My mail box (the one by the road, in meatspace) is full of local ads for things I throw away, sometimes the amount of actual paper spam to real mail is 10:1. It's ALREADY bad. All the local grocery stores that know my address by my little card I scan in for discounts, and every little shop in town gives me paper crap.
I drag a garbage can next to my mailbox and keep it there so I can sort faster.
If this catches on, advertisers will stop targetting people with the paper spam (they pay for) without first determining if they have a chance to sell to me.
but.... I block ads, use encryption, avoid a lot of general spyware, and practice safe webbing. What they know about me is based almost solely on amazon, web sites I bought from in the past, and google. meaning I'm gonna get adds for things I already bought, and will instantly toss or targetted ads for geek stuff in ways I don't mind.
I see this as DROPPING the amount of paper that winds up in the round file.
I do however pity the joe sixpack that doesn't know how to ad block, or visits intrusive sites like porn, It's gonna hit this poor guy like an explicitly embarrassing, ad-covered bus.
Not really no.... It took a little longer than a fast email note, but I built it pretty quick. and I kept dashing in and adding stuff every so often as I went about my day... that's kinda the point. I'd say it might be a multiple of time, but not logarithmic.
I do tend to leave a wave tab open in my browser, so I can see if someone has added stuff or sent me a message... but I'm starting to prefer it over Facebook for most of my "Hey guys, check this out" kinda stuff.
Yeah, there's a lot on wave I want to see an improvement on, but I really like it.
This message on slashdot took me longer to write, than a quick wave I sent to a friend with several pictures and a video on it. mostly due to the annoying way I check the formatting with the preview button.
no, I'm not... heh. I'm pretty techie. So is my wife. and so were most of the potluck attenders. but it really is pretty easy to do. I live in Seattle, and assist field techs in installing fttp. My wife works for a major RPG company, and half my friends work for big software companies based in Redmond, or big industrial facilities based in Everett.
but the real point here is that my mother in law, ex wife, and several friends are NOT technical, and were able to pick up what we created and use it fine.
as for working for Google... naw, but if they'd offer, I'd consider it.
I'm using wave to store character sheets, waves for each person detailing all of the rotes they have created,other waves for their background, and lists of "issues"... dice rollers, xp tallies, and most of all... a summary of the gaming sessions. these have pretty much turned into several novels, and are fun to read.
All of the group are tech savvy, very imaginative and wanna-be writers, so its a pretty kick ass game.
we play in person every friday night, and all of us update the wave afterwards.
I do all arete quests and side adventures in wave chat.
I do all my own notes in wave form as well, and I have several master waves, consisting mainly of a collection of links to other waves.
Since I have PDF's of all my ascencion books, I can run the entire game from a a hand held machine if I really wanted to.
last week my wife made a schedule for potluck plans, in a wave.
bulleted list of items, detailed dates and times, some friendly ribbing about doing the dishes, and a lot of things involving many other people.
she included me in the wave, but no one else at first.
some side bar sort of things got added, I sent some funny pics, we added a little "will you attend" applet, deleted the whole dishes thread, added the potluck menu items, and went back and corrected my spelling.
she looked over that, made a few more changes while I was watching this time, then added several other people to the wave.
they then looked at it... MORE side bar conversations happened,the potluck items started including pictures and diet information, and we got a rundown of who was coming.
an hour before the potluck, one person changed his rsvp, and several more people wanted to come, we added them to the wave, they saw the entire thread of events, and picked up complementary things from the store on the way over. we threw in a map. and used a sketching tool to draw on it.
I love wave.
the coolest thing about this is how seemless that all was. My mother in law, and several non-techy neighbors were able to puzzle out the entire thing and add to it with very little problem.
on a completely unrelated series of waves, I'm having political debates, discussing singularity related web-finds and running a hell of a mage game.
From what I gather, they figured out the gene sequence in flatworms for growing another head for a flatworm, and can do so consistently.
