I don't know about you but I can't seem to find ANY studies besides the one done by the 9th graders on the effects of wifi on low order plants.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02861092 finding that under 60kW of radiation of the same type as wifi, 90+ hours of exposure is required to prevent plant growth over a radius of 50 metres. So say you're looking at 900 hours exposure (i.e. about the length of time the referenced expirement would have taken) and for simplicities sake 60mW (which is more power than a wifi router actually emits), the radius receiving plant-killing levels of exposure would be about 0.5cm. If you put your plants right on top of the router, they may suffer a touch. Otherwise, they'll be fine -- which suggests something went wrong in the reported experiment other than wireless interference with the plants.
Yeah, actually if someone is bad enough to make the NSA's top 10 list,
If they can break keys in "a few hours", you don't have to make their top 10 list for them to break your key. "A few hours" per key = a few thousand keys per year. With most targets staying under scrutiny for multiple years, this means you probably only have to be in the top 10,000 to have your keys cracked. I'd imagine it's fairly easy to end up there by mistake.
I've not heard of a Key Lime Pie before (I'm British).
Really? They're in Tesco in the refrigerated dessert isle, right next to the cheesecakes. Live a little, wander around a supermarket and try something you've never tried before. I did that last week and ended up with a tub of Marshmallow Fluff. Hope they consider that in a couple of versions time...:)
This might be true of dark chocolate, but British milk chocolate is evil, at least as far as I've experienced it at import stores.
If you mean "dairy milk" it is worth noting the legal battle that Cadbury's have had over whether it can actually be called chocolate or not (it has too high a proportion of non-cocoa-originating fats for at least some definitions). It apparently cannot be sold as chocolate in the US, and the EU were considering implementing similar rules at one point (although a compromise was apparently reached). By US labeling requirements, it would have to be sold as a chocolate-flavoured bar containing partially-hydrogenated vegetable fats. The stuff Hershey's sell under the same branding is completely different, and is actually chocolate.
Most of us brits with taste consider it an embarrassment to the nation, and are rather glad that Kraft have taken over -- they can keep it, now it's not *really* British any more. We're happy to have Thorntons as the only remaining nationally-distributed British-owned chocolate manufacturer, so we can now claim to make some passably-good chocolate, even if it's not *quite* as good as the Swiss or Belgian stuff.:)
"Coverity fails to detect errors in python" would be my headline of choice here. Seem a much more reasonable explanation for the results.
Or, to put it another way, "static analysis tool fails to detect many potential errors in code whose authors use the same static analysis tool to find and fix potential errors." Which is hardly surprising.
A polygraph is not complete pseudoscience. There's a definite correlation between the various factors measured and lying.
There is a study that keeps being brought out to justify the use of polygraphs in job applicant security screening. The only problem is that the study was studying an entirely different use of polygraphs (determining whether the test subject performed a specific act where direct physical evidence is available), and security screening is known to be an area where they have substantially lower accuracy -- and they only just barely managed to be better than chance in the study. Paraphrasing the words of the American Psychological Association, there has never been a study examining the use of polygraphs for security screening which is not methodologically flawed, and there is no known physiological reaction to lying that cannot also be caused by other effects (e.g. stressful situations, particularly like you might experience in, say, an interview for a job you really really want). So, no, at least for the purpose under discussion here: polygraphs *are* complete pseudoscience, and there is no statistically significant correlation that has been demonstrated in a methodologically sound scientific study.
I agree that's a complete dick move on their part. But when you see "We may, from time to time at our sole discretion and without notice or liability, create, amend, change, or delete any content from the IGP Offerings." at the top of their terms, that should raise a *huge* red flag before you reach for your wallet in the first place.
