I am constantly amazed at how willing people are to tell you how to attack their own systems, particularly on Slashdot, where simply implying somebody is doing poorly will practically get you full description, network maps, and vulnerability reports.
Similarly, I was talking to a friend in the Army the other day about IT security, and he told me that he didn't think I could attack his unit's systems, then went into a long discussion about what protections are in place. Out of curiosity, I decided to find out what I could learn. He only clammed up when I started probing for specifics about password policies on a particular device.
People: please don't tell anybody about your IT configuration. At least not on a public forum like/. Admittedly, a lot of it is easy to find out other ways, but that's no reason to give that information out.
I believe the Navy's heard about that for ages. They have a phrase loose lips sink ships that applies very well in that case. Be honest, it's much harder to crack a system completely blind. If I tell you the IP, the exact OS, service patches and what apps that I have running on it, you should be able to easily determine how crackable that system is within minutes. If all you know is that I have a computer on the planet Earth somewhere turned off and not connected to the net, you've got much more problems cracking it.
In this case, people might actually believe (as much as you and I can't see how) that someone they know might be in real peril of getting kidnapped. Yup, it's naive, but we know people believe all sorts of things.
Many relative "rich" business travelers worry about this. It depends on where you are at as to what "rich" is defined as. You make an average salary in the US, and you could be automatically defined as "rich" to alot of parts on the global so you've got to be careful when you doing your traveling. I think those that routinely do this hire body guards/mercs to keep their asses safe and shoot back if anyone tries anything along those lines. I can't really blame them. Its kinda what all military/police folks are supposed to do. Keep the folks that pay them safe from criminals/"the enemy." Gotta admit that there will always be a place for armspeople/guards of all kinds.
Well, pay me $1000 or your mother in law will receive this immortality drug...
Shouldn't you be able to sell an immortality drug for millions or a few billion rather than give it away if some one doesn't give you 1K? Talk about poor planning.
Nintendo has sold a lot more than 1,337 copies of Mario Kart Wii in each region, each with an adapter to convert a Wii Remote into a Bluetooth racing wheel.
Well of course Nintendo is a smart game company. This company is turning their nose up at the entire Mario Kart audience though. I'd think that this company would want to sell it's own classy sim racing wheel and pedals though.
And the loss of community has really pushed the anonymity movement. In days of old, you had to have a "relationship" with the people who bought and sold. Somewhere along the way, that was lost in favor of cheaper prices. We have, collectively, started to see the repercussions of this throughout society.
Now, to buy big ticket items, all you need is a fake ID, a Good SS#, and be gone, and nobody seems to care that we've lost the humanity in the process.
Define "big ticket items." I'd define it as cars, houses or more expensive than that. For that, the normal person takes out a loan with a bank. There is a lot of paper work involved and communications with sales people and folks at the bank. If your idea of "big ticket items" is between $500-3000, then it doesn't take anyone at a bank to stop or question the payment if you are in the habit of spending that kinda of money or the store that sells the item does normal business with the bank. If you bought a stove at sears or an ID theft did with your ID, then the bank or CC wouldn't question it much. If you bought 2+ stoves at sears or mom and pop we've never heard of store, the bank/CC may flag it and question if the store was trying to over charge/double charge their customer.
In the name of preventing ID theft, CC and banks are looking at your buying habits to see if you purchase anything odd. This should ring alarm bells, but doesn't for some reason. Oh well, its not like the CC or banks do well at verifying you are who you claim to be. The banks/CC should just run their own biometric ID network that requires everyone that wants to use said network to submit finger prints, retina scans, DNA, foot prints, and thermal face scans to the issuing agency. The banks/CC could use all that crap to ID you and in the name of ID theft prevention to not give your resources to anyone else.
In the days of yore, the stores ID'd and monitored all their customers and knew exactly where they all worked/how much they made and if they were good for the credit that the store extended them. How is that much different today rather than the min. wage sales person not knowing all that crap about you? The CC and the store in general most likely does know it, it just takes more effort on the stores part to find out the info as long as they get paid by a CC/bank they don't care if it was you or an ID theif though.
Stop taking yourself so seriously and lighten up a little bit. Requiring a subscription and a racing wheel should be enough to weed out the mad 1337 gamers. Do you really think all the WoW people are going to suddenly poo their pants over a racing game?
Um, I figure 1337 gamers would be the only ones interested in their game. Why? Quite simple. Who else already has a racing wheel? Um, only 1337 gamers. I don't even have a racing wheel, and I have a few car games.
Actually, I'm curious if any racing people/fans will actually get excited over this. I find myself mixed on that one. They seem to be targeting the hard core realistic car sim crowd rather than arcade physics racing. Um, I bet there is a niche for this, but I don't know if it is large enough to support them. I'd think that the niche for arcade physics or online multiplayer mario cart would be far larger than the sim racing people. I think that the actual racing people would still be shilling out for real cars rather than virtual cars. If they try to copy the normal lets start the player/user off with something crappy and work their way up, then they might find many people that were once excited by this decide to just tinker on their own cars rather than spend the time/effort to upgrade their virtual cars.
Virtual stuff of things that we could never actually own or play with in real life is fun. Virtual stuff of things that we do or could own and have to work at more than our real world stuff ain't nearly as fun.;)
If you can simply smelt the drives, that is complete destruction. Anything else depends on the level of 'it's not there anymore' you need. Far too many people don't care or believe their data can be used from an old disk. They also don't understand that a format will not necessarily overwrite anything on the drive. sigh.
