Step 1: Steal (or scam or otherwise obtain) login info for one character. Step 2: Log in as that character. Step 3: Find another player that appears to have a pre-existing relationship with the account owner. Step 4: Convince that player that a family member suddenly died, and that he can't afford the bus/plane ticket to be able to attend the funeral. Step 5: Profit (via Western Union).
Unfortunately this actually happened to someone I know. She was out $300 as a result of this scam. Normally she wouldn't fall for something like this, but the compromised account happened to belong to someone she had known for several years.
Note that this doesn't require a game bug or other vulnerability--it can be accomplished entirely through social engineering.
Apparently there has been a shortage of nurses in the US for quite a while, and it is expected to get worse. It's probably not what you were looking for, but it might be worth considering if you place a high value on job security. Random news report on this, dated January 7 2009: http://cbs5.com/health/nursing.shortage.patient.2.901996.html
"We recently had a hiring event where, for experienced nurses to interview -- just to interview -- we gave them $50 gas cards," said Tom Zinda, the director of recruitment at Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare in the Milwaukee-area city of Glendale. "We really try to get as creative as we can. It's a tough position to fill."
Speaking of Prime, one thing my family learned is that a single Prime subscription can be extended to multiple people (scroll to "How do I share Amazon Prime with members of my household"), and they don't have to live in the same location. That surprised me--I guess Amazon has a loose definition of "household". $80 for Prime for one person didn't seem worthwhile, but split between 4 people (living in 3 different places!) that all use Amazon occasionally, it made a lot more sense.
It won't, really, at least in EQ1. Having diminishing returns on power from experience--the Alternate Advancement system--ensures that the relative power boost from even a fulltime 50% experience bonus would be modest. The remaining items besides experience potions are mostly cosmetic. The virtual trading card game, Legends of Norrath, did far more damage to game integrity, and even then I only consider one of the Legends of Norrath items to be truly game breaking (the Kiss of Erollisi Marr).
What most of us are worried about is the slippery slope: that this is another step, however small, toward additional purchases becoming an essential part of gameplay and character progression.
Mudflation is an entirely separate issue, and not necessarily a bad thing if it happens at a measured pace (which it has in EQ1, for the most part). It allows weaker players and organizations to experience content that was previously too difficult for them, for one thing.
One possible application comes to mind: scaling an image to sizes larger than its original size. Obviously no additional detail can be recovered, and the technique wouldn't be suitable for realtime scaling, but I wonder how the results would compare with other algorithms...
If I understand correctly, the argument is not that the RIAA shouldn't have filed a suit in the first place, but that the resulting default judgement should be overturned and the case should be heard. Since the default judgement occurred due to the person failing to show up to court, a medical condition that makes it difficult or impossible to appear in court would be quite relevant.
If you don't mind a small "REFURB" engraved in the case, consider something like a refurbished Sandisk Sansa C2xx or E2xx, likely among the cheapest Rockbox compatible players out there. Regardless of what an mp3 player is designed for, if it can run Rockbox (and is not an Archos) it will play Ogg Vorbis and mp3 files, as well as a number of other file formats. Woot features players like this often enough that it has become a sort of running joke; if you're patient you might get a good deal there. I got my refurbished 2GB Sansa C250 at Woot for $15 + $5 shipping, then added a 2GB MicroSD card I had picked up elsewhere for around $5.
Rockbox, on any supported player, allows far more customization than the built-in software. You can even write your own programs (plugins) to run on it, or modify the Rockbox software itself, if you're so inclined. Rockbox is open source.
Head tracking in this case is referring primarily to position rather than orientation. You can move your head quite a bit while looking at the same location (from different angles). It doesn't take a whole lot of movement to get some useful depth information from a single eye. The same concept should apply to video on a flat screen. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051007100639.htm
If you look at DSOrganize, one of the most popular homebrew programs for the DS, you'll see that it can use either the wifi settings stored in firmware or custom wifi settings stored by DSOrganize.
Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, a game written for Windows in Visual Basic 3 back in 1995, still has a number of loyal players. Last time I checked Mordor did not work with Wine, and many people have had issues running it in Vista (it apparently requires UAC to be disabled). Mordor plays perfectly in DOSBox with Windows 3.1 installed, though.
