When I turned 30, I've finally bothered to sit down and seriously try to write the game I've been planning ever since about a year after I got my ZX Spectrum.
Before now, I've started it in BASIC, Z80 assembler, Visual BASIC, x86 assembler, Java and C++, (in roughly that order) and a ton of other languages in order to learn the language, and never got to where I felt it was coming together. A year or so ago I sat down with another project, ported it to an ARM embedded device using C without much hassle at all (I already knew the language much better than I thought), and in the process set myself up a complete cross-platform development environment that was invisible to me.
Once there, I decided to start the ancient project of mine again to see if I could and got further than ever before (you know you program too much and remember too much of your computer science courses from 10 years ago when you can knock up a D* pathfinding algorithm with multiple zones and movement prediction quicker than you can find one on the Internet).
Now I have an Eclipse window running on my computer at all times (literally), plugged into a remote SVN server on a remote dedicated server that I bought for that purpose alone, with Cygwin and (later) MinGW integrated and a remote Linux headless build on the dedicated server that "shows" its screen to a VNC client on my PC (which gives me Windows and Linux, 32- and 64-bit, GPU-accelerated (high GPU bandwidth) and unaccelerated (with low VNC "video bus" bandwidth), responsive and latent clients, at least three different versions of gcc to test-compile on etc. in one fell swoop) and several 10's of 1000's of lines of code that I've wrote from scratch.
Gaming when you're young just makes you want to be a gamer and make your own games when you're older, in my experience. I bet most games industry workers are OLDER than the supposed demographic of the games they write - in which case you have to ask why they wouldn't make the games fun for themselves too - after all, they play them more than ANYONE else and they become an immutable part of their lives.
I haven't played a single game in the last 15 years where I didn't try to work out how they got it to work how it did,and some of them (especially the smaller indie titles) I have actually recreated in my own tests - just without the pretty graphics. I just bought Dungeon Keeper on GoG.com - unaccelerated 486-era computers running a fully-rotatable 3D environment. Admittedly low res, but damn I was never expecting that to work in DOSBox - and then I remembered Magic Carpet and other similar games and realised that even back then how the games worked was just as interesting to me as how they played.
And yet, I still pour hundreds of hours into silly indie games that are nothing more than pre-rendered sprites on a 2D background with very primitive physics. Altitude has sucked my life away, for instance.
If other words - if the underlying method was allowable, the computerised version was also allowable.
The point is that "business method" and other nonsensical mathematical processes aren't allowable. I.e. you could have patented computer-controlled ABS in a car (because it was new, innovative, non-obvious, and the computer wasn't necessary to the invention) but you STILL can't patent ways to advertise at clients using sounds (because that's a business method patent, is obvious, has prior art, etc. and thus is invalid whether you do it on a PC, or a cloud-farm, or on paper).
What that says is that the computer program DOES NOT form part of the patent unless the job it is doing DOES (in which case it can't just be, say, anti-aliasing a font because that's just a matrix multiplication and anti-aliasing has been applied to everything in the past and doing it on a computer or to a font makes no difference).
The UK doesn't have software patents. We have a tiny piece of case law (which is easily overruled because the EU-wide law it's based on doesn't have that) above and beyond the EU's blanket "no-software-patents" policy, none of which really affects the outcome unless it's an extremely close call about whether something is patentable AT ALL (and the fact of it being software or not is completely incidental)
Nobody ever challenges someone who *looks* like they should be doing something. Wear a hi-vis jacket. Carry a piece of paper that's had coffee spilled on and says something vaguely on the right lines (no-one will check anyway). Knock on the door of the place next door and tell them you'll be doing some work, will try not to disturb them, etc. If they have no idea who you are, you just say that you're only the contractor with a job sheet - they aren't going to be phoning city hall for an explanation and by the time they *did*, you'd be long gone.
I've walked into *schools* that haven't challenged me because I *look* like an IT guy and was carrying a laptop and a multimeter (I was allowed there, but nobody present KNEW that) and was staring at the cable runs along the ceiling.
Don't try to fit in, don't try to be friendly, don't try to be too helpful (are genuine contractors usually helpful?), just act like your boss has pushed you into doing that job "a day early" and you don't want to be there but "that's what the paperwork says to do".
Someone sticking a ladder up in a public street is going to get zero attention, even from police, because it happens 50 times a day on advertising hoardings, building work, even just an IT guy checking his external cables, etc. Someone pasting a "professional looking" poster on a large empty space will attract zero comment. You could probably even get a free cup of tea if you spoke to whoever owns the shop underneath it or next door, etc. People would even let you run a mains lead out their back door for a drill or something for a day if you ask them, into which you could plug *anything*.
Don't create a fuss, don't try to hide, look like you're meant to be there. It's a piece of piss. How do you think burglars etc. get their work done, scout out a place beforehand, etc.? It's not unusual for someone to challenge a burglar only to be given a convincing explanation ("Er, yeah, John said I could pick up my stuff from last night" - guess what name is on the envelopes in the mailbox?) and let them carry on. It's just a matter of *not caring* about getting caught (i.e. the consequences are negligible -as in this case - or the chances of you being able to escape if caught are high).
The patent system isn't actually that bad in the UK. We don't have software patents, which are a ridiculously stupid idea, for instance. Thus this doesn't really solve pretty much the biggest problem in patent law anywhere in the world - US software patents.
If I were to write an iPhone app, and it gets sold on the US iPhone app store, some moron can try to sue me because I used anti-aliases fonts, or whatever, even if in my own country that's a meaningless and invalid patent. That will probably get my app revoked, provide me with huge negative publicity and cost a bomb to defend.
Sadly, most of the big online sites and services are US-based. Steam, iTunes, Amazon Kindle Store, etc. It saddens me that a percentage of the money I spend goes on fighting people who basically claim to have an exclusive right to "1+1=2" (or applying technique X to technical device Y where the two weren't married before but where the connection is blatantly and blindingly obvious to anyone who knows about X at all) under a law that doesn't exist in my own country or even the majority of countries in the world.
