My mom did this during the 80s by herself. She had a (very) little list of which deals she couldn't solve. I wonder how many other people have done the same.
She still goes through 20 deals every day but with the new version she knows she'll never finish.
On a complete tangent, reading this article is the first time I've noticed the ugly little details of the "felony murder law".
Under Florida law, individuals involved in a felony resulting in death can be charged with murder.
You'd think that means if you kill someone while committing a felony that you can be charged with murder. That seems somewhat reasonable, although I can think of cases where it would be excessive.
It turns out if you break into a house for a robbery and some other guy that came with you kills someone maybe somewhere else in the house and you didn't even know you can still be charged with murder.
Now, that seems pretty unfair but we find out in this story that they can go even beyond that. In this story a couple of kids break into a house and the homeowner shoots and kills one of them. They then applied this law to charge the other kid with murder!
why would you open yourself up to potential legal trouble
Unfortunately this line of thinking leads to life in general being a lot less pleasant that it should be in countries with this sort of attitude towards liability.
We end up with people making lots of regrettable decisions like "I shouldn't let anyone walk across my property", "I shouldn't let anyone use anything of mine", "I shouldn't help that kid crying in the middle of the road" just because there's a real chance that the government will ruin your life over it if someone gets offended.
Most people are nice and want to help others but we force them to close up and stop interacting with people out of fear of liability. It's sad.
People keep saying "Google wants" like Google is made up of a bunch of drones who were all brainwashed to think alike. Google has hired some of the smartest programmers in the world. Do you think they all just get hired and then go "yes master, I will try to increase Google's advertising capability"?
Yes, advertising is the core of Google's success but the majority of their services are created by geeks who just want to do something cool and found a job at a company that lets them do cool things without requiring everything to have an ROI. Many of their programs don't have any use to their advertising business. People keep asking themselves "why is Google doing this?" and since advertising is how Google makes money they always seem to come to the conclusion that whatever they are doing must boost advertising somehow. For the most part Google does stuff because the people working at Google sat down and thought "wouldn't it be cool if someone did this?"
The DNS service explicitly states that they are keeping information around on a short term basis just for debugging, performance optimization and spoof detection purposes and they are not sharing the data with the advertising team or any other Google program. This isn't making them money.
Where did you hear that REI got 250 million dollars from the government? I haven't heard of any retailers anywhere getting bailout money for that matter.
Uh, yeah, that's how terrorism works - they create terror which leads the victims to act in ways that are in the interests of the terrorists rather than the victims.
9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack ever not because they took down the towers but because America is turning itself into a police state and starting wars and destroying our economy because of the attacks. Hence "the terrorists have won" in the sense that we are voluntarily doing their wishes.
It's not just hard to use, it's also ugly as hell. I thought about starting to use PGP again recently and just using it for digital signatures makes my email nearly unreadable never mind using actual encryption. Here's a nice one-line email:
If I sent this it a non-geek they'd probably go WTF? and tell me my email program is broken.
It would need to be transparently integrated into all popular email programs so that no one actually needs to see the code in their inbox. An argument could be made that in the long run PGP has actually made the problem worse by allowing email vendors to punt on the concept of encryption and just tell users "if you want encryption use PGP" instead of having to develop an integrated solution that actually works well enough for mass adoption.
Not so useful if you want to sign on to an intranet IM service however. It also doesn't seem to let you specify things like ports and auth type over Jabber.
You're seriously comparing a lotto ticket to buying stock in a company? You think that's reasonable?
Yes, in the fact-limited context of your original "think about it" anecdote. Really, I'm comparing your example story which was meant to demonstrate why people should invest in stock to why people think it's reasonable to buy a lottery ticket. There are many legitimate reasons to invest in the stock market and it's obviously a much better investment than a lottery ticket, but just saying "if you invested x dollars in this cherry-picked example 35 years again you'd be rich now" doesn't even glancingly address any of those legitimate reasons. You're just appealing to people's greed, like the lottery does. I could easily give an example of a company you could have invested in that would have lost you your entire investment, does that make it an equally compelling arguement against the stock market? If you want to convince people to invest in the stock market you should probably at least provide information about market performance in general, not just a statement that it's possible to get rich there because that's true of many things.
