No one asks for you credit card number unless they are intending to charge you.
In Germany there is an age verification system based on Stored-value cards (Geldkarte) used for cigarette machines, but indeed credit card don't seem to be used for age verification and the Geldkarte, while valid in theory for online stuff, doesn't seem to be much used in practice.
A little Googling seems to indicate that its basically just PostIdent and sending photocopies of your Id Card. Services like http://ueber18.de/ or http://x-check.de/ also want you bank info, but they don't use that for age verification, but only for charging you money (36EUR per year in the first case and 19EUR in the second it seems, their crappy websites hide that quite well).
Ok, here is a question: Is this actually different in other western countries?
As far as I know in Germany for example you are not allowed to publish porn on the net unless you make sure that people under 18 don't have access it. To confirm to this criteria it isn't enough to just add an agegate, but instead it requires things like sending credit card info, PostIdent (you show your Id-card at a post office and post office confirms your identity to the website) or something else that is much more secure, thus essentially removing porn from the public Internet.
Now this of course doesn't mean that there isn't porn on the net in Germany, there is tons of it as the net isn't filtered, but I don't think many of it is hosted in Germany by German companies.
I'd argue that when you want to teach kids programming, the language is actually rather unimportant. It is the API and the IDE that matter. Have something that allows the kids to use graphics easy without a ton of initialization, have an IDE that automatically jumps them to errors in there code and all the little things like that. QBASIC was pretty good in that regard, it even auto-corrected the upper/lower-case when you mixed it in your variable names.
These days I would probably go with Python/Pygame or Processing as they make it easy to get interesting stuff happening. Python has also the advantage that you can do real stuff with it, when you are bored of toying around.
Can you provide an example of when goto is appropriate
Just go and look at C code, such as the Linux Kernel, it is full of gotos. The way it is used there is simply as form to avoid code duplication for cleanup after errors, kind of like a 'finally' or 'throw/catch' in Java. Something like this:
{
fd = open(file);
if (stuff_goes_wrong)
goto close_file;
if (other_stuff_goes_wrong)
goto close_file;
mem = malloc();
if (other_stuff_goes_wrong)
goto free_mem;
free_memory:
free(mem); close_file:
close(fd); }
In C++ you could RAII to accomplish the same thing, but in C you don't really have many other options that lead to such nice code.
Only that it would buy more time during the transition
The IPv6 transition doesn't need time, it already had tons of that. What IPv6 needs pressure to force people to actually start doing it and for that a shortage of IPv4 is actually a good thing.
I didn't miss that it'd run out, but if you think IPv6 is going to last forever you're hilariously dillusioned.
IPv6 is not going to last forever, but when it gets replaced it will very certainly not be replaced due to limits in its address space, as that address space will basically last forever.
IPv6 machines all have to run in dual stack, which means they all need an IPv4 address, which means IPv6 is solving exactly zero problems.
Thats not that hard to solve. Plug all regular consumers behind a IPv4 NAT and give the servers the remaining IPv4 addresses. Also give everybody IPv6 addresses. That way the regular consumer browsing happens over NAT'ed IPv4, while the peer2peer connection can be handled over IPv6.
Yes, you missed the "would only give us about 1.5 more years" part. You can reclaim all the IPv4 addresses you want, won't change the inevitable fact that we will run out of them very very soon. Thats what you get when you have more people on earth then IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, I hope you realize that even IPv6 isn't a permanent solution nor is it intended to be, right?
Good luck trying to exhausting a 128bit address space. Thats more addresses then atoms on the surface of earth.
Yes, buts thats already the case anyway. Your browser already stores your passwords and cookies that give everybody access to all your accounts. If you want to prevent that when your laptop is stolen use an encrypted hard drive.
In that case just mail the password/authentication-tool, there is nothing magic about a mobile phone, it simply makes it easier to carry the stuff used for authentication around.
Whats the alternative that doesn't require users to buy something to authenticate themselves?
OpenId or public key encryption, the later one would need support from the browser to be easy to use, but thats not much different from passwords, give that a huge number of people probably depend on the "remember password" function of their browser.