"Real" patents aren't much of a problem. They really aren't and haven't been for centuries. It's just this stupid "intellectual property" definition, and stupid patent checking, that somehow manages to incriminate people using an OK button in a piece of software, or whatever other insanities have passed through the US patent system where other countries would exclude the entire category, question the originality and obviousness, and do a half-decent search for prior art before granting anything.
Take a laptop, by all means, but internet-connectivity is hardly necessary or even desirable even on a long flight.
The laptop will die before you get there, guaranteed, and most planes *don't* have charge points that the passenger can access. And yet, without Internet, you can watch movies, listen to music, read books, program (it's brilliant for programming if you get a quiet night flight), draft email (yes, email does NOT have to be sent live every time), play games, etc. If you can't occupy yourselves with a pre-prepared laptop, I don't see that an Internet connection is going to help you.
And I'd really rather not have to share a high-latency, low-bandwidth, insecure, monitored, filtered and paid-for connection with 100+ other passengers who are all either a) using wifi on the same channel in a confined metal box or b) have cables strewn about the place (which is also still infinitely less useful than just giving people a mains socket which is still *NOT* standard on quite a lot of flights).
Gimme a mains socket, not an internet connection, and I'll have my own, personal, in-flight movies for the entire flight with MY OWN headphones for myself and my companion. Hell, you can even bill me for the electricity at an extortionate KWh rate if you like. I already do just that but there's never anywhere to plug in to recharge, especially on short European flights.
If you *need* Internet that badly that you can't be without it for a day or survive 24 hours in a plane without it, you seriously need to work on your attention span and getting a couple of hobbies (even if computer-related, e.g. programming, gaming, etc.)
Mathematics deals in certainties. An integer is odd (or prime, or divisble, or constant, or whatever), or it's not, by a very strict definition.
The problem stems from *proving* that. The mathematician (i.e. someone who studied mathematics at, say, degree level or higher) that can actually write a proof is surprisingly rare. The one that can write a perfect, undeniable, accepted, doubt-free proof in a single hit is would be seen as an absolute genius better than any other mathematician that's ever lived - more "clever" than Einstein, Hawking, etc. Because we're human and we always miss *something* in any proof ever offered for even the simplest of things.
Most proofs are like security programs on computers - they'll have holes with virtually certainty, and it's only accepted as "proof" when the holes have been found, poked at for 20+ years and every holes patched, countered and fixed. That's the process called "peer review". Look at any mathematical-based security process in computer science and you see the same pattern - cryptography, clever exploits, chroot-breaking etc. It takes decades to find MOST of the holes and an infinite amount of time to find all of them.
Any "proof" that comes from someone who hasn't been poking holes in others papers, or endlessly patching their proof for years based on the input of humongously talented third-parties is, history shows, 100% bullshit. Just read the story behind the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, for example.
The problem is that the mathematical equivalent of "free energy" fanatics, etc., are people who claim to have proven something and yet have zero experience of providing actual proofs that are accepted by the mathematical community. It's elitest, sure, but it helps to filter out the nutters if you just ignore EVERYTHING posted on arxiv.org until it appears in a reputable, third-party-reviewed journal and has had ten rebuttals, all of which have been neatly countered using fabulously complex arguments.
You can now "prove" the four-colour theorem in an afternoon with a home computer and some mathematical knowledge. But it took *decades* to convince the mathematical community that a proof which relies almost entirely on the output of a computer to perform the grunt work was acceptable. And it was still in doubt from 1976 up until around 2005 as to whether it was actually a "proof" or not.
If someone claims to have solved a long-standing mathematical problem, with zero previous experience, treat them how you'd treat someone who claims that they can double the output of your car engine without using any extra energy source if you let them take the car apart. Yes, technically and historically, such things have been possible by certain marvellous innovations in the field. But would you really let him tinker with your car on the basis of that without knowledge of that person himself?
P=NP is a field that attracts people just like the "free/perpetual energy/motion" nutters, for instance. There's been at least three or four slashdot stories of "proofs" of that since the beginning of the year. None of them came to anything, all of them were firmly rebutted, and none of the authors were heard of again. It's not a general hostility in mathematics - just towards the time-wasters and nutters that think A-level maths qualifies them to provide a definitive proof of something new in an afternoon.
And any system worth its salt (crypto-hashing joke) won't allow that many attempts against any external or internal authenticator and will NEVER expose its password hashes.
Seriously, if someone has your password hash, it's game over anyway and it doesn't matter if it takes 2 weeks or 2 months to guess the passwords. And if they don't, then you shouldn't be letting them try several BILLION attempts at guessing a password anyway.
What is it with this modern fad of having to join some exclusive, pay-for, preorder list for something that you have NO idea what it will play like, before you get to see (for example) a bloody demo!
The point of a demo is that people can see what they're buying BEFORE they lay down money and to generate hype. Why do people lay down money to join these elitest little clubs in order to get access to stuff they should already have been given? Does it make you feel big and clever that you can throw money away on something that you don't know what it is?
It seriously sounds like some Scientology-style club - "Hey! Pay me some money and in a few years, I'll let you into a secret before everyone else! The more you pay, the more secrets I'll tell you!"
Now that's off my chest - I really don't care. The most-hyped game in the world isn't out yet and I *still* can't even play a demo. I enjoyed the first Duke3D (though it was the only 3D game I've ever played that induced motion sickness in myself), when I was about 17, and while games still took themselves a bit too seriously. I saw nothing there that, brought forward onto a new engine, would actually be new or original or quirky when this game comes out (and now I'm 32!).
How about this, people - instead of hyping up a game, for free, on someone else's behalf, at zero benefit to yourself, just wait a couple of weeks and see what the damn game is actually LIKE. Then, if it's good, you can buy it. If it's not, you can let it rot in the annals of gaming history with all the other over-hyped crap (Daikatana.... I still have NEVER played that game, even for a minute).
