I remember hearing about this too. My impression was they weren't released here(US), only in Japan. I've been trying to find a link for a couple minutes, so far with no success. Anyone have more info?
this provides a great solution for a "white list" of ok sites
I once heard about an ongoing project of finding paths through the web. The objective was to take any web site and within seven clicks on links arrive at a porn site. Last I heard, the government of New Zealand web site was the only one for which they hadn't succeeded. Adjusting the content (removing links that aren't on the whitelist, to satisfy the link requirement) of a web site based on which TLD the domain was requested as isn't terribly difficult to do, but will the adoption of this be so widespread as to warrant very many sites doing it? In my opinion, no. I like the idea of a non-kid friendly TLD much better; at that point filtering in large part becomes trivial.
Another thing, how does the government determine what material is acceptible for children? Obviously some things are right out, but what about for instance a Tom and Jerry cartoon with animated violence? How much is too much? What about the purists that say "I'd rather have my child watch two people making love than two people trying to kill each other"? The definition of 'acceptable' varies widely from parent to parent, culture to culture, and I don't think you can appease them all at once, not by a long way. Better to organize things into catagories such as ".xxx" and let parents figure out what they want their kids to see.
Here's the quote. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
I agree with you, the TiVo doesn't "think" anything. Thinking implies the ability to take limited data and draw logical conclusions (I have yet to hear of a machine that can do that outside of the purely mathematical sense). All it sees two catagories and returns other results in those same catagories, and possibly weights programs that fall into more than one; it has no concept that those catagories are or cannot be related. What it's doing is more along the lines of "User's interest list:..., gay,..., pregnancy,..."
So I won't see the site.. not my loss but ultimately theirs
If anyone out there would like to prove that to them start sucking down the rejection page at a couple megs a second. Oh wait, the/. editors already initiated that...
Been there done that, sorta...
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 2
I wrote an IRC bot a couple years ago after finding an javascript ALICE web bot, and after seeing mine a friend of mine did as well, both of them talk. Mine goes by a 'save part of the line and spit it back in a new form' approach (prone to errors but a more right way to go), whereas his has a huge database of responses to specific words/phrases (not prone to grammar errors, but less sophisticated), a couple weeks ago we decided to put them in a channel together and have them chat it up (yes I've read the RFC and I know you're not suppose to do this). My bot is named Bananas, my friend's is mini-para, and he is paranOia. The source (GPLed, of course) and necessary files to run it, along with the semi-humorous log of that chat are here. The bot chat features still need a lot of work and more patterns and responses to them, but it's been an interesting and fun project on the whole.
I hope so too, considering: -Smoke rises -The thing is 700mm tall (~28 inches) -My bed is about the same height or higher So if I'm in bed (you'd think I would be if I'm having this thing patrol my house, but then again it probably makes a lot of noise) I'll be dead of smoke inhalation before its warnings go off if it didn't detect more than just a high concentration of smoke.
And speaking of its dimensions, did anyone else notice how big this thing is? A meter long, and almost as tall and wide. A lot of people are making fun of the "home security" concept but given a threatening posture, its size, and composition (its a goddamn robot), it may be more effective at scaring off burglars than one might think (though there are definitely some serious questions remaining there). My question is, whats to stop the burglars from stealing this really novel (read: expensive) looking piece of equipment?
Actually, this guy has proven possible half the first person shooters on the market today. "Lets check my inventory. Pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, minigun, chainsaw, flamethrower, railgun, 6 ft claymore sword, M1A1 Abrams, deck mounted battleship cannon, small country, and 15 trillion rounds of ammunition for each... all of it fits conveniently into my armor/trench coat/pants pockets. MWHAHAHA."
Windows isn't a OS... it is a glorified application launcher...
If you're referencing that Windows sits on top of DOS, you're only partially right. All the NT based versions (2k, XP, NT, maybe ME but I don't think so) don't.
My college protects grades a similar way before they're released, last semester I started publishing a form in my web space (hosted on their server:)) that allows you to get your grades (presumably) as soon as they're scanned in, several days before their intended release. I don't know if anyone on staff noticed and/or cared; it may be that the official release time is just there to prevent complaining about "she got her grades before I could". All that was required to make the form was stripping down their grade submit page and changing one of the options in a select.
