Schneier's synopsis is pretty good. Apparently, most hardware only provides page-level memory granularity, whereas protecting these hooks requires byte-level granularity.
People's experience with TV and movies would disagree with you.
Incorrect. TV and movies require different emoting to get the same thing across and have dozens of people who back it up to make sure that everything goes through. The best possible alternative over the internet is full audio and webcam, and that's still not nearly as good as face to face communication. The movements within the webcam aren't natural; either the head moves unnaturally within the frame, or the frame moves with the head and is still unnatural.
However, I doubt the company and the employee are going to give up the bandwidth to do their communications over webcam all the time. Usually, the amount of email and IM chatter goes up, which is vastly inferior to face to face communication.
Communication benefits greatly from gestures, facial cues, and subtle tone changes that can't be transmitted as well if they can be transmitted at all over a digital medium. For instance, if I were to say this in person, the meaning would change drastically depending on whether I was yelling while flipping you off or talking in a relative monotone. Digital communication can't fully replace face to face conversation, so it makes sense that in communication-rich environments telecommuting would be discouraged.
Not only that, but science requires a lot of preexisting knowledge. You can't pick up a scientific journal in a field you've never studied and understand an article; that's impossible unless you have the necessary knowledge to even understand what they're saying. Modern science is pushing fringes that are bizarre and hard to grasp. With relativity, you can give a nice example of a man taking a trip to Alpha Centauri and returning younger than his brother who stayed here. It's weird, but you can kind of grasp it in a few minutes. Try to do the same thing with quantum physics and see if they don't come back 5 minutes later completely missing the point. Compare the complexity if relativity to the complexity of string theory; relativity is simple by comparison.
People have gotten used to not knowing anything about science because they don't know enough to understand what's going on. We all make fun of articles that try to dumb down the science to make it understandable to people, yet that's what's necessary for people to try to understand it. Right now, the average person doesn't know science because it's inaccessible to them, and because they don't know science they don't trust that they can tell the difference between a lie and good research (this is probably because they can't).
To support this point, from the book Almost Perfect by W.E. Peterson,
Even if a successful company is fair and honest in every one of its business dealings, there will be a few lawsuits. The only way to avoid them is to stay unsuccessful and keep your pockets empty. As soon as you have something worth having, there will be someone else who will try to take it.
If you have an idea and you want to make sure you can use it, but don't think it is patent worthy, you can publish it to cite later when someone else attempts to patent it.
Or you can patent it and have an ironclad defense. Prior art should prevent infringement suits, but patents work better. With patent application so cheap, they'd be idiots NOT to patent something they feared they could get sued for.
Prior art works better for when something gives you a true competitive edge and can't be reverse engineered anyway, like a manufacturing system. Since a patent requires you explain things in detail, patenting a secret process can be counter-productive. However, with something that's already public anyway (like a controller design, or the design of your webpage), defensive patents are the best option.
I think the point, which would remain even with the group you've described, is that they do things together outside of work. Teams which share more than just a workplace will generally be stronger than those which don't. If Kevin the Mormon helped Samir move, and they both help Tammi paint protest signs, then they'll be closer knit than if they just see each other between 9 and 5.
When it comes down to choosing OS, the name's something of a metaphor for everything else. Want an OS that generally works, has been around for a while and runs nearly everything you want, even though it's boring? Windows 7. Want an OS that's cool, has a lot of "wow" factor, is trendy, but won't necessarily do everything else that you want it to do? Snow Leopard and the Mac.
If you're looking for Linux, you won't be looking at that article in the first place.
In their defense, doesn't the submitter get to choose where their name links to? Seems to me that we should all point and laugh at the submitter who thinks we all want to know what he is doing at all times.
The liability from lawsuits by people who sue after getting hit in the head by heavy gold flying pony crap will bankrupt you
Just pass that liability on to someone else. For instance, you could put it in their employment contract that any damages from law suits will be paid by garnishing the pooper scoopers' wages.
Cookies are used for tracking, so cookies should be regulated. But we won't treat cookies like they're special -- we'll regulate all other forms of tracking as well.
No -- just regulate tracking. If you regulate the method, then when a new method comes it's legal. If you just regulate tracking, then you get the same results for all forms.
Exactly. It sounds like he's looking for things that can be played in someones spare time, which means that above all the games have to be fun. A lot of educational games aren't games at all, just interactive teaching which isn't necessarily bad, just not a game.
Because everybody knows that when people are trampling each other at the gates to pay the retail price, it's a sure sign that the store is going to lower it in a hurry.
If they're smart, that's exactly what they'll do. If they can get it working smoothly, then scale up to where their costs are lower, then lowering the expense of the flight is the most profitable route. Right now the only market they're tapping is the market of the very rich and those who are willing to save up multiple annual incomes for one trip. Every time they lower the price they'll increase the size of their market.