Since our genes are similar, they probably can figure out where the genes for growing a human head are, and *might* be able to use that info for regenerating damaged brain tissue
I see seventeen wireless networks where I live, each one of theose sees maybe one or two outside the local cluster... Can't we instantly and easily build a software program that creates an ad hoc LAN, then hooks into every unsecure router around it, allowing connection to the WAN from random routers at any given moment making it a nightmare to puzzle out a trail later? I'd continue to pay my current ISP for MY connection, but if I wanted to do something anonymous, what stops me from firing the program up, and connecting to anyone of a dozen routers near me? If you you had the right software, then you could have the unsecure router then connect to yet another router, farther away, before connecting to the net.
On a related note, If we build a big enough base of people doing this, we could probably build a peer to peer network that stretched for miles without ever actually getting onto the net at all, a darknet of epic proportions
Ever since watching the sixth sense TED conference, I've been wanting this, but I want the light projected in something you can't see unless you are wearing special glasses. That way the person I'm tagging doesn't know I've just printed on his chest that he's an idiot to avoid.
So the idea here is that a judge will decide what is and is not empirical scientific evidence? Isn't that a lot like asking a pastry chef to fix a design flaw on a mechanical blueprint for a helicopter fuel injector?
add filter toggles, let people call them "farms" and alow them to be rated accordingly.
I have no issue with power leveling.. I've done it a few times. this game is often about making MORE characters and doing it again.
I've got characters I'd deliberately left around level 30 because I like doing the sewer trial, or the Hess task force. I LIKE doing different things with different toons. I made a stalker JUST so I could use him to design MA missions, (invisible, so I can walk up to all my critters and check them "in mission")
Allow people to rate things as a farm, or as Fun, or as Too Hard or as Too Easy. HAVE a content rating, have a way to select missions with no AV's or not over level 10, or under level 40. Once it becomes clear what people want... THEN data mine these ratings to tweak the game.
If people rate everything as too easy, then leave the game... fix that.... but if the people rating it as farm keep playing (and giving the game money) then no problem, right?
The New Mission Architect stuff has totally renewed my interest in this game. I've designed two missions now:
"Dorothy is Dangerous" a Wizard of OZ themed map where munchkins and flying monkeys protect Dorothy, the Tin Man, ect.... as your team tries to take them out as a favor to the wicked witch...
And "Judgment" where ten Arch villains, each with very different abilities, are on the same map, and your team (or solo) tries to arrest the hell out of them. I've had only two people send me messages where they have successfuly Soloed the ten trials of Judgment. Both said they loved it.
Betcha some one can make a false gps pinger, and attach it to his own car so now the gps unit recieves and reports very innacurate info... he could even test it with his own reciever to make sure it is working. as long as it isn't affecting anyone elses stuff it wouldn't be illegal.
In about three hours I built a mission called "Dorothy is Dangerous", fleshed it out with a Wizard of Oz theme, had the wicked witch as a contact and had a team of supers taking on munchkins, flying monkeys, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and a massive boss battle to take down Dorothy. I've been tweaking it since to make it better. Other people send me input on my mission saying if they like it or not.
Since then I've played one story arc after another... most of them seem to be focussed on leveling the toon as fast as possible, but that's just one aspect. A LOT of them are simply fun little adventures to run people through.
Right now, I'm working on a Fairies vs Goblins battle where I expect to have a dozen flying fairies helping me defeat the goblin king at the end.(as you can tell, I have an eight year old daughter assisting me in my design choices).
I never played silent hill, but liked the imagery, and heard from someone it was based on a small town that had an underground coal mine catch fire.
I did some research and found out such a place really existed. Ever since then, Centrailia Pennsylvania has fueled many of my role playing game settings. Appaerently it caught fire many years ago, and has been burning ever since.
