1. All the talk about "tracking" is nonsense. An RFID anything has a range measured in inches normally. Stuff it in your wallet sandwiched in between more cards and it pretty much won't work.
Until the next technology comes along -- then you can be tracked with all the range they want. But by then it will be too late to argue about it and you would just look like one those "tinfoil hat" types or a "conspiracy kook" if you questioned it. All Americans want to be tracked to help their government fight "terrorism", don't they?
There are limits on the signal to noise ratio and distance, and you can greatly reduce the readability with a commercially available sleeve. Or a piece of tinfoil. Like the kind you currently use for your hats;). They can keep adding more and more expensive and sensitive technology, you just need to keep adding sheets of aluminum foil to your shield. It would be the stupidest arms race ever.
3. What's the application though? If it is just border crossings, then do border crossings have the infrastructure to process a contactless card?
The application is -- you guessed it -- remote tracking. The newest U.S. Passports as of July of this year all have RFID chips in them as well. It's not perfect, but yet another baby step on the way to "total information awareness" on citizens, just like the East Germans had but without all the fancy technology. It's a pilot program, testing the waters regarding citizen resistance, and inching it into general acceptance. There was a huge revolt against the REAL ID program, so think of this as a "reboot" of that program.
The passports are including a chip so that we can retain our visa-waiver status with European countries. They don't trust paper travel documents anymore, and they require anyone traveling there to either have a secure Schengen visa or a document from your home country that they think is secure enough. If you ever get concerned about the "remote tracking," wrap more layers of aluminum foil around your passport and ID.
4. Accidentally leaving the card inside a microwave oven while you are warming coffee would harm the chip, so don't ever do that.
That's right. As soon as they get enough of these things in circulation, you will need them to get on airlines, go in government buildings, or maybe pass "illegal immigrant checkpoints". If your RFID chip was disabled, that might mean that you are an illegal immigrant, or a terrorist, or that you just like standing in long lines and being searched thoroughly.
The REAL ID program would have gone into effect on May 11 of this year, except that it was such a tremendous threat against the rights of our citizens that many states openly revolted against it. The REAL ID was an "enhanced drivers license" and you would have needed it to get on airplanes or enter government buildings nationwide by now. The Department of Homeland Security had a deadline of May 13 of this year, and yes, they were planning to put an RFID chip in the REAL ID card as well. Google it -- it's everything that you are arguing that this identical program is not, and it was a planned nationwide program before it got derailed.
I have no problem with a secure document that proves my identity, as long as I can shield it when not in active use. If I don't trust the shielding that the government provides, I can use my own. I have no problem with biometric authentication on the document, as long as the enrollment data is a token on the card and not in a central government database. Both of those are covered in the new passports, so I don't have a problem with it.
Where I do have a problem is that the breeder documents AREN'T as secure. We can't trust biometri
It's already illegal (at least in California) to not carry a drivers license with you.
This is 100% complete and utter fabricated bullshit. There is no such law.
I think you should look up ISO 14443 if you're concerned about your cards being read from that far away. Maybe invest in a $5 sleeve to put your card in, or a 5 cent piece of aluminum foil to wrap around it.
It's kind of borderline possible right now. Facial recognition isn't really good enough at lights-out single person identification - it's seldom able to give you a 99.99% definitive answer as to which of thousands of people the sample image is, let alone balancing that against the possibility that the person isn't even enrolled. It's also very dependent on enrollment quality, so if you're enrolling from the security camera the accuracy is going to take a huge hit. It's fantastic at pulling up with 20 of 20 million people you probably are, and letting a human operator make the final call.
But why? You get 99% of the utility you could ever want by limiting yourself to the checkout counter. The shelves aren't going to rearrange themselves as people walk by, and you aren't going to be responding to immediate gaze tracking. There's basically one scenario where it can make a difference, where someone repeatedly window-shops a specific item and is offered a discount that tips them over the edge. I've seen that be effective in e-Commerce since all the site visit information is sitting there anyway, but even then it's hard to prove that the ROI is positive.
But really, beyond the millions of dollars for blob-tracking and matching licenses, beyond the fact that you have to tell all your patrons that you're enrolling them in a Big Brother system, you face the fact that in the end you care about what they're actually buying.