Even simpler mathematical analysis would include such techniques as seeing which one takes up more disk space. Last I checked, that was very highly correlated with compression level.
One would think that they would have the numbers they told the artists easily accessible and widely known by anybody in the organization that deals with those numbers. You don't want someone to slip up at the wrong time, after all.
My guess is that they want more time to figure out the best way to present the numbers and how much info they can hold back without being held in contempt. If they can get away with just disclosing the profit they have in the balance books, that's completely different from producing the balance books themselves or even the gross revenue.
The key ingredient that I think game companies are missing is that they can be active participants in this process and that the used game market's performance is coupled to the new game market's performance.
For instance, EA could open their own stores and use the used games as loss-leaders: sure we have madden '07 for $5, but why not get '08 with the updated roster? When someone trades in the game, they could sell them a new game immediately. They'd build brand loyalty, get some positive PR, and get customers into the stores where they make the most profit. They could then run sales at specific stores to see how price points changed the number of sales. If every game shop in LA lowers the price of Madden from $60 to $40, do sales go up 300%? They could even offer incentive programs, where gamer dads could pay $50/yr for the ability to turn in damaged game discs for new ones.
Even without being active participants, though, everyone knows those guys who buy a game the day it comes out, plays it over the weekend and then trades it in so they can get the next great game. In my case, I use it as a safety net if I end up hating the game. I love the original Resistance, but Resistance 2 was painful because it removed literally everything I loved about the original. I only trade in games I hate, but it effectively means there's only $15 on the line instead of $60 when I get a new game. Without that safety net I'm not even sure I'd own a console.
If it doesn't need to be accessible any time in the near future, you could just take 1x10^16 or however many bits it is and say that they're encoded in the spin of 1x10^16 particles in this 1kg rock I'm holding. Don't know what data's there, don't know if it's meaningful for any use other than being a rock, but there's a petabyte of data in there if you can read it.
Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc.
The only problem I see there (and I don't think it's necessarily a deal breaker) is that the designers have competing interests: the thieves have to be able to max out a skill, but if a thief can always steal from the shop then there's no incentive to open the shop in the first place. Either the shop is impossible to steal from, thus making the thief feel slighted, or the thief can steal from the shop, which means that all thieves which max out their skills can steal from the shops. And if you make it a progression, where lower-level shop owners are more easily stolen from than more senior shop owners, then you have a situation where thieves always steal from lower level shops, making it so that the only workable levels for owning a shop are extremely high.
I would probably resolve that issue through making it so that either the shops can't be stolen from at all, or else there's a limited scope in what can be stolen. For instance, there's a certain amount of gold on hand from items being bought and sold. Only half of that gold can be stolen, thus ensuring that there's something to steal but the shop owner can't lose everything. Or maybe shops earn latent income through the assumed purchases made by NPCs, and it's only this income which can be stolen from. Or maybe it's only custom made weapons, and the regular stock can't be stolen from, etc. Because anyone and everyone can get to the highest levels of thievery, there has to be an artificial barrier when it comes to thievery between PCs.
IE is only double all its competition combined? Watch out, Redmond, we're coming for you! (By the way, I was being sarcastic)
IE is the most important browser to support for a site that wants widespread appeal. That won't change for many years. Whether it will eventually add to IE's downfall or not, for now they couldn't shoot themselves in the foot badly enough to rival the amount of damage that it does to the rest of the community.
Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...
FTA:
I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.
Finally:
Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student.
Bennett, in his usual way, has made so many leaps of logic without enough support that it's astounding. He's making assumptions he can't support (such as above, or assuming that those using mechanical turk are a valid sample), and it's kind of sad. He's making the assumption the a minor's head pasted on the body of an adult constitutes a simulated minor, which may or may not be legally true. Here's the cogent argument: Miley Cyrus is a minor, her actual picture is being used to simulate her in a sexual position. By using her actual head, it's entirely possible that it fit the legal definition. What's more, in matters of legal opinion, the DA is more likely to know the law than some guy who goes off on Slashdot about it.
Seems to me that if we were really rational about this, we'd defer to the experts rather than read essays by people of middling intelligence and logic with no serious legal background and serious holes in his logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Schneier's synopsis is pretty good. Apparently, most hardware only provides page-level memory granularity, whereas protecting these hooks requires byte-level granularity.
People's experience with TV and movies would disagree with you.
Incorrect. TV and movies require different emoting to get the same thing across and have dozens of people who back it up to make sure that everything goes through. The best possible alternative over the internet is full audio and webcam, and that's still not nearly as good as face to face communication. The movements within the webcam aren't natural; either the head moves unnaturally within the frame, or the frame moves with the head and is still unnatural.
However, I doubt the company and the employee are going to give up the bandwidth to do their communications over webcam all the time. Usually, the amount of email and IM chatter goes up, which is vastly inferior to face to face communication.