Summary: I don't disagree with you that investing in the market is a good idea, I just don't think you gave a very good reason for it.:)
I remember reading some stock tip book as a kid and reading that if you instead of buying a pair of Gap Jeans in 1969, you had purchased the equivalent amount of stock in The Limited, you would be a millionaire today.
So what? You could just as reasonably say that if you hadn't bought that candy bar last week and had instead bought a lottery ticket and chosen the numbers 3-14-23-48-49-57 that you'd be a millionaire today! While true, it's hardly useful advice; it's easy to get rich if you go back in time with the knowledge of what things will turn out to be valuable.
yet you don't hear complaints calling for the building industry to stop installing windows
Well, only because windows are a lot more indispensible than wind turbines. There are quite a few people complaining about the various things that kill birds and estimates of birds killed by windows go from 100 million to over a billion a year, much more than the number killed by windmills. There's even people developing special glass to try to stop birds from hitting windows.
Eh, one of the main reasons people enjoyed playing the LD games was that they were so beautiful to watch that if someone was any good they'd get a lot of bystanders looking over their shoulders and telling them how great they were. That aspect will be completely missing from a home version.
Also everyone is complaining about how the game is so static and you do the same moves every time but if you think about other games from back then like Robocop or Shinobi or Super Mario or Q*Bert (any game without a random number generator, really) you had theoretical freedom in the game but as the same thing happened every level at the same time, when you got good you really just ended up doing exactly the same pattern of moves every game at the same times and you only ever died if you screwed up the pattern. Of course, people had the freedom of creating and improving their personal "patterns" but it's not as different as people seem to think.
Well, it's pretty official now since they have updated the expansion website with information on the Draenei.
It also explains that the Draenei are the remnants of the Eredar race who chose not to become evil demons back when Sargeras was forming the burning crusade.
The fact here is that a lot of these accounts aren't "cheating"
How do you know? I bet a large number, perhaps all, of the "banned" accounts were banned for teleport hacking. The programs to do this have gotten very sophisticated and user-friendly and nearly every server has problems with people who do nothing but teleport around the world mining rich thorium veins and hanging around instanced dungeons teleporting to places where they can't be hit but can kill bosses from.
I think the main reason they can't fix this is that they want their game to be playable in high latency conditions (virtually required with the load and network problems they are having) and so they can't really tell the difference between someone who lost their connection for 10 seconds and popped up somewhere new because they weren't reporting their position while they were moving and someone who just hacked their client into thinking it's somewhere else now.
I upgraded from PINE too, for the spam filter
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
I used PINE up until the start of this year. The main reason I finally started using gmail instead of PINE is that it filtered all my spam out a lot better. I was running all my mail thru SpamAssassin and then SpamBayes and I still got 20-30 spams a day. With gmail I'm down to 1 or 2 usually, although there are occasionally false positives on my mailing list traffic. Unfortunately you cannot whitelist incoming mail by subject line in gmail.
My list of professions wasn't meant to be exhaustive; I imagine there's lots of other specialized professions where pay-for-skill is common. I can think of half a dozen more off the top of my head. I imagine there are also many examples of people who get paid for their skill in industries where such practices are extremely uncommon.
However, my point was that those people and professions are the exception and most people end up in jobs that pay by the hour.
I think it is. It's called being paid by the hour (or by the year, if you are salary, but it's the same thing). It's vastly more popular than paying by measuring the quality or quantity of the actual work done which would be more fair but much more difficult to implement; skill is very hard to measure objectively.
I can write a program in 2 hours. Joe in the next cubical would take 10 hours to write the same program while Frank might only take 1 hour. Guess what, we all get paid nearly the same amount. Maybe the more skilled people get 10% or 20% more per year but there's no way Frank gets paid 10x what Joe makes. Only in some very specialized jobs (pro sports, lawyers, doctors) subject to direct control of the free market does skill frequently have any reasonable correlation to pay and then usually only for the top few percent.
The Street Fighter lessons might be all warm and fuzzy and represent the world you'd like to have but the WoW lessons reflect reality, sad as that may be.
