Um, what? Of course they'll use it to cut prices. Unlike some companies, Amazon is in a competitive field. And when people are shopping online, it's trivial to comparison shop, so people do. There are plenty of other online retailers selling the same stuff as them, and one of the reasons Amazon does well is that they're cheaper. Sure, they want more profit -- but once they find a way to cut costs, the optimal way to make more profit is to pass some of that cost savings along as a price reduction, in order to attract more customers. Remember, there are two ways to increase profits -- increase margins, and increase units sold. In highly competitive markets, the optimal use for any cost cutting measure will be a mix of the two.
Sure, you won't see the whole reduction passed along (at least not until everyone is doing it and they can't afford not to), but who cares? The stuff gets cheaper, and friendlier for the environment, and less frustrating to open. I rather like this idea.
So they want to simultaneously change the underlying network fabric in order to make their systems unattackable, and also be able to successfully attack any other system at any time? Does no one there see a disconnect between these goals?
Sure they can. It just adds a step: get the hardware connected. Sometimes that can be accomplished through social engineering, sometimes well-meaning people do it for you, and sometimes people simply don't realize the connection existed in the first place. Of course, it does make things harder, and it is a valuable step... but it should not, under any circumstances, be assumed to be bulletproof by itself. You still need to worry about security against an attack.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying you should avoid spoilers until you need them, and read them in moderation. For the *vast* majority of people it's not worth trying to ascend without any spoilers. But at the same time, if you're playing with wikihack open in your browser, you're really not getting the full intended experience.
Occasionally, you get something that's truly unfair. Traps on level 1-2 are one of the classic examples. (Gnomes early in the mines with potent wands are another.) But all of those are early; you reroll the character and it cost you all of 5 minutes. Later game deaths that you truly can't avoid with good play are very, very rare.
The problem is that you don't get the good parts of the gameplay without them. The rest of the game feels unfair until you get to know it. What's really going on is that you're not sufficiently prepared. You get rewarded for expecting the worst case scenario and being ready for it -- and if you're not, you won't get to continue the game.
The only real problem I see with the game is that it's not always obvious to the player that they could have done something better and avoided dying. Then again, if it always told you what you did wrong, it would be too easy.
The other major thing that the permadeath feature does is make you be actually invested in the character. An RPG on a computer with savepoints, or a GM who's willing to fudge numbers to let the PCs handle the tough monster, can simply never inspire the same sense of fear for your character that nethack can.
You missed a big one: caps on skills. Different classes are restricted as to how far they can advance in different skills. Wizards and monks, for example, are the only classes that can reach Basic level in all spellcasting schools. Other classes do better with weapons and such.
On the contrary, I've been to both. I think they would generally agree that you should avoid it, but not get too stuck up about it -- at least until you finish your first ascension. But that doesn't mean they'll look down on you for it, and it certainly doesn't mean they don't do it...
If you're on level 10, you "gain" a level to end up at level 9. Doing this on level 1 has the same effect as going up the stairs, ie it's not normally what you want.
I think most veteran hackers would agree that looking at the source, along with most spoilers, is definitely cheating -- though some level of general advice is not. The definitely-not-cheating ways to learn about the game are explore mode and the oracle; both are quite informative without being overly spoiled. At the same time, I think the vast majority of players look at spoilers to some degree.
To anyone new to nethack out there: Give it an honest try without spoilers. Use them when you get stuck, but only in moderation. Nethack is fundamentally a game about discovering the rules; if you learn them all by reading, it's far less fun. Of course, remaining eternally clueless is no fun either. As in many things, moderation is the key.
My only ascension so far has been a wizard. I may try to ascend a monk for the tournament. Wizards with their spells have so many options, but they can be very fragile at times...
One of the things I love about nethack is that items (and monsters, and dungeon features...) interact with each other in so many ways. Wielding a cockatrice corpse as a weapon will make short work of many monsters -- as long as you're wearing gloves. Just be careful not to fall down the stairs because you're carrying too much load...
