The problem is that cheats make players do what a really good player could do. I've seem people with 23" monitors and 2Ghz P4s who 0wn the r41l in Q3, without cheating. How's a server going to tell perfect aim from perfect aim from a bot?
There are some tells, like someone always hitting the center of a model, or the very leading edge of the bounding box. But once those cheats stop working people will learn to quickly randomize where the shot hits, and to miss a certain percentage of shots.
You need to take out easy cheats like railguns, sniper rifles, perfectly dark shadows, etc. Once there's nothing like that which a bot is really good at, cheating will diminish.
It tends to be the other way. It takes a team of developers a few weeks to implement a protection scheme, it takes one cracker a day or two to break it and code a crack that everyone can use.
Sure, you can change a few variables and release a new version, but that's not going to stop the cracker for more than a few minutes. It'll annoy all the legitimate users though who have to upgrade to a new version just to play.
The problem is that this isn't the sort of application where you can pick a secret key and the bad guy has to find it by exhaustive search... In this case, the bad guy knows everything the client knows. He can watch over its shoulder, sort of. You can't rely on new numbers to confuse him, you have to rely on a whole new method, such that he can see the numbers but doesn't know what you're doing with them. And even then he simply has to replay it slowly, step by step, and pay closer attention until he noticed your slight-of-hand trick.
Stopping crackers is a losing game. If they have access to the client computer there's *nothing* you can do that they can't undo.
The problem with your fix is that someone can hack the game to always keep two copies of the visibility data. One it uses to report to other gamers, the other it uses for actually displaying.
It's pretty simple. It's like the workarounds for PB, that simply point it to an unhacked DLL while using another one.
Cheat-checks like that aren't very reliable anyways.
One that pisses me off is that some multiplayer games refuse to run with Soft-Ice loaded. They're mildly annoying the crackers, who know how to get around soft-ice detection, but seriously pissing off developers who have no need to know how to mask soft-ice, but who have it for legitimate reasons.
But then, it's like all protection systems. They penalize the legitimate users to theoretically block the pirates/cheats, but it never really stops the bad guys.
Yeah, less insta-hit weapons makes the game harder to cheat in. IMHO Quake went way downhill with the introduction of the railgun.
People whined that the rocket was the only good weapon (not true) but even if that was true at least it was a weapon that took prediction skills to kill someone with, as you describe.
Bring the railgun in and it's simply a matter of holding the crosshairs over someone and pressing the button. Basically as dificult as targetting a rocket, except that it was an instant hit.
Not only did this make the game much more hardware dependent (you need a decent framerate to rail) and increase camping (why leave a rail perch?) but it also made cheating really profitable.
In Quake1 the Reaper bot could have perfect aim but there weren't any distance weapons (lightning was short range) that this helped with. And when you got followed by lightning through a rocket jump or something it was a fairly obvious indication of a bot.
But come Q2 (and now anything with a sniper rifle) and you could be killed across the map by someone you couldn't see.
And that's when people really started making client side bots. There were some for Q1, but those tended to be comp-sci projects more, something that would try to build maps on the fly and such. Certainly nothing you'd get pissed at someone for using. But Q2 and Q3 have been plagued by cheaters constantly.
Remove the hitscan weapons, or at least the big nasty ones, and the game would go back to what it was before.
So yes, I think game design has a lot to do with making games cheatproof.
It's just like UO would be mostly rid of people selling items on EBay if you had to have high stats to use the items, such that you couldn't really use it unless you could survive the quest to go get it in the first place.
You may have been coding ATC systems for a while, but that doesn't give you a lot of credibility in the issue of building a strong crashproof system.
I come from an environment where if an embedded system crashes once in a year it's a failure. And this is only for telephony and other non-life critical applications.
It's hard to imagine how a system can be so badly screwed up that it dies for a few hours at a time every few months.
Even then, where's the backup system waiting to take over without any loss of functionality?
People who work in glass design teams shouldn't throw stones...
Probably not, if you started cooling it before turning it on.
The cracking of glass comes when part of it is hotter than the rest and the uneven expansion causes stress.
Glass that can take quick heating and freezing isn't as tough as it is low-expansion over the normal heat range.
However, water cooling a tube would probably be mostly useless. You'd be cooling the glass, the part that rarely suffers heat-related damage, and pumping more power to the inards, the stuff protected from losing heat to the glass by a nice vacuum.