Why can't the paper trail be the official vote of record, with any electronic counting serving as the equivalent of an exit poll? You get a mostly accurate tally instantly, yet retain the security of a paper ballot system.
Here's my system: Each voter gets a paper ballot that is both human- and machine-readable. This ballot may be filled in either by a computer printer (with suitable accessibility features) or by hand. Either way, the voter then goes to a verification station, where the ballot can be fed through an optical reader. The scanned choices are displayed on a screen (with a privacy curtain around it). Earphones could be available for the blind to hear the scanned results. If the results match what the voter intended, the voter proceeds to the box to deposit the ballot. If not, the voter inserts the ballot into an incinerator and is given another ballot to try again. The verification stations send unofficial vote counts to a central location for tallying, but the paper ballots are hand-counted over a period of several days to produce the official result.
It wouldn't be foolproof, but it should combine most of the benefits of both paper-based and electronic voting. Because the votes should in most cases be confirmed machine readable by an optical scanner before being deposited in the box, very few votes should be ambiguous to a human vote counter.
I did actually dream in text mode once, after having spent all day at the computer. The dream didn't "work" very well--any kind of writing in dreams tends to be unstable, changing on the fly--but I was definitely reading from a console that filled my entire field of view.
Off the top of my head, maybe one potential answer would be GPS tracking systems that encrypt each user's data with a user-specified password? Obviously there would be other implementation details to work out, but the goal would be to make it so that only the user can choose whether to introduce GPS tracking data as evidence.
The latest version of this program has hit a number of forums hard. In the last two days many vBulletin forum administrators have posted to complain and look for assistance--notice the sudden increase in activity on that thread as of the 11th post: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1634634&postcount=11 In the last 15 minutes alone 3 spammers have attempted to register on a small forum that I help run, one that would only be of interest to a few hundred people. (We get a valid new user about once a week on average.) A simple tweak has kept them at bay for now, but I doubt it'll be effective for very long. Of the latest batch of spammers, most of them have been using gmail.com email addresses. The last time we had a significant wave of forum spam, the spammers tended to use Yahoo for email (specifically username####@yahoo.com, where "username" matches the vBulletin username they are signing up with and #### is 4 random digits).
I wonder when they'll start using the same disposable email services that we use to avoid email spam. After all, it's much easier to get a temporary Mailinator email address (for example) than a Gmail address...
What is magic? Then there is the witches' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the witch. Older witches hardly put words to it at all, but may suspect in their hearts that the universe really doesn't know what the hell is going on and consists of a zillion trillion billion possibilities, and could become any one of them if a trained mind rigid with quantum certainty was inserted in the crack and/twisted/; that, if you really had to make someone's hat explode, all you needed to do was/twist/ into that universe where a large number of hat molecules all decide at the same time to bounce off in different directions. Younger witches, on the other hand, talk about it all the time and believe it involves crystals, mystic forces, and dancing about without yer drawers on. Everyone may be right, all at the same time. That's the thing about quantum. --Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"
Pfft. Real programmers just think really hard, choosing the proper universe such that electrons happen to tunnel at just the right place and time to affect the magnetizer.
Even better ones choose the universe in which the atoms of the proper hard disk spontaneously tunnel into just the right configuration from across spacetime.
I tried to check wikileaks.org hours before the link was posted on Slashdot, and like you I ended up having to use the coralized version. Wikileaks.org was pre-Slashdotted.
I agree, but just to nitpick: Prepared statements are a subset of parameterized queries. A prepared statement is a parameterized query with a flag indicating that the query should be "prepared" for reuse (possibly with different values for the parameters), so that the cost of analyzing the query and developing an execution plan is limited to the first execution. There can be a bit of extra overhead, typically in the creation of a temporary stored procedure, so a query that is only to be executed once should not be prepared.
Using parameterized queries--prepared or not--protects you from SQL injection (unless the query is specifically designed to execute input, which there is rarely a reason to do). Of course if you want to maximize performance, in most cases you'll want to use stored procedures instead, which provide the same protection and shift query analysis costs to compile time instead of execution time.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Steal (or scam or otherwise obtain) login info for one character.
