The formula for the area of a circle is pi * r^2 (really, Slashdot, you don't allow the ASCII ii symbol?) Solving for r gives us sqrt(12000/pi) which turns out to be about 61.8 miles. As other posters have pointed out this is suspiciously close to 100 km, leading one to believe that it's an estimate and not necessarily accurate. It does mean that you might be able to deliver internet to space by the most common definition:)
If politicians had two braincells to rub together, they'd enact a law to prevent trades faster than some tick, say, an hour. Your 'trading' company would go out of business in a week, and nobody would care. Farmers would still sell their wheat, and bakers would still buy it, but without you leeches skimming off the top.
I read an excellent article a while ago that, in summary, described how HFT basically is just ripping of regular companies in regular business (you know, the people who actually create the value in the first place). He made a compelling argument for how imposing even a mandatory 60 second acceptance period for any trade would allow a human to intervene and reject a trade which is obviously a very bad deal for the seller (and thus a very good deal for the scum of the earth that are high frequency traders). He also provided several specific examples of how this could have saved traditional "honest" companies substantial losses which, while they didn't break those companies outright, at least made a serious dent in their bottom line.
According to him HFT gets it profit from exploiting margins in trades which no sane trader would accept if they had the time to respond to it, such as issuing and cancelling offers tens of times in less than a second to nail the price limit which a trader has put on a buy request.
Obviously I don't know much about the subject, and sadly I can't find that specific article now (turns out there is a vast amount of articles written from both perspectives), but if anyone can point me to it I'd be grateful.
Huh, that's interesting. After first reading the word in a humorous context I've always believed that it was only an aviator's joke (also mentioned on the Wiki page), I never knew it had a serious usage as well:)
2. undermine their own freedoms in their own fear of the "enemy", stop trusting one another and view anyone that appears different as the "enemy". This is the aim of the terrorist, not the initial damage.
I have a reasonable hope that the Norwegian government won't panic and impose restrictions based on this. As a matter of fact our PM is making a public statement just now where he just said "We shall *not* be cowed [by intimidations of violence]". Incidentally there are no evidence that this is an islamist action, in fact there are strong indications that both the bombing and the shootings might be perpetrated by a lone Norwegian lunatic.
While granted terror attacks in Norway are probably pretty rare
Actually, nothing like this has happened in Norway since WWII, and AFAIK no known terror attacks whatsoever has been perpetrated on Norwegian soil in modern times. That might be the reason it's made the news worldwide, I'm still not sure why this is on Slashdot.
On a side note I work at the University of Oslo, I heard the blast clearly from my office (believed it was thunder at the time). An hour prior to the explosion I suggested to colleagues leaving early and having a beer at this pub, now I'm happy they declined... While I'm very conscious that this shall not influence my everyday life in any way in the future, it *is* a strong reminder that even our peaceful country is vulnerable.
Games that were relatively cheap to make and are (in my subjective opinion) incredibly entertaining are not hard to find. Recent examples, off the top of my head: Terraria, Star Ruler, Chime, Eufloria, Recettear.
Thanks! I can add Aquaria, Braid, Osmos, Penumbra, Gish, and Trine to that list. I play quite a lot of games in a year, but I guess that between indie games and games from a couple of years ago I spend no more than about $120 on games every year.
On a side note, can anyone recommend good indie/open source single-player FPSs which are not of the botmatch variety?
I'm sorry, but your statement's just naive, elitist bollocks. I run Linux at home, and frequently need it at work (all-Windows environment by policy) for specific tasks. I used to have a separate box, isolated from the office network, for this purpose. After getting a new workstation I ditched the old box, installed VirtualBox and never looked back. There are *heaps* of legitimate use cases for running Linux on a Windows host.
3) Rubberhose (or, in some jurisdictions, legal) cryptanalysis. An unscrupulous third party will always get at your data if they deem it valuable enough.