Maybe if you got off your backside and bought a $1 domain that you actually OWN (or at least have a guaranteed annual right to) rather than having A@B.com (are you an international corporation?) you wouldn't have that problem.
Seriously, my MOTHER has her own domain name with infinite aliases and forwarding to a proper email account and has had for years and despite several changes in ISP, host and moving onto webmail still has the same address and has never had to inform people of the change. You could have done that YEARS ago and forwarded it to your io.com account and slowly migrated to using the new name until your io.com was merely a mail storage account, rather than actually used for reception or sitting in other people's address books.
There is nothing worse, in this day and age, than seeing a huge lorry go past you on the motorway with "companyname@randomdomainhost.com" (or, worse, randomname.uk.com!) as the email. It's even worse if you'r applying for an IT job and your CV has some Hotmail or freebie ISP address. It costs literally PENCE to have a much more personalised, reliable, controlled and relevant address and has for years.
Not sure I'd want to be a commercial airliner where the pilot didn't know such a procedure by heart and had practised it several hundred times in a simulator (or even for real).
If you're digging out bits of paper mid-crash, that's probably the reason you crash.
Not to nit-pick, but your brain has little to do with your organs functioning - they just do that anyway. They are *all* pretty autonomous - when people say stupid things like "Your brain doesn't have to think about this, it does it subconciously", I want to slap them. Most systems in the body are autonomous, but they are sustained by the body as a whole (hence don't go on doing it forever) and the brain has only a very vague oversight of it going on.
Those organs have a life-support system controlled by other autonomous systems, and those autonomous systems work with no input from the brain if necessary. The brain actually plays little part in those processes, except primitive sensor-reponses (deploying a hormone, raising body temperature, etc.) but it's like the engineer at the nuclear plant who presses the "coolant" button when the temperature alarms go off being called a "nuclear scientist" or pretending that *HE'S* banging the atoms together.
All the hard work is done by countless billions of autonomous, specialised cells that do little else, do it automatically (because that's their sole purpose and "design" in life - they can ONLY do that job) and can go on doing that long after death. Hell, your heartbeat has virtually nothing to do with your brain, for example, but the brain can send a request along the lines of "I'm feeling low blood pressure, can you speed up a bit?"
And each neuron has several *thousand* connections so the order of magnitude just went up by 3 or maybe 4 (so we're now "only" 6 or 7 orders of magnitude away from having a "potential" brain simulation). When you have a planet with 100 billion computers, and each of those is simultaneously connected (via speed-of-light links) directly to, say, 10,000 other computers all the time, then THAT system would resemble the complexity of the human brain. That's about 16 computers for every person on the planet, with 10,000 ethernet cards in each (because the links are DIRECT, not incidental), if you want an actual computer analogy.
And then you have the spinal cord which contains a "mini" brain, if you like, that's capable of responding to stimuli before the brain even knows about it. And most organs self-controlled by billions of cells which the brain knows nothing about. Even the immune system is pretty much automated and the brain has little to do with it.
Trying to pretend we're ANYWHERE near that sort of complexity is like saying that we *almost* simulate the entire universe down to a molecular level on a supercomputer. Elements of truth but out by so many orders of magnitude that it's laughable.
Which is why, when a scientists tells you they have made an "artifial brain" or even "artificial intelligence" of some kind, you should laugh in their face. It's not having a superiority complex about how wonderful humans are, it's just that we're literally playing with toys at the moment and have no way to come close to simulating even an *ant's* brain. Hell, we can just about pretend to almost simulate a single-celled organism. Guess how many of those it would take to make a brain-like structure? 100's or 1000's of billions.
Maybe the Twits should apply for a super-injunction to keep their name secret? After all, it's not in the public interest for them to be outed and it might hurt their families etc.
Oh, sorry, I forgot - you have to be rich enough.
Or Ryan Giggs could just instruct his lawyers to stop digging him into an even deeper hole, the end result of which will be that he'll have even less privacy than when he started.
A year ago: "Ryan Giggs had an affair" would have been a one-day, one-column bit of news and nobody would have cared.
Today, the thing has been in the papers every day for several months and is going to be the subject of (in the worst case) 75,000 lawsuits.
Similarly, other people who had superinjunctions (including a BBC journalist!) confessed to them, and the affair they had that was the subject of the censorship, and within a day they were out of the news.
Nobody will go to jail - and if they do it'll be so incredibly expensive that you'll be more likely to have riots over the costs than the privacy implications... MP's in the UK have already said it's far too impractical to jail (or even identify) 75,000 people for such a thing, especially when days later an MP themselves used parliamentary privilege to announce who the subject of the injunction was (and Scottish newspapers have already printed it, as have Italian, American, etc. etc.)
And the whole question of superinjunctions has gone so far that the prime minister himself said that he doesn't understand how they were issued and thinks that it's wrong that they were.
Twitter have said they'll co-operate. But nobody's actually ASKED for that data yet. And they probably never will.
Yeah, it literally takes 10 minutes for anyone with a brain.
Yeah, there are ways for ISP's to even automate it and shield users from it (e.g. transparent tunnels so they carry on using IPv4 but IPV6 is the actual carrier).
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
I did it. I went to the IPv6 test sites. They told me I was enabled. Ten minutes later, after not finding another IPv6 accessible website, I turned it off to save me having yet-another-avenue where someone could get onto my network if I'd made a mistake in the configuration, or forgotten to include ip6tables rules as wall as iptables rules, etc.
There was literally NO reason to have it enabled. The only "problem" I had was that ntpq seemed to think all my usual NTP peers were offline but that was probably just me.
YET AGAIN: When Slashdot posts AAAA records, we can start the push, otherwise we're just geeks pushing an agenda that we don't follow ourselves. When the BBC posts them, we're getting there. When every website I normally visit is IPv6 accessible, it's a success. Only THEN can we think about turning "off" IPv4. Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
Seeing as you're the only one commenting on this, and I can't see it either, it's probably YOU that's infected, or you clicked something you didn't mean to.