How is that different than taking a job with any new company? The company could just close down and then you'd be out of work.
Heck, it happens to workers in old companies too (Enron, Worldcom, GM, Ford).
Besides, if she's making 4 times her previous salary it won't take long to be able to afford to have a few years with no income at the same standard of living if she wanted.:)
I'm just curious why people feel the need to bring any of this nonsense into the game.
Because MMOGs are as much a social phenomonon as they are a game. Guilds are made up of people you expect to be spending a lot of time with and getting to know during the course of the game. People naturally want to associate with others who have similar viewpoints, just like IRL. As an extreme example, there are thousands of people that play on the Dark Iron WoW server because they are fans of the Penny Arcade or PvP comic strips (who's guilds battle each other constantly and have so many members that they actually had to split into several sub-guilds each due to in-game guild size limitations). That's pretty irrelevant to anything inside WoW, but they certainly get a lot of enjoyment out of tying those out-of-game activites to their gameplay.
You will find that every guild in the end filters its members to some degree by social skills not just by game skills. For example, guilds kick people out for being jerks all the time. Many guilds have charters stating that they are made up of "friendly, family oriented players" or something similar. Some guilds are just more organized about certain traits or opinions that they desire.
these things will be flying off the shelves like hotcakes.
I think you overestimate how many people will care about the features you list. I never look at my keyboard. Admittedly that's partially because it never changes and I already know what it says, but it'll still be the difference between hunt-and-peck and touch typing. You only need to see the labels until you know what they keys do, then they are superfluous. In other words, the only people who will be watching the keyboard to see what the keys change to when they press control are those who don't already know and that ignorance doesn't last long. If you use computers infrequently enough to need those labels all the time, you are not likely to be buying high end cutting edge geek keyboards.
Well, I suppose it boils down to cost. If you could have this additional functionality for a small cost, sure, why not? But given that the 3 key version costs $100, what's a 103 key keyboard cost? Ouch. I doubt they can get the price down to cheap enough for a regular consumer to consider the purchase with the volume that they'll be selling before it's widely supported. Actually I doubt if it would be cheap even if they were selling millions of them.
Now, if they fail to deliver the product EVER, that's a crime.
Technically, for mail order at least, they have 30 days to ship from the time they take your payment unless they specifically tell you otherwise in advance. This is the FTC's "Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Trade Regulation Rule" and it's a pretty big deal for mail order companies to follow.
"The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days."
Basically if you fail to ship in 30 days you have to obtain the customer's explicit consent to keep their money until you can ship or you must refund their payment.
I don't see in TFA any details about actually making a pre-order so I don't know what they promise in this case, although they say "Keyboards ready for shipment will arrive on May 15" but that doesn't mean they'll have enough to actually fulfill all pre-orders.
As a nice bonus, games can finally tell me what keys I'm supposed to press instead of going through the config screen and trying to memorize all the combinations.
Except of course there will never be sufficient market penetration for anyone to actually bother putting support for this in their programs. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem with all new technology that requires new media or drivers, but this is sufficiently expensive and specialized that I don't expect it to ever become common enough to be a "standard".
That was the problem with the 3d visor display I bought back in the early 90s; I think only 3 programs ever supported it.
Game designers know that even if they hide the numbers, the players will deduce them.
Not only that but every single patch half the playerbase will be convinced that some of those invisible numbers have been changed (for the worse, of course) without them being told and raise a fuss that the developers (or PR folks) have to deal with.
You mean like so many text-based MUDs have done since forever?
I remember playing a MUD in the early 90s where when you hit the max level you could plant a dungeon somewhere (just connected your dungeon to an existing room node) and write object oriented code to implement monsters, puzzles and treasure. I always figured it would be a good way to teach OO design since it's a lot easier to think of a monster or a magical scepter as an object with attributes than it is to start with abstract data structures...
Anyway, like all games, MUDs have had a large drop in the ability for users to affect them as the graphics and detail went up. Back in the day everyone could easily make levels for Lode Runner or Wolf 3d without any training or learning curve. Nowdays you need a degree in 4th dimensional geometry and several days of free time to make a good FPS level, never mind a virtual world...