It seems I was actually talking about a third contraption which is a tad more complicated than an HRV, a geothermal heat pump. It's compressor-based and can actually extract usable heat for indoor use from a source temperature of down to -20 Celsius, but the efficiency shines if you can use a warmer source such as non-frozen water. My excuse for the confusion is that this is called simply a "heat pump" directly translated from my native language:)
Both the price and efficiency depend on the situation of your house, but large private homes and places such as farms can benefit from it in the long run.
Thanks for tipping me off about the simpler free-standing heat pump units, they are not common here, but I see that a few vendors sell them.
Why would a cold location use electric radiators rather than heat pumps, which are usually about 4x more efficient?
Because of initial cost, and because it's not *that* efficient depending on your heat source. We have cold winters where I live. A couple I know just bought a two-story house which they completely renovated. They looked into installing a heat pump, but they would probably not recuperate the initial outlay within the expected lifetime, and just invested in good isolation instead. They run a construction firm, so presumably they know what they're talking about.
The parents of another buddy lives in a house by the sea. They do have a heat pump which gets great efficiency since the ocean is the heat source, still they don't figure on recuperating their investment before having used it for about 15 years. If you take into account the added complexity and maintenance requirements of your heating system it simply doesn't make economic sense in many cases.
Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely.mobi, which is most compatible among readers).
I have some experience with this as I have produced ~50 professional quality ebooks. I would strongly recommend that you first generate a well-formatted epub. This is an easy format to work with, as it's basically zipped xhtml, and it will also work out-of-the-box with most devices. It's also one of the richest formats when it comes to layout, making it a good basis for converting to other formats.
When you have a proberly formatted epub you can generate a TOC, add metadata and convert to a host of other formats (including mobi/prc) by using the excellent open source library program Calibre. Calibre is also practical for working with epubs, as it can automatically unzip/zip the files for you. For initial epub conversion your best option is probably to generate html + images and then import into Calibre.
Self editing. Applies equally to ebooks and old fashioned paper ones.
Bravo. I'm a voracious reader, I prefer reading on E-ink, and I've read quite a few self-published stories for free or very cheap ($4). Some are very good stories, some are weaker, but without exception so far all are marred by poor flow, sentences that not quite work and even grammatical and spelling errors. A good copy-editor could work wonders, an editor who is involved in the shaping of the book is even better. It takes a good author to write a compelling story or a good non-fiction book, but to end up with a good final result you need professionals somewhere down the line.
This doesn't mean that self-publishing is inherently bad, if you write a good story you can rise above the rest by spending something like $1500 to have a professional copy-edit your book. If you're serious about your writing this is not a huge investment, especially if you compare it to the time you put into writing your story. And no, your friend who got an A+ in $language is almost certainly *not* a good substitute.
I love to see a lot of promising fresh writers being able to publish their work without needing a publishing contract, but even an ace racing driver can't win without his team of mechanics and support crew. Something similar goes for writers (-1, car analogy).
Disclaimer: I've worked at an academic publishing company since 1999 and have participated in publishing hundreds of works. I *know* how important a good editor, proof-reader and copy-editor are for getting a good result. A good percentage of our authors don't understand why they need it until they see the finished book:)
And based on the replies you've gotten, maybe I read wrong?
Depends on what types of number crunching you're doing. If every step depends on the previous step then you won't be able to exploit the hundreds of cores that makes up even a cheap GPU these days by running them in parallel. If, on the other hand, your task consists of subtasks which can be easily done simultaneously like password hashing (just send a separate password to be hashed to all cores at once) or n-body calculations you will experience huge speedups. If you do a lot of matrix (vector) operations the GPU is also very well suited as it contains specialised hardware for such tasks.
Each GPU unit is also a lot simpler than a general purpose CPU, which means that you may have to implement your algorithms in a less efficient way. So, it depends on the task:)
It is spam. You never asked them to send those emails to you. [...] when your address is not public, you are free to report them to spamcop.
Why would you pollute spam filters with legitimate mail? While they're not for you, they are probably useful to someone, wrongly categorising them as spam degrades the quality of spam filters. Just delete or filter them.
