Simple. Cover the message with black duct tape. Nobody sees the message and nobody bothers you. But when the thief peels off the tape, they are DOOMED.
Uh, and who is going to be in a habit of buying cheap laptops quick from that average thief? Maybe Jonas 6-liter, but more likely an above average thief who is experienced at extracting the extra value from a stolen laptop before selling the hardware. He's the one who might take the time to look for credit card numbers, passwords, or even hotel room numbers if the previous owner looks like a really valuable target.
Just because the first thief won't look at the data doesn't mean the data is safe.
I've heard of shadow bans from forums - to the banned user it looks like their comments are being posted normally, but everyone is ignoring them. In reality, only that user can see their own comments. Similar trickery could make a matched game too lame for griefers to bother with.
Or they could be put into shards where everyone is antisocial. For some people the game isn't what the designers say, it's doing what the designers don't want you to do. A bunch of antisocials could be quite happy griefing, cheating, and BSing each other, especially if they're not fully aware that the other shards aren't as Lord of the Flies as their own.
Or they could share a shard with the other player types who aren't antisocial themselves but do in fact tolerate or enjoy their presence. I hate hackers in Starcraft so much that I sometimes enjoy hunting them down and killing/griefing them without the use of hacks. So a shard of cops and robbers might give the antisocials a place to go and give the paladins some evil to conquer.
I sense a demand for a service like eHarmony, Match.com, or Chemistry.com geared toward finding compatible gamers rather than sexual mates. Put all the immersive RPGers on one shard, all the 1/2 hr a night casual grownups on another, the emo teens on a third, etc. Maybe include a function to vote misbehavers off the shard.
Seven informative responses and not a mod point to spend. Maybe every logged in user should get a half mod point to spend every day. If two of those seven spent a tenth as long modding as talking, the misunderstanding would be corrected and closed.
I release several games as custom maps in Starcraft. Many of them are refinements of earlier versions made by others. And all of them are released unprotected so that others may add their own refinements.
Version numbers get messy. I typically go to the next major number if I'm doing a serious overhaul of my own or somebody else's map. Then I increment the minor numbers for bug fixes, balance changes, and minor enhancements.
But then somebody else comes along, makes a minor (and often terrible) change and releases it as the next major version. Or they make major changes and release it as the next minor version. Then when I make a new version, it either clashes with those other versions or looks older than the versions released with big jumps.
I've tried adding descriptor names to my versions, a la Vista. So I have "Phantom BGH Gold 1.0" as my refinement of "Phantom BGH 2.4", but most people don't seem to get that. When my updates landed me at "Phantom BGH Gold 3.0" people at least paid attention that it might be newer, but they still complained that it was different than "Phantom BGH 2.4".
I also tried adding "Classic" to a game version which was a totally rewritten implementation of a game type with other versions in the 3.0 to 9.0 range. I intended the "Classic" to signify I was focusing on the core ideas of the game type, but so many people thought it meant "old". As if the first version ever released of that map was labeled "Classic", and a label of "New" means new forever.
I was referring mostly to the software issues of Windows. Time spent installing drivers, booting and rebooting, being interrupted every five minutes when the OS decides it needs to install its weekly update, frustration with clunky software compared to Apple iLife, and malware.
My mom and my sister both had all of those problems when they lived with Windows. One by one I converted them to Macs and now they can write books, burn CDs, edit and upload photos, and install their own tax software. And I don't have to fix some broken driver or missing file every six months. And I have a pleasant OS to work on when I visit.
I have Windows XP on my MacBook Pro too. Sometimes I need it, but when I can accomplish a task in either OS, I never find the Windows way to be more efficient or elegant.
There might also be hardware issues, but I haven't played with $400 laptop hardware enough to know.
Say I own a company that supplies parts to automobile manufacturers. Say I also own stock in one of those automobile manufacturers. Say that automobile manufacturer violates a contract with my parts supplier. Is it crazy for me (the owner of the supplier) to sue the automobile manufacturer (which I also partly own)?
The article mentions other lien holders. It sounds to me like an entity is suing a pool of entities. If they win, then each member of that pool pays the first entity a share of the settlement. Having a stake in the losing side just means that they net only 80% of the settlement rather than 100%, not that the entire case is a wash.