Ah, I see. I've taken care of this problem with my standard mouse my setting the mouse sensitivity to five times (yes, five) the default. Fine movements get more difficult, but a few extra key binds to a couple lower sensitivities can take care of that; and after you get used to it you only need them for sniping.
And with a desktop mouse you're still taking your hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, off the mouse, and repositioning over the keyboard.
What??? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but when I'm playing games (I'll use my FPS config as an example), my left hand is on the mouse (I'm left handed), my right is positioned with my ring finger on the up arrow, my thumb on >, and my index finger on enter (some keyboards vary), and my handsnever move aside from my fingers moving slightly to hit different keys, I think 'm' is the farthest my thumb ever has to move, and its set to a command I don't need very often. Games like every modern First Person Shooter allow you to change keys for a reason. If you're using the default binds or some silly configuration where you're moving your hands you're going to lose to someone who isn't. Hardcore games are won and lost by milliseconds, and hardcore players carefully craft their control configurations accordingly.
So you would sit there and shoot a guy a bunch of times and then it would turn out he was a teammate (unless of coruse friendly fire was on, heheh).
You couldn't turn friendly fire off until after the first several betas, and what make it a bigger pain was that the only difference between the CT and T models was the lack of sleeves on the latter; from the back it was impossible to tell friend from foe. The team killing was horrendous up until then because any player that came in would have no money, and other players had guns he might want, and guns were also much more expensive and money was much harder to obtain. I specifically remember one instance where a guy came into a server and proceded to kill the closest teammate with a good gun (the auto-sniper, called the GSG3 or something like that, been awhile since I played). The moron failed to notice his victim had a 0 ping and was therefore the server owner.
I like your name for it better. "Gib" just seems like a much more appropriate name for the end of the universe. "What happened to the universe?" "Oh, it got gibbed"
Re:Who cares if a football player's taking steroid
on
Unmaking The Game
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1) Verant should step up and fix what is wrong I played Diablo2 for quite some time, and I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix bugs that allowed item duplication ("duping") and various other cheats. Without exception after every fix, within a week, I became aware of a new method of duping (I didn't engage in it, but I knew people who did). I don't know what version Diablo2 is currently in, so I can't say this applies at the moment. My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
2) Stop paying Verant $12.95 a month and go play one of the other 4 or 5 OnLine roleplaying games. And lose all invested time spent building up a character in EQ? Not to mention every one of those other games will suffer from similar bugs. In First Person Shooters it's wall-hacks and aimbots, in map-driven information warfare games (AKA "fog of war") it's map-hacks, in resource management games it's resource duplication, in economy based games (Diablo2 multiplayer, EQ, UO, and a host of others) it's currency counterfeiting. There are a number of complex problems behind each of these cheats but they all boil down to basically the same thing: a combination of finite trusted resources and the untrusted client problem, there aren't enough trusted resources to do all the calculations, so some must be shifted over to untrusted resources, the puzzle is to choose which calculations will allow the least severe and lowest number of cheats, taking into account the amount of trusted and untrusted resources available. I have yet to hear of any game with a significant number of players and no cheats/bugs, granted though, some have fewer than others.
You do have a choice. Yes, that choice is to play with the cheaters, or not at all.
I use encryption to keep my files secure because I don't necessarily trust the security of the medium they're stored on; I don't want anyone to be able to decrypt them except me, which would be possible even if I was the only one with the algorithm. There's also one-way encryption which is an encryption function that is mathematically impossible (or atleast extremely difficult) to reverse. The best example of uses for this is storing passwords: encrypt the password using one-way encryption, store it, whenever someone attempts to use the password encrypt that guess and compare the two, if they're the same, the original data were the same hence the password was correct.
Robert Novak is representing himself in this lawsuit, and thus it is effectively costing him nothing to persue this campaign of harassmentIANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if his lawsuits are found frivolous doesn't he have to pay the legal bills of the people he's suing? If thats the case it seems all he's doing is committing financial suicide. Large companys like Google tend to have lawyers by the boatload and given that he's representing himself it's a pretty good bet that no lawyer will touch the case (read: he's got nothing on them).
