Well, the sad side of that coin are the linux users who really can't wait a whole two days to get a game. They're the bastiches that made the Quake3 linux sales suck so badly, because they couldn't wait a whole two weeks.
Then again, maybe by now the lustre has worn of id and they aren't the heroin addicts to id's smack that they used to be.
Yeah, great job id. I didn't even know Q4 was out at all.:)
Either going into the computer industry is a bad choice or it's not.
No. The decision of whether to go into the computer industry or not is complicated, and there is no possible way you can reduce it to a simple good/bad value, especially as a generalization that applies to everyone since that seems to be what you are asking for.
Life is complicated. There are precious few equations in math that can be reduced to a constant. The equations that govern our lives in human society are not among them. But people demand that they be forced into single, binary values. This makes no sense, and decisions based on such nonsensical thinking fail. "Going into computers is a bad choice or it's not." "Getting lasik surgery is a bad choice or it's not." "You're either with us or against us." No! The universe is not a collection of binary choices. You have to think about and consider all the actual variables that make up whether something is true for you.
The fact that not only do you expect "should M go into computers?" to be reduced to a True/False constant for all values of M, but that you expect/. to do pick the constant for you, rather frightens me.
He didn't make up his mind about his future in time for college deadlines, and still reads slashdot and their conflicting outlooks on the future.
So you're saying this hypothetical idiot was going to base his career choice entirely on Slashdot Groupthink(tm), but because there was no consensus and actually several sides to the story that required consideration, he was unable to make up his mind and became a grocer?
GOOD. We don't need another engineer who isn't capable of basic critical thinking and decision making, or who thinks every decision in life can be represented by a single boolean value. That isn't even true in programming, much less real life, so I doubt this person would in the long run be a good engineer anyway. I can only imagine what will happen when this fool tries to buy a house. "Variable vs fixed rate mortages... why can't you just tell me which one is better?!"
In the end, no, "us slashdotters" not need to "make up our mind". Slashdotters need to continue to hear about and discuss all the factors that go into these decisions so that each of us can make as informed a decision as possble. Not have that decision made for us.
Yeah, just as I suspected. It all breaks down in section 3.2.1.1: "The trusted party generates a pseudo-random identity for each of the listed voters, using a secure pseudorandom generator. This identity is then stored, in scrambled order, in a read-only memory, accessable only to the counter, which, however, is unable to establish any relation between this list and the list of voters". Assuming, of course, that the counter is in fact the only thing able to read the list of identities and that the "stored in scrambled order" step is faithfully carried out, and that the seed for the random number generator is not kept.
In other words, just like I said, this only works to protect Bob if Alice faithfully forgets something Bob has told her. If Alice doesn't want to keep Bob's anonymity, it is trivial to break it (just store the random seed so you can recreate the voter identity -> pseudo-random identiy mapping).
The assumption is that Alice is untrustworthy. Hence this is broken.
As is typical in cryptography, it is not the cryptography that actually breaks things. It is the protocol and the assumptions that the protocol makes that breaks things.
Um... "All you have to do is seperate identity from authorization"? How do you prevent them from knowing your identity and what authorization token they sent you at the same time, if they're the ones sending and receiving and decrypting all your packets? It's cheating to require that they run specific code themselves -- remember, the whole point is that we are assuming they are duplicitous.
I'm pretty suspicious of any form of security that claims "Bob sends Alice a message which is kept secret from Alice". That's the problem DRM is having, and it isn't surprising in the least. But if there's some clever trick I just don't know about, well, that's different.
Information is sparse, but does anyone know if votes were linked to who voted for what?
Do you mean are they supposed to be, or if they can be? I'm assuming they aren't supposed to be, but without a doubt they can be. The cards are used "for online access to bank accounts and tax record", so they clearly identify the user, which would be required to prevent duplicate voting, and thus they know who you are when you access the system. I'm sure they claim that they don't associate the user with the subsequent vote, but it would be simple as pie to store that information.
This is exactly why I don't want a system like this in the U.S., for exactly the reason you state: coercion and retaliation.
Oh yeah, GTA trains you in all kinds of important cop-killing techniques and strategies:
- To start your rampage, you'll need weapons and armor. Civilians can get shotguns, pistols, kevlar vests, and double-ended dildos (for hand to hand combat, of course...) from their local police station.