Hell, there aren't even any banner ads on that page at all.
Damn, you're an idiot. I don't claim to be a perfect driver but the fact there are people on the roads like you worries me.
And in some countries, the official advice if someone is too close to your backside for you to have an adequate braking distance is to brake in order to recoup that distance from the front instead. I'd be very surprised if "slower yields to faster" is actually written ANYWHERE in the US Highway Code.
If someone's doing the speed limit it is legally *CORRECT* (but not necessarily the safest possible thing for that particular driver) to not go any faster. To "get out of your way" is up to the lane rules, which say that so long as THEY are overtaking, it's fine to be in the second overtaking lane (or third, if you have a four-lane motorway). Yes, they are called overtaking lanes (all except one). "Fast lane" is a term you won't find on any legal document or driving course.
The most dangerous thing on a road is tailgaters like yourself, especially high-speed tailgaters. If someone's doing the speed limit, sit behind them. They just might save your life one day.
That said, I'm far from a goodie-two-shoes and if you try that shite with someone who just-doesn't-care about your urgent appointment, or their clapped-out-old-motor, they might just choose to slam their brakes on. Guess who'll pay for having insufficient braking distance and travelling too fast? Guess whose car will be ruined beyond repair and whose car will just have the boot pushed out a bit, a new exhaust and be back on the road? Not the guy in front. "I was doing 70, officer, and saw a flash out of the corner of my eye - my instinct was to brake to avoid a collision and in doing so the idiot behind ran straight into me because he had insufficient braking distance between himself and the car in front".
YOU are the reason that speed cameras even exist - if you drove reasonably at those speeds, it wouldn't be a problem. Expecting the world and his brother to get out of your way is a good way to end up in the rear of a truck that just doesn't care, or didn't even see you (and didn't really need to if you were behind him).
Go for a drive on an Autobahn - I went there once and it was fabulous. Not the speed, the sheer courtesy of other drivers and the fact that ALL of them stick to the rules all the time. I nearly got arrested for turning in an empty two-way street, for God's sake! It's the least stressful driving experience I've ever had - 10 minutes in my home town had me cursing at people and braking to avoid the local nutters in their souped-up cars tearing across lanes without looking.
I know plenty of people that have stopped taking data (and sometimes their business) over to the states since they started getting too heavy-handed while at the same time ordering the EU to send personal data on visitors to them.
They either VPN it in and access it live (which is still dodgy because certain people could insist they do that with them watching, but I supposed you'd at least get a choice to notice that from the home-base and revoke their credentials), or don't take the data to the US at all. Some of them literally take re-imaged laptops and/or nothing at all and work it out the other end.
- FUCK NO - pulling over takes less time than than it would to fiddle for the device. I only know of a handful of roads where you're not allowed to pull over in my entire countries (so-called "red routes" which invariably join to lots and lots of other roads where you can do just that - motorways have a hard shoulder and services for a reason).
- Taxi
Amazing things, taxis. Been around for centuries. Damn sight cheaper than buying an entire automated vehicle for such one-off episodes. Stick your kids in an automated car so they can go to the prom when you're working? Sod off. The logistics and legalities don't even bear thinking about.
That's not even mentioning the complete pipe-dream of being able to do that as a minor for many, many, many years to come (I doubt this century but that's a prediction). And I've already covered the problems with a car that has manual override too (as in how would you stop your kids having manual override capability too, and / or if you have manual override who's responsible if the car does something wrong and you take over, and who's responsible if manual override WOULD have saved the pedestrian you hit but you didn't use it?).
I suspect your minority is much, much, much tinier than my one.
That was a (non-existent) "brake defect" where the drivers claimed they weren't able to brake. Not one case was proved in court where this was the case, to my knowledge. But, damn expensive for Toyota to prove otherwise, I should think.
However, an ABS failure, for instance, wouldn't necessarily be the car's fault as the device only operates when the car is skidding anyway (read: driver error). And cruise-control is a human-activated switch that warns against it's use and that doesn't excuse you from controlling the car.
So, yes, you may have an expensive proof. And the car company may have an even more expensive one. But it's hardly a get-out-of-jail-free card to the automated car manufacturer - they either assign the fault to the driver (and thus automated cars are worthless because the driver has to be 100% switched on, same as driving), assign it to themselves (and take on massive class-actions), or fight over who's to blame at great expense. All loss-situations for a company producing automated cars.
Sell one car that will last until breakdown, require special roads, special taxation, special infrastructure, special laws, huge investment, extreme legal risk, having to ride around even-more-patents, having every politician in your pocket, etc.
Or sell lots of cheaper cars that occasionally get dented/smashed up (but keep the driver intact of course), profit from the spare parts market (even if through patent licensing), require none of the above and where almost all the risk is on the driver.
The car market is already over-priced and struggling (i.e. the ENTIRE UK car market had to be bailed out by the government just a few years ago, and it's not the first time). The governments already spend billions on road infrastructure (where a road is a bit of tarmac with some paint on it, not an isolated, obstruction-free, electronically-enabled, few-travellers, risky multi-billion-dollar venture) and, believe it or not, serious road accidents are actually rare given the number of cars in the road (multiply the number of air-accidents by the difference between the number of planes journeys and the number of cars journeys world-wide and see what happens!).
Additionally, human drivers speeding and parking in the wrong places etc. is actually a HUGE source of income (not to mention drivers licenses, driving schools, insurance, etc.). Until the economics vastly change, it ain't gonna happen. If we see it in my lifetime, I will be hugely impressed at the amount of administrative and economic crap we've had to remove to get to that point. And to be honest, I don't particularly want it either.
Slashdot Mirror
When I turned 30, I've finally bothered to sit down and seriously try to write the game I've been planning ever since about a year after I got my ZX Spectrum.