Where the current systems fail, IMO, is that they tend to give me coupons at the end of my shopping trip, and I never see them again. If I could wave a contactless loyalty card at a kiosk as I walked in to get coupons, I think it would drive my purchasing decisions a lot more than those stupid coupons with my receipt would. Maybe there are people who come back to the store because of specific 99 cent coupons, but I'm not one of them - coupons for me drive impulse buys once I'm shopping, not the trip to the store itself.
economies: much as I hate to admit it (I like the idea of a player economy as well), player based economies are actually very destructive to game enjoyment. The "Auction Hall" global market with instant results just provides massive encouragement for goldselling services and the resulting rampant inflation. The more resources and money supply is controlled by the publisher, the more the econommy winds up in control of the goldsellers.
Puzzle Pirates has a great economy, which is *COMPLETELY* player run other than the sources and sinks. It requires design and balance, not slapping an auction house down on an existing looting system.
Yup. And I wouldn't be surprised if the way seasonal weather lines up with your first few years makes a difference. You're going to share whether you get to be outdoors during your watching, walking, exploring phases with other people with your sign.
Puzzle Pirates has been pretty successful (for an indie game) with a micro-payment model. Items, clothing, and badges that allow access to more advanced parts of the game cost a certain number of game tokens (in addition to their cost in in-game money), and eventually decay. There is an in-game exchange between the game token and the game currency, which makes it possible to play entirely for free or to buy everything for real life money or a happy medium. This payment model is actually the magic bullet that made Three Rings profitable after a couple years using a subscription model (legacy subscription oceans are still around for people who prefer an 'all you can eat' model).
The core gameplay doesn't actually require itemization for most players (though having a cheap sword is usually better than a stick). Gold farmers never get a foothold in the market because they're competing against legitimate free players - the exchange is on a free market which is settled somewhere near a value that makes you work twice as long to get an item for free as to pay half with game tokens. You can't cash out the tokens and the game is rather small, so no professional farmers have moved in (it's also a skill-based game rather than a time/item-based game, so it's not that easy to farm).
I don't know if it can be translated to something like WoW, which relies on leveling and item mechanisms that scale exponentially. It could certainly be lucrative, and allowing people to choose their time/money trade off without going through chinese gold farmers means more profit for Blizzard.
"If you want my opinion (or even if you don't...:-p) this is the achelle's(sp) heel of our society today, most people are lazy bastards that just want to get done with somethign without learning anything about it."
"Another thing that pisses me off is incopetence."
Part of the reason for the success is that PP is more or less un-farmable. Hand in hand with that is the fact that you don't *need* to spend Pieces of Eight to play. Doubloons let you unlock some important aspects of the game, but you aren't required to have anything - except maybe your own sloop, although even that isn't really a requirement.
So there just isn't much bad feeling to someone who bought an all-black outfit - it doesn't effect gameplay, it just looks pretty. And because it's a very open exchange, almost all players participate in one form or another, and it's symbiotic. It doesn't really cause inflation, because there are only so many doubloons you can use - they generally go hand in hand with spending PoE, and you can't cash them out of the game, so there's no point farming them.
The way they handle this is a micropayment system, in the form of doubloons. On a doubloon server, you buy doubloons for ~25 cents each from Three Rings (the developers). These are used to pay for the parts of the game you use - such as access to higher ranks and items - in addition to the in game currency of Pieces of Eight. The doubloons are sunk out of the economy completely, whereas the Pieces of Eight go to the merchant who you buy things from (who is also a player).
The key is that they have a player-driven exchange, where you can offer to buy and sell doubloons (the micro payment currency) for Pieces of Eight (the virtual currency). The price point fluctuates with demand, but it effectively allows those who want virtual cash to buy it - but only in the form of paying for other players' subscriptions.
So if you are an adult with a full time job and a credit card, you can pay other people to make cash for you by paying for their playing time directly. Conversly, if you're cash strapped, you can play for free by putting in the extra time to earn in-game cash and sell it for doubloons.
This system doesn't apply to the Subscription servers, which are a traditional fixed price model. But the Doubloon model has helped them really take off in terms of revenue.