- Stealing a cop car is a great way to start a murder rampage. The best way to do this is to find a car with one cop, and try to open the passenger door. The cop will unlock both doors as he gets out, and leave the keys in the ignition. You can then get in through the passenger door as he runs around the car to catch you, and drive off.
- If you only commit a minor crime, such as bludgeoning a hooker to death with a double-ended dildo in the middle of the street, the police will forget about you in a few minutes.
- For more severe crimes, such as beating a police officer to death with a double-ended dildo, you will have to duck into various dark alleys until you find one marked with a star that will cause the police to forget about you.
- If the heat gets too hot to handle, try spray painting your car so the police won't recognize you. Changing cars won't work, though. The police aren't dumb, you know!
- If you do lose the police by spraying your car, refrain from immediately bludgeoning one with your dildo, or they'll recognize you. You have to be patient. It can take up to thirty seconds for the police to forget about the dozens of cops you killed.
- If defeat is inevitable, try to let an on-foot officer catch up to your car so he can arrest you. Despite the trail of destruction behind you and the cop guts stuck in your tire treads, the officer will forgive and forget for a measely $100 bribe. You'll be dropped outside the police station without any of your weapons, so make sure to run back inside and re-arm.
Clearly he wasn't familiar with Doom2's final boss, John Romero's Head on a Stick. The fact that no gamer has gone out to kill John Romero, in spite of "making us his bitches" with Daikatana, is proof to me at least that J. Thompson's thesis that kids will kill whoever video games tell them to kill is bullshit.
Of course soldiers are cheaper and they don't generate a profit, like the continual replacement of a sort of armoured car rather than the survivability an actual armoured car (sarcasm folks, I used to be one).
When an inventor has to search for patents when designing every portion of a capital work, less time is spent on developing the capital itself.
That's only for the small-time inventor, who doesn't hold any (or few) other patents. These are the guys that the patent system is allegedly supposed to help the most -- keep the big boys from stealing their idea. It works laughably in practice.
If you are a large-time inventor, a multinational corporation, then you explicitly do not search for patents. Because, you see, knowingly violating a patent results in treble damages. Since so many things are patented, violating someone else's patent is inevitable. When they come to the negotiating table, you want two things: 1) to be able to claim that you didn't knowingly violate their patent 2) to have a vast enough patent portfolio that you can be assured that they themselves are unknowingly violating one of your patents. At that point you sign a cross-license agreement that favors the party with the bigger/more valuable pile of patents.
Guess how well the small time inventor does at one of these negotiations? Can you imagine some small business going up against the patent portfolio of IBM?
The result is that all the big corps have cross-licensing agreements for all the patents of each other's that they have violated, creating a big mutual technology trust that is a barrier to entry for all smaller competitors. They love this situation, and it only makes sense that they would want to see any restriction on patenting removed, even if it means they will eventually violate someone's ridiculous business method patent.
Big corps are stealing our money, locking away our technology, and basically planning on destroying our country for a gigantic payoff. In this sense, patents are nothing but a single front, a symptom of the underlying problem.
Because Le Inq got it wrong, or at least used confusing wording. Given the incestuous relationship between Newisys and AMD, this isn't surprising, and in fact referring to it as an "AMD product" isn't 100% off the mark... But the.pdf (and history) make it clear that it is a Newisys product.
That only makes any sense if what you care about is what caused the animal to go extinct. There's tons of useful chemicals and materials found in nature that don't help at all against, say, slash and burn farming, or a metor strike.
Is that your metric? "This could only be useful if it would let me survive a meteor strike."
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about us losing the benefit of being able to discover all the different things these species used to adequately survive before we came along. Things like Resilin. Things we don't know about, and never will because the species that developed them are gone now.
"Fault" is irrelevent. The cost of our own actions is, and it is costing us.
I know. I think of all the species we have lost and are losing in the rain forests and other places, all those innovations from millions of years of evolution that are now gone, and its our own stupid fault.