The lack of a save and restore feature is definitely one of the things that makes nethack work so well. After putting in several hours carefully figuring out which potions do what and collecting decent armor and weapons, that D down the hall will be far scarier than any gorgeously rendered 3D dragon. After all, it can actually kill your character, not just send you back to the last save point.
At first glance, nethack seems not just hard but outright sadistic (well, ok, it is, but bear with me). But, as you get to know it, you realize that it's not like many other RPGs. Rather than trying to acquire the single best collection of stuff you can, in nethack you're rewarded for having backup plans -- and backups to your backups. When you find yourself surrounded my monsters and low on HP and out of healing potions you might consider praying. If you've done that too recently, you might try a wand of teleport or digging to escape. And when you discover that those wands just ran out of charges, you'll be glad you didn't leave that cursed potion of gain level behind. (The cursed ones, rather than gaining a character level, make you gain a *dungeon* level.)
Combine the attention to detail with the huge variety of options for character class, general strategies, and the high game-to-game variability thanks to random dungeons levels with random items, and you get serious replay value.
That's still just a collision, not a preimage. The definition of a preimage attack is the ability to go from MD5(x1) to x2 such that MD5(x2) == MD5(x1). The fact that you can generate additional collisions once you've found the first has no (direct) bearing on your ability to work backwards. In order for your concatenation process to be useful, you somehow have to generate a and b such that one of them is the same as the start of your message text -- the current collision attacks give you very little control over either a or b, they simply produce a pair that's useful.
Right. The assertion is fallacious because dollars aren't being destroyed. Material goods, and indirectly the labor involved in producing them, and directly the labor our troos could be doing instead, is. Following the money trail is complicated (as you say, a mix of deficit spending and printing money), but the assertion that our economy would be better off if we weren't draining hundreds of billions worth of goods from it seems fairly obviously true. Reducing our spending in Iraq can only do good things for the economy at home.
When asked how he would run his presidency, Obama has said to look at how he runs his campaign. That campaign is a massive piece of organization, running remarkably smoothly. Obama is clearly in charge of it, but equally clearly knows how to find people experienced at doing the jobs that need doing and then supporting them as they do those jobs. One of the most important abilities a president can have is the ability to delegate well, knowing when to listen (and not listen!) to their advisors.
Obama may not have as much experience, but he has amply demonstrated the ability. An intelligent, thoughtful president who can make his administration run like that would be quite a thing to behold.
Ostensibly, Bob Barr is a Libertarian. To me, that should mean a smaller government that is less involved in my life. However, Barr has historically been in favor of things like bans on same sex marriage and medical marijuana. He claims to have changed stances on these things, but from someone who used to be a strong supporter I'd like to see more actual work in the direction of his newfound views before I trusted him with the presidency. I have a lot of respect for the ability to take an idealogical viewpoint like opposition to drugs, observe that it simply doesn't work, and change your position on it as a result -- but I need to see strong evidence that he really means it, and is willing to work for it, before voting for him for president. Let's see what he can do as a representative or state-level official first.
Sure, the dollars aren't destroyed -- but all that stuff is. The thing is, you don't have to compare government spending on war consumables to government spending on infrastructure. You can instead compare it to less government spending, resulting in individuals instead spending the money on things like sending their kids to college or corporations spending it on a new manufacturing plant. Every $B we spend on various things that go boom represents a few million hours of labor that didn't go into improving our lives back home. Sure, the dollars keep flowing around and around, but the labor cost the represent really did get used up in making a pretty fireball.
If someone does not know how to design a bridge, purports to be able to anyway (ie telling a falsehood for personal gain at the expense of others, an act of fraud), designs a bridge, and then that bridge collapses, we hold them criminally responsible -- even if they honestly believed they were capable of performing the task safely. Why should we treat elections as less important to our society? The engineering work that goes into the machinery involved should be held to the same standard.
