I was scribbling some notes on paper earlier and wondered whether I spelled a word correctly. The absence of red squiggles appearing under my hand-written text was momentarily reassuring.
My account got compromised a year after I quit, and I only discovered it because I got an IM from someone who saw my character log in and wanted to know if I was playing again. My password was good enough that no one was going to randomly guess it, and I certainly never gave it out.
My best theory on how it happened is that I used the same account and password on lots of web forums, many of which have terrible security. Someone probably hacked into one of them and tried all the user/pass combos to see if they were also WoW accounts. I took a look at my old characters on armory and noticed that my lowbie alts had been stripped and my main moved to another server. I figure whoever got access probably sold the account to a clueless buyer because I can't imagine someone paying for a character transfer otherwise. I also wouldn't be surprised if people made a lot of money doing this. Lesson learned: use unique passwords (or usernames) on any accounts you actually care about.
Blizzard reset my password, but refused to transfer my character back to his original server because I "willingly gave out my password." I didn't intend to ever play again anyway, but service like that certainly sealed it. They didn't care one bit about catching the person who did it either, despite having IP addresses and even credit card numbers.
You joke, but in the early days of the Internet, you could have been. Posting anything publicly accessible on the Internet carries an implied license for people to copy it into RAM in order to view it, but it took a court ruling to establish that.
Additionally, the patent itself must be a technical document, not a legal document as it is now. It must provide the average practitioner in the field in question with all the information he needs to implement the invention.
This is already required actually.
35 U.S.C. 112 Specification.
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Actually, look at the rankings for intellectual property law in particular. George Washington is ranked third, and Santa Clara University was ranked fourth last year (not sure about this year since you have to pay to see beyond the top three). I think it's fairly irrelevant because most law students don't live on campus. Also, *insert obligatory comment about how rankings are worthless garbage anyway*
I've attended two of the twenty-three on the list and haven't been sued yet, what do I win?
This explains the first half of why spam bots always post exactly five replies and seven new topics on my forum even though I'm not using any such limits. If your board is still spam free, it's only a matter of time.
The CAPTCHA does nothing, but a simple "Are you Human? yes/no" radio button option on registration blocked them for over a month.
I think you've confused patent and copyright law. A patent grants you the right to exclude others from your invention no matter whether they came up with the same idea on their own or copied it from you.
TFO doesn't seem to put much, if any, weight on the fact that the fields were mandatory. The two ways an interactive computer service can lose 230 protection for user-submitted information is now apparently: 1) "categorizing, channeling, or limiting the information;" or, 2) "actively prompting for, encouraging, or soliciting the information."
While Kozinski does analyze the mandatory nature of the questions, he doesn't seem to base his ruling on it at all. I don't think previous cases have made any distinctions between mandatory and optional solicitations either. Reinhardt states in his concurrence that he would actually find liability for the free-form response textarea too, which is as optional as possible.
TFA makes it sound like this opinion clarified the bounds of the CDA. In reality, the 9th Circuit took a complete 180 from previous case law and made one of the clearer issues in Internet law a total mess. The Supreme Court really needs to take a look at this and resolve the conflict.
MMOGs neglect the beginning because no one spends a significant amount of time at that level. With a tough treadmill and no permanent death, players are going to spend their time getting one or two characters up to a high level and staying there. Your average console game has a well-designed level 1 because you have to play level 1 every time through; with MMOGs, there's little incentive. Newbies don't quit because the first few levels are boring. First of all, they expect it, either from previous experience or their friends; second, the mantra of the level treadmiller is "this game is going to be so awesome when I get level X!" The thought that maybe, just maybe, higher levels are going to be significantly more fun keeps people on the treadmill.
Clearly, you can't throw permanent death into Game X and expect it to work. The idea is to design a game around it--a game where it not only doesn't take months to reach the highest level, but the process of getting there is fun too. If done right, you wouldn't be all that frustrated about dying. However, living would be much more rewarding.
I agree with everyone saying this whole list is a crock, but there are some small reasons I don't think GT deserves to be in the top 25.
Online registration: Oscarweb is gone as of this year. Students have to use oscar's clunky database searching to find classes or use a printed copy of the course catalogue. The system sucks.