Makes me think about those comapny signatures with some legal blabla in it telling me what to do if mail is send to me by accident.
I once received a mail with such a footer intended for some poor smuck who hadn't paid several of his bills, the email included some embarrassingly personal information. I replied that they'd got the wrong person. Someone in legal obviously got cold feet, because I received a reply with what I would characterise as legal abuse, demanding that I take certain actions to remedy their mistake and confirm to them that I had done so.
I just ignored this, but after several increasingly insistent follow-ups from them I replied that I certainly had no interest in their business with this character, but if they didn't stop harassing me I would happily notify the relevant authorities about their sloppy handling of sensitive information (we have pretty potent privacy laws where I live). I got an "apology" from their CEO with a veiled threat about what they would do if I took further steps... I was tempted, but let it lie and moved on.
I typically just mark misdirected messages as spam.
That's not the best solution, the spam filter in mail clients develops a strong bias against mail you actively mark as spam. While these mails are not for you, they *are* legitimate, giving your mail client a bias against legitimate mail. You might find that mail you want to receive goes straight to the junk folder.
Just delete them, or if it happens frequently make a folder named notforme or something to which you filter these mails.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
People like you will keep saying that untill Hell freezes over, and it still won't make any sense whatsoever. In the first seconds of a crisis your personal level of alertness simply won't make a difference; neither should it, that's what the crew is trained for. During take off or landing you can read, solve a crossword, fuzz with your (crying child|stressed out cat), be wildly panicked due to fear of flying, be three sheets to the wind, eat, sleep, or make out with your girlfriend, all without them stopping you. I've seen it all on flights.
I think it is mostly security theater combined with CYA. After all, they've no real incentive to "go out on a limb" by allowing you to do anything. I don't really care all that much, I can put away my ereader (no radio) during those few minutes, but I also don't understand why otherwise rational people keep bringing up this ridiculous statement.
So wifi might be interesting on a flight, but I definitely wouldn't pay for it.
Last year free Wifi via 3G became ubiquitous where I live on bus rides longer than a couple of hours. I'd guess that every other passenger accesses it from their smartphone or laptop, as the majority have metered data plans on their phones, and the benefits of "free" outweights the lower bandwidth due to several people using the line.
I also prefer to read, but it'd be handy for those "Oh, I'll google that"-moments. I wouldn't be interested either with the fees they mention in the article, but I'd probably go for it if they sold credentials for, say, two bucks. So, for you and me it's "meh", but if you're a business traveller interested in working in-flight it seems like a steal.
Reminds me of a particular scare story run by a Norwegian tabloid (Verdens Gang) some time during the y2k-bug craze with the following reasoning:
* Computers are vulnerable * Even your waffle iron may contain a chip for temperature regulation, this is surely a kind of computer, right? * YOUR WAFFLE IRON WILL STOP WORKING AT JANUARY 1ST 2000!!!111
Funny and sad at the same time. I actually sent an email to the journalist where I politely pointed out how ridiculous this was. His reply was basically that he didn't know the details, but had been assured of this by "a computer expert". I still wonder how that story came to be.
Distracting? It sounds exactly the same, you should be wise enough to understand what he's getting at.
I'm not listening to it, I'm reading it. Of course the OP is not unintelligible, but errors like these do make it seem sloppy, which degrades my first impression of its general quality. The poster doesn't care much about his own message, why should I? If the author is someone I've never met it'll give me a negative preconception of him which he could easily avoid. That said, onyxruby *does* write a lot of good posts.
Constructive criticism like my AC grandparent gives is exactly what I'm looking for through my.sig. English is not my first language, still it's important to me to be as correct as possible in *any* communication, especially written ones. Go ahead and call me pedantic, you're probably right:)
I never really tried this, but i could see the organisation refusing to buy back unspent coins
I have been to a lot of music festivals, and no, they usually don't. I still prefer tokens as opposed to cash for a few reasons:
The queues go a lot faster when the staff don't have to bother with change, and everyone has the "correct" amount. It *really* makes a difference, and it has a huge effect on your enjoyment.
