Ingress isn't a video game, not really. So if that's what you're looking for, Ingress isn't it. At least not after a few hours. Personally, I have no time for video games. I play a little Sudoku or something on my phone to kill time in the doctor's office or whatever, but outside of that, I just don't have the time.
Meeting other geeks in my area, though, that I like. Now that you mention it, it is a little like running a BBS in the old days. And I still like it.
There are still some places where two or three men work each truck, where one drives and one or two manually dump the tenants' or residents' own cans instead of a standardized can supplied by the municipality
The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
Why don't you decline the service then and handle it yourself by driving to the dump every week?
Or move to a place that doesn't mind if people let flies and maggots accumulate on their trash in their own yard, aka not require trash service?
Or get the city to improve their trash collection process to use fewer people and cost less money. The service in my town costs $15 per month for weekly pickup. No flies and maggots, no trash accumulation, and less than one-third the price. $50 per month is outrageous.
Yep. The exception I see is that sometimes the dude has to hop out when there is a car too close and he needs to drag it out in the street. Autonomous trash trucks won't handle that.
Sure they will. They just won't pick those cans up. Then it will be up to the owners of the cans to work out a solution with their neighbors to ensure that there's enough space to position the can for pickup.
Interacting with the screeching masses in a video game seems like a pointless endeavor.
Actually, it's the social aspect of Ingress that has made it popular. I'd even say that socializing with like-minded geeky folks is what the game is all about. Without that the game is pretty pointless and boring, just grinding for levels and medals, with a fairly weak motivating story. The fun in the game is all about the people you meet and work with to accomplish goals. I've met a fair number of the players in my area and become friends with some. Still only "online" friends, in that I really only communicate with them electronically, but I could definitely see that changing because I've found several that share many non-game interests.
The game is designed to more or less force socializing. For example, to max out a portal takes eight players. Now, they can come along at different times so they don't actually need to interact, but in most areas if they don't coordinate at least somewhat it won't happen before the portal gets smashed by the opposition. Throwing big fields basically requires extensive social networks and cooperation. Not only do you need to get portal keys transported long distances, but it's very hard to establish long links because of all the blocking fields and links in between. So you need to have people at the edges ready to throw the long links and people throughout the interior ready to go out and smash any blockers, and everyone needs to coordinate the timing of their efforts. The same applies to blocking the opposition's efforts.
As a result, groups of players self-organize and communicate constantly, mostly via Google Hangouts. Because group Hangouts are persistent and because people need to monitor them to be ready to go do stuff when the time is right, the groups end up connected constantly, which leads to lots of random conversations, many of which have nothing to do with the game.
As for jerks, from what I see they tend not to get invited into the groups, and to be pushed out pretty fast if they do get in. This means that for them the game is pretty pointless and boring. It's hard to accomplish much by yourself. I suppose it's possible that there are organized groups of bullies. I haven't encountered that. Also, though several posters have said that Niantic doesn't take action against cheaters and bullies, that's not my experience. Mine is that Niantic tends to be pretty aggressive about it.
I used to not be able to surf the web on my wife's iPad because it would always switch from Safari to the App Store, then it started happening on my Android devices, too.
On Android you have the option of whether you want to open Play Store links in your web browser or with the Google Play Store app. If it's automatically going to the app, that's because at some point you told the device you wanted all Play Store links to go there. To undo this decision, go to Settings->Apps, then open the menu and touch "Reset app preferences". Then, next time you hit a Play Store link, the device will ask you whether you want to open it in the browser or the app, and whether you want to do this "just once" or "always".
I'm pretty sure that most users will not get the patch for a very long time, if ever, due to carriers not caring one bit about updating in a timely manner.
This. It seems that the US carriers rarely send out OS updates for the many security updates. This needs to change.
And one that's trivial to avoid... the poll worker only gives you one ballot. For that matter, the electronic voting machines, lousy as they are in many ways, completely prevent this issue as well.
You think they were going to perform a full forensic analysis of it before they called the cops?
Who's asking for a "full forensic analysis"? How about just a quick look to notice that there is nothing *other* than electronics. To make a bomb, you have to have, you know, something that can go boom.
I was under the impression that the whole DMCA legislation related to whether or not someone owns the content. That is something that can't be sued over and needs to go through various processes. This case seems to be about fair use, that was always something for a court to decide.
Right. But normally, the only party that has any standing to sue is the rights holder.
