Well, I may be off topic because this isn't a complaint...
We got nice Eddie Bauer company-logo jackets (fleece lined weather proof kind-of cloth thing). Bonuses happen along about new years, but last year they were in the thousands of dollars range.
Of course this is because my company (shameless plug pointing at a enemic server that wont take the load 8-) doesn't suck, didn't dot-bomb itself, and is still quite profitable.
Then again, we did do fund-rasing this year, which involved going from a limited partnership to a board-of-directors thing, so there is no telling. Perhaps we will get slammed later in a classic "syphon off the value, sell the shell, admire our management technique, and call it a win." spoken of elsewhere on this forum.
I personally make a point of showing everyone I encounter who's interested in making PDFs the beauty of Ghostscript and Ghostview. Every sale I can cost Adobe makes me feel that much warmer inside.
By costing Adobe market share, and negatively impacting their financial ability to manufacture and distribute their e-book software; and by further making your technique known, and encouraging others to use that technique; you are circumventing Adobe's e-book publishing system and by simple induction its encryption technologies.
This is a violation of the DMCA (secret corporate subdy provisions). A copy of your Summons will be delivered to you by our jackbooted government thugs.
Keep in mind that the envelope glue holding the summons closed is a technological measure to ensure security and confidentiality of the copyrighted summons text. The summons itself is issued and owned by the Department of Justice. Any attemtp to read the summons itself, or make its contents known to your firends, family, coworkers, or legal representitives will be usable against you as evidence of wanton disreguard of the DMCA and US legal practices in a court of law.
You are free to confront your accusers. Their identities and afadavids are in this locked bag. You may do anything you see fit with this information provided you do not voilate the integrety of the closed bag or the lock holding the bag closed...
Quote:... of firearms except for those used by police and army.
Presuming you were raised in the USA, I must also persume that you didn't pay one single whit of attention in your public school education.
The singular and only reason that the Constitution of the United States contains a provision to allow for the ownership and excercise of arms is that the framers knew that ANY ONE CITIZEN must have the right to be AT LEAST as well armed as ANY ONE MEMBER of their own government. (That is exactly and percisely the POLICE and the ARMY.)
In short, the citizenry of a free country must have the means to OPPOSE THE POLICE of their own government to keep those police from evolving into an occupying force.
Remember the abbuses of the British forces occupying the settlments in the colonies and compare those to the elements of the bill of rights.
Freedom of the press, because the Red Coats closed the decenting newspapers.
Freedom of assembly because the Red Coats dispersed crowds in an attempt to quell desent.
Freedom from search and seizure because they were breaking into homes and taking whatever the chose as evidence from whoever they suspected of crimes (fishing through communities for disidents)
See how there is a patern emerging?
The constitution give me the right to keep and bare arms, along with my neighbors, spesifically so that if enough of us decide the government is getting out of hand, we will have the recourse of the revolutionary.
In short, I am SUPPOSED to be able to outgun the police, and "crime" and "self protection" have nothing to do with it at all. Period.
The Bill of Rights is singularly and wholly the Right to Restraint over and Revolution against the government should it get out of line.
Period. Nothing Else. No hunting. No (individual) home intrustion countermeasures. No shouting fire in a crouded theater.
Only the police and army armed? The founding fathers would turn over in their graves.
[Pre-Note: I do not now, nor have I ever, owned a firearm. I have, however, bothered to go out and be taught at least the first things you must know to be an "informed" participant in the debate. That is; how to handle, load, and shoot a gun; what is involved in their maintenance and upkeep; how easy/hard it is to "safely" store an handle a gun; and so on. This also includes the reasonably unbiased political history of the issue (e.g. I paid attention in junior/senior high school social studies, and took the time to read on the subject... 8-)]
Your nice and over-broad statistics not withstanding, with respect to children killed in gun accidents (though I wish I could cite this better), my understanding is that there is another more important correlation.
In cultural settings where the child is raised with guns (taken hunting, taught to respect the weapon, allowd supervised access to the weapon if he/she asks) the incidence of accidental gun deaths/shootings of/by children is hugely reduced (e.g. near zero).
What is the classic scenerio? Child 1: "hey dude, my dad has a gun and I know where it is... want to see?"
If Child 2 then says "so what, my dad takes me shooting" child one never gets to the "whoops, sorry I killed you dude" phase.
If Child 1 doesn't think the gun is a forbidden mistery it stops being an attractive nusance.
Hell, if you wan't to keep kids alive, make the gun into a chore. You know, "no jimmy, you have to come to the range, do your target practice, clean your gun, and put it away before you can play with timmy from next door." You wouldn't be able to drive the kids to the guns with sticks.
In simple point of fact, virtually all gun accidents involve improperly trained or otherwise clueless people. And most people with an "anti-gun" bias have never even bothered to learn about them.
Incidents are most likely to occur in a house where it (the gun) is "the first gun I have ever owned" or was bought "because I was mugged last year" and where "I've never fired one before" or "I shot it once on the range when I bough it."
On the other hand, the acutal "crime prevention" statistics are virtually non-existant. How many times is a gun "brandished" (brought out or otherwise made known to a criminal but never fired) each year? Nobody knows. Even the simple "I heard someone in the house and I yelled 'I have a gun'" incidents arn't statistically correlated out of police reports.
Guns are very good at wounding and killing people. That's what they are for and that isn't something to be ashamed of. When a gun is fired there is a high incidence of someone or something being struck by a bullett. But untill and unless you can compile statistics about the number of times a gun was "used" without being fired, you can't construct any statistically or culturally valid statemets that meaningfully compare the "cost of having them" in lives and property loss, to the "cost of not having them" in lives and property saved.
So your numbers, like virtually all the numbers in the debate, are ad homonym, and uselessly incomplete.
And ALL OF THAT ignores the reason we have the "keep and bare arms" provisions. If you go back to your bare-bones public-school education, you will recall that the intent of the provision is that any one member of a society should have the right to be at least as well armed as any one member of their own government. The British took the guns away from the colonists so that the occupying force could dominate the will of the citizenry.
It is quite the point that the average citizen *MUST* be at least as well armed as the police to keep the police from becomming an occupying force.
The thing that has been lost is that the citizenry were also supposed to be trained, willing, and ready to assist the police (every citizen is in the militia etc) if/as/when needed. It's part of that all-rights no-responsibilities thing that is rotting the western world at its core.
Remember, conversly, that in the age of the authoring of the constitution, gun-control was automatic. (Hua? you may ask...) Because of the quality of materials available at the time, if you didn't care for your gun regularly and know how it was operated, it would become useless and dangerous to you in a matter of days or weeks. If the average gang-banger had to clean his gun every three days whether he fired it or not, do you think he would want to own it, let alone shove it hurridly down his pants?
Modern guns are really the problem they are now because you can hammer a tent peg into the ground with one, have it get rained on, drop it in the mud, and still know that you can whipe it off and expect it to fire instead of blowing your hand off.
Further, there is the issue of "rights" in the (USA biased here) core social conscience. The idea that a right is absolute is, well, absolute nonsense. In any debate where the word "right" is used, the heat totally out-musters the light. You have the right to smoke, I have the right not to be forced to breathe your smoke. I have the right to keep and bare arms, you have the right NOT TO BE GUNNED DOWN OUTSIDE THE LOCAL CIRCLE-K (sothern areas all-night grocery and sundries chain-store). Rights, priviliges, and responsibilities all exist in a hierarchy and, without exception, the "right to" something is trumped by the "right not to have done to", but only so far as do-er and the do-ee are interracting. So the right not to be gunned down in turn, doesn't anywhere become the right to exist in a world restructured to remove the possibility of everything you fear or dislike comming anywhere near you.