I don't understand how any rational person could not be at least in principle an environmentalist.
torchdragon already mentioned that there is actually a lot of skill involved in making a 6-line figure. I found this to be true myself -- when I was working on a Quake mod, my friend doing the modelling was very good at making models that looked good with low poly counts (low for a quake model, even). Most other community-made models didn't look nearly as good, and the ones that did had higher poly counts. We liked having more enemies at once, so this was a good thing.
However, there is something to what you are saying. In particular, the amount of time it takes to make a high-quality high-poly-count model may be higher, just like the stick figure -- even if quality -- can be made faster than the 'realistic' drawing. The concern then is that amateurs -- even quite talented ones -- will have a hard time producing the same quality of content in their spare time. The ability is there, the time is not.
I'd reconsider buying Samsung, personally. Then you don't have to pay the settlement-inflated costs for their RAM, nor reward them for paying their "cost of doing business" fine after using illegal business practices.
Sometimes I think this world needs another regime like that because so many have forgotten how bad they were.
I think it is you who have forgotten how bad they were. How bad were the Nazis? So bad that things can be many times better than the Nazis and still be really, really bad.
WWII should be the ultimate warning about the risks of a Republic descending into Totalitarianism. The extreme evil of the Nazi regime should make you more wary of anything resembling such a descent, not less. Instead it's become the minimum level of badness that raises concern. That's crazily backwards.
There are plenty of valid comparisons between the path of Germany in the Thirties and the U.S. of the Aughts that are obvious if you really do have the first clue about "real Nazis" and their rise to power. Refusing to make this comparison because you believe the result will be less bad than the worst horrors of the last century is the height of foolishness.
Then why should they be held responsible for the "loss" and not profit?
Because that's vastly preferable to the executives. Okay, maybe you wanted a way to spin it as a positive for the employee, but I can't do that. The trend has been to increase executive compensation while reducing their actual risk. Passing the buck on to the employees for software defects would be perfect. So that might actually happen. But they'd never let the executives themselves be held responsible.
My only question for the genius who came up with this idea is what happens when your boss demands you ship the product before you've had a chance to test it properly? Is that a defense, and could you then go after the boss for liability instead? Whatever, this idea is idiotic.
And how many million+ lines of code have you written without any security holes? Hmmmm.
I hope that "Hmmmm" is you thinking about the difference between any security holes and many security holes. "The inevitable existence of bugs means all software is equally vulnerable" is such a ludicrous argument it only makes sense if you don't think about it at all. That said: 1) I guarantee I produce fewer security holes than the guy who thought automatically running VB scripts in the preview pane of Outlook was a good idea. I wouldn't have had VB script in email at all... but I forgot design decisions don't matter because all software has bugs. 2) If I wrote the software that helped make "Melissa" a household name, I would have made security my top priority the next day, rather than years later.
Maybe, you are just like everyone else. Bitter and jealous that some young punk like Bill Gates could take a small company and revolutionize the computing world.
You mean everyone else who doesn't buy into the MS revisionist history? The revolutionaries were IBM with the PC and Compaq with their reverse engineered BIOS that created the clone market. MS did have the good fortune and accumen to be at the right place at the right time, but just about any other OS could have been used instead with the same result, and probably would have been better too. MS revolutionized nothing.
Oh, and get rich doing it.
The lesson? Monopolies are more profitable than quality products.
It seems with this situation, MS is damned if they do, damned if they dont. Damned if they do: Accused of trying to leverage out Symateic, damned if they dont: blasted for insecure OSes. Damned if they do pt 2: Put fixes in Vista software, and are accused of trying to gouge customers out of more money for an upgrade.
See what happens when you write shitty, insecure code and do nothing to try to fix it until several years after it is a major problem? Sorry if I'm not gushing with sympathy for this horrible situation they put themselves in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the sad side of that coin are the linux users who really can't wait a whole two days to get a game. They're the bastiches that made the Quake3 linux sales suck so badly, because they couldn't wait a whole two weeks.
:)
Then again, maybe by now the lustre has worn of id and they aren't the heroin addicts to id's smack that they used to be.
Yeah, great job id. I didn't even know Q4 was out at all.
Either going into the computer industry is a bad choice or it's not.
/. to do pick the constant for you, rather frightens me.