Another alternative, that for some reason I have never seen anywhere being used, would be pure email/cookie based authentication. The way most sites work these days is:
1) supply username, password, email 2) get an email for account activation 3) login
or for password reminder:
1) supply username, email 2) get an email with new password 3) login
Why not get rid of the password and have the link you get by email be the thing that authenticates you? Your browser already stores the cookie that will keep your login alive across sessions, the password servers absolutely no purpose and we could be getting rid of it without much harm. When you work across multiple machines that scheme of course might not work, but in those cases you could simply let the webpage generate a password or another link for you, so that you would only need to fall back to passwords when you need them, not being forced to use them when you don't.
No, the weakest link is the flawed authentication mechanics that requires you to use passwords in the first place. Bad password are just the natural result of that. If you want to fix the problem, you have to fix the way users authenticated themselves, not just chose a better password.
Does a company really have the power to decide who and what can be developed for a piece of hardware it makes?
Yes, they do and they have been doing so for at least 20 years, see the censorship needed on Maniac Mansion to be allowed a release on NES.
As in, once someone buys it, they are allowed to do anything they like with it?
The consoles only run authorized code, so you might be able to do what you want with it, but you can't do that as you can't break the encryption, "being allow to" != "being able to". The other issue is that even if you manage to get past the encryption, you can really do that, as they will send lawyers and police after you for breaking the encryption, as that is illegal under the DMCA (people might disagree on the details).
The AO rating basically means that the game can't be published, as neither Nintendo, Sony nor Microsoft will allow that to happen on their consoles. Even on the PC an AO rating would run into trouble as quite a few stores wouldn't carry it (not sure about Steam and other online platforms).
The reason why GTA:SA has an AO is due to the Hot Coffee incident, before that it was M and it got a rerelease that was M as well. Manhunt 2 also only has an AO on PC, the console version is censored and M.
It's not really worth developing games for Linux. The hardcore gamers - the bulk of the market all use Windows.
It is more troublesome than that: The bulk of the market uses game consoles. These days it isn't exactly uncommon for Windows to get games late, badly broken or not at all, as the PC port is an afterthought, not the main target. Getting games to Linux in a time where the PC gaming market isn't exactly in the best conditions is rather hard.
The only hope I have left for games on Linux is random indie titles like in the Humble bundle and for big commercial titles streaming services like OnLive, as it should be rather simple to port just the streaming client, without all the support hassles and issues that a full native port would imply.
Ummmm. No. This has virtually nothing to do with donations.
A large part of Wikipedias issue come from its crappy outdated user interface, following discussions for example is virtually impossible, tracking down page deletions is a complete mess, looking at deleted pages is still impossible and so on. All of that makes Wikipedia completly inaccessible for all but the most extreme inner circle. And all of those are completly the fault of the management and fixable by proper use of the money.
Human nature also comes into play, but it is the broken system that encourages bad behavior and frequently punished good intentions.
He never tried to hack into a mainframe and copy a database, he tried to hack into a game company and get a copy of their newest game, something that has happened quite a few times in reality.
Tomb Raider games where successful because they where among the first true third person 3D games and really good once too for their time. They of course also feed of a bit of the success from Indiana Jones, but that isn't exactly anything remarkable, as a ton of video games take heavy inspiration from movies without acquiring a proper license. The whole sexy bit was in large part just marketing and isn't really part of the games themselves. And of course, ironically enough, later Indiana Jones games where Tomb Raider clones themselves.
The issue with the Tomb Raider movies was basically just that they weren't all that well written. Tomb Raider, as a franchise, works due to the character and setting, just like Indiana Jones or James Bond, not due to any specific story lines. And just as you can write a good movie with such a character, you can also write a bad one (see Indy4 for a bad movie).
Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to.
Kind of, thats why good video game movies don't adopt an already existing story, but write a new one in the same universe. Resident Evil: Degeneration and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children do that and they are as a result fine video game movies. The trouble with adoption is that you have to rewrite, reinvent and just change stuff around that people are already deeply familiar with and while one can't avoid that in a book, it just feels out of places in games where the source material already is in no small parts build out of movie pieces.
Many pages have special ip6 domain names, such ipv6.google.com or www.v6.facebook.com. Almost none have IPv6 on their main domain name, they all still experiment with it, but hesitate to actually deploy it.
