You *do* close the blinds before having sex, don't you?
But the real issue is that people are too hung up over this in the U.S. If such an incident happened to most normal people in the rest of the world, they would simply take better precautions and move on with their life. Going into a panic over it to the point where you get paranoid and dysfunctional is the wrong way to handle the problem. Also, there would be less of an issue with stalkers and so on if the U.S. wasn't so anally obsessed with maintaining a pseudo-1950s ideal of purity about the human body. I mean, as it was pointed out a couple of days ago here, you can show someone's head being exploded in a PG movie but you show a little too much skin and you're looking at a R rating.
ie - most of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't generally have to worry as much about such issues because sex and the body in media is far more accessible. So there's less of a psychological issue amongst the society because they can easily and simply get their porn or whatever as they need to. You'll note that the most sexually repressed societies are also amongst the most violent, especially in terms of assaults and rape.
Of course, this is barely being touched upon in modern Psychology. The idea that high incidents of rape and physical assault are a result of societal issues and a dysfunctional environment between the sexes and people's views of themselves and their bodies.
The book "An Interview with The Devil" also has a coupe of great passages in it about this. Though it's mostly tongue-in-cheek humor, there is a valid point to be made about how people who are less able to show affection and obtain closeness with others end up being more violent. You'll note that the U.S. is even worse off than ever before and we also at the same time can't even hug each other or touch each other in public/school/work/etc without fear of being charged with a crime.
It would be interesting to do a study on sexual and physical repression in terms of the collapse of great empires throughout history. I suspect that the results might be quite interesting.
The best option of course is simply to allow each player to use a different monitor or screen. Even placing the screens at 45 degrees to each other so you can't SEE the other player makes an enormous difference. Imagine playing a game like Halo 2 multi-player if the person can plainly see you hiding. Let alone something more modern where stealth and being hard to see is a major aspect of the game. When the other player can see you, it's reduced to a twitch=fest and there's no tactics or strategy. So of course games like that are not as fun to play. Case in point - my friend has a machine(basically a cheap P4 brick in the garage) set up as an Unreal Tournament server - and every so often we play and it's amazing how fun it is compared to split-screen.
My current PC can handle 2 monitors and 2 keyboard/mouse combinations(dual video and 4 USB 2.0 ports). Yet not one game takes advantage of this. And I'm positive with a little tweaking, the next generation Xbox or Playstation could handle it as well - and in fact, easier, since they already support multiple controllers. Adding a 2nd LCD screen for $100 or so is a minor consideration if that's all you have to do.
There are numerous unauthorized examples of games out there. Major retailers won't carry them, but in this case, it doesn't matter, really. If the company is in a small "offshore" country(or in China), there's nothing that anyone can do. It's the same as the various "crack" disks from years ago. They hate it, but they can't stop it, either.
Awesome. You'd think that databases would allow for SLIGHTLY better performance in this area especially since so much of today's commerce is international.
Someone commented about security through obscurity as not being effective, but I disagree. It will only be lone individuals who are making such attempts, and that means that they will be operating without the advantage of scripts, programs, or a botnet. Old school manual crunching and much frustration. With plenty of trails to follow, since they don't know how to disable and re-write the logs or much of anything with a system like OpenVMS. ie - even if they got in, they'd not know what to do.
In short, as long as you're not running Windows, Linux, or Apple, you're 100% off of their radar and essentially immune. And while this may seem silly for many users, but for specific things like a router/firewall or a mail server, there are compelling reasons to think about going this route, especially as the knowledge of these systems becomes more and more arcane. (also, VMS has its own drive formatting and directory structure that isn't standard as well. - this also drives intruders crazy)
Exactly. Even the best forensics tools don't include such characters in their brute-force attempts unless you actually manually include non-standard characters. Adding every sub-language and system command is wearisome to say the least.
My best password, ever, though, was on an old PC. It had a non-standard key layout with old extended/high-set ASCII graphics type symbols covering the other half keyboard(similar to keyboards on Japanese or Hebrew machines designed for Unicode). So passwords that were little pictures was extremely commonplace. Windows got rid of them, but they did make guessing passwords essentially impossible at the time. (IMO, one of the most boneheaded moves done by Microsoft)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 Of course, operating systems other than Windows never got rid of such extended character sets, (or have their own version of ASCII) which is a big plus.
Lastly, one can still use some of the 33 unused formatting codes if they want. IIRC, all ASCII formats still have those embedded but they never appear normally in a text editor. I also don't know of any password cracking tool that bothers to check those. Atari and Commodore made use of them for graphical characters, which make it really easy to have PC-proof passwords at the time.
Having spent a few years working for a company that dealt with files from Asia on a daily basis, it strikes me as odd that more sites don't allow unicode characters. Adding a single Chinese or Arabic character to the password is enough to force most cracking utilities *even when you have the machine in your hands* to have to resort to brute-force measures that can take days. What's awful, though, is how sites restrict you to A-Z and 0-9 98% of the time, which defeats the entire reason for a password. I suspect that they want to be able to maybe crack it themselves in case they feel the need to do so. Because 10 characters max, with a simple 36 character ASCII limit is going to be cracked exactly as it was in the example.
It's the old obscure OS trick. If you are using an operating system that the hackers commands mean nothing to, you are secure. I know of a few people who run email servers(as an example) that use very obscure and old operating systems that no botnet or hacker is designed or has the knowledge any more to deal with. One friend a few years ago was using an old A/UX Macintosh as a router, precisely because the ability to remotely hack the code was essentially zero.(while there were easy ways ten years ago, everyone has forgotten them by now) If you can find a book on how to program some of these obscure OSs, good luck to you. If you want to really go crazy, run OpenVMS on your mail server. And watch anyone who gets into the system have a fit trying to take over. (I suppose there are some people who can, but criminals are lazy and I suspect less than 1% of people here on slashdot even have used OpenVMS in their lifetime)
While that's not usually workable, though, for modern computers, it IS easy to do with Unicode, since the latest version covers 109.000 characters. Figuring out what characters you used would probably take a cracker just to figure out a simple 2 character combination. It's just not something that the botnets are (currently) equipped to deal with.(though I suspect that they do check for simplified Chinese and Japanese and similar characters - the trick would be to pick something obscure like Sandscrit or another ancient language.
Diablo III of course is going to sell a "few" million copies(10+ would be my guess). And Fallout, of course, well, it's already at 5 million copies sold and climbing. Speaking of Diablo III, though, Torchlight sold very well.(500K copies so far) And of course, there are the classic games like Final Fantasy, which sold an ungodly number of copies over the years. How many in all of its games, most of which are solely single player?
80 million. Just the Final Fantasy franchise. As long as Square Enix alone is making games, EA's theory is worthless. (and this isn't counting their ownership of Eidos, which almost exclusively makes single player games)
With the linear type of games that EA knows how to make, I'm not surprised that they would think of games as good for only one play-through in single player mode. There are many games that are made by other companies that excel in single player mode because of the vast ability to play the game multiple times without it getting old. Now, true, many games today ARE linear but that's because they are dumbed-down to near idiot levels as they are also released on consoles. But that's only because the game developers are simpletons who can't design a good single player game. Not because there is a lack of interest in them.
You forget that the *companies* that own the cables and machinery of the Internet absolutely have the right to block content that is harmful or wasteful of their resources and hardware. It says so in every contract at every level. When Russia "allows" a carrier to have coverage in a city or region, both sides have such clauses in the fine print to protect themselves.
This isn't about nations, which can cause all sorts of problems and incidents by doing such actions against other nations, but multi-national companies that aren't associated with any one government. They could make a decision to block a neighboring country's or customer's main arteries and restrict that flow to a trickle.
ie - "find another provider" Eventually Russia (as an example) might very well find itself running out of companies that want to work with it. That's perfectly fair, isn't it?
What needs to happen is for them to get tougher and in the case that a researcher finds a problem provider, at least notify the company instead of sitting on their hands passively watching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam 80% of spam is sent via botnets. Of course, a little research shows that 30% of all botnets are in Brazil and only 7% are in Russia. (roughly 20% of spam by volume, though, is sent from the U.S. - and that's entirely within their rights to crack down upon - just read your terms of service)
While cutting off Russia might be somewhat problematic(though all of the EU which most of the wires route through has laws against spam), I doubt if cutting off Brazil and smaller countries until they clean up their act would amount to much international fallout. Doubly so since these are companies and not governments making the decision that it's just too expensive and too risky to do so any more.
And as for the other person's comment about it turning into "Bambi", well, we're talking about over 20 billion dollars a year in lost productivity just in the U.S. alone. There's a real reason TO keep the coyotes out of the hen house, no matter how fascinating it might be to watch. I guess a better analogy would have been a nature show about wolves and the scene being one getting into a commercial poultry farm. I'd expect the farm/business to be a MITE bit angry if they passively sat back and let several thousand dollars worth of damage occur just to get their film done.
If all else fails, the telecommunications companies that own the backbone can literally cut Russia's feed until they get their act together and do something about it.
Simple as turning the connection off - that will get their attention. And as a multinational company, they are pretty much impossible to do much against(unlike a country).
The real question is why these "researchers" aren't actively poisoning the wells as it were to disrupt the botnets. It's like watching some nature show where they sit passively while the huge coyote mauls the little pet. At some point you would think that they would try to do something.
Of course, there is a simpler method open to authorities, which is to just not accept connections from Russia. If need be, just cut the wire until the local government hunts these criminals down.
Well, making it easier to do so isn't the right direction to be taking as a company.
All you need is to be part of any of the larger interest groups. A *lot* of people also belong to these and I get several a week trying to get me to join. If you put it up, someone can view it someday or will quite possibly steal it someday. The saner approach is to just not divulge any personal information at all online.
Well, then you take your chances, I guess. Just don't complain when your identity gets stolen. What's there is almost enough to do it if you have a fairly unique name. Finding out the rest of your real life identity information wouldn't be that difficult.
I physically yanked it out of my browser a long time ago. No Java and no Flash makes it extremely unlikely that normal browsing will result in malicious code getting onto my system. And, also my bandwidth usage as well as memory and CPU usage are a mere fraction of what they were with it enabled, since no ads run in the background. 90% of sites work just fine without it. Highly recommended just turning off the crap.
What's really missing from the games is depth. Part of this is because the more they try to out-do each other with fancy effects and eye-candy, the more it appears to be like a loud commercial rather than a nicely done presentation. But beyond that, games are now churned out like Hollywood does - all scripted, simplified, and by the numbers.
For instance, they take time to explain *everything* in such horrendous detail and have trainers and all sorts of idiot-hand-holding. Compare this to Baldur's Gate. You knew nothing, you had to learn it as you went, and there was a real sense of a story, precisely because they didn't tell you everything that was happening. Deus Ex? didn't tell you much of anything. Diablo didn't either. In fact, the "great" games were designed to be a good game first and never worried about trophies or making it so that some addle-headed eight year old could get 100% on it on their XBOX or PS3. They were "hard" because you had to think. And they didn't have guides and books available before the game itself came out, either.
Now, compare that to Mass Effect 2. I liked the game, but it was so much more simplified than it had to be. Even the Citadel level was a coupe of barely larger than room-sized areas and was designed so that even a moron couldn't get lost. Everything was possible to obtain as well as complete. Compared to the first game, it was a massive let-down. You never could get off-track with your missions. You never could get lost in a city. You never ran out of ammo. I mean, with that much space on the DVD, they actually *shrunk* the square footage of almost every level in the game.
Depth. Hardly any. Replay-ability? Nearly zero. It doesn't feel like we're entering a world so much as watching a made for TV movie. And, it's everything now. Assassin's Creed? I've played games from the 80s with more depth to the character interactions. Shoot, they couldn't even randomize the dialogs for the city missions. Just the same 4 or 5 canned scenarios. Would it have really killed them to spend another 5-10 hours to bring that up to 20 or 30 so we feel like it's a realistic mission? And, this gets worse as you get older. Eventually you want something that isn't mature because it has lots of sex and violence in it, but because it respects your intelligence enough to not treat you like a child while playing it.
From rubber-band AI to canned dialog to overblown effects and "trophies" for the most useless and inane things possible, it's no wonder people are so nostalgic for the days when gaming meant more than sitting through an 8 hour interactive movie on their screen.
(foo)arsenide... that means it has Arsenic in it and that's just more nasty stuff that we have to deal with in our landfills. Iridium is also a whopping $795 an ounce as of today. Mainstream chip manufacturers won't like a 2-3x hike in price that's likely to happen if they start using most of the world's production for chip making.
It takes a couple of years or more as well to actually develop a chip and the manufacturing process to make it in bulk, so neither is more than in the R&D stage for a while anyways. In terms of this technology, it's at exactly where Graphene was a year ago - a prototype nano-scale transistor.
Is it interesting? Sure. But 300Ghz(current max, likely much higher) and incredible heat tolerance - with common and safe materials is a hat trick that's not going to be probably equaled in our lifetimes. If ever. It's hard to imagine anything more stable and fault-tolerant than graphite.
Graphene and Graphene compounds are essentially the Holy Grail of chip design and it's silly to pour money into anything else at this stage. So in addition, while this might be great in a lab, the chip makers aren't going to spend the actual hard cash on it with Graphene's potential payout staring them in the face and singing sweet songs to them.
Essentially the other issues are that solid boosters are smaller and cheaper. But this comes with a huge problem as well in the forces that the thing transmits to the ship and cargo as well. A liquid fueled rocket will get up to speed much more slowly and in a smoother manner. One more minute to get to orbit isn't a big deal at all. In the end, the cost savings for the booster has to be designed into the rocket to withstand it and also to reinforce the payload so that it arrives in one piece. (Astronauts routinely commented that the solid boosters on the Shuttle felt very unpleasant - almost painful, in fact)
You end up with no real savings and more danger and wear in the end. While this isn't a big deal for something like a missile, it's different with humans and delicate ($$$) cargo like a satellite.
I don't see the point of this when comparing the potential of Graphene based processors. These things, when (not if) they become reality, will have the same impact that perfecting Fusion power will. There's just no reason to spend the time trying to eek out a few more percent when the second that we manage to get the better technology to work, we'll no longer need anything else.
If we had to in a worst case scenario send shipments of Nitrogen to both places, sending anything to the Moon would be easier. Also, we really don't know what is underneath the surface. (there is also a small Lunar ice cap as well, according to a recent probe - at least 600 million tons of it in 1-2 meter thick sheets. Perfect and easy to handle as well with our current machinery.
And actually, 0g assembly is worlds more demanding than low gravity would be. You could easily put a crane, for instance, on the Moon. Launching would require a vastly lower amount of resources(and cause no potential debris that we'd care about). And, of course, there's something TO launch against. Current orbital platform ideas assume that you float away and then engage the engines, but there's a lot of objects in orbit to run into - and a very big thing to fall down into. One mistake and the political fallout would be enough to get it shut down.
Also, the Moon is a far superior place to do orbital assembly as the amount of distance and fuel required to reach such a station/platform would be low enough (~20 miles) and close enough to allow for a space elevator or similar to be a realistic option(also, with a complete lack of atmospheric and seismic activity, extremely predictable and safe) The Earth is a horrendously bad place to build such a structure, while materials we have today could easily build one on the Moon if we needed to.
Mars... As we witnessed in the past, just getting something the size of a small mini-fridge is a huge effort. We can get huge amounts of material up to the Moon quickly by comparison. And there's the communication distance, which is horrendous for Mars but small enough to even set up a computer network between the Earth and the Moon.
Really a no-brainer here. Moon first, then figure out where you want to go from there.
To have a group survive a doomsday scenario and be able to get back to Earth, say, after 10-20 years when it's safe to do so again, you'd only need around 100,000 people.
Yes, that's a LOT and likely won't happen for a while, but it will eventually. ie - If we looked to the year 3000, how much of the Moon would be colonized? Probably quite a large area of it. The problem, of course, is that we need to start the process, and starting a colony always sucks.
oh - the whole prison thing was only because someone earlier mentioned it what with the whole "one-way ticket" proposal. With the Moon, both of those become optional - and works better in both cases, since sending supplies is a simple matter by comparison. Trust me, some bright soul in the Pentagon has certainly thought of putting a Supermax type prison up on the Moon. (nothing says you can't have both - even 10-20 miles from the main colony might as well be another planet)
True, but all we really need to do to start a research station is find a cave underground and then drill a hole with a small tunnel boring machine to it. Put in an airlock and presto. Easy and simple. Pressurize it and there you go. Done properly, you wouldn't even need fancy barriers. Maybe a spray-on coating on the walls.
We're talking a few dozen billion versus impossible. The initial project just needs a space station type living area with a small reactor to power the boring machine and of course, the tools and machinery. This could be done in as few as three trips/payloads. Once it's started, we just wait for them to either find or dig a big enough cave underground. (note - we would of course need some sort of ground penetrating radar first to figure out where to drill, but that's not impossible, either.
Mars? Mars is just silly by comparison. Trying to land several hundred tons of materials on the surface alone is not going to be something that we can do with our current level of technology. But we could do that on the Moon quite a bit easier. (plus the Moon makes for an excellent place to build ships versus in orbit - lots safer and easier)
Correct. It appears as if the Moon is actually far better to colonize in this fashion. Actually better for several reasons:
1 - Distance - this is obvious. Less everything and less time to mount a rescue. 2 - The recent probing of the lunar sub-surface pretty much confirmed what most people though would be true. That the soil there is nearly identical to that found on our planet if you dig beneath the the surface. It appears as if there's a radiation and micrometeorite blasted exterior (egg)"shell" but solid rock underneath. This means that pretty much every element that we need is there. Mars is a huge unknown by comparison. 3 - The climate on the Moon is actually better. A lack of wind and temperature fluctuations makes for a more predictable environment. Make no mistake, Mars is just as deadly and un-breathable as the Moon, with 0.1675 PSI of pressure at its densest. That's still effectively hard vacuum in terms of equipment and seals and the need for air-tight structures. It's the same as roughly 65,000 ft on earth. The Poles are much thinner, though, and that's where we'd have to land in any case to get water. 4 - Plans already exist online and elsewhere for proposed underground bases on the Moon which look like they could be made to be fairly self-sufficient.This would be a much better "Prison" scenario as well, since a single riot half a mile underground won't cripple the entire structure. All we need are tunnel boring machines. The smallest such ones can *just* be lifted to orbit by our largest rockets. Getting the same equipment to Mars is in no way possible. This means that the simplest way to build a habitat on Mars (underground) isn't an immediate option, while it would be on the Moon.
Slashdot Mirror
You *do* close the blinds before having sex, don't you?
But the real issue is that people are too hung up over this in the U.S. If such an incident happened to most normal people in the rest of the world, they would simply take better precautions and move on with their life. Going into a panic over it to the point where you get paranoid and dysfunctional is the wrong way to handle the problem. Also, there would be less of an issue with stalkers and so on if the U.S. wasn't so anally obsessed with maintaining a pseudo-1950s ideal of purity about the human body. I mean, as it was pointed out a couple of days ago here, you can show someone's head being exploded in a PG movie but you show a little too much skin and you're looking at a R rating.
ie - most of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't generally have to worry as much about such issues because sex and the body in media is far more accessible. So there's less of a psychological issue amongst the society because they can easily and simply get their porn or whatever as they need to. You'll note that the most sexually repressed societies are also amongst the most violent, especially in terms of assaults and rape.
Of course, this is barely being touched upon in modern Psychology. The idea that high incidents of rape and physical assault are a result of societal issues and a dysfunctional environment between the sexes and people's views of themselves and their bodies.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.ipce.info/library_2/pdf/prescott_en.pdf (perhaps the first study of its kind, though largely ignored in the U.S. until recently)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1981.tb01068.x/abstract - This is extremely recent and a (long overdue) logical progression of the hypothesis, IMO.
The book "An Interview with The Devil" also has a coupe of great passages in it about this. Though it's mostly tongue-in-cheek humor, there is a valid point to be made about how people who are less able to show affection and obtain closeness with others end up being more violent. You'll note that the U.S. is even worse off than ever before and we also at the same time can't even hug each other or touch each other in public/school/work/etc without fear of being charged with a crime.
It would be interesting to do a study on sexual and physical repression in terms of the collapse of great empires throughout history. I suspect that the results might be quite interesting.
The best option of course is simply to allow each player to use a different monitor or screen. Even placing the screens at 45 degrees to each other so you can't SEE the other player makes an enormous difference. Imagine playing a game like Halo 2 multi-player if the person can plainly see you hiding. Let alone something more modern where stealth and being hard to see is a major aspect of the game. When the other player can see you, it's reduced to a twitch=fest and there's no tactics or strategy. So of course games like that are not as fun to play. Case in point - my friend has a machine(basically a cheap P4 brick in the garage) set up as an Unreal Tournament server - and every so often we play and it's amazing how fun it is compared to split-screen.
My current PC can handle 2 monitors and 2 keyboard/mouse combinations(dual video and 4 USB 2.0 ports). Yet not one game takes advantage of this. And I'm positive with a little tweaking, the next generation Xbox or Playstation could handle it as well - and in fact, easier, since they already support multiple controllers. Adding a 2nd LCD screen for $100 or so is a minor consideration if that's all you have to do.
There are numerous unauthorized examples of games out there. Major retailers won't carry them, but in this case, it doesn't matter, really. If the company is in a small "offshore" country(or in China), there's nothing that anyone can do. It's the same as the various "crack" disks from years ago. They hate it, but they can't stop it, either.
Awesome. You'd think that databases would allow for SLIGHTLY better performance in this area especially since so much of today's commerce is international.
Someone commented about security through obscurity as not being effective, but I disagree. It will only be lone individuals who are making such attempts, and that means that they will be operating without the advantage of scripts, programs, or a botnet. Old school manual crunching and much frustration. With plenty of trails to follow, since they don't know how to disable and re-write the logs or much of anything with a system like OpenVMS. ie - even if they got in, they'd not know what to do.
In short, as long as you're not running Windows, Linux, or Apple, you're 100% off of their radar and essentially immune. And while this may seem silly for many users, but for specific things like a router/firewall or a mail server, there are compelling reasons to think about going this route, especially as the knowledge of these systems becomes more and more arcane.
(also, VMS has its own drive formatting and directory structure that isn't standard as well. - this also drives intruders crazy)
Exactly. Even the best forensics tools don't include such characters in their brute-force attempts unless you actually manually include non-standard characters. Adding every sub-language and system command is wearisome to say the least.
My best password, ever, though, was on an old PC. It had a non-standard key layout with old extended/high-set ASCII graphics type symbols covering the other half keyboard(similar to keyboards on Japanese or Hebrew machines designed for Unicode). So passwords that were little pictures was extremely commonplace. Windows got rid of them, but they did make guessing passwords essentially impossible at the time. (IMO, one of the most boneheaded moves done by Microsoft)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
Of course, operating systems other than Windows never got rid of such extended character sets, (or have their own version of ASCII) which is a big plus.
Lastly, one can still use some of the 33 unused formatting codes if they want. IIRC, all ASCII formats still have those embedded but they never appear normally in a text editor. I also don't know of any password cracking tool that bothers to check those. Atari and Commodore made use of them for graphical characters, which make it really easy to have PC-proof passwords at the time.
Having spent a few years working for a company that dealt with files from Asia on a daily basis, it strikes me as odd that more sites don't allow unicode characters. Adding a single Chinese or Arabic character to the password is enough to force most cracking utilities *even when you have the machine in your hands* to have to resort to brute-force measures that can take days. What's awful, though, is how sites restrict you to A-Z and 0-9 98% of the time, which defeats the entire reason for a password. I suspect that they want to be able to maybe crack it themselves in case they feel the need to do so. Because 10 characters max, with a simple 36 character ASCII limit is going to be cracked exactly as it was in the example.
It's the old obscure OS trick. If you are using an operating system that the hackers commands mean nothing to, you are secure. I know of a few people who run email servers(as an example) that use very obscure and old operating systems that no botnet or hacker is designed or has the knowledge any more to deal with. One friend a few years ago was using an old A/UX Macintosh as a router, precisely because the ability to remotely hack the code was essentially zero.(while there were easy ways ten years ago, everyone has forgotten them by now) If you can find a book on how to program some of these obscure OSs, good luck to you. If you want to really go crazy, run OpenVMS on your mail server. And watch anyone who gets into the system have a fit trying to take over. (I suppose there are some people who can, but criminals are lazy and I suspect less than 1% of people here on slashdot even have used OpenVMS in their lifetime)
While that's not usually workable, though, for modern computers, it IS easy to do with Unicode, since the latest version covers 109.000 characters. Figuring out what characters you used would probably take a cracker just to figure out a simple 2 character combination. It's just not something that the botnets are (currently) equipped to deal with.(though I suspect that they do check for simplified Chinese and Japanese and similar characters - the trick would be to pick something obscure like Sandscrit or another ancient language.
You do know that you can hold DOWN the button in Diablo II to auto-fire?
*click* (dead monster)
*click* (dead monster)
Diablo III of course is going to sell a "few" million copies(10+ would be my guess). And Fallout, of course, well, it's already at 5 million copies sold and climbing. Speaking of Diablo III, though, Torchlight sold very well.(500K copies so far) And of course, there are the classic games like Final Fantasy, which sold an ungodly number of copies over the years. How many in all of its games, most of which are solely single player?
80 million. Just the Final Fantasy franchise. As long as Square Enix alone is making games, EA's theory is worthless. (and this isn't counting their ownership of Eidos, which almost exclusively makes single player games)
With the linear type of games that EA knows how to make, I'm not surprised that they would think of games as good for only one play-through in single player mode. There are many games that are made by other companies that excel in single player mode because of the vast ability to play the game multiple times without it getting old. Now, true, many games today ARE linear but that's because they are dumbed-down to near idiot levels as they are also released on consoles. But that's only because the game developers are simpletons who can't design a good single player game. Not because there is a lack of interest in them.
You forget that the *companies* that own the cables and machinery of the Internet absolutely have the right to block content that is harmful or wasteful of their resources and hardware. It says so in every contract at every level. When Russia "allows" a carrier to have coverage in a city or region, both sides have such clauses in the fine print to protect themselves.
This isn't about nations, which can cause all sorts of problems and incidents by doing such actions against other nations, but multi-national companies that aren't associated with any one government. They could make a decision to block a neighboring country's or customer's main arteries and restrict that flow to a trickle.
ie - "find another provider"
Eventually Russia (as an example) might very well find itself running out of companies that want to work with it. That's perfectly fair, isn't it?
What needs to happen is for them to get tougher and in the case that a researcher finds a problem provider, at least notify the company instead of sitting on their hands passively watching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
80% of spam is sent via botnets. Of course, a little research shows that 30% of all botnets are in Brazil and only 7% are in Russia. (roughly 20% of spam by volume, though, is sent from the U.S. - and that's entirely within their rights to crack down upon - just read your terms of service)
While cutting off Russia might be somewhat problematic(though all of the EU which most of the wires route through has laws against spam), I doubt if cutting off Brazil and smaller countries until they clean up their act would amount to much international fallout. Doubly so since these are companies and not governments making the decision that it's just too expensive and too risky to do so any more.
And as for the other person's comment about it turning into "Bambi", well, we're talking about over 20 billion dollars a year in lost productivity just in the U.S. alone. There's a real reason TO keep the coyotes out of the hen house, no matter how fascinating it might be to watch. I guess a better analogy would have been a nature show about wolves and the scene being one getting into a commercial poultry farm. I'd expect the farm/business to be a MITE bit angry if they passively sat back and let several thousand dollars worth of damage occur just to get their film done.
If all else fails, the telecommunications companies that own the backbone can literally cut Russia's feed until they get their act together and do something about it.
Simple as turning the connection off - that will get their attention. And as a multinational company, they are pretty much impossible to do much against(unlike a country).
The real question is why these "researchers" aren't actively poisoning the wells as it were to disrupt the botnets. It's like watching some nature show where they sit passively while the huge coyote mauls the little pet. At some point you would think that they would try to do something.
Of course, there is a simpler method open to authorities, which is to just not accept connections from Russia. If need be, just cut the wire until the local government hunts these criminals down.
Well, making it easier to do so isn't the right direction to be taking as a company.
All you need is to be part of any of the larger interest groups. A *lot* of people also belong to these and I get several a week trying to get me to join. If you put it up, someone can view it someday or will quite possibly steal it someday. The saner approach is to just not divulge any personal information at all online.
Well, then you take your chances, I guess. Just don't complain when your identity gets stolen. What's there is almost enough to do it if you have a fairly unique name. Finding out the rest of your real life identity information wouldn't be that difficult.
I physically yanked it out of my browser a long time ago. No Java and no Flash makes it extremely unlikely that normal browsing will result in malicious code getting onto my system. And, also my bandwidth usage as well as memory and CPU usage are a mere fraction of what they were with it enabled, since no ads run in the background. 90% of sites work just fine without it. Highly recommended just turning off the crap.
I left all of those areas blank from day one and there's nothing changed in my profile. Just because they ask doesn't mean you have to answer.
What's really missing from the games is depth. Part of this is because the more they try to out-do each other with fancy effects and eye-candy, the more it appears to be like a loud commercial rather than a nicely done presentation. But beyond that, games are now churned out like Hollywood does - all scripted, simplified, and by the numbers.
For instance, they take time to explain *everything* in such horrendous detail and have trainers and all sorts of idiot-hand-holding. Compare this to Baldur's Gate. You knew nothing, you had to learn it as you went, and there was a real sense of a story, precisely because they didn't tell you everything that was happening. Deus Ex? didn't tell you much of anything. Diablo didn't either. In fact, the "great" games were designed to be a good game first and never worried about trophies or making it so that some addle-headed eight year old could get 100% on it on their XBOX or PS3. They were "hard" because you had to think. And they didn't have guides and books available before the game itself came out, either.
Now, compare that to Mass Effect 2. I liked the game, but it was so much more simplified than it had to be. Even the Citadel level was a coupe of barely larger than room-sized areas and was designed so that even a moron couldn't get lost. Everything was possible to obtain as well as complete. Compared to the first game, it was a massive let-down. You never could get off-track with your missions. You never could get lost in a city. You never ran out of ammo. I mean, with that much space on the DVD, they actually *shrunk* the square footage of almost every level in the game.
Depth. Hardly any. Replay-ability? Nearly zero. It doesn't feel like we're entering a world so much as watching a made for TV movie. And, it's everything now. Assassin's Creed? I've played games from the 80s with more depth to the character interactions. Shoot, they couldn't even randomize the dialogs for the city missions. Just the same 4 or 5 canned scenarios. Would it have really killed them to spend another 5-10 hours to bring that up to 20 or 30 so we feel like it's a realistic mission? And, this gets worse as you get older. Eventually you want something that isn't mature because it has lots of sex and violence in it, but because it respects your intelligence enough to not treat you like a child while playing it.
From rubber-band AI to canned dialog to overblown effects and "trophies" for the most useless and inane things possible, it's no wonder people are so nostalgic for the days when gaming meant more than sitting through an 8 hour interactive movie on their screen.
(foo)arsenide... that means it has Arsenic in it and that's just more nasty stuff that we have to deal with in our landfills. Iridium is also a whopping $795 an ounce as of today. Mainstream chip manufacturers won't like a 2-3x hike in price that's likely to happen if they start using most of the world's production for chip making.
It takes a couple of years or more as well to actually develop a chip and the manufacturing process to make it in bulk, so neither is more than in the R&D stage for a while anyways. In terms of this technology, it's at exactly where Graphene was a year ago - a prototype nano-scale transistor.
Is it interesting? Sure. But 300Ghz(current max, likely much higher) and incredible heat tolerance - with common and safe materials is a hat trick that's not going to be probably equaled in our lifetimes. If ever. It's hard to imagine anything more stable and fault-tolerant than graphite.
Graphene and Graphene compounds are essentially the Holy Grail of chip design and it's silly to pour money into anything else at this stage. So in addition, while this might be great in a lab, the chip makers aren't going to spend the actual hard cash on it with Graphene's potential payout staring them in the face and singing sweet songs to them.
Beat me to it. Well, part of it at least.
Essentially the other issues are that solid boosters are smaller and cheaper. But this comes with a huge problem as well in the forces that the thing transmits to the ship and cargo as well. A liquid fueled rocket will get up to speed much more slowly and in a smoother manner. One more minute to get to orbit isn't a big deal at all. In the end, the cost savings for the booster has to be designed into the rocket to withstand it and also to reinforce the payload so that it arrives in one piece. (Astronauts routinely commented that the solid boosters on the Shuttle felt very unpleasant - almost painful, in fact)
You end up with no real savings and more danger and wear in the end. While this isn't a big deal for something like a missile, it's different with humans and delicate ($$$) cargo like a satellite.
I don't see the point of this when comparing the potential of Graphene based processors. These things, when (not if) they become reality, will have the same impact that perfecting Fusion power will. There's just no reason to spend the time trying to eek out a few more percent when the second that we manage to get the better technology to work, we'll no longer need anything else.
If we had to in a worst case scenario send shipments of Nitrogen to both places, sending anything to the Moon would be easier. Also, we really don't know what is underneath the surface. (there is also a small Lunar ice cap as well, according to a recent probe - at least 600 million tons of it in 1-2 meter thick sheets. Perfect and easy to handle as well with our current machinery.
And actually, 0g assembly is worlds more demanding than low gravity would be. You could easily put a crane, for instance, on the Moon. Launching would require a vastly lower amount of resources(and cause no potential debris that we'd care about). And, of course, there's something TO launch against. Current orbital platform ideas assume that you float away and then engage the engines, but there's a lot of objects in orbit to run into - and a very big thing to fall down into. One mistake and the political fallout would be enough to get it shut down.
Also, the Moon is a far superior place to do orbital assembly as the amount of distance and fuel required to reach such a station/platform would be low enough (~20 miles) and close enough to allow for a space elevator or similar to be a realistic option(also, with a complete lack of atmospheric and seismic activity, extremely predictable and safe) The Earth is a horrendously bad place to build such a structure, while materials we have today could easily build one on the Moon if we needed to.
Mars... As we witnessed in the past, just getting something the size of a small mini-fridge is a huge effort. We can get huge amounts of material up to the Moon quickly by comparison. And there's the communication distance, which is horrendous for Mars but small enough to even set up a computer network between the Earth and the Moon.
Really a no-brainer here. Moon first, then figure out where you want to go from there.
To have a group survive a doomsday scenario and be able to get back to Earth, say, after 10-20 years when it's safe to do so again, you'd only need around 100,000 people.
Yes, that's a LOT and likely won't happen for a while, but it will eventually. ie - If we looked to the year 3000, how much of the Moon would be colonized? Probably quite a large area of it. The problem, of course, is that we need to start the process, and starting a colony always sucks.
oh - the whole prison thing was only because someone earlier mentioned it what with the whole "one-way ticket" proposal. With the Moon, both of those become optional - and works better in both cases, since sending supplies is a simple matter by comparison. Trust me, some bright soul in the Pentagon has certainly thought of putting a Supermax type prison up on the Moon. (nothing says you can't have both - even 10-20 miles from the main colony might as well be another planet)
True, but all we really need to do to start a research station is find a cave underground and then drill a hole with a small tunnel boring machine to it. Put in an airlock and presto. Easy and simple. Pressurize it and there you go. Done properly, you wouldn't even need fancy barriers. Maybe a spray-on coating on the walls.
We're talking a few dozen billion versus impossible. The initial project just needs a space station type living area with a small reactor to power the boring machine and of course, the tools and machinery. This could be done in as few as three trips/payloads. Once it's started, we just wait for them to either find or dig a big enough cave underground. (note - we would of course need some sort of ground penetrating radar first to figure out where to drill, but that's not impossible, either.
Mars? Mars is just silly by comparison. Trying to land several hundred tons of materials on the surface alone is not going to be something that we can do with our current level of technology. But we could do that on the Moon quite a bit easier. (plus the Moon makes for an excellent place to build ships versus in orbit - lots safer and easier)
Correct. It appears as if the Moon is actually far better to colonize in this fashion. Actually better for several reasons:
1 - Distance - this is obvious. Less everything and less time to mount a rescue.
2 - The recent probing of the lunar sub-surface pretty much confirmed what most people though would be true. That the soil there is nearly identical to that found on our planet if you dig beneath the the surface. It appears as if there's a radiation and micrometeorite blasted exterior (egg)"shell" but solid rock underneath. This means that pretty much every element that we need is there. Mars is a huge unknown by comparison.
3 - The climate on the Moon is actually better. A lack of wind and temperature fluctuations makes for a more predictable environment. Make no mistake, Mars is just as deadly and un-breathable as the Moon, with 0.1675 PSI of pressure at its densest. That's still effectively hard vacuum in terms of equipment and seals and the need for air-tight structures. It's the same as roughly 65,000 ft on earth. The Poles are much thinner, though, and that's where we'd have to land in any case to get water.
4 - Plans already exist online and elsewhere for proposed underground bases on the Moon which look like they could be made to be fairly self-sufficient.This would be a much better "Prison" scenario as well, since a single riot half a mile underground won't cripple the entire structure. All we need are tunnel boring machines. The smallest such ones can *just* be lifted to orbit by our largest rockets. Getting the same equipment to Mars is in no way possible. This means that the simplest way to build a habitat on Mars (underground) isn't an immediate option, while it would be on the Moon.