I can keep my wallet somewhere safe, and only keep tokens on my person. This is safer when I am in huge crowds all the time, usually in various states of inebriety.
Outlets for tokens are usually located near every place you can use them, and they accept plastic as well as regular currency. This means that I only need to bring a credit card. There is usually no set minimum amount you need to buy, so if you only need a couple more you can buy that. There is no need to leave the festival with a surplus.
For the organisers there are obvious advantages, probably the least of which is that they will sell a few unused tokens. As you can only use the tokens onsite they need less security at points of sale, they don't even need to trust their employees/volunteers all that much since most of them don't handle cash. They need fewer counters for goods that sell in large volumes, such as beer, as tokens are more efficient in transactions. It's faster to count the registers afterwards. Of course there will probably always be people who buy more than they need as well, but I don't think this amounts to very much, people tend to be very conscious about how many tokens they buy.
So if somebody gets the password database it's safest to assume they've got the passwords in it.
I'm not a security expert, someone please correct me if I' wrong, but I hope PSN uses salts with the hashed passwords. Without salting an attacker would be pretty much guaranteed to hit quite a few real passwords, many of which would work for other logins as well. 2000 hashes/sec (or whatever) has a great chance of hitting gold when they're applied against 77M rows:)
If PSN does employ known salts they would only be able to find "a" password that is valid for the PSN network, not necessarily the real plaintext password which would work for other logins. If the salt is secret (not available to the attackers, and reasonably random) the attackers would probably not even be able to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
If my Math-Fu is not failing me.
sqrt ( 12000 / 2 * Pi ) = 43.7 mile radius.
The math is weak in this one :)
The formula for the area of a circle is pi * r^2 (really, Slashdot, you don't allow the ASCII ii symbol?) Solving for r gives us sqrt(12000/pi) which turns out to be about 61.8 miles. As other posters have pointed out this is suspiciously close to 100 km, leading one to believe that it's an estimate and not necessarily accurate. It does mean that you might be able to deliver internet to space by the most common definition :)
If politicians had two braincells to rub together, they'd enact a law to prevent trades faster than some tick, say, an hour. Your 'trading' company would go out of business in a week, and nobody would care. Farmers would still sell their wheat, and bakers would still buy it, but without you leeches skimming off the top.
I read an excellent article a while ago that, in summary, described how HFT basically is just ripping of regular companies in regular business (you know, the people who actually create the value in the first place). He made a compelling argument for how imposing even a mandatory 60 second acceptance period for any trade would allow a human to intervene and reject a trade which is obviously a very bad deal for the seller (and thus a very good deal for the scum of the earth that are high frequency traders). He also provided several specific examples of how this could have saved traditional "honest" companies substantial losses which, while they didn't break those companies outright, at least made a serious dent in their bottom line.
According to him HFT gets it profit from exploiting margins in trades which no sane trader would accept if they had the time to respond to it, such as issuing and cancelling offers tens of times in less than a second to nail the price limit which a trader has put on a buy request.
Obviously I don't know much about the subject, and sadly I can't find that specific article now (turns out there is a vast amount of articles written from both perspectives), but if anyone can point me to it I'd be grateful.
Lithobraking [wikipedia.org]
Huh, that's interesting. After first reading the word in a humorous context I've always believed that it was only an aviator's joke (also mentioned on the Wiki page), I never knew it had a serious usage as well :)
2. undermine their own freedoms in their own fear of the "enemy", stop trusting one another and view anyone that appears different as the "enemy". This is the aim of the terrorist, not the initial damage.
I have a reasonable hope that the Norwegian government won't panic and impose restrictions based on this. As a matter of fact our PM is making a public statement just now where he just said "We shall *not* be cowed [by intimidations of violence]". Incidentally there are no evidence that this is an islamist action, in fact there are strong indications that both the bombing and the shootings might be perpetrated by a lone Norwegian lunatic.