Degree requirement checking: GT finally added this recently, but it's still in beta, buggy, and doesn't support all majors. Despite its beta status, it has been more accurate than my advisor however. Still, other universities have had a good system for this for years.
Graduation process: still all on paper. You have to pick up forms, fill out your classes, and get them signed by multiple people 8 months before you actually want to graduate. My friends at UGA have to make sure they don't accidently graduate. Other colleges have an online "yes I want to graduate this semester" button.
Getting a minor requires two forms that have to be signed by advisors in the major and minor school. Again, the online system knows that I've taken enough Japanese classes to earn a minor so why do I have to list all my courses, dates, and grades on paperwork and submit them 7 months in advance? Not only are these forms not available on the web, instructions and deadlines are absent as well.
Georgia Tech has a great residential network, good campus computer access, and decent wireless. OIT has been doing a fine job, but all of the Tech administration still hasn't joined the digital age with the rest of us.
Yeah, because if people don't see ads for guns, they won't know where to buy them or even that they can buy them! This is about text ads for gun stores, not full page magazine spots showing how cool it is to blow people away.
Yaskawa does this in Japan, but the plant I visited in Kyushu had less than a hundred robots, not thousands. It was pretty neat to watch robots building more robots, but humans were still involved in steps of the process, and plenty of people were there to supervise.
If you don't believe me, ask the next Japanese person about it over a nice cold biru.
A nice cold building? Funny how the Japanese borrowed two English words and made their pronunciations very similar. I don't type or read romaji much, but it seems to me that beer would be "biiru" for the extended vowel sound.
Actually they've already had 12 Mbps connections in Japan for awhile through Yahoo BB. Sure, this new company can offer the service for a little cheaper, but his customers aren't getting anything better. Yahoo seems to even be offering 26 Mbps service there now for $32 a month (assuming you don't need their Wireless LAN package and I'm reading their site correctly).
Well, besides the fact that there aren't any starships to win (as others have pointed out), there's nothing stopping a player from running a gambling operation in the cantina or out of their own home. You can find or craft sets of dice, everything from a standard 6 to a d20 and publicly roll them. With the/tip command, players and the house can easily exchange money without trade screens when someone wins or loses. I haven't seen anyone do this yet, but I've seriously considered it myself. One perk is that it wouldn't take any skills whatsoever.
There was an SNES game that you may or may not consider a sequel to RCR. Only released in Japan, however. Similar looking graphics and gameplay, and it was made by the same people.
He created the site last year and complained about the freshman housing so he's definitely a sophomore now. He had a good reason to complain about that considering he was in a dorm that was closed for Spring to be renovated. I don't know which was worse for them, having to live there in Fall or being forced to move out.
His complaints are still valid; nothing on his site was fabricated, though obviously some things are made to sound worse than they really are. I didn't enjoy Scheme when I took the class, but I was a teaching assistant for it last semester, and it actually made sense.
Seriously though, GaTech is worth it. It has a great reputation and really isn't that hard if you put forth some effort and show up to class every once in awhile.
Re:My take on the game after playing it recently:
on
Gaming Goodness
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The game is somewhat unbalanced. In the first few minutes on the smaller maps, aliens have a massive advantage, and can win quickly by rushing the human base.
I blame this on inexperienced marine teams. If at least one person is watching every enterance, the aliens don't have a chance of winning with a quick rush. The problem is when the entire marine team has their back turned building something, and no one starts firing until the first guy is already dead.
Later in the game, the defensive structures are unbalanced. Human turrets are nearly impossible to kill for the aliens, but the alien structures fall quickly to heavy machine guns or grenade launchers.
As was already said, the lerk is the ultimate anti-turret weapon. With a bit of experience, you'll get rid of them in no time. Three or four alien defense chambers can make any group of chambers nearly impervious to grenade fire, and will only fall to dedicated heavy machine gunning by multiple marines. By that time, hopefully a few aliens are snacking on them from behind.
The ability of the commander to heal 50% of a soldier's health instantly is too powerful, because it allows the commander to turn a few soldiers into unstoppable juggernauts. It would be better if the health packs only healed a few hit points per second.
I like your suggestion, but I haven't seen that abused too often. A commander can't continuously heal everyone, and a marine with full life and no armor is dead in 2 bites anyway.