Communication benefits greatly from gestures, facial cues, and subtle tone changes that can't be transmitted as well if they can be transmitted at all over a digital medium. For instance, if I were to say this in person, the meaning would change drastically depending on whether I was yelling while flipping you off or talking in a relative monotone. Digital communication can't fully replace face to face conversation, so it makes sense that in communication-rich environments telecommuting would be discouraged.
Not only that, but science requires a lot of preexisting knowledge. You can't pick up a scientific journal in a field you've never studied and understand an article; that's impossible unless you have the necessary knowledge to even understand what they're saying. Modern science is pushing fringes that are bizarre and hard to grasp. With relativity, you can give a nice example of a man taking a trip to Alpha Centauri and returning younger than his brother who stayed here. It's weird, but you can kind of grasp it in a few minutes. Try to do the same thing with quantum physics and see if they don't come back 5 minutes later completely missing the point. Compare the complexity if relativity to the complexity of string theory; relativity is simple by comparison.
People have gotten used to not knowing anything about science because they don't know enough to understand what's going on. We all make fun of articles that try to dumb down the science to make it understandable to people, yet that's what's necessary for people to try to understand it. Right now, the average person doesn't know science because it's inaccessible to them, and because they don't know science they don't trust that they can tell the difference between a lie and good research (this is probably because they can't).
Even if a successful company is fair and honest in every one of its business dealings, there will be a few lawsuits. The only way to avoid them is to stay unsuccessful and keep your pockets empty. As soon as you have something worth having, there will be someone else who will try to take it.
If you have an idea and you want to make sure you can use it, but don't think it is patent worthy, you can publish it to cite later when someone else attempts to patent it.
Or you can patent it and have an ironclad defense. Prior art should prevent infringement suits, but patents work better. With patent application so cheap, they'd be idiots NOT to patent something they feared they could get sued for.
Prior art works better for when something gives you a true competitive edge and can't be reverse engineered anyway, like a manufacturing system. Since a patent requires you explain things in detail, patenting a secret process can be counter-productive. However, with something that's already public anyway (like a controller design, or the design of your webpage), defensive patents are the best option.
I think the point, which would remain even with the group you've described, is that they do things together outside of work. Teams which share more than just a workplace will generally be stronger than those which don't. If Kevin the Mormon helped Samir move, and they both help Tammi paint protest signs, then they'll be closer knit than if they just see each other between 9 and 5.
When it comes down to choosing OS, the name's something of a metaphor for everything else. Want an OS that generally works, has been around for a while and runs nearly everything you want, even though it's boring? Windows 7. Want an OS that's cool, has a lot of "wow" factor, is trendy, but won't necessarily do everything else that you want it to do? Snow Leopard and the Mac.
If you're looking for Linux, you won't be looking at that article in the first place.
They're tougher than Chuck Norris (and that was supposed to be impossible too).
Who do you think put their planet in an unstable orbit? They may be tougher than Chuck Norris, but that doesn't prevent him from killing them all.
In their defense, doesn't the submitter get to choose where their name links to? Seems to me that we should all point and laugh at the submitter who thinks we all want to know what he is doing at all times.
The liability from lawsuits by people who sue after getting hit in the head by heavy gold flying pony crap will bankrupt you
Just pass that liability on to someone else. For instance, you could put it in their employment contract that any damages from law suits will be paid by garnishing the pooper scoopers' wages.
Cookies are used for tracking, so cookies should be regulated. But we won't treat cookies like they're special -- we'll regulate all other forms of tracking as well.
No -- just regulate tracking. If you regulate the method, then when a new method comes it's legal. If you just regulate tracking, then you get the same results for all forms.
Exactly. It sounds like he's looking for things that can be played in someones spare time, which means that above all the games have to be fun. A lot of educational games aren't games at all, just interactive teaching which isn't necessarily bad, just not a game.
Read: "We are still committed to forcing ads on you and will find a less annoying way to do so."
How dare they?
Because everybody knows that when people are trampling each other at the gates to pay the retail price, it's a sure sign that the store is going to lower it in a hurry.
If they're smart, that's exactly what they'll do. If they can get it working smoothly, then scale up to where their costs are lower, then lowering the expense of the flight is the most profitable route. Right now the only market they're tapping is the market of the very rich and those who are willing to save up multiple annual incomes for one trip. Every time they lower the price they'll increase the size of their market.
Maybe he read and understood the book?
When people say they no longer care, when in reality they do. If he really didn't care, he would have typed the first sentence and stopped.
You know what I hate? People who get on soapboxes and criticize others when the criticism is obviously not valid.
Mr. Cox no longer cares about the TTY bugs; he still cares about being polite to those who address him. The statements are in no way contradictory.
modern day prophet
I can't decide if that's awesome or awful. Probably both.