The Wayback machine can still read the archives.... it's basically a bunch of people, myself included, that did exactly that, put every random half baked idea they could into the public domain... I truly wish someone would start that website back up.
the URL was shouldexist.org its been down for a long time... meaning all ideas in there not patented at this time should now be prior art. Go. Invent these things. Do what I can't.
only if the monitor is relatively flat against the desktop, at a reasonable height to prevent wrist strain, and easy to access...
I don't want to reach past my keyboard all the time to touch the screen. and I certainly don't want to lose the haptic response and general precision of a keyboard.
If a touchcreen can handle 50 words per minute typing, and is as comfortable as a keyboard..... maybe.
wouldn't the easy way to fix this be to charge someone a yearly fee to keep a copyright active, with maybe the first 5 years free. and increase the fee by a significant amount each decade? That way greedy bastards get to keep Micky Mouse locked up forever, but might release older stuff that's not showing a profit and is now COSTING them money to hold onto.
Over time everything not making money goes into public domain, keeping both sides relatively happy.
I'd have the Library of Congress be the final decider of what is and is not public domain, and if you forget to pay your tax even once... it's public domain forever after.
get a hold of the logo, put it on patches, hats, socks, jewelry etc... get everyone to wear it... this will dilute the "brand" so the mongols won't want it, and send a message to police that that doesn't work, so they won't try controlling symbols again either. when the cops try to arrest a clueless teen fashion victim for wearing a picture the cops don't like, that will point out the futility of controlling images.
Slashdot Mirror
My mail box (the one by the road, in meatspace) is full of local ads for things I throw away, sometimes the amount of actual paper spam to real mail is 10:1. It's ALREADY bad. All the local grocery stores that know my address by my little card I scan in for discounts, and every little shop in town gives me paper crap.
I drag a garbage can next to my mailbox and keep it there so I can sort faster.
If this catches on, advertisers will stop targetting people with the paper spam (they pay for) without first determining if they have a chance to sell to me.
but.... I block ads, use encryption, avoid a lot of general spyware, and practice safe webbing. What they know about me is based almost solely on amazon, web sites I bought from in the past, and google. meaning I'm gonna get adds for things I already bought, and will instantly toss or targetted ads for geek stuff in ways I don't mind.
I see this as DROPPING the amount of paper that winds up in the round file.
I do however pity the joe sixpack that doesn't know how to ad block, or visits intrusive sites like porn, It's gonna hit this poor guy like an explicitly embarrassing, ad-covered bus.
Not really no.... It took a little longer than a fast email note, but I built it pretty quick. and I kept dashing in and adding stuff every so often as I went about my day... that's kinda the point. I'd say it might be a multiple of time, but not logarithmic.
I do tend to leave a wave tab open in my browser, so I can see if someone has added stuff or sent me a message... but I'm starting to prefer it over Facebook for most of my "Hey guys, check this out" kinda stuff.
Yeah, there's a lot on wave I want to see an improvement on, but I really like it.
This message on slashdot took me longer to write, than a quick wave I sent to a friend with several pictures and a video on it. mostly due to the annoying way I check the formatting with the preview button.
no, I'm not... heh. I'm pretty techie. So is my wife. and so were most of the potluck attenders. but it really is pretty easy to do. I live in Seattle, and assist field techs in installing fttp. My wife works for a major RPG company, and half my friends work for big software companies based in Redmond, or big industrial facilities based in Everett.
but the real point here is that my mother in law, ex wife, and several friends are NOT technical, and were able to pick up what we created and use it fine.
as for working for Google... naw, but if they'd offer, I'd consider it.
Disney just lost the rights to winnie the pooh?
I'm using wave to store character sheets, waves for each person detailing all of the rotes they have created,other waves for their background, and lists of "issues"... dice rollers, xp tallies, and most of all... a summary of the gaming sessions. these have pretty much turned into several novels, and are fun to read.
All of the group are tech savvy, very imaginative and wanna-be writers, so its a pretty kick ass game.
we play in person every friday night, and all of us update the wave afterwards.
