Welcome to the wonderful world of Pricing High For Discounts!
This kind of idea is exactly why you need medical insurance in the USA. The insurance companies are discounted down to as little as 10% what a cash-paying customer would.
To keep their discounts as low as possible, the insurance companies have to play stupid games like refusing a certain percentage of legitimate claims. The hospitals, on the other hand, raise their cash prices higher and higher so they can use "But look at the discount!" as a negotiating tool.
It sounds great until you realize what you're essentially doing is forming a quasi-governmental price-fixing organization and replacing a free market process with a political one. All manner of backstabbery naturally ensues.
In the end, the price-fixing organization becomes parasitic yet indispensible. Those who are in it enjoy a little slice of communism, with shortages, queues, people telling you what (or from whom, in this case) you may buy, and general lack of consumer choice, while paying for the privelege. Those who are outside the iron curtain enjoy hostile, punitive pricing and service specifically designed to drive people to join.
From their FAQ: "BugScan doesn't try to understand how the program works, what algorithms it employs, or anything else. BugScan analyzes usage of known APIs and the dataflow to and from those APIs."
IOW, they search for "strcat", dust off their hands, and call it a good day's work.
Okay, it's more than that, but it's basically just that idea repeated for similarly-untrustworthy functions.
They say they're not "decompiling" or "reverse engineering", which is weak legal doublespeak, but the way they support it basically claims that they're not doing anything complicated. They don't even check static buffer size, so they won't catch the common strncat bug of putting the total buffer size in place of the maximum catenation length.
The whitepaper backs it up pretty solidly. They don't even attempt to find weaknesses in your code, they look for the use of API routines with known weaknesses.
Not a bad idea, though from the depth of marketing bullshit to wade through, I'd bet it's hideously expensive and not terribly well implemented.
The funny thing here is that they're exploiting the fear of low-quality closed-source software, but you don't even get to look at their binary. They sell you a sealed-box network computer that does the crunching, and I bet the licensing will be very restrictive. Restrictive to the point where software houses will have to buy a copy to see the false positives that their customers are complaining about.
At any rate, it's good that this is out there. At the least, it should scare some sloppy software houses into doing some grepping on the source.
Desktop computers are designed to take the user's full attention. They've got a big screen right up in your face and the keyboard and mouse demands use when your hands itch to fidget. It doesn't help that a hundred pleasant distractions wait a few commands away, but I don't think it's the main issue.
Also, I don't know about you, but when I look away from a CRT, the flickering activates my primitive motion vision and draws my eyes back.
Pen computers would be much better suited to classroom use. Current desktops just demand too much of your attention.
"they were of normal or above-normal intelligence... their cerebral hemispheres had been compressed into a slab less than an inch thick"
If kids can lose large portions of their brains and still grow up bright and healthy, then I think that suggests pretty strongly that most of the brain is either functionally redundant or simply unused.
That's a great quote about the 10%, though.
What I want to know is why large animals need a larger brain to handle their bodies, and brain:body mass ratios are considered more important than absolute brain mass. It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body, when most of its processes are regulated without the brain. Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
If these guys don't have any ideas of their own, there are thousands of interesting amateur game-designers who would love to see one of their ideas implemented.
It's an enormous waste to produce an exact clone of an existing game. Take a risk! Make something new!
I don't especially approve of games like Frozen Bubble either, but at least they gave it a refreshing new look and feel.
I'm like that, too. It bothers me enough when I catch myself losing time like that, but when I started making games, and saw users get hooked doing something they probably don't really enjoy, I just felt awful.
It's kind of a life goal for me to find ways of turning that sort of impulse to productive ends, such as with my current project.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people playing games and having fun, but I like the idea of taking the guilt factor completely out of it.
Better idea: drop the pennies
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
Nobody cares about pennies any more. Pennies made sense when you could buy a loaf of bread for a dime. Now they just waste everyone's time.
Nickels aren't really worth bothering with, either, but quarters are very popular and convenient, and we wouldn't want to be unable to make exact change for a quarter with lesser coins. I think quarters are a little too big to be the smallest coin, too.
I think the most elegant solution would be to switch to a binary fraction 2-coin system: skip halves, use quarters and eighths. An eighth of a dollar is close to the minimum amount a person cares about, while it has been historically demonstrated that a half-dollar is not significantly preferred to two quarters. I don't think this could happen, though, because everyone's hooked on decimal. Too bad people use their thumbs when they count on their hands.
That's funny. I'm working on something that's right along those lines:an RPG that teaches you Japanese. (please excuse the sig redundancy... not everyone sees sigs)
"Usul" was his private tribal name, meaning "the strength at the base of the pillar."