Before now, I've started it in BASIC, Z80 assembler, Visual BASIC, x86 assembler, Java and C++, (in roughly that order) and a ton of other languages in order to learn the language, and never got to where I felt it was coming together. A year or so ago I sat down with another project, ported it to an ARM embedded device using C without much hassle at all (I already knew the language much better than I thought), and in the process set myself up a complete cross-platform development environment that was invisible to me.
Once there, I decided to start the ancient project of mine again to see if I could and got further than ever before (you know you program too much and remember too much of your computer science courses from 10 years ago when you can knock up a D* pathfinding algorithm with multiple zones and movement prediction quicker than you can find one on the Internet).
Now I have an Eclipse window running on my computer at all times (literally), plugged into a remote SVN server on a remote dedicated server that I bought for that purpose alone, with Cygwin and (later) MinGW integrated and a remote Linux headless build on the dedicated server that "shows" its screen to a VNC client on my PC (which gives me Windows and Linux, 32- and 64-bit, GPU-accelerated (high GPU bandwidth) and unaccelerated (with low VNC "video bus" bandwidth), responsive and latent clients, at least three different versions of gcc to test-compile on etc. in one fell swoop) and several 10's of 1000's of lines of code that I've wrote from scratch.
Gaming when you're young just makes you want to be a gamer and make your own games when you're older, in my experience. I bet most games industry workers are OLDER than the supposed demographic of the games they write - in which case you have to ask why they wouldn't make the games fun for themselves too - after all, they play them more than ANYONE else and they become an immutable part of their lives.
I haven't played a single game in the last 15 years where I didn't try to work out how they got it to work how it did ,and some of them (especially the smaller indie titles) I have actually recreated in my own tests - just without the pretty graphics. I just bought Dungeon Keeper on GoG.com - unaccelerated 486-era computers running a fully-rotatable 3D environment. Admittedly low res, but damn I was never expecting that to work in DOSBox - and then I remembered Magic Carpet and other similar games and realised that even back then how the games worked was just as interesting to me as how they played.
And yet, I still pour hundreds of hours into silly indie games that are nothing more than pre-rendered sprites on a 2D background with very primitive physics. Altitude has sucked my life away, for instance.
If other words - if the underlying method was allowable, the computerised version was also allowable.
The point is that "business method" and other nonsensical mathematical processes aren't allowable. I.e. you could have patented computer-controlled ABS in a car (because it was new, innovative, non-obvious, and the computer wasn't necessary to the invention) but you STILL can't patent ways to advertise at clients using sounds (because that's a business method patent, is obvious, has prior art, etc. and thus is invalid whether you do it on a PC, or a cloud-farm, or on paper).
What that says is that the computer program DOES NOT form part of the patent unless the job it is doing DOES (in which case it can't just be, say, anti-aliasing a font because that's just a matrix multiplication and anti-aliasing has been applied to everything in the past and doing it on a computer or to a font makes no difference).
The UK doesn't have software patents. We have a tiny piece of case law (which is easily overruled because the EU-wide law it's based on doesn't have that) above and beyond the EU's blanket "no-software-patents" policy, none of which really affects the outcome unless it's an extremely close call about whether something is patentable AT ALL (and the fact of it being software or not is completely incidental)
Nobody ever challenges someone who *looks* like they should be doing something. Wear a hi-vis jacket. Carry a piece of paper that's had coffee spilled on and says something vaguely on the right lines (no-one will check anyway). Knock on the door of the place next door and tell them you'll be doing some work, will try not to disturb them, etc. If they have no idea who you are, you just say that you're only the contractor with a job sheet - they aren't going to be phoning city hall for an explanation and by the time they *did*, you'd be long gone.
I've walked into *schools* that haven't challenged me because I *look* like an IT guy and was carrying a laptop and a multimeter (I was allowed there, but nobody present KNEW that) and was staring at the cable runs along the ceiling.
Don't try to fit in, don't try to be friendly, don't try to be too helpful (are genuine contractors usually helpful?), just act like your boss has pushed you into doing that job "a day early" and you don't want to be there but "that's what the paperwork says to do".
Someone sticking a ladder up in a public street is going to get zero attention, even from police, because it happens 50 times a day on advertising hoardings, building work, even just an IT guy checking his external cables, etc. Someone pasting a "professional looking" poster on a large empty space will attract zero comment. You could probably even get a free cup of tea if you spoke to whoever owns the shop underneath it or next door, etc. People would even let you run a mains lead out their back door for a drill or something for a day if you ask them, into which you could plug *anything*.
Don't create a fuss, don't try to hide, look like you're meant to be there. It's a piece of piss. How do you think burglars etc. get their work done, scout out a place beforehand, etc.? It's not unusual for someone to challenge a burglar only to be given a convincing explanation ("Er, yeah, John said I could pick up my stuff from last night" - guess what name is on the envelopes in the mailbox?) and let them carry on. It's just a matter of *not caring* about getting caught (i.e. the consequences are negligible -as in this case - or the chances of you being able to escape if caught are high).
The patent system isn't actually that bad in the UK. We don't have software patents, which are a ridiculously stupid idea, for instance. Thus this doesn't really solve pretty much the biggest problem in patent law anywhere in the world - US software patents.
If I were to write an iPhone app, and it gets sold on the US iPhone app store, some moron can try to sue me because I used anti-aliases fonts, or whatever, even if in my own country that's a meaningless and invalid patent. That will probably get my app revoked, provide me with huge negative publicity and cost a bomb to defend.
Sadly, most of the big online sites and services are US-based. Steam, iTunes, Amazon Kindle Store, etc. It saddens me that a percentage of the money I spend goes on fighting people who basically claim to have an exclusive right to "1+1=2" (or applying technique X to technical device Y where the two weren't married before but where the connection is blatantly and blindingly obvious to anyone who knows about X at all) under a law that doesn't exist in my own country or even the majority of countries in the world.
"Real" patents aren't much of a problem. They really aren't and haven't been for centuries. It's just this stupid "intellectual property" definition, and stupid patent checking, that somehow manages to incriminate people using an OK button in a piece of software, or whatever other insanities have passed through the US patent system where other countries would exclude the entire category, question the originality and obviousness, and do a half-decent search for prior art before granting anything.