I do all arete quests and side adventures in wave chat.
I do all my own notes in wave form as well, and I have several master waves, consisting mainly of a collection of links to other waves.
Since I have PDF's of all my ascencion books, I can run the entire game from a a hand held machine if I really wanted to.
last week my wife made a schedule for potluck plans, in a wave.
bulleted list of items, detailed dates and times, some friendly ribbing about doing the dishes, and a lot of things involving many other people.
she included me in the wave, but no one else at first.
some side bar sort of things got added, I sent some funny pics, we added a little "will you attend" applet, deleted the whole dishes thread, added the potluck menu items, and went back and corrected my spelling.
she looked over that, made a few more changes while I was watching this time, then added several other people to the wave.
they then looked at it... MORE side bar conversations happened,the potluck items started including pictures and diet information, and we got a rundown of who was coming.
an hour before the potluck, one person changed his rsvp, and several more people wanted to come, we added them to the wave, they saw the entire thread of events, and picked up complementary things from the store on the way over. we threw in a map. and used a sketching tool to draw on it.
I love wave.
the coolest thing about this is how seemless that all was. My mother in law, and several non-techy neighbors were able to puzzle out the entire thing and add to it with very little problem.
on a completely unrelated series of waves, I'm having political debates, discussing singularity related web-finds and running a hell of a mage game.
From what I gather, they figured out the gene sequence in flatworms for growing another head for a flatworm, and can do so consistently.
Since our genes are similar, they probably can figure out where the genes for growing a human head are, and *might* be able to use that info for regenerating damaged brain tissue
No zaphod's anytime soon.
what the hell happened to that moon colony? And the cyborg uprising?
I see seventeen wireless networks where I live, each one of theose sees maybe one or two outside the local cluster... Can't we instantly and easily build a software program that creates an ad hoc LAN, then hooks into every unsecure router around it, allowing connection to the WAN from random routers at any given moment making it a nightmare to puzzle out a trail later? I'd continue to pay my current ISP for MY connection, but if I wanted to do something anonymous, what stops me from firing the program up, and connecting to anyone of a dozen routers near me? If you you had the right software, then you could have the unsecure router then connect to yet another router, farther away, before connecting to the net.
On a related note, If we build a big enough base of people doing this, we could probably build a peer to peer network that stretched for miles without ever actually getting onto the net at all, a darknet of epic proportions
Ever since watching the sixth sense TED conference, I've been wanting this, but I want the light projected in something you can't see unless you are wearing special glasses. That way the person I'm tagging doesn't know I've just printed on his chest that he's an idiot to avoid.
So the idea here is that a judge will decide what is and is not empirical scientific evidence? Isn't that a lot like asking a pastry chef to fix a design flaw on a mechanical blueprint for a helicopter fuel injector?
Good: actions that help others at your own expense.
Evil: actions that help yourself by harming others
Stupid: actions that harm others with no benefit to yourself
Intelligent: actions that benefit both yourself and others.
This implies that it's better to act intelligent than good. and better to act evil than stupid.
I think we should start mailing checks for 8 1/2 cents....
LOTS of checks.... no particular reason we need to combine them all into one big check, it doesn't cost us anything to mail separate checks.
How much does it cost them to process a check nowadays? 10 cents?
No reason we should have to spend anything on postage either....
add filter toggles, let people call them "farms" and alow them to be rated accordingly.
I have no issue with power leveling.. I've done it a few times. this game is often about making MORE characters and doing it again.
I've got characters I'd deliberately left around level 30 because I like doing the sewer trial, or the Hess task force. I LIKE doing different things with different toons. I made a stalker JUST so I could use him to design MA missions, (invisible, so I can walk up to all my critters and check them "in mission")
Allow people to rate things as a farm, or as Fun, or as Too Hard or as Too Easy. HAVE a content rating, have a way to select missions with no AV's or not over level 10, or under level 40. Once it becomes clear what people want... THEN data mine these ratings to tweak the game.
