expecting this to be when I first saw it. I was prepared to be impressed. There doesn't seem to be such a thing but something similar exists (from the same company even). I didn't know about it until just now, but it sounds interesting. It's the "PoGo Instant Digital Camera" and it prints thermally on some kind of special paper. The camera is more expensive, but the price per shot works out to a much more reasonable 17 cents.
May I suggest it for a future Reg hardware review.
Arguably, apathetic voters who are forced to vote do more harm than apathetic voters who don't vote at all. When voting is voluntary, voters are self selected for being at least mildly interested in politics, which one might hope correlates at least to some small degree with being better informed politically.
The image is 3D, not the screen. The (apparent) position of the image does indeed require three coordinates. X relative to left eye, X relative to right eye, and Y. From this your brain can easily extrapolate the more traditional X, Y and Z. Just like it does with actual 3D objects.
I guess it's for people who never close their browser, or have it configured it to reopen with all their old tabs, but I never do that so... it's just more bloat. Yuck.
I would like some kind of tree or tier based system, but switching to a whole separate window looks like a waste of time. For now, using a separate browser window like bhotaling said seems to be the most practical solution.
Even if it's only another way to stay one step ahead of the bots, I think it's worth exploring. But even as a proof of concept, that implementation was sorely lacking.
I'm imagining something more like Google's CAPTCHAs, only instead of fixed a distortion, it would use a changing distortion, basically the "underwater" effect you've not doubt seen before (but randomized, obviously). And in this case the individual letters (and optionally a background) would move independently. Done well I think it could very likely be easier for a human while still posing some new challenges to a bot.
Of course I'm not crazy about adding more flash and just to sites, but this would probably still work okay as an animated gif.
I suppose that make sense, but they must have realized this would happen. The fake handler scheme couldn't last long against any but the dimmest adversary. As soon as she got back in touch with her real handlers the jig would be up.
So the question then becomes why did they escalate the investigation to the point where they blew their own cover now (or rather a little while ago)? Given that we're supposedly trying to patch up relations with Russia it still seems like very strange timing.
If a random guy says "Hey baby, I'm a doctor, wanna screw?", that's sleazy, but not illegal. But if he says "I'm a doctor and ohmygosh you've got phantasmaembryois. Come back to my place and I'll reach up there and fix it for free.", that crosses the line. The difference is he's lying about the purpose of the act itself, and that's what this guy did too. The fact that you'd have to be an idiot to believe it in this case is irrelevant. In California that would actually be considered rape, which IMHO may be extreme, but it's certainly not a "little white lie".
It's entertaining to speculate about what kind of software you would use to outsmart the FBI but as far as I've seen, none of the information released so far explains what tipped the feds off to the existence of these spies in the first place. It could just as easily have been some unrelated leak, or even info from a US spy in Russia. To me it sounds like they were actually doing a pretty good job of keeping a low profile.
But it's not so strange. It was only for buying a phone, I put down stuff like that all the time. Still it's probably not a great idea if you're trying to keep a low profile.
Though it also occurs to me that the clerk could have put that in after she declined to provide an address.
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