And about routers, this list is rather short and certainly doesn't qualify as "many". The really shocking part isn't even that hardly anybody has a IPv6 capable router at home, but that even routers you buy today for most part still completly lack any IPv6 capabilities.
I'd say a properly secured OS is more open then an insecure one, not less, as it gives the user the freedom to mess around, try stuff, run untrusted application, etc. without fear of having the whole thing fall apart.
Extreme example: Imagine every page on the Internet would have full access to your computer. Not such a happy thought, yet that is exactly the kind of access that a normal application gets. This is one of the main reason why most new stuff in computing these days happens on the Internet in safe Flash or HTML environments or on the iPhone, not in the form of an regular application.
Being an indie game isn't going make up for lack of a physical control system.
Indie games can't emulate a good dpad with a touchscreen, but they can build games that don't need one in the first place. The touchscreen, accelerometer and cameras provide plenty options for game control beside the dpad. An Angry Bird doesn't need a dpad to work, neither does a Doodle Jump. Even mainstream titles such as Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the NintendoDS don't need the dpad.
Unless somebody comes up with a really elegant way to hide a real dpad in a smart phone, my bet would be that the games that require a dpad will simply disappear from the mobile gaming market in the long run.
Just look at FPS on console, dual analog might not have the precision of a mouse, but the market doesn't care and the games have simply adopted, providing auto aim, lock-on and snap-targeting when needed.
Nor are they a completely new form of gaming: SimCity, ring a bell?
While SimCity and FarmVille have some similarities on the surface, they really don't have all that in common once you dig a little deeper. FarmVille basically has no simulation driving the world, instead it has an extremely simple set of mechanics: click once to plant a crop, return a few real-world hours later to farm it, if you don't return in time, the crop will weather and you have to restart the planting process. This means you basically need zero skill other then regularly checking the gameworld for updates. FarmVille is in that respect much closer to a Tamagotchi then to SimCity. On top of that the social aspect of FarmVille basically boils down to a window popping up after every little accomplishment that asks you if you want to spam your friends.
Slashdot Mirror
No one asks for you credit card number unless they are intending to charge you.
In Germany there is an age verification system based on Stored-value cards (Geldkarte) used for cigarette machines, but indeed credit card don't seem to be used for age verification and the Geldkarte, while valid in theory for online stuff, doesn't seem to be much used in practice.
A little Googling seems to indicate that its basically just PostIdent and sending photocopies of your Id Card. Services like http://ueber18.de/ or http://x-check.de/ also want you bank info, but they don't use that for age verification, but only for charging you money (36EUR per year in the first case and 19EUR in the second it seems, their crappy websites hide that quite well).
Ok, here is a question: Is this actually different in other western countries?
As far as I know in Germany for example you are not allowed to publish porn on the net unless you make sure that people under 18 don't have access it. To confirm to this criteria it isn't enough to just add an agegate, but instead it requires things like sending credit card info, PostIdent (you show your Id-card at a post office and post office confirms your identity to the website) or something else that is much more secure, thus essentially removing porn from the public Internet.
Now this of course doesn't mean that there isn't porn on the net in Germany, there is tons of it as the net isn't filtered, but I don't think many of it is hosted in Germany by German companies.
I'd argue that when you want to teach kids programming, the language is actually rather unimportant. It is the API and the IDE that matter. Have something that allows the kids to use graphics easy without a ton of initialization, have an IDE that automatically jumps them to errors in there code and all the little things like that. QBASIC was pretty good in that regard, it even auto-corrected the upper/lower-case when you mixed it in your variable names.
These days I would probably go with Python/Pygame or Processing as they make it easy to get interesting stuff happening. Python has also the advantage that you can do real stuff with it, when you are bored of toying around.
Can you provide an example of when goto is appropriate
Just go and look at C code, such as the Linux Kernel, it is full of gotos. The way it is used there is simply as form to avoid code duplication for cleanup after errors, kind of like a 'finally' or 'throw/catch' in Java. Something like this:
{
fd = open(file);
if (stuff_goes_wrong)
goto close_file;
if (other_stuff_goes_wrong)
goto close_file;
mem = malloc();
if (other_stuff_goes_wrong)
goto free_mem;
free_memory:
free(mem);
close_file:
close(fd);
}
In C++ you could RAII to accomplish the same thing, but in C you don't really have many other options that lead to such nice code.