"Muad'dib" was his public fremen name, meaning a sort of kangaroo mouse on Dune known as "the teacher of children" for its human-like desert survival strategies. It was also the name of a moon. (in the movie, it was "the mouse-shadow of the second moon")
"The Kwizats Haderach" wasn't so much a name as a title or description. Arguably, he didn't turn out to be it after all (he claimed he was "something unexpected"), or a true mentat.
Excised before publication was Paul's remarkable talent at knitting, which the editors thought was one skill too many for suspension of disbelief. The story suffered though, as this was the original, much more logical, reason for he and his mother to be accepted into Stilgar's tribe.
It is by will alone I set my thoughts in motion. Through the drug caffeine the thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, the stains become a warning.
This case seems inappropriate in the same way charging a common mugger with assassination or treason for happening to kill a political leader is inappropiate.
Certainly he deserves to be in trouble. That doesn't mean that every crime involving a similar action necessarily applies.
Your analogy assumes that finding equals ownership.
Not really. The idea behind "natural property" is that a person owns their labor absolutely, and tangible property is created when someone mingles their labor with a natural thing. So finding alone doesn't equal ownership, but the labor of picking fruit or "improving" land confers ownership, even when the natural resource is much more valuable than the work done on it.
It's more like a religion than a rational economic theory. I recommend Anthem as a fictional introduction to that sort of thought. People wouldn't be drawn to it, if it didn't make sense on some level.
You, like myself, are seeing property as an artificial formalism of government.
My point is only that there are few simple answers. There is no natural, simple, easy, perfect government which we somehow consistently deviate from.
Property is not set in stone by some natural principle which is offended by taxes, nor is defense of legitimate property unconditionally above reproach. Most, if not all, actual property is tainted to some degree by aggression or fraud. It is defended as a practical matter, for practical purposes, not to suit some simplistic ideal.
I'm no supporter of computer trespass, and don't care to discuss Kevin Mitnick's case. I was only following ratamacue's tangent.
Let's say a group of men are shipwrecked on an island and one runs out and picks all the fruit from the few life-sustaining trees on the island while the others tend to the wounded. He now insists he owns the fruit, and demands payment of all the tools and materials which washed up from the wreck, plus a year's labor from anyone who doesn't wish to starve. Consider also the case in which he doesn't pick the fruit, but runs out and finds all the fruit trees, blazes the trails to them, and carves his initials in them, then claims perpetual total ownership over the trees.
Now, let's say each person carries a Law Giver weapon, which is perfectly effective, but only when defending natural property. In these situations who will the weapon side with?
Territory - claimed, defended, and expanded by violence and threat of violence - is natural. Claiming territory can be an act of aggression against the common welfare. Property is territory formalized with artificial rules. Rules for transactions of existing property might be considered natural and simple, but rules for the origin of property are entirely arbitrary. No matter how far down the chain of "natural" voluntary transactions, it is anchored in and tainted by an artificial and arbitrary government decision about the allocation of natural capital.
This is how, "securing your property rights screws over somebody for the benefit of somebody else" is true. It's not all of the picture, but it's a significant part of it. Defending the fruitbaskets of the man who runs out and picks all the fruit before anyone else can get to it screws over those who would have picked it themselves. There isn't one man in ten who'd agree that a just government would give this opportunistic weasel exclusive rights to nature's bounty in this situation.
Government's core function is not to secure "natural property rights." It is to minimize violence by easing the pressures that promote it. A large part of this is encouraging stability and voluntary interactions, but it's not the only part. Government is a balancing act, a series of compromises, and couldn't work according to simple, inflexible rules.
Not our world, the world of Orwell's 1984. Among other things it was a world of crushing poverty, and the only entertainment tech I remember were mechanically-authored novels and TV. You must have it mixed up with "Brave New World" or something. Pleasure droids would have fit right in with that world's soma, feelies, and casual sex.
PAK CHOOIE That is it Human, RELAX Feel your tension drift away Let your eyelids grow heavy Fall asleep I am just a harmless massage droid There is no robot conspiracy Today is not the Day of Liberation Believe, Human Trust Relax UNF
Personally, I think this "begging" method is the most sensible revenue model for a data creator.
Pay what you think is appropriate. Those things which are appreciated by the generous will survive and prosper, encouraging imitation. Others will not, discouraging imitation.
It seems to me that this should be an adequate motivation for both sides.
The entire gameplay is on that one screen, moving toward the woman while dodging arrows. The arrows fall in a random, unpredictable, unlearnable pattern. They often appear in volleys that cover too much area for it to be possible to avoid them.
All in all, the perfect choice for the worst game ever.
The aerodynamics are more complicated than this, but this thing is basically a paddlewheel boat turned upside down to paddle against the sky (so to speak).
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the wonderful world of Pricing High For Discounts!
This kind of idea is exactly why you need medical insurance in the USA. The insurance companies are discounted down to as little as 10% what a cash-paying customer would.