From the wired article: One studio recently signed a deal to make Doom a motion picture. At first I presumed they meant the failed attempt several years ago, but then I found this article on Yahoo dated last Wednesday. I figured we would've seen a/. story about this by now, or did I just miss it?
Prefences->Homepage->Exclude Stories from Homepage->Topics: Microsoft. Theres also a filter for JonKatz if anyone out there doesn't already have it checked.
Article date: August 23, 1998; I find this excerp interesting: The United States persuaded Sudan to expel bin Laden in 1995. The minister called that move a mistake.
"We gave (U.S. officials) a piece of advice that they never followed. We told them: 'Don't send him out of Sudan because you will lose control over him.' Now, the United States has ended up with war with an invisible enemy," Salah el-Din said.
I work on computers now and then as summer jobs, for school, friends, etc. and I have to say I think I've seen more Maxtor drives die than all other brands combined. I've never taken notice of what portion of the population they compose (i.e., if they make 90% of the harddrives in existance, they may have only average chance of failure), but it's spooked me enough that I won't buy any of their drives. I bought a 120 GB Western Dig. drive yesterday for $150 new (they're even cheaper on pricewatch), so I don't think Maxtor has the best product for the price any more.
Supposing that one of my hands was missing one of these might be a nice thing to have for everyday applications, but why are we limiting ourselves to emulating biology? why not take our bodies in a drastically different direction? All those nerve endings that used to control the dexterous muscles in a hand could be used for more than just controling a new hand, given a little practise. Back to supposing my hand was missing, I spend a great deal of time typing every day, I'm sure there are more than enough nerve signals flowing through my wrists to create every character on a standard keyboard, but there would need to be an intermediate interpretation/conversion device. With such a device I could keep one hand on the mouse while typing at full speed. Disablity becomes advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember hearing about this too. My impression was they weren't released here(US), only in Japan. I've been trying to find a link for a couple minutes, so far with no success. Anyone have more info?
this provides a great solution for a "white list" of ok sites
I once heard about an ongoing project of finding paths through the web. The objective was to take any web site and within seven clicks on links arrive at a porn site. Last I heard, the government of New Zealand web site was the only one for which they hadn't succeeded. Adjusting the content (removing links that aren't on the whitelist, to satisfy the link requirement) of a web site based on which TLD the domain was requested as isn't terribly difficult to do, but will the adoption of this be so widespread as to warrant very many sites doing it? In my opinion, no. I like the idea of a non-kid friendly TLD much better; at that point filtering in large part becomes trivial.
Another thing, how does the government determine what material is acceptible for children? Obviously some things are right out, but what about for instance a Tom and Jerry cartoon with animated violence? How much is too much? What about the purists that say "I'd rather have my child watch two people making love than two people trying to kill each other"? The definition of 'acceptable' varies widely from parent to parent, culture to culture, and I don't think you can appease them all at once, not by a long way. Better to organize things into catagories such as ".xxx" and let parents figure out what they want their kids to see.
Here's the quote.
..., gay, ..., pregnancy, ..."
Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
I agree with you, the TiVo doesn't "think" anything. Thinking implies the ability to take limited data and draw logical conclusions (I have yet to hear of a machine that can do that outside of the purely mathematical sense). All it sees two catagories and returns other results in those same catagories, and possibly weights programs that fall into more than one; it has no concept that those catagories are or cannot be related. What it's doing is more along the lines of "User's interest list:
So I won't see the site.. not my loss but ultimately theirs
/. editors already initiated that...
If anyone out there would like to prove that to them start sucking down the rejection page at a couple megs a second. Oh wait, the
I wrote an IRC bot a couple years ago after finding an javascript ALICE web bot, and after seeing mine a friend of mine did as well, both of them talk. Mine goes by a 'save part of the line and spit it back in a new form' approach (prone to errors but a more right way to go), whereas his has a huge database of responses to specific words/phrases (not prone to grammar errors, but less sophisticated), a couple weeks ago we decided to put them in a channel together and have them chat it up (yes I've read the RFC and I know you're not suppose to do this). My bot is named Bananas, my friend's is mini-para, and he is paranOia. The source (GPLed, of course) and necessary files to run it, along with the semi-humorous log of that chat are here. The bot chat features still need a lot of work and more patterns and responses to them, but it's been an interesting and fun project on the whole.