Re:I'm glad to see the back of them
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 2
Do you wish to buy a 75Gig 75GXP?
I got one returned from the factory (replacement for a dead one) and I haven't bothered opening the anti-static wrap yet because I went and bought a Maxtor during the month it took IBM to get around to sending me a HD.
It should be as good as any other they make, because it has no wear at all, since factory testing.
If you really think they're good, buy it for a fair market price.
Reply to this message, or to my email address, and we'll discuss price.
I feel like my collection might be worth something in the future. It's not unreasonable that WMAs will eventually only be playable in WMP. MS leaned on WinAmp to disable the play-to-file feature for WMA files. When do they lean on them to stop playing them completely?
Besides, I tried some blind testing (recorded some samples, had a friend randomzie the order and play them to me) and I picked the CD and the Ogg, I complained that a ton of detail was lost in most of the sample, which turned out to be all the MP3s up to 256VBR, which was as high as I went.
Even the 56k Ogg kept most of the detail. At 112k the Ogg was undistinguishable from the CD in almost everything.
This was using a fairly decent sound card (SB Live, not great, but not as crap as some) and $90 ear buds that sound better than anything else I've ever owned, speaker, headphone, or otherwise.
So I have a real reason to use Ogg and I'd like to see the format be supported in such a way that makes it usable in the future.
Even if it is, which isn't clear, it's a stupid law.
If laws don't reflect the will of the majority, they're stupid laws. People ignore stupid laws.
If companies want fair treatment from consumers, they need to treat them fairly. If they buy a law (like Disney and copyright extensions) that allows them to cheat consumers, they should be suprised to see consumers with no concern about cheating them.
Not that id would really say anything else, even if it had been cracked.
They sell that protection, along with the engine. If they said someone had figured out how to beat it, it wouldn't be worth much.
But, people have beaten it. There's a patch that makes a server not request checks from connecting clients. It was written to let anyone play but it has the side benefit of reducing that annoying lag that everyone notices when someone connects to a server.
I don't know if anyone has defeated the whole system yet, in such a way as to allow for the creation of a new serial number that is valid, or appears valid. It's fairly likely though, because you could either generate the rest of the numbers (possible if they weren't careful to hash them after generation and used a less than wonderful PRNG) or crack the key server and grab the master list. Or likely one of a few other ways.
Would id even be able to detect this, if it was used by a small (1000-5000) number of people. They get a duplicate-key message all the time, when someone connects to a server, disconnects, and joins another. And I know people who succesfully use one key on multiple computers. As long as they join a server a few minutes apart they're fine, supposedly even on the same server.
But in the end, the system is weak in the worst way. It's VERY easy to DoS it out of service and when the server isn't reachable they servers prevent anyone, anywhere, from playing, instead of allowing everyone. Would you buy a game that would refuse to let you play based on something a master server said? I wouldn't. I've played Q3 a few times at LANs, but I'll never spend money on, or even install, a game that I don't have control over.
I remember the Vic-20 manual which said basically the same thing. "Unless you're an elephant."
Yeah, hardware shouldn't be destroyable via software means.
I've been expecting a new email virus one of these days that'll perform an intentionally bad flash-upgrade of hardware to disable a computer permanently.
It'd be trivial. Almost all flash upgrades are simple verified with CRCs, which while being good for detecting random corruption, are incredibly easy to spoof intentionaly. (By design.)
Motherboards, Video cards, CD drives, HDs, Ethernet cards, and more all have flashable BIOSes.
Apple's hardware is at fault because it can't handle even simple error conditions such as something that's not a valid CD. What would happen if someone put a failed burn into the drive and it refused to boot or eject the CD properly? Would apple disclaim all responsibility?
Now, it's also Sony's fault and Apple should probably help consumers sue Sony for intentionally trying to wreak havok on computers.
This is crap though, with Apple refusing to take responsibility for a broken design.
If you want peace, try killing anyone who tells you to kill someone else.
If someone needs killing for the security of a group it should be obvious enough that the group can see it themselves and all decide independently to act, perhaps with others who have also personally decided to act.
Whenever you pass the responsibility for your actions to someone else you're inviting injustice.