Just format it, stick linux on it, and then fill the rest of it up with your standard porn DVD. They'll be too busy viewing the porn to think that their may be a formerly useful windows partition with sensitive data on it underneath it.;) Just make sure that your porn DVD isn't one of those that has the girls looking young, and you'd be set.
I used to format do a quick install of win98, then wipe and install win2000 and then wipe install linux, and then wipe install winxp home and just leave it alone. I figured that was good enough. I'd also make sure that after installing any of those OSs that I had data that I could use to copy and fill up the drive with. Now a days I guess you could download wikipedia or something and use that instead of the porn dvd.;)
That was then, now we're in the Age of the World Wide Web, and there's just no excuse whatsoever for loading down a portable (read: easily stolen) computer system with vast quantities of confidential data. In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
Um, that seems very short sighted. What happens when all the servers in the data center get reduced into the size of a briefcase or smaller? Will you say that you can't upgrade those servers to physically smaller machines because those smaller machines can be more easily stolen?
I'm of the mind that is shouldn't matter if the data is recovered on a hard drive, DVD, or super holographic storage medium. It should be required to be encrypted at both the field level and the entire db level before any of those records were readable that you need certain user names, passwords, and key cards to read any portion of it. We've got the tech for that now, don't we? Heck even using PGP to encrypt it should safe enough if anyone other than a government got their hands on it. That this stuff was in a format that anyone with a CD/DVD drive and Access could view it is the real crime.
The worst part is that RBS didn't actually have a breach, it was a 3rd party. That, of course, could well lead to someone getting sued.
Um, by my logic, if its your data that you are required by law to keep "secure" every "third party" that you allow access to that data falls under your responsibility. Sure, the RBS is fully responsible for this. It sounds like they are doing every thing that they can to determine how the breach happened. I'd want automatic government fines against the RBS and every "third party" that was responsible for handling the data.
Saying it wasn't the RBS's breach is like absolving them of responsibility for it. It was their breach since it was their contracted third party.
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
Um, don't open source the stuff you use to hurt other people with. Gotcha. So should we open source our election process/government or not? I'm not clear if we'd classify that as weapon/harmful medium to be controlled.
Is riding the subway to work art? No. Is seeing a painting on the wall art? The painting itself is, yes, but not the act of seeing it or your choice to go and see it. Is listening to music art? Not the act of listening, but the music itself is art... and you see my point.
Video games offer us a passage to artistic things, but are wholly not art in themselves.
You just defeated your entire argument. That's like saying any art form that you have to experience in order to perceive that its art isn't art. I'd take the complete opposite POV. All "art" without a viewer is just an empty chunk of matter. It is the viewer/audience and their experiences that the piece evoke that determines if a piece is trash, art, entertainment, should be censored/banned, or not even interesting enough to be bothered with.
It's like if I invented a clicky pen that would give the person clicking it an orgasm every time. The device would just be a chuck of matter. It's the viewer(s) and their experience(s) with it that are important.
I can't say I'd like replaying real world modern atrocities, but I know from accounts of elderly relatives just how bloody and horrific the second world war was (in unfortunately graphic detail, given how young I was when I listened to the stories), yet we happily recreate that in game after game.
recreation of nasty events is going to happen, there's no way to avoid it, and good luck trying to set a time limit on how much time must pass before an event becomes a suitable topic for a game.
I'd say the suitable time frame is when those that were in said event are now mostly grandparents or mostly dead is about the right time. Of course somethings are different. I bet while the wars were going on that you had kids on both sides playing to be solider against whoever was their country's enemy. Think of cops and robbers or cow boys and Indians. That doesn't mean that the toy companies of the time pushed it more than usual or that certain percentage of mothers weren't horrified that their darlings were playing solider. Its that loud vocal group that are trying to get everyone else from playing modern solider or cops and robbers games.
Well, there is a significant difference you see. Sure the opening scene of Private Ryan is gruesome and vivid. Yet the message behind it is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing. Most violence in GTA is trivial in comparison but instills that VIOLENCE HAS REWARDS. That is a very significant difference.
I'm confused, but violence does have rewards in war. Maybe its that the creators of that movie want to portray all war as pointless and therefore in an inept manner try to prevent future wars?
Not quite. As other people pointed out, playwriting during Shakespeare's time was what second-rate writers did to pass the time. Real artists wrote poetry or essays, not common entertainment for the masses. It was only years later that anyone started to appreciate Shakespeare as anything more than the equivalent of today's TV.
There's also the problem that interactive entertainment, such as games, are more limited in audience.
I'd disagree with the limited audience bit. Why? What is the min. audience for a mildly successful game? (Pick what ever profitable number that you choose.) Now compare that with the average readers of poetry/essays or even theater/Opera audiences. Jewel Quest has massively larger audience than most modern poetry/essays will ever get unless its something that is read during a swearing in of a president. Now lets compare Jewel Quest, Shakespeare, Sherlock Homes books, and Dilbert/Sluggy and the cultural value of each.;)
Will B5, Cheers, Charmed, Friends, Smallville, Star Trek, Star Wars, or Buffy be considered this last set of decades classics in the future? There is a part of me that thinking audience says and future audience size in the face of a changing culture determines if what is now entertainment will one day be required for kids to learn about as being a classic example of something from this age.;)
If you don't define "intellectual depth", then there's no way to ever argue the point with you. If you do define it, then you must define it specifically to exclude video games, and comic books, and trashy romantic comedy movies. Otherwise you will inevitably find a counterexample if you look hard enough & wait long enough (note also that paintings and literature have a far longer history than video games from which to produce classics).