The guns are in the equation now, and trying to get them out needs must fail.
Drugs are in the equation now, and trying to get them out needs must fail.
And so on for religous wackos, our-truth-only christians and Xenutologists, leftist extremeists, secular humanists, racists, vegans, confectioners.
You can't take pee out of a pool. You can't legislate morallity. You can't legislate intellegence either.
You can only find out what is wrong, what is breaking the minds of the people and turning them to animals, and then try to act intelligently and proactively.
No Apeasement (sp?). No Reactionary diatribe. No Crufty Science. No Return to the Golden-Age dogma. No Absolute Moral Truth.
Only people trying to think and reason honestly and completely.
It's a lot to think about...
And (reguardless of topic) when you see or hear someone who shows no signs of that requisite minimum thought, you should discard their statements as pre-opinionated dogma.
(From Memory) So I was watching some show on these issues (crime, murder, gun control) and the smart-alek host asks this question "What is the most dangerous place in the world?" He was expecting to provoke a debate among his various and fully-diverse-on-the-issues panel members. But the first person to answer, some retired police chief, stimied the interviewer and managed 100% agreement with the entire panel.
The most dangerous place in the world is... "the secondary crime scene."
Ok, you can't find it on an international map but it is a real, abet highly conceptual, place.
If you are moved from one place to another during the commission of a crime the probability that you will end up dead reaches near certianty. For whatever reason the criminal doesn't want to "do (to) you" whatever he intends while you are all where you are. If someone tries to force you into a car or to walk down a path DON'T DO IT.
To that end, going along with the crime peacfully is asking to be slain. (Ask the French, a policy of appeasment [spelling?] NEVER works.)
Therefore, being armed must increase the victims chance to resist visiting the secondary crime scene, and therefore must tend to keep people alive.
The typical shooting is IMHO an act of cowardess. The random shooters in our lot would't ever decide that a gun show or police convention was "the best possible choice" for a random act of violence. No siree... You want to have a good killin you go to a kindergarden or a MacDonalds or a commuter train or a mall. And not one in Texas or West Virgina.
The odd-but-seemingly-true of the matter is that it isn't the gun control laws that act as a functional component to the crime rate... it's the CARRY LAWS. The easier it is for a person to carry a CONCEALED weapon in a municipality, the less random gun violence takes place. If people have to cary their guns out in the open then an assailant can gage the probability he will take return fire.
Gun Violence is an act of cowardess.
The graphs (of cities etc) from least to most "easy to arrange for concealed carry"; and most to least "likely to have a random shooting"; are essentially the same graph.
Where there are no carry laws, most people don't even (have to) carry because they have the same "protective camoflage" as the little old lady next to them with that hog-leg in her purse.
And so, anything you can do you should do, to keep from being moved or looking like a victim will keep you from that most deadly place. Guns, or just the reasonable probability that a law abiding person might have a gun, are excelent in that reguard. And if you don't have a gun, get a knife, or a stick, or a good kick ready.
And the only solution *REALLY* is to figure out what makes some people need to drag others out into the bushes and do them harm, but barring that unlikely miracle, go armed if you have the mental presence to use it wisely, and don't if you don't.
(I personally don't own a gun, and wouldn't trust myself to carry one around, but I know that I feel more comfortable visiting a place like West Virginia where the law abiding persons are at least as well armed as the kooks, than I feel in LA or New York where only the kooks and bangers are armed.)
The single thing I noticed about the inset logo (annoying little thing in the lower right hand of the screen) is that the new one is *MUCH* less visually intrusive.
Yes, I noticed it, and yes, it is different.
But by slimming down the letters, and turning the "base" ringed planet into the dual-silloette (spelling?) of just the ring and the planetary arc they reduced the "this covers crap up" factor by about 50%. It is still suggestive of the ringed planet, but now it is (were you to do a 3D analysis of the image 8-) just the user in near syzygy with the star (light source) roughly behind the planet, so two swooping arcs replace the planet. This moves the bulk of the planatary body OFF MY DAMN VIEWING AREA.
You see, watching the comercial without buying the product is a DMCA violation as the chain-of-process protecting the advertisers intellectual property starts at the invention of marketing plan and ends at the city dump.
By using your brain to abort the process of conception to advertisement to purchase to addictive use to discard-with-immediate-repurchase you are interupting the process which protects the intellectual property (e.g. the senior partner's Jaguar ownership) of the marketing firm. This is identical to interrupting the delivery-chain inside your DVD by DeCCSing the movie.
So your brain, by recognizing the worthlessness of the comercial and the product constitutes a circumvention of a technology intended to provide the marketers with access to their Jaguars.
The FBI will be by shortly to arrest you, confisiate your brain, drain your wallet into the hands of the marketing company, and repatriate you as an afgan so that you may then be held by the CIA as a forign terrorist.
Well, As someone who is trying to break into SF I can say if is far easier to define what makes SF truly awful.
-- Sexual Fetishisim: Any story written to legitimize the authors sexual fetishism will be awful beyond words.
-- The "Tacky Document Theory": Any time the full purpose of the story is to extoll some great historical document, the story will suck. ("we sought out the great ancient secret, and it began 'we the people...'"
-- Mmmm, Cruchy: The old "to serve man is a cookbook" was a great idea. It doesn't need to be written again folks.
-- The Dragon Ball Z effect: Any story where each heroic feat must out-do the previous until each character is destroying planets with a glance, simply must suck.
-- Did I mention sexual fetishisim? Really. It's bad. Don't do it.
For instance, I will probably never be able to sell my novel unless I subtitle it "Not Gay Porn". The problem is that I have a character who's story arc, to be believable, has to start "very low". To that end, he starts the book naked in a cage. My intent is to make the reader think of him as property. It works quite well. But I know in my soul that any editor will see that and think "oh, god, another 'slave naked in a cage' book" and fire off a rejection without guilt.
(There is no explicit, and less than 100 words of implicit sex in the book, but how do you say that believably to editors that are being burried in alternate-star-trek-universe furry porn? 8-)
There really is a huge body of bad sexual frustration out in the SF community, at least among the "I'll become an author, then people will finally see my mind and accept me, and that will finally show my parents that I'm NOT a freak" crowd.
So, what makes SF "good SF"? The presense of thoughtful insight into the human condition, the presence of internal consistency in the authors vision, the presence of something to say, good punctuation, and the utter absence of Spock-as-a-wombat having sex with the dophinan Captian Kirk.
The thing I don't get is why nobody has argued that DeCCS isn't actionable under the DMCA.
(The argument goes something like this...)
Everything I have read about the DMCA paraphrases into a statement that people "may not traffic (etc, blah blah blah) effective (blah) prevent copying".
A smartalek may harp on "effective" but I would like to harp on "prevent copying."
The CCS system does absolutely nothing to "prevent copying" what so ever. It singularly and only complicates viewing. The data stream itself before and after a DeCCS run is equally copyable. Therefore it is not, reguardless of the intent, a "copy protection mechanisim" AT ALL.
It is intended as a porely implemented use-limiter.