I don't know about your jurisdiction, but mine has "unfair contract terms" legislation. One of the Act's cited examples of a term which is unfair and therefore not enforceable in any contract is a term which:
has the object or effect of [...] enabling the seller or supplier to alter unilaterally without a valid reason any characteristics of the product or service to be provided
Quoting from government advice on interpretation of this law:
Where circumstances could prevent the supply of the goods or services agreed (or a version of them that the consumer has indicated is acceptable) then the consumer should be able to cancel the contract, and receive a refund of prepayments.
A term which could allow the supplier to vary what is supplied at will – rather than because of bona fide external circumstances – is unlikely to be fair even if customers have a right of cancellation and refund. The consumer should never have to choose between accepting a product that is not what was agreed, or suffering the inconvenience of unexpectedly not getting, for example, goods for which he or she may have an immediate need, or a long-planned holiday, just because it suits the supplier not to supply what was promised.
If you have similar legislation in your jurisdiction, you may want to challenge the decision not to supply what you paid for in court. You may be entitled not just to a refund, but also compensation.
IANAL; this is not legal advice; consult a legal professional before commencing court proceedings; etc.
So, what you're saying is that there is a game mechanic (the XP system) whose effects are to make the game less fun by turning it into work, but which you can pay real money to lessen, and you don't see that as a problem?
Different people have different tolerances for repetitive play, and different amounts of free time that they can spend on it. People with less free time have a tendency to want to advance faster so that they can enjoy different parts of the game; people with more free time tend to prefer to take progress through the game at a more leisurely rate so they can enjoy it for longer. While I haven't played this particular game, it is usual for the cash shop in free-to-play (and even sometimes non-free) games to sell ways to modify your progression rate, increasing it or even in some cases decreasing it (I know several players in LOTRO, for example, who have paid for the ability to stop gaining XP in order to allow a single character to complete all the quests at each level, which is not normally possible because you gain XP too quickly and there are many quests; the item costs about $5, so it's a non-trivial purchase, but some people find it lets them enjoy the game better, so...).
Except that in my case, my friends and I decided to start our own company. We're building a MMO.
Everyone's building an MMO. It seems to be the default I-want-to-make-this-kind-of-game genre (just like building an OS is the default for big software engineering projects -- just look how many hobbyist OSs there are out there!). Perhaps you shouldn't let this discourage you, but still worth thinking about.
If we're onto book recommendations, there are a couple more:
A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster. If you read his blog, it turns out there's a new edition due out soon, so may be worth waiting for it, but this is the seminal title on what it is that makes games fun.
Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle. Bartle co-developed the first MUD, which of course was the inspiration that eventually led to the development of the first MMOs, so this book is actually pretty indispensible for an MMO developer, I reckon. Goes into a lot of nitty-gritty about how a typical MMO actually works.
I was listening to the radio last night and they reported the top job desired by children is that of reality star. I see this in a number of high school and college graduates as well. They want to be a star working at a star company. For jobs that do not really create anything, CEO, lawyer, doctor, that is OK. But for an engineer, who should be innovating everyday things that makes our lives better, that should be making the world safer, it does. Of course a game developer is likely more like a lawyer than an engineer, but still. I would say find somewhere you can make a difference, not somewhere you can be a star. It is not a bad thing to know that you went into work and did something meaningful. Of course that could happen a Blizzard. But if someone is offerring you a job at a firm where what you do matters, and you are getting well compensated, I think that is a good thing.
I think working on a project that would likely make millions of people happy (even if only for a few hours each) is pretty damned meaningful. Sure, entertainment isn't life-or-death, but it's got to be more rewarding than, say, accountancy.
It is also quite likely that advocating or promoting suicide is a violation of the terms of service.
To be honest, I don't see anything advocating or promoting suicide. I see him explaining his reasonings in rather clear terms and as such I'd classify it as a discussion about suicide. There is a difference between discussion and active advocation and/or promotion.
There's a page on the site that outlines a list of possible methods and reasons why you would choose one or the other of them. Sure, it's in the context of how he decided what method to use for himself, but it can be read as instructional for other people, which is a clear violation of Yahoo's ToS.
Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service, sudden death of a party is a sleazy way to weasel out of a service contract.
Unless he violates the terms of service.
10.1 Prohibited Uses [...] You agree that you will not: [...] (p) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals.
A section of his site was instructions on how to commit suicide, which is an illegal act in many (most?) jurisdictions.
You can treat them however you like cycle-wise and you'll get about the same total lifespan out of them
This isn't entirely true. See the graph here (the page is mostly about lead-acids, but as the author states the graph in question is valid for li-ion, just with a different scale). Look at a couple of data points towards either edge of the graph, for example, 20% and 80% depth-of-discharge. At 20%, the battery the author is describing gets 3,300 cycles whereas at 80% it gets 675. Assuming the battery has a 1Ah capacity (for simplicity of calculation) this means that with 20% DOD you get a total battery life of 660Ah but at 80% you only get 540Ah. That's nearly a 20% difference in lifespan.
If it was under warranty you could have them do the work for free.
"the AppleCare Protection Plan for notebook computers does not cover batteries that have failed or are exhibiting diminished capacity except when the failure or diminished capacity is the result of a manufacturing defect" (source).
...that's about the most stupid thing you could do.
"X" hours? I don't need to get up to plug the charger in. So why is this the most stupid thing I could do?
Because most batteries last much longer if you don't discharge them as far. So charge them whenever you can and they're not nearly full. About 80%-90% is probably the best place to start, not 10%.
Evidence suggests that scaling quantum computing to the large number of qubits required to decrypt 2kbit RSA would be extraordinarily expensive, if possible at all. The largest quantum computer[1] built so far outside of secret institutions has, I believe, 14 qubits (I may be a little out-of-date, but not by a long way). Scaling has occurred at a fairly constant linear rate of about 1 qubit per annum since the earliest machines were produced. There's no signs of an exponential take-off the way there was with conventional computing hardware, which suggests that the expense of scaling to larger and larger quantum computers doesn't get decrease the way it does with silicon.
Some data points:
1998: 3 qubits 2000: 5 qubits 2001: 7 qubits (largest achieved to date with single atom containing all qubits in different degrees of freedom) 2005: 8 qubits 2006: 12 qubits 2011: 14 qubits
This is the best private industry can do. I'd be surprised if the NSA were doing more than a factor of 10 better. To crack 2048-bit RSA, about 3000 qubits would be required[2], or about 20 times my best guess as the limit of what the NSA could have achieved. Besides, Shor's algorithm is not instant: even if it's faster than any classical algorithm, it's still third-order polynomial on the number of bits in the input, and quantum computers don't perform individual operations particularly quickly, so even if we assume the NSA has managed to make a quantum computer that's a thousand times faster per operation than existing private systems, to factor a 2048-bit RSA key on a 3,000 qubit computer would take about 8.6 billion operations running at about 10-100us each, which is to say approximately 1 to 10 days of time on the (enormously expensive) system (of which they almost certainly only have one, which will therefore have a very long prioritized queue of jobs waiting for it).
And upgrade to 4096 bits, and they'll need a quantum computer with 6,000 qubits, and the job will take somewhere between a week and three months to complete.
[1] I'm excluding so-called quantum annealing computers from this, e.g. various systems produced by D-Wave, because they cannot be used to run Shor's algorithm, so are not a threat to RSA. This is not so much an entry into the debate as to whether or not they should be classified as quantum computers, but a practical decision based on the subject under discussion. [2] traditionally, this would be 4096 (twice the number of bits in the input), but this arxiv paper claims 1.5 x bits in input or fewer is achievable through a method I don't really understand
Yes, they surrendered data with a court order. Pretty-much any service provider in most countries will, and when there's actual evidence of serious crimes tied to your identity it's easy to get such a court order in most countries. These were targeted, court-approved disclosures, which is a very, very different thing from massive unwarranted trawling.
Also: if you avoid their javascript-based interface and use the java applet, they still *can't* disclose your emails, as they are never available unencrypted on their server.
Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?
Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you but I can't seem to find ANY studies besides the one done by the 9th graders on the effects of wifi on low order plants.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02861092 finding that under 60kW of radiation of the same type as wifi, 90+ hours of exposure is required to prevent plant growth over a radius of 50 metres. So say you're looking at 900 hours exposure (i.e. about the length of time the referenced expirement would have taken) and for simplicities sake 60mW (which is more power than a wifi router actually emits), the radius receiving plant-killing levels of exposure would be about 0.5cm. If you put your plants right on top of the router, they may suffer a touch. Otherwise, they'll be fine -- which suggests something went wrong in the reported experiment other than wireless interference with the plants.
He stopped helping that customer after the comment
No, he didn't. According to the story I read, he installed another hide in a separate vehicle after seeing the drug money and realising what it was.
Each person may have more than one key...
Many people may have no keys at all.
Yeah, actually if someone is bad enough to make the NSA's top 10 list,
If they can break keys in "a few hours", you don't have to make their top 10 list for them to break your key. "A few hours" per key = a few thousand keys per year. With most targets staying under scrutiny for multiple years, this means you probably only have to be in the top 10,000 to have your keys cracked. I'd imagine it's fairly easy to end up there by mistake.
I've not heard of a Key Lime Pie before (I'm British).
Really? They're in Tesco in the refrigerated dessert isle, right next to the cheesecakes. Live a little, wander around a supermarket and try something you've never tried before. I did that last week and ended up with a tub of Marshmallow Fluff. Hope they consider that in a couple of versions time... :)
This might be true of dark chocolate, but British milk chocolate is evil, at least as far as I've experienced it at import stores.
If you mean "dairy milk" it is worth noting the legal battle that Cadbury's have had over whether it can actually be called chocolate or not (it has too high a proportion of non-cocoa-originating fats for at least some definitions). It apparently cannot be sold as chocolate in the US, and the EU were considering implementing similar rules at one point (although a compromise was apparently reached). By US labeling requirements, it would have to be sold as a chocolate-flavoured bar containing partially-hydrogenated vegetable fats. The stuff Hershey's sell under the same branding is completely different, and is actually chocolate.
Most of us brits with taste consider it an embarrassment to the nation, and are rather glad that Kraft have taken over -- they can keep it, now it's not *really* British any more. We're happy to have Thorntons as the only remaining nationally-distributed British-owned chocolate manufacturer, so we can now claim to make some passably-good chocolate, even if it's not *quite* as good as the Swiss or Belgian stuff. :)
Some would argue that having a codebase that's so hard to understand that static analysis tools get confused about what it does is a bug in itself.
"Coverity fails to detect errors in python" would be my headline of choice here. Seem a much more reasonable explanation for the results.
Or, to put it another way, "static analysis tool fails to detect many potential errors in code whose authors use the same static analysis tool to find and fix potential errors." Which is hardly surprising.
Is "ostensible" a word in American English?
Ostensibly.
A polygraph is not complete pseudoscience. There's a definite correlation between the various factors measured and lying.
There is a study that keeps being brought out to justify the use of polygraphs in job applicant security screening. The only problem is that the study was studying an entirely different use of polygraphs (determining whether the test subject performed a specific act where direct physical evidence is available), and security screening is known to be an area where they have substantially lower accuracy -- and they only just barely managed to be better than chance in the study. Paraphrasing the words of the American Psychological Association, there has never been a study examining the use of polygraphs for security screening which is not methodologically flawed, and there is no known physiological reaction to lying that cannot also be caused by other effects (e.g. stressful situations, particularly like you might experience in, say, an interview for a job you really really want). So, no, at least for the purpose under discussion here: polygraphs *are* complete pseudoscience, and there is no statistically significant correlation that has been demonstrated in a methodologically sound scientific study.