Just wait another 50 years and see what current games are still around and being played with little adaption. There would be your classic video game. Tetris is about the only really classic video game that we currently have. I guess the real test is wait 500-1000 years to see what current video games survive. Then you'd see "classics." Heck, it's liable not to be even Tetris or Mario, but something folks have bootlegged over the years and we might have considered third rate. Just cause it survives doesn't mean its the best that this generation produced. It just means some one some where thought it was worth preserving. Stone statues that grand dad paid an arm and leg for are generally thought to be worth preserving.;) You know it'll be a real challenge even having true classic video games because there wouldn't be easy platforms to play them with even 20 years down the line. Try digging up an Atari video game console and all the games. We'd agree some of the games like Frogger and PacMan were classics, but they've been rewritten for our current systems and not really preserved in their original forms so we don't know if the originals were better. Actually one thing that you could say to their benefit was that you could pick up/in theory stop any game at any time and it was all skill based. There wasn't such a thing as pause or save or sometimes more than one life.;) I'm not really surprised that those games have disappeared today.
OTOH, something that doesn't seem to be taken into account is, what happens when families change? A single guy only needs 'x' amount of space. Now when that single guy gets married*, has 4 kids, and a parent becomes decrepit/disabled and decide to move in...? Obviously there's going to be a lot of change in how much space the guy can be comfortable living in, no matter what culture we're talking about here.
Also, what happens when some fatal communicable disease starts making the rounds? shutting folks into their 'homes' will only work for so long before even the most gregarious human being starts to get cabin fever (for lack of a better term).
Well, you could just have everyone be required to have their own rooms. That way husband/wife/kids would have to have separate living spaces. That would make sure if they got divorced they'd each have an apartment and that the kids would already be allocated space. I'm sure there would develop rules for the kids to move off into different sections of the city.
As for plague/sickness, I think you are thinking about it the wrong way. A normal city can't shut out the outside world when a plague or flu season starts. This thing could have medical scans of everyone entering/exiting to make sure they don't bring in the flu or plague.
The key question to answer is: What is the reason for the people to live there, rather than somewhere else? That's the question that builds cities - or ghost towns.
The simple answer would be that they'd all be someone's economic serfs and the housing would be cheaper there or it would after you figured in the daily commuter tax for all the various workers to work there. Think of it starting out as a massive company town. As long as internal crime isn't a problem, the lord that owns/rules it can just ignore the outside world. If I built a structure like that though, I'd want to make sure to have some sort of integrated military to defend the thing from outside threats.
Anywhere in the world where you have a single massively wealthy family/person directly or indirectly employing that many people, you'd have interest in building such a structure. It could start some type of corporate feudalism and be very successful.
One interesting fact they mentioned: in the event of a disaster, sky scrapers are not designed to be evacuated. There isn't enough room in the stairwells to get thousands of people down dozens of floors in a timely fashion. In the event of fire, people are supposed to generally stay in place, while a few floors near the fire are evacuated. Fire is then fought in place on the effected floors. If it's not possible to get a few thousand people out of the WTC in an hour or two, then there's no way you'll ever evacuate a million people from a single building.
Did you just not get it? Why would you evacuate a city or large skyscraper if you didn't have to? Sure, fires can spread quickly, but has NY been burnt to the ground by a few random fires in its sky scrappers? Nope, that city seems to be still standing. If we've figured out how to build single building skyscrapers that can isolate a fire and most of the surrounding floors barely notice, why don't you think we can design an entire city like that? You don't evacuate everything, only the isolated areas that are currently dangerous. This is like whining that NY is doomed if any single one of its skyscrapers burned because there would be the potential that the fire could spread to the rest of the city. Here is a clue. Dubai like NY has a fire department and will design such structures so most people don't have to leave their spots when the fire fighters pop by to put the random fire out.
This is like complaining that just in case the structure is hit by a nuke there wouldn't be an easy way to get people out and house them afterward. Heck, any city of 1 million that was hit by a nuke wouldn't be able to move the people or house its refugees. I'd be more worried about industrial air pollution laws within the structure to keep the air quality higher than outside.
Space is very big, and finding stuff there is pretty hard. Designing a satellite which can keep transmitting a signal (so that it will actually be found) for two thousand years is not at all easy - solar panels degrade long before this and even radiothermal generators don't last much longer than a hundred years.
Hmm, I wonder what it would take to design something that could/would stay in orbit for say a million years and be viewable from Earth with the naked eye without having to worry about them knowing about radio. You'd have to depend on flashing lights as the only way you could transmit your message.;) Oh you could have it transmit in radio as well, but the main thing would be not to depend on the people on the ground knowing about radio. I guess you could flash instructions on how to build the simplest radios that you could as the intro part to your message.;)
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. What bothers me is how prominent religion is in American society - leaders doing their thing in the name of God, large groups of fundamentalist christian believers picketing funerals of people they deem unworthy... I'm sure many of you can think of lots of examples. I think it's time that religions be demoted to the realm of mythology where they belong. I mean, come on, it's not gospel.
