Oh, you also forgot a few other agencies as well around the world. But most of them will simply send an agent to take you out of the equation. (ie: Russia, Israel, and so on). If you pull stunts like this, you're going to be caught or worse. Evey time. In fact, if you live in the U.S. or U.K., there's no point even trying to hide. They know absolutely everything about everyone, or can in a very short amount of time.
Well, then that's Amazon's problem with making it so easy to manipulate ratings like that. And if it really is someone else's work, then it should have to pass through a filter before being accepted.
An easy way to deal with this would be to filter out all 99 cent books and start it at 1.99, where the profit margins are actually workable for an author.
Possibly, but the targets make no sense, really, if that was the objective. The pattern is solidly that of stupid kids trying to make some sort of statement or having an axe to grind. And I say stupid, because if any of them happen to be reading this, you ARE making them crack down harder and faster with your actions.
It's a lot like old books that are public domain. It's clutter, to be sure, but there is actual information that some people might want to read or purchase, even in these things.
I'd pay 99 cents for a manual that told me how to fix the roof on my house. Or how to handle some legal issue. Having it downloaded to my e-reader when I need it versus having to go to the local library and look through their stacks is well worth the convenience fee.
This sounds more like a bunch of traditional authors are whining about how they are being drowned out by the competition. Well, hello... you have to do more than let your latest novel sit there like a lump. It's called a business, and they need to market their books just the same as local businesses do. (ie - most authors' models to date has been akin to placing an ad in the local phone book and waiting for people to call you)
As I mentioned in a couple of days ago concerning CCP being targeted by these people, this sort of legislation is the obvious result of their actions. Even if it is a decentralized group of fanboys and people who want to make a statement or just rail against the establishment, it's clear that this law was passed in direct response to Sony's bidding/what happened to them recently.
All that happens is that the more that they do stunts like they've been doing recently, the quicker the governments around the world tighten their grip on the rest of us and make us all suffer under a virtual online police-state. They think it's bad now? They have no idea how bad it could possibly get. Most of the Internet operates due to the good will and charity of the world's governments. And they're running out of patience very very quickly as of late.
Actually, it's 99.7%, and their lay judge system is only currently used for murder cases. Even then, it's really that the people act more like a Grand Jury and get to ask questions and be part of the process rather than actually make any decision. The judge still has all of the actual control and say, and given Japanese social and legal norms, the "jury" (if it can be called that) pretty much goes along with him.
It's only two years old as well. In essence, nothing has changed and it's a sham that's similar to their laws concerning porn that they passed a few years ago to get the U.S. off their backs - which everyone simply ignores. Business goes on as usual. It's no improvement at all, really, because by the time you get to that stage, IF you are granted such a trial, you're already assumed to be guilty and it's basically a matter of whether you're goign to be executed or be given a prison sentence.
As you can imagine, don't EVER get into trouble in Japan. Their prisons are brutally harsh as well as they see it as a time for the prisoner to be punished for their crimes on a daily basis in order to reform their ways. ie - you're guilty, so therefore their "job" is to make your life such hell that you'll never come back again. It works (virtually zero repeat offender rate), but it's also like something out of a WWII movie.
It's not about protecting us as a people, it's about the potential threat. Without a tangible threat to their power by the population, politicians throughout history have always abused their power to the point where the country eventually turns into an oligarchy. It's a lot different as well, more than twenty years later, and you know it. The response by those in power concerning the tax roll riots was to put cameras everywhere, step up security, and remove virtually all firearms from the population. It simply would not happen today. They would squash such riots and go on with business as usual.
Oh you HAVE to be kidding. Community bathroom? That place is a single room with a stove on top of a cabinet - and no proper venting, either(!). It's in an area of town where you'd not want to even go out during the day, let alone the night. It's 4 blocks from Skid row and in essentially South Central Los Angeles. Only Compton rates worse than that scumhole that I know of, so it's not a viable option.
I suppose you CAN make it work like that, but is it really a livable existence and a decent wage to have to be reduced to nearly third world living standards just to find a job these days?