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My mom did this during the 80s by herself. She had a (very) little list of which deals she couldn't solve. I wonder how many other people have done the same.
She still goes through 20 deals every day but with the new version she knows she'll never finish.
On a complete tangent, reading this article is the first time I've noticed the ugly little details of the "felony murder law".
You'd think that means if you kill someone while committing a felony that you can be charged with murder. That seems somewhat reasonable, although I can think of cases where it would be excessive.
It turns out if you break into a house for a robbery and some other guy that came with you kills someone maybe somewhere else in the house and you didn't even know you can still be charged with murder.
Now, that seems pretty unfair but we find out in this story that they can go even beyond that. In this story a couple of kids break into a house and the homeowner shoots and kills one of them. They then applied this law to charge the other kid with murder!
That's pretty messed up.
Unfortunately this line of thinking leads to life in general being a lot less pleasant that it should be in countries with this sort of attitude towards liability.
We end up with people making lots of regrettable decisions like "I shouldn't let anyone walk across my property", "I shouldn't let anyone use anything of mine", "I shouldn't help that kid crying in the middle of the road" just because there's a real chance that the government will ruin your life over it if someone gets offended.
Most people are nice and want to help others but we force them to close up and stop interacting with people out of fear of liability. It's sad.
People keep saying "Google wants" like Google is made up of a bunch of drones who were all brainwashed to think alike. Google has hired some of the smartest programmers in the world. Do you think they all just get hired and then go "yes master, I will try to increase Google's advertising capability"?
Yes, advertising is the core of Google's success but the majority of their services are created by geeks who just want to do something cool and found a job at a company that lets them do cool things without requiring everything to have an ROI. Many of their programs don't have any use to their advertising business. People keep asking themselves "why is Google doing this?" and since advertising is how Google makes money they always seem to come to the conclusion that whatever they are doing must boost advertising somehow. For the most part Google does stuff because the people working at Google sat down and thought "wouldn't it be cool if someone did this?"
The DNS service explicitly states that they are keeping information around on a short term basis just for debugging, performance optimization and spoof detection purposes and they are not sharing the data with the advertising team or any other Google program. This isn't making them money.
Where did you hear that REI got 250 million dollars from the government? I haven't heard of any retailers anywhere getting bailout money for that matter.
I think you just made that up.
The EFF mostly works in the US for obvious reasons, but they do international work as well.
Uh, yeah, that's how terrorism works - they create terror which leads the victims to act in ways that are in the interests of the terrorists rather than the victims.
9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack ever not because they took down the towers but because America is turning itself into a police state and starting wars and destroying our economy because of the attacks. Hence "the terrorists have won" in the sense that we are voluntarily doing their wishes.
It's not just hard to use, it's also ugly as hell. I thought about starting to use PGP again recently and just using it for digital signatures makes my email nearly unreadable never mind using actual encryption. Here's a nice one-line email:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Hey dude, how's it going?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
iD8DBQFH6CrifPJd VEzW7qwRAs8fAKCSg8j qWO8zfHpIrNKJ zBtrHF54UwCfQWhO
lGZk7Ys4hl e1OqxyEuHn1EY=
=izSS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
If I sent this it a non-geek they'd probably go WTF? and tell me my email program is broken.
It would need to be transparently integrated into all popular email programs so that no one actually needs to see the code in their inbox. An argument could be made that in the long run PGP has actually made the problem worse by allowing email vendors to punt on the concept of encryption and just tell users "if you want encryption use PGP" instead of having to develop an integrated solution that actually works well enough for mass adoption.
Not so useful if you want to sign on to an intranet IM service however. It also doesn't seem to let you specify things like ports and auth type over Jabber.
Yes, in the fact-limited context of your original "think about it" anecdote. Really, I'm comparing your example story which was meant to demonstrate why people should invest in stock to why people think it's reasonable to buy a lottery ticket. There are many legitimate reasons to invest in the stock market and it's obviously a much better investment than a lottery ticket, but just saying "if you invested x dollars in this cherry-picked example 35 years again you'd be rich now" doesn't even glancingly address any of those legitimate reasons. You're just appealing to people's greed, like the lottery does. I could easily give an example of a company you could have invested in that would have lost you your entire investment, does that make it an equally compelling arguement against the stock market? If you want to convince people to invest in the stock market you should probably at least provide information about market performance in general, not just a statement that it's possible to get rich there because that's true of many things.