Licenses it out to other OEMs that make cheap computers. I mean, when I can buy a $400 laptop (not a netbook but a laptop) with Windows on it and do just about everything that a $999 Macbook can do, the choice is clear for most people.
A $400 Windows laptop is cheap only if your time has no value.
Article: "They are fat. [...] In Canada's Manitoba province, three out of five people treated for the new flu strain in intensive care units are obese."
If this virus killed only fat people that would be astounding. If it kills more than it's share of fat people, that's still interesting (despite all the "being fat is bad duh!" comments here) but less flashy.
How do you explain swearing to yourself? I spent many nights during the past month pacing around my apartment with worsening cancer pain. Sometimes it got bad enough to elicit yelps and curses. There was nobody else around to give me an adrenaline rush from risky social behavior. It hurt, I swore, I felt a little better.
I also discovered that singing to myself helps with tolerating pain. I was laid out still on a hard radiation table for an hour. The first ten minutes were easy but the pain got worse and worse as I stayed in that one position. Since I couldn't move, I tried moaning to myself - which helped a little. On the third session I tried humming and singing along with my iPod, and found that was even more effective at helping me endure the pain to get the treatment.
Gah, I lost my mod points two minutes before reading your post. Yes! A game where "fouls" are committed intentionally, regularly, and repeatedly is seriously broken. I understand that it's commonly accepted and expected now, but anyone who steps away from that game for a year and comes back should say: "You know, that's really dumb."
Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet:)
My number one answer is to keep the world big. But I think you nailed number two.
People can and do play themselves to death with big, immersive online games. Many more play themselves sick. Some forced downtime is a good thing for letting a few rational brain cells get a turn to take care of the body (food, exercise, rest, eliminate, clean) rather than suffer at the hands of all the twitch and reward cells.
I don't think this is the reason they made slow transportation, but I think Blizzard is wise enough to realize it's a good reason to keep it.
If I haven't typed anything for about fifteen minutes, then the first key I press is ignored. This happens in situations where the OS is otherwise alert because of mouse movement, such as while browsing the Web. I click a text field, start typing, and ten letters in I realize that the keyboard missed the first one.
This is particularly annoying in cases where there's a little typing lag anyway, like typing in an search box with autocomplete. There's a short delay before the letters start appearing anyway, so the only way to type error-free is to wait a second every damn time to see if the first keypress was recognized.
Apple issued a Keyboard Firmware Update in February 2008 but it never fixed my problem and others have reported it made their systems totally freeze.
Does anybody else still have this problem? Or did you have it before and get it fixed?
In fact, I would say that anybody who has lived a moral, decent life should receive the same level of medical care, and that should be the highest available at the time.
What if the best medical care possible is very, very expensive? Like, for a sci-fi example, a drug made from atoms of antimatter trapped inside buckyballs. The buckyballs are tagged with proteins to stick to cancer cells, then an electromagnetic pulse cracks them open, releases the antimatter, and POOF - no more cancer.
Suppose that making the antimatter requires a $5 billion dollar facility that needs $100 million dollars of energy to make enough for one patient. There's not enough money, energy, or scientists on Earth to make enough to treat everybody with cancer.
Should we deny a billionaire cancer patient the freedom to buy his own dose from a multibillion pharmaceutical company that invested in such a facility for the small but profitable segment of the population that can afford such a drug?
View sites with ease, even if they were designed for an older browser, with one click on the Compatibility View button.
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Maybe Internet Explorer 8 is a born again standards compliant browser if it needs a special button to render sites designed for IE6.
My only interests in filesystems are how much free space I have and whether mine will recover from a power outage. Thus 95% of these graphs are a total bore to me.
But I do like the Timelines of kernel releases. Some kernels see an exponential slowdown of release rate as they approach finalization and others are released like clockwork throughout their lifetime.
I'd love to see these methods applied to other topics I care more about, like games and science
When I develop maps for Starcraft, I usually go with a "release when it's ready" approach. That leads to a first public release long after my internal rough draft. Then there are a few quick releases as major bugs are found. And later the releases slow to a trickle as the focus move from bug fixes to balance tweaks. The magnitude of the changes also decreases over time, but each one's effect on game play can be disproportionately large.