While granted terror attacks in Norway are probably pretty rare
Actually, nothing like this has happened in Norway since WWII, and AFAIK no known terror attacks whatsoever has been perpetrated on Norwegian soil in modern times. That might be the reason it's made the news worldwide, I'm still not sure why this is on Slashdot.
On a side note I work at the University of Oslo, I heard the blast clearly from my office (believed it was thunder at the time). An hour prior to the explosion I suggested to colleagues leaving early and having a beer at this pub, now I'm happy they declined... While I'm very conscious that this shall not influence my everyday life in any way in the future, it *is* a strong reminder that even our peaceful country is vulnerable.
Games that were relatively cheap to make and are (in my subjective opinion) incredibly entertaining are not hard to find. Recent examples, off the top of my head: Terraria, Star Ruler, Chime, Eufloria, Recettear.
Thanks! I can add Aquaria, Braid, Osmos, Penumbra, Gish, and Trine to that list. I play quite a lot of games in a year, but I guess that between indie games and games from a couple of years ago I spend no more than about $120 on games every year.
On a side note, can anyone recommend good indie/open source single-player FPSs which are not of the botmatch variety?
Sadly camera isn't a "multifunction device".
I don't know if this camera has an accelerometer, but I'd say that running Doom is a quite separate function from taking/viewing pictures :)
Recycling urine does sound like an efficient and logical thing to do in a space craft, but I'd hate to be the one testing it.
Apparently you get used to it after a while :)
I repeat, don't run Linux under Windows. Ever.
Never be ridiculously categorical. Ever.
I'm sorry, but your statement's just naive, elitist bollocks. I run Linux at home, and frequently need it at work (all-Windows environment by policy) for specific tasks. I used to have a separate box, isolated from the office network, for this purpose. After getting a new workstation I ditched the old box, installed VirtualBox and never looked back. There are *heaps* of legitimate use cases for running Linux on a Windows host.
I don't know why I even bother replying to this.
Encryption is vulnerable in two ways
3) Rubberhose (or, in some jurisdictions, legal) cryptanalysis. An unscrupulous third party will always get at your data if they deem it valuable enough.
I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing.
It seems I was actually talking about a third contraption which is a tad more complicated than an HRV, a geothermal heat pump. It's compressor-based and can actually extract usable heat for indoor use from a source temperature of down to -20 Celsius, but the efficiency shines if you can use a warmer source such as non-frozen water. My excuse for the confusion is that this is called simply a "heat pump" directly translated from my native language :)
Both the price and efficiency depend on the situation of your house, but large private homes and places such as farms can benefit from it in the long run.
Thanks for tipping me off about the simpler free-standing heat pump units, they are not common here, but I see that a few vendors sell them.
Why would a cold location use electric radiators rather than heat pumps, which are usually about 4x more efficient?
Because of initial cost, and because it's not *that* efficient depending on your heat source. We have cold winters where I live. A couple I know just bought a two-story house which they completely renovated. They looked into installing a heat pump, but they would probably not recuperate the initial outlay within the expected lifetime, and just invested in good isolation instead. They run a construction firm, so presumably they know what they're talking about.
The parents of another buddy lives in a house by the sea. They do have a heat pump which gets great efficiency since the ocean is the heat source, still they don't figure on recuperating their investment before having used it for about 15 years. If you take into account the added complexity and maintenance requirements of your heating system it simply doesn't make economic sense in many cases.
Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely .mobi, which is most compatible among readers).
I have some experience with this as I have produced ~50 professional quality ebooks. I would strongly recommend that you first generate a well-formatted epub. This is an easy format to work with, as it's basically zipped xhtml, and it will also work out-of-the-box with most devices. It's also one of the richest formats when it comes to layout, making it a good basis for converting to other formats.
When you have a proberly formatted epub you can generate a TOC, add metadata and convert to a host of other formats (including mobi/prc) by using the excellent open source library program Calibre. Calibre is also practical for working with epubs, as it can automatically unzip/zip the files for you. For initial epub conversion your best option is probably to generate html + images and then import into Calibre.
If you're stuck or have questions I can also recommend asking the friendly people at Mobileread's epub section, they have lots of experience and share readily: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=179.