(Of course, if someone is qualified, follows best practices, and makes no mistakes that should have been obvious at the time, and something still goes wrong -- then we investigate, but conclude that the mistake was notihng more than that. There's no need to hold voting machine engineers to a standard of perfection, but we should treat them the same as any other engineer with a task whos results are important to society.)
It is possible. Many places do it. Where I'll be voting (NC), that's the system in place. Paper ballot, make your mark in black ink, ballots are optically scanned. In the event of a recount, the paper ballots are the final arbiters.
Why doesn't everyone do it this way? I don't know. Clearly there are people who have disabilities that make the paper ballots difficult, and providing alternative means is appropriate. But the default should clearly be paper ballots and optical scanners.
You have to design systems for the users you have, not the ones you'd like to have. If your users will be around for a long time, perhaps you can try to do what you think is best for them rather than what works now -- but that's not the case in a voting booth.
In a voting booth, you have to take a purely pragmatic approach to UI design. Something that works is correct, and something that doesn't work is incorrect. If it doesn't work in a way that introduces systematic bias, then it should be treated not merely as bad UI design but vote fraud, even if there was no malicious intent. The people designing the UI claimed to be competent to do the job; making that claim falsely should not be taken lightly.
There's a reason the founding fathers gave the CIC position to a civilian office. It would make just as much sense to disqualify McCain because he *did* serve in the military.
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If you want to do it fast, dd will always be more performant. Depends on the size of sda1 :P
Are you sure about that?
evand@Desktop:/data$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp0 bs=1M count=128
128+0 records in
128+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 0.875425 seconds, 153 MB/s
evand@Desktop:/data$ dd if=tmp0 of=tmp1 bs=1M count=128
128+0 records in
128+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 1.80238 seconds, 74.5 MB/s
evand@Desktop:/data$ time cp tmp0 tmp1
real 0m0.838s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.644s
evand@Desktop:/data$ dd if=tmp0 of=tmp1
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 2.16979 seconds, 61.9 MB/s
You know, cp works just as well, and the syntax is simpler. dd is great, but you might as well use cp in many cases.
cp /dev/zero /dev/sda1
Um, what? Of course they'll use it to cut prices. Unlike some companies, Amazon is in a competitive field. And when people are shopping online, it's trivial to comparison shop, so people do. There are plenty of other online retailers selling the same stuff as them, and one of the reasons Amazon does well is that they're cheaper. Sure, they want more profit -- but once they find a way to cut costs, the optimal way to make more profit is to pass some of that cost savings along as a price reduction, in order to attract more customers. Remember, there are two ways to increase profits -- increase margins, and increase units sold. In highly competitive markets, the optimal use for any cost cutting measure will be a mix of the two.
Sure, you won't see the whole reduction passed along (at least not until everyone is doing it and they can't afford not to), but who cares? The stuff gets cheaper, and friendlier for the environment, and less frustrating to open. I rather like this idea.
So they want to simultaneously change the underlying network fabric in order to make their systems unattackable, and also be able to successfully attack any other system at any time? Does no one there see a disconnect between these goals?
Sure they can. It just adds a step: get the hardware connected. Sometimes that can be accomplished through social engineering, sometimes well-meaning people do it for you, and sometimes people simply don't realize the connection existed in the first place. Of course, it does make things harder, and it is a valuable step... but it should not, under any circumstances, be assumed to be bulletproof by itself. You still need to worry about security against an attack.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying you should avoid spoilers until you need them, and read them in moderation. For the *vast* majority of people it's not worth trying to ascend without any spoilers. But at the same time, if you're playing with wikihack open in your browser, you're really not getting the full intended experience.
Occasionally, you get something that's truly unfair. Traps on level 1-2 are one of the classic examples. (Gnomes early in the mines with potent wands are another.) But all of those are early; you reroll the character and it cost you all of 5 minutes. Later game deaths that you truly can't avoid with good play are very, very rare.