Only that it would buy more time during the transition
The IPv6 transition doesn't need time, it already had tons of that. What IPv6 needs pressure to force people to actually start doing it and for that a shortage of IPv4 is actually a good thing.
I didn't miss that it'd run out, but if you think IPv6 is going to last forever you're hilariously dillusioned.
IPv6 is not going to last forever, but when it gets replaced it will very certainly not be replaced due to limits in its address space, as that address space will basically last forever.
IPv6 machines all have to run in dual stack, which means they all need an IPv4 address, which means IPv6 is solving exactly zero problems.
Thats not that hard to solve. Plug all regular consumers behind a IPv4 NAT and give the servers the remaining IPv4 addresses. Also give everybody IPv6 addresses. That way the regular consumer browsing happens over NAT'ed IPv4, while the peer2peer connection can be handled over IPv6.
Ignorant?
Yes, you missed the "would only give us about 1.5 more years" part. You can reclaim all the IPv4 addresses you want, won't change the inevitable fact that we will run out of them very very soon. Thats what you get when you have more people on earth then IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, I hope you realize that even IPv6 isn't a permanent solution nor is it intended to be, right?
Good luck trying to exhausting a 128bit address space. Thats more addresses then atoms on the surface of earth.
Yes, buts thats already the case anyway. Your browser already stores your passwords and cookies that give everybody access to all your accounts. If you want to prevent that when your laptop is stolen use an encrypted hard drive.
In that case just mail the password/authentication-tool, there is nothing magic about a mobile phone, it simply makes it easier to carry the stuff used for authentication around.
Whats the alternative that doesn't require users to buy something to authenticate themselves?
OpenId or public key encryption, the later one would need support from the browser to be easy to use, but thats not much different from passwords, give that a huge number of people probably depend on the "remember password" function of their browser.
Another alternative, that for some reason I have never seen anywhere being used, would be pure email/cookie based authentication. The way most sites work these days is:
1) supply username, password, email
2) get an email for account activation
3) login
or for password reminder:
1) supply username, email
2) get an email with new password
3) login
Why not get rid of the password and have the link you get by email be the thing that authenticates you? Your browser already stores the cookie that will keep your login alive across sessions, the password servers absolutely no purpose and we could be getting rid of it without much harm. When you work across multiple machines that scheme of course might not work, but in those cases you could simply let the webpage generate a password or another link for you, so that you would only need to fall back to passwords when you need them, not being forced to use them when you don't.
No, the weakest link is the flawed authentication mechanics that requires you to use passwords in the first place. Bad password are just the natural result of that. If you want to fix the problem, you have to fix the way users authenticated themselves, not just chose a better password.
Does a company really have the power to decide who and what can be developed for a piece of hardware it makes?
Yes, they do and they have been doing so for at least 20 years, see the censorship needed on Maniac Mansion to be allowed a release on NES.
As in, once someone buys it, they are allowed to do anything they like with it?
The consoles only run authorized code, so you might be able to do what you want with it, but you can't do that as you can't break the encryption, "being allow to" != "being able to". The other issue is that even if you manage to get past the encryption, you can really do that, as they will send lawyers and police after you for breaking the encryption, as that is illegal under the DMCA (people might disagree on the details).
The AO rating basically means that the game can't be published, as neither Nintendo, Sony nor Microsoft will allow that to happen on their consoles. Even on the PC an AO rating would run into trouble as quite a few stores wouldn't carry it (not sure about Steam and other online platforms).
The reason why GTA:SA has an AO is due to the Hot Coffee incident, before that it was M and it got a rerelease that was M as well. Manhunt 2 also only has an AO on PC, the console version is censored and M.
It's not really worth developing games for Linux. The hardcore gamers - the bulk of the market all use Windows.
It is more troublesome than that: The bulk of the market uses game consoles. These days it isn't exactly uncommon for Windows to get games late, badly broken or not at all, as the PC port is an afterthought, not the main target. Getting games to Linux in a time where the PC gaming market isn't exactly in the best conditions is rather hard.
The only hope I have left for games on Linux is random indie titles like in the Humble bundle and for big commercial titles streaming services like OnLive, as it should be rather simple to port just the streaming client, without all the support hassles and issues that a full native port would imply.