What has happened here is that the copyright owner sent a legitimate (per the DMCA) takedown request. Lenz responded with a counter-notice. All fine; the next step is for the rights holder to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement, if they want. They can decide to just drop it, or they can just be quietly menacing and not do anything, leaving the issue hanging over the poster for years.
This is bad because it means that rights holder has zero reason not to shotgun takedown notices at anything that bothers them or even might potentially bother them. There is no risk to them, because they get to decide whether or not they're actually going to pursue litigation in the event of a counter notice, and it gives them a huge amount of power because the vast majority of individuals will not dare file a counter notice. So they can harass and bully millions of people, without any repercussions.
Until now.
Lenz and the EFF have filed suit against Universal for sending the takedown. They're not claiming the takedown didn't comply with the requirements of the DMCA, they're claiming that the takedown was sent for an unauthorized use that was obviously Fair Use and therefore not infringing, and that the takedown was harassment. The DMCA imposes no significant due diligence requirements beyond verifying that they actually own the material they claim was infringed, so the law doesn't directly support Lenz's case. The appellate court rightly pointed out that the letter of the law is unjust and that rights holders should have a responsibility to actually evaluate their case before sending takedowns and, most importantly, that the recipients of invalid takedowns have grounds for a lawsuit.
This means that rights holders do face a risk if they send obviously bad takedowns. That's why the RIAA and MPAA are up in arms about this ruling, and why it's a good thing.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But the complete lack of a paper trail means that if you can get past the inspection, you're golden.
Good job because a paper trail is impossible to fake
Oh wait, it's pretty easy.
Actually, securely handling pieces of paper is something that people are pretty good at. Locked ballot boxes with a slot in the top, with tamper-evident seals, transported and stored under the watchful eyes of representatives of each party (who don't have to have any special training or knowledge, because everyone groks pieces of paper)... it's a very well-solved problem.
Overall though I think the benefits far far far outweigh the potential downsides.
Not if coercion becomes widespread. But as I said, that's not so much of an issue given that there are so many simpler and safer ways to manipulate the outcome.
0. Implementation is as important as design. Both must be flawless. If not, why change from paper?
With a provable-integrity system, implementation errors show up in the verification stage. This is a very cool property. It means that, worst case, if there are bugs in the implementation you find out at the end and have to throw out the election results and try again. That's unfortunate but up to a point it's better than proceeding with an incorrect result.
1. Ranking system are intended to gain consensus. Majority elections are intended to reach decisions. Big difference.
Elections are intended to make decisions. Ranking systems notionally improve the decision by allowing voters to more fully express their intent, e.g. A and B are both okay, but I like A more. Single-choice systems only allow you to say "I like A", which would be fine if that didn't immediately lead to a need for strategic voting to best express your preference: "I like A more than B and both more than C, but I know A won't win so I'd better vote for B, otherwise I'll be effectively voting for C".
Approval voting allows you to express more of your intent, but not as much as ranked ballot systems (which in turn are less expressive than weighted voting ballots). Done right, both are approval and ranked systems can be relatively strategy-free, but approval voting is, as I said in my first post, easier to understand and I think that makes it better.
Yes, it's a change, because prior to this ruling it was generally believed that suits like this one could not succeed. This case was a long shot, a Hail Mary thrown by the EFF. The court has said that this is now business as usual. That's huge.
Sure... except that they won't be, because the people that will typically get these takedown notices are unlikely to have the resources to pursue costly litigation in the first place.
It only takes a few who are willing do do it... like Stephanie Lenz, with the support of the EFF. And now it's been made clear that such suits can actually proceed.
Mail-in ballots have a huge downside: they enable vote buying and coercion. If you don't show me your ballot, filled out the way I told you, and then give it to me to mail for you, I'll break your kneecaps. If you do it the right way, I'll give you $50. My (perhaps cynical) belief is that the only reason this hasn't proven to be a problem is that those who want to manipulate election results have easier/cheaper options available.
Bad accessibility for the disabled, no paper trail and high susceptibility to manipulation (not harder to hack than updating an MDB file). Yeah, that's a good idea. As bad as they are, the crappy electronic voting machines were an upgrade over the mechanical lever machines.
The main reason I remain somewhat skeptical is that I'm concerned that complex systems of this sort, even if the math is beautiful and the proofs are rock solid and the implementation is bulletproof (though note that these systems do not rely on perfect implementation for their security proofs) may not actually engender as much vote confidence as simpler systems which are vastly more vulnerable to manipulation.
Oh, I forgot to point out the obvious counterargument here: Americans seem, by and large, to be fine with using voting machines that are excessively complex and have been proven to suck in all sorts of ways and for which there's even non-trivial evidence that they've been used to manipulate actual national election outcomes.