I'm not one that thinks that the world will be destroyed shortly by man or god. I do believe of all the crap that we've got today about the only part that will actually survive into the future is the concept of religions and the worship of certain people as gods on earth. There is a part of me that thinks that the first set that really gets that whole nano tech thing down will gain near god like abilities and well war would happen and you don't think that they'd be dragged down with the rest of us? What would they do? Setup themselves as the new gods. They could pick any current religion/mythology and its moral code and use that to control the rest of humanity. A small group of immortals could easily keep humanity at or near the same tech level for thousands of years. Any cities that make too much progress can just be punished by the gods and make sure there is a big hole or survivors so they'd tell everyone else not to do/build such and such.
You really don't believe that people would use things like nanotech for the good of all? You could quite easily do most of the miracles in the bible with the right tech tool kit and as long as the bulk of humanity never reaches your tech level, then you don't really have anything to worry about.
That's a ridiculous comparison. The bible is fictional.
Oh if only it mainly was. The problem is that there is far too much factual info in there and well the fictional/scifi elements get drowned out. I've tried to explain to my wife that of course there are huge chucks of the bible that are very factual. Why? The Jews used it as their history/moral/everything a person needed to know book and it was fairly up to date at the time. So of course all the cities/villages mentioned are likely to have actually existed. I try to explain to her its like if some one or family had been keeping a family history since the founding of the US, well in 2000 in the future they could use that family history to locate the cities/towns that said family lived. That part could be mostly factual, but that still doesn't mean everything in the book is factual. You could have a fictional story happen in a realistic setting and that doesn't make the story factual. Though 2000 years latter, if they find the setting, they may assume parts/pieces of the story are true.
And that's just the start of it. No one pays attention to them anymore, and even if we did, we wouldn't know just what the problem was, because the law only requires that the sign be posted, not explain what led to it being posted.
You could just assume California causes cancer and move to any other state so you won't be likely to get it just by living there.
This kinda reminds me of all the no smoking signs that have the effect of getting every smoker in the building right into the most public entry way so everyone that enters said buildings now have to breath second had smoke. (There is a part of me that wants personal air pollution laws and if you violate them its the death penalty. Basically if you stink, BO, perfume, smoking anything and it annoys anyone else they've got the right to kill you. If you can tell, smokers really annoy me. )
Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.
No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad.
Is is because they and folks like my wife reliaze the same thing. I can get a flyer or something from a local food place or store and see this week's sales what not. You often need the physical coupon for lots of crap. The only place that we really do business where she downloads and prints something out is Carinos after filling in their little on-line survey you get a printable coupon for a free appetizer.
Now I use the internet when looking through walmart, samsclub, officedepot, staples, bestbuy, homedepot, lowes, radio shack, CDWG, and tigerdirect. (CDWG so I know what the worst price is and tigerdirect so I'll generally know what the best/lowest price is.) After making sure that the product is in the local store and its not worth the hassle/delay of an online purchase, we go get the product. I've yet to ever print out a sales insert/coupon for any of those stores though I'd actually be somewhat interested in it know that I think about it. From their POV, its easier to train sales staff to id their sales insert, the various ways and media that you could print off a sales ad/coupon could confuse the heck out of a slightly more than min. wage worker.
Does any one else have any experience with printing what would usually be sales inserts ads directly from the internet off their local computer? The other down side is that you are directly paying for that ink/paper. I'd say that for most of that the traditional sales ad would be shinier/glossier but since its not on standard paper wouldn't last as long.
I'm never worried by being spied upon by the government. I feel that they already know everything that the could ever really care to know about me. Who do I really fear spying on me?
Mom and the mother-in-law. Heck, my mom lives 15 minutes away across town and talks to my wife at least twice a day and I figure that's too much spying on my family's life. The mother-in-law lives 2 hours away and calls the wife maybe 3-4 times a week. What nut case would want to allow two way video access for their parents to see and comment how they are raising their kids? I mean come on the government is at least somewhat reasonable in where they pick to interfere in our daily lives. The parents can get on their soap boxes about the most crazy things and you can't just disconnect them... you'd never hear the end of it. I've read about a tons of different ways this could nearly trivially be setup.
I'm scared that I've yet to read a single post that says it might not be a very good idea except for the comments about watching the grandparents do things when they thought that they weren't observed. I mean come on how many of you live a distance away from your parents just so you won't have them visiting? I mean doesn't this defeat the entire purpose of living a distance away from your parents/inlaws?
The reason it seems odious is because the very act of farming highlights the paradox that threatens the very reason one plays: MMOs are work disguised as leisure.
I could be worse. It could be education disguised as leisure. I mean they could trick you into repeating all primary school. I beat sooner or latter that'll be required. No more shortcuts on having a background, you've got to go to "virtual school" and actually know the crap that makes your character a PHd chemist. The virtual school and grades could replace tons of grinding.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I am constantly amazed at how willing people are to tell you how to attack their own systems, particularly on Slashdot, where simply implying somebody is doing poorly will practically get you full description, network maps, and vulnerability reports.
Similarly, I was talking to a friend in the Army the other day about IT security, and he told me that he didn't think I could attack his unit's systems, then went into a long discussion about what protections are in place. Out of curiosity, I decided to find out what I could learn. He only clammed up when I started probing for specifics about password policies on a particular device.