Neither side has enough weapons and upgrades to make the game interesting in the long run.
Aliens have 5 classes with 4 weapons each. Marines are a bit more limited, but the whole RTS integration adds more stuff than any other FPS has. Speaking of enough weapons, Counter-Strike has tons of them yet how many people buy anything besides mp5, ak/colt, and the awp? It seems that most people don't care about weapon selection, as long as they like the weapons they have.
Obviously the game needs more work, but it's extraordinary for a version 1 release.
Re:Balancing Issues in NS
on
Gaming Goodness
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
e.g. Give the team a useful defensive weapon that has limited lifetime (pehaps a fixed number of proximity mines), so that they can lock down their base for a short period, while they build up.
Actually that's already in there. The marines have trip mines that they can place very early in the game for little cost. The alien side has the advantage that they can kill a starting marine in 2 hits so rushing them is usually suicidal. The maps are huge and the marines move slowly, so a dead marine early on has a long way to go in a rush.
Either universities limit P2P traffic or the internet connection gets completely saturated, at which point your P2P speeds (not to mention everything else) suck anyway.
Georgia Tech manages to limit P2P uploading only so you can still download at full speed. I don't use P2P at all, but the limiting they put in place this semester has worked perfectly in keeping lots of bandwidth available and pings low. Prior to the rate limits, we were saturated 24/7 and couldn't even ping local Atlanta sites at less than half a second.
That company then sells your email address to 10 other spam companies. And most of the time they don't remove you from their list. A common trick I've noticed is that you won't get anything from them for a few months, then it'll start back again. It's pretty obvious when you see a very unique opt-out page a few times in a year.
The second red flag comes from the wording: "Creating a curriculum"? That smells like they haven't been accredited yet.
As an Anonymous Coward has already posted, they're not. Two of my friends considered being part of that pre-freshman class last year, and it was made very clear to them that the school was not yet accredited, but would hopefully be in 5 years before the first class graduates. Neither of them wanted to risk that.
Slashdot Mirror
If only voting these assholes out of Congress were as easy.
I was scribbling some notes on paper earlier and wondered whether I spelled a word correctly. The absence of red squiggles appearing under my hand-written text was momentarily reassuring.
My account got compromised a year after I quit, and I only discovered it because I got an IM from someone who saw my character log in and wanted to know if I was playing again. My password was good enough that no one was going to randomly guess it, and I certainly never gave it out.
My best theory on how it happened is that I used the same account and password on lots of web forums, many of which have terrible security. Someone probably hacked into one of them and tried all the user/pass combos to see if they were also WoW accounts. I took a look at my old characters on armory and noticed that my lowbie alts had been stripped and my main moved to another server. I figure whoever got access probably sold the account to a clueless buyer because I can't imagine someone paying for a character transfer otherwise. I also wouldn't be surprised if people made a lot of money doing this. Lesson learned: use unique passwords (or usernames) on any accounts you actually care about.
Blizzard reset my password, but refused to transfer my character back to his original server because I "willingly gave out my password." I didn't intend to ever play again anyway, but service like that certainly sealed it. They didn't care one bit about catching the person who did it either, despite having IP addresses and even credit card numbers.
You joke, but in the early days of the Internet, you could have been. Posting anything publicly accessible on the Internet carries an implied license for people to copy it into RAM in order to view it, but it took a court ruling to establish that.
The Supreme Court of the US was referring to copyright infringement as "piracy" in the 19th Century. Deal with it.
Additionally, the patent itself must be a technical document, not a legal document as it is now. It must provide the average practitioner in the field in question with all the information he needs to implement the invention.
This is already required actually.
35 U.S.C. 112 Specification.
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Actually, look at the rankings for intellectual property law in particular. George Washington is ranked third, and Santa Clara University was ranked fourth last year (not sure about this year since you have to pay to see beyond the top three). I think it's fairly irrelevant because most law students don't live on campus. Also, *insert obligatory comment about how rankings are worthless garbage anyway*
I've attended two of the twenty-three on the list and haven't been sued yet, what do I win?
This explains the first half of why spam bots always post exactly five replies and seven new topics on my forum even though I'm not using any such limits. If your board is still spam free, it's only a matter of time.