It's really about the threat. Even if it's a.00001% chance that we actually do it, it's enough to keep the politicians from taking power completely. That little voice in the back of their head keeps them from going completely insane with power. Well, the vast majority of the time, at least.
In a society like the U.K.or Japan, where guns have been essentially removed from the equation, there's nothing to stop them from essentially making it into a police state. Though in those two cases, they take different approaches. In the U.K., it is run a bit more like "big brother" is watching you and in Japan, they enforce obedience with some of the worst courts and harshest prisons on the planet.
Wow. Rent here in Los Angeles is $1000 minimum for a rathole in a bad area of town. Oh, and you of course need a car here as well due to the insanely hopeless public transportation system. Food has jumped to $250 a month per person as well. I wish my electricity bill was only $50. $20 for clothing... yeah, I can't go thrift store shopping in this town.... And yet they still want to give the same $30K for the same job. It simply can't be done and then they bitch and whine about how they can't find any engineers (or qualified computer people in my case)
I interviewed for a position a few months ago (always helps to keep looking and searching, even while you are employed) that wanted me to completely overhaul and re-do their entire inventory system. Loads of database work and inventory checking and re-entering. (and about 100K actual parts and pieces in their warehouse!) It was easily a 6-12 month job.
They offered 12 an hour, with a 45 minute commute by car. Oh, and no medical either. The boss was, and I quote, "Well, you've got no commute and are pretty young..." I of course laughed and left. But the sobering thing is... welcome to the new global economy. People don't seem to understand that what is good for big business is diametrically opposed to what's good for small businesses and individuals. $12 an hour in Los Angeles for 5+ years of programming and computer experience is an insult. But it's made possible by outsourcing and greed.
Actually, without that safety net in place, you simply *can't* survive as an adult on 30K a year any more.
Our nation is at the stage where the empire is about to implode on itself. The economy is stalling, inflation is rising, taxes are going up (though mostly in tariffs and hidden taxes and fines, naturally), and yet prices that people ask for things like houses and rent and so on keep going up and up as if nothing has changed. Greed is everywhere and morality is not even a glimmer in the eye of our leaders.
True, mistakes can happen at any company. But having a problem with cookies is an issue that is the user's issue, really. (ie - if their machine gets hacked, they're toast any ways). The servers themselves are fairly tightly watched over and maintained. Far better than the "security?" attitude of Sony and many other large companies.
Their forums do suck I have to admit. Good servers. The rest of the team can't seem to make a decent forum.
I just typed in "starter character" in their search field on the forum and it still spits back an un-filterable mess of all sorts of dates and articles. Like a pile of server vomit, really. It doesn't even take into account the forum that you were in when you made the request. It's honestly the worst forum that I've ever used in my entire nearly 30 years of computing. Nothing is properly indexed, nothing is really search-able, and nothing is threaded properly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But it'll sway some votes to tighten security. In a way, it's a lot like gun laws. They don't ever say "lets ban all guns". They are slow and sneaky about it and when it comes time to vote on issues like increased security and more oversight (all in the name of good, of course...), it's just one more vote that goes the wrong way. Sure, they are all pro-democracy, but even the most liberal nations are feeling the problems lately of how the net is essentially a vast chaotic mess. Another few hacks and DDOS may be all it takes before even the few remaining hold-outs start to take a hard line. Just like most nations already have concerning crime. The historical trend has always been to accelerate slowly towards an authoritarian model in any society. First it's crime, then it's commerce and money, then it's rights, then it's things like the Internet and free speech.
The more they attack and do things like this, the more they are seen as an actual threat to be dealt with. And then we all lose. What we are dealing with is a bunch of idiots in a giant mob who unfortunately don't see the bigger issue. If you create large enough problems (using the mob analogy), the National Guard *will* eventually be called in. The question is are we talking about 5 years or 50 years.