This is directly analogous to using a password to encrypt a zip archive. This does nothing to limit or control the copying of the archive. It does work to limit how the possesser of the archive can access it. And it does so reguardless of whether the possesser came into that possession through clear entitlement or agregous breach of security or ethics.
the CCS system uniformly restricts the usage of the data reguardless of whether the data is possess via clear entitlement (you have the DVD in the drive), transitive entitlement (you have the DVD in its jewel case and the image on your hard drive) or agregous breach (you just downloaded the image from a movie-warze site).
So it is not a "copy protection" technology at all.
Someone needs to make that point in a court of law.
And the word is "Antipathy". While the literal definition holds words like "distaste" and "enmity" as synonyms (see Merriam-Websters online for a nice impartial dictionary) the common usage I have heard all my life is "extreme apathy".
To quote the old joke...
Teacher: "Are you ignorant? or just plain apathetic?" Student: "I don't know... and I don't care!"
So I was in the viedo-rental-sore with my roomate. He says "That looks interesting" and points to a shelf. I say "What? this?" picking up rather lame DVD. "Not that... that!" he says, still pointing but stepping closer. I pick up the cruddy DVD that was next to the first. "No! This!" he says...
After several dense itterations I realize that he is talking about the rectanngular advertisement that is clipped to the shelf between two rows of DVDs. He is actually touching the sign by this point, and getting kind of upset.
It seems that I have cultured a blind spot for full-color rectangular advertisements immediately above or below anthing I feel is "content". It is so pervasive in my mental state that meat-world advertisements have begun getting the same treatment.
The comercialization of the internet has actually rendered me blind.
Square insets are next, and soon I wont even be able to read a text book any more.
And to keep them from harvesting out the.gov and.mil addresses, everyone who can should set up an email alias that does nothing but forward to uce@ftc.gov and post it liberally on IRC, unused but spider-accessable web pages, and blogs.
Basically put up web pages that have a (graphical) "you better not send spam to these addresses" logo (so it isn't fraud itself 8-).
It seems like the easiest way for ISPs and government agencies to spot the spammers would be to have a suite of these no-real-use addresses and then publicize them on no-real-use fora 8-)
Your cost differential analysis is flawed because of a base inequity. You presume that your for-pay solution will not have a percent-of-FTE-time associated.
Even when you pay for support for a product, if you don't assign someone to actively track the product you will not gain the benefit of the support you pay for.
Few if any support contracts provide that "whatever the supporting company discovers will be broadcast to the paying customers." That is, while the infomation will be "made available" to the supported entities, it will not be spoon/force-fed to same.
Consider the typical support contract. Such a contract entitles the user to certian things:
1) reasonably unrestricted access to some sort of knowledge base. 2) reasonably unrestricted access to the current patch archive. 3) telephone/email (whatever) access to someone who will help you find your way through items 1 and 2. 4) the opportunity to add bugs to the development chain.
Usually, these support contracts seem to have more value because of the phantom-element number five. (Someone to blame when the fix isn't available.)
Now a truely expensive contract that garentees *any fix whatsoever* let alone garentees to *fix your problem in (whatever) time or less* tends to run into huge dollar amounts.
So the total service rendered for a paid comercial support contract is for items 3 and phantom-5. And you only get to use these items when something is really broken. If you are not actively persuing items 1 and 2 yourself and at your own expense then you will have taken no preventative action, and an unmaintained system will likely break no matter how you acquire it.
So Decide... Are you pricing a system that will be maintained?
If so, you will have to allocate some fraction of an FTE. That cost will be similar no matter the source or positioning.
If not, then cost will be a function of frequency of breakdown.
Then, once a breakdown occurs...
Does your support contract *garantee* a fix?
If not, then the total cost expended on the support contract was paid to deflect accoutnability and allow you to contact a person who will walk you through the existing database of problems.
Remember, almost nobody who has paid Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, or IBM to "support" their applications has *ever* gotten to do more than submit a trouble ticket. Paying support doesn't reserve you a programmer who will jump to your needs like a hound to a scent. It just buys you the right to be heard and the right to hear.
Joining the mailing list (or hopefully bugzilla-style issue/ticket database) for an Open Source product is the free equivalent to 90% of what a support contract is anyway. The only thing you don't get free is access to someone who has the cookbook for pawing through the data.
You need to quantify your expectations for "service contract" before you can properly assess the cost.
If your personal storm-troopers don't have jurisdiction to persontally seize the equipment doing the production, you should not have the jurisdiction to bring charges.
So if you are a city attorney you can only prosecute someone under "community standards" if your city police can snatch the computer without "help" from a larger jurisdiction.
To that end, if Zimbabwe would need "help" or "permission" from {some other government here} to legally sieze the computer, then Zimbabwe just can't prosecute for community standards.
Beyond that, if you can't keep the signal out of your precious community, clearly you don't take your own standards seriously enough... (see The Great-Firewall of China)
ah, to be able to destroy idiots and "arbiters of moral rectitude" from space...
How does this help? The cheater simply needs to keep a copy of the data they're using in the client as normal,and a copy of what the server expects elsewhere so that they can send it in.
The data isn't static. Also, most cheats can't and don't actually try to interact with the engine. Instead they patch the memory image of the data set and then let the engine do what it does. In order to defeat this technique the cheat would have to do each of the following:
1) run realtime 2) pre and post process the packet stream 3) track the "expected" state of the game engine wherever the cheat has effect. 4) maintain a differential state, where the local state is enhanced and the remote state isn't. 5) do all of the above with exact precesion.
Remember that the checksum is on a data set representative of the entire current game state and is produced on demand of the server. The data stream would have to be pre-processed to keep the checksum request from reaching the "real" engine, and then post processed to reinsert the results into the returning data stream. The cheat would have to retain a complete false state laid out in the exact byte order of the real data set. Yes, all these things "could", in theory, be done, but at what cost to the cheaters "play experience"?
The differential logic alone would eat more than half the CPU and may not be practical at all for most games. The differential engine would also be at least twice as complex to code as the engine itself. Granted with an infinite motivation and unlimited computing resources a person still could, in theory, cheat. But think of his sucky pollygon count... 8-)
With an infinite motiviation and unlimited computing resources, in theory, a person can break any incryption in real time too. But it doesn't happen.
The real point of my post is that if the state model was a true and proper distributed thought process and if the state model were sufficently thurough (e.g. with "sufficent" data to check for oddities) and had a little validation (e.g. the occasional MD5 etc) the system could know that it was being tampered with. With that knowledge the system istelf could easily punish the dickwad...
Further, the technology exists, is simple enought to use, has the necessary performance characteristics if used judicously, and most important, has already been proven in other fields.
The game designers just havn't bothered to go out and address the problem with one one-hundredth the effort they spend on polygon count.
From a purely protocol/programming standpoint it would be *VERY* easy to prevent cheating in online games. Remember that the distributed data state of an online game is in every way a distributed database synchronization problem. Additionally, the portions of the database that are "useful" as a cheat are, in any game, relitively isolated.
(One simple version of) What you have to do is align the key data elements in contiguous memory in a platform independent format and then do MD5 (or similar) checksums on it. Every few hundred {your favorite quanta here} transmit the new checksum to the game server. If a given client participant's checksum is wrong then reset the client, if the client persists in "going bad" then a cheat has almost certianly been used and the client is ejected and barred from the server for some time (say two days).
Now, to work, the game designers will have to actually learn how to do a few things like a proper checkpoint of a real time database, but that is the cost of data integrity.
