If you just blow up satellites with rockets, it will put debris into its orbit, drastically reducing the usability of the orbit for anyone.
If you build a weapon to simply disable the satellite, or better yet, cause it to drop out of orbit and burn up without hitting anything, then you would have an advantage. I hope that we are keeping tabs on anyone that plans to develop that kind of technology.
By posting these excerpts, you just redistributed part of their source code without displaying the appropriate copyright notice in tact. You've violated the license agreement.
I think the Earth already does a pretty good job of putting water vapour into the atmosphere on a daily basis.
The cloud cover is in dynamic equilibrium. I don't think that spraying some water air changes that equilibrium. Because, like I said, it's already dynamic equilibrium!.
We need to find the Earth's thermostat and turn it down a bit. I think it has to do more with the composition of the atmosphere.
Well, I learned basic interpreters first and I turned out all right! As for instruction, The first I ever had was watching "Bits and Bytes" with Billy Van and Luba Goy (Canadian TV series, some clips are available on youtube). It's (obviously) the only first exposure to programming I ever experienced. It's taken me an additional 25 years or so to get to where I am now, but I have to say it was good beginning.
It had cute little animations about bits being light-switches and the CPU being a long-nosed cartoon character putting numbers into boxes. I still think about computers like that.
Interesting. After reading all these replies, I'm now really hyper-aware of the 4th wall aspect to video games. I've been familiar with it in theatre for quite some time, and I am a live improvised comedy theatre actor so I know how easy it is to break the 4th wall. I've always thought of it as something that betrays the intended scope of the fantasy. I think games are interactive fiction by design, so you're supposed to be immersed, but interactively so. It's up to the writers to decide what the rules of the game's fantasy are. There's a difference between a soliloquy in a play, and a moment where the actor starts wise-cracking back to a heckler. One is intended, the other is accidental, and is beyond the scope of the play. Furthermore, i've seen desperate attempts to keep from breaking the 4th wall in improv, like when someone in the audience's cell-phone rings, and the actor mime-answers their cellphone, there, the actor deals with the situation within the reality of the play. It's clear that information is passed through the wall, but this is not really _breaking_ the wall, because it doesn't betray the fantasy, it just draws on information that is exchanged between the fantasy and our reality.
Obviously, the video game is trying to set the scope of the fantasy and the degree to which you are expected to be immersed. If that gets radically changed for some reason in a way that suddenly made the laws of the fantasy world seem changed such that they involved more of our reality that you originally thought, you could say that the 4th wall had been broken, or you could just say that the writers were going for that kind of a twist. This can be a great source of humour. I've seen some cool movies where the characters acknowledge that they're making a movie, and it's done intentionally.
Video game designers are given a hard task of justifying phases of the game like the install, the menu screens, dealing with errors, ending the game and restarting, etc.
One of my favourite goofs is when the in-game character speaks out "I have to hit the X button to pick that up" like my character is holding a game controller?!?...what exactly is the perceived reality in those situations? Sure it's self referential, but I believe that those things are just errors that lead to a less immersed experience for the gamer. A much better line would be "You have to hit your X button if you want me to pick that up." Of course it could just be a stylistic choice by the writers to blur the lines as the article said.
I'd like to see a video game that blurred the lines so much that it made me think it wasn't running. So it integrated with my outlook, blackberry, windows desktop etc. It could do crazy things like call me on my cellphone, send me emails, instant-message me. That would be FREAKY!!! Maybe the game will read slashdot and the in-game character will reference real-world events in-character.
Start writing! Be prolific and build your portfolio.
Then you have to learn how to pitch your stories. It's brutally hard -- but study a little philosophy and learn what gets and keeps peoples focus. The content is easy, VG entertainment is mostly escapism; the problem is that your best writing will come from writing what you know, which may not align with what interests other people, so just appeal to the fundamentals of human nature. Polish your silver tongue, weave a tangled web, then sell, sell, sell!