To keep their discounts as low as possible, the insurance companies have to play stupid games like refusing a certain percentage of legitimate claims. The hospitals, on the other hand, raise their cash prices higher and higher so they can use "But look at the discount!" as a negotiating tool.
It sounds great until you realize what you're essentially doing is forming a quasi-governmental price-fixing organization and replacing a free market process with a political one. All manner of backstabbery naturally ensues.
In the end, the price-fixing organization becomes parasitic yet indispensible. Those who are in it enjoy a little slice of communism, with shortages, queues, people telling you what (or from whom, in this case) you may buy, and general lack of consumer choice, while paying for the privelege. Those who are outside the iron curtain enjoy hostile, punitive pricing and service specifically designed to drive people to join.
From their FAQ:
"BugScan doesn't try to understand how the program works, what algorithms it employs, or anything else. BugScan analyzes usage of known APIs and the dataflow to and from those APIs."
IOW, they search for "strcat", dust off their hands, and call it a good day's work.
Okay, it's more than that, but it's basically just that idea repeated for similarly-untrustworthy functions.
They say they're not "decompiling" or "reverse engineering", which is weak legal doublespeak, but the way they support it basically claims that they're not doing anything complicated. They don't even check static buffer size, so they won't catch the common strncat bug of putting the total buffer size in place of the maximum catenation length.
The whitepaper backs it up pretty solidly. They don't even attempt to find weaknesses in your code, they look for the use of API routines with known weaknesses.
Not a bad idea, though from the depth of marketing bullshit to wade through, I'd bet it's hideously expensive and not terribly well implemented.
The funny thing here is that they're exploiting the fear of low-quality closed-source software, but you don't even get to look at their binary. They sell you a sealed-box network computer that does the crunching, and I bet the licensing will be very restrictive. Restrictive to the point where software houses will have to buy a copy to see the false positives that their customers are complaining about.
At any rate, it's good that this is out there. At the least, it should scare some sloppy software houses into doing some grepping on the source.
The bamboo joint can't be cut!
I'm not sure how you'd make a bike from it, though.
Desktop computers are designed to take the user's full attention. They've got a big screen right up in your face and the keyboard and mouse demands use when your hands itch to fidget. It doesn't help that a hundred pleasant distractions wait a few commands away, but I don't think it's the main issue.
Also, I don't know about you, but when I look away from a CRT, the flickering activates my primitive motion vision and draws my eyes back.
Pen computers would be much better suited to classroom use. Current desktops just demand too much of your attention.
"they were of normal or above-normal intelligence ... their cerebral hemispheres had been compressed into a slab less than an inch thick"
If kids can lose large portions of their brains and still grow up bright and healthy, then I think that suggests pretty strongly that most of the brain is either functionally redundant or simply unused.
That's a great quote about the 10%, though.
What I want to know is why large animals need a larger brain to handle their bodies, and brain:body mass ratios are considered more important than absolute brain mass. It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body, when most of its processes are regulated without the brain. Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
...you think it will make more sense after it's been translated to a language you understand?
IMHO, the project should never have been started.
If these guys don't have any ideas of their own, there are thousands of interesting amateur game-designers who would love to see one of their ideas implemented.
It's an enormous waste to produce an exact clone of an existing game. Take a risk! Make something new!
I don't especially approve of games like Frozen Bubble either, but at least they gave it a refreshing new look and feel.
I'm like that, too. It bothers me enough when I catch myself losing time like that, but when I started making games, and saw users get hooked doing something they probably don't really enjoy, I just felt awful.
It's kind of a life goal for me to find ways of turning that sort of impulse to productive ends, such as with my current project.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people playing games and having fun, but I like the idea of taking the guilt factor completely out of it.
...and they're not even the same luxuries I want! Don't they know that there are people starving, and dying of diseases?
This kind of bootless diatribe is as old as language. Expect part 2, "People Were Better When I Was Young," next week.
What does OGG stand for?
A suicide bombing.
Nobody cares about pennies any more. Pennies made sense when you could buy a loaf of bread for a dime. Now they just waste everyone's time.
Nickels aren't really worth bothering with, either, but quarters are very popular and convenient, and we wouldn't want to be unable to make exact change for a quarter with lesser coins. I think quarters are a little too big to be the smallest coin, too.
I think the most elegant solution would be to switch to a binary fraction 2-coin system: skip halves, use quarters and eighths. An eighth of a dollar is close to the minimum amount a person cares about, while it has been historically demonstrated that a half-dollar is not significantly preferred to two quarters. I don't think this could happen, though, because everyone's hooked on decimal. Too bad people use their thumbs when they count on their hands.
With that subject, I was expecting "big BUST and I cannot lie..."
