You only need more than ten hours if you can't fool them into thinking the half-hour of actual content you created is new and different the second time they see it! Go WoW!
Step 1: Create a mechanism by which gamers can be coerced into voluntarily repeating a thirty-minute span of playtime over and over, with no additional content development required! Step 2: ??? Step 3: PROFIT!
Rather more than one in a hundred Americans also watch MTV on a regular basis.
Does that mean you should also? At the upper end of the curve, subscriber numbers are a better indicator of mediocrity than they are for anything else.
"Extremists" are just people, like any other, driven by emotions and reasons. Villainizing them and dehumanizing them is failing to understand the real problem.
The real problem being that "extremists" actively work to harm individuals who have done nothing to harm the extremists and pose no direct threat to anyone?
This form of extremism in any cause is indefensible, and the reason we have so much violence is that extremism fails to drive enough of the people who matter to violence and hate-- the members of a rational civil society who should take an absolute and uncompromising stand against extremists who advocate or cause harm to innocents, whether they're American politicians, suicide bombers, racist agitators, or media commentators.
Understanding the perspectives of others and empathizing with them should never take precedence over establishing the rule of law and requiring all members of a society to respect the basic human rights of others.
Choosing to be driven by by emotions and disregarding the rights of others? That's well and good. Let he who is without emotion and fully cognizant of the rights of others decide whether to let you have a warning shot...
I used to experience similar symptoms while half-asleep on a desk in class.
The truly odd part was that I retained voluntary control over my fingertips and toes, and I could eventually wake myself up by twitching around until it moved my hand, then use that to move my arm, and so on. Also, math tended to make more sense when I couldn't move......or maybe I was just hallucinating.
Always remember that the rich have done something that was good enough to convince a lot of people to give them money. That's why they're rich. Do you think that simply not working for a living is as great an achievement as inventing a new method to make steel, developing the nation's petroleum industry, or coming up with a better way to search the internet? The rich deserve their riches; the people gave them to them.
In an ideally capitalistic world, yes. However, you are completely missing some rather important factors in the real world, like inherited wealth, market externalities, corruption, coercion, theft, oligarchic market exploitation, and so on.
About all that you can actually say is that the rich have done something which caused them to possess a great deal of money, and as the amount of money in question increases, the odds of it having been acquired by means which an ordinary member of society would associate with 'work' decrease geometrically.
That, and the realization that money is a pretty screwed-up mechanism for giving people what they deserve...
Eagles don't hunt humans because they're not durable enough to reliably survive the encounter.
The largest known species of eagle (now extinct) weighed in at under 30 pounds. The largest eagles in North America today weigh in at about fifteen pounds, under seven percent of which is extra-light hollow bone. Very large, but very light. Not very resistant to being turned into an Eagle Pretzel by an unarmed human because cause light, hollow bones are not well designed to cope with blunt force trauma.
Eagles are highly-evolved killing machines, but they're literally nowhere near our weight class-- under 15% of even adolescent human body weight, and with less than half of the bone mass per pound. *SNAP*
Mouse for common-- Movement, firing. It works.
on
Sid Meier Responds
·
· Score: 1
The problem most folks experience is getting used to pointing your 'head' with the mouse and walking with your keys. Once you get that down there is no going back.
Back in the joyful days of Jedi Knight 2 I picked up the habit of reversed mouse axis and putting +forward movement on mouse2. To this day, my friends think I'm insane, but I like not having to become a stationary target in order to inventively taunt my opponents, or perform other actions which require near-exclusive keyboard use for a moment. An additional factor is that most hardware/interfaces/games only accept so many simultaneous keyboard input channels, so offloading the most-used ones (movement and firing) to alternate mouse input makes a ridiculous amount of sense-- being able to effectively hit one more concurrent button than your opponents is an intangible but highly useful advantage.
It's so satisfying when some fool starts typing back and stops moving till someone nails them, but there really is no going back-- reversed-mouse and mouse2 = forward for life. My friends hop on when I'm grabbing something out of the kitchen, and they're effectively helpless and bitch about my control scheme.
Of course, I laugh at them too.