The problem is that you don't get the good parts of the gameplay without them. The rest of the game feels unfair until you get to know it. What's really going on is that you're not sufficiently prepared. You get rewarded for expecting the worst case scenario and being ready for it -- and if you're not, you won't get to continue the game.
The only real problem I see with the game is that it's not always obvious to the player that they could have done something better and avoided dying. Then again, if it always told you what you did wrong, it would be too easy.
The other major thing that the permadeath feature does is make you be actually invested in the character. An RPG on a computer with savepoints, or a GM who's willing to fudge numbers to let the PCs handle the tough monster, can simply never inspire the same sense of fear for your character that nethack can.
Yep. You start with a pickaxe and bull whip. They're certainly not the easiest class to play, but they have their upsides.
You missed a big one: caps on skills. Different classes are restricted as to how far they can advance in different skills. Wizards and monks, for example, are the only classes that can reach Basic level in all spellcasting schools. Other classes do better with weapons and such.
On the contrary, I've been to both. I think they would generally agree that you should avoid it, but not get too stuck up about it -- at least until you finish your first ascension. But that doesn't mean they'll look down on you for it, and it certainly doesn't mean they don't do it...
If you're on level 10, you "gain" a level to end up at level 9. Doing this on level 1 has the same effect as going up the stairs, ie it's not normally what you want.
I think most veteran hackers would agree that looking at the source, along with most spoilers, is definitely cheating -- though some level of general advice is not. The definitely-not-cheating ways to learn about the game are explore mode and the oracle; both are quite informative without being overly spoiled. At the same time, I think the vast majority of players look at spoilers to some degree.
To anyone new to nethack out there: Give it an honest try without spoilers. Use them when you get stuck, but only in moderation. Nethack is fundamentally a game about discovering the rules; if you learn them all by reading, it's far less fun. Of course, remaining eternally clueless is no fun either. As in many things, moderation is the key.
My only ascension so far has been a wizard. I may try to ascend a monk for the tournament. Wizards with their spells have so many options, but they can be very fragile at times...
One of the things I love about nethack is that items (and monsters, and dungeon features...) interact with each other in so many ways. Wielding a cockatrice corpse as a weapon will make short work of many monsters -- as long as you're wearing gloves. Just be careful not to fall down the stairs because you're carrying too much load...
The lack of a save and restore feature is definitely one of the things that makes nethack work so well. After putting in several hours carefully figuring out which potions do what and collecting decent armor and weapons, that D down the hall will be far scarier than any gorgeously rendered 3D dragon. After all, it can actually kill your character, not just send you back to the last save point.
At first glance, nethack seems not just hard but outright sadistic (well, ok, it is, but bear with me). But, as you get to know it, you realize that it's not like many other RPGs. Rather than trying to acquire the single best collection of stuff you can, in nethack you're rewarded for having backup plans -- and backups to your backups. When you find yourself surrounded my monsters and low on HP and out of healing potions you might consider praying. If you've done that too recently, you might try a wand of teleport or digging to escape. And when you discover that those wands just ran out of charges, you'll be glad you didn't leave that cursed potion of gain level behind. (The cursed ones, rather than gaining a character level, make you gain a *dungeon* level.)
Combine the attention to detail with the huge variety of options for character class, general strategies, and the high game-to-game variability thanks to random dungeons levels with random items, and you get serious replay value.
That's still just a collision, not a preimage. The definition of a preimage attack is the ability to go from MD5(x1) to x2 such that MD5(x2) == MD5(x1). The fact that you can generate additional collisions once you've found the first has no (direct) bearing on your ability to work backwards. In order for your concatenation process to be useful, you somehow have to generate a and b such that one of them is the same as the start of your message text -- the current collision attacks give you very little control over either a or b, they simply produce a pair that's useful.
Hypocrisy is just poor ethics in a different setting. This shouldn't surprise you at all.