Because CCP can actually stand up in front of the other representatives and voice its opinion on the matter directly, they effectively are the equivalent of a major PAC if we were talking about U.S. politics. "We need to support stronger regulation and control" is hard to ignore when your country is broke due to lack of general control and oversight of its financial markets and banks.
The think they forgot that CCP is part of the government of Iceland at this point.(ie - they actually have a voting seat in Parliament there).
With the vote for admission to the EU coming within days or weeks, this is a stupid thing to do as it essentially cements Iceland's position as hard-core about internet rules and enforcement. Because what threatens CCP (about the only company in Iceland making major profit at this point in time) is seen as a direct threat to Iceland by its government. They aren't a very humorous people to begin with (especially after the beating their economy took), and this pretty much puts them solidly in the anti-online-rights crowd. I know it's just a few potential votes in the EU, but all these attacks seem to do is to whittle away support for a free and open net one vote or representative at a time.
It seems as if nobody bothers to check any more to see if these targets are politically linked to bigger issues that might hurt users online. They just rampage like a mob and then wonder why the army sent in troops to enforce martial law.
This really doesn't make sense, either, as EVE actually has some serious IT professionals working for it and has very high levels of security. I know this as the company I last worked for had a nearly identical server farm (though they processed computer data and didn't run a game on it) and it's as bleeding-edge as it gets. The specs call for a server farm that unlike most servers where requests for data come from single points and access individual drives (short bursts of concentrated activity), essentially every machine has to be able to have its maximum bandwidth to any and all others in the network simultaneously.
Traditional server networks and networking protocols (as well as even the network card drivers) aren't designed for this as it requires a virtual rats nest of interconnects and special wiring as well as a solid state array to handle the cache and I/O from the SQL stacks. (note - not a bunch of SSDs) Because unlike WoW and other games, the entire cluster of machines that make up the entire server has to operate as if it were only one single computer and every sub-component was essentially like memory address locations on the sticks of RAM. The solid state array functions as essentially the Northbridge. Imagine a giant cluster of 100+ machines networked like a neural network and you're close to the insanity that his type of computer engineering requires..
Dummies don't work on and put together such systems. I knew about it as it was exceedingly rare at the time it was started to even try this and only about a dozen companies were trying to even do this sort of thing, including the one I worked for. Usually you'd see this in financial and similar fields where TB of data per hour is being processed or moved around, but not applied to an online game in a large scale. 6-7 years ago it was unheard of. Now, more companies are doing this sort of thing, naturally. But only one online game does this. Hence, what drew attention to it at the time from others trying or having done similar setups.
And it's just a game. Perhaps they wanted to try to get customer data and went after what they thought was a softer target, but they're going to get nothing. CCP is a bunch of jerks most of the time precisely because they are all hard-asses and take their tech so seriously. These guys would have been better off targeting an insurance company or something that actually was easier. CCP will simply take the entire system offline and wait. It's not like they give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks. Unlike Sony, they are impossible to pressure and don't care what happens in the press because of this.
These guys will pound dirt for a week or two and then give up. So in a way, it's not really news.
NOTE - because of their seat in Parliament in Iceland (as they are about the only major company making money there right now), the government of Iceland views any serious threat to them as an attack on their own government or one of its agencies. With Iceland within possible weeks of joining the EU as I type this, it's just one more vote in the end for more restrictive rules and laws governing online use. Because you know that Iceland will vote to be as brutally hard-line about security as it feels that it needs to to protect its one real cash cow. Way to go, guys. You just made your life and most of the EU's online community that much harder.
The single worst thing about traditional split-screen play, though, is that you can see the other player. This solves that, so that you can for once actually use tactics and sneak up on them as opposed to being restricted to bashing at each other because you both know where you are at all times.