Unfortunately, some games have issues with arcane controls-- the current bad example would be Battlefield 2, which while otherwise excellent, suffers from where the developers insisted on putting in the downright clunkiest UI I've ever seen-- key mappings for in-game actions are cross-linked to the key mappings for parts of the goddamn UI, which is downright slow, bad and wrong. I bring up the map window, and I have to remember which keyboard key I have bound to whatever mouse2 defaults to in order to access the functions that mouse2 would normally hit, simply horrible. Awesome game though.
Even worse, the new BF2 patch made it so forward movement captures lots of the HUD input modes, so I have to stop moving like all of the other normal-control-scheme retards do in order to spot enemies or use the HUD-up radio menus, so it comes down to a choice between moving and shooting at the hostile armor I just spotted *or* lighting his position up on the HUD for my buddies so everyone knows to take cover and whip out the explosives. Being able to do both was much nicer, and I will thank them kindly if they stop crippling my interface further just 'cause none of their QA people use a rational control scheme.
Anyway, the bottom line is that offloading forward movement onto mouse2 just makes sense, and game developers need to pick up on that with default settings and working interfaces that don't leave mousemovers as crippled as everyone else.
The actual problem to be solved is that of fraudulent transactions. Financial institutions make it too easy for a criminal to commit fraudulent transactions, and too difficult for the victims to clear their names. The institutions make a lot of money because it's easy to make a transaction, open an account, get a credit card and so on.
As Schneier says, banks and other entities that extend credit are making an unbelievable amount of money because the current system places the emphasis on ease of use rather than security. Visa USA processed $1.3 trillion dollars in transactions last year, an amount greater than 10% of the GDP of the United States of America.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years, you probably recieve at least one 'pre-approved' credit card offer per week in the mail-- often for lines of credit exceeding your annual income. Advertisements tout mortgages, credit, car financing, gas credit cards, and innumerable other forms of lending.
Ease of use. That's why you can apply for a credit card by filling in a few lines on a form, with just a name, address, and SSN#. It's also the reason why someone else can fradulently apply for credit under your name with just your name, address, and SSN#.
Rather than individuals being required to prove that credit was granted fraudulently, creditors should have to prove that it was not.
I'd like to see a socially acceptable cease-and-desist letter: "I did not apply for or recieve that line of credit. Unless you can conclusively prove that I was the individual who did, you will remove all references to that credit from my credit history and never contact me again."
The current system is entirely based on security through obscurity, and that just doesn't work in a world where an arbitrary number of people have access to the authentication information being used. Making credit vendors entirely responsible for their own mistakes will cause very rapid changes in that regard.
So, who has enough information to apply for credit in your name, no matter how well you try to hide it?
- Your Employer: All the information anyone needs to fraudulently impersonate you in one simple employee file. - Your bank/lender/creditor: Same as the above. - Your University: Mine just phased out SSN#s as a primary userID five years ago. Some still haven't, and you can bet they all still have it on file... along with a prior address. - Government Agencies: Yeah. They have all of it.
All of the information necessary to authenticate or counterfeit your identity under the current paradigm is available to anyone with access to records in any of those monolithic entities. Or anyone who gains access illicitly. Or anyone who buys access.
Entities which extend credit need to take responsibility for positively verifying the identity of anyone requesting credit, and be 100% responsible by default for all the expense, hassle, and annoyance of instances where credit is granted improperly. Right now, the responsibility is entirely on the individual who was impersonated to resolve the situation, and that is unacceptable.
An extra five minutes is over eight man-hours lost per hundred people present.
So, given that they're all commuting to work, 1% of them could have stayed home that day...
When applied to large groups, 'minor' inconveniences aren't so minor anymore. Let's take air travel as an example: approximately 630 million commercial airline passengers flew over the last 12 months within the United States. Add an average fifteen minutes for additional 'security' measures such as shoe removal searches, pat-downs of hotties, and nail-clipper confiscation, and hey presto, you have nearly 18,000 man-years wasted... and I'd say fifteen minutes per person is very much understating the extent of the problem.
Inefficient and useless security measures do far more harm than good, even when disregarding the morale effects they have on society as a whole.
AOL was already the quantum link to killing AOL Time Warner.
You have to admit that there aren't a lot of entities big enough to lose more money with AOL than Time Warner already did. Maybe M$ going for the worst-acquisition-ever record...