Take a laptop, by all means, but internet-connectivity is hardly necessary or even desirable even on a long flight.
The laptop will die before you get there, guaranteed, and most planes *don't* have charge points that the passenger can access. And yet, without Internet, you can watch movies, listen to music, read books, program (it's brilliant for programming if you get a quiet night flight), draft email (yes, email does NOT have to be sent live every time), play games, etc. If you can't occupy yourselves with a pre-prepared laptop, I don't see that an Internet connection is going to help you.
And I'd really rather not have to share a high-latency, low-bandwidth, insecure, monitored, filtered and paid-for connection with 100+ other passengers who are all either a) using wifi on the same channel in a confined metal box or b) have cables strewn about the place (which is also still infinitely less useful than just giving people a mains socket which is still *NOT* standard on quite a lot of flights).
Gimme a mains socket, not an internet connection, and I'll have my own, personal, in-flight movies for the entire flight with MY OWN headphones for myself and my companion. Hell, you can even bill me for the electricity at an extortionate KWh rate if you like. I already do just that but there's never anywhere to plug in to recharge, especially on short European flights.
If you *need* Internet that badly that you can't be without it for a day or survive 24 hours in a plane without it, you seriously need to work on your attention span and getting a couple of hobbies (even if computer-related, e.g. programming, gaming, etc.)
Mathematics deals in certainties. An integer is odd (or prime, or divisble, or constant, or whatever), or it's not, by a very strict definition.
The problem stems from *proving* that. The mathematician (i.e. someone who studied mathematics at, say, degree level or higher) that can actually write a proof is surprisingly rare. The one that can write a perfect, undeniable, accepted, doubt-free proof in a single hit is would be seen as an absolute genius better than any other mathematician that's ever lived - more "clever" than Einstein, Hawking, etc. Because we're human and we always miss *something* in any proof ever offered for even the simplest of things.
Most proofs are like security programs on computers - they'll have holes with virtually certainty, and it's only accepted as "proof" when the holes have been found, poked at for 20+ years and every holes patched, countered and fixed. That's the process called "peer review". Look at any mathematical-based security process in computer science and you see the same pattern - cryptography, clever exploits, chroot-breaking etc. It takes decades to find MOST of the holes and an infinite amount of time to find all of them.
Any "proof" that comes from someone who hasn't been poking holes in others papers, or endlessly patching their proof for years based on the input of humongously talented third-parties is, history shows, 100% bullshit. Just read the story behind the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, for example.
The problem is that the mathematical equivalent of "free energy" fanatics, etc., are people who claim to have proven something and yet have zero experience of providing actual proofs that are accepted by the mathematical community. It's elitest, sure, but it helps to filter out the nutters if you just ignore EVERYTHING posted on arxiv.org until it appears in a reputable, third-party-reviewed journal and has had ten rebuttals, all of which have been neatly countered using fabulously complex arguments.
You can now "prove" the four-colour theorem in an afternoon with a home computer and some mathematical knowledge. But it took *decades* to convince the mathematical community that a proof which relies almost entirely on the output of a computer to perform the grunt work was acceptable. And it was still in doubt from 1976 up until around 2005 as to whether it was actually a "proof" or not.
If someone claims to have solved a long-standing mathematical problem, with zero previous experience, treat them how you'd treat someone who claims that they can double the output of your car engine without using any extra energy source if you let them take the car apart. Yes, technically and historically, such things have been possible by certain marvellous innovations in the field. But would you really let him tinker with your car on the basis of that without knowledge of that person himself?
P=NP is a field that attracts people just like the "free/perpetual energy/motion" nutters, for instance. There's been at least three or four slashdot stories of "proofs" of that since the beginning of the year. None of them came to anything, all of them were firmly rebutted, and none of the authors were heard of again. It's not a general hostility in mathematics - just towards the time-wasters and nutters that think A-level maths qualifies them to provide a definitive proof of something new in an afternoon.
Dunno what you have in your country but in mine, if you don't answer a call that rings, it costs neither party anything.
And any system worth its salt (crypto-hashing joke) won't allow that many attempts against any external or internal authenticator and will NEVER expose its password hashes.
Seriously, if someone has your password hash, it's game over anyway and it doesn't matter if it takes 2 weeks or 2 months to guess the passwords. And if they don't, then you shouldn't be letting them try several BILLION attempts at guessing a password anyway.
What is it with this modern fad of having to join some exclusive, pay-for, preorder list for something that you have NO idea what it will play like, before you get to see (for example) a bloody demo!
The point of a demo is that people can see what they're buying BEFORE they lay down money and to generate hype. Why do people lay down money to join these elitest little clubs in order to get access to stuff they should already have been given? Does it make you feel big and clever that you can throw money away on something that you don't know what it is?
It seriously sounds like some Scientology-style club - "Hey! Pay me some money and in a few years, I'll let you into a secret before everyone else! The more you pay, the more secrets I'll tell you!"
Now that's off my chest - I really don't care. The most-hyped game in the world isn't out yet and I *still* can't even play a demo. I enjoyed the first Duke3D (though it was the only 3D game I've ever played that induced motion sickness in myself), when I was about 17, and while games still took themselves a bit too seriously. I saw nothing there that, brought forward onto a new engine, would actually be new or original or quirky when this game comes out (and now I'm 32!).
How about this, people - instead of hyping up a game, for free, on someone else's behalf, at zero benefit to yourself, just wait a couple of weeks and see what the damn game is actually LIKE. Then, if it's good, you can buy it. If it's not, you can let it rot in the annals of gaming history with all the other over-hyped crap (Daikatana.... I still have NEVER played that game, even for a minute).
Maybe if you got off your backside and bought a $1 domain that you actually OWN (or at least have a guaranteed annual right to) rather than having A@B.com (are you an international corporation?) you wouldn't have that problem.