If I were hiring, I would hope to meet an inspiring individual who can capture my attention with their imagination.
I think you're going to the right places, but it sounds like you don't have self-marketing confidence.
Half my point here is: don't wait for someone to tell you to get involved -- just get involved. The rest of my point is that you need to SHOW your passion. You need to tell people some stories.
I'm picturing a movie plot where an inmate's conjugal visitor gets taken hostage and can't use her cellphone to call for help because THE PRISON JAMS THE SIGNALS! The inmate has to break his wife OUT of his own prison, and kick ass against the other prisoners.
You start with a feeling and if the number doesn't jive with your feeling, you change the number, lest people have their feelings be changed by the number.
Having the version number in the product name seems to be a dangerous choice for this reason alone. I can't help but notice that this has been recently ditched by Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
Even when using the year instead of the version number, people lie. Everyone wants to use the next number. There are plenty of 2009 products out already.
People just seem to be predisposed to deceive with numbers. And I'm not talking about hyperbole, I'm talking about the fish story where the fisherman tells you how big the fish was, as his hands slowly move farther and farther apart.
"How big does my number have to be to be convincing but not obviously deceptive?" People will ALWAYS play this game. Anyone who has asked a teenager what time they came home last night will agree.
Well, it seems to me that spammers ARE humans. So trying to detect if the creator of the account is human or not doesn't separate the spammers from the non-spammers.
Think about it: the authenticating machines are designed by humans, and the perpetrating machines are also designed by humans, and the legitimate users are humans too.
Perhaps the problem itself needs to be restated: Allow accounts to legitimate users, deny accounts to spammers. Whether or not there is a human involved on either end seems irrelevant.
That's ridiculous. The American statute says that a "useful process" is patentable, where a process is a "process, act or method". Software is surely in that category of things. It's all about how you use a computer.
I realize you said "it shouldn't get patent protection", all I'm saying is that it's pretty clear that it does. Whether it should or not is left for you to discuss with your government, and it would be democratic of you to participate in such discussions.
And I am reluctant to accept the definition of software as being "the expression of an idea". At least on the dictionary.com site, which lists several such definitions, neither of the words "express" nor "idea" appear anywhere on the page.
Pay for a genuine copy of Windows. There is no excuse not to.
Discontinuing your use of Windows is the only alternative. I totally encourage you to switch to using free software if you can't afford to pay for Windows.
The high price of Windows combined with the simplicity of stealing it, the anonymity of the theft and how essential the product is makes for the theft of it being a pretty common occurrence.
Cellphones, razors, and clothes all have the same problem -- very easy to steal, except that it's pretty clear that people are regularly being caught and punished for those thefts. I'm not so sure that the average software thief is at any risk of being caught.
My motivator for downloading cracked games was always to avoid paying for the software. The pirated version was free, and free was good. Obviously.
And even if I managed to circumvent protection on a game myself, I never redistributed software. I'd have no problem downloading the games but I would never upload them, or give them away. I was a user, not a dealer.
I used to pirate games, but I don't any more. I met a friend who convinced me that it was wrong. And now that I have a job where I can afford to buy some games here and there, I fork out the money. I've done a quick survey of my friends and they all think of me as being abnormally honest in this regard. I don't mind though. I have a clear conscience and a trophy room of shiny original CDs and manuals. I even buy my music and movies. I have original CDs for all the mp3s in my library, and no DVD-R's with the movie-title in sharpie. Apparently I'm also an outsider in that regard.
This got particularly costly for my music composition software. Which I found a free copy of online, but instead shelled out a whopping $900 for the software to have a legit copy. The software just isn't worth that much. But whatever, I support them in principle -- in that I expect other people to pay full price for my products, or don't use them.