People: please don't tell anybody about your IT configuration. At least not on a public forum like /. Admittedly, a lot of it is easy to find out other ways, but that's no reason to give that information out.
I believe the Navy's heard about that for ages. They have a phrase loose lips sink ships that applies very well in that case. Be honest, it's much harder to crack a system completely blind. If I tell you the IP, the exact OS, service patches and what apps that I have running on it, you should be able to easily determine how crackable that system is within minutes. If all you know is that I have a computer on the planet Earth somewhere turned off and not connected to the net, you've got much more problems cracking it.
In this case, people might actually believe (as much as you and I can't see how) that someone they know might be in real peril of getting kidnapped. Yup, it's naive, but we know people believe all sorts of things.
Many relative "rich" business travelers worry about this. It depends on where you are at as to what "rich" is defined as. You make an average salary in the US, and you could be automatically defined as "rich" to alot of parts on the global so you've got to be careful when you doing your traveling. I think those that routinely do this hire body guards/mercs to keep their asses safe and shoot back if anyone tries anything along those lines. I can't really blame them. Its kinda what all military/police folks are supposed to do. Keep the folks that pay them safe from criminals/"the enemy." Gotta admit that there will always be a place for armspeople/guards of all kinds.
Well, pay me $1000 or your mother in law will receive this immortality drug...
Shouldn't you be able to sell an immortality drug for millions or a few billion rather than give it away if some one doesn't give you 1K? Talk about poor planning.
Nintendo has sold a lot more than 1,337 copies of Mario Kart Wii in each region, each with an adapter to convert a Wii Remote into a Bluetooth racing wheel.
Well of course Nintendo is a smart game company. This company is turning their nose up at the entire Mario Kart audience though. I'd think that this company would want to sell it's own classy sim racing wheel and pedals though.
And the loss of community has really pushed the anonymity movement. In days of old, you had to have a "relationship" with the people who bought and sold. Somewhere along the way, that was lost in favor of cheaper prices. We have, collectively, started to see the repercussions of this throughout society.
Now, to buy big ticket items, all you need is a fake ID, a Good SS#, and be gone, and nobody seems to care that we've lost the humanity in the process.
Define "big ticket items." I'd define it as cars, houses or more expensive than that. For that, the normal person takes out a loan with a bank. There is a lot of paper work involved and communications with sales people and folks at the bank. If your idea of "big ticket items" is between $500-3000, then it doesn't take anyone at a bank to stop or question the payment if you are in the habit of spending that kinda of money or the store that sells the item does normal business with the bank. If you bought a stove at sears or an ID theft did with your ID, then the bank or CC wouldn't question it much. If you bought 2+ stoves at sears or mom and pop we've never heard of store, the bank/CC may flag it and question if the store was trying to over charge/double charge their customer.
In the name of preventing ID theft, CC and banks are looking at your buying habits to see if you purchase anything odd. This should ring alarm bells, but doesn't for some reason. Oh well, its not like the CC or banks do well at verifying you are who you claim to be. The banks/CC should just run their own biometric ID network that requires everyone that wants to use said network to submit finger prints, retina scans, DNA, foot prints, and thermal face scans to the issuing agency. The banks/CC could use all that crap to ID you and in the name of ID theft prevention to not give your resources to anyone else.
In the days of yore, the stores ID'd and monitored all their customers and knew exactly where they all worked/how much they made and if they were good for the credit that the store extended them. How is that much different today rather than the min. wage sales person not knowing all that crap about you? The CC and the store in general most likely does know it, it just takes more effort on the stores part to find out the info as long as they get paid by a CC/bank they don't care if it was you or an ID theif though.
Stop taking yourself so seriously and lighten up a little bit. Requiring a subscription and a racing wheel should be enough to weed out the mad 1337 gamers. Do you really think all the WoW people are going to suddenly poo their pants over a racing game?
Um, I figure 1337 gamers would be the only ones interested in their game. Why? Quite simple. Who else already has a racing wheel? Um, only 1337 gamers. I don't even have a racing wheel, and I have a few car games.
Actually, I'm curious if any racing people/fans will actually get excited over this. I find myself mixed on that one. They seem to be targeting the hard core realistic car sim crowd rather than arcade physics racing. Um, I bet there is a niche for this, but I don't know if it is large enough to support them. I'd think that the niche for arcade physics or online multiplayer mario cart would be far larger than the sim racing people. I think that the actual racing people would still be shilling out for real cars rather than virtual cars. If they try to copy the normal lets start the player/user off with something crappy and work their way up, then they might find many people that were once excited by this decide to just tinker on their own cars rather than spend the time/effort to upgrade their virtual cars.
Virtual stuff of things that we could never actually own or play with in real life is fun. Virtual stuff of things that we do or could own and have to work at more than our real world stuff ain't nearly as fun. ;)
If you can simply smelt the drives, that is complete destruction. Anything else depends on the level of 'it's not there anymore' you need. Far too many people don't care or believe their data can be used from an old disk. They also don't understand that a format will not necessarily overwrite anything on the drive. sigh.
Just format it, stick linux on it, and then fill the rest of it up with your standard porn DVD. They'll be too busy viewing the porn to think that their may be a formerly useful windows partition with sensitive data on it underneath it. ;) Just make sure that your porn DVD isn't one of those that has the girls looking young, and you'd be set.