What really chokes me these days is that countries try not to kill each others leaders. In fact, the US has a law that forbids assasination of enemy leaders, regardless of a state of war.
I'd rather that my country, if they decided to go to war, would try to stop the war with the minimum of bloodshed, by taking out the freak at the top.
But no... We'd rather mow down wave after wave of conscript troops, starve and kill civilians, destroy cities and farm and more, just to capture the enemy leader where we'll subject him to a rigged trial and toss him in jail for life (these days).
But if we'd have just dropped a huge bomb on them in the first place there'd have been a lot less casualties in the process, people that likely didn't want to be there and were forced at gunpoint.
But if our leaders used that policy, they'd invite similar reprisals. And instead of simply not going to war, to avoid pissing anyone off they'd rather waste the lives of hundreds of thousands.
But... But... You do realize that there are secret IR scanners installed in most stores around the states, reading the serial numbers (which are printed with an IR reflective ink) on all our cash. This is the reasons that stores tend to use incandescent lights near the cash registers, to provide more short-wave IR (the more reflective) to increase visibility for the scanners.
They suplement this by using facial recognition AI software. This was one of the first products of the AI revolution, but unfortunately in order to keep this secret for government use they've had to supress almost all research in these areas. We really could have had human-level AI by now if it hadn't been appropriated by the NSA.
Of course, this is just a spoof of a paranoid rant... right?:)
Actually, I'm a programmer, as in that's my job title and I get paid for it. I use C and Perl, with whatever other languages are needed for the task at hand, shell script, VB, PHP, whatever. I also have to code up HTML for any of the web-based apps I make.
Know what I spend more time looking up? HTML. By far.
With C I know probably 98% of the language blindfolded, the other 2% is really obscure stuff and thus I rarely need to look for it. Perl is weirder, but I've made a quick-ref card with the forms of various data structures for the really bizarre stuff, that's 90% of my Perl-related research. But HTML... Anything more complex than an anchor, simple table, or bold tag likely has some weird syntax, and also likely works slightly differently on various browsers.
Must look kind of funny when a programmer they pay to write network simulations and other stuff has a book on basic HTML open while working, but it saves me from memorizing trivial crap.
It's a troll because it's the same irrelevant statement that luddites trot out every time someone on Slashdot discusses electronic books.
You like reading on the toilet? Good for you. But to imply that ebooks aren't good because they can't be read while shitting is wrong. Moreover, even if it wasn't wrong, it's still be a stupid reason to dislike it. Most people can't watch TV while on the can and they still like TV. Nobody mocks TiVo because it doesn't come with a free bathroom TV.
If you really like reading on the can that much, take your ebook/palm with you, or save a few books/magazines and read them.
But more importantly, don't tell us about it, especially not in a thread dedicated to exactly the opposite. It's as annoying a Star Wars haters who go into AotC threads to mock fans, or SW fans who going into LotR threads to mock those fans, or Jon Katz haters who feel the need to go into every story he posts and tell everyone how much they hate him.
Get over yourselves. Your luddite toilet habits are irrelevant to the rest of the world and if you persist in babbling on about them you will be modded down.
What's the point of law enforcement? To fund the city, or prevent criminal activity?
If it's to stop criminal activity I think the systems should be installed where they're likely to catch the most offenders, not where they'll make the most money.
Now, this isn't a defense or anything. Anyone caught did run the red light (aside from weird circumstances like having to stop mid-intersection to avoid hitting a jaywalker, or something.) but if the system is supposed to accomplish the stated goals (make the streets safer) it should be used in the most effective way.
If the police need more money, give them more money, don't make them bias law enforcement to get it. (It's fairly well documented that police in some areas make out like literal bandits because of forfeiture laws allowing them to take houses, vehicles, and cash from people without needing to win a drug case in court.)
What these cameras are doing, besides eroding public trust in their elected officials, is targetting people more likely to make a mistake than others. If the yellow-light times are shorter people used to longer times are more likely to misjudge the timing. Anyways, all else being equal, it takes a smaller mistake to run a red with a short yellow than with a longer delay. Why not target drivers (first) who are making larger, more dangerous mistakes?
Canon's printers come with full ink. I was told that they're the only common brand that does. That and the seperate cartridges was the reason I went with Canon. (And easy refill procedures, if I decided to go with that - but the new ink prices are fairly reasonable, what with replacing only what you need.)