I agree that's a complete dick move on their part. But when you see "We may, from time to time at our sole discretion and without notice or liability, create, amend, change, or delete any content from the IGP Offerings." at the top of their terms, that should raise a *huge* red flag before you reach for your wallet in the first place.
I don't know about your jurisdiction, but mine has "unfair contract terms" legislation. One of the Act's cited examples of a term which is unfair and therefore not enforceable in any contract is a term which:
Quoting from government advice on interpretation of this law:
If you have similar legislation in your jurisdiction, you may want to challenge the decision not to supply what you paid for in court. You may be entitled not just to a refund, but also compensation.
IANAL; this is not legal advice; consult a legal professional before commencing court proceedings; etc.
So, what you're saying is that there is a game mechanic (the XP system) whose effects are to make the game less fun by turning it into work, but which you can pay real money to lessen, and you don't see that as a problem?
Different people have different tolerances for repetitive play, and different amounts of free time that they can spend on it. People with less free time have a tendency to want to advance faster so that they can enjoy different parts of the game; people with more free time tend to prefer to take progress through the game at a more leisurely rate so they can enjoy it for longer. While I haven't played this particular game, it is usual for the cash shop in free-to-play (and even sometimes non-free) games to sell ways to modify your progression rate, increasing it or even in some cases decreasing it (I know several players in LOTRO, for example, who have paid for the ability to stop gaining XP in order to allow a single character to complete all the quests at each level, which is not normally possible because you gain XP too quickly and there are many quests; the item costs about $5, so it's a non-trivial purchase, but some people find it lets them enjoy the game better, so...).
Except that in my case, my friends and I decided to start our own company. We're building a MMO.
Everyone's building an MMO. It seems to be the default I-want-to-make-this-kind-of-game genre (just like building an OS is the default for big software engineering projects -- just look how many hobbyist OSs there are out there!). Perhaps you shouldn't let this discourage you, but still worth thinking about.
If we're onto book recommendations, there are a couple more:
A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster. If you read his blog, it turns out there's a new edition due out soon, so may be worth waiting for it, but this is the seminal title on what it is that makes games fun.
Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle. Bartle co-developed the first MUD, which of course was the inspiration that eventually led to the development of the first MMOs, so this book is actually pretty indispensible for an MMO developer, I reckon. Goes into a lot of nitty-gritty about how a typical MMO actually works.
I was listening to the radio last night and they reported the top job desired by children is that of reality star. I see this in a number of high school and college graduates as well. They want to be a star working at a star company. For jobs that do not really create anything, CEO, lawyer, doctor, that is OK. But for an engineer, who should be innovating everyday things that makes our lives better, that should be making the world safer, it does. Of course a game developer is likely more like a lawyer than an engineer, but still. I would say find somewhere you can make a difference, not somewhere you can be a star. It is not a bad thing to know that you went into work and did something meaningful. Of course that could happen a Blizzard. But if someone is offerring you a job at a firm where what you do matters, and you are getting well compensated, I think that is a good thing.
I think working on a project that would likely make millions of people happy (even if only for a few hours each) is pretty damned meaningful. Sure, entertainment isn't life-or-death, but it's got to be more rewarding than, say, accountancy.
It is also quite likely that advocating or promoting suicide is a violation of the terms of service.
To be honest, I don't see anything advocating or promoting suicide. I see him explaining his reasonings in rather clear terms and as such I'd classify it as a discussion about suicide. There is a difference between discussion and active advocation and/or promotion.
There's a page on the site that outlines a list of possible methods and reasons why you would choose one or the other of them. Sure, it's in the context of how he decided what method to use for himself, but it can be read as instructional for other people, which is a clear violation of Yahoo's ToS.
Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service, sudden death of a party is a sleazy way to weasel out of a service contract.
Unless he violates the terms of service.
A section of his site was instructions on how to commit suicide, which is an illegal act in many (most?) jurisdictions.