If people rate everything as too easy, then leave the game... fix that.... but if the people rating it as farm keep playing (and giving the game money) then no problem, right?
The New Mission Architect stuff has totally renewed my interest in this game. I've designed two missions now:
"Dorothy is Dangerous" a Wizard of OZ themed map where munchkins and flying monkeys protect Dorothy, the Tin Man, ect.... as your team tries to take them out as a favor to the wicked witch...
And "Judgment" where ten Arch villains, each with very different abilities, are on the same map, and your team (or solo) tries to arrest the hell out of them. I've had only two people send me messages where they have successfuly Soloed the ten trials of Judgment. Both said they loved it.
Betcha some one can make a false gps pinger, and attach it to his own car so now the gps unit recieves and reports very innacurate info... he could even test it with his own reciever to make sure it is working. as long as it isn't affecting anyone elses stuff it wouldn't be illegal.
Mission Architect is fun... really fun.
In about three hours I built a mission called "Dorothy is Dangerous", fleshed it out with a Wizard of Oz theme, had the wicked witch as a contact and had a team of supers taking on munchkins, flying monkeys, the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, and a massive boss battle to take down Dorothy. I've been tweaking it since to make it better. Other people send me input on my mission saying if they like it or not.
Since then I've played one story arc after another... most of them seem to be focussed on leveling the toon as fast as possible, but that's just one aspect. A LOT of them are simply fun little adventures to run people through.
Right now, I'm working on a Fairies vs Goblins battle where I expect to have a dozen flying fairies helping me defeat the goblin king at the end.(as you can tell, I have an eight year old daughter assisting me in my design choices).
I'm having a blast.
I never played silent hill, but liked the imagery, and heard from someone it was based on a small town that had an underground coal mine catch fire.
I did some research and found out such a place really existed. Ever since then, Centrailia Pennsylvania has fueled many of my role playing game settings. Appaerently it caught fire many years ago, and has been burning ever since.
Wow.
The Wayback machine can still read the archives.... it's basically a bunch of people, myself included, that did exactly that, put every random half baked idea they could into the public domain... I truly wish someone would start that website back up.
the URL was shouldexist.org its been down for a long time... meaning all ideas in there not patented at this time should now be prior art. Go. Invent these things. Do what I can't.
Laston Kirkland.
only if the monitor is relatively flat against the desktop, at a reasonable height to prevent wrist strain, and easy to access...
I don't want to reach past my keyboard all the time to touch the screen. and I certainly don't want to lose the haptic response and general precision of a keyboard.
If a touchcreen can handle 50 words per minute typing, and is as comfortable as a keyboard..... maybe.
wouldn't the easy way to fix this be to charge someone a yearly fee to keep a copyright active, with maybe the first 5 years free. and increase the fee by a significant amount each decade? That way greedy bastards get to keep Micky Mouse locked up forever, but might release older stuff that's not showing a profit and is now COSTING them money to hold onto.
Over time everything not making money goes into public domain, keeping both sides relatively happy.
I'd have the Library of Congress be the final decider of what is and is not public domain, and if you forget to pay your tax even once... it's public domain forever after.
get a hold of the logo, put it on patches, hats, socks, jewelry etc... get everyone to wear it... this will dilute the "brand" so the mongols won't want it, and send a message to police that that doesn't work, so they won't try controlling symbols again either. when the cops try to arrest a clueless teen fashion victim for wearing a picture the cops don't like, that will point out the futility of controlling images.
cue techies around the world trying to create a rubber band refrigerator. Heh, sounds like fun.
Can you wash the disks before you play them?
for instance
Pirates
Lilliput people in a world of giants
Steampunk
Film noir detectives
Roger rabbit toon land
Wonderland
Oz
Anthropomorhic animals in a low tech world
and that's what I thought up in about 3 minutes. Try other things, dammit.