Sorry to sound like a Canon pimp, but I just bought an S750 and not only are there plenty of refill cartridges for it, but all the inks are in a seperate cartridge so you only have to muck with/buy the one that went empty. They also provide the printer with full ink cartridges, unlike all other (according to the sales guy) companies.
It cost me $200 CDN (after $100 rebate from buying a digital camera) but it was worth it to get a decent printer and not get screwed on refills.
One already does. Canon. Not only do they make easily refillable ink cartridges but they also have a different one for each color, and black. This is true of their S520 and up (and perhaps down), a line starting at $120 and going up to $1000+.
It's also the reason that I bought a Canon S750 printer just recently. I checked availability of refills and also the price of new cartridges. The Canon was cheaper either way.
And then when I selected the printer the sales guy tells me that it comes with full ink cartridges. I said "Yeah...?" He told me that it was the only company that did. Most/All of the rest only supply half-full demo cartridges.
I'm glad I could buy from a company that doesn't feel the need to screw with their customers for a buck. I'm going to email them, explaining the reasons for my purchase.
Actually it makes a lot of sense. Law enforcement shouldn't be arbitrary or random, or targetted at any specific group other than law breakers.
How'd you feel if you found you'd been assigned a police officer who'd follow you around looking for a violation, while your neighbor who you thought was a criminal didn't get this treatment? Likely you'd feel victimized and like your tax dollars were being wasted.
They also shouldn't be arbitrary. If drugs are being targetted then you should be searched for cocaine, heroin, and any other illegal drugs, not just the scare-drug of the week.
Consistency with the stated purpose would be good too, to avoid the impression of targetted or arbitrary enforcement.
If the police state that the cameras are for stopping people from running red light, because that's dangerous, they should put it where the accidents happen. Similarly, if they were doing a drug bust they should watch the dealers, busting people who drive up, not doing a random car search in a rich neighborhood in order to seize a more expensive car if they do manage to find drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that cheats make players do what a really good player could do. I've seem people with 23" monitors and 2Ghz P4s who 0wn the r41l in Q3, without cheating. How's a server going to tell perfect aim from perfect aim from a bot?
There are some tells, like someone always hitting the center of a model, or the very leading edge of the bounding box. But once those cheats stop working people will learn to quickly randomize where the shot hits, and to miss a certain percentage of shots.
You need to take out easy cheats like railguns, sniper rifles, perfectly dark shadows, etc. Once there's nothing like that which a bot is really good at, cheating will diminish.
It tends to be the other way. It takes a team of developers a few weeks to implement a protection scheme, it takes one cracker a day or two to break it and code a crack that everyone can use.
Sure, you can change a few variables and release a new version, but that's not going to stop the cracker for more than a few minutes. It'll annoy all the legitimate users though who have to upgrade to a new version just to play.
The problem is that this isn't the sort of application where you can pick a secret key and the bad guy has to find it by exhaustive search... In this case, the bad guy knows everything the client knows. He can watch over its shoulder, sort of. You can't rely on new numbers to confuse him, you have to rely on a whole new method, such that he can see the numbers but doesn't know what you're doing with them. And even then he simply has to replay it slowly, step by step, and pay closer attention until he noticed your slight-of-hand trick.
Stopping crackers is a losing game. If they have access to the client computer there's *nothing* you can do that they can't undo.
The problem with your fix is that someone can hack the game to always keep two copies of the visibility data. One it uses to report to other gamers, the other it uses for actually displaying.
It's pretty simple. It's like the workarounds for PB, that simply point it to an unhacked DLL while using another one.
Cheat-checks like that aren't very reliable anyways.
One that pisses me off is that some multiplayer games refuse to run with Soft-Ice loaded. They're mildly annoying the crackers, who know how to get around soft-ice detection, but seriously pissing off developers who have no need to know how to mask soft-ice, but who have it for legitimate reasons.
But then, it's like all protection systems. They penalize the legitimate users to theoretically block the pirates/cheats, but it never really stops the bad guys.
Yeah, less insta-hit weapons makes the game harder to cheat in. IMHO Quake went way downhill with the introduction of the railgun.
People whined that the rocket was the only good weapon (not true) but even if that was true at least it was a weapon that took prediction skills to kill someone with, as you describe.