You can treat them however you like cycle-wise and you'll get about the same total lifespan out of them
This isn't entirely true. See the graph here (the page is mostly about lead-acids, but as the author states the graph in question is valid for li-ion, just with a different scale). Look at a couple of data points towards either edge of the graph, for example, 20% and 80% depth-of-discharge. At 20%, the battery the author is describing gets 3,300 cycles whereas at 80% it gets 675. Assuming the battery has a 1Ah capacity (for simplicity of calculation) this means that with 20% DOD you get a total battery life of 660Ah but at 80% you only get 540Ah. That's nearly a 20% difference in lifespan.
If it was under warranty you could have them do the work for free.
"the AppleCare Protection Plan for notebook computers does not cover batteries that have failed or are exhibiting diminished capacity except when the failure or diminished capacity is the result of a manufacturing defect" (source).
It definitely isn't rocket surgery.
But is it brain science?
...that's about the most stupid thing you could do.
"X" hours? I don't need to get up to plug the charger in. So why is this the most stupid thing I could do?
Because most batteries last much longer if you don't discharge them as far. So charge them whenever you can and they're not nearly full. About 80%-90% is probably the best place to start, not 10%.
Evidence suggests that scaling quantum computing to the large number of qubits required to decrypt 2kbit RSA would be extraordinarily expensive, if possible at all. The largest quantum computer[1] built so far outside of secret institutions has, I believe, 14 qubits (I may be a little out-of-date, but not by a long way). Scaling has occurred at a fairly constant linear rate of about 1 qubit per annum since the earliest machines were produced. There's no signs of an exponential take-off the way there was with conventional computing hardware, which suggests that the expense of scaling to larger and larger quantum computers doesn't get decrease the way it does with silicon.
Some data points:
1998: 3 qubits
2000: 5 qubits
2001: 7 qubits (largest achieved to date with single atom containing all qubits in different degrees of freedom)
2005: 8 qubits
2006: 12 qubits
2011: 14 qubits
This is the best private industry can do. I'd be surprised if the NSA were doing more than a factor of 10 better. To crack 2048-bit RSA, about 3000 qubits would be required[2], or about 20 times my best guess as the limit of what the NSA could have achieved. Besides, Shor's algorithm is not instant: even if it's faster than any classical algorithm, it's still third-order polynomial on the number of bits in the input, and quantum computers don't perform individual operations particularly quickly, so even if we assume the NSA has managed to make a quantum computer that's a thousand times faster per operation than existing private systems, to factor a 2048-bit RSA key on a 3,000 qubit computer would take about 8.6 billion operations running at about 10-100us each, which is to say approximately 1 to 10 days of time on the (enormously expensive) system (of which they almost certainly only have one, which will therefore have a very long prioritized queue of jobs waiting for it).
And upgrade to 4096 bits, and they'll need a quantum computer with 6,000 qubits, and the job will take somewhere between a week and three months to complete.
[1] I'm excluding so-called quantum annealing computers from this, e.g. various systems produced by D-Wave, because they cannot be used to run Shor's algorithm, so are not a threat to RSA. This is not so much an entry into the debate as to whether or not they should be classified as quantum computers, but a practical decision based on the subject under discussion.
[2] traditionally, this would be 4096 (twice the number of bits in the input), but this arxiv paper claims 1.5 x bits in input or fewer is achievable through a method I don't really understand
Yes, they surrendered data with a court order. Pretty-much any service provider in most countries will, and when there's actual evidence of serious crimes tied to your identity it's easy to get such a court order in most countries. These were targeted, court-approved disclosures, which is a very, very different thing from massive unwarranted trawling.
Also: if you avoid their javascript-based interface and use the java applet, they still *can't* disclose your emails, as they are never available unencrypted on their server.
It won't cure range anxiety totally though, it only has a 2.4 gallon fuel tank.
That should cure range anxiety completely: it is more than enough to get you home, however far you've driven on the batteries.
Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?
Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
I didn't realise the aliens were involved in a massive accountancy war.