Right. The assertion is fallacious because dollars aren't being destroyed. Material goods, and indirectly the labor involved in producing them, and directly the labor our troos could be doing instead, is. Following the money trail is complicated (as you say, a mix of deficit spending and printing money), but the assertion that our economy would be better off if we weren't draining hundreds of billions worth of goods from it seems fairly obviously true. Reducing our spending in Iraq can only do good things for the economy at home.
When asked how he would run his presidency, Obama has said to look at how he runs his campaign. That campaign is a massive piece of organization, running remarkably smoothly. Obama is clearly in charge of it, but equally clearly knows how to find people experienced at doing the jobs that need doing and then supporting them as they do those jobs. One of the most important abilities a president can have is the ability to delegate well, knowing when to listen (and not listen!) to their advisors.
Obama may not have as much experience, but he has amply demonstrated the ability. An intelligent, thoughtful president who can make his administration run like that would be quite a thing to behold.
Ostensibly, Bob Barr is a Libertarian. To me, that should mean a smaller government that is less involved in my life. However, Barr has historically been in favor of things like bans on same sex marriage and medical marijuana. He claims to have changed stances on these things, but from someone who used to be a strong supporter I'd like to see more actual work in the direction of his newfound views before I trusted him with the presidency. I have a lot of respect for the ability to take an idealogical viewpoint like opposition to drugs, observe that it simply doesn't work, and change your position on it as a result -- but I need to see strong evidence that he really means it, and is willing to work for it, before voting for him for president. Let's see what he can do as a representative or state-level official first.
Sure, the dollars aren't destroyed -- but all that stuff is. The thing is, you don't have to compare government spending on war consumables to government spending on infrastructure. You can instead compare it to less government spending, resulting in individuals instead spending the money on things like sending their kids to college or corporations spending it on a new manufacturing plant. Every $B we spend on various things that go boom represents a few million hours of labor that didn't go into improving our lives back home. Sure, the dollars keep flowing around and around, but the labor cost the represent really did get used up in making a pretty fireball.
How often are towns of 10000 destroyed by natural disaster? How many terrorist groups or rogue nations have the ability to destroy a small town?
If someone does not know how to design a bridge, purports to be able to anyway (ie telling a falsehood for personal gain at the expense of others, an act of fraud), designs a bridge, and then that bridge collapses, we hold them criminally responsible -- even if they honestly believed they were capable of performing the task safely. Why should we treat elections as less important to our society? The engineering work that goes into the machinery involved should be held to the same standard.
(Of course, if someone is qualified, follows best practices, and makes no mistakes that should have been obvious at the time, and something still goes wrong -- then we investigate, but conclude that the mistake was notihng more than that. There's no need to hold voting machine engineers to a standard of perfection, but we should treat them the same as any other engineer with a task whos results are important to society.)
It is possible. Many places do it. Where I'll be voting (NC), that's the system in place. Paper ballot, make your mark in black ink, ballots are optically scanned. In the event of a recount, the paper ballots are the final arbiters.
Why doesn't everyone do it this way? I don't know. Clearly there are people who have disabilities that make the paper ballots difficult, and providing alternative means is appropriate. But the default should clearly be paper ballots and optical scanners.
You have to design systems for the users you have, not the ones you'd like to have. If your users will be around for a long time, perhaps you can try to do what you think is best for them rather than what works now -- but that's not the case in a voting booth.
In a voting booth, you have to take a purely pragmatic approach to UI design. Something that works is correct, and something that doesn't work is incorrect. If it doesn't work in a way that introduces systematic bias, then it should be treated not merely as bad UI design but vote fraud, even if there was no malicious intent. The people designing the UI claimed to be competent to do the job; making that claim falsely should not be taken lightly.
There's a reason the founding fathers gave the CIC position to a civilian office. It would make just as much sense to disqualify McCain because he *did* serve in the military.