But recently I went with a public balancing approach. I released the rough draft to get a feel for how it played. Then released new drafts as often as twice a day as suggestions were made and problems became apparent. I love to see that contrast visually or see other patterns I hadn't considered.
I run my blog on dealing with cancer as a young adult the same way. I knew from the start that I didn't want to write about day-to-day events ("Got my 4th dose of chemo", "I feel sick", "Today I'm going for a walk"). I wanted to write about bigger issues after I had time to think about it ("What it feels like to undergo radation", "How many pills does a cancer patient swallow in a week", "Is it possible to maintain a career during treatment").
Looking at my traffic reports I found that my most popular articles were on practical subjects like wound care and symptoms of certain tumors. So now I write more in that vein: first-hand accounts that will be useful to people searching on those topics in the future, not updates intended for daily readers of my blog.
Social networking allows people to find each other to have sex.
You know, I have yet to experience any social networking site that actually hooks me up with new people (as friends or otherwise). They all seem geared to keep me in touch with current friends or get me reacquainted with old friends. They strengthen my network with people I already know but don't put me in touch with new people I'd like to know. Are there sites I'm missing that do that?
I lost some feeling in my hands and feet due to the various chemotherapy drugs I've taken over the past five years. I also lost my fingerprints thanks to Xeloda, which irritates the palms and soles in a reaction called hand-foot syndrome.
When I went to Disney World in 2007 I found that the entry gates use fingerprint scanners to ensure that the person using an electronic ticket is the same one who registered it. The scanner choked when I tried to register and an attendant had to override it. I bet that enough of the population has similar issues that it's in their training manual. I suppose it also means that people like me are a headache for anyone else trying to use fingerprints for identification.
Some of the numbness is nerve damage, particularly from the platinum-based drugs. The nerves do slowly heal, so I am getting some feeling back. In fact, now that I've been off of systemic chemo for four months I have enough feeling to realize that I lost more than I appreciated. Except for a period after a massive dose in 2005, the numbness hasn't been enough to interfere with tasks like holding a pen or buttoning a shirt. It's just been a dullness of sensation.
Today I learned that there's another explanation. According to research published in Science, fingerprints enhance the sense of touch. The ridges vibrate as they encounter bumps on a surface and transmit stronger signals to the nerve endings. So part of my numbness to texture is not just the nerve damage but the lack of fingerprints. I wonder if they, too, will regrow over time.
Magic Online generates a lot of complaints about randomness. That's a card game with decks of at least sixty cards built from a pool of thousands of different cards, shuffled, and drawn one by one. The most common complaint is uneven distribution of land cards (about 40% of most decks).
One theory for why people complain is that everybody's brain is wired to notice unusual draws, and when you play online you have far more draws than in paper. A typical rate of play with paper is six games an hour, for two to four hours a week. A typical rate of play online is twelve games an hour, for two to four hours a night. With that larger sample, you see more weird stuff and accumulate more anecdotes about how broken the shuffler is. (You also have someone to blame other than yourself and a global audience for your complaints.)
I left my mom on Tiger because that's the version she learned on and any changes would just confuse her. I'll probably still leave her there when I move to Snow Leopard, because Grand Central and OpenCL are exciting to me as a scientific programmer but there's not much benefit for her tasks on an older Mac Mini.
But in five years, if she wants a new computer for high definition iChat and mastering Blu-ray discs of home movies, then the new stuff in Snow Leopard will be essential. So I see Snow Leopard as exciting for nerds today and exciting for the masses in the future.
On a UNIX system (like Mac OS X) you should be able to "nice" the low-priority processes to give them less attention. If I'm running a twelve-hour, max-the-CPU simulation and I want to play a game while I'm waiting, I nice the simulation to a low priority. That way it yields most of the CPU to the game while I'm playing, yet runs at full dual-core speed when I'm not.
I'm not sure this is actually working in Mac OS X 10.5, though. Since I got my dual-core system, the activity monitors don't seem to show that nice is having the expected effect. I'm not sure if that's a problem with the monitor or with the OS. Hopefully 10.6 will be nicer.