You can do this with two machines networked together, but that's cumbersome. If you use a 1080P TV, it's essentially a 1000X1000 square that you'll be seeing - plenty of resolution to play a good game. (I'm figuring about 100 pixels at the bottom for status messages and so on)
The big thing that needs to happen is that the systems need to upgrade to a proper unicode character set. And not limit us to stupid things like 8 characters or force use to only use numbers and letters. It's not like the computer itself cares what we put in, after all. @#93^202¾3\fm395212i.345349wdm is just as easy for a computer to put into a table as password42.(as an example) Most of these systems seem to be archaic holdovers from pen and paper days. After all, when you recover the password, it clears the old one anyways. It's not not like some rent-a-tech is actually reading it back to you over the phone.
(note - Slashdot choked on what I typed) - The characters that I randomly inserted were: @#93^202[3/4 symbol]3\fm39[r shaped graphics character - ignored]5[epsilon - also ignored]212i.345[up/down arrow - also ignored]349wdm This is bog-standard Arial Unicode. Every PC and every site should support it at this point. But even slashdot is behind the times, so it seems.
Also, where I used to work, we had to crack Office file passwords for clients from time to time (data recovery and the like) Most could be brute-forced in seconds, but add a single unicode character like or even something as innocuous as an extended graphic character like to the password and the cracker would choke and never get it. We'd know it was no more than 8-12 characters and it would run overnight and get nothing (problem with having clients in foreign countries send you data to recover... sigh). I'd wager that less than 1% of all cracking programs and tools that are available to use, either commercially or that are out on the net in the hands of criminals are set up to deal with Unicode.
It's a shame only two sites that I visit allow it. Slashdot isn't one of them, BTW. Sony certainly did not. Of course, I always used the prepaid cards as well, since it was an obvious problem - not only from a password perspective, but the idea that anyone (ie - kids) could log into your main account and buy stuff from the store pretty easily if they wanted to.
This all begs the question as to which competitor to YouTube is paying (I mean supporting their re-election campaign...) the bill's sponsor behind the scenes. Someone wants YouTube shut down and is obviously getting this exact sort of wording put into the bill so that they can do it.
Remember, it's never about politics or even copyrights these days. It's about power and money.
That's 300 prisoners making ~$850 a day. Or about $2.85 a person, per day. That doesn't sound like much, but multiply it times a few hundred thousand people and you're looking at a good extra bit of money for the government to keep running their work camps.
Well, It's hugely expensive to run, but if all you need is fuel and some ablative undercoating repairs every few flights(assuming a liquid-fueled rocket or scramjet), it's perhaps at the extreme outside, a few million per launch as opposed to $54 million (Space X Falcon 1).
Remember, while most large rockets are in theory, reusable, it's really a matter of "recover" the hull and spend a huge amount of money rebuilding the thing to be re-used again.(Space Shuttle rockets for example)
The time to think about this sort of thing is when the company is/was getting started.
I'm positive that your existing contract explicitly states that you have no rights to the software in question beyond maybe being credited with it, and that you are just a contractor. Going in and asking for a cut of the business now is going to be seen as offensive and almost certainly will erode your current relationship. And it may end you up in court being sued in a worst-case scenario.*
You only recourse is to raise your rates or possibly talk about a full-time position as a in-house developer. Neither will be seen as an offensive move and you may get some perks out of full-time employment that you don't currently get, like health coverage and bonuses and so on (as well as a possible management position later on).
* in the rare case that the software rights are yours and yours alone and the company doesn't have such a clause in the contract (they'd be rank idiots if this happened, so don't count on it), then you can actually hold them by the short and curlies if you want. But you'll get the same pissed-off response by them. In such a case, everyone loses, and the person with the smallest pockets for legal expenses usually comes out the worse for it.
Right. But there's nothing to say that a properly designed shunt couldn't fix or bridge the gap (or we re-wire directly form the break to the muscles themselves). Most of what happens in your body (legs as an example) is controlled by a few specific groups of muscles, but it's not like we need to reconnect a thousand synthetic nerves to muscles and so on. It's only a few dozen. Once they are reconnected, recovery should be extremely quick.