It's odd that you can buy a PC for $399, but it will cost you another $59 to play a major title game on it. Or should I say $29, because the $399 computer won't play the $59 titles, for that you'll need a $1500 computer, and a $799 graphic card. Whatever, I mean, I spent $2500 for my Apple ][+ back in the day, so hardware costs, and you can't download hardware. But it was so hard to find software for the Apple ][+ that very nearly all my titles were pirated. It was the only way I could get stuff. I also lived about 300 km from the nearest store that sold software at the time.
I used to think that shareware was a good model -- release an unprotected demo version that people can play for as long as they want, and then ask people to pay for the full version or for more content. The idea was supposed to be that the shareware version was going to proliferate more than the cracked version -- yeah right.
I think that when I pay full price for a game though, that I shouldn't have to buy a second copy of the game to play LAN multiplayer with my family. My wife and I play video games and it sucks when we buy a game that we really like, but each of us needs a disk in the CD drive to be able to play multiplayer. It used to be that I'd try duplicating the disk to see if that works, which it almost never does. But now I go buy the second disk. Call me a sucker. It's ridiculous that the price of the multiplayer version is proportional to the number of players. I remember a game that would have a ratio, something like 1 disk required for every 3 players on the LAN. That seemed much more reasonable to me. I don't mind buying a second copy when the fourth player joins.
...and replaces it with the alternate unnecessary inconvenience of making it more difficult for customers to change their preferences. "Uh, yeah, I noticed you're bagging those in plastic...could you unbag all that and give me paper? Thanks for not asking."
It makes me wonder if ancient archaeologists were unearthing simple tools (perhaps hunting and farming implements) that were ancient to them, and had equal difficulty imagining how they worked and what their purpose was, or if archaeology was easier long ago. And will archaeology be harder or easier in the future? Hopefully we are leaving more clues behind, but our devices are more complex.
It makes me wonder how much difficulty future archaeologists will have in a few thousand years when they unearth the Slashdot servers and try to imagine how they worked and what purpose they served.
After I ran 6.2 kilometer yesterday, I was feeling thirsty. So I drank 1.6 liter of water. It took 37 minute to walk back to my car. I fired it up, and saw that the engine was already 52 degree from sitting in the hot sun. I got home, and collapsed from exhaustion. I slept an entire 9 hour.
After a 6.2 kilometer run yesterday, I was feeling thirsty. So I had a 1.6 liter drink of water. It was a 37 minute walk back to my car. I fired it up, and saw it already had a 52 degree engine temperature from sitting in the hot sun. I got home, and collapsed from exhaustion. I had a 9 hour sleep.
I enjoy stories that contemplate, in a scientific way, the ramification of a single change to how the world works. To me, great science fiction is written by exploring in depth a single scientific concept, and at the same time resisting the urge to change every law of physics to serve new plot devices.
To me, stories that make liberal adjustments to reality are more of a fantasy genre than science fiction. I think that movies like Groundhog Day and GATTACA are successful science fiction stories because they have only one significant change to scientific truths. Whereas shows like Star Trek are just fantasy worlds, full of adjustments and modifications to physics and reality.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy genre too, but not for its science; mostly just for its artistic impressions of scientificly creative worlds.
Obviously, both good and bad stories can be written with either technique, but I gain special satisfaction from the stories that change only one thing, and explore it in depth. To me, the science is the the exploration of the concepts, not the invention of them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you just blow up satellites with rockets, it will put debris into its orbit, drastically reducing the usability of the orbit for anyone.
If you build a weapon to simply disable the satellite, or better yet, cause it to drop out of orbit and burn up without hitting anything, then you would have an advantage. I hope that we are keeping tabs on anyone that plans to develop that kind of technology.
I cant imagine that China didn't learn their lesson from blowing up satellites.
By posting these excerpts, you just redistributed part of their source code without displaying the appropriate copyright notice in tact. You've violated the license agreement.
Since you are consulting us regarding TheNextBigThing(TM), we will now require 30% royalties on all revenue generated from TheNextBigThing(TM).
So we need MORE clouds? The Earth is already about 70% covered in clouds.