ISTM that all motherboard manufacturers today build pretty much the same product, which is aimed at... everybody, which means "nobody in particular". This is a market ripe for picking.
In many cases, it costs more to design a separate 'barebones' mobo than it does to include the same components as a standard/midrange mobo. For an example from the last few years, even if only a few percent of the market wants an ISA slot, the additional sales more than cover the cost of the additional components on the entire product line, and it's more profitable than having two separate designs.
How many of you people have bought the latest, greatest camera phone, sent a few pictures of your dick to your girlfriend in the vain hope that you would impress her with your "high-techness", and then never used that feature again?
This is Slashdot, so... very few of us? A phone and a girlfriend? That's just unrealistic!
I don't even have a phone, so the closest I can get is having a girlfriend. I wonder if the real reason she's been bugging me to get a phone is so I can take pictures of my dick and send them to her...
Well, if you'd RTFA, human activity definitely increased the destructiveness of the storm by peeling away natural barriers to flooding:
Loss of the coastal marshes that dampened earlier storm surges puts the city at increasing risk to hurricanes. Eighty years of substantial river leveeing has prevented spring flood deposition of new layers of sediment into the marshes, and a similarly lengthy period of marsh excavation activities related to oil and gas exploration and transportation canals for the petrochemical industry have threatened marsh integrity. Sea level rise is expected to further accelerate the loss of these valuable coastal wetlands, the loss of which jeopardizes the fabric of Louisiana communities by threatening the harvesting of natural resources, an integral part of coastal culture. Concerted efforts by state and federal agencies are underway to develop appropriate restoration technologies and adequate funding to implement them.
On a more global scale, human activity is the most plausible cause for the increased rate of sea level rise which has been recorded during the last century. Given the risks associated with major climate change and environmental damage (see above for a minor example), it seems reasonable to pursue responsible methods of minimizing environmental impact now to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failures in the future. I'm a technological optimist, but tempting fate like that merely to avoid marginal impacts on our current lifestyle is stupid.
The question is, how much of this information is being sold in other countries, perhaps in a more sophisticated manner?
All of it, of course. Sooner or later we're going to have to get used to the idea that the concept of preserving privacy as a society disproportionately benefits individuals and groups with the resources to acquire and disseminate information regardless of the obstacles in their way.
It's too late to save privacy as most people currently envision it. What we need to be doing as a society is focus on transparency and equality-- ensuring that all parties in the social contract stand on an equal footing with regard to what information is publicly available. Secrecy is most dangerous when the powers that be insist that it be one-sided...
I used to be the owner of a linksys cable modem, and I find it disturbing that anyone takes pride in owning the corporation that manufactured that POS.
You know, the feminist and civil rights movements were ushered in by the Christian activists.
I think you would have a great deal of difficulty proving that 'Christian activists' were the force behind the feminist and civil rights movements. Many people of faith participated, but that is unsurprising in a population where the majority espouse some form of Christianity.
The bottom line was individual people united behind the goals of ending discrimination nonviolently. The principles of many religions helped guide the civil rights movement, and generalizing things to the degree of saying that it was the work of 'Christian activists' is patently absurd.
Don't even get me started on feminism and Christianity...
the $25 billion he's donated to charity probably would've done more good if left in the hands of the people who were overchargd....or the people who were 'overcharged' could have chosen not to purchase the product, if they happened to think that it wasn't cost-effective. There are always alternatives.
The easiest way to not have to worry about LM hashes is to use a password longer than 14 characters.
This poor sod just happened to shoot one char too short in laying down the law to his kiddies. A clear-cut case of insufficient paranoia leading to Slashdot ridicule.
Slashdot Mirror
You only need more than ten hours if you can't fool them into thinking the half-hour of actual content you created is new and different the second time they see it! Go WoW!
Step 1: Create a mechanism by which gamers can be coerced into voluntarily repeating a thirty-minute span of playtime over and over, with no additional content development required!
Step 2: ???
Step 3: PROFIT!
Rather more than one in a hundred Americans also watch MTV on a regular basis.
Does that mean you should also? At the upper end of the curve, subscriber numbers are a better indicator of mediocrity than they are for anything else.