I've never been one to actually pay for my games, but I gladly fork over $25 a quarter to Three Rings for this one. There are a few really strong selling points.
the community is mature, not the content. There is a default chat filter that turns most online and d00d speak into more pleasant piratey versions. 12 year olds find that they don't fit in well at all, unless they act more mature than kids their age usually do.
there is no level grind. While there is a wide range of levels (as in any RPG), it's all skill, not artificial experience points. You go up in levels by simply getting better at the puzzles.
there are no predefined classes of players, but there are many different ways to play. You can make money pillaging, trading, being a merchant, or even just winning swordfighting or drinking competitions. If one form of play gets boring, you can move on to other ones.
teamwork is a fundamental design goal, and all of the duty puzzles come together to make ships sail in a fun and intuitive way.
once you've gotten sick of just puzzling and pillaging, there is a vast political game to play. Players fight for control of islands in blockades that require weeks of planning and involve hundreds of people.
most importantly for the slashdot crowd, there is a good dialogue between the designers and the community. Developers have even been recruited from the player base, adding some valuable perspective. A few months ago they released the island editor for designing landscapes, and ran a design competition. The winners were invited to finalize the entries to make up one of the archipelagoes in the new ocean.
So give it a try if you are looking for something fresh. There has been quite a flood of new players with some new ad placements, but the players will still go out of their way to help you get aquainted with things.
I was going to post about TVEyes doing this, but you beat me to it. I always thought that idea was pretty neat, and I'm actually a little surprised it took google this long to do this.
TVEyes is more based around email alerts than manual searching, but if Google offers every data analysis tool for free, what's going to be left to make money on? I'm starting to get a creepy "Google is the MS of data" feeling.
Sounds about right for Frank. I had him as a TA my first semester of school - he taught us Einstein summation convention, as well as an introduction to quantum chromodynamics. Unfortunately, it was a recitation for an advanced E&M class. Rather frustrating for kids who were struggling to understand their coursework.
Joe Six-Pack is finally getting a sense for these things, which is a great step. I recently started working for a net marketing company, and I'm amazed by the volume of flaming emails we get from people across the country saying that they will take us to court when they find the single cookie we put on their machine. There is also a lot of talk of pushing their congressmen to make our 'spyware' actions illegal.
I love this. It would be nice if people were more educated on this (and knew the difference between a viral program and an inert string of text that they have set their browser to allow), but it's a huge start. Detecting these programs as viruses is wonderful - it raises awareness levels. And the first step to legislation is enough people telling their congressmen. Remember, a phone call or letter is worth hundreds of constituient votes.
Four years ago when I first came across Gator, I considered taking apart their offices with a bat and a black ski mask. But I lived on the wrong coast. Now I might finally see them go to jail some day, and their cell mates will do far worse things to some scrawny coders than I ever could. But that will only happen if you contact your congresscritter. So do it.
Well, I've got me a gmail account... and the interface is wonderful. It's attractive, and very fast. It has a few dozen keyboard shortcuts, as well as some real cool ways of organizing mail (it displays "conversations" rather than individual messages).
As for it only having 10k users... I'd say that google knows more about scaling their product while keep it incredibly fast than any other company. ever.
because I went to their site, and read about their chip. http://adsx.com/prodservpart/verichip.html it is a glass capsul that CONTAINS the encryption processor. again, I have to ask, what is with your superiority complex? why do you constantly assume that a company that has been entrusted with a contract will necessarily be scamming their customers?
i don't understand this prejudice. i'm starting to think that i am being trolled. actually go to their site. read it. i don't know why people here want to assume that anyone other than themselves implementing a system would be grossly incompetent. even when given the opportunity to see if that is the case, they refuse to check, because it could turn out that other people are as competent as they are.
well, if you bother to check their site, they say quite clearly (though in spanish) that they use VeriChip. So yes, we do think that. Why do you assume that, because an establishment serves alcohol, they are suddenly going to make shady and ill-advised business decisions?
Slashdot Mirror
1. All the talk about "tracking" is nonsense. An RFID anything has a range measured in inches normally. Stuff it in your wallet sandwiched in between more cards and it pretty much won't work.