I think the Earth already does a pretty good job of putting water vapour into the atmosphere on a daily basis.
The cloud cover is in dynamic equilibrium. I don't think that spraying some water air changes that equilibrium. Because, like I said, it's already dynamic equilibrium!.
We need to find the Earth's thermostat and turn it down a bit. I think it has to do more with the composition of the atmosphere.
And 150 million of those users are bots.
Either that or facebook has tonnes of supermodels that have only two or three friends. ...not that I've been searching ;)
Well, I learned basic interpreters first and I turned out all right! As for instruction, The first I ever had was watching "Bits and Bytes" with Billy Van and Luba Goy (Canadian TV series, some clips are available on youtube). It's (obviously) the only first exposure to programming I ever experienced. It's taken me an additional 25 years or so to get to where I am now, but I have to say it was good beginning.
It had cute little animations about bits being light-switches and the CPU being a long-nosed cartoon character putting numbers into boxes. I still think about computers like that.
For example: Bits and Bytes: Program 1
That's too bad. I work right next to the Perimeter Institute and was hoping Stephen would be able to start going to lunch with us.
speak_text.replace( "science", "hockey" )
speak_text.replace( "collision", "body-check" )
speak_text.replace( "universe", "Tim Horton's" )
speak_text.replace( "God", "Gretzky" )
speak_text.replace( "million", "813,000" )
Interesting. After reading all these replies, I'm now really hyper-aware of the 4th wall aspect to video games. I've been familiar with it in theatre for quite some time, and I am a live improvised comedy theatre actor so I know how easy it is to break the 4th wall. I've always thought of it as something that betrays the intended scope of the fantasy. I think games are interactive fiction by design, so you're supposed to be immersed, but interactively so. It's up to the writers to decide what the rules of the game's fantasy are. There's a difference between a soliloquy in a play, and a moment where the actor starts wise-cracking back to a heckler. One is intended, the other is accidental, and is beyond the scope of the play. Furthermore, i've seen desperate attempts to keep from breaking the 4th wall in improv, like when someone in the audience's cell-phone rings, and the actor mime-answers their cellphone, there, the actor deals with the situation within the reality of the play. It's clear that information is passed through the wall, but this is not really _breaking_ the wall, because it doesn't betray the fantasy, it just draws on information that is exchanged between the fantasy and our reality.
Obviously, the video game is trying to set the scope of the fantasy and the degree to which you are expected to be immersed. If that gets radically changed for some reason in a way that suddenly made the laws of the fantasy world seem changed such that they involved more of our reality that you originally thought, you could say that the 4th wall had been broken, or you could just say that the writers were going for that kind of a twist. This can be a great source of humour. I've seen some cool movies where the characters acknowledge that they're making a movie, and it's done intentionally.
Video game designers are given a hard task of justifying phases of the game like the install, the menu screens, dealing with errors, ending the game and restarting, etc.
One of my favourite goofs is when the in-game character speaks out "I have to hit the X button to pick that up" like my character is holding a game controller?!?...what exactly is the perceived reality in those situations? Sure it's self referential, but I believe that those things are just errors that lead to a less immersed experience for the gamer. A much better line would be "You have to hit your X button if you want me to pick that up." Of course it could just be a stylistic choice by the writers to blur the lines as the article said.
I'd like to see a video game that blurred the lines so much that it made me think it wasn't running. So it integrated with my outlook, blackberry, windows desktop etc. It could do crazy things like call me on my cellphone, send me emails, instant-message me. That would be FREAKY!!! Maybe the game will read slashdot and the in-game character will reference real-world events in-character.
Start writing! Be prolific and build your portfolio.
Then you have to learn how to pitch your stories. It's brutally hard -- but study a little philosophy and learn what gets and keeps peoples focus. The content is easy, VG entertainment is mostly escapism; the problem is that your best writing will come from writing what you know, which may not align with what interests other people, so just appeal to the fundamentals of human nature. Polish your silver tongue, weave a tangled web, then sell, sell, sell!