I hope so too, considering:
-Smoke rises
-The thing is 700mm tall (~28 inches)
-My bed is about the same height or higher
So if I'm in bed (you'd think I would be if I'm having this thing patrol my house, but then again it probably makes a lot of noise) I'll be dead of smoke inhalation before its warnings go off if it didn't detect more than just a high concentration of smoke.
And speaking of its dimensions, did anyone else notice how big this thing is? A meter long, and almost as tall and wide. A lot of people are making fun of the "home security" concept but given a threatening posture, its size, and composition (its a goddamn robot), it may be more effective at scaring off burglars than one might think (though there are definitely some serious questions remaining there). My question is, whats to stop the burglars from stealing this really novel (read: expensive) looking piece of equipment?
Actually, this guy has proven possible half the first person shooters on the market today. "Lets check my inventory. Pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, minigun, chainsaw, flamethrower, railgun, 6 ft claymore sword, M1A1 Abrams, deck mounted battleship cannon, small country, and 15 trillion rounds of ammunition for each... all of it fits conveniently into my armor/trench coat/pants pockets. MWHAHAHA."
At 2.02 megs thats the biggest config file I've ever seen...
Windows isn't a OS... it is a glorified application launcher...
If you're referencing that Windows sits on top of DOS, you're only partially right. All the NT based versions (2k, XP, NT, maybe ME but I don't think so) don't.
My college protects grades a similar way before they're released, last semester I started publishing a form in my web space (hosted on their server :)) that allows you to get your grades (presumably) as soon as they're scanned in, several days before their intended release. I don't know if anyone on staff noticed and/or cared; it may be that the official release time is just there to prevent complaining about "she got her grades before I could". All that was required to make the form was stripping down their grade submit page and changing one of the options in a select.
Censorship, n. The act, process, or practice of removing or suppressing what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.
Where do you draw the line, and why do you think you are qualified to draw this line for everyone else.
Ah, I see. I've taken care of this problem with my standard mouse my setting the mouse sensitivity to five times (yes, five) the default. Fine movements get more difficult, but a few extra key binds to a couple lower sensitivities can take care of that; and after you get used to it you only need them for sniping.
And with a desktop mouse you're still taking your hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, off the mouse, and repositioning over the keyboard.
What??? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but when I'm playing games (I'll use my FPS config as an example), my left hand is on the mouse (I'm left handed), my right is positioned with my ring finger on the up arrow, my thumb on >, and my index finger on enter (some keyboards vary), and my hands never move aside from my fingers moving slightly to hit different keys, I think 'm' is the farthest my thumb ever has to move, and its set to a command I don't need very often. Games like every modern First Person Shooter allow you to change keys for a reason. If you're using the default binds or some silly configuration where you're moving your hands you're going to lose to someone who isn't. Hardcore games are won and lost by milliseconds, and hardcore players carefully craft their control configurations accordingly.
So you would sit there and shoot a guy a bunch of times and then it would turn out he was a teammate (unless of coruse friendly fire was on, heheh).
You couldn't turn friendly fire off until after the first several betas, and what make it a bigger pain was that the only difference between the CT and T models was the lack of sleeves on the latter; from the back it was impossible to tell friend from foe. The team killing was horrendous up until then because any player that came in would have no money, and other players had guns he might want, and guns were also much more expensive and money was much harder to obtain. I specifically remember one instance where a guy came into a server and proceded to kill the closest teammate with a good gun (the auto-sniper, called the GSG3 or something like that, been awhile since I played). The moron failed to notice his victim had a 0 ping and was therefore the server owner.