In a decade, spinal injuries will be a problem and no longer a disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you also forgot a few other agencies as well around the world. But most of them will simply send an agent to take you out of the equation. (ie: Russia, Israel, and so on). If you pull stunts like this, you're going to be caught or worse. Evey time. In fact, if you live in the U.S. or U.K., there's no point even trying to hide. They know absolutely everything about everyone, or can in a very short amount of time.
Well, then that's Amazon's problem with making it so easy to manipulate ratings like that. And if it really is someone else's work, then it should have to pass through a filter before being accepted.
An easy way to deal with this would be to filter out all 99 cent books and start it at 1.99, where the profit margins are actually workable for an author.
Possibly, but the targets make no sense, really, if that was the objective. The pattern is solidly that of stupid kids trying to make some sort of statement or having an axe to grind. And I say stupid, because if any of them happen to be reading this, you ARE making them crack down harder and faster with your actions.
It's a lot like old books that are public domain. It's clutter, to be sure, but there is actual information that some people might want to read or purchase, even in these things.
I'd pay 99 cents for a manual that told me how to fix the roof on my house. Or how to handle some legal issue. Having it downloaded to my e-reader when I need it versus having to go to the local library and look through their stacks is well worth the convenience fee.
This sounds more like a bunch of traditional authors are whining about how they are being drowned out by the competition. Well, hello... you have to do more than let your latest novel sit there like a lump. It's called a business, and they need to market their books just the same as local businesses do. (ie - most authors' models to date has been akin to placing an ad in the local phone book and waiting for people to call you)
As I mentioned in a couple of days ago concerning CCP being targeted by these people, this sort of legislation is the obvious result of their actions. Even if it is a decentralized group of fanboys and people who want to make a statement or just rail against the establishment, it's clear that this law was passed in direct response to Sony's bidding/what happened to them recently.
All that happens is that the more that they do stunts like they've been doing recently, the quicker the governments around the world tighten their grip on the rest of us and make us all suffer under a virtual online police-state. They think it's bad now? They have no idea how bad it could possibly get. Most of the Internet operates due to the good will and charity of the world's governments. And they're running out of patience very very quickly as of late.
Actually, it's 99.7%, and their lay judge system is only currently used for murder cases. Even then, it's really that the people act more like a Grand Jury and get to ask questions and be part of the process rather than actually make any decision. The judge still has all of the actual control and say, and given Japanese social and legal norms, the "jury" (if it can be called that) pretty much goes along with him.
It's only two years old as well. In essence, nothing has changed and it's a sham that's similar to their laws concerning porn that they passed a few years ago to get the U.S. off their backs - which everyone simply ignores. Business goes on as usual. It's no improvement at all, really, because by the time you get to that stage, IF you are granted such a trial, you're already assumed to be guilty and it's basically a matter of whether you're goign to be executed or be given a prison sentence.
As you can imagine, don't EVER get into trouble in Japan. Their prisons are brutally harsh as well as they see it as a time for the prisoner to be punished for their crimes on a daily basis in order to reform their ways. ie - you're guilty, so therefore their "job" is to make your life such hell that you'll never come back again. It works (virtually zero repeat offender rate), but it's also like something out of a WWII movie.
Anyways.. back to the discussion...
It's not about protecting us as a people, it's about the potential threat. Without a tangible threat to their power by the population, politicians throughout history have always abused their power to the point where the country eventually turns into an oligarchy. It's a lot different as well, more than twenty years later, and you know it. The response by those in power concerning the tax roll riots was to put cameras everywhere, step up security, and remove virtually all firearms from the population. It simply would not happen today. They would squash such riots and go on with business as usual.
Oh you HAVE to be kidding. Community bathroom? That place is a single room with a stove on top of a cabinet - and no proper venting, either(!). It's in an area of town where you'd not want to even go out during the day, let alone the night. It's 4 blocks from Skid row and in essentially South Central Los Angeles. Only Compton rates worse than that scumhole that I know of, so it's not a viable option.
I suppose you CAN make it work like that, but is it really a livable existence and a decent wage to have to be reduced to nearly third world living standards just to find a job these days?