No. The decision of whether to go into the computer industry or not is complicated, and there is no possible way you can reduce it to a simple good/bad value, especially as a generalization that applies to everyone since that seems to be what you are asking for.
Life is complicated. There are precious few equations in math that can be reduced to a constant. The equations that govern our lives in human society are not among them. But people demand that they be forced into single, binary values. This makes no sense, and decisions based on such nonsensical thinking fail. "Going into computers is a bad choice or it's not." "Getting lasik surgery is a bad choice or it's not." "You're either with us or against us." No! The universe is not a collection of binary choices. You have to think about and consider all the actual variables that make up whether something is true for you.
The fact that not only do you expect "should M go into computers?" to be reduced to a True/False constant for all values of M, but that you expect
He didn't make up his mind about his future in time for college deadlines, and still reads slashdot and their conflicting outlooks on the future.
So you're saying this hypothetical idiot was going to base his career choice entirely on Slashdot Groupthink(tm), but because there was no consensus and actually several sides to the story that required consideration, he was unable to make up his mind and became a grocer?
GOOD. We don't need another engineer who isn't capable of basic critical thinking and decision making, or who thinks every decision in life can be represented by a single boolean value. That isn't even true in programming, much less real life, so I doubt this person would in the long run be a good engineer anyway. I can only imagine what will happen when this fool tries to buy a house. "Variable vs fixed rate mortages... why can't you just tell me which one is better?!"
In the end, no, "us slashdotters" not need to "make up our mind". Slashdotters need to continue to hear about and discuss all the factors that go into these decisions so that each of us can make as informed a decision as possble. Not have that decision made for us.
Once the earth slows down enough gravitational waves might cause the system to decay over time but for now the moon's orbit is increasing.
We need to build millions of tidal generators now, to draw energy out of the system and stop the moon from flying off into space!
Save our moon!
Yeah, just as I suspected. It all breaks down in section 3.2.1.1: "The trusted party generates a pseudo-random identity for each of the listed voters, using a secure pseudorandom generator. This identity is then stored, in scrambled order, in a read-only memory, accessable only to the counter, which, however, is unable to establish any relation between this list and the list of voters". Assuming, of course, that the counter is in fact the only thing able to read the list of identities and that the "stored in scrambled order" step is faithfully carried out, and that the seed for the random number generator is not kept.
In other words, just like I said, this only works to protect Bob if Alice faithfully forgets something Bob has told her. If Alice doesn't want to keep Bob's anonymity, it is trivial to break it (just store the random seed so you can recreate the voter identity -> pseudo-random identiy mapping).
The assumption is that Alice is untrustworthy. Hence this is broken.
As is typical in cryptography, it is not the cryptography that actually breaks things. It is the protocol and the assumptions that the protocol makes that breaks things.
Um... "All you have to do is seperate identity from authorization"? How do you prevent them from knowing your identity and what authorization token they sent you at the same time, if they're the ones sending and receiving and decrypting all your packets? It's cheating to require that they run specific code themselves -- remember, the whole point is that we are assuming they are duplicitous.
I'm pretty suspicious of any form of security that claims "Bob sends Alice a message which is kept secret from Alice". That's the problem DRM is having, and it isn't surprising in the least. But if there's some clever trick I just don't know about, well, that's different.
Information is sparse, but does anyone know if votes were linked to who voted for what?
Do you mean are they supposed to be, or if they can be? I'm assuming they aren't supposed to be, but without a doubt they can be. The cards are used "for online access to bank accounts and tax record", so they clearly identify the user, which would be required to prevent duplicate voting, and thus they know who you are when you access the system. I'm sure they claim that they don't associate the user with the subsequent vote, but it would be simple as pie to store that information.
This is exactly why I don't want a system like this in the U.S., for exactly the reason you state: coercion and retaliation.
Oh yeah, GTA trains you in all kinds of important cop-killing techniques and strategies:
- To start your rampage, you'll need weapons and armor. Civilians can get shotguns, pistols, kevlar vests, and double-ended dildos (for hand to hand combat, of course...) from their local police station.
- Stealing a cop car is a great way to start a murder rampage. The best way to do this is to find a car with one cop, and try to open the passenger door. The cop will unlock both doors as he gets out, and leave the keys in the ignition. You can then get in through the passenger door as he runs around the car to catch you, and drive off.