Let's not try to automate voting beyond OCR scanners until we can secure it. We can't now. No. We cannot.
This actually isn't true any more. It definitely was true a decade ago, and I was making this same argument up to about a year ago. However, another slashdotter pointed me to several research papers describing not just electronic but Internet voting systems with rather outstanding properties, properties that I would have said were impossible. The schemes provide for guaranteed voter anonymity (including receipt-freeness, for some level of coercion resistance), universal verifiability (any voter can verify that his or her ballot was counted correctly), provable integrity, etc. All of these properties are evaluated under "cryptographically-strong" assumptions, i.e. this is MATH, bitch.
We really can do it now. I'm less certain that there's a good reason to, but we can do it securely.
The main reason I remain somewhat skeptical is that I'm concerned that complex systems of this sort, even if the math is beautiful and the proofs are rock solid and the implementation is bulletproof (though note that these systems do not rely on perfect implementation for their security proofs) may not actually engender as much vote confidence as simpler systems which are vastly more vulnerable to manipulation. I mean, everyone and their dog knows how to manipulate a box full of paper ballots, the only security guarantee comes from the difficulty of doing the manipulation on a sufficiently large scale without getting caught. But people get boxes of paper and confidence in the voting process is absolutely crucial to a functional democracy.
This, by the way, is why I'm also no longer a fan of pairwise ranking election systems like Condorcet. They have much better properties but the cycle resolution algorithms (e.g. Schwartz Sequential Dropping) get complicated. That's fine for groups of geeks like Debian developers, maybe not so much for nations of people from all walks of life. So I'm now a fan of approval voting. It's not strategy-free, but close enough and really, really easy to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy you are replying to is an actual Google employee. He usually states as much but not today apparently.
Nope. I know tlambert personally (from college). I am a Google employee, and he is not.
Ingress isn't a video game, not really. So if that's what you're looking for, Ingress isn't it. At least not after a few hours. Personally, I have no time for video games. I play a little Sudoku or something on my phone to kill time in the doctor's office or whatever, but outside of that, I just don't have the time.
Meeting other geeks in my area, though, that I like. Now that you mention it, it is a little like running a BBS in the old days. And I still like it.
Golf, though, is just insanely boring.
The City of Atlanta supplies standardized cans but still has guys on the truck manually emptying them. Maybe that's why trash pickup costs almost $50/month (for a single-family residence) here.
Why don't you decline the service then and handle it yourself by driving to the dump every week? Or move to a place that doesn't mind if people let flies and maggots accumulate on their trash in their own yard, aka not require trash service?
Or get the city to improve their trash collection process to use fewer people and cost less money. The service in my town costs $15 per month for weekly pickup. No flies and maggots, no trash accumulation, and less than one-third the price. $50 per month is outrageous.
Yep. The exception I see is that sometimes the dude has to hop out when there is a car too close and he needs to drag it out in the street. Autonomous trash trucks won't handle that.
Sure they will. They just won't pick those cans up. Then it will be up to the owners of the cans to work out a solution with their neighbors to ensure that there's enough space to position the can for pickup.
Interacting with the screeching masses in a video game seems like a pointless endeavor.
Actually, it's the social aspect of Ingress that has made it popular. I'd even say that socializing with like-minded geeky folks is what the game is all about. Without that the game is pretty pointless and boring, just grinding for levels and medals, with a fairly weak motivating story. The fun in the game is all about the people you meet and work with to accomplish goals. I've met a fair number of the players in my area and become friends with some. Still only "online" friends, in that I really only communicate with them electronically, but I could definitely see that changing because I've found several that share many non-game interests.
The game is designed to more or less force socializing. For example, to max out a portal takes eight players. Now, they can come along at different times so they don't actually need to interact, but in most areas if they don't coordinate at least somewhat it won't happen before the portal gets smashed by the opposition. Throwing big fields basically requires extensive social networks and cooperation. Not only do you need to get portal keys transported long distances, but it's very hard to establish long links because of all the blocking fields and links in between. So you need to have people at the edges ready to throw the long links and people throughout the interior ready to go out and smash any blockers, and everyone needs to coordinate the timing of their efforts. The same applies to blocking the opposition's efforts.
As a result, groups of players self-organize and communicate constantly, mostly via Google Hangouts. Because group Hangouts are persistent and because people need to monitor them to be ready to go do stuff when the time is right, the groups end up connected constantly, which leads to lots of random conversations, many of which have nothing to do with the game.