Seriously, my MOTHER has her own domain name with infinite aliases and forwarding to a proper email account and has had for years and despite several changes in ISP, host and moving onto webmail still has the same address and has never had to inform people of the change. You could have done that YEARS ago and forwarded it to your io.com account and slowly migrated to using the new name until your io.com was merely a mail storage account, rather than actually used for reception or sitting in other people's address books.
There is nothing worse, in this day and age, than seeing a huge lorry go past you on the motorway with "companyname@randomdomainhost.com" (or, worse, randomname.uk.com!) as the email. It's even worse if you'r applying for an IT job and your CV has some Hotmail or freebie ISP address. It costs literally PENCE to have a much more personalised, reliable, controlled and relevant address and has for years.
Yeah, because the US *never* tries to override or manipulate a foreign court to get to foreign persons...
*cough* Assange *cough* McKinnon *cough*
Not sure I'd want to be a commercial airliner where the pilot didn't know such a procedure by heart and had practised it several hundred times in a simulator (or even for real).
If you're digging out bits of paper mid-crash, that's probably the reason you crash.
Not to nit-pick, but your brain has little to do with your organs functioning - they just do that anyway. They are *all* pretty autonomous - when people say stupid things like "Your brain doesn't have to think about this, it does it subconciously", I want to slap them. Most systems in the body are autonomous, but they are sustained by the body as a whole (hence don't go on doing it forever) and the brain has only a very vague oversight of it going on.
Those organs have a life-support system controlled by other autonomous systems, and those autonomous systems work with no input from the brain if necessary. The brain actually plays little part in those processes, except primitive sensor-reponses (deploying a hormone, raising body temperature, etc.) but it's like the engineer at the nuclear plant who presses the "coolant" button when the temperature alarms go off being called a "nuclear scientist" or pretending that *HE'S* banging the atoms together.
All the hard work is done by countless billions of autonomous, specialised cells that do little else, do it automatically (because that's their sole purpose and "design" in life - they can ONLY do that job) and can go on doing that long after death. Hell, your heartbeat has virtually nothing to do with your brain, for example, but the brain can send a request along the lines of "I'm feeling low blood pressure, can you speed up a bit?"
And each neuron has several *thousand* connections so the order of magnitude just went up by 3 or maybe 4 (so we're now "only" 6 or 7 orders of magnitude away from having a "potential" brain simulation). When you have a planet with 100 billion computers, and each of those is simultaneously connected (via speed-of-light links) directly to, say, 10,000 other computers all the time, then THAT system would resemble the complexity of the human brain. That's about 16 computers for every person on the planet, with 10,000 ethernet cards in each (because the links are DIRECT, not incidental), if you want an actual computer analogy.
And then you have the spinal cord which contains a "mini" brain, if you like, that's capable of responding to stimuli before the brain even knows about it. And most organs self-controlled by billions of cells which the brain knows nothing about. Even the immune system is pretty much automated and the brain has little to do with it.
Trying to pretend we're ANYWHERE near that sort of complexity is like saying that we *almost* simulate the entire universe down to a molecular level on a supercomputer. Elements of truth but out by so many orders of magnitude that it's laughable.
Which is why, when a scientists tells you they have made an "artifial brain" or even "artificial intelligence" of some kind, you should laugh in their face. It's not having a superiority complex about how wonderful humans are, it's just that we're literally playing with toys at the moment and have no way to come close to simulating even an *ant's* brain. Hell, we can just about pretend to almost simulate a single-celled organism. Guess how many of those it would take to make a brain-like structure? 100's or 1000's of billions.
P.S. Next time keep it in your pants, and you won't have a problem, Ryan.
Maybe the Twits should apply for a super-injunction to keep their name secret? After all, it's not in the public interest for them to be outed and it might hurt their families etc.
Oh, sorry, I forgot - you have to be rich enough.
Or Ryan Giggs could just instruct his lawyers to stop digging him into an even deeper hole, the end result of which will be that he'll have even less privacy than when he started.
A year ago: "Ryan Giggs had an affair" would have been a one-day, one-column bit of news and nobody would have cared.
Today, the thing has been in the papers every day for several months and is going to be the subject of (in the worst case) 75,000 lawsuits.
Similarly, other people who had superinjunctions (including a BBC journalist!) confessed to them, and the affair they had that was the subject of the censorship, and within a day they were out of the news.
Nobody will go to jail - and if they do it'll be so incredibly expensive that you'll be more likely to have riots over the costs than the privacy implications... MP's in the UK have already said it's far too impractical to jail (or even identify) 75,000 people for such a thing, especially when days later an MP themselves used parliamentary privilege to announce who the subject of the injunction was (and Scottish newspapers have already printed it, as have Italian, American, etc. etc.)
And the whole question of superinjunctions has gone so far that the prime minister himself said that he doesn't understand how they were issued and thinks that it's wrong that they were.
Twitter have said they'll co-operate. But nobody's actually ASKED for that data yet. And they probably never will.
Genius.
http://banjo.employees.org/~dwing/aaaa-stats.html
Yeah, we're gonna have to do it eventually.
Yeah, it literally takes 10 minutes for anyone with a brain.
Yeah, there are ways for ISP's to even automate it and shield users from it (e.g. transparent tunnels so they carry on using IPv4 but IPV6 is the actual carrier).
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
I did it. I went to the IPv6 test sites. They told me I was enabled. Ten minutes later, after not finding another IPv6 accessible website, I turned it off to save me having yet-another-avenue where someone could get onto my network if I'd made a mistake in the configuration, or forgotten to include ip6tables rules as wall as iptables rules, etc.
There was literally NO reason to have it enabled. The only "problem" I had was that ntpq seemed to think all my usual NTP peers were offline but that was probably just me.
YET AGAIN: When Slashdot posts AAAA records, we can start the push, otherwise we're just geeks pushing an agenda that we don't follow ourselves. When the BBC posts them, we're getting there. When every website I normally visit is IPv6 accessible, it's a success. Only THEN can we think about turning "off" IPv4. Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
So is a metal spoon.
