Years ago, I got up to the lighthouse on the island in Portland beach in the first GTA3 by getting a boat to it, and then jumping _backwards_ all the way up to the lighthouse.
If you face the slope, the game slides you down. Not sure why it doesn't when you're facing backwards - maybe they designed it that way for people like me.
Apparently there are plenty of other "easter egg spots" in GTA3.
Governments are not inherently less efficient than corporations. Just go look at various private companies (big and small) they're not all lean mean super efficient entities. Far from it.
And it's not a matter of size. It's a matter of quality.
You can have good or bad quality government (whether big or small).
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
And guess what, the Invisible Hand only does what the people want to do.
If only the bad guys want to be politicians, the voters will have to pick the least crappy. If the voters keep voting for more crappy instead of less crappy, it doesn't help... If only the lazy inefficient people want to work in the civil service, that doesn't help either.
It's like all the cells in your body doing all that hard work just for your body to not fall apart overnight. A poor good:bad cell ratio, and the body falls apart sooner.
But if you do it right, you can design a jet engine that will exclude "foreign objects" from airflow during takeoff - at the cost of power loss, extra weight and complexity.
The shield could be retracted at cruising speeds to restore full power and efficiency.
The Russians did try with the MIG 25 (and probably some other planes - Su27?), but some of their customers experienced problems - the debris was actually accumulating at the edge of the screen/door and dumped into the engine when the screen was retracted! Doh!:). But I think that got fixed by now.
So it's possible, it's just whether people think it's worth it.
"And how many people are in Hamilton Joe Frank an Reynolds anyway?"
So there's an extremely high chance he already knows.
In case you're still missing a line or two: You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings. You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings. You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings.
If the zombie machines use up too much of the bandwidth - the users or ISP will notice and the relevant zombies get dealt with.
When that happens it's not that difficult for an ISP to cut the infected machines off the net if they become a big problem.
However with 10^7 zombies if each zombie just DoSed a target at even as low as 128kbps per zombie it still works out to 152GBps. While some grandma in Sweden might be OK with that, many less well connected sites will still get crushed.
IMO the big problem is at low speeds like tens to hundreds of kbps per zombie, the ISPs and users of zombies won't notice, and so won't do anything.
Only the target and the target's ISP will be affected. If the zombies have an even more intelligent "back off" scheme it's even worse - the target's ISP might not even be affected - it just looks like the target being maxed out.
In which case good luck calling up and convincing the rest of the world to help you with your very personal problem:).
I'm no expert but a thing to be aware of, it won't produce pure water. It will produce other liquids/chemicals that condense at vaguely similar temperatures that happen to be vapour in there.
If you haven't been eating or drinking anything terribly bad, using pee shouldn't be too bad, but be a bit selective with the vegetation - skip it if it's got the usual "Nature's warning colours" all over it, or smells funny.
Various other alcohols (including nasty ones) have boiling points not far below that of water.
Yah I know it's not the same thing... But I live in a tropical country, even if I could see the milky way there are currently too many mosquitoes to make it a pleasant experience...
Yeah, how in the world are they going to keep a huge inflatable tower stuck to the same spot against strong winds? And pointing upwards too? Heavier than air skyscrapers already sway in the winds.
Or is it part of the plan for it to be flapping around?
It's not like they can keep it indoors all the time...
At least if the space elevator thing falls down it's not going to fly around as much and take out stuff wherever the wind blows it.
> I think it would be nice to have some MMOs that have fixed time-lines or a clever way to regularly make everyone restart, etc.
Currently what many do is go bankrupt and hold a final event.
I've played Archmage (a web and turn based online game) before, and ending was part of the game. You had people trying to get the game to end early (cast "armageddon") and people trying to stop them... Armageddon was inevitable though even if nobody casted it - the server would go into it eventually. Then the top 10 players end up on some "top ranking list".
The big problem with "final events" (e.g. say a "final" huge war in WoW) is naturally very many players would want to play during them. Then the servers might fall over and everyone gets pissed off.
That's fine if you're intending to close down the game, but not fine if you're not:).
Well many in the USA seem to have huge hangups about nonanonymous voting. I don't know why.
To me in the scenarios where it is a big problem, are the same scenarios where voting probably doesn't matter much anymore - everything else has become terribly corrupt - the cops, courts etc. e.g. The Dictator wins with 98% of the votes.
Otherwise, in normal cases, you just get some evidence that your boss was trying to force you to vote some way, complain to the cops/lawyer and boss is in deep shit.