"Extremists" are just people, like any other, driven by emotions and reasons. Villainizing them and dehumanizing them is failing to understand the real problem.
The real problem being that "extremists" actively work to harm individuals who have done nothing to harm the extremists and pose no direct threat to anyone?
This form of extremism in any cause is indefensible, and the reason we have so much violence is that extremism fails to drive enough of the people who matter to violence and hate-- the members of a rational civil society who should take an absolute and uncompromising stand against extremists who advocate or cause harm to innocents, whether they're American politicians, suicide bombers, racist agitators, or media commentators.
Understanding the perspectives of others and empathizing with them should never take precedence over establishing the rule of law and requiring all members of a society to respect the basic human rights of others.
Choosing to be driven by by emotions and disregarding the rights of others? That's well and good. Let he who is without emotion and fully cognizant of the rights of others decide whether to let you have a warning shot...
I used to experience similar symptoms while half-asleep on a desk in class.
...or maybe I was just hallucinating.
The truly odd part was that I retained voluntary control over my fingertips and toes, and I could eventually wake myself up by twitching around until it moved my hand, then use that to move my arm, and so on. Also, math tended to make more sense when I couldn't move...
Always remember that the rich have done something that was good enough to convince a lot of people to give them money. That's why they're rich. Do you think that simply not working for a living is as great an achievement as inventing a new method to make steel, developing the nation's petroleum industry, or coming up with a better way to search the internet? The rich deserve their riches; the people gave them to them.
In an ideally capitalistic world, yes. However, you are completely missing some rather important factors in the real world, like inherited wealth, market externalities, corruption, coercion, theft, oligarchic market exploitation, and so on.
About all that you can actually say is that the rich have done something which caused them to possess a great deal of money, and as the amount of money in question increases, the odds of it having been acquired by means which an ordinary member of society would associate with 'work' decrease geometrically.
That, and the realization that money is a pretty screwed-up mechanism for giving people what they deserve...
Eagles don't hunt humans because they're not durable enough to reliably survive the encounter.
The largest known species of eagle (now extinct) weighed in at under 30 pounds. The largest eagles in North America today weigh in at about fifteen pounds, under seven percent of which is extra-light hollow bone. Very large, but very light. Not very resistant to being turned into an Eagle Pretzel by an unarmed human because cause light, hollow bones are not well designed to cope with blunt force trauma.
Eagles are highly-evolved killing machines, but they're literally nowhere near our weight class-- under 15% of even adolescent human body weight, and with less than half of the bone mass per pound. *SNAP*
The problem most folks experience is getting used to pointing your 'head' with the mouse and walking with your keys. Once you get that down there is no going back.
Back in the joyful days of Jedi Knight 2 I picked up the habit of reversed mouse axis and putting +forward movement on mouse2. To this day, my friends think I'm insane, but I like not having to become a stationary target in order to inventively taunt my opponents, or perform other actions which require near-exclusive keyboard use for a moment. An additional factor is that most hardware/interfaces/games only accept so many simultaneous keyboard input channels, so offloading the most-used ones (movement and firing) to alternate mouse input makes a ridiculous amount of sense-- being able to effectively hit one more concurrent button than your opponents is an intangible but highly useful advantage.
It's so satisfying when some fool starts typing back and stops moving till someone nails them, but there really is no going back-- reversed-mouse and mouse2 = forward for life. My friends hop on when I'm grabbing something out of the kitchen, and they're effectively helpless and bitch about my control scheme.
Of course, I laugh at them too.
Unfortunately, some games have issues with arcane controls-- the current bad example would be Battlefield 2, which while otherwise excellent, suffers from where the developers insisted on putting in the downright clunkiest UI I've ever seen-- key mappings for in-game actions are cross-linked to the key mappings for parts of the goddamn UI, which is downright slow, bad and wrong. I bring up the map window, and I have to remember which keyboard key I have bound to whatever mouse2 defaults to in order to access the functions that mouse2 would normally hit, simply horrible. Awesome game though.