It all depends on context.
Seeing as you're the only one commenting on this, and I can't see it either, it's probably YOU that's infected, or you clicked something you didn't mean to.
Hell, there aren't even any banner ads on that page at all.
Damn, you're an idiot. I don't claim to be a perfect driver but the fact there are people on the roads like you worries me.
And in some countries, the official advice if someone is too close to your backside for you to have an adequate braking distance is to brake in order to recoup that distance from the front instead. I'd be very surprised if "slower yields to faster" is actually written ANYWHERE in the US Highway Code.
If someone's doing the speed limit it is legally *CORRECT* (but not necessarily the safest possible thing for that particular driver) to not go any faster. To "get out of your way" is up to the lane rules, which say that so long as THEY are overtaking, it's fine to be in the second overtaking lane (or third, if you have a four-lane motorway). Yes, they are called overtaking lanes (all except one). "Fast lane" is a term you won't find on any legal document or driving course.
The most dangerous thing on a road is tailgaters like yourself, especially high-speed tailgaters. If someone's doing the speed limit, sit behind them. They just might save your life one day.
That said, I'm far from a goodie-two-shoes and if you try that shite with someone who just-doesn't-care about your urgent appointment, or their clapped-out-old-motor, they might just choose to slam their brakes on. Guess who'll pay for having insufficient braking distance and travelling too fast? Guess whose car will be ruined beyond repair and whose car will just have the boot pushed out a bit, a new exhaust and be back on the road? Not the guy in front. "I was doing 70, officer, and saw a flash out of the corner of my eye - my instinct was to brake to avoid a collision and in doing so the idiot behind ran straight into me because he had insufficient braking distance between himself and the car in front".
YOU are the reason that speed cameras even exist - if you drove reasonably at those speeds, it wouldn't be a problem. Expecting the world and his brother to get out of your way is a good way to end up in the rear of a truck that just doesn't care, or didn't even see you (and didn't really need to if you were behind him).
Go for a drive on an Autobahn - I went there once and it was fabulous. Not the speed, the sheer courtesy of other drivers and the fact that ALL of them stick to the rules all the time. I nearly got arrested for turning in an empty two-way street, for God's sake! It's the least stressful driving experience I've ever had - 10 minutes in my home town had me cursing at people and braking to avoid the local nutters in their souped-up cars tearing across lanes without looking.
Or just - don't take that data to that country.
I know plenty of people that have stopped taking data (and sometimes their business) over to the states since they started getting too heavy-handed while at the same time ordering the EU to send personal data on visitors to them.
They either VPN it in and access it live (which is still dodgy because certain people could insist they do that with them watching, but I supposed you'd at least get a choice to notice that from the home-base and revoke their credentials), or don't take the data to the US at all. Some of them literally take re-imaged laptops and/or nothing at all and work it out the other end.
- Taxi
- Taxi
- Taxi
- Taxi
- Taxi
- FUCK NO - pulling over takes less time than than it would to fiddle for the device. I only know of a handful of roads where you're not allowed to pull over in my entire countries (so-called "red routes" which invariably join to lots and lots of other roads where you can do just that - motorways have a hard shoulder and services for a reason).
- Taxi
Amazing things, taxis. Been around for centuries. Damn sight cheaper than buying an entire automated vehicle for such one-off episodes. Stick your kids in an automated car so they can go to the prom when you're working? Sod off. The logistics and legalities don't even bear thinking about.
That's not even mentioning the complete pipe-dream of being able to do that as a minor for many, many, many years to come (I doubt this century but that's a prediction). And I've already covered the problems with a car that has manual override too (as in how would you stop your kids having manual override capability too, and / or if you have manual override who's responsible if the car does something wrong and you take over, and who's responsible if manual override WOULD have saved the pedestrian you hit but you didn't use it?).
I suspect your minority is much, much, much tinier than my one.
That was a (non-existent) "brake defect" where the drivers claimed they weren't able to brake. Not one case was proved in court where this was the case, to my knowledge. But, damn expensive for Toyota to prove otherwise, I should think.
However, an ABS failure, for instance, wouldn't necessarily be the car's fault as the device only operates when the car is skidding anyway (read: driver error). And cruise-control is a human-activated switch that warns against it's use and that doesn't excuse you from controlling the car.
So, yes, you may have an expensive proof. And the car company may have an even more expensive one. But it's hardly a get-out-of-jail-free card to the automated car manufacturer - they either assign the fault to the driver (and thus automated cars are worthless because the driver has to be 100% switched on, same as driving), assign it to themselves (and take on massive class-actions), or fight over who's to blame at great expense. All loss-situations for a company producing automated cars.
Sell one car that will last until breakdown, require special roads, special taxation, special infrastructure, special laws, huge investment, extreme legal risk, having to ride around even-more-patents, having every politician in your pocket, etc.
Or sell lots of cheaper cars that occasionally get dented/smashed up (but keep the driver intact of course), profit from the spare parts market (even if through patent licensing), require none of the above and where almost all the risk is on the driver.
The car market is already over-priced and struggling (i.e. the ENTIRE UK car market had to be bailed out by the government just a few years ago, and it's not the first time). The governments already spend billions on road infrastructure (where a road is a bit of tarmac with some paint on it, not an isolated, obstruction-free, electronically-enabled, few-travellers, risky multi-billion-dollar venture) and, believe it or not, serious road accidents are actually rare given the number of cars in the road (multiply the number of air-accidents by the difference between the number of planes journeys and the number of cars journeys world-wide and see what happens!).
Additionally, human drivers speeding and parking in the wrong places etc. is actually a HUGE source of income (not to mention drivers licenses, driving schools, insurance, etc.). Until the economics vastly change, it ain't gonna happen. If we see it in my lifetime, I will be hugely impressed at the amount of administrative and economic crap we've had to remove to get to that point. And to be honest, I don't particularly want it either.