Summary: I don't disagree with you that investing in the market is a good idea, I just don't think you gave a very good reason for it.
So what? You could just as reasonably say that if you hadn't bought that candy bar last week and had instead bought a lottery ticket and chosen the numbers 3-14-23-48-49-57 that you'd be a millionaire today! While true, it's hardly useful advice; it's easy to get rich if you go back in time with the knowledge of what things will turn out to be valuable.
Well, only because windows are a lot more indispensible than wind turbines. There are quite a few people complaining about the various things that kill birds and estimates of birds killed by windows go from 100 million to over a billion a year, much more than the number killed by windmills. There's even people developing special glass to try to stop birds from hitting windows.
Eh, one of the main reasons people enjoyed playing the LD games was that they were so beautiful to watch that if someone was any good they'd get a lot of bystanders looking over their shoulders and telling them how great they were. That aspect will be completely missing from a home version.
Also everyone is complaining about how the game is so static and you do the same moves every time but if you think about other games from back then like Robocop or Shinobi or Super Mario or Q*Bert (any game without a random number generator, really) you had theoretical freedom in the game but as the same thing happened every level at the same time, when you got good you really just ended up doing exactly the same pattern of moves every game at the same times and you only ever died if you screwed up the pattern. Of course, people had the freedom of creating and improving their personal "patterns" but it's not as different as people seem to think.
Well, it's pretty official now since they have updated the expansion website with information on the Draenei.
It also explains that the Draenei are the remnants of the Eredar race who chose not to become evil demons back when Sargeras was forming the burning crusade.
The fact here is that a lot of these accounts aren't "cheating"
4 422454044&q=w
How do you know? I bet a large number, perhaps all, of the "banned" accounts were banned for teleport hacking. The programs to do this have gotten very sophisticated and user-friendly and nearly every server has problems with people who do nothing but teleport around the world mining rich thorium veins and hanging around instanced dungeons teleporting to places where they can't be hit but can kill bosses from.
Here's a video of someone teleporting around Dire Maul. The UI on the hack is pretty impressive, although the resolution is too bad to see details: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53051962
I think the main reason they can't fix this is that they want their game to be playable in high latency conditions (virtually required with the load and network problems they are having) and so they can't really tell the difference between someone who lost their connection for 10 seconds and popped up somewhere new because they weren't reporting their position while they were moving and someone who just hacked their client into thinking it's somewhere else now.
I used PINE up until the start of this year. The main reason I finally started using gmail instead of PINE is that it filtered all my spam out a lot better. I was running all my mail thru SpamAssassin and then SpamBayes and I still got 20-30 spams a day. With gmail I'm down to 1 or 2 usually, although there are occasionally false positives on my mailing list traffic. Unfortunately you cannot whitelist incoming mail by subject line in gmail.
My list of professions wasn't meant to be exhaustive; I imagine there's lots of other specialized professions where pay-for-skill is common. I can think of half a dozen more off the top of my head. I imagine there are also many examples of people who get paid for their skill in industries where such practices are extremely uncommon.
However, my point was that those people and professions are the exception and most people end up in jobs that pay by the hour.
I think it is. It's called being paid by the hour (or by the year, if you are salary, but it's the same thing). It's vastly more popular than paying by measuring the quality or quantity of the actual work done which would be more fair but much more difficult to implement; skill is very hard to measure objectively.
I can write a program in 2 hours. Joe in the next cubical would take 10 hours to write the same program while Frank might only take 1 hour. Guess what, we all get paid nearly the same amount. Maybe the more skilled people get 10% or 20% more per year but there's no way Frank gets paid 10x what Joe makes. Only in some very specialized jobs (pro sports, lawyers, doctors) subject to direct control of the free market does skill frequently have any reasonable correlation to pay and then usually only for the top few percent.
The Street Fighter lessons might be all warm and fuzzy and represent the world you'd like to have but the WoW lessons reflect reality, sad as that may be.