I used to format do a quick install of win98, then wipe and install win2000 and then wipe install linux, and then wipe install winxp home and just leave it alone. I figured that was good enough. I'd also make sure that after installing any of those OSs that I had data that I could use to copy and fill up the drive with. Now a days I guess you could download wikipedia or something and use that instead of the porn dvd. ;)
That was then, now we're in the Age of the World Wide Web, and there's just no excuse whatsoever for loading down a portable (read: easily stolen) computer system with vast quantities of confidential data. In fact, that really ought to be a law with few exceptions: customer and personal data must be stored on a server that is both physically and electronically protected. Period.
Um, that seems very short sighted. What happens when all the servers in the data center get reduced into the size of a briefcase or smaller? Will you say that you can't upgrade those servers to physically smaller machines because those smaller machines can be more easily stolen?
I'm of the mind that is shouldn't matter if the data is recovered on a hard drive, DVD, or super holographic storage medium. It should be required to be encrypted at both the field level and the entire db level before any of those records were readable that you need certain user names, passwords, and key cards to read any portion of it. We've got the tech for that now, don't we? Heck even using PGP to encrypt it should safe enough if anyone other than a government got their hands on it. That this stuff was in a format that anyone with a CD/DVD drive and Access could view it is the real crime.
The worst part is that RBS didn't actually have a breach, it was a 3rd party. That, of course, could well lead to someone getting sued.
Um, by my logic, if its your data that you are required by law to keep "secure" every "third party" that you allow access to that data falls under your responsibility. Sure, the RBS is fully responsible for this. It sounds like they are doing every thing that they can to determine how the breach happened. I'd want automatic government fines against the RBS and every "third party" that was responsible for handling the data.
Saying it wasn't the RBS's breach is like absolving them of responsibility for it. It was their breach since it was their contracted third party.
they embraced Open Source. Weapons. Tools. Technology as a whole. Homo Sapiens stole everything from them, made some improvements and made it Closed Source. Neanderthals had to buy their own inventions back. The competitive disadvantage put them under.
Let this be a warning to you all.
Um, don't open source the stuff you use to hurt other people with. Gotcha. So should we open source our election process/government or not? I'm not clear if we'd classify that as weapon/harmful medium to be controlled.
Is riding the subway to work art? No. Is seeing a painting on the wall art? The painting itself is, yes, but not the act of seeing it or your choice to go and see it. Is listening to music art? Not the act of listening, but the music itself is art... and you see my point.
Video games offer us a passage to artistic things, but are wholly not art in themselves.
You just defeated your entire argument. That's like saying any art form that you have to experience in order to perceive that its art isn't art. I'd take the complete opposite POV. All "art" without a viewer is just an empty chunk of matter. It is the viewer/audience and their experiences that the piece evoke that determines if a piece is trash, art, entertainment, should be censored/banned, or not even interesting enough to be bothered with.
It's like if I invented a clicky pen that would give the person clicking it an orgasm every time. The device would just be a chuck of matter. It's the viewer(s) and their experience(s) with it that are important.
I can't say I'd like replaying real world modern atrocities, but I know from accounts of elderly relatives just how bloody and horrific the second world war was (in unfortunately graphic detail, given how young I was when I listened to the stories), yet we happily recreate that in game after game.
recreation of nasty events is going to happen, there's no way to avoid it, and good luck trying to set a time limit on how much time must pass before an event becomes a suitable topic for a game.
I'd say the suitable time frame is when those that were in said event are now mostly grandparents or mostly dead is about the right time. Of course somethings are different. I bet while the wars were going on that you had kids on both sides playing to be solider against whoever was their country's enemy. Think of cops and robbers or cow boys and Indians. That doesn't mean that the toy companies of the time pushed it more than usual or that certain percentage of mothers weren't horrified that their darlings were playing solider. Its that loud vocal group that are trying to get everyone else from playing modern solider or cops and robbers games.
Well, there is a significant difference you see. Sure the opening scene of Private Ryan is gruesome and vivid. Yet the message behind it is the pointlessness and futility of the whole thing. Most violence in GTA is trivial in comparison but instills that VIOLENCE HAS REWARDS. That is a very significant difference.
I'm confused, but violence does have rewards in war. Maybe its that the creators of that movie want to portray all war as pointless and therefore in an inept manner try to prevent future wars?
Not quite. As other people pointed out, playwriting during Shakespeare's time was what second-rate writers did to pass the time. Real artists wrote poetry or essays, not common entertainment for the masses. It was only years later that anyone started to appreciate Shakespeare as anything more than the equivalent of today's TV.
There's also the problem that interactive entertainment, such as games, are more limited in audience.
I'd disagree with the limited audience bit. Why? What is the min. audience for a mildly successful game? (Pick what ever profitable number that you choose.) Now compare that with the average readers of poetry/essays or even theater/Opera audiences. Jewel Quest has massively larger audience than most modern poetry/essays will ever get unless its something that is read during a swearing in of a president. Now lets compare Jewel Quest, Shakespeare, Sherlock Homes books, and Dilbert/Sluggy and the cultural value of each. ;)
Will B5, Cheers, Charmed, Friends, Smallville, Star Trek, Star Wars, or Buffy be considered this last set of decades classics in the future? There is a part of me that thinking audience says and future audience size in the face of a changing culture determines if what is now entertainment will one day be required for kids to learn about as being a classic example of something from this age. ;)
If you don't define "intellectual depth", then there's no way to ever argue the point with you. If you do define it, then you must define it specifically to exclude video games, and comic books, and trashy romantic comedy movies. Otherwise you will inevitably find a counterexample if you look hard enough & wait long enough (note also that paintings and literature have a far longer history than video games from which to produce classics).