Slashdot Mirror
A grue?
Simple. Cover the message with black duct tape. Nobody sees the message and nobody bothers you. But when the thief peels off the tape, they are DOOMED.
Uh, and who is going to be in a habit of buying cheap laptops quick from that average thief? Maybe Jonas 6-liter, but more likely an above average thief who is experienced at extracting the extra value from a stolen laptop before selling the hardware. He's the one who might take the time to look for credit card numbers, passwords, or even hotel room numbers if the previous owner looks like a really valuable target.
Just because the first thief won't look at the data doesn't mean the data is safe.
I've heard of shadow bans from forums - to the banned user it looks like their comments are being posted normally, but everyone is ignoring them. In reality, only that user can see their own comments. Similar trickery could make a matched game too lame for griefers to bother with.
Or they could be put into shards where everyone is antisocial. For some people the game isn't what the designers say, it's doing what the designers don't want you to do. A bunch of antisocials could be quite happy griefing, cheating, and BSing each other, especially if they're not fully aware that the other shards aren't as Lord of the Flies as their own.
Or they could share a shard with the other player types who aren't antisocial themselves but do in fact tolerate or enjoy their presence. I hate hackers in Starcraft so much that I sometimes enjoy hunting them down and killing/griefing them without the use of hacks. So a shard of cops and robbers might give the antisocials a place to go and give the paladins some evil to conquer.
I sense a demand for a service like eHarmony, Match.com, or Chemistry.com geared toward finding compatible gamers rather than sexual mates. Put all the immersive RPGers on one shard, all the 1/2 hr a night casual grownups on another, the emo teens on a third, etc. Maybe include a function to vote misbehavers off the shard.
Seven informative responses and not a mod point to spend. Maybe every logged in user should get a half mod point to spend every day. If two of those seven spent a tenth as long modding as talking, the misunderstanding would be corrected and closed.
I release several games as custom maps in Starcraft. Many of them are refinements of earlier versions made by others. And all of them are released unprotected so that others may add their own refinements.
Version numbers get messy. I typically go to the next major number if I'm doing a serious overhaul of my own or somebody else's map. Then I increment the minor numbers for bug fixes, balance changes, and minor enhancements.
But then somebody else comes along, makes a minor (and often terrible) change and releases it as the next major version. Or they make major changes and release it as the next minor version. Then when I make a new version, it either clashes with those other versions or looks older than the versions released with big jumps.
I've tried adding descriptor names to my versions, a la Vista. So I have "Phantom BGH Gold 1.0" as my refinement of "Phantom BGH 2.4", but most people don't seem to get that. When my updates landed me at "Phantom BGH Gold 3.0" people at least paid attention that it might be newer, but they still complained that it was different than "Phantom BGH 2.4".
I also tried adding "Classic" to a game version which was a totally rewritten implementation of a game type with other versions in the 3.0 to 9.0 range. I intended the "Classic" to signify I was focusing on the core ideas of the game type, but so many people thought it meant "old". As if the first version ever released of that map was labeled "Classic", and a label of "New" means new forever.
TheNevermind
I was referring mostly to the software issues of Windows. Time spent installing drivers, booting and rebooting, being interrupted every five minutes when the OS decides it needs to install its weekly update, frustration with clunky software compared to Apple iLife, and malware.
My mom and my sister both had all of those problems when they lived with Windows. One by one I converted them to Macs and now they can write books, burn CDs, edit and upload photos, and install their own tax software. And I don't have to fix some broken driver or missing file every six months. And I have a pleasant OS to work on when I visit.
I have Windows XP on my MacBook Pro too. Sometimes I need it, but when I can accomplish a task in either OS, I never find the Windows way to be more efficient or elegant.
There might also be hardware issues, but I haven't played with $400 laptop hardware enough to know.
Say I own a company that supplies parts to automobile manufacturers. Say I also own stock in one of those automobile manufacturers. Say that automobile manufacturer violates a contract with my parts supplier. Is it crazy for me (the owner of the supplier) to sue the automobile manufacturer (which I also partly own)?