That said, even with anonymous voting, it is still quite hard to cheat if you have a proper hand count paper ballot system.
It's hard when there are observers from various parties/orgs watching each count as it happens. And keeping a guard over the ballot boxes to make sure they aren't moved or switched.
The way to cheat that system is via postal votes. So maybe postal votes should not be anonymous. The other votes can be anonymous.
Well a sufficiently high level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
So maybe the people responsible should be punished as if they did it on purpose.
Because we're not actually talking about "just counting". We're talking about something far more important - voting.
The USA keeps making disparaging remarks about non democratic countries, spends hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to establish democracies/"regime change", but can't even count votes properly back home. Come on, we know the USA can do better than that.
If the USA can't, maybe they should outsource to India. India's a democracy and they have far more voters than the USA;).
There are plenty of good paper based systems around.
They scale. The more voters you have, the more volunteers and observers you should be able to get.
The counting of each ballot can be observed by party representatives and independent 3rd party observers/monitors. In my country, the counter holds up each ballot paper to show it to "everyone". It'll take a fair number of magicians to cheat in this and they would have to work a lot harder to cheat without getting caught.
As I've said before- Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be SEEN as fair. If democracy is important, it doesn't matter if it costs a few hours to get it right.
The best thing about it is, even if it's a surprise result - because the various observers see that it's mostly fair, the losers will grudgingly accept the result. If the result is close a recount can be done with even more stringent monitoring.
Where the cheating probably happens in my country is from the postal votes. But the electronic systems will also be vulnerable to this problem, in addition to being vulnerable to very many other problems inherent with e-voting.
E-voting fails my "seen to be fair" requirement- because it's some blackbox that the normal folk don't understand, and the IT security people understand and thus don't trust. Even if you have the source code, it's so hard to prove that it's the same software that actually runs during the counting, or that the rest of the hardware isn't messed with.
With e-voting, only a few specialists can understand and check the system, and the rest of the public have to near blindly trust them.
Whereas with hand counting, it's easy to explain to most people how it's done - and their party representatives are there checking each ballot as it's counted as well.
Is it so hard in the USA to find people who can count? Tell me it can't be so bad as "Counting votes is hard, let's go shopping!" right?
Firstly as long as he sticks to playing it all day long it'll have very little effect on the rest of us. So maybe we'll all be safe if the game is really addictive;).
Yes, I know doing something a lot can reinforce the mindset - practice makes perfect (just like rote memorization). However it might just end up game specific rather than spilling over to the real world.
Which brings me to the second point: it won't worry me much if all that sadism doesn't show up much in the "real world". For instance if he also enjoys pulling wings off flies, kicking dogs, doing nasty stuff to other humans in the "real world" then I will be worried.
If he's your dorm mate or neighbour and not a sadistic evil bastard, maybe it'll help if you invite him out and try to get him interested in other stuff.
By the way, you can have an arrow sticking through your head and keep on going. It depends on which part the arrow goes through. But yeah TF2 is certainly not about being realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
So why were those firms fined?
Perhaps someone should go study how the right people got to the right places so that stuff like the Manhattan Project could get done.
Years ago, I got up to the lighthouse on the island in Portland beach in the first GTA3 by getting a boat to it, and then jumping _backwards_ all the way up to the lighthouse.
If you face the slope, the game slides you down. Not sure why it doesn't when you're facing backwards - maybe they designed it that way for people like me.
Apparently there are plenty of other "easter egg spots" in GTA3.
All Hail and Worship the Invisible Hand!
A lot of people just don't get it.
Governments are not inherently less efficient than corporations. Just go look at various private companies (big and small) they're not all lean mean super efficient entities. Far from it.
And it's not a matter of size. It's a matter of quality.
You can have good or bad quality government (whether big or small).
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
And guess what, the Invisible Hand only does what the people want to do.
If only the bad guys want to be politicians, the voters will have to pick the least crappy.
If the voters keep voting for more crappy instead of less crappy, it doesn't help...
If only the lazy inefficient people want to work in the civil service, that doesn't help either.
It's like all the cells in your body doing all that hard work just for your body to not fall apart overnight. A poor good:bad cell ratio, and the body falls apart sooner.
Something like that is possible. At low speeds the engine can even run while taking air in from the sides. Been done already [1]
The deflectors have to be a extremely reliable - a malfunctioning deflector is likely to do far more damage than a bird.