As for jerks, from what I see they tend not to get invited into the groups, and to be pushed out pretty fast if they do get in. This means that for them the game is pretty pointless and boring. It's hard to accomplish much by yourself. I suppose it's possible that there are organized groups of bullies. I haven't encountered that. Also, though several posters have said that Niantic doesn't take action against cheaters and bullies, that's not my experience. Mine is that Niantic tends to be pretty aggressive about it.
I used to not be able to surf the web on my wife's iPad because it would always switch from Safari to the App Store, then it started happening on my Android devices, too.
On Android you have the option of whether you want to open Play Store links in your web browser or with the Google Play Store app. If it's automatically going to the app, that's because at some point you told the device you wanted all Play Store links to go there. To undo this decision, go to Settings->Apps, then open the menu and touch "Reset app preferences". Then, next time you hit a Play Store link, the device will ask you whether you want to open it in the browser or the app, and whether you want to do this "just once" or "always".
Works great for me. And much more flexible than your option.
I'm pretty sure that most users will not get the patch for a very long time, if ever, due to carriers not caring one bit about updating in a timely manner.
This. It seems that the US carriers rarely send out OS updates for the many security updates. This needs to change.
That change can be had TODAY.
Fixed that link for you.
*sigh*
It's not a mistake, it's a clue. A good one. Clearly, the perp is a time-traveller, which really narrows down the list of suspects.
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that football programs are self sustaining
Not in high school.
And not, actually, in any but the top tier football-playing universities. But definitely not in high school.
And one that's trivial to avoid... the poll worker only gives you one ballot. For that matter, the electronic voting machines, lousy as they are in many ways, completely prevent this issue as well.
/me cries
You think they were going to perform a full forensic analysis of it before they called the cops?
Who's asking for a "full forensic analysis"? How about just a quick look to notice that there is nothing *other* than electronics. To make a bomb, you have to have, you know, something that can go boom.
I was under the impression that the whole DMCA legislation related to whether or not someone owns the content. That is something that can't be sued over and needs to go through various processes. This case seems to be about fair use, that was always something for a court to decide.
Right. But normally, the only party that has any standing to sue is the rights holder.
What has happened here is that the copyright owner sent a legitimate (per the DMCA) takedown request. Lenz responded with a counter-notice. All fine; the next step is for the rights holder to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement, if they want. They can decide to just drop it, or they can just be quietly menacing and not do anything, leaving the issue hanging over the poster for years.
This is bad because it means that rights holder has zero reason not to shotgun takedown notices at anything that bothers them or even might potentially bother them. There is no risk to them, because they get to decide whether or not they're actually going to pursue litigation in the event of a counter notice, and it gives them a huge amount of power because the vast majority of individuals will not dare file a counter notice. So they can harass and bully millions of people, without any repercussions.
Until now.
Lenz and the EFF have filed suit against Universal for sending the takedown. They're not claiming the takedown didn't comply with the requirements of the DMCA, they're claiming that the takedown was sent for an unauthorized use that was obviously Fair Use and therefore not infringing, and that the takedown was harassment. The DMCA imposes no significant due diligence requirements beyond verifying that they actually own the material they claim was infringed, so the law doesn't directly support Lenz's case. The appellate court rightly pointed out that the letter of the law is unjust and that rights holders should have a responsibility to actually evaluate their case before sending takedowns and, most importantly, that the recipients of invalid takedowns have grounds for a lawsuit.
This means that rights holders do face a risk if they send obviously bad takedowns. That's why the RIAA and MPAA are up in arms about this ruling, and why it's a good thing.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But the complete lack of a paper trail means that if you can get past the inspection, you're golden.
Good job because a paper trail is impossible to fake
Oh wait, it's pretty easy.
Actually, securely handling pieces of paper is something that people are pretty good at. Locked ballot boxes with a slot in the top, with tamper-evident seals, transported and stored under the watchful eyes of representatives of each party (who don't have to have any special training or knowledge, because everyone groks pieces of paper)... it's a very well-solved problem.
Have to rig before and after an election, they are inspected. Any kind of rigging is ridiculously easy to detect can be visibly detected.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But the complete lack of a paper trail means that if you can get past the inspection, you're golden.
Yeah you're a deep thinker.
And you're an ass. So what?
I'm not sure that we're fine with it. The lack of overt protest isn't really a sign of acceptance.
I think that's a distinction without a difference. It's true enough, but it doesn't matter.
Overall though I think the benefits far far far outweigh the potential downsides.
