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In which case something has screwed up a registry setting. Favorites to do this (apart from malware) are graphics card drivers, and Google Chrome, The other more likely possibility is that you have fiddled with Folder Options, make certain that in the advanced options you have unchecked the option to ‘open windows as a separate process’.
Deleted my comment.
Try a full shut-down restart.
‘rockonbazza’ I agree with all your comments and unfortunately you have to persevere for many hours to reach level 14 before the game starts to become at all enjoyable.
It actually has a lot more depth to it than a simple hack & slash game as in addition to managing your own and your companions survival/needs you have three to five potential allies hell-bent on ‘doing a Trump’ on all your other allies rather than the real enemy. Nearly every ally has their own little Machiavellian sub-plot that they are pursuing which often conflicts with your own goals. – Game of Thrones writ small. You have to be careful not to let one of these allies become too powerful or they will play havoc when you are not looking. This part of the game I found both challenging and enjoyable – rather like herding cats!
While the early game suffers badly from balance, the later game suffers from naff ‘legendary’ treasures that require absurd strengths to use but are never the less quite weak compared with ordinary weapons. The usual hunt for money to fund character upgrading also becomes too much of a pain and again is unbalanced.
On the positive side, I have only had a couple of game crashes and the frequent autosave meant little was lost.
Bottom line – nowhere near as bad as the earlier games from this company, A flawed but potentially rich jewel, that is covered in unbalanced layers of ordure.
He was correct with respect to QR codes in as much that they potentially link to multiple sites as well as potentially containing space for a fair amount of encrypted text or code words//numbers. QR codes do however have to conform to some minimal standards in order to make them readable.How-to’s for this are freely available.
If however you see a rectangular code block then it is probably IQR.
While the potential is there for harm, such codes are unlikely to used for the antisocial purposes that your friend moots as such codes suffer from the two drawbacks of being both static and visible. In that use they are as good as but not much better than the old thieves/didicoy secret chalk marks.
Any techie who has read spy stories can think of dozens of ways to pass on information that are far less visible, contain even more data and can be easily updated. I can think of half a dozen examples of different ways of passing huge quantities of secret hidden info, that are potentially a lot more secure and capable of far reaching coverage. If the Government were not so fixated on spying on the general public maybe the security services would have more resources to pursue humint and focus on these aspects . (It hasn’t gone unnoticed by me that nearly every real terrorist was known to the authorities but they did not have the resources to follow up their lines of inquiry.)
Tell your friend not to worry about terrorist bar codes and instead read some old Cold War spy novels by Len Deighton et al. then apply his imagination to this.
Sorry, I cannot see what point you are trying to make. If you order stuff from Chibay it will come with a standard custom’s sticker that should identify if the contents are valuable. Anything you are musing about would also have to cover that situation.
Barcodes/skus are currently only for vendor/distributor convenience though I guess eventually things like smart freezers will need to have some sort of standardised sticker identifying package contents, freezer life etc. No doubt the EU will produce the necessary regs to which we will have to adhere without any post-Brexit say in the matter.?
I’d guess that Yodel labels are similar to SKUs which only have to conform to Yodel’s internal standards.
The answer is of course yes you can if the barcoder has conformed with the international standards. There are however a couple of prerequisites – first a bar code parser, to get out the GTIN and second you need access to a database of manufacturer numbers.
As Richard was professionally involved in procurement (resisting temptation to call him a professional procurer)?, he can fill in the gaps much better than me. Suffice to say that there is nothing ‘secret’ in standard barcodes as they are now an essential part of nearly any company’s purchasing , goods received/order entry, stock control and general ledger systems.
However, what you may find are two bar codes on an object, a big ‘standard’ one and a much smaller company info barcode the latter is company specific and as you say Steve not normally capable of being read.
A QR code is of course different again and can have masses of info as well as the down-loadable stuff. This could in theory contain encrypted/encoded info.
QR codes are much more dangerous as the act of scanning one can in the worst case send your phone off to a malicious web address. You should really only scan QR codes from trusted sources. See article
While Dave is of course correct with respect to bar codes, they are an important part of many inventory control systems (for example goods in/out of a warehouse or stock control). To that end most companies adhere to a global standard such as EAN or UPC. It is too many moons ago since I last was involved in warehouse automation but I know my old company used a standard code which was probably UPC.
Vitamin D during pregnancy is also getting far more attention. Too little D and too little sunlight (e.g. burqa wearers) is now thought to be very closely linked with a much higher risk of MS in later life.
Sort of related to the OP. Vitamin D supplementation is getting increasing attention from the medical profession. It now appears that they have been working with the wrong assumptions for years! link
This is the skit I had in mind.
Double DIN is apparently just a size spec. Just out of interest I took a look at these players – in the worst case you could be paying north of £700! Looks like a return to the old hifi tech rip-offs which were the butt of so many comedy skits.
Bob, M$ seem to have fixed the issue. I just updated a Win7 64bit vm machine that I had not used for a while. ( A games box)
Steve Chibay phone battery replacement is not physically difficult, just near impossible to find a replacement battery for 2+ years old phones.
I used to have Chibay phones – but as you say service was a bit of a lottery and battery replacement difficult or not available. I also had one bit of malware installed on the raw phone that needed rooting to remove. I would have repeated my experience with an Elephone but they have gone very large format and 5.2 inch is now my upper limit.
I therefore went the Wileyfox Swift2X in the Black Friday sales – I am extremely pleased with the phone and their support — two or three full Android updates in the short time since I have had it. If this continues for the life of the phone then I’ll stick with them. The only downer is the non-replaceable battery, not a good idea imo but I guess it allows a slimline phone.
Richard, being slightly plump is good as slightly plump people have a greater life expectancy than those at the lower end of the bmi band.
I do not care who snoops if they have a judicial warrant to do so. It is snooping without such a warrant that worries me as the public is exposed to nosey snoopers from both the police and local authorities. The Government should at a minimum raise the proposed bar for serious crime to greater than their laughable 6 month tariff (i.e. any of these can snoop if they SUSPECT that you may refuse to pay your TV licence).
I do not personally worry about such snooping but were I poor, a film/pop star or footballer than there would be a high likelihood of intrusive snooping much of which would be illegal.
I don’t trust anything American as far as Govt sponsored spying goes. We don’t really have an massively popular software written here in the UK, but I’m sure there’s plenty of taps in the ISP infrastructure. I just assume anything on my PC is accessible to someone somewhere if they’re Govt sponsored. I aim to keep the criminals out, not helped when they start using Govt written exploits.
+1 – Unfortunately those who work for Government Agencies frequently have different views about the systems put in place for mass surveillance. Some, are whistle-blowers such as Snowdon and do it out of a genuine belief that their Agency is acting illegally, while others find ways of subverting the internal security checks of the Government link.
The bottom line is that Government inspired operating system/CPU flaws become known to the criminal fraternity and feed things like botnets or ransomware. Unfortunately NSA and GCHQ seem to me to be the original source of most of this malware (Stuxnet being potentially the worst of the lot). I now view Kaspersky as being less likely to kow-tow in keeping such security flaws secret and more likely to flag this malware.
While I agree we cannot keep Governments from spying on us, we should not facilitate criminals using these self-same tools.
[edit] just found the other reference – that one fits too! I must have had a case of dittography! I should probably have rephrased the Kaspersky comment.
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