Until the next technology comes along -- then you can be tracked with all the range they want. But by then it will be too late to argue about it and you would just look like one those "tinfoil hat" types or a "conspiracy kook" if you questioned it. All Americans want to be tracked to help their government fight "terrorism", don't they?
There are limits on the signal to noise ratio and distance, and you can greatly reduce the readability with a commercially available sleeve. Or a piece of tinfoil. Like the kind you currently use for your hats ;). They can keep adding more and more expensive and sensitive technology, you just need to keep adding sheets of aluminum foil to your shield. It would be the stupidest arms race ever.
3. What's the application though? If it is just border crossings, then do border crossings have the infrastructure to process a contactless card?
The application is -- you guessed it -- remote tracking. The newest U.S. Passports as of July of this year all have RFID chips in them as well. It's not perfect, but yet another baby step on the way to "total information awareness" on citizens, just like the East Germans had but without all the fancy technology. It's a pilot program, testing the waters regarding citizen resistance, and inching it into general acceptance. There was a huge revolt against the REAL ID program, so think of this as a "reboot" of that program.
The passports are including a chip so that we can retain our visa-waiver status with European countries. They don't trust paper travel documents anymore, and they require anyone traveling there to either have a secure Schengen visa or a document from your home country that they think is secure enough. If you ever get concerned about the "remote tracking," wrap more layers of aluminum foil around your passport and ID.
4. Accidentally leaving the card inside a microwave oven while you are warming coffee would harm the chip, so don't ever do that.
That's right. As soon as they get enough of these things in circulation, you will need them to get on airlines, go in government buildings, or maybe pass "illegal immigrant checkpoints". If your RFID chip was disabled, that might mean that you are an illegal immigrant, or a terrorist, or that you just like standing in long lines and being searched thoroughly.
The REAL ID program would have gone into effect on May 11 of this year, except that it was such a tremendous threat against the rights of our citizens that many states openly revolted against it. The REAL ID was an "enhanced drivers license" and you would have needed it to get on airplanes or enter government buildings nationwide by now. The Department of Homeland Security had a deadline of May 13 of this year, and yes, they were planning to put an RFID chip in the REAL ID card as well. Google it -- it's everything that you are arguing that this identical program is not, and it was a planned nationwide program before it got derailed.
I have no problem with a secure document that proves my identity, as long as I can shield it when not in active use. If I don't trust the shielding that the government provides, I can use my own. I have no problem with biometric authentication on the document, as long as the enrollment data is a token on the card and not in a central government database. Both of those are covered in the new passports, so I don't have a problem with it.
Where I do have a problem is that the breeder documents AREN'T as secure. We can't trust biometri
It's already illegal (at least in California) to not carry a drivers license with you.
This is 100% complete and utter fabricated bullshit. There is no such law.
I think you should look up ISO 14443 if you're concerned about your cards being read from that far away. Maybe invest in a $5 sleeve to put your card in, or a 5 cent piece of aluminum foil to wrap around it.
It's kind of borderline possible right now. Facial recognition isn't really good enough at lights-out single person identification - it's seldom able to give you a 99.99% definitive answer as to which of thousands of people the sample image is, let alone balancing that against the possibility that the person isn't even enrolled. It's also very dependent on enrollment quality, so if you're enrolling from the security camera the accuracy is going to take a huge hit. It's fantastic at pulling up with 20 of 20 million people you probably are, and letting a human operator make the final call.
But why? You get 99% of the utility you could ever want by limiting yourself to the checkout counter. The shelves aren't going to rearrange themselves as people walk by, and you aren't going to be responding to immediate gaze tracking. There's basically one scenario where it can make a difference, where someone repeatedly window-shops a specific item and is offered a discount that tips them over the edge. I've seen that be effective in e-Commerce since all the site visit information is sitting there anyway, but even then it's hard to prove that the ROI is positive.
But really, beyond the millions of dollars for blob-tracking and matching licenses, beyond the fact that you have to tell all your patrons that you're enrolling them in a Big Brother system, you face the fact that in the end you care about what they're actually buying.
Where the current systems fail, IMO, is that they tend to give me coupons at the end of my shopping trip, and I never see them again. If I could wave a contactless loyalty card at a kiosk as I walked in to get coupons, I think it would drive my purchasing decisions a lot more than those stupid coupons with my receipt would. Maybe there are people who come back to the store because of specific 99 cent coupons, but I'm not one of them - coupons for me drive impulse buys once I'm shopping, not the trip to the store itself.