Not if coercion becomes widespread. But as I said, that's not so much of an issue given that there are so many simpler and safer ways to manipulate the outcome.
0. Implementation is as important as design. Both must be flawless. If not, why change from paper?
With a provable-integrity system, implementation errors show up in the verification stage. This is a very cool property. It means that, worst case, if there are bugs in the implementation you find out at the end and have to throw out the election results and try again. That's unfortunate but up to a point it's better than proceeding with an incorrect result.
1. Ranking system are intended to gain consensus. Majority elections are intended to reach decisions. Big difference.
Elections are intended to make decisions. Ranking systems notionally improve the decision by allowing voters to more fully express their intent, e.g. A and B are both okay, but I like A more. Single-choice systems only allow you to say "I like A", which would be fine if that didn't immediately lead to a need for strategic voting to best express your preference: "I like A more than B and both more than C, but I know A won't win so I'd better vote for B, otherwise I'll be effectively voting for C".
Approval voting allows you to express more of your intent, but not as much as ranked ballot systems (which in turn are less expressive than weighted voting ballots). Done right, both are approval and ranked systems can be relatively strategy-free, but approval voting is, as I said in my first post, easier to understand and I think that makes it better.
So no change then?
Yes, it's a change, because prior to this ruling it was generally believed that suits like this one could not succeed. This case was a long shot, a Hail Mary thrown by the EFF. The court has said that this is now business as usual. That's huge.
Sure... except that they won't be, because the people that will typically get these takedown notices are unlikely to have the resources to pursue costly litigation in the first place.
It only takes a few who are willing do do it... like Stephanie Lenz, with the support of the EFF. And now it's been made clear that such suits can actually proceed.
Mail-in ballots have a huge downside: they enable vote buying and coercion. If you don't show me your ballot, filled out the way I told you, and then give it to me to mail for you, I'll break your kneecaps. If you do it the right way, I'll give you $50. My (perhaps cynical) belief is that the only reason this hasn't proven to be a problem is that those who want to manipulate election results have easier/cheaper options available.
Bad accessibility for the disabled, no paper trail and high susceptibility to manipulation (not harder to hack than updating an MDB file). Yeah, that's a good idea. As bad as they are, the crappy electronic voting machines were an upgrade over the mechanical lever machines.
The main reason I remain somewhat skeptical is that I'm concerned that complex systems of this sort, even if the math is beautiful and the proofs are rock solid and the implementation is bulletproof (though note that these systems do not rely on perfect implementation for their security proofs) may not actually engender as much vote confidence as simpler systems which are vastly more vulnerable to manipulation.
Oh, I forgot to point out the obvious counterargument here: Americans seem, by and large, to be fine with using voting machines that are excessively complex and have been proven to suck in all sorts of ways and for which there's even non-trivial evidence that they've been used to manipulate actual national election outcomes.
So, yeah, there's that.
Let's not try to automate voting beyond OCR scanners until we can secure it. We can't now. No. We cannot.
This actually isn't true any more. It definitely was true a decade ago, and I was making this same argument up to about a year ago. However, another slashdotter pointed me to several research papers describing not just electronic but Internet voting systems with rather outstanding properties, properties that I would have said were impossible. The schemes provide for guaranteed voter anonymity (including receipt-freeness, for some level of coercion resistance), universal verifiability (any voter can verify that his or her ballot was counted correctly), provable integrity, etc. All of these properties are evaluated under "cryptographically-strong" assumptions, i.e. this is MATH, bitch.
We really can do it now. I'm less certain that there's a good reason to, but we can do it securely.
The main reason I remain somewhat skeptical is that I'm concerned that complex systems of this sort, even if the math is beautiful and the proofs are rock solid and the implementation is bulletproof (though note that these systems do not rely on perfect implementation for their security proofs) may not actually engender as much vote confidence as simpler systems which are vastly more vulnerable to manipulation. I mean, everyone and their dog knows how to manipulate a box full of paper ballots, the only security guarantee comes from the difficulty of doing the manipulation on a sufficiently large scale without getting caught. But people get boxes of paper and confidence in the voting process is absolutely crucial to a functional democracy.
This, by the way, is why I'm also no longer a fan of pairwise ranking election systems like Condorcet. They have much better properties but the cycle resolution algorithms (e.g. Schwartz Sequential Dropping) get complicated. That's fine for groups of geeks like Debian developers, maybe not so much for nations of people from all walks of life. So I'm now a fan of approval voting. It's not strategy-free, but close enough and really, really easy to understand.