- If you only commit a minor crime, such as bludgeoning a hooker to death with a double-ended dildo in the middle of the street, the police will forget about you in a few minutes.
- For more severe crimes, such as beating a police officer to death with a double-ended dildo, you will have to duck into various dark alleys until you find one marked with a star that will cause the police to forget about you.
- If the heat gets too hot to handle, try spray painting your car so the police won't recognize you. Changing cars won't work, though. The police aren't dumb, you know!
- If you do lose the police by spraying your car, refrain from immediately bludgeoning one with your dildo, or they'll recognize you. You have to be patient. It can take up to thirty seconds for the police to forget about the dozens of cops you killed.
- If defeat is inevitable, try to let an on-foot officer catch up to your car so he can arrest you. Despite the trail of destruction behind you and the cop guts stuck in your tire treads, the officer will forgive and forget for a measely $100 bribe. You'll be dropped outside the police station without any of your weapons, so make sure to run back inside and re-arm.
Clearly he wasn't familiar with Doom2's final boss, John Romero's Head on a Stick. The fact that no gamer has gone out to kill John Romero, in spite of "making us his bitches" with Daikatana, is proof to me at least that J. Thompson's thesis that kids will kill whoever video games tell them to kill is bullshit.
Of course soldiers are cheaper and they don't generate a profit, like the continual replacement of a sort of armoured car rather than the survivability an actual armoured car (sarcasm folks, I used to be one).
You used to be an armored car?
When an inventor has to search for patents when designing every portion of a capital work, less time is spent on developing the capital itself.
That's only for the small-time inventor, who doesn't hold any (or few) other patents. These are the guys that the patent system is allegedly supposed to help the most -- keep the big boys from stealing their idea. It works laughably in practice.
If you are a large-time inventor, a multinational corporation, then you explicitly do not search for patents. Because, you see, knowingly violating a patent results in treble damages. Since so many things are patented, violating someone else's patent is inevitable. When they come to the negotiating table, you want two things: 1) to be able to claim that you didn't knowingly violate their patent 2) to have a vast enough patent portfolio that you can be assured that they themselves are unknowingly violating one of your patents. At that point you sign a cross-license agreement that favors the party with the bigger/more valuable pile of patents.
Guess how well the small time inventor does at one of these negotiations? Can you imagine some small business going up against the patent portfolio of IBM?
The result is that all the big corps have cross-licensing agreements for all the patents of each other's that they have violated, creating a big mutual technology trust that is a barrier to entry for all smaller competitors. They love this situation, and it only makes sense that they would want to see any restriction on patenting removed, even if it means they will eventually violate someone's ridiculous business method patent.
Big corps are stealing our money, locking away our technology, and basically planning on destroying our country for a gigantic payoff. In this sense, patents are nothing but a single front, a symptom of the underlying problem.
Because Le Inq got it wrong, or at least used confusing wording. Given the incestuous relationship between Newisys and AMD, this isn't surprising, and in fact referring to it as an "AMD product" isn't 100% off the mark... But the .pdf (and history) make it clear that it is a Newisys product.
That only makes any sense if what you care about is what caused the animal to go extinct. There's tons of useful chemicals and materials found in nature that don't help at all against, say, slash and burn farming, or a metor strike.
Is that your metric? "This could only be useful if it would let me survive a meteor strike."
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about us losing the benefit of being able to discover all the different things these species used to adequately survive before we came along. Things like Resilin. Things we don't know about, and never will because the species that developed them are gone now.
"Fault" is irrelevent. The cost of our own actions is, and it is costing us.
I know. I think of all the species we have lost and are losing in the rain forests and other places, all those innovations from millions of years of evolution that are now gone, and its our own stupid fault.
I don't understand how any rational person could not be at least in principle an environmentalist.
The system? Having rejected the system as a horrible screw job for the people on upon my first consideration, I see little need to re-consider. :)
torchdragon already mentioned that there is actually a lot of skill involved in making a 6-line figure. I found this to be true myself -- when I was working on a Quake mod, my friend doing the modelling was very good at making models that looked good with low poly counts (low for a quake model, even). Most other community-made models didn't look nearly as good, and the ones that did had higher poly counts. We liked having more enemies at once, so this was a good thing.