How is that different than taking a job with any new company? The company could just close down and then you'd be out of work.
:)
Heck, it happens to workers in old companies too (Enron, Worldcom, GM, Ford).
Besides, if she's making 4 times her previous salary it won't take long to be able to afford to have a few years with no income at the same standard of living if she wanted.
I'm just curious why people feel the need to bring any of this nonsense into the game.
Because MMOGs are as much a social phenomonon as they are a game. Guilds are made up of people you expect to be spending a lot of time with and getting to know during the course of the game. People naturally want to associate with others who have similar viewpoints, just like IRL. As an extreme example, there are thousands of people that play on the Dark Iron WoW server because they are fans of the Penny Arcade or PvP comic strips (who's guilds battle each other constantly and have so many members that they actually had to split into several sub-guilds each due to in-game guild size limitations). That's pretty irrelevant to anything inside WoW, but they certainly get a lot of enjoyment out of tying those out-of-game activites to their gameplay.
You will find that every guild in the end filters its members to some degree by social skills not just by game skills. For example, guilds kick people out for being jerks all the time. Many guilds have charters stating that they are made up of "friendly, family oriented players" or something similar. Some guilds are just more organized about certain traits or opinions that they desire.
these things will be flying off the shelves like hotcakes.
I think you overestimate how many people will care about the features you list. I never look at my keyboard. Admittedly that's partially because it never changes and I already know what it says, but it'll still be the difference between hunt-and-peck and touch typing. You only need to see the labels until you know what they keys do, then they are superfluous. In other words, the only people who will be watching the keyboard to see what the keys change to when they press control are those who don't already know and that ignorance doesn't last long. If you use computers infrequently enough to need those labels all the time, you are not likely to be buying high end cutting edge geek keyboards.
Well, I suppose it boils down to cost. If you could have this additional functionality for a small cost, sure, why not? But given that the 3 key version costs $100, what's a 103 key keyboard cost? Ouch. I doubt they can get the price down to cheap enough for a regular consumer to consider the purchase with the volume that they'll be selling before it's widely supported. Actually I doubt if it would be cheap even if they were selling millions of them.
Now, if they fail to deliver the product EVER, that's a crime.
Technically, for mail order at least, they have 30 days to ship from the time they take your payment unless they specifically tell you otherwise in advance. This is the FTC's "Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Trade Regulation Rule" and it's a pretty big deal for mail order companies to follow.
"The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days."
Basically if you fail to ship in 30 days you have to obtain the customer's explicit consent to keep their money until you can ship or you must refund their payment.
I don't see in TFA any details about actually making a pre-order so I don't know what they promise in this case, although they say "Keyboards ready for shipment will arrive on May 15" but that doesn't mean they'll have enough to actually fulfill all pre-orders.
As a nice bonus, games can finally tell me what keys I'm supposed to press instead of going through the config screen and trying to memorize all the combinations.
Except of course there will never be sufficient market penetration for anyone to actually bother putting support for this in their programs. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem with all new technology that requires new media or drivers, but this is sufficiently expensive and specialized that I don't expect it to ever become common enough to be a "standard".
That was the problem with the 3d visor display I bought back in the early 90s; I think only 3 programs ever supported it.
Game designers know that even if they hide the numbers, the players will deduce them.
Not only that but every single patch half the playerbase will be convinced that some of those invisible numbers have been changed (for the worse, of course) without them being told and raise a fuss that the developers (or PR folks) have to deal with.
You mean like so many text-based MUDs have done since forever?
I remember playing a MUD in the early 90s where when you hit the max level you could plant a dungeon somewhere (just connected your dungeon to an existing room node) and write object oriented code to implement monsters, puzzles and treasure. I always figured it would be a good way to teach OO design since it's a lot easier to think of a monster or a magical scepter as an object with attributes than it is to start with abstract data structures...
Anyway, like all games, MUDs have had a large drop in the ability for users to affect them as the graphics and detail went up. Back in the day everyone could easily make levels for Lode Runner or Wolf 3d without any training or learning curve. Nowdays you need a degree in 4th dimensional geometry and several days of free time to make a good FPS level, never mind a virtual world...