It's really about the threat. Even if it's a .00001% chance that we actually do it, it's enough to keep the politicians from taking power completely. That little voice in the back of their head keeps them from going completely insane with power. Well, the vast majority of the time, at least.
In a society like the U.K.or Japan, where guns have been essentially removed from the equation, there's nothing to stop them from essentially making it into a police state. Though in those two cases, they take different approaches. In the U.K., it is run a bit more like "big brother" is watching you and in Japan, they enforce obedience with some of the worst courts and harshest prisons on the planet.
Wow. Rent here in Los Angeles is $1000 minimum for a rathole in a bad area of town. Oh, and you of course need a car here as well due to the insanely hopeless public transportation system. Food has jumped to $250 a month per person as well. I wish my electricity bill was only $50. $20 for clothing... yeah, I can't go thrift store shopping in this town.... And yet they still want to give the same $30K for the same job. It simply can't be done and then they bitch and whine about how they can't find any engineers (or qualified computer people in my case)
I interviewed for a position a few months ago (always helps to keep looking and searching, even while you are employed) that wanted me to completely overhaul and re-do their entire inventory system. Loads of database work and inventory checking and re-entering. (and about 100K actual parts and pieces in their warehouse!) It was easily a 6-12 month job.
They offered 12 an hour, with a 45 minute commute by car. Oh, and no medical either. The boss was, and I quote, "Well, you've got no commute and are pretty young..." I of course laughed and left. But the sobering thing is... welcome to the new global economy. People don't seem to understand that what is good for big business is diametrically opposed to what's good for small businesses and individuals. $12 an hour in Los Angeles for 5+ years of programming and computer experience is an insult. But it's made possible by outsourcing and greed.
Actually, without that safety net in place, you simply *can't* survive as an adult on 30K a year any more.
Our nation is at the stage where the empire is about to implode on itself. The economy is stalling, inflation is rising, taxes are going up (though mostly in tariffs and hidden taxes and fines, naturally), and yet prices that people ask for things like houses and rent and so on keep going up and up as if nothing has changed. Greed is everywhere and morality is not even a glimmer in the eye of our leaders.
True, mistakes can happen at any company. But having a problem with cookies is an issue that is the user's issue, really. (ie - if their machine gets hacked, they're toast any ways). The servers themselves are fairly tightly watched over and maintained. Far better than the "security?" attitude of Sony and many other large companies.
Their forums do suck I have to admit. Good servers. The rest of the team can't seem to make a decent forum.
I just typed in "starter character" in their search field on the forum and it still spits back an un-filterable mess of all sorts of dates and articles. Like a pile of server vomit, really. It doesn't even take into account the forum that you were in when you made the request. It's honestly the worst forum that I've ever used in my entire nearly 30 years of computing. Nothing is properly indexed, nothing is really search-able, and nothing is threaded properly.
$30,000 in today's money, though, is barely above the poverty level.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But it'll sway some votes to tighten security. In a way, it's a lot like gun laws. They don't ever say "lets ban all guns". They are slow and sneaky about it and when it comes time to vote on issues like increased security and more oversight (all in the name of good, of course...), it's just one more vote that goes the wrong way. Sure, they are all pro-democracy, but even the most liberal nations are feeling the problems lately of how the net is essentially a vast chaotic mess. Another few hacks and DDOS may be all it takes before even the few remaining hold-outs start to take a hard line. Just like most nations already have concerning crime. The historical trend has always been to accelerate slowly towards an authoritarian model in any society. First it's crime, then it's commerce and money, then it's rights, then it's things like the Internet and free speech.
The more they attack and do things like this, the more they are seen as an actual threat to be dealt with. And then we all lose. What we are dealing with is a bunch of idiots in a giant mob who unfortunately don't see the bigger issue. If you create large enough problems (using the mob analogy), the National Guard *will* eventually be called in. The question is are we talking about 5 years or 50 years.