Consider "Starcraft". The two areas where cheats come up are "map cheats" (where after the game is in play, a cheat "tweaks" the local map to give the player an advantage) and "unit tweaks" (where the attributes of a unit are changed to make it faster, invoulnerable, more damaging etc).
Now consider: durring startup the server builds the MD5 of the map definition. Durring a "checkpoint cycle" the server starts a snapshot of the unit configurations for the target client. The client transcribes a snapshot of the working data (map and units), creats the checksums with an exact timestamp and sends those checksum and timestamp to the server. The server rolls its log to the matching timestamp and does a checksum. If they don't match then there is a problem.
Consider the "unkillable unit" hack. In order to spoof the checksum the chekpoint code would have to "back out" the hack to get the unit flags back to spec and somehow account for the "wrong" hitpoints remaining.
Now a first-order drirtive of the problm would be if the main server "noticed" that the "base hitpoints + points repaired - points taken as damage" values didn't match in the first place, the checkpoint would not be necessary. For that simple check the server would have to track those three numbers instead of just "remaining health". It would be one of those "why is this unit still alive with a current health of -1288 points?" kind of conditions. The thing is the "Starcraft" engine doesn't seem to arbitrate things at that level. If it did, the "unkillable unit" hack would never have worked in the first place.
Then again, the "total cost" of duplicating all the data instead of just "trusting" the client is hugely trivial compared to the cost of, say, rendering a frame of graphics.
So if the engine designers would treat the games as a true distributed dataset. (You know, do a little integrity constraint checking.) Learn how "real" programs solve these problems in "real" (as opposed to "toy") applications and apply that known technology to their games, the cheats would vanish into the noise floor.
That of course, would require the companies to take a little manpower from the front-side gee-wiz rendering problem, send that manpower to school to learn some hard comp-sci of the boring data-integrity kind, and then pay them to beef up that "user shouldn't ever see it if it is working correctly" part of their system.
The most important "conceptual model" is "you already know how to solve problems, you do it every day."
This is generally followed by:
"This is not hard, just new/strange to you" and/or "Everything anybody can do in here, at the atomic level, is exactly analogous to something you have already done in the real world."
The first and hardest thing to do is demystify the experience. Computer mystics program by rote formula, always recreating the same program with nearly identical structures in a cookbook-like format. Computer scientists take knowledge and use it to manufacture a good solution for each unique problem.
Most of the freshly-minted graduates in Computer Science are Computer Mystics. If you can break down this formula approach to the subject you will get much further much faster and produce a better graduate.
It seems obvious when you say it aloud, but the purpose of any program is to "do something". That is where I start. With what exactly it "can mean to do something".
The fact that this is vauge is, frankly, exactly the point. I also take the student through the real-world words excersize. Particularly "what is a file? Now try again but completely forget that htere has ever been a thing called a computer; what is a file?" wearing them down to "An arbitrary collection of arbitrary things."
Once you have done this decomposition of practical thought (typically about ten minutes of easy banter and cheap jokes) you can "really start" with the idea that there is a thing called "a state", that that thing is "only as defined as it needs to be for the task" and that any task is a transformation on that state.
The whole lecture really involves working a crowd (of students) like you were the warm-up act for a TV sit-com live-taping audience. But done correctly you are seeding your students with the tiniest grains of everything you will be requireing them to think from there on out. Most importantly you are doing it in a non-threatening way AND showing them that what they already know is vitally important. (That's the heart of the all important act of validating your students.)
Then you start bouncing back and forth between the practical and the theoretical.
Basically, what you should *REALLY* do is spend a few weeks with an "english as a second language" teacher or just a plain english teacher and learn how to *TEACH* before you even think about teaching a particular subject like "programming".
The fundimental problem with computer science is that the students are learning from the people who learned from the people who made it up in the first place, and not one of those people ever learned to "teach" any subject to anybody. -- me
By forcing your unit to record a certian show at a certian time Tvio people are "using up" your recording capacity for that interval. That is, the tuner is in use and can not, therefore, be recording any other show.
Think about it. Network A doesn't want you record/time-shift the show on an opposing network B. They buy-up your recorder for an hour.
Better yet, say "The Friends Series Finaly" (sp?) has a huge ad dollar per minute on the advertising. So NBC buys-up the Tvio tuners to record "animal planet" for that timeslot. Now if you want to see the all-important last episode you *MUST* watch it live and you *CAN'T* time-shift it or save it.
The issue is not whether there is a disk reserve that doesn't affect your viewing time, it is whether there is a "tuner reserve" that means that this "feature" doesn't busy-your-box against all other use.
So what? You don't PURCHASE Linux if you just download and use it.
It's a loop-hole alright, but no worse or better than the fact that the tested software isn't required to have "passed" any test to any particular degree.
"Well Admiral Bob, I didn't purchase a dman thing. I just downloaded and installed it..." 8-)
What we should be crying over an mocking is our current "no nuclear power plants" policy. Almost on the very day that Carter blocked the licencing of any new power stations a woman at Fermi-Lab (spelling?) was finishing up work on what I have heard referred to as "the french process".
Basically a breeder reactor process that would make it cost and energy effective to reprocess our existing nuclear waste as fuel.
The process/design/whatever (I'm not an expert, but I have spoken to them) produces at least an order of magnitude less waste per unit of fuel. So where 100lbs were produced in the old format less than 10lbs would be produced. Reprocessing the existing waste as fuel would, once it was spent reduce the amount of existing waste by that same 10-to-1 ratio.
Since we never used flammables (graphite) to cool our reactors we were never at risk for a Chernoybl (sp?)...
Since nothing really happened at Three Mile Island (the first safety system in a chain of dozens did exactly what it was supposed to do and released some heat with ZERO RADIATION but it was good "media copy".../sigh)
Since fossil feul is messy and obnoxious...
We canceled the best power technology we possess(ed) before it had a chance to mature. And now the people who would know how to revive it are ageing out of the workforce and/or dying off. Prety soon there won't be anybody with experience to get this vital technology back into production.
When I first signed up at pobox.com I wanted to use whiter@pobox.com but some Brazillian guy already had it, so dispite my years-long use of "whiter" for various purposes I was S.O.L.
Aparently he has receintly started having to use an "rwhite" login name for a bunch of stuff because he has apparently sent (my email address above without anti-spam) instead of his own to several spam-list-generating forms.
How do I know? The flood of spanglish spam that is hitting my mailbox. Mostly it seems to be coming from variations of random_evilspammer_@_whatever.ar, the worst offender being _various_people_@yahoo.com.ar
The sad thing is there is no mandated "remove" mechanisim on most of this (non-US sourced) mail AND the postmaster persons at these sites don't respond to my "please god make it stop I don't speek any kind of spanish" requests. [Probably because they, in turn, don't speek english, possibly because they don't have to care.]
I have been led to wonder if whiter@pobox.com is trying to get me to surrender my own alias by signing it up for spam. I don't think this is actually the case but what a technique! (Then again the account would be useless once I surrendered it so it is a self-defeating technique.)
Remember: Never attribute to MALACE that which can be adequately explained by STUPIDITY.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I may be off topic because this isn't a complaint...
We got nice Eddie Bauer company-logo jackets (fleece lined weather proof kind-of cloth thing). Bonuses happen along about new years, but last year they were in the thousands of dollars range.
Of course this is because my company (shameless plug pointing at a enemic server that wont take the load 8-) doesn't suck, didn't dot-bomb itself, and is still quite profitable.