Good luck with your book!
Self editing. Applies equally to ebooks and old fashioned paper ones.
Bravo. I'm a voracious reader, I prefer reading on E-ink, and I've read quite a few self-published stories for free or very cheap ($4). Some are very good stories, some are weaker, but without exception so far all are marred by poor flow, sentences that not quite work and even grammatical and spelling errors. A good copy-editor could work wonders, an editor who is involved in the shaping of the book is even better. It takes a good author to write a compelling story or a good non-fiction book, but to end up with a good final result you need professionals somewhere down the line.
This doesn't mean that self-publishing is inherently bad, if you write a good story you can rise above the rest by spending something like $1500 to have a professional copy-edit your book. If you're serious about your writing this is not a huge investment, especially if you compare it to the time you put into writing your story. And no, your friend who got an A+ in $language is almost certainly *not* a good substitute.
I love to see a lot of promising fresh writers being able to publish their work without needing a publishing contract, but even an ace racing driver can't win without his team of mechanics and support crew. Something similar goes for writers (-1, car analogy).
Disclaimer: I've worked at an academic publishing company since 1999 and have participated in publishing hundreds of works. I *know* how important a good editor, proof-reader and copy-editor are for getting a good result. A good percentage of our authors don't understand why they need it until they see the finished book :)
And based on the replies you've gotten, maybe I read wrong?
Depends on what types of number crunching you're doing. If every step depends on the previous step then you won't be able to exploit the hundreds of cores that makes up even a cheap GPU these days by running them in parallel. If, on the other hand, your task consists of subtasks which can be easily done simultaneously like password hashing (just send a separate password to be hashed to all cores at once) or n-body calculations you will experience huge speedups. If you do a lot of matrix (vector) operations the GPU is also very well suited as it contains specialised hardware for such tasks.
Each GPU unit is also a lot simpler than a general purpose CPU, which means that you may have to implement your algorithms in a less efficient way. So, it depends on the task :)
It is spam. You never asked them to send those emails to you. [...] when your address is not public, you are free to report them to spamcop.
Why would you pollute spam filters with legitimate mail? While they're not for you, they are probably useful to someone, wrongly categorising them as spam degrades the quality of spam filters. Just delete or filter them.
Makes me think about those comapny signatures with some legal blabla in it telling me what to do if mail is send to me by accident.
I once received a mail with such a footer intended for some poor smuck who hadn't paid several of his bills, the email included some embarrassingly personal information. I replied that they'd got the wrong person. Someone in legal obviously got cold feet, because I received a reply with what I would characterise as legal abuse, demanding that I take certain actions to remedy their mistake and confirm to them that I had done so.
I just ignored this, but after several increasingly insistent follow-ups from them I replied that I certainly had no interest in their business with this character, but if they didn't stop harassing me I would happily notify the relevant authorities about their sloppy handling of sensitive information (we have pretty potent privacy laws where I live). I got an "apology" from their CEO with a veiled threat about what they would do if I took further steps... I was tempted, but let it lie and moved on.
I typically just mark misdirected messages as spam.
That's not the best solution, the spam filter in mail clients develops a strong bias against mail you actively mark as spam. While these mails are not for you, they *are* legitimate, giving your mail client a bias against legitimate mail. You might find that mail you want to receive goes straight to the junk folder.
Just delete them, or if it happens frequently make a folder named notforme or something to which you filter these mails.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
People like you will keep saying that untill Hell freezes over, and it still won't make any sense whatsoever. In the first seconds of a crisis your personal level of alertness simply won't make a difference; neither should it, that's what the crew is trained for. During take off or landing you can read, solve a crossword, fuzz with your (crying child|stressed out cat), be wildly panicked due to fear of flying, be three sheets to the wind, eat, sleep, or make out with your girlfriend, all without them stopping you. I've seen it all on flights.
I think it is mostly security theater combined with CYA. After all, they've no real incentive to "go out on a limb" by allowing you to do anything. I don't really care all that much, I can put away my ereader (no radio) during those few minutes, but I also don't understand why otherwise rational people keep bringing up this ridiculous statement.