Because CCP can actually stand up in front of the other representatives and voice its opinion on the matter directly, they effectively are the equivalent of a major PAC if we were talking about U.S. politics. "We need to support stronger regulation and control" is hard to ignore when your country is broke due to lack of general control and oversight of its financial markets and banks.
The think they forgot that CCP is part of the government of Iceland at this point.(ie - they actually have a voting seat in Parliament there).
With the vote for admission to the EU coming within days or weeks, this is a stupid thing to do as it essentially cements Iceland's position as hard-core about internet rules and enforcement. Because what threatens CCP (about the only company in Iceland making major profit at this point in time) is seen as a direct threat to Iceland by its government. They aren't a very humorous people to begin with (especially after the beating their economy took), and this pretty much puts them solidly in the anti-online-rights crowd. I know it's just a few potential votes in the EU, but all these attacks seem to do is to whittle away support for a free and open net one vote or representative at a time.
It seems as if nobody bothers to check any more to see if these targets are politically linked to bigger issues that might hurt users online. They just rampage like a mob and then wonder why the army sent in troops to enforce martial law.
This really doesn't make sense, either, as EVE actually has some serious IT professionals working for it and has very high levels of security. I know this as the company I last worked for had a nearly identical server farm (though they processed computer data and didn't run a game on it) and it's as bleeding-edge as it gets. The specs call for a server farm that unlike most servers where requests for data come from single points and access individual drives (short bursts of concentrated activity), essentially every machine has to be able to have its maximum bandwidth to any and all others in the network simultaneously.
Traditional server networks and networking protocols (as well as even the network card drivers) aren't designed for this as it requires a virtual rats nest of interconnects and special wiring as well as a solid state array to handle the cache and I/O from the SQL stacks. (note - not a bunch of SSDs) Because unlike WoW and other games, the entire cluster of machines that make up the entire server has to operate as if it were only one single computer and every sub-component was essentially like memory address locations on the sticks of RAM. The solid state array functions as essentially the Northbridge. Imagine a giant cluster of 100+ machines networked like a neural network and you're close to the insanity that his type of computer engineering requires..
Dummies don't work on and put together such systems. I knew about it as it was exceedingly rare at the time it was started to even try this and only about a dozen companies were trying to even do this sort of thing, including the one I worked for. Usually you'd see this in financial and similar fields where TB of data per hour is being processed or moved around, but not applied to an online game in a large scale. 6-7 years ago it was unheard of. Now, more companies are doing this sort of thing, naturally. But only one online game does this. Hence, what drew attention to it at the time from others trying or having done similar setups.
And it's just a game. Perhaps they wanted to try to get customer data and went after what they thought was a softer target, but they're going to get nothing. CCP is a bunch of jerks most of the time precisely because they are all hard-asses and take their tech so seriously. These guys would have been better off targeting an insurance company or something that actually was easier. CCP will simply take the entire system offline and wait. It's not like they give a damn about what the rest of the world thinks. Unlike Sony, they are impossible to pressure and don't care what happens in the press because of this.
These guys will pound dirt for a week or two and then give up. So in a way, it's not really news.
NOTE - because of their seat in Parliament in Iceland (as they are about the only major company making money there right now), the government of Iceland views any serious threat to them as an attack on their own government or one of its agencies. With Iceland within possible weeks of joining the EU as I type this, it's just one more vote in the end for more restrictive rules and laws governing online use. Because you know that Iceland will vote to be as brutally hard-line about security as it feels that it needs to to protect its one real cash cow. Way to go, guys. You just made your life and most of the EU's online community that much harder.
The single worst thing about traditional split-screen play, though, is that you can see the other player. This solves that, so that you can for once actually use tactics and sneak up on them as opposed to being restricted to bashing at each other because you both know where you are at all times.