Just wait another 50 years and see what current games are still around and being played with little adaption. There would be your classic video game. Tetris is about the only really classic video game that we currently have. I guess the real test is wait 500-1000 years to see what current video games survive. Then you'd see "classics." Heck, it's liable not to be even Tetris or Mario, but something folks have bootlegged over the years and we might have considered third rate. Just cause it survives doesn't mean its the best that this generation produced. It just means some one some where thought it was worth preserving. Stone statues that grand dad paid an arm and leg for are generally thought to be worth preserving. ;) You know it'll be a real challenge even having true classic video games because there wouldn't be easy platforms to play them with even 20 years down the line. Try digging up an Atari video game console and all the games. We'd agree some of the games like Frogger and PacMan were classics, but they've been rewritten for our current systems and not really preserved in their original forms so we don't know if the originals were better. Actually one thing that you could say to their benefit was that you could pick up/in theory stop any game at any time and it was all skill based. There wasn't such a thing as pause or save or sometimes more than one life. ;) I'm not really surprised that those games have disappeared today.
OTOH, something that doesn't seem to be taken into account is, what happens when families change? A single guy only needs 'x' amount of space. Now when that single guy gets married*, has 4 kids, and a parent becomes decrepit/disabled and decide to move in...? Obviously there's going to be a lot of change in how much space the guy can be comfortable living in, no matter what culture we're talking about here.
Also, what happens when some fatal communicable disease starts making the rounds? shutting folks into their 'homes' will only work for so long before even the most gregarious human being starts to get cabin fever (for lack of a better term).
Well, you could just have everyone be required to have their own rooms. That way husband/wife/kids would have to have separate living spaces. That would make sure if they got divorced they'd each have an apartment and that the kids would already be allocated space. I'm sure there would develop rules for the kids to move off into different sections of the city.
As for plague/sickness, I think you are thinking about it the wrong way. A normal city can't shut out the outside world when a plague or flu season starts. This thing could have medical scans of everyone entering/exiting to make sure they don't bring in the flu or plague.
The key question to answer is: What is the reason for the people to live there, rather than somewhere else? That's the question that builds cities - or ghost towns.
The simple answer would be that they'd all be someone's economic serfs and the housing would be cheaper there or it would after you figured in the daily commuter tax for all the various workers to work there. Think of it starting out as a massive company town. As long as internal crime isn't a problem, the lord that owns/rules it can just ignore the outside world. If I built a structure like that though, I'd want to make sure to have some sort of integrated military to defend the thing from outside threats.
Anywhere in the world where you have a single massively wealthy family/person directly or indirectly employing that many people, you'd have interest in building such a structure. It could start some type of corporate feudalism and be very successful.
One interesting fact they mentioned: in the event of a disaster, sky scrapers are not designed to be evacuated. There isn't enough room in the stairwells to get thousands of people down dozens of floors in a timely fashion.
In the event of fire, people are supposed to generally stay in place, while a few floors near the fire are evacuated. Fire is then fought in place on the effected floors.
If it's not possible to get a few thousand people out of the WTC in an hour or two, then there's no way you'll ever evacuate a million people from a single building.
Did you just not get it? Why would you evacuate a city or large skyscraper if you didn't have to? Sure, fires can spread quickly, but has NY been burnt to the ground by a few random fires in its sky scrappers? Nope, that city seems to be still standing. If we've figured out how to build single building skyscrapers that can isolate a fire and most of the surrounding floors barely notice, why don't you think we can design an entire city like that? You don't evacuate everything, only the isolated areas that are currently dangerous. This is like whining that NY is doomed if any single one of its skyscrapers burned because there would be the potential that the fire could spread to the rest of the city. Here is a clue. Dubai like NY has a fire department and will design such structures so most people don't have to leave their spots when the fire fighters pop by to put the random fire out.
This is like complaining that just in case the structure is hit by a nuke there wouldn't be an easy way to get people out and house them afterward. Heck, any city of 1 million that was hit by a nuke wouldn't be able to move the people or house its refugees. I'd be more worried about industrial air pollution laws within the structure to keep the air quality higher than outside.
Space is very big, and finding stuff there is pretty hard. Designing a satellite which can keep transmitting a signal (so that it will actually be found) for two thousand years is not at all easy - solar panels degrade long before this and even radiothermal generators don't last much longer than a hundred years.
Hmm, I wonder what it would take to design something that could/would stay in orbit for say a million years and be viewable from Earth with the naked eye without having to worry about them knowing about radio. You'd have to depend on flashing lights as the only way you could transmit your message. ;) Oh you could have it transmit in radio as well, but the main thing would be not to depend on the people on the ground knowing about radio. I guess you could flash instructions on how to build the simplest radios that you could as the intro part to your message. ;)
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. What bothers me is how prominent religion is in American society - leaders doing their thing in the name of God, large groups of fundamentalist christian believers picketing funerals of people they deem unworthy... I'm sure many of you can think of lots of examples. I think it's time that religions be demoted to the realm of mythology where they belong. I mean, come on, it's not gospel.