Bring the railgun in and it's simply a matter of holding the crosshairs over someone and pressing the button. Basically as dificult as targetting a rocket, except that it was an instant hit.
Not only did this make the game much more hardware dependent (you need a decent framerate to rail) and increase camping (why leave a rail perch?) but it also made cheating really profitable.
In Quake1 the Reaper bot could have perfect aim but there weren't any distance weapons (lightning was short range) that this helped with. And when you got followed by lightning through a rocket jump or something it was a fairly obvious indication of a bot.
But come Q2 (and now anything with a sniper rifle) and you could be killed across the map by someone you couldn't see.
And that's when people really started making client side bots. There were some for Q1, but those tended to be comp-sci projects more, something that would try to build maps on the fly and such. Certainly nothing you'd get pissed at someone for using. But Q2 and Q3 have been plagued by cheaters constantly.
Remove the hitscan weapons, or at least the big nasty ones, and the game would go back to what it was before.
So yes, I think game design has a lot to do with making games cheatproof.
It's just like UO would be mostly rid of people selling items on EBay if you had to have high stats to use the items, such that you couldn't really use it unless you could survive the quest to go get it in the first place.
You may have been coding ATC systems for a while, but that doesn't give you a lot of credibility in the issue of building a strong crashproof system.
I come from an environment where if an embedded system crashes once in a year it's a failure. And this is only for telephony and other non-life critical applications.
It's hard to imagine how a system can be so badly screwed up that it dies for a few hours at a time every few months.
Even then, where's the backup system waiting to take over without any loss of functionality?
People who work in glass design teams shouldn't throw stones...
Probably not, if you started cooling it before turning it on.
The cracking of glass comes when part of it is hotter than the rest and the uneven expansion causes stress.
Glass that can take quick heating and freezing isn't as tough as it is low-expansion over the normal heat range.
However, water cooling a tube would probably be mostly useless. You'd be cooling the glass, the part that rarely suffers heat-related damage, and pumping more power to the inards, the stuff protected from losing heat to the glass by a nice vacuum.
Do you wish to buy a 75Gig 75GXP?
I got one returned from the factory (replacement for a dead one) and I haven't bothered opening the anti-static wrap yet because I went and bought a Maxtor during the month it took IBM to get around to sending me a HD.
It should be as good as any other they make, because it has no wear at all, since factory testing.
If you really think they're good, buy it for a fair market price.
Reply to this message, or to my email address, and we'll discuss price.
I feel like my collection might be worth something in the future. It's not unreasonable that WMAs will eventually only be playable in WMP. MS leaned on WinAmp to disable the play-to-file feature for WMA files. When do they lean on them to stop playing them completely?
Besides, I tried some blind testing (recorded some samples, had a friend randomzie the order and play them to me) and I picked the CD and the Ogg, I complained that a ton of detail was lost in most of the sample, which turned out to be all the MP3s up to 256VBR, which was as high as I went.
Even the 56k Ogg kept most of the detail. At 112k the Ogg was undistinguishable from the CD in almost everything.
This was using a fairly decent sound card (SB Live, not great, but not as crap as some) and $90 ear buds that sound better than anything else I've ever owned, speaker, headphone, or otherwise.
So I have a real reason to use Ogg and I'd like to see the format be supported in such a way that makes it usable in the future.
Even if it is, which isn't clear, it's a stupid law.
If laws don't reflect the will of the majority, they're stupid laws. People ignore stupid laws.
If companies want fair treatment from consumers, they need to treat them fairly. If they buy a law (like Disney and copyright extensions) that allows them to cheat consumers, they should be suprised to see consumers with no concern about cheating them.
Ignore a law today!
Actually, the CPU is (usually) what does the decrypting, so there's no reason why data over the memory bus needs to be decrypted.
Not that id would really say anything else, even if it had been cracked.
They sell that protection, along with the engine. If they said someone had figured out how to beat it, it wouldn't be worth much.
But, people have beaten it. There's a patch that makes a server not request checks from connecting clients. It was written to let anyone play but it has the side benefit of reducing that annoying lag that everyone notices when someone connects to a server.