So wifi might be interesting on a flight, but I definitely wouldn't pay for it.
Last year free Wifi via 3G became ubiquitous where I live on bus rides longer than a couple of hours. I'd guess that every other passenger accesses it from their smartphone or laptop, as the majority have metered data plans on their phones, and the benefits of "free" outweights the lower bandwidth due to several people using the line.
I also prefer to read, but it'd be handy for those "Oh, I'll google that"-moments. I wouldn't be interested either with the fees they mention in the article, but I'd probably go for it if they sold credentials for, say, two bucks. So, for you and me it's "meh", but if you're a business traveller interested in working in-flight it seems like a steal.
My microwave doesn't give a crap what year it is.
Reminds me of a particular scare story run by a Norwegian tabloid (Verdens Gang) some time during the y2k-bug craze with the following reasoning:
* Computers are vulnerable
* Even your waffle iron may contain a chip for temperature regulation, this is surely a kind of computer, right?
* YOUR WAFFLE IRON WILL STOP WORKING AT JANUARY 1ST 2000!!!111
Funny and sad at the same time. I actually sent an email to the journalist where I politely pointed out how ridiculous this was. His reply was basically that he didn't know the details, but had been assured of this by "a computer expert". I still wonder how that story came to be.
Distracting? It sounds exactly the same, you should be wise enough to understand what he's getting at.
I'm not listening to it, I'm reading it. Of course the OP is not unintelligible, but errors like these do make it seem sloppy, which degrades my first impression of its general quality. The poster doesn't care much about his own message, why should I? If the author is someone I've never met it'll give me a negative preconception of him which he could easily avoid. That said, onyxruby *does* write a lot of good posts.
Constructive criticism like my AC grandparent gives is exactly what I'm looking for through my .sig. English is not my first language, still it's important to me to be as correct as possible in *any* communication, especially written ones. Go ahead and call me pedantic, you're probably right :)
buying beer coins at a festival/concert?
I never really tried this, but i could see the organisation refusing to buy back unspent coins
I have been to a lot of music festivals, and no, they usually don't. I still prefer tokens as opposed to cash for a few reasons:
The queues go a lot faster when the staff don't have to bother with change, and everyone has the "correct" amount. It *really* makes a difference, and it has a huge effect on your enjoyment.
I can keep my wallet somewhere safe, and only keep tokens on my person. This is safer when I am in huge crowds all the time, usually in various states of inebriety.
Outlets for tokens are usually located near every place you can use them, and they accept plastic as well as regular currency. This means that I only need to bring a credit card. There is usually no set minimum amount you need to buy, so if you only need a couple more you can buy that. There is no need to leave the festival with a surplus.
For the organisers there are obvious advantages, probably the least of which is that they will sell a few unused tokens. As you can only use the tokens onsite they need less security at points of sale, they don't even need to trust their employees/volunteers all that much since most of them don't handle cash. They need fewer counters for goods that sell in large volumes, such as beer, as tokens are more efficient in transactions. It's faster to count the registers afterwards. Of course there will probably always be people who buy more than they need as well, but I don't think this amounts to very much, people tend to be very conscious about how many tokens they buy.
All in all, win all around :)
Cold hard reality wrote:
How old are you?
Seldom have I seen a message whose poster's username was more appropriate :)
So if somebody gets the password database it's safest to assume they've got the passwords in it.
I'm not a security expert, someone please correct me if I' wrong, but I hope PSN uses salts with the hashed passwords. Without salting an attacker would be pretty much guaranteed to hit quite a few real passwords, many of which would work for other logins as well. 2000 hashes/sec (or whatever) has a great chance of hitting gold when they're applied against 77M rows :)
If PSN does employ known salts they would only be able to find "a" password that is valid for the PSN network, not necessarily the real plaintext password which would work for other logins. If the salt is secret (not available to the attackers, and reasonably random) the attackers would probably not even be able to do that.