Step 2: Log in as that character.
Step 3: Find another player that appears to have a pre-existing relationship with the account owner.
Step 4: Convince that player that a family member suddenly died, and that he can't afford the bus/plane ticket to be able to attend the funeral.
Step 5: Profit (via Western Union).
Unfortunately this actually happened to someone I know. She was out $300 as a result of this scam. Normally she wouldn't fall for something like this, but the compromised account happened to belong to someone she had known for several years.
Note that this doesn't require a game bug or other vulnerability--it can be accomplished entirely through social engineering.
Apparently there has been a shortage of nurses in the US for quite a while, and it is expected to get worse. It's probably not what you were looking for, but it might be worth considering if you place a high value on job security.
Random news report on this, dated January 7 2009: http://cbs5.com/health/nursing.shortage.patient.2.901996.html
Redirect Remover
If the "waste" is producing a dangerous amount of energy for thousands of years, then it is an energy source and ought to be reused.
Speaking of Prime, one thing my family learned is that a single Prime subscription can be extended to multiple people (scroll to "How do I share Amazon Prime with members of my household"), and they don't have to live in the same location. That surprised me--I guess Amazon has a loose definition of "household". $80 for Prime for one person didn't seem worthwhile, but split between 4 people (living in 3 different places!) that all use Amazon occasionally, it made a lot more sense.
It won't, really, at least in EQ1. Having diminishing returns on power from experience--the Alternate Advancement system--ensures that the relative power boost from even a fulltime 50% experience bonus would be modest. The remaining items besides experience potions are mostly cosmetic. The virtual trading card game, Legends of Norrath, did far more damage to game integrity, and even then I only consider one of the Legends of Norrath items to be truly game breaking (the Kiss of Erollisi Marr).
What most of us are worried about is the slippery slope: that this is another step, however small, toward additional purchases becoming an essential part of gameplay and character progression.
Mudflation is an entirely separate issue, and not necessarily a bad thing if it happens at a measured pace (which it has in EQ1, for the most part). It allows weaker players and organizations to experience content that was previously too difficult for them, for one thing.
One possible application comes to mind: scaling an image to sizes larger than its original size.
Obviously no additional detail can be recovered, and the technique wouldn't be suitable for realtime scaling, but I wonder how the results would compare with other algorithms...
If I understand correctly, the argument is not that the RIAA shouldn't have filed a suit in the first place, but that the resulting default judgement should be overturned and the case should be heard. Since the default judgement occurred due to the person failing to show up to court, a medical condition that makes it difficult or impossible to appear in court would be quite relevant.
If you don't mind a small "REFURB" engraved in the case, consider something like a refurbished Sandisk Sansa C2xx or E2xx, likely among the cheapest Rockbox compatible players out there. Regardless of what an mp3 player is designed for, if it can run Rockbox (and is not an Archos) it will play Ogg Vorbis and mp3 files, as well as a number of other file formats. Woot features players like this often enough that it has become a sort of running joke; if you're patient you might get a good deal there. I got my refurbished 2GB Sansa C250 at Woot for $15 + $5 shipping, then added a 2GB MicroSD card I had picked up elsewhere for around $5.
Rockbox, on any supported player, allows far more customization than the built-in software. You can even write your own programs (plugins) to run on it, or modify the Rockbox software itself, if you're so inclined. Rockbox is open source.
Head tracking in this case is referring primarily to position rather than orientation. You can move your head quite a bit while looking at the same location (from different angles).
It doesn't take a whole lot of movement to get some useful depth information from a single eye. The same concept should apply to video on a flat screen.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051007100639.htm
Thunderbird 3 is under development. An alpha version is available.
They use dswifi, which is included with devkitPro (devkitARM). Yes, it is basically a homebrew driver/library. (It has been previously covered on Slashdot.)
If you look at DSOrganize, one of the most popular homebrew programs for the DS, you'll see that it can use either the wifi settings stored in firmware or custom wifi settings stored by DSOrganize.
Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, a game written for Windows in Visual Basic 3 back in 1995, still has a number of loyal players. Last time I checked Mordor did not work with Wine, and many people have had issues running it in Vista (it apparently requires UAC to be disabled). Mordor plays perfectly in DOSBox with Windows 3.1 installed, though.
Why can't the paper trail be the official vote of record, with any electronic counting serving as the equivalent of an exit poll? You get a mostly accurate tally instantly, yet retain the security of a paper ballot system.
Here's my system: Each voter gets a paper ballot that is both human- and machine-readable. This ballot may be filled in either by a computer printer (with suitable accessibility features) or by hand. Either way, the voter then goes to a verification station, where the ballot can be fed through an optical reader. The scanned choices are displayed on a screen (with a privacy curtain around it). Earphones could be available for the blind to hear the scanned results. If the results match what the voter intended, the voter proceeds to the box to deposit the ballot. If not, the voter inserts the ballot into an incinerator and is given another ballot to try again. The verification stations send unofficial vote counts to a central location for tallying, but the paper ballots are hand-counted over a period of several days to produce the official result.
It wouldn't be foolproof, but it should combine most of the benefits of both paper-based and electronic voting. Because the votes should in most cases be confirmed machine readable by an optical scanner before being deposited in the box, very few votes should be ambiguous to a human vote counter.
Synesthesia, perhaps? That tends to run in families.
I did actually dream in text mode once, after having spent all day at the computer. The dream didn't "work" very well--any kind of writing in dreams tends to be unstable, changing on the fly--but I was definitely reading from a console that filled my entire field of view.
9000!! = 9000! / 8999!!
9000!! < 9000!
Definition of the double factorial
Off the top of my head, maybe one potential answer would be GPS tracking systems that encrypt each user's data with a user-specified password? Obviously there would be other implementation details to work out, but the goal would be to make it so that only the user can choose whether to introduce GPS tracking data as evidence.
The latest version of this program has hit a number of forums hard. In the last two days many vBulletin forum administrators have posted to complain and look for assistance--notice the sudden increase in activity on that thread as of the 11th post:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1634634&postcount=11
In the last 15 minutes alone 3 spammers have attempted to register on a small forum that I help run, one that would only be of interest to a few hundred people. (We get a valid new user about once a week on average.) A simple tweak has kept them at bay for now, but I doubt it'll be effective for very long.
Of the latest batch of spammers, most of them have been using gmail.com email addresses. The last time we had a significant wave of forum spam, the spammers tended to use Yahoo for email (specifically username####@yahoo.com, where "username" matches the vBulletin username they are signing up with and #### is 4 random digits).
I wonder when they'll start using the same disposable email services that we use to avoid email spam. After all, it's much easier to get a temporary Mailinator email address (for example) than a Gmail address...
It could have a name that functions as its own UPC bar code!
So, a Real Programmer is...a witch!
Be sure you get one of the models with the nVidia graphics card, then. Notice that the cheapest model, the $599 N10EA1, does NOT have it:
http://www.jr.com/product/productListing.jsp?Ntt=asus+n10
With any decent optimizing compiler it shouldn't terminate. Try it with "gcc -O2", or more specifically, "gcc -foptimize-sibling-calls".
As for the flood fill lab assignment, there are methods that do not require recursion or the use of "goto".
I tried to check wikileaks.org hours before the link was posted on Slashdot, and like you I ended up having to use the coralized version. Wikileaks.org was pre-Slashdotted.
I agree, but just to nitpick:
Prepared statements are a subset of parameterized queries. A prepared statement is a parameterized query with a flag indicating that the query should be "prepared" for reuse (possibly with different values for the parameters), so that the cost of analyzing the query and developing an execution plan is limited to the first execution. There can be a bit of extra overhead, typically in the creation of a temporary stored procedure, so a query that is only to be executed once should not be prepared.
Using parameterized queries--prepared or not--protects you from SQL injection (unless the query is specifically designed to execute input, which there is rarely a reason to do). Of course if you want to maximize performance, in most cases you'll want to use stored procedures instead, which provide the same protection and shift query analysis costs to compile time instead of execution time.