The article mentions other lien holders. It sounds to me like an entity is suing a pool of entities. If they win, then each member of that pool pays the first entity a share of the settlement. Having a stake in the losing side just means that they net only 80% of the settlement rather than 100%, not that the entire case is a wash.
A $400 Windows laptop is cheap only if your time has no value.
Summary: "They are all fat."
Article: "They are fat. [...] In Canada's Manitoba province, three out of five people treated for the new flu strain in intensive care units are obese."
If this virus killed only fat people that would be astounding. If it kills more than it's share of fat people, that's still interesting (despite all the "being fat is bad duh!" comments here) but less flashy.
How do you explain swearing to yourself? I spent many nights during the past month pacing around my apartment with worsening cancer pain. Sometimes it got bad enough to elicit yelps and curses. There was nobody else around to give me an adrenaline rush from risky social behavior. It hurt, I swore, I felt a little better.
I also discovered that singing to myself helps with tolerating pain. I was laid out still on a hard radiation table for an hour. The first ten minutes were easy but the pain got worse and worse as I stayed in that one position. Since I couldn't move, I tried moaning to myself - which helped a little. On the third session I tried humming and singing along with my iPod, and found that was even more effective at helping me endure the pain to get the treatment.
Gah, I lost my mod points two minutes before reading your post. Yes! A game where "fouls" are committed intentionally, regularly, and repeatedly is seriously broken. I understand that it's commonly accepted and expected now, but anyone who steps away from that game for a year and comes back should say: "You know, that's really dumb."
My number one answer is to keep the world big. But I think you nailed number two.
People can and do play themselves to death with big, immersive online games. Many more play themselves sick. Some forced downtime is a good thing for letting a few rational brain cells get a turn to take care of the body (food, exercise, rest, eliminate, clean) rather than suffer at the hands of all the twitch and reward cells.
I don't think this is the reason they made slow transportation, but I think Blizzard is wise enough to realize it's a good reason to keep it.
My MacBook Pro has one continually annoying problem:
Missing first keypress
If I haven't typed anything for about fifteen minutes, then the first key I press is ignored. This happens in situations where the OS is otherwise alert because of mouse movement, such as while browsing the Web. I click a text field, start typing, and ten letters in I realize that the keyboard missed the first one.
This is particularly annoying in cases where there's a little typing lag anyway, like typing in an search box with autocomplete. There's a short delay before the letters start appearing anyway, so the only way to type error-free is to wait a second every damn time to see if the first keypress was recognized.
Apple issued a Keyboard Firmware Update in February 2008 but it never fixed my problem and others have reported it made their systems totally freeze.
Does anybody else still have this problem? Or did you have it before and get it fixed?
What if the best medical care possible is very, very expensive? Like, for a sci-fi example, a drug made from atoms of antimatter trapped inside buckyballs. The buckyballs are tagged with proteins to stick to cancer cells, then an electromagnetic pulse cracks them open, releases the antimatter, and POOF - no more cancer.
Suppose that making the antimatter requires a $5 billion dollar facility that needs $100 million dollars of energy to make enough for one patient. There's not enough money, energy, or scientists on Earth to make enough to treat everybody with cancer.
Should we deny a billionaire cancer patient the freedom to buy his own dose from a multibillion pharmaceutical company that invested in such a facility for the small but profitable segment of the population that can afford such a drug?
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Maybe Internet Explorer 8 is a born again standards compliant browser if it needs a special button to render sites designed for IE6.
My only interests in filesystems are how much free space I have and whether mine will recover from a power outage. Thus 95% of these graphs are a total bore to me.
But I do like the Timelines of kernel releases. Some kernels see an exponential slowdown of release rate as they approach finalization and others are released like clockwork throughout their lifetime.
I'd love to see these methods applied to other topics I care more about, like games and science
When I develop maps for Starcraft, I usually go with a "release when it's ready" approach. That leads to a first public release long after my internal rough draft. Then there are a few quick releases as major bugs are found. And later the releases slow to a trickle as the focus move from bug fixes to balance tweaks. The magnitude of the changes also decreases over time, but each one's effect on game play can be disproportionately large.