The CAPTCHA does nothing, but a simple "Are you Human? yes/no" radio button option on registration blocked them for over a month.
I think you've confused patent and copyright law. A patent grants you the right to exclude others from your invention no matter whether they came up with the same idea on their own or copied it from you.
TFO doesn't seem to put much, if any, weight on the fact that the fields were mandatory. The two ways an interactive computer service can lose 230 protection for user-submitted information is now apparently:
1) "categorizing, channeling, or limiting the information;" or,
2) "actively prompting for, encouraging, or soliciting the information."
While Kozinski does analyze the mandatory nature of the questions, he doesn't seem to base his ruling on it at all. I don't think previous cases have made any distinctions between mandatory and optional solicitations either. Reinhardt states in his concurrence that he would actually find liability for the free-form response textarea too, which is as optional as possible.
TFA makes it sound like this opinion clarified the bounds of the CDA. In reality, the 9th Circuit took a complete 180 from previous case law and made one of the clearer issues in Internet law a total mess. The Supreme Court really needs to take a look at this and resolve the conflict.
MMOGs neglect the beginning because no one spends a significant amount of time at that level. With a tough treadmill and no permanent death, players are going to spend their time getting one or two characters up to a high level and staying there. Your average console game has a well-designed level 1 because you have to play level 1 every time through; with MMOGs, there's little incentive. Newbies don't quit because the first few levels are boring. First of all, they expect it, either from previous experience or their friends; second, the mantra of the level treadmiller is "this game is going to be so awesome when I get level X!" The thought that maybe, just maybe, higher levels are going to be significantly more fun keeps people on the treadmill.
Clearly, you can't throw permanent death into Game X and expect it to work. The idea is to design a game around it--a game where it not only doesn't take months to reach the highest level, but the process of getting there is fun too. If done right, you wouldn't be all that frustrated about dying. However, living would be much more rewarding.
I agree with everyone saying this whole list is a crock, but there are some small reasons I don't think GT deserves to be in the top 25.
Online registration: Oscarweb is gone as of this year. Students have to use oscar's clunky database searching to find classes or use a printed copy of the course catalogue. The system sucks.
Degree requirement checking: GT finally added this recently, but it's still in beta, buggy, and doesn't support all majors. Despite its beta status, it has been more accurate than my advisor however. Still, other universities have had a good system for this for years.
Graduation process: still all on paper. You have to pick up forms, fill out your classes, and get them signed by multiple people 8 months before you actually want to graduate. My friends at UGA have to make sure they don't accidently graduate. Other colleges have an online "yes I want to graduate this semester" button.
Getting a minor requires two forms that have to be signed by advisors in the major and minor school. Again, the online system knows that I've taken enough Japanese classes to earn a minor so why do I have to list all my courses, dates, and grades on paperwork and submit them 7 months in advance? Not only are these forms not available on the web, instructions and deadlines are absent as well.
Georgia Tech has a great residential network, good campus computer access, and decent wireless. OIT has been doing a fine job, but all of the Tech administration still hasn't joined the digital age with the rest of us.
Yeah, because if people don't see ads for guns, they won't know where to buy them or even that they can buy them! This is about text ads for gun stores, not full page magazine spots showing how cool it is to blow people away.
Who needs to wake up here?
Yaskawa does this in Japan, but the plant I visited in Kyushu had less than a hundred robots, not thousands. It was pretty neat to watch robots building more robots, but humans were still involved in steps of the process, and plenty of people were there to supervise.
If you don't believe me, ask the next Japanese person about it over a nice cold biru.
A nice cold building? Funny how the Japanese borrowed two English words and made their pronunciations very similar. I don't type or read romaji much, but it seems to me that beer would be "biiru" for the extended vowel sound.
Actually they've already had 12 Mbps connections in Japan for awhile through Yahoo BB. Sure, this new company can offer the service for a little cheaper, but his customers aren't getting anything better. Yahoo seems to even be offering 26 Mbps service there now for $32 a month (assuming you don't need their Wireless LAN package and I'm reading their site correctly).