Then again, we did do fund-rasing this year, which involved going from a limited partnership to a board-of-directors thing, so there is no telling. Perhaps we will get slammed later in a classic "syphon off the value, sell the shell, admire our management technique, and call it a win." spoken of elsewhere on this forum.
Meanwhile things are quite nice.
I personally make a point of showing everyone I encounter who's interested in making PDFs the beauty of Ghostscript and Ghostview. Every sale I can cost Adobe makes me feel that much warmer inside.
By costing Adobe market share, and negatively impacting their financial ability to manufacture and distribute their e-book software; and by further making your technique known, and encouraging others to use that technique; you are circumventing Adobe's e-book publishing system and by simple induction its encryption technologies.
This is a violation of the DMCA (secret corporate subdy provisions). A copy of your Summons will be delivered to you by our jackbooted government thugs.
Keep in mind that the envelope glue holding the summons closed is a technological measure to ensure security and confidentiality of the copyrighted summons text. The summons itself is issued and owned by the Department of Justice. Any attemtp to read the summons itself, or make its contents known to your firends, family, coworkers, or legal representitives will be usable against you as evidence of wanton disreguard of the DMCA and US legal practices in a court of law.
You are free to confront your accusers. Their identities and afadavids are in this locked bag. You may do anything you see fit with this information provided you do not voilate the integrety of the closed bag or the lock holding the bag closed...
How many crimes are stopped each year without the gun ever being fired?
Hom many crimes are commited each year without the gun ever being fired?
Until someone bothers to find and correlate those tow numbers there is no truth to any of the numbers for or agains guns.
Quote: ... of firearms except for those used by police and army.
Presuming you were raised in the USA, I must also persume that you didn't pay one single whit of attention in your public school education.
The singular and only reason that the Constitution of the United States contains a provision to allow for the ownership and excercise of arms is that the framers knew that ANY ONE CITIZEN must have the right to be AT LEAST as well armed as ANY ONE MEMBER of their own government. (That is exactly and percisely the POLICE and the ARMY.)
In short, the citizenry of a free country must have the means to OPPOSE THE POLICE of their own government to keep those police from evolving into an occupying force.
Remember the abbuses of the British forces occupying the settlments in the colonies and compare those to the elements of the bill of rights.
Freedom of the press, because the Red Coats closed the decenting newspapers.
Freedom of assembly because the Red Coats dispersed crowds in an attempt to quell desent.
Freedom from search and seizure because they were breaking into homes and taking whatever the chose as evidence from whoever they suspected of crimes (fishing through communities for disidents)
See how there is a patern emerging?
The constitution give me the right to keep and bare arms, along with my neighbors, spesifically so that if enough of us decide the government is getting out of hand, we will have the recourse of the revolutionary.
In short, I am SUPPOSED to be able to outgun the police, and "crime" and "self protection" have nothing to do with it at all. Period.
The Bill of Rights is singularly and wholly the Right to Restraint over and Revolution against the government should it get out of line.
Period.
Nothing Else.
No hunting.
No (individual) home intrustion countermeasures.
No shouting fire in a crouded theater.
Only the police and army armed? The founding fathers would turn over in their graves.
Try actually reading a highschool civics book.
[Pre-Note: I do not now, nor have I ever, owned a firearm. I have, however, bothered to go out and be taught at least the first things you must know to be an "informed" participant in the debate. That is; how to handle, load, and shoot a gun; what is involved in their maintenance and upkeep; how easy/hard it is to "safely" store an handle a gun; and so on. This also includes the reasonably unbiased political history of the issue (e.g. I paid attention in junior/senior high school social studies, and took the time to read on the subject... 8-)]
Your nice and over-broad statistics not withstanding, with respect to children killed in gun accidents (though I wish I could cite this better), my understanding is that there is another more important correlation.
In cultural settings where the child is raised with guns (taken hunting, taught to respect the weapon, allowd supervised access to the weapon if he/she asks) the incidence of accidental gun deaths/shootings of/by children is hugely reduced (e.g. near zero).
What is the classic scenerio?
Child 1: "hey dude, my dad has a gun and I know where it is... want to see?"
If Child 2 then says "so what, my dad takes me shooting" child one never gets to the "whoops, sorry I killed you dude" phase.
If Child 1 doesn't think the gun is a forbidden mistery it stops being an attractive nusance.
Hell, if you wan't to keep kids alive, make the gun into a chore. You know, "no jimmy, you have to come to the range, do your target practice, clean your gun, and put it away before you can play with timmy from next door." You wouldn't be able to drive the kids to the guns with sticks.
In simple point of fact, virtually all gun accidents involve improperly trained or otherwise clueless people. And most people with an "anti-gun" bias have never even bothered to learn about them.
Incidents are most likely to occur in a house where it (the gun) is "the first gun I have ever owned" or was bought "because I was mugged last year" and where "I've never fired one before" or "I shot it once on the range when I bough it."
On the other hand, the acutal "crime prevention" statistics are virtually non-existant. How many times is a gun "brandished" (brought out or otherwise made known to a criminal but never fired) each year? Nobody knows. Even the simple "I heard someone in the house and I yelled 'I have a gun'" incidents arn't statistically correlated out of police reports.
Guns are very good at wounding and killing people. That's what they are for and that isn't something to be ashamed of. When a gun is fired there is a high incidence of someone or something being struck by a bullett. But untill and unless you can compile statistics about the number of times a gun was "used" without being fired, you can't construct any statistically or culturally valid statemets that meaningfully compare the "cost of having them" in lives and property loss, to the "cost of not having them" in lives and property saved.
So your numbers, like virtually all the numbers in the debate, are ad homonym, and uselessly incomplete.
And ALL OF THAT ignores the reason we have the "keep and bare arms" provisions. If you go back to your bare-bones public-school education, you will recall that the intent of the provision is that any one member of a society should have the right to be at least as well armed as any one member of their own government. The British took the guns away from the colonists so that the occupying force could dominate the will of the citizenry.
It is quite the point that the average citizen *MUST* be at least as well armed as the police to keep the police from becomming an occupying force.
The thing that has been lost is that the citizenry were also supposed to be trained, willing, and ready to assist the police (every citizen is in the militia etc) if/as/when needed. It's part of that all-rights no-responsibilities thing that is rotting the western world at its core.
Remember, conversly, that in the age of the authoring of the constitution, gun-control was automatic. (Hua? you may ask...) Because of the quality of materials available at the time, if you didn't care for your gun regularly and know how it was operated, it would become useless and dangerous to you in a matter of days or weeks. If the average gang-banger had to clean his gun every three days whether he fired it or not, do you think he would want to own it, let alone shove it hurridly down his pants?
Modern guns are really the problem they are now because you can hammer a tent peg into the ground with one, have it get rained on, drop it in the mud, and still know that you can whipe it off and expect it to fire instead of blowing your hand off.
Further, there is the issue of "rights" in the (USA biased here) core social conscience. The idea that a right is absolute is, well, absolute nonsense. In any debate where the word "right" is used, the heat totally out-musters the light. You have the right to smoke, I have the right not to be forced to breathe your smoke. I have the right to keep and bare arms, you have the right NOT TO BE GUNNED DOWN OUTSIDE THE LOCAL CIRCLE-K (sothern areas all-night grocery and sundries chain-store). Rights, priviliges, and responsibilities all exist in a hierarchy and, without exception, the "right to" something is trumped by the "right not to have done to", but only so far as do-er and the do-ee are interracting. So the right not to be gunned down in turn, doesn't anywhere become the right to exist in a world restructured to remove the possibility of everything you fear or dislike comming anywhere near you.