But recently I went with a public balancing approach. I released the rough draft to get a feel for how it played. Then released new drafts as often as twice a day as suggestions were made and problems became apparent. I love to see that contrast visually or see other patterns I hadn't considered.
I run my blog on dealing with cancer as a young adult the same way. I knew from the start that I didn't want to write about day-to-day events ("Got my 4th dose of chemo", "I feel sick", "Today I'm going for a walk"). I wanted to write about bigger issues after I had time to think about it ("What it feels like to undergo radation", "How many pills does a cancer patient swallow in a week", "Is it possible to maintain a career during treatment").
Looking at my traffic reports I found that my most popular articles were on practical subjects like wound care and symptoms of certain tumors. So now I write more in that vein: first-hand accounts that will be useful to people searching on those topics in the future, not updates intended for daily readers of my blog.
You know, I have yet to experience any social networking site that actually hooks me up with new people (as friends or otherwise). They all seem geared to keep me in touch with current friends or get me reacquainted with old friends. They strengthen my network with people I already know but don't put me in touch with new people I'd like to know. Are there sites I'm missing that do that?
I wrote about this in my cancer blog a few months back:
I lost some feeling in my hands and feet due to the various chemotherapy drugs I've taken over the past five years. I also lost my fingerprints thanks to Xeloda, which irritates the palms and soles in a reaction called hand-foot syndrome.
When I went to Disney World in 2007 I found that the entry gates use fingerprint scanners to ensure that the person using an electronic ticket is the same one who registered it. The scanner choked when I tried to register and an attendant had to override it. I bet that enough of the population has similar issues that it's in their training manual. I suppose it also means that people like me are a headache for anyone else trying to use fingerprints for identification.
Some of the numbness is nerve damage, particularly from the platinum-based drugs. The nerves do slowly heal, so I am getting some feeling back. In fact, now that I've been off of systemic chemo for four months I have enough feeling to realize that I lost more than I appreciated. Except for a period after a massive dose in 2005, the numbness hasn't been enough to interfere with tasks like holding a pen or buttoning a shirt. It's just been a dullness of sensation.
Today I learned that there's another explanation. According to research published in Science, fingerprints enhance the sense of touch. The ridges vibrate as they encounter bumps on a surface and transmit stronger signals to the nerve endings. So part of my numbness to texture is not just the nerve damage but the lack of fingerprints. I wonder if they, too, will regrow over time.
Magic Online generates a lot of complaints about randomness. That's a card game with decks of at least sixty cards built from a pool of thousands of different cards, shuffled, and drawn one by one. The most common complaint is uneven distribution of land cards (about 40% of most decks).
One theory for why people complain is that everybody's brain is wired to notice unusual draws, and when you play online you have far more draws than in paper. A typical rate of play with paper is six games an hour, for two to four hours a week. A typical rate of play online is twelve games an hour, for two to four hours a night. With that larger sample, you see more weird stuff and accumulate more anecdotes about how broken the shuffler is. (You also have someone to blame other than yourself and a global audience for your complaints.)
MillionaireMatch.com, but they ain't cheap and you must be able to host.
I left my mom on Tiger because that's the version she learned on and any changes would just confuse her. I'll probably still leave her there when I move to Snow Leopard, because Grand Central and OpenCL are exciting to me as a scientific programmer but there's not much benefit for her tasks on an older Mac Mini.
But in five years, if she wants a new computer for high definition iChat and mastering Blu-ray discs of home movies, then the new stuff in Snow Leopard will be essential. So I see Snow Leopard as exciting for nerds today and exciting for the masses in the future.
On a UNIX system (like Mac OS X) you should be able to "nice" the low-priority processes to give them less attention. If I'm running a twelve-hour, max-the-CPU simulation and I want to play a game while I'm waiting, I nice the simulation to a low priority. That way it yields most of the CPU to the game while I'm playing, yet runs at full dual-core speed when I'm not.
I'm not sure this is actually working in Mac OS X 10.5, though. Since I got my dual-core system, the activity monitors don't seem to show that nice is having the expected effect. I'm not sure if that's a problem with the monitor or with the OS. Hopefully 10.6 will be nicer.