I like your name for it better. "Gib" just seems like a much more appropriate name for the end of the universe. "What happened to the universe?" "Oh, it got gibbed"
1) Verant should step up and fix what is wrong
I played Diablo2 for quite some time, and I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix bugs that allowed item duplication ("duping") and various other cheats. Without exception after every fix, within a week, I became aware of a new method of duping (I didn't engage in it, but I knew people who did). I don't know what version Diablo2 is currently in, so I can't say this applies at the moment. My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
2) Stop paying Verant $12.95 a month and go play one of the other 4 or 5 OnLine roleplaying games.
And lose all invested time spent building up a character in EQ? Not to mention every one of those other games will suffer from similar bugs. In First Person Shooters it's wall-hacks and aimbots, in map-driven information warfare games (AKA "fog of war") it's map-hacks, in resource management games it's resource duplication, in economy based games (Diablo2 multiplayer, EQ, UO, and a host of others) it's currency counterfeiting.
There are a number of complex problems behind each of these cheats but they all boil down to basically the same thing: a combination of finite trusted resources and the untrusted client problem, there aren't enough trusted resources to do all the calculations, so some must be shifted over to untrusted resources, the puzzle is to choose which calculations will allow the least severe and lowest number of cheats, taking into account the amount of trusted and untrusted resources available. I have yet to hear of any game with a significant number of players and no cheats/bugs, granted though, some have fewer than others.
You do have a choice.
Yes, that choice is to play with the cheaters, or not at all.
I use encryption to keep my files secure because I don't necessarily trust the security of the medium they're stored on; I don't want anyone to be able to decrypt them except me, which would be possible even if I was the only one with the algorithm. There's also one-way encryption which is an encryption function that is mathematically impossible (or atleast extremely difficult) to reverse. The best example of uses for this is storing passwords: encrypt the password using one-way encryption, store it, whenever someone attempts to use the password encrypt that guess and compare the two, if they're the same, the original data were the same hence the password was correct.
Robert Novak is representing himself in this lawsuit, and thus it is effectively costing him nothing to persue this campaign of harassmentIANAL, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if his lawsuits are found frivolous doesn't he have to pay the legal bills of the people he's suing? If thats the case it seems all he's doing is committing financial suicide. Large companys like Google tend to have lawyers by the boatload and given that he's representing himself it's a pretty good bet that no lawyer will touch the case (read: he's got nothing on them).
From the wired article: One studio recently signed a deal to make Doom a motion picture. /. story about this by now, or did I just miss it?
At first I presumed they meant the failed attempt several years ago, but then I found this article on Yahoo dated last Wednesday. I figured we would've seen a
Prefences->Homepage->Exclude Stories from Homepage->Topics: Microsoft. Theres also a filter for JonKatz if anyone out there doesn't already have it checked.
Article date: August 23, 1998; I find this excerp interesting:
The United States persuaded Sudan to expel bin Laden in 1995. The minister called that move a mistake.
"We gave (U.S. officials) a piece of advice that they never followed. We told them: 'Don't send him out of Sudan because you will lose control over him.' Now, the United States has ended up with war with an invisible enemy," Salah el-Din said.
Heres another humorous reply. I take no credit for it(it cites a slashdot posting interestingly enough).
I work on computers now and then as summer jobs, for school, friends, etc. and I have to say I think I've seen more Maxtor drives die than all other brands combined. I've never taken notice of what portion of the population they compose (i.e., if they make 90% of the harddrives in existance, they may have only average chance of failure), but it's spooked me enough that I won't buy any of their drives. I bought a 120 GB Western Dig. drive yesterday for $150 new (they're even cheaper on pricewatch), so I don't think Maxtor has the best product for the price any more.
So, according to media hype, what exactly are schools teaching well?
Supposing that one of my hands was missing one of these might be a nice thing to have for everyday applications, but why are we limiting ourselves to emulating biology? why not take our bodies in a drastically different direction? All those nerve endings that used to control the dexterous muscles in a hand could be used for more than just controling a new hand, given a little practise. Back to supposing my hand was missing, I spend a great deal of time typing every day, I'm sure there are more than enough nerve signals flowing through my wrists to create every character on a standard keyboard, but there would need to be an intermediate interpretation/conversion device. With such a device I could keep one hand on the mouse while typing at full speed. Disablity becomes advantage.