Even worse, the new BF2 patch made it so forward movement captures lots of the HUD input modes, so I have to stop moving like all of the other normal-control-scheme retards do in order to spot enemies or use the HUD-up radio menus, so it comes down to a choice between moving and shooting at the hostile armor I just spotted *or* lighting his position up on the HUD for my buddies so everyone knows to take cover and whip out the explosives. Being able to do both was much nicer, and I will thank them kindly if they stop crippling my interface further just 'cause none of their QA people use a rational control scheme.
Anyway, the bottom line is that offloading forward movement onto mouse2 just makes sense, and game developers need to pick up on that with default settings and working interfaces that don't leave mousemovers as crippled as everyone else.
The actual problem to be solved is that of fraudulent transactions. Financial institutions make it too easy for a criminal to commit fraudulent transactions, and too difficult for the victims to clear their names. The institutions make a lot of money because it's easy to make a transaction, open an account, get a credit card and so on.
As Schneier says, banks and other entities that extend credit are making an unbelievable amount of money because the current system places the emphasis on ease of use rather than security. Visa USA processed $1.3 trillion dollars in transactions last year, an amount greater than 10% of the GDP of the United States of America.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last 20 years, you probably recieve at least one 'pre-approved' credit card offer per week in the mail-- often for lines of credit exceeding your annual income. Advertisements tout mortgages, credit, car financing, gas credit cards, and innumerable other forms of lending.
Ease of use. That's why you can apply for a credit card by filling in a few lines on a form, with just a name, address, and SSN#. It's also the reason why someone else can fradulently apply for credit under your name with just your name, address, and SSN#.
Rather than individuals being required to prove that credit was granted fraudulently, creditors should have to prove that it was not.
I'd like to see a socially acceptable cease-and-desist letter: "I did not apply for or recieve that line of credit. Unless you can conclusively prove that I was the individual who did, you will remove all references to that credit from my credit history and never contact me again."
The current system is entirely based on security through obscurity, and that just doesn't work in a world where an arbitrary number of people have access to the authentication information being used. Making credit vendors entirely responsible for their own mistakes will cause very rapid changes in that regard.
So, who has enough information to apply for credit in your name, no matter how well you try to hide it?
- Your Employer: All the information anyone needs to fraudulently impersonate you in one simple employee file.
- Your bank/lender/creditor: Same as the above.
- Your University: Mine just phased out SSN#s as a primary userID five years ago. Some still haven't, and you can bet they all still have it on file... along with a prior address.
- Government Agencies: Yeah. They have all of it.
All of the information necessary to authenticate or counterfeit your identity under the current paradigm is available to anyone with access to records in any of those monolithic entities. Or anyone who gains access illicitly. Or anyone who buys access.
Entities which extend credit need to take responsibility for positively verifying the identity of anyone requesting credit, and be 100% responsible by default for all the expense, hassle, and annoyance of instances where credit is granted improperly. Right now, the responsibility is entirely on the individual who was impersonated to resolve the situation, and that is unacceptable.
An extra five minutes is over eight man-hours lost per hundred people present.
So, given that they're all commuting to work, 1% of them could have stayed home that day...
When applied to large groups, 'minor' inconveniences aren't so minor anymore. Let's take air travel as an example: approximately 630 million commercial airline passengers flew over the last 12 months within the United States. Add an average fifteen minutes for additional 'security' measures such as shoe removal searches, pat-downs of hotties, and nail-clipper confiscation, and hey presto, you have nearly 18,000 man-years wasted... and I'd say fifteen minutes per person is very much understating the extent of the problem.
Inefficient and useless security measures do far more harm than good, even when disregarding the morale effects they have on society as a whole.
AOL was already the quantum link to killing AOL Time Warner.
You have to admit that there aren't a lot of entities big enough to lose more money with AOL than Time Warner already did. Maybe M$ going for the worst-acquisition-ever record...
ISTM that all motherboard manufacturers today build pretty much the same product, which is aimed at ... everybody, which means "nobody in particular". This is a market ripe for picking.
In many cases, it costs more to design a separate 'barebones' mobo than it does to include the same components as a standard/midrange mobo. For an example from the last few years, even if only a few percent of the market wants an ISA slot, the additional sales more than cover the cost of the additional components on the entire product line, and it's more profitable than having two separate designs.
Feature creep on steroids...