This is because many jet engines are already designed to be able to take a hit from a chicken sized bird[1] - http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1134/is-a-chicken-gun-used-to-test-jet-engines
So your deflector has to pose less risk than that. Or it'll cost more lives than it'll save.
Anyway, it's technically viable, not sure whether it's commercially viable for commercial passenger jets.
[1] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOD#Engine_and_airframe_designs_which_avoid_FOD
[2] The problem I guess is when both engines suck in half a flock each ;).
Then the engine won't work so well.
But if you do it right, you can design a jet engine that will exclude "foreign objects" from airflow during takeoff - at the cost of power loss, extra weight and complexity.
The shield could be retracted at cruising speeds to restore full power and efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOD#Engine_and_airframe_designs_which_avoid_FOD
The Russians did try with the MIG 25 (and probably some other planes - Su27?), but some of their customers experienced problems - the debris was actually accumulating at the edge of the screen/door and dumped into the engine when the screen was retracted! Doh! :). But I think that got fixed by now.
So it's possible, it's just whether people think it's worth it.
I daresay many brits don't believe Britain is part of Europe either ;).
Can you reveal what sort of critical bug it was?
Seems you didn't get the last line of his post:
"And how many people are in Hamilton Joe Frank an Reynolds anyway?"
So there's an extremely high chance he already knows.
In case you're still missing a line or two:
You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings.
You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings.
You may be experiencing a line loss of about 33% there. That's a bit too high, you might have to check your settings.
"But it doesn't work on my browser!"
lmgtfy _requires_ javascript to work and the previous BoFH might have disabled javascript (or installed noscript) on everyone's browser...
If the zombie machines use up too much of the bandwidth - the users or ISP will notice and the relevant zombies get dealt with.
:).
When that happens it's not that difficult for an ISP to cut the infected machines off the net if they become a big problem.
However with 10^7 zombies if each zombie just DoSed a target at even as low as 128kbps per zombie it still works out to 152GBps. While some grandma in Sweden might be OK with that, many less well connected sites will still get crushed.
IMO the big problem is at low speeds like tens to hundreds of kbps per zombie, the ISPs and users of zombies won't notice, and so won't do anything.
Only the target and the target's ISP will be affected. If the zombies have an even more intelligent "back off" scheme it's even worse - the target's ISP might not even be affected - it just looks like the target being maxed out.
In which case good luck calling up and convincing the rest of the world to help you with your very personal problem
I'm no expert but a thing to be aware of, it won't produce pure water. It will produce other liquids/chemicals that condense at vaguely similar temperatures that happen to be vapour in there.
If you haven't been eating or drinking anything terribly bad, using pee shouldn't be too bad, but be a bit selective with the vegetation - skip it if it's got the usual "Nature's warning colours" all over it, or smells funny.
Various other alcohols (including nasty ones) have boiling points not far below that of water.
But is a hypervisor or virtualization really involved?
Seems to me that the software involved was some sort of web hosting software.
Which to me is rather different from the vmware, virtualbox, xen sort of stuff.
An exploit in those would be a bit more interesting (though not unexpected).
Whereas an exploit in some random PHP web hosting software is about as surprising as an exploit in Yet Another PHP Bulletin Board.
The guy hanging himself is noteworthy though.
More of what we're missing :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YQEOT9yARk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwnfLF9vTOU
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Deathvalleysky_nps_big.jpg
They can. On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKSejOwwB7I
Plenty of other videos too :).
Yah I know it's not the same thing... But I live in a tropical country, even if I could see the milky way there are currently too many mosquitoes to make it a pleasant experience...
Yeah, how in the world are they going to keep a huge inflatable tower stuck to the same spot against strong winds? And pointing upwards too? Heavier than air skyscrapers already sway in the winds.
Or is it part of the plan for it to be flapping around?
It's not like they can keep it indoors all the time...
At least if the space elevator thing falls down it's not going to fly around as much and take out stuff wherever the wind blows it.
> I think it would be nice to have some MMOs that have fixed time-lines or a clever way to regularly make everyone restart, etc.
Currently what many do is go bankrupt and hold a final event.
I've played Archmage (a web and turn based online game) before, and ending was part of the game. You had people trying to get the game to end early (cast "armageddon") and people trying to stop them... Armageddon was inevitable though even if nobody casted it - the server would go into it eventually. Then the top 10 players end up on some "top ranking list".
http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/index.php/Armageddon
The big problem with "final events" (e.g. say a "final" huge war in WoW) is naturally very many players would want to play during them. Then the servers might fall over and everyone gets pissed off.