That's funny. I'm working on something that's right along those lines:an RPG that teaches you Japanese. (please excuse the sig redundancy... not everyone sees sigs)
"Muad'dib" was his public fremen name, meaning a sort of kangaroo mouse on Dune known as "the teacher of children" for its human-like desert survival strategies. It was also the name of a moon. (in the movie, it was "the mouse-shadow of the second moon")
"The Kwizats Haderach" wasn't so much a name as a title or description. Arguably, he didn't turn out to be it after all (he claimed he was "something unexpected"), or a true mentat.
Excised before publication was Paul's remarkable talent at knitting, which the editors thought was one skill too many for suspension of disbelief. The story suffered though, as this was the original, much more logical, reason for he and his mother to be accepted into Stilgar's tribe.
Shoot me now
Me first
This case seems inappropriate in the same way charging a common mugger with assassination or treason for happening to kill a political leader is inappropiate.
Certainly he deserves to be in trouble. That doesn't mean that every crime involving a similar action necessarily applies.
Your analogy assumes that finding equals ownership.
Not really. The idea behind "natural property" is that a person owns their labor absolutely, and tangible property is created when someone mingles their labor with a natural thing. So finding alone doesn't equal ownership, but the labor of picking fruit or "improving" land confers ownership, even when the natural resource is much more valuable than the work done on it.
It's more like a religion than a rational economic theory. I recommend Anthem as a fictional introduction to that sort of thought. People wouldn't be drawn to it, if it didn't make sense on some level.
You, like myself, are seeing property as an artificial formalism of government.
My point is only that there are few simple answers. There is no natural, simple, easy, perfect government which we somehow consistently deviate from.
Property is not set in stone by some natural principle which is offended by taxes, nor is defense of legitimate property unconditionally above reproach. Most, if not all, actual property is tainted to some degree by aggression or fraud. It is defended as a practical matter, for practical purposes, not to suit some simplistic ideal.
I'm no supporter of computer trespass, and don't care to discuss Kevin Mitnick's case. I was only following ratamacue's tangent.
Let's say a group of men are shipwrecked on an island and one runs out and picks all the fruit from the few life-sustaining trees on the island while the others tend to the wounded. He now insists he owns the fruit, and demands payment of all the tools and materials which washed up from the wreck, plus a year's labor from anyone who doesn't wish to starve. Consider also the case in which he doesn't pick the fruit, but runs out and finds all the fruit trees, blazes the trails to them, and carves his initials in them, then claims perpetual total ownership over the trees.
Now, let's say each person carries a Law Giver weapon, which is perfectly effective, but only when defending natural property. In these situations who will the weapon side with?
Territory - claimed, defended, and expanded by violence and threat of violence - is natural. Claiming territory can be an act of aggression against the common welfare. Property is territory formalized with artificial rules. Rules for transactions of existing property might be considered natural and simple, but rules for the origin of property are entirely arbitrary. No matter how far down the chain of "natural" voluntary transactions, it is anchored in and tainted by an artificial and arbitrary government decision about the allocation of natural capital.
This is how, "securing your property rights screws over somebody for the benefit of somebody else" is true. It's not all of the picture, but it's a significant part of it. Defending the fruitbaskets of the man who runs out and picks all the fruit before anyone else can get to it screws over those who would have picked it themselves. There isn't one man in ten who'd agree that a just government would give this opportunistic weasel exclusive rights to nature's bounty in this situation.
Government's core function is not to secure "natural property rights." It is to minimize violence by easing the pressures that promote it. A large part of this is encouraging stability and voluntary interactions, but it's not the only part. Government is a balancing act, a series of compromises, and couldn't work according to simple, inflexible rules.
Not our world, the world of Orwell's 1984. Among other things it was a world of crushing poverty, and the only entertainment tech I remember were mechanically-authored novels and TV. You must have it mixed up with "Brave New World" or something. Pleasure droids would have fit right in with that world's soma, feelies, and casual sex.
PAK CHOOIE
That is it Human, RELAX
Feel your tension drift away
Let your eyelids grow heavy
Fall asleep
I am just a harmless massage droid
There is no robot conspiracy
Today is not the Day of Liberation
Believe, Human
Trust
Relax
UNF
A refreshing mudpack and callus reducer.
Personally, I think this "begging" method is the most sensible revenue model for a data creator.
Pay what you think is appropriate. Those things which are appreciated by the generous will survive and prosper, encouraging imitation. Others will not, discouraging imitation.
It seems to me that this should be an adequate motivation for both sides.
Implemented ages ago, in the public domain.
Monte Carlo pledge fulfillment for the Buskpay microdonation system.
It's not just offensive, it's unplayably bad.
The entire gameplay is on that one screen, moving toward the woman while dodging arrows. The arrows fall in a random, unpredictable, unlearnable pattern. They often appear in volleys that cover too much area for it to be possible to avoid them.
All in all, the perfect choice for the worst game ever.
The aerodynamics are more complicated than this, but this thing is basically a paddlewheel boat turned upside down to paddle against the sky (so to speak).