I don't know if anyone has defeated the whole system yet, in such a way as to allow for the creation of a new serial number that is valid, or appears valid. It's fairly likely though, because you could either generate the rest of the numbers (possible if they weren't careful to hash them after generation and used a less than wonderful PRNG) or crack the key server and grab the master list. Or likely one of a few other ways.
Would id even be able to detect this, if it was used by a small (1000-5000) number of people. They get a duplicate-key message all the time, when someone connects to a server, disconnects, and joins another. And I know people who succesfully use one key on multiple computers. As long as they join a server a few minutes apart they're fine, supposedly even on the same server.
But in the end, the system is weak in the worst way. It's VERY easy to DoS it out of service and when the server isn't reachable they servers prevent anyone, anywhere, from playing, instead of allowing everyone. Would you buy a game that would refuse to let you play based on something a master server said? I wouldn't. I've played Q3 a few times at LANs, but I'll never spend money on, or even install, a game that I don't have control over.
Actually, the gel was probably to be used to seperate them, so that vibrations weren't transfered directly.
I remember the Vic-20 manual which said basically the same thing. "Unless you're an elephant."
Yeah, hardware shouldn't be destroyable via software means.
I've been expecting a new email virus one of these days that'll perform an intentionally bad flash-upgrade of hardware to disable a computer permanently.
It'd be trivial. Almost all flash upgrades are simple verified with CRCs, which while being good for detecting random corruption, are incredibly easy to spoof intentionaly. (By design.)
Motherboards, Video cards, CD drives, HDs, Ethernet cards, and more all have flashable BIOSes.
No matter what garbage, or lack there of, is on a small piece of plastic in the shape of a CD, your firmware shouldn't be damaged.
Apple's hardware is at fault because it can't handle even simple error conditions such as something that's not a valid CD. What would happen if someone put a failed burn into the drive and it refused to boot or eject the CD properly? Would apple disclaim all responsibility?
Now, it's also Sony's fault and Apple should probably help consumers sue Sony for intentionally trying to wreak havok on computers.
This is crap though, with Apple refusing to take responsibility for a broken design.
Blow them up with what?
If you want peace, try killing anyone who tells you to kill someone else.
If someone needs killing for the security of a group it should be obvious enough that the group can see it themselves and all decide independently to act, perhaps with others who have also personally decided to act.
Whenever you pass the responsibility for your actions to someone else you're inviting injustice.
What really chokes me these days is that countries try not to kill each others leaders. In fact, the US has a law that forbids assasination of enemy leaders, regardless of a state of war.
I'd rather that my country, if they decided to go to war, would try to stop the war with the minimum of bloodshed, by taking out the freak at the top.
But no... We'd rather mow down wave after wave of conscript troops, starve and kill civilians, destroy cities and farm and more, just to capture the enemy leader where we'll subject him to a rigged trial and toss him in jail for life (these days).
But if we'd have just dropped a huge bomb on them in the first place there'd have been a lot less casualties in the process, people that likely didn't want to be there and were forced at gunpoint.
But if our leaders used that policy, they'd invite similar reprisals. And instead of simply not going to war, to avoid pissing anyone off they'd rather waste the lives of hundreds of thousands.
But... But... You do realize that there are secret IR scanners installed in most stores around the states, reading the serial numbers (which are printed with an IR reflective ink) on all our cash. This is the reasons that stores tend to use incandescent lights near the cash registers, to provide more short-wave IR (the more reflective) to increase visibility for the scanners.
:)
They suplement this by using facial recognition AI software. This was one of the first products of the AI revolution, but unfortunately in order to keep this secret for government use they've had to supress almost all research in these areas. We really could have had human-level AI by now if it hadn't been appropriated by the NSA.
Of course, this is just a spoof of a paranoid rant... right?
Actually, I'm a programmer, as in that's my job title and I get paid for it. I use C and Perl, with whatever other languages are needed for the task at hand, shell script, VB, PHP, whatever. I also have to code up HTML for any of the web-based apps I make.
Know what I spend more time looking up? HTML. By far.
With C I know probably 98% of the language blindfolded, the other 2% is really obscure stuff and thus I rarely need to look for it. Perl is weirder, but I've made a quick-ref card with the forms of various data structures for the really bizarre stuff, that's 90% of my Perl-related research. But HTML... Anything more complex than an anchor, simple table, or bold tag likely has some weird syntax, and also likely works slightly differently on various browsers.