I'm not one that thinks that the world will be destroyed shortly by man or god. I do believe of all the crap that we've got today about the only part that will actually survive into the future is the concept of religions and the worship of certain people as gods on earth. There is a part of me that thinks that the first set that really gets that whole nano tech thing down will gain near god like abilities and well war would happen and you don't think that they'd be dragged down with the rest of us? What would they do? Setup themselves as the new gods. They could pick any current religion/mythology and its moral code and use that to control the rest of humanity. A small group of immortals could easily keep humanity at or near the same tech level for thousands of years. Any cities that make too much progress can just be punished by the gods and make sure there is a big hole or survivors so they'd tell everyone else not to do/build such and such.
You really don't believe that people would use things like nanotech for the good of all? You could quite easily do most of the miracles in the bible with the right tech tool kit and as long as the bulk of humanity never reaches your tech level, then you don't really have anything to worry about.
That's a ridiculous comparison. The bible is fictional.
Oh if only it mainly was. The problem is that there is far too much factual info in there and well the fictional/scifi elements get drowned out. I've tried to explain to my wife that of course there are huge chucks of the bible that are very factual. Why? The Jews used it as their history/moral/everything a person needed to know book and it was fairly up to date at the time. So of course all the cities/villages mentioned are likely to have actually existed. I try to explain to her its like if some one or family had been keeping a family history since the founding of the US, well in 2000 in the future they could use that family history to locate the cities/towns that said family lived. That part could be mostly factual, but that still doesn't mean everything in the book is factual. You could have a fictional story happen in a realistic setting and that doesn't make the story factual. Though 2000 years latter, if they find the setting, they may assume parts/pieces of the story are true.
And that's just the start of it. No one pays attention to them anymore, and even if we did, we wouldn't know just what the problem was, because the law only requires that the sign be posted, not explain what led to it being posted.
You could just assume California causes cancer and move to any other state so you won't be likely to get it just by living there.
This kinda reminds me of all the no smoking signs that have the effect of getting every smoker in the building right into the most public entry way so everyone that enters said buildings now have to breath second had smoke. (There is a part of me that wants personal air pollution laws and if you violate them its the death penalty. Basically if you stink, BO, perfume, smoking anything and it annoys anyone else they've got the right to kill you. If you can tell, smokers really annoy me. )
Advertisers are still willing to pay more to have a physical insert in the physical paper, and they don't seem very interested in recreating that via PDF or Flash, or whatever online.
No doubt, our company will shift more and more online in the future, but print isn't dead yet if you put out a quality product, cater to your audience, and sell advertising like mad.
Is is because they and folks like my wife reliaze the same thing. I can get a flyer or something from a local food place or store and see this week's sales what not. You often need the physical coupon for lots of crap. The only place that we really do business where she downloads and prints something out is Carinos after filling in their little on-line survey you get a printable coupon for a free appetizer.
Now I use the internet when looking through walmart, samsclub, officedepot, staples, bestbuy, homedepot, lowes, radio shack, CDWG, and tigerdirect. (CDWG so I know what the worst price is and tigerdirect so I'll generally know what the best/lowest price is.) After making sure that the product is in the local store and its not worth the hassle/delay of an online purchase, we go get the product. I've yet to ever print out a sales insert/coupon for any of those stores though I'd actually be somewhat interested in it know that I think about it. From their POV, its easier to train sales staff to id their sales insert, the various ways and media that you could print off a sales ad/coupon could confuse the heck out of a slightly more than min. wage worker.
Does any one else have any experience with printing what would usually be sales inserts ads directly from the internet off their local computer? The other down side is that you are directly paying for that ink/paper. I'd say that for most of that the traditional sales ad would be shinier/glossier but since its not on standard paper wouldn't last as long.
I'm never worried by being spied upon by the government. I feel that they already know everything that the could ever really care to know about me. Who do I really fear spying on me?
Mom and the mother-in-law. Heck, my mom lives 15 minutes away across town and talks to my wife at least twice a day and I figure that's too much spying on my family's life. The mother-in-law lives 2 hours away and calls the wife maybe 3-4 times a week. What nut case would want to allow two way video access for their parents to see and comment how they are raising their kids? I mean come on the government is at least somewhat reasonable in where they pick to interfere in our daily lives. The parents can get on their soap boxes about the most crazy things and you can't just disconnect them... you'd never hear the end of it. I've read about a tons of different ways this could nearly trivially be setup.
I'm scared that I've yet to read a single post that says it might not be a very good idea except for the comments about watching the grandparents do things when they thought that they weren't observed. I mean come on how many of you live a distance away from your parents just so you won't have them visiting? I mean doesn't this defeat the entire purpose of living a distance away from your parents/inlaws?
The reason it seems odious is because the very act of farming highlights the paradox that threatens the very reason one plays: MMOs are work disguised as leisure.
I could be worse. It could be education disguised as leisure. I mean they could trick you into repeating all primary school. I beat sooner or latter that'll be required. No more shortcuts on having a background, you've got to go to "virtual school" and actually know the crap that makes your character a PHd chemist. The virtual school and grades could replace tons of grinding. ;)