The guns are in the equation now, and trying to get them out needs must fail.
Drugs are in the equation now, and trying to get them out needs must fail.
And so on for religous wackos, our-truth-only christians and Xenutologists, leftist extremeists, secular humanists, racists, vegans, confectioners.
You can't take pee out of a pool.
You can't legislate morallity.
You can't legislate intellegence either.
You can only find out what is wrong, what is breaking the minds of the people and turning them to animals, and then try to act intelligently and proactively.
No Apeasement (sp?).
No Reactionary diatribe.
No Crufty Science.
No Return to the Golden-Age dogma.
No Absolute Moral Truth.
Only people trying to think and reason honestly and completely.
It's a lot to think about...
And (reguardless of topic) when you see or hear someone who shows no signs of that requisite minimum thought, you should discard their statements as pre-opinionated dogma.
(From Memory) So I was watching some show on these issues (crime, murder, gun control) and the smart-alek host asks this question "What is the most dangerous place in the world?" He was expecting to provoke a debate among his various and fully-diverse-on-the-issues panel members. But the first person to answer, some retired police chief, stimied the interviewer and managed 100% agreement with the entire panel.
The most dangerous place in the world is... "the secondary crime scene."
Ok, you can't find it on an international map but it is a real, abet highly conceptual, place.
If you are moved from one place to another during the commission of a crime the probability that you will end up dead reaches near certianty. For whatever reason the criminal doesn't want to "do (to) you" whatever he intends while you are all where you are. If someone tries to force you into a car or to walk down a path DON'T DO IT.
To that end, going along with the crime peacfully is asking to be slain. (Ask the French, a policy of appeasment [spelling?] NEVER works.)
Therefore, being armed must increase the victims chance to resist visiting the secondary crime scene, and therefore must tend to keep people alive.
The typical shooting is IMHO an act of cowardess. The random shooters in our lot would't ever decide that a gun show or police convention was "the best possible choice" for a random act of violence. No siree... You want to have a good killin you go to a kindergarden or a MacDonalds or a commuter train or a mall. And not one in Texas or West Virgina.
The odd-but-seemingly-true of the matter is that it isn't the gun control laws that act as a functional component to the crime rate... it's the CARRY LAWS. The easier it is for a person to carry a CONCEALED weapon in a municipality, the less random gun violence takes place. If people have to cary their guns out in the open then an assailant can gage the probability he will take return fire.
Gun Violence is an act of cowardess.
The graphs (of cities etc) from least to most "easy to arrange for concealed carry"; and most to least "likely to have a random shooting"; are essentially the same graph.
Where there are no carry laws, most people don't even (have to) carry because they have the same "protective camoflage" as the little old lady next to them with that hog-leg in her purse.
And so, anything you can do you should do, to keep from being moved or looking like a victim will keep you from that most deadly place. Guns, or just the reasonable probability that a law abiding person might have a gun, are excelent in that reguard. And if you don't have a gun, get a knife, or a stick, or a good kick ready.
And the only solution *REALLY* is to figure out what makes some people need to drag others out into the bushes and do them harm, but barring that unlikely miracle, go armed if you have the mental presence to use it wisely, and don't if you don't.
(I personally don't own a gun, and wouldn't trust myself to carry one around, but I know that I feel more comfortable visiting a place like West Virginia where the law abiding persons are at least as well armed as the kooks, than I feel in LA or New York where only the kooks and bangers are armed.)
The single thing I noticed about the inset logo (annoying little thing in the lower right hand of the screen) is that the new one is *MUCH* less visually intrusive.
Yes, I noticed it, and yes, it is different.
But by slimming down the letters, and turning the "base" ringed planet into the dual-silloette (spelling?) of just the ring and the planetary arc they reduced the "this covers crap up" factor by about 50%. It is still suggestive of the ringed planet, but now it is (were you to do a 3D analysis of the image 8-) just the user in near syzygy with the star (light source) roughly behind the planet, so two swooping arcs replace the planet. This moves the bulk of the planatary body OFF MY DAMN VIEWING AREA.
Reducing the screen clutter is always better. 8-)
...a flagrant DMCA Copyright violation.
You see, watching the comercial without buying the product is a DMCA violation as the chain-of-process protecting the advertisers intellectual property starts at the invention of marketing plan and ends at the city dump.
By using your brain to abort the process of conception to advertisement to purchase to addictive use to discard-with-immediate-repurchase you are interupting the process which protects the intellectual property (e.g. the senior partner's Jaguar ownership) of the marketing firm. This is identical to interrupting the delivery-chain inside your DVD by DeCCSing the movie.
So your brain, by recognizing the worthlessness of the comercial and the product constitutes a circumvention of a technology intended to provide the marketers with access to their Jaguars.
The FBI will be by shortly to arrest you, confisiate your brain, drain your wallet into the hands of the marketing company, and repatriate you as an afgan so that you may then be held by the CIA as a forign terrorist.
Well, As someone who is trying to break into SF I can say if is far easier to define what makes SF truly awful.
-- Sexual Fetishisim: Any story written to legitimize the authors sexual fetishism will be awful beyond words.
-- The "Tacky Document Theory": Any time the full purpose of the story is to extoll some great historical document, the story will suck. ("we sought out the great ancient secret, and it began 'we the people...'"
-- Mmmm, Cruchy: The old "to serve man is a cookbook" was a great idea. It doesn't need to be written again folks.
-- The Dragon Ball Z effect: Any story where each heroic feat must out-do the previous until each character is destroying planets with a glance, simply must suck.
-- Did I mention sexual fetishisim? Really. It's bad. Don't do it.
Consider This Authoratative Guide to all thigs wrong with SF and SF fandom...
For instance, I will probably never be able to sell my novel unless I subtitle it "Not Gay Porn". The problem is that I have a character who's story arc, to be believable, has to start "very low". To that end, he starts the book naked in a cage. My intent is to make the reader think of him as property. It works quite well. But I know in my soul that any editor will see that and think "oh, god, another 'slave naked in a cage' book" and fire off a rejection without guilt.
(There is no explicit, and less than 100 words of implicit sex in the book, but how do you say that believably to editors that are being burried in alternate-star-trek-universe furry porn? 8-)
There really is a huge body of bad sexual frustration out in the SF community, at least among the "I'll become an author, then people will finally see my mind and accept me, and that will finally show my parents that I'm NOT a freak" crowd.
So, what makes SF "good SF"? The presense of thoughtful insight into the human condition, the presence of internal consistency in the authors vision, the presence of something to say, good punctuation, and the utter absence of Spock-as-a-wombat having sex with the dophinan Captian Kirk.
The thing I don't get is why nobody has argued that DeCCS isn't actionable under the DMCA.
(The argument goes something like this...)
Everything I have read about the DMCA paraphrases into a statement that people "may not traffic (etc, blah blah blah) effective (blah) prevent copying".
A smartalek may harp on "effective" but I would like to harp on "prevent copying."
The CCS system does absolutely nothing to "prevent copying" what so ever. It singularly and only complicates viewing. The data stream itself before and after a DeCCS run is equally copyable. Therefore it is not, reguardless of the intent, a "copy protection mechanisim" AT ALL.
It is intended as a porely implemented use-limiter.