However, there is something to what you are saying. In particular, the amount of time it takes to make a high-quality high-poly-count model may be higher, just like the stick figure -- even if quality -- can be made faster than the 'realistic' drawing. The concern then is that amateurs -- even quite talented ones -- will have a hard time producing the same quality of content in their spare time. The ability is there, the time is not.
Check this out. While some engines try to re-create hand-drawn cell art, here's someone who did Quake as sketchy line art.
Anyone want to reconsider this?
I'd reconsider buying Samsung, personally. Then you don't have to pay the settlement-inflated costs for their RAM, nor reward them for paying their "cost of doing business" fine after using illegal business practices.
Sometimes I think this world needs another regime like that because so many have forgotten how bad they were.
I think it is you who have forgotten how bad they were. How bad were the Nazis? So bad that things can be many times better than the Nazis and still be really, really bad.
WWII should be the ultimate warning about the risks of a Republic descending into Totalitarianism. The extreme evil of the Nazi regime should make you more wary of anything resembling such a descent, not less. Instead it's become the minimum level of badness that raises concern. That's crazily backwards.
There are plenty of valid comparisons between the path of Germany in the Thirties and the U.S. of the Aughts that are obvious if you really do have the first clue about "real Nazis" and their rise to power. Refusing to make this comparison because you believe the result will be less bad than the worst horrors of the last century is the height of foolishness.
I understand that there are compression schemes, but sadly they are all lossy.
Then why should they be held responsible for the "loss" and not profit?
Because that's vastly preferable to the executives. Okay, maybe you wanted a way to spin it as a positive for the employee, but I can't do that. The trend has been to increase executive compensation while reducing their actual risk. Passing the buck on to the employees for software defects would be perfect. So that might actually happen. But they'd never let the executives themselves be held responsible.
My only question for the genius who came up with this idea is what happens when your boss demands you ship the product before you've had a chance to test it properly? Is that a defense, and could you then go after the boss for liability instead? Whatever, this idea is idiotic.
Of course. The Terminator grabs a bunch of attention with flashy displays of destruction, but is eventually crushed, melted, or blown up.
Life mirros art? We can only hope.
And how many million+ lines of code have you written without any security holes? Hmmmm.
I hope that "Hmmmm" is you thinking about the difference between any security holes and many security holes. "The inevitable existence of bugs means all software is equally vulnerable" is such a ludicrous argument it only makes sense if you don't think about it at all. That said:
1) I guarantee I produce fewer security holes than the guy who thought automatically running VB scripts in the preview pane of Outlook was a good idea. I wouldn't have had VB script in email at all... but I forgot design decisions don't matter because all software has bugs.
2) If I wrote the software that helped make "Melissa" a household name, I would have made security my top priority the next day, rather than years later.
Maybe, you are just like everyone else. Bitter and jealous that some young punk like Bill Gates could take a small company and revolutionize the computing world.
You mean everyone else who doesn't buy into the MS revisionist history? The revolutionaries were IBM with the PC and Compaq with their reverse engineered BIOS that created the clone market. MS did have the good fortune and accumen to be at the right place at the right time, but just about any other OS could have been used instead with the same result, and probably would have been better too. MS revolutionized nothing.
Oh, and get rich doing it.
The lesson? Monopolies are more profitable than quality products.
It seems with this situation, MS is damned if they do, damned if they dont. Damned if they do: Accused of trying to leverage out Symateic, damned if they dont: blasted for insecure OSes. Damned if they do pt 2: Put fixes in Vista software, and are accused of trying to gouge customers out of more money for an upgrade.
See what happens when you write shitty, insecure code and do nothing to try to fix it until several years after it is a major problem? Sorry if I'm not gushing with sympathy for this horrible situation they put themselves in.
Bzzt! Wrong, but thanks for playing.
:)
Huh, that's weird. Your buzzer is working fine, but your sarcasm detector seems to be broken.
I was trying to make the reference to specifically Dmitry Sklyarov as obvious as possible, but I seem to have failed in at least some people's cases.