Even simpler mathematical analysis would include such techniques as seeing which one takes up more disk space. Last I checked, that was very highly correlated with compression level.
One would think that they would have the numbers they told the artists easily accessible and widely known by anybody in the organization that deals with those numbers. You don't want someone to slip up at the wrong time, after all.
My guess is that they want more time to figure out the best way to present the numbers and how much info they can hold back without being held in contempt. If they can get away with just disclosing the profit they have in the balance books, that's completely different from producing the balance books themselves or even the gross revenue.
The key ingredient that I think game companies are missing is that they can be active participants in this process and that the used game market's performance is coupled to the new game market's performance.
For instance, EA could open their own stores and use the used games as loss-leaders: sure we have madden '07 for $5, but why not get '08 with the updated roster? When someone trades in the game, they could sell them a new game immediately. They'd build brand loyalty, get some positive PR, and get customers into the stores where they make the most profit. They could then run sales at specific stores to see how price points changed the number of sales. If every game shop in LA lowers the price of Madden from $60 to $40, do sales go up 300%? They could even offer incentive programs, where gamer dads could pay $50/yr for the ability to turn in damaged game discs for new ones.
Even without being active participants, though, everyone knows those guys who buy a game the day it comes out, plays it over the weekend and then trades it in so they can get the next great game. In my case, I use it as a safety net if I end up hating the game. I love the original Resistance, but Resistance 2 was painful because it removed literally everything I loved about the original. I only trade in games I hate, but it effectively means there's only $15 on the line instead of $60 when I get a new game. Without that safety net I'm not even sure I'd own a console.
If it doesn't need to be accessible any time in the near future, you could just take 1x10^16 or however many bits it is and say that they're encoded in the spin of 1x10^16 particles in this 1kg rock I'm holding. Don't know what data's there, don't know if it's meaningful for any use other than being a rock, but there's a petabyte of data in there if you can read it.
Make the shops able to be stolen from, and you have room for thieves, and let the players put in traps, fancy locks, etc.
The only problem I see there (and I don't think it's necessarily a deal breaker) is that the designers have competing interests: the thieves have to be able to max out a skill, but if a thief can always steal from the shop then there's no incentive to open the shop in the first place. Either the shop is impossible to steal from, thus making the thief feel slighted, or the thief can steal from the shop, which means that all thieves which max out their skills can steal from the shops. And if you make it a progression, where lower-level shop owners are more easily stolen from than more senior shop owners, then you have a situation where thieves always steal from lower level shops, making it so that the only workable levels for owning a shop are extremely high.
I would probably resolve that issue through making it so that either the shops can't be stolen from at all, or else there's a limited scope in what can be stolen. For instance, there's a certain amount of gold on hand from items being bought and sold. Only half of that gold can be stolen, thus ensuring that there's something to steal but the shop owner can't lose everything. Or maybe shops earn latent income through the assumed purchases made by NPCs, and it's only this income which can be stolen from. Or maybe it's only custom made weapons, and the regular stock can't be stolen from, etc. Because anyone and everyone can get to the highest levels of thievery, there has to be an artificial barrier when it comes to thievery between PCs.
IE is only double all its competition combined? Watch out, Redmond, we're coming for you! (By the way, I was being sarcastic)
IE is the most important browser to support for a site that wants widespread appeal. That won't change for many years. Whether it will eventually add to IE's downfall or not, for now they couldn't shoot themselves in the foot badly enough to rival the amount of damage that it does to the rest of the community.
Rationality is still atypical, and still associated with mathematical ability...
FTA:
I've tried, and I can't think of any coherent point that could be made in order to argue that the Miley photoshopper really did violate the Tennessee law.
Finally:
Even though 44% of the 27 people with "excellent" math skills said the man did violate the law, when you look at the 58 people who self-reported "very good" math skills, 74% of them said he violated the law. This would appear to confound my original hypothesis that good math skills lead people to converge on the correct answer. But I suspect that many people with self-reported "very good" math grades were probably just good students who studied hard and did the practice problems and got good grades in math, but without necessarily having the insight that makes someone an "excellent" math student.
Bennett, in his usual way, has made so many leaps of logic without enough support that it's astounding. He's making assumptions he can't support (such as above, or assuming that those using mechanical turk are a valid sample), and it's kind of sad. He's making the assumption the a minor's head pasted on the body of an adult constitutes a simulated minor, which may or may not be legally true. Here's the cogent argument: Miley Cyrus is a minor, her actual picture is being used to simulate her in a sexual position. By using her actual head, it's entirely possible that it fit the legal definition. What's more, in matters of legal opinion, the DA is more likely to know the law than some guy who goes off on Slashdot about it.
Seems to me that if we were really rational about this, we'd defer to the experts rather than read essays by people of middling intelligence and logic with no serious legal background and serious holes in his logic.