Well, besides the fact that there aren't any starships to win (as others have pointed out), there's nothing stopping a player from running a gambling operation in the cantina or out of their own home. You can find or craft sets of dice, everything from a standard 6 to a d20 and publicly roll them. With the /tip command, players and the house can easily exchange money without trade screens when someone wins or loses. I haven't seen anyone do this yet, but I've seriously considered it myself. One perk is that it wouldn't take any skills whatsoever.
There was an SNES game that you may or may not consider a sequel to RCR. Only released in Japan, however. Similar looking graphics and gameplay, and it was made by the same people.
From Georgia Tech right now:
FSU: 7ms
MIT: 25ms
CalTech: 54ms
UW: 59ms
In words, really good latency since you never have to worry about bottlenecks along the route.
He created the site last year and complained about the freshman housing so he's definitely a sophomore now. He had a good reason to complain about that considering he was in a dorm that was closed for Spring to be renovated. I don't know which was worse for them, having to live there in Fall or being forced to move out.
His complaints are still valid; nothing on his site was fabricated, though obviously some things are made to sound worse than they really are. I didn't enjoy Scheme when I took the class, but I was a teaching assistant for it last semester, and it actually made sense.
Seriously though, GaTech is worth it. It has a great reputation and really isn't that hard if you put forth some effort and show up to class every once in awhile.
The game is somewhat unbalanced. In the first few minutes on the smaller maps, aliens have a massive advantage, and can win quickly by rushing the human base.
I blame this on inexperienced marine teams. If at least one person is watching every enterance, the aliens don't have a chance of winning with a quick rush. The problem is when the entire marine team has their back turned building something, and no one starts firing until the first guy is already dead.
Later in the game, the defensive structures are unbalanced. Human turrets are nearly impossible to kill for the aliens, but the alien structures fall quickly to heavy machine guns or grenade launchers.
As was already said, the lerk is the ultimate anti-turret weapon. With a bit of experience, you'll get rid of them in no time. Three or four alien defense chambers can make any group of chambers nearly impervious to grenade fire, and will only fall to dedicated heavy machine gunning by multiple marines. By that time, hopefully a few aliens are snacking on them from behind.
The ability of the commander to heal 50% of a soldier's health instantly is too powerful, because it allows the commander to turn a few soldiers into unstoppable juggernauts. It would be better if the health packs only healed a few hit points per second.
I like your suggestion, but I haven't seen that abused too often. A commander can't continuously heal everyone, and a marine with full life and no armor is dead in 2 bites anyway.
Neither side has enough weapons and upgrades to make the game interesting in the long run.
Aliens have 5 classes with 4 weapons each. Marines are a bit more limited, but the whole RTS integration adds more stuff than any other FPS has. Speaking of enough weapons, Counter-Strike has tons of them yet how many people buy anything besides mp5, ak/colt, and the awp? It seems that most people don't care about weapon selection, as long as they like the weapons they have.
Obviously the game needs more work, but it's extraordinary for a version 1 release.
e.g. Give the team a useful defensive weapon that has limited lifetime (pehaps a fixed number of proximity mines), so that they can lock down their base for a short period, while they build up.
Actually that's already in there. The marines have trip mines that they can place very early in the game for little cost. The alien side has the advantage that they can kill a starting marine in 2 hits so rushing them is usually suicidal. The maps are huge and the marines move slowly, so a dead marine early on has a long way to go in a rush.
Either universities limit P2P traffic or the internet connection gets completely saturated, at which point your P2P speeds (not to mention everything else) suck anyway.
Georgia Tech manages to limit P2P uploading only so you can still download at full speed. I don't use P2P at all, but the limiting they put in place this semester has worked perfectly in keeping lots of bandwidth available and pings low. Prior to the rate limits, we were saturated 24/7 and couldn't even ping local Atlanta sites at less than half a second.
Almost.
That company then sells your email address to 10 other spam companies. And most of the time they don't remove you from their list. A common trick I've noticed is that you won't get anything from them for a few months, then it'll start back again. It's pretty obvious when you see a very unique opt-out page a few times in a year.
The second red flag comes from the wording: "Creating a curriculum"? That smells like they haven't been accredited yet.
As an Anonymous Coward has already posted, they're not. Two of my friends considered being part of that pre-freshman class last year, and it was made very clear to them that the school was not yet accredited, but would hopefully be in 5 years before the first class graduates. Neither of them wanted to risk that.