You want either Eve or Puzzle Pirates. They cover pretty different gaming experiences and genres, but they both have great economies.
economies: much as I hate to admit it (I like the idea of a player economy as well), player based economies are actually very destructive to game enjoyment. The "Auction Hall" global market with instant results just provides massive encouragement for goldselling services and the resulting rampant inflation. The more resources and money supply is controlled by the publisher, the more the econommy winds up in control of the goldsellers.
Puzzle Pirates has a great economy, which is *COMPLETELY* player run other than the sources and sinks. It requires design and balance, not slapping an auction house down on an existing looting system.
Yup. And I wouldn't be surprised if the way seasonal weather lines up with your first few years makes a difference. You're going to share whether you get to be outdoors during your watching, walking, exploring phases with other people with your sign.
Puzzle Pirates has been pretty successful (for an indie game) with a micro-payment model. Items, clothing, and badges that allow access to more advanced parts of the game cost a certain number of game tokens (in addition to their cost in in-game money), and eventually decay. There is an in-game exchange between the game token and the game currency, which makes it possible to play entirely for free or to buy everything for real life money or a happy medium. This payment model is actually the magic bullet that made Three Rings profitable after a couple years using a subscription model (legacy subscription oceans are still around for people who prefer an 'all you can eat' model).
The core gameplay doesn't actually require itemization for most players (though having a cheap sword is usually better than a stick). Gold farmers never get a foothold in the market because they're competing against legitimate free players - the exchange is on a free market which is settled somewhere near a value that makes you work twice as long to get an item for free as to pay half with game tokens. You can't cash out the tokens and the game is rather small, so no professional farmers have moved in (it's also a skill-based game rather than a time/item-based game, so it's not that easy to farm).
I don't know if it can be translated to something like WoW, which relies on leveling and item mechanisms that scale exponentially. It could certainly be lucrative, and allowing people to choose their time/money trade off without going through chinese gold farmers means more profit for Blizzard.
When I roll two dice, 7 comes up more than any other number. Must not be random, huh?
"If you want my opinion (or even if you don't...:-p) this is the achelle's(sp) heel of our society today, most people are lazy bastards that just want to get done with somethign without learning anything about it."
"Another thing that pisses me off is incopetence."
Oh, the irony.
Part of the reason for the success is that PP is more or less un-farmable. Hand in hand with that is the fact that you don't *need* to spend Pieces of Eight to play. Doubloons let you unlock some important aspects of the game, but you aren't required to have anything - except maybe your own sloop, although even that isn't really a requirement.
So there just isn't much bad feeling to someone who bought an all-black outfit - it doesn't effect gameplay, it just looks pretty. And because it's a very open exchange, almost all players participate in one form or another, and it's symbiotic. It doesn't really cause inflation, because there are only so many doubloons you can use - they generally go hand in hand with spending PoE, and you can't cash them out of the game, so there's no point farming them.
http://www.puzzlepirates.com/
The way they handle this is a micropayment system, in the form of doubloons. On a doubloon server, you buy doubloons for ~25 cents each from Three Rings (the developers). These are used to pay for the parts of the game you use - such as access to higher ranks and items - in addition to the in game currency of Pieces of Eight. The doubloons are sunk out of the economy completely, whereas the Pieces of Eight go to the merchant who you buy things from (who is also a player).
The key is that they have a player-driven exchange, where you can offer to buy and sell doubloons (the micro payment currency) for Pieces of Eight (the virtual currency). The price point fluctuates with demand, but it effectively allows those who want virtual cash to buy it - but only in the form of paying for other players' subscriptions.
So if you are an adult with a full time job and a credit card, you can pay other people to make cash for you by paying for their playing time directly. Conversly, if you're cash strapped, you can play for free by putting in the extra time to earn in-game cash and sell it for doubloons.
This system doesn't apply to the Subscription servers, which are a traditional fixed price model. But the Doubloon model has helped them really take off in terms of revenue.