This is directly analogous to using a password to encrypt a zip archive. This does nothing to limit or control the copying of the archive. It does work to limit how the possesser of the archive can access it. And it does so reguardless of whether the possesser came into that possession through clear entitlement or agregous breach of security or ethics.
the CCS system uniformly restricts the usage of the data reguardless of whether the data is possess via clear entitlement (you have the DVD in the drive), transitive entitlement (you have the DVD in its jewel case and the image on your hard drive) or agregous breach (you just downloaded the image from a movie-warze site).
So it is not a "copy protection" technology at all.
Someone needs to make that point in a court of law.
And the word is "Antipathy". While the literal definition holds words like "distaste" and "enmity" as synonyms (see Merriam-Websters online for a nice impartial dictionary) the common usage I have heard all my life is "extreme apathy".
To quote the old joke...
Teacher: "Are you ignorant? or just plain apathetic?"
Student: "I don't know... and I don't care!"
So I was in the viedo-rental-sore with my roomate.
He says "That looks interesting" and points to a shelf.
I say "What? this?" picking up rather lame DVD.
"Not that... that!" he says, still pointing but stepping closer.
I pick up the cruddy DVD that was next to the first.
"No! This!" he says...
After several dense itterations I realize that he is talking about the rectanngular advertisement that is clipped to the shelf between two rows of DVDs. He is actually touching the sign by this point, and getting kind of upset.
It seems that I have cultured a blind spot for full-color rectangular advertisements immediately above or below anthing I feel is "content". It is so pervasive in my mental state that meat-world advertisements have begun getting the same treatment.
The comercialization of the internet has actually rendered me blind.
Square insets are next, and soon I wont even be able to read a text book any more.
Someone should do a study.
And to keep them from harvesting out the .gov and .mil addresses, everyone who can should set up an email alias that does nothing but forward to uce@ftc.gov and post it liberally on IRC, unused but spider-accessable web pages, and blogs.
Basically put up web pages that have a (graphical) "you better not send spam to these addresses" logo (so it isn't fraud itself 8-).
It seems like the easiest way for ISPs and government agencies to spot the spammers would be to have a suite of these no-real-use addresses and then publicize them on no-real-use fora 8-)
Look ma, I Fixed my cookie!
8-)
I guess I should have used a sexier subject line...
(Sorry couldn't resist... 8-)
Your cost differential analysis is flawed because of a base inequity. You presume that your for-pay solution will not have a percent-of-FTE-time associated.
Even when you pay for support for a product, if you don't assign someone to actively track the product you will not gain the benefit of the support you pay for.
Few if any support contracts provide that "whatever the supporting company discovers will be broadcast to the paying customers." That is, while the infomation will be "made available" to the supported entities, it will not be spoon/force-fed to same.
Consider the typical support contract. Such a contract entitles the user to certian things:
1) reasonably unrestricted access to some sort of knowledge base.
2) reasonably unrestricted access to the current patch archive.
3) telephone/email (whatever) access to someone who will help you find your way through items 1 and 2.
4) the opportunity to add bugs to the development chain.
Usually, these support contracts seem to have more value because of the phantom-element number five. (Someone to blame when the fix isn't available.)
Now a truely expensive contract that garentees *any fix whatsoever* let alone garentees to *fix your problem in (whatever) time or less* tends to run into huge dollar amounts.
So the total service rendered for a paid comercial support contract is for items 3 and phantom-5. And you only get to use these items when something is really broken. If you are not actively persuing items 1 and 2 yourself and at your own expense then you will have taken no preventative action, and an unmaintained system will likely break no matter how you acquire it.
So Decide... Are you pricing a system that will be maintained?
If so, you will have to allocate some fraction of an FTE. That cost will be similar no matter the source or positioning.
If not, then cost will be a function of frequency of breakdown.
Then, once a breakdown occurs...
Does your support contract *garantee* a fix?
If not, then the total cost expended on the support contract was paid to deflect accoutnability and allow you to contact a person who will walk you through the existing database of problems.
Remember, almost nobody who has paid Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, or IBM to "support" their applications has *ever* gotten to do more than submit a trouble ticket. Paying support doesn't reserve you a programmer who will jump to your needs like a hound to a scent. It just buys you the right to be heard and the right to hear.
Joining the mailing list (or hopefully bugzilla-style issue/ticket database) for an Open Source product is the free equivalent to 90% of what a support contract is anyway. The only thing you don't get free is access to someone who has the cookbook for pawing through the data.
You need to quantify your expectations for "service contract" before you can properly assess the cost.
If your personal storm-troopers don't have jurisdiction to persontally seize the equipment doing the production, you should not have the jurisdiction to bring charges.
So if you are a city attorney you can only prosecute someone under "community standards" if your city police can snatch the computer without "help" from a larger jurisdiction.
To that end, if Zimbabwe would need "help" or "permission" from {some other government here} to legally sieze the computer, then Zimbabwe just can't prosecute for community standards.
Beyond that, if you can't keep the signal out of your precious community, clearly you don't take your own standards seriously enough... (see The Great-Firewall of China)
ah, to be able to destroy idiots and "arbiters of moral rectitude" from space...
How does this help? The cheater simply needs to keep a copy of the data they're using in the client as normal,and a copy of what the server expects elsewhere so that they can send it in.
The data isn't static. Also, most cheats can't and don't actually try to interact with the engine. Instead they patch the memory image of the data set and then let the engine do what it does. In order to defeat this technique the cheat would have to do each of the following:
1) run realtime
2) pre and post process the packet stream
3) track the "expected" state of the game engine wherever the cheat has effect.
4) maintain a differential state, where the local state is enhanced and the remote state isn't.
5) do all of the above with exact precesion.
Remember that the checksum is on a data set representative of the entire current game state and is produced on demand of the server. The data stream would have to be pre-processed to keep the checksum request from reaching the "real" engine, and then post processed to reinsert the results into the returning data stream. The cheat would have to retain a complete false state laid out in the exact byte order of the real data set. Yes, all these things "could", in theory, be done, but at what cost to the cheaters "play experience"?
The differential logic alone would eat more than half the CPU and may not be practical at all for most games. The differential engine would also be at least twice as complex to code as the engine itself. Granted with an infinite motivation and unlimited computing resources a person still could, in theory, cheat. But think of his sucky pollygon count... 8-)
With an infinite motiviation and unlimited computing resources, in theory, a person can break any incryption in real time too. But it doesn't happen.
The real point of my post is that if the state model was a true and proper distributed thought process and if the state model were sufficently thurough (e.g. with "sufficent" data to check for oddities) and had a little validation (e.g. the occasional MD5 etc) the system could know that it was being tampered with. With that knowledge the system istelf could easily punish the dickwad...
Further, the technology exists, is simple enought to use, has the necessary performance characteristics if used judicously, and most important, has already been proven in other fields.
The game designers just havn't bothered to go out and address the problem with one one-hundredth the effort they spend on polygon count.
From a purely protocol/programming standpoint it would be *VERY* easy to prevent cheating in online games. Remember that the distributed data state of an online game is in every way a distributed database synchronization problem. Additionally, the portions of the database that are "useful" as a cheat are, in any game, relitively isolated.
(One simple version of) What you have to do is align the key data elements in contiguous memory in a platform independent format and then do MD5 (or similar) checksums on it. Every few hundred {your favorite quanta here} transmit the new checksum to the game server. If a given client participant's checksum is wrong then reset the client, if the client persists in "going bad" then a cheat has almost certianly been used and the client is ejected and barred from the server for some time (say two days).