If I were hiring, I would hope to meet an inspiring individual who can capture my attention with their imagination.
I think you're going to the right places, but it sounds like you don't have self-marketing confidence.
Half my point here is: don't wait for someone to tell you to get involved -- just get involved. The rest of my point is that you need to SHOW your passion. You need to tell people some stories.
I'm picturing a movie plot where an inmate's conjugal visitor gets taken hostage and can't use her cellphone to call for help because THE PRISON JAMS THE SIGNALS! The inmate has to break his wife OUT of his own prison, and kick ass against the other prisoners.
I'll take Jason Statham as the inmate.
So your previous amount of security turned out to be: NONE. Anyone could have remotely executed arbitrary code without authentication.
I wonder how much security you will have after the update?
I wonder if people will simply ROT13 their data for cheap token compliance.
This is absolutely true.
You start with a feeling and if the number doesn't jive with your feeling, you change the number, lest people have their feelings be changed by the number.
Having the version number in the product name seems to be a dangerous choice for this reason alone. I can't help but notice that this has been recently ditched by Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
Even when using the year instead of the version number, people lie. Everyone wants to use the next number. There are plenty of 2009 products out already.
People just seem to be predisposed to deceive with numbers. And I'm not talking about hyperbole, I'm talking about the fish story where the fisherman tells you how big the fish was, as his hands slowly move farther and farther apart.
"How big does my number have to be to be convincing but not obviously deceptive?" People will ALWAYS play this game. Anyone who has asked a teenager what time they came home last night will agree.
Well, it seems to me that spammers ARE humans. So trying to detect if the creator of the account is human or not doesn't separate the spammers from the non-spammers.
Think about it: the authenticating machines are designed by humans, and the perpetrating machines are also designed by humans, and the legitimate users are humans too.
Perhaps the problem itself needs to be restated: Allow accounts to legitimate users, deny accounts to spammers. Whether or not there is a human involved on either end seems irrelevant.
- Wyck
That's ridiculous. The American statute says that a "useful process" is patentable, where a process is a "process, act or method". Software is surely in that category of things. It's all about how you use a computer.
I realize you said "it shouldn't get patent protection", all I'm saying is that it's pretty clear that it does. Whether it should or not is left for you to discuss with your government, and it would be democratic of you to participate in such discussions.
And I am reluctant to accept the definition of software as being "the expression of an idea". At least on the dictionary.com site, which lists several such definitions, neither of the words "express" nor "idea" appear anywhere on the page.
Pay for a genuine copy of Windows. There is no excuse not to.
Discontinuing your use of Windows is the only alternative. I totally encourage you to switch to using free software if you can't afford to pay for Windows.
The high price of Windows combined with the simplicity of stealing it, the anonymity of the theft and how essential the product is makes for the theft of it being a pretty common occurrence.
Cellphones, razors, and clothes all have the same problem -- very easy to steal, except that it's pretty clear that people are regularly being caught and punished for those thefts. I'm not so sure that the average software thief is at any risk of being caught.
And to get things started, everyone that posts a message in these threads gets put on "the list".
Oh "Perl"! We thought you said "peril" so we opted out, just to be safe.
My motivator for downloading cracked games was always to avoid paying for the software. The pirated version was free, and free was good. Obviously.
And even if I managed to circumvent protection on a game myself, I never redistributed software. I'd have no problem downloading the games but I would never upload them, or give them away. I was a user, not a dealer.
I used to pirate games, but I don't any more. I met a friend who convinced me that it was wrong. And now that I have a job where I can afford to buy some games here and there, I fork out the money. I've done a quick survey of my friends and they all think of me as being abnormally honest in this regard. I don't mind though. I have a clear conscience and a trophy room of shiny original CDs and manuals. I even buy my music and movies. I have original CDs for all the mp3s in my library, and no DVD-R's with the movie-title in sharpie. Apparently I'm also an outsider in that regard.