That's fine if you're intending to close down the game, but not fine if you're not :).
http://shippai.jst.go.jp/en/Detail?fn=0&id=CA1000621
Many contributing causes for that crash.
Most "modern" fighter planes need a lot of computing power to stay in the sky. F16, F18 etc.
They are based on the idea of making an extremely maneuverable plane by making one that will change direction if a mouse sneezed on it.
So they need computers making very rapid adjustments all the time just to keep the plane flying in a straight line.
> he'll probably discover in his teenage years that he lacks peers
He seems to be doing better with relating to girls than many slashdotters:
http://www.daylife.com/photo/076m3k4g056Fe
So maybe his social skills are OK.
Actor = contradiction?
;).
Maybe he intends to be President of the United States (or some position of great power).
Movie-actor isn't so bad preparation for that role
Be prepared to welcome your ex-child-genius martial artist, scuba diving, piano playing Overlord...
Well many in the USA seem to have huge hangups about nonanonymous voting. I don't know why.
To me in the scenarios where it is a big problem, are the same scenarios where voting probably doesn't matter much anymore - everything else has become terribly corrupt - the cops, courts etc. e.g. The Dictator wins with 98% of the votes.
Otherwise, in normal cases, you just get some evidence that your boss was trying to force you to vote some way, complain to the cops/lawyer and boss is in deep shit.
That said, even with anonymous voting, it is still quite hard to cheat if you have a proper hand count paper ballot system.
It's hard when there are observers from various parties/orgs watching each count as it happens. And keeping a guard over the ballot boxes to make sure they aren't moved or switched.
The way to cheat that system is via postal votes. So maybe postal votes should not be anonymous. The other votes can be anonymous.
Well a sufficiently high level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
;).
So maybe the people responsible should be punished as if they did it on purpose.
Because we're not actually talking about "just counting". We're talking about something far more important - voting.
The USA keeps making disparaging remarks about non democratic countries, spends hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to establish democracies/"regime change", but can't even count votes properly back home. Come on, we know the USA can do better than that.
If the USA can't, maybe they should outsource to India. India's a democracy and they have far more voters than the USA
It's called paper based voting.
There are plenty of good paper based systems around.
They scale. The more voters you have, the more volunteers and observers you should be able to get.
The counting of each ballot can be observed by party representatives and independent 3rd party observers/monitors. In my country, the counter holds up each ballot paper to show it to "everyone". It'll take a fair number of magicians to cheat in this and they would have to work a lot harder to cheat without getting caught.
As I've said before- Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be SEEN as fair. If democracy is important, it doesn't matter if it costs a few hours to get it right.
The best thing about it is, even if it's a surprise result - because the various observers see that it's mostly fair, the losers will grudgingly accept the result. If the result is close a recount can be done with even more stringent monitoring.
Where the cheating probably happens in my country is from the postal votes. But the electronic systems will also be vulnerable to this problem, in addition to being vulnerable to very many other problems inherent with e-voting.
E-voting fails my "seen to be fair" requirement- because it's some blackbox that the normal folk don't understand, and the IT security people understand and thus don't trust. Even if you have the source code, it's so hard to prove that it's the same software that actually runs during the counting, or that the rest of the hardware isn't messed with.
With e-voting, only a few specialists can understand and check the system, and the rest of the public have to near blindly trust them.
Whereas with hand counting, it's easy to explain to most people how it's done - and their party representatives are there checking each ballot as it's counted as well.
Is it so hard in the USA to find people who can count? Tell me it can't be so bad as "Counting votes is hard, let's go shopping!" right?
Firstly as long as he sticks to playing it all day long it'll have very little effect on the rest of us. So maybe we'll all be safe if the game is really addictive ;).
Yes, I know doing something a lot can reinforce the mindset - practice makes perfect (just like rote memorization). However it might just end up game specific rather than spilling over to the real world.
Which brings me to the second point: it won't worry me much if all that sadism doesn't show up much in the "real world". For instance if he also enjoys pulling wings off flies, kicking dogs, doing nasty stuff to other humans in the "real world" then I will be worried.
If he's your dorm mate or neighbour and not a sadistic evil bastard, maybe it'll help if you invite him out and try to get him interested in other stuff.
By the way, you can have an arrow sticking through your head and keep on going. It depends on which part the arrow goes through. But yeah TF2 is certainly not about being realistic.