Now, to work, the game designers will have to actually learn how to do a few things like a proper checkpoint of a real time database, but that is the cost of data integrity.
Consider "Starcraft". The two areas where cheats come up are "map cheats" (where after the game is in play, a cheat "tweaks" the local map to give the player an advantage) and "unit tweaks" (where the attributes of a unit are changed to make it faster, invoulnerable, more damaging etc).
Now consider: durring startup the server builds the MD5 of the map definition. Durring a "checkpoint cycle" the server starts a snapshot of the unit configurations for the target client. The client transcribes a snapshot of the working data (map and units), creats the checksums with an exact timestamp and sends those checksum and timestamp to the server. The server rolls its log to the matching timestamp and does a checksum. If they don't match then there is a problem.
Consider the "unkillable unit" hack. In order to spoof the checksum the chekpoint code would have to "back out" the hack to get the unit flags back to spec and somehow account for the "wrong" hitpoints remaining.
Now a first-order drirtive of the problm would be if the main server "noticed" that the "base hitpoints + points repaired - points taken as damage" values didn't match in the first place, the checkpoint would not be necessary. For that simple check the server would have to track those three numbers instead of just "remaining health". It would be one of those "why is this unit still alive with a current health of -1288 points?" kind of conditions. The thing is the "Starcraft" engine doesn't seem to arbitrate things at that level. If it did, the "unkillable unit" hack would never have worked in the first place.
Then again, the "total cost" of duplicating all the data instead of just "trusting" the client is hugely trivial compared to the cost of, say, rendering a frame of graphics.
So if the engine designers would treat the games as a true distributed dataset. (You know, do a little integrity constraint checking.) Learn how "real" programs solve these problems in "real" (as opposed to "toy") applications and apply that known technology to their games, the cheats would vanish into the noise floor.
That of course, would require the companies to take a little manpower from the front-side gee-wiz rendering problem, send that manpower to school to learn some hard comp-sci of the boring data-integrity kind, and then pay them to beef up that "user shouldn't ever see it if it is working correctly" part of their system.
Not to reply to my own post but...
The most important "conceptual model" is "you already know how to solve problems, you do it every day."
This is generally followed by:
"This is not hard, just new/strange to you"
and/or
"Everything anybody can do in here, at the atomic level, is exactly analogous to something you have already done in the real world."
The first and hardest thing to do is demystify the experience. Computer mystics program by rote formula, always recreating the same program with nearly identical structures in a cookbook-like format. Computer scientists take knowledge and use it to manufacture a good solution for each unique problem.
Most of the freshly-minted graduates in Computer Science are Computer Mystics. If you can break down this formula approach to the subject you will get much further much faster and produce a better graduate.
It seems obvious when you say it aloud, but the purpose of any program is to "do something". That is where I start. With what exactly it "can mean to do something".
The fact that this is vauge is, frankly, exactly the point. I also take the student through the real-world words excersize. Particularly "what is a file? Now try again but completely forget that htere has ever been a thing called a computer; what is a file?" wearing them down to "An arbitrary collection of arbitrary things."
Once you have done this decomposition of practical thought (typically about ten minutes of easy banter and cheap jokes) you can "really start" with the idea that there is a thing called "a state", that that thing is "only as defined as it needs to be for the task" and that any task is a transformation on that state.
The whole lecture really involves working a crowd (of students) like you were the warm-up act for a TV sit-com live-taping audience. But done correctly you are seeding your students with the tiniest grains of everything you will be requireing them to think from there on out. Most importantly you are doing it in a non-threatening way AND showing them that what they already know is vitally important. (That's the heart of the all important act of validating your students.)
Then you start bouncing back and forth between the practical and the theoretical.
Basically, what you should *REALLY* do is spend a few weeks with an "english as a second language" teacher or just a plain english teacher and learn how to *TEACH* before you even think about teaching a particular subject like "programming".
The fundimental problem with computer science is that the students are learning from the people who learned from the people who made it up in the first place, and not one of those people ever learned to "teach" any subject to anybody. -- me
By forcing your unit to record a certian show at a certian time Tvio people are "using up" your recording capacity for that interval. That is, the tuner is in use and can not, therefore, be recording any other show.
Think about it. Network A doesn't want you record/time-shift the show on an opposing network B. They buy-up your recorder for an hour.
Better yet, say "The Friends Series Finaly" (sp?) has a huge ad dollar per minute on the advertising. So NBC buys-up the Tvio tuners to record "animal planet" for that timeslot. Now if you want to see the all-important last episode you *MUST* watch it live and you *CAN'T* time-shift it or save it.
The issue is not whether there is a disk reserve that doesn't affect your viewing time, it is whether there is a "tuner reserve" that means that this "feature" doesn't busy-your-box against all other use.
... which has not been tested by the NAS?
So what? You don't PURCHASE Linux if you just download and use it.
It's a loop-hole alright, but no worse or better than the fact that the tested software isn't required to have "passed" any test to any particular degree.
"Well Admiral Bob, I didn't purchase a dman thing. I just downloaded and installed it..." 8-)
What we should be crying over an mocking is our current "no nuclear power plants" policy. Almost on the very day that Carter blocked the licencing of any new power stations a woman at Fermi-Lab (spelling?) was finishing up work on what I have heard referred to as "the french process".
/sigh)
Basically a breeder reactor process that would make it cost and energy effective to reprocess our existing nuclear waste as fuel.
The process/design/whatever (I'm not an expert, but I have spoken to them) produces at least an order of magnitude less waste per unit of fuel. So where 100lbs were produced in the old format less than 10lbs would be produced. Reprocessing the existing waste as fuel would, once it was spent reduce the amount of existing waste by that same 10-to-1 ratio.
Since we never used flammables (graphite) to cool our reactors we were never at risk for a Chernoybl (sp?)...
Since nothing really happened at Three Mile Island (the first safety system in a chain of dozens did exactly what it was supposed to do and released some heat with ZERO RADIATION but it was good "media copy"...
Since fossil feul is messy and obnoxious...
We canceled the best power technology we possess(ed) before it had a chance to mature. And now the people who would know how to revive it are ageing out of the workforce and/or dying off. Prety soon there won't be anybody with experience to get this vital technology back into production.
THAT is what we should mock and resent.
When I first signed up at pobox.com I wanted to use whiter@pobox.com but some Brazillian guy already had it, so dispite my years-long use of "whiter" for various purposes I was S.O.L.
Aparently he has receintly started having to use an "rwhite" login name for a bunch of stuff because he has apparently sent (my email address above without anti-spam) instead of his own to several spam-list-generating forms.
How do I know? The flood of spanglish spam that is hitting my mailbox. Mostly it seems to be coming from variations of random_evilspammer_@_whatever.ar, the worst offender being _various_people_@yahoo.com.ar
The sad thing is there is no mandated "remove" mechanisim on most of this (non-US sourced) mail AND the postmaster persons at these sites don't respond to my "please god make it stop I don't speek any kind of spanish" requests. [Probably because they, in turn, don't speek english, possibly because they don't have to care.]
I have been led to wonder if whiter@pobox.com is trying to get me to surrender my own alias by signing it up for spam. I don't think this is actually the case but what a technique! (Then again the account would be useless once I surrendered it so it is a self-defeating technique.)
Remember: Never attribute to MALACE that which can be adequately explained by STUPIDITY.