Must look kind of funny when a programmer they pay to write network simulations and other stuff has a book on basic HTML open while working, but it saves me from memorizing trivial crap.
It's a troll because it's the same irrelevant statement that luddites trot out every time someone on Slashdot discusses electronic books.
You like reading on the toilet? Good for you. But to imply that ebooks aren't good because they can't be read while shitting is wrong. Moreover, even if it wasn't wrong, it's still be a stupid reason to dislike it. Most people can't watch TV while on the can and they still like TV. Nobody mocks TiVo because it doesn't come with a free bathroom TV.
If you really like reading on the can that much, take your ebook/palm with you, or save a few books/magazines and read them.
But more importantly, don't tell us about it, especially not in a thread dedicated to exactly the opposite. It's as annoying a Star Wars haters who go into AotC threads to mock fans, or SW fans who going into LotR threads to mock those fans, or Jon Katz haters who feel the need to go into every story he posts and tell everyone how much they hate him.
Get over yourselves. Your luddite toilet habits are irrelevant to the rest of the world and if you persist in babbling on about them you will be modded down.
What's the point of law enforcement? To fund the city, or prevent criminal activity?
If it's to stop criminal activity I think the systems should be installed where they're likely to catch the most offenders, not where they'll make the most money.
Now, this isn't a defense or anything. Anyone caught did run the red light (aside from weird circumstances like having to stop mid-intersection to avoid hitting a jaywalker, or something.) but if the system is supposed to accomplish the stated goals (make the streets safer) it should be used in the most effective way.
If the police need more money, give them more money, don't make them bias law enforcement to get it. (It's fairly well documented that police in some areas make out like literal bandits because of forfeiture laws allowing them to take houses, vehicles, and cash from people without needing to win a drug case in court.)
What these cameras are doing, besides eroding public trust in their elected officials, is targetting people more likely to make a mistake than others. If the yellow-light times are shorter people used to longer times are more likely to misjudge the timing. Anyways, all else being equal, it takes a smaller mistake to run a red with a short yellow than with a longer delay. Why not target drivers (first) who are making larger, more dangerous mistakes?
Canon's printers come with full ink. I was told that they're the only common brand that does. That and the seperate cartridges was the reason I went with Canon. (And easy refill procedures, if I decided to go with that - but the new ink prices are fairly reasonable, what with replacing only what you need.)
Sorry to sound like a Canon pimp, but I just bought an S750 and not only are there plenty of refill cartridges for it, but all the inks are in a seperate cartridge so you only have to muck with/buy the one that went empty. They also provide the printer with full ink cartridges, unlike all other (according to the sales guy) companies.
It cost me $200 CDN (after $100 rebate from buying a digital camera) but it was worth it to get a decent printer and not get screwed on refills.
One already does. Canon. Not only do they make easily refillable ink cartridges but they also have a different one for each color, and black. This is true of their S520 and up (and perhaps down), a line starting at $120 and going up to $1000+.
It's also the reason that I bought a Canon S750 printer just recently. I checked availability of refills and also the price of new cartridges. The Canon was cheaper either way.
And then when I selected the printer the sales guy tells me that it comes with full ink cartridges. I said "Yeah...?" He told me that it was the only company that did. Most/All of the rest only supply half-full demo cartridges.
I'm glad I could buy from a company that doesn't feel the need to screw with their customers for a buck. I'm going to email them, explaining the reasons for my purchase.
Actually it makes a lot of sense. Law enforcement shouldn't be arbitrary or random, or targetted at any specific group other than law breakers.
How'd you feel if you found you'd been assigned a police officer who'd follow you around looking for a violation, while your neighbor who you thought was a criminal didn't get this treatment? Likely you'd feel victimized and like your tax dollars were being wasted.
They also shouldn't be arbitrary. If drugs are being targetted then you should be searched for cocaine, heroin, and any other illegal drugs, not just the scare-drug of the week.
Consistency with the stated purpose would be good too, to avoid the impression of targetted or arbitrary enforcement.
If the police state that the cameras are for stopping people from running red light, because that's dangerous, they should put it where the accidents happen. Similarly, if they were doing a drug bust they should watch the dealers, busting people who drive up, not doing a random car search in a rich neighborhood in order to seize a more expensive car if they do manage to find drugs.