How many of you people have bought the latest, greatest camera phone, sent a few pictures of your dick to your girlfriend in the vain hope that you would impress her with your "high-techness", and then never used that feature again?
This is Slashdot, so... very few of us? A phone and a girlfriend? That's just unrealistic!
I don't even have a phone, so the closest I can get is having a girlfriend. I wonder if the real reason she's been bugging me to get a phone is so I can take pictures of my dick and send them to her...
Well, if you'd RTFA, human activity definitely increased the destructiveness of the storm by peeling away natural barriers to flooding:
Loss of the coastal marshes that dampened earlier storm surges puts the city at increasing risk to hurricanes. Eighty years of substantial river leveeing has prevented spring flood deposition of new layers of sediment into the marshes, and a similarly lengthy period of marsh excavation activities related to oil and gas exploration and transportation canals for the petrochemical industry have threatened marsh integrity. Sea level rise is expected to further accelerate the loss of these valuable coastal wetlands, the loss of which jeopardizes the fabric of Louisiana communities by threatening the harvesting of natural resources, an integral part of coastal culture. Concerted efforts by state and federal agencies are underway to develop appropriate restoration technologies and adequate funding to implement them.
On a more global scale, human activity is the most plausible cause for the increased rate of sea level rise which has been recorded during the last century. Given the risks associated with major climate change and environmental damage (see above for a minor example), it seems reasonable to pursue responsible methods of minimizing environmental impact now to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failures in the future. I'm a technological optimist, but tempting fate like that merely to avoid marginal impacts on our current lifestyle is stupid.
Man, the 1980's just loves to screw up words, don't they? After all, that decade is what happened to our beloved "hacker" as well.
I believe you mean 'h4x0r'. The 90's changed the spelling to avoid confusion after the horrendous mistakes of the 80's.
Dip your balls in cold water
No, thank you, we're British.
Oh yes, the Olympics are non-profit... for the athletes.
For everyone else involved, there's an absolutely incredible amount of money flying in all directions.
Results 1 - 10 of about 61,900 for IOC corruption. (0.20 seconds
In many cases, laws are inconvenient for most, ignored by many, and selectively enforced against the few.
Selective enforcement is something to get all righteous about.
No. Move along, Citizen.
One big one is, you have a general idea where the ground is. It's a roughly horizontal approximate plane.
"Roughly Horizontal" covers an awful lot of ground.
Off-road, the only constant is that the ground isn't a road.
The question is, how much of this information is being sold in other countries, perhaps in a more sophisticated manner?
All of it, of course. Sooner or later we're going to have to get used to the idea that the concept of preserving privacy as a society disproportionately benefits individuals and groups with the resources to acquire and disseminate information regardless of the obstacles in their way.
It's too late to save privacy as most people currently envision it. What we need to be doing as a society is focus on transparency and equality-- ensuring that all parties in the social contract stand on an equal footing with regard to what information is publicly available. Secrecy is most dangerous when the powers that be insist that it be one-sided...
Cisco are now the proud owners of Linksys
I used to be the owner of a linksys cable modem, and I find it disturbing that anyone takes pride in owning the corporation that manufactured that POS.
You know, the feminist and civil rights movements were ushered in by the Christian activists.
I think you would have a great deal of difficulty proving that 'Christian activists' were the force behind the feminist and civil rights movements. Many people of faith participated, but that is unsurprising in a population where the majority espouse some form of Christianity.
The bottom line was individual people united behind the goals of ending discrimination nonviolently. The principles of many religions helped guide the civil rights movement, and generalizing things to the degree of saying that it was the work of 'Christian activists' is patently absurd.
Don't even get me started on feminism and Christianity...
the $25 billion he's donated to charity probably would've done more good if left in the hands of the people who were overchargd. ...or the people who were 'overcharged' could have chosen not to purchase the product, if they happened to think that it wasn't cost-effective. There are always alternatives.
Just a thought about free markets.
Yet again, investigation reveals that the primary cause of the incident is pilot error.
The easiest way to not have to worry about LM hashes is to use a password longer than 14 characters.
This poor sod just happened to shoot one char too short in laying down the law to his kiddies. A clear-cut case of insufficient paranoia leading to Slashdot ridicule.