No, this has nothing to do with an email client. This is for a system connected to the internet and just sitting there with a default install.
the guy was a morn and got what he deserved
It's spelled 'Moran'.
the community is mature, not the content. There is a default chat filter that turns most online and d00d speak into more pleasant piratey versions. 12 year olds find that they don't fit in well at all, unless they act more mature than kids their age usually do.
there is no level grind. While there is a wide range of levels (as in any RPG), it's all skill, not artificial experience points. You go up in levels by simply getting better at the puzzles.
there are no predefined classes of players, but there are many different ways to play. You can make money pillaging, trading, being a merchant, or even just winning swordfighting or drinking competitions. If one form of play gets boring, you can move on to other ones.
teamwork is a fundamental design goal, and all of the duty puzzles come together to make ships sail in a fun and intuitive way.
once you've gotten sick of just puzzling and pillaging, there is a vast political game to play. Players fight for control of islands in blockades that require weeks of planning and involve hundreds of people.
most importantly for the slashdot crowd, there is a good dialogue between the designers and the community. Developers have even been recruited from the player base, adding some valuable perspective. A few months ago they released the island editor for designing landscapes, and ran a design competition. The winners were invited to finalize the entries to make up one of the archipelagoes in the new ocean.
So give it a try if you are looking for something fresh. There has been quite a flood of new players with some new ad placements, but the players will still go out of their way to help you get aquainted with things.
I was going to post about TVEyes doing this, but you beat me to it. I always thought that idea was pretty neat, and I'm actually a little surprised it took google this long to do this.
TVEyes is more based around email alerts than manual searching, but if Google offers every data analysis tool for free, what's going to be left to make money on? I'm starting to get a creepy "Google is the MS of data" feeling.
33 is pretty much after child bearing (at least historically). Anything past that doesn't matter in terms of evolution.
I'm hoping that this is irony...
Well, maybe the fact that no comment to this point has understood that fact makes it worth pointing out.
Sounds about right for Frank. I had him as a TA my first semester of school - he taught us Einstein summation convention, as well as an introduction to quantum chromodynamics. Unfortunately, it was a recitation for an advanced E&M class. Rather frustrating for kids who were struggling to understand their coursework.
Joe Six-Pack is finally getting a sense for these things, which is a great step. I recently started working for a net marketing company, and I'm amazed by the volume of flaming emails we get from people across the country saying that they will take us to court when they find the single cookie we put on their machine. There is also a lot of talk of pushing their congressmen to make our 'spyware' actions illegal.
I love this. It would be nice if people were more educated on this (and knew the difference between a viral program and an inert string of text that they have set their browser to allow), but it's a huge start. Detecting these programs as viruses is wonderful - it raises awareness levels. And the first step to legislation is enough people telling their congressmen. Remember, a phone call or letter is worth hundreds of constituient votes.
Four years ago when I first came across Gator, I considered taking apart their offices with a bat and a black ski mask. But I lived on the wrong coast. Now I might finally see them go to jail some day, and their cell mates will do far worse things to some scrawny coders than I ever could. But that will only happen if you contact your congresscritter. So do it.
yeah, and the libertarians are one of the top three political parties in America.
Well, I've got me a gmail account... and the interface is wonderful. It's attractive, and very fast. It has a few dozen keyboard shortcuts, as well as some real cool ways of organizing mail (it displays "conversations" rather than individual messages).
As for it only having 10k users... I'd say that google knows more about scaling their product while keep it incredibly fast than any other company. ever.
because I went to their site, and read about their chip. http://adsx.com/prodservpart/verichip.html
it is a glass capsul that CONTAINS the encryption processor. again, I have to ask, what is with your superiority complex? why do you constantly assume that a company that has been entrusted with a contract will necessarily be scamming their customers?
i don't understand this prejudice. i'm starting to think that i am being trolled. actually go to their site. read it. i don't know why people here want to assume that anyone other than themselves implementing a system would be grossly incompetent. even when given the opportunity to see if that is the case, they refuse to check, because it could turn out that other people are as competent as they are.
well, if you bother to check their site, they say quite clearly (though in spanish) that they use VeriChip. So yes, we do think that. Why do you assume that, because an establishment serves alcohol, they are suddenly going to make shady and ill-advised business decisions?
i guess it is likely. thanks chaoticlimbs for the link.