This got particularly costly for my music composition software. Which I found a free copy of online, but instead shelled out a whopping $900 for the software to have a legit copy. The software just isn't worth that much. But whatever, I support them in principle -- in that I expect other people to pay full price for my products, or don't use them.
It's odd that you can buy a PC for $399, but it will cost you another $59 to play a major title game on it. Or should I say $29, because the $399 computer won't play the $59 titles, for that you'll need a $1500 computer, and a $799 graphic card. Whatever, I mean, I spent $2500 for my Apple ][+ back in the day, so hardware costs, and you can't download hardware. But it was so hard to find software for the Apple ][+ that very nearly all my titles were pirated. It was the only way I could get stuff. I also lived about 300 km from the nearest store that sold software at the time.
I used to think that shareware was a good model -- release an unprotected demo version that people can play for as long as they want, and then ask people to pay for the full version or for more content. The idea was supposed to be that the shareware version was going to proliferate more than the cracked version -- yeah right.
I think that when I pay full price for a game though, that I shouldn't have to buy a second copy of the game to play LAN multiplayer with my family. My wife and I play video games and it sucks when we buy a game that we really like, but each of us needs a disk in the CD drive to be able to play multiplayer. It used to be that I'd try duplicating the disk to see if that works, which it almost never does. But now I go buy the second disk. Call me a sucker. It's ridiculous that the price of the multiplayer version is proportional to the number of players. I remember a game that would have a ratio, something like 1 disk required for every 3 players on the LAN. That seemed much more reasonable to me. I don't mind buying a second copy when the fourth player joins.
I can't self replicate, but I'm pretty sure I'm alive.
Hold on, I have an important call from my host machinery...er...wife.
...and replaces it with the alternate unnecessary inconvenience of making it more difficult for customers to change their preferences. "Uh, yeah, I noticed you're bagging those in plastic...could you unbag all that and give me paper? Thanks for not asking."
Are you sure this wasn't Microsoft's idea?
It makes me wonder if ancient archaeologists were unearthing simple tools (perhaps hunting and farming implements) that were ancient to them, and had equal difficulty imagining how they worked and what their purpose was, or if archaeology was easier long ago. And will archaeology be harder or easier in the future? Hopefully we are leaving more clues behind, but our devices are more complex.
It makes me wonder how much difficulty future archaeologists will have in a few thousand years when they unearth the Slashdot servers and try to imagine how they worked and what purpose they served.
After I ran 6.2 kilometer yesterday, I was feeling thirsty. So I drank 1.6 liter of water. It took 37 minute to walk back to my car. I fired it up, and saw that the engine was already 52 degree from sitting in the hot sun. I got home, and collapsed from exhaustion. I slept an entire 9 hour.
After a 6.2 kilometer run yesterday, I was feeling thirsty. So I had a 1.6 liter drink of water. It was a 37 minute walk back to my car. I fired it up, and saw it already had a 52 degree engine temperature from sitting in the hot sun. I got home, and collapsed from exhaustion. I had a 9 hour sleep.Adjective vs. noun usage?
I enjoy stories that contemplate, in a scientific way, the ramification of a single change to how the world works. To me, great science fiction is written by exploring in depth a single scientific concept, and at the same time resisting the urge to change every law of physics to serve new plot devices.
To me, stories that make liberal adjustments to reality are more of a fantasy genre than science fiction. I think that movies like Groundhog Day and GATTACA are successful science fiction stories because they have only one significant change to scientific truths. Whereas shows like Star Trek are just fantasy worlds, full of adjustments and modifications to physics and reality.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fantasy genre too, but not for its science; mostly just for its artistic impressions of scientificly creative worlds.
Obviously, both good and bad stories can be written with either technique, but I gain special satisfaction from the stories that change only one thing, and explore it in depth. To me, the science is the the exploration of the concepts, not the invention of them.
- Wyck