Ummmm. No. This has virtually nothing to do with donations.
A large part of Wikipedias issue come from its crappy outdated user interface, following discussions for example is virtually impossible, tracking down page deletions is a complete mess, looking at deleted pages is still impossible and so on. All of that makes Wikipedia completly inaccessible for all but the most extreme inner circle. And all of those are completly the fault of the management and fixable by proper use of the money.
Human nature also comes into play, but it is the broken system that encourages bad behavior and frequently punished good intentions.
He never tried to hack into a mainframe and copy a database, he tried to hack into a game company and get a copy of their newest game, something that has happened quite a few times in reality.
Tomb Raider games where successful because they where among the first true third person 3D games and really good once too for their time. They of course also feed of a bit of the success from Indiana Jones, but that isn't exactly anything remarkable, as a ton of video games take heavy inspiration from movies without acquiring a proper license. The whole sexy bit was in large part just marketing and isn't really part of the games themselves. And of course, ironically enough, later Indiana Jones games where Tomb Raider clones themselves.
The issue with the Tomb Raider movies was basically just that they weren't all that well written. Tomb Raider, as a franchise, works due to the character and setting, just like Indiana Jones or James Bond, not due to any specific story lines. And just as you can write a good movie with such a character, you can also write a bad one (see Indy4 for a bad movie).
Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to.
Kind of, thats why good video game movies don't adopt an already existing story, but write a new one in the same universe. Resident Evil: Degeneration and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children do that and they are as a result fine video game movies. The trouble with adoption is that you have to rewrite, reinvent and just change stuff around that people are already deeply familiar with and while one can't avoid that in a book, it just feels out of places in games where the source material already is in no small parts build out of movie pieces.
If you want someone to make a movie the way you want to see it, become a director.
Even that didn't work for video games, see the Wing Commander movie.
Many pages have special ip6 domain names, such ipv6.google.com or www.v6.facebook.com. Almost none have IPv6 on their main domain name, they all still experiment with it, but hesitate to actually deploy it.
And about routers, this list is rather short and certainly doesn't qualify as "many". The really shocking part isn't even that hardly anybody has a IPv6 capable router at home, but that even routers you buy today for most part still completly lack any IPv6 capabilities.
The operation systems are a nice start however you still have to deal with:
* almost no home router supports IPv6
* almost no provider offers IPv6
* almost no webpage runs IPv6
I'd say a properly secured OS is more open then an insecure one, not less, as it gives the user the freedom to mess around, try stuff, run untrusted application, etc. without fear of having the whole thing fall apart.
Extreme example: Imagine every page on the Internet would have full access to your computer. Not such a happy thought, yet that is exactly the kind of access that a normal application gets. This is one of the main reason why most new stuff in computing these days happens on the Internet in safe Flash or HTML environments or on the iPhone, not in the form of an regular application.
Being an indie game isn't going make up for lack of a physical control system.
Indie games can't emulate a good dpad with a touchscreen, but they can build games that don't need one in the first place. The touchscreen, accelerometer and cameras provide plenty options for game control beside the dpad. An Angry Bird doesn't need a dpad to work, neither does a Doodle Jump. Even mainstream titles such as Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the NintendoDS don't need the dpad.
Unless somebody comes up with a really elegant way to hide a real dpad in a smart phone, my bet would be that the games that require a dpad will simply disappear from the mobile gaming market in the long run.
Just look at FPS on console, dual analog might not have the precision of a mouse, but the market doesn't care and the games have simply adopted, providing auto aim, lock-on and snap-targeting when needed.
Nor are they a completely new form of gaming: SimCity, ring a bell?
While SimCity and FarmVille have some similarities on the surface, they really don't have all that in common once you dig a little deeper. FarmVille basically has no simulation driving the world, instead it has an extremely simple set of mechanics: click once to plant a crop, return a few real-world hours later to farm it, if you don't return in time, the crop will weather and you have to restart the planting process. This means you basically need zero skill other then regularly checking the gameworld for updates. FarmVille is in that respect much closer to a Tamagotchi then to SimCity. On top of that the social aspect of FarmVille basically boils down to a window popping up after every little accomplishment that asks you if you want to spam your friends.