You can do this with two machines networked together, but that's cumbersome. If you use a 1080P TV, it's essentially a 1000X1000 square that you'll be seeing - plenty of resolution to play a good game. (I'm figuring about 100 pixels at the bottom for status messages and so on)
The big thing that needs to happen is that the systems need to upgrade to a proper unicode character set. And not limit us to stupid things like 8 characters or force use to only use numbers and letters. It's not like the computer itself cares what we put in, after all. @#93^202¾3\fm395212i.345349wdm is just as easy for a computer to put into a table as password42.(as an example) Most of these systems seem to be archaic holdovers from pen and paper days. After all, when you recover the password, it clears the old one anyways. It's not not like some rent-a-tech is actually reading it back to you over the phone.
(note - Slashdot choked on what I typed) - The characters that I randomly inserted were:
@#93^202[3/4 symbol]3\fm39[r shaped graphics character - ignored]5[epsilon - also ignored]212i.345[up/down arrow - also ignored]349wdm
This is bog-standard Arial Unicode. Every PC and every site should support it at this point. But even slashdot is behind the times, so it seems.
Also, where I used to work, we had to crack Office file passwords for clients from time to time (data recovery and the like) Most could be brute-forced in seconds, but add a single unicode character like or even something as innocuous as an extended graphic character like to the password and the cracker would choke and never get it. We'd know it was no more than 8-12 characters and it would run overnight and get nothing (problem with having clients in foreign countries send you data to recover... sigh). I'd wager that less than 1% of all cracking programs and tools that are available to use, either commercially or that are out on the net in the hands of criminals are set up to deal with Unicode.
It's a shame only two sites that I visit allow it. Slashdot isn't one of them, BTW. Sony certainly did not. Of course, I always used the prepaid cards as well, since it was an obvious problem - not only from a password perspective, but the idea that anyone (ie - kids) could log into your main account and buy stuff from the store pretty easily if they wanted to.
All you need to do is use a unicode character set and it pretty much kills any local password cracking attempts.
This all begs the question as to which competitor to YouTube is paying (I mean supporting their re-election campaign...) the bill's sponsor behind the scenes. Someone wants YouTube shut down and is obviously getting this exact sort of wording put into the bill so that they can do it.
Remember, it's never about politics or even copyrights these days. It's about power and money.
That's 300 prisoners making ~$850 a day. Or about $2.85 a person, per day. That doesn't sound like much, but multiply it times a few hundred thousand people and you're looking at a good extra bit of money for the government to keep running their work camps.
Well, It's hugely expensive to run, but if all you need is fuel and some ablative undercoating repairs every few flights(assuming a liquid-fueled rocket or scramjet), it's perhaps at the extreme outside, a few million per launch as opposed to $54 million (Space X Falcon 1).
Remember, while most large rockets are in theory, reusable, it's really a matter of "recover" the hull and spend a huge amount of money rebuilding the thing to be re-used again.(Space Shuttle rockets for example)
The time to think about this sort of thing is when the company is/was getting started.
I'm positive that your existing contract explicitly states that you have no rights to the software in question beyond maybe being credited with it, and that you are just a contractor. Going in and asking for a cut of the business now is going to be seen as offensive and almost certainly will erode your current relationship. And it may end you up in court being sued in a worst-case scenario.*
You only recourse is to raise your rates or possibly talk about a full-time position as a in-house developer. Neither will be seen as an offensive move and you may get some perks out of full-time employment that you don't currently get, like health coverage and bonuses and so on (as well as a possible management position later on).
* in the rare case that the software rights are yours and yours alone and the company doesn't have such a clause in the contract (they'd be rank idiots if this happened, so don't count on it), then you can actually hold them by the short and curlies if you want. But you'll get the same pissed-off response by them. In such a case, everyone loses, and the person with the smallest pockets for legal expenses usually comes out the worse for it.
Right. But there's nothing to say that a properly designed shunt couldn't fix or bridge the gap (or we re-wire directly form the break to the muscles themselves). Most of what happens in your body (legs as an example) is controlled by a few specific groups of muscles, but it's not like we need to reconnect a thousand synthetic nerves to muscles and so on. It's only a few dozen. Once they are reconnected, recovery should be extremely quick.
In a decade, spinal injuries will be a problem and